Anime

"I buy gay non-porn for college girls” - My life as Tokyogetter

By Ani DotME 1 year, 7 months ago

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Whoever came up with that one wasn’t messing about. Believe that sh**.
If you had told me that at the age of 25 my life would turn into a non-stop parade of extreme Japanese pop culture, weird pseudo-porn, giant robots, and international boy crushes I’d have asked you two questions; A. What did you just take? and B. How long did you think you had until your brain exploded all over me? Alas, it came to pass.

… and it was, as Shakespeare said, FACKING AWESOME.

Back to necessity – in 2006 I had a necessity to get my ass out of the backwater south of Japan and onto the streets of Tokyo where things tend to, uh, actually HAPPEN. The problem? I had spent a good majority of my academic life pondering the issues most relevant to modernity and post-modernity in a developed first world society and neglecting to develop things like contacts, skills, an amenable attitude towards work, or anything that wasn’t a steadfast and undying interest in 1980s mecha anime or skinny indie rock girls with borderline personalities.

You guessed it: I was a former liberal arts honors student working as an English teacher, and I was about as employable as a case of jock itch.

The problem about Tokyo is that, well, it’s Tokyo. EVERYBODY wants to live there. Foreign workers who are outside the finance sector get paid the same kind of money that you’d throw to a South American abortion clinician to hush them up. The creepy-weirdo-suits that hire for the privatized teaching companies are unrelenting in terms of their pernicious exploitation of the people who want to live in Tokyo. For those interested in skipping to the shorthand, the subtext reads: “there will be another asshole along in 4 minutes who wants to live out his-or-her own Lost in Translation. You ain’t special. Money’s on the dresser. Take it or leave it.”

So how did I deal with my upgrade in rent, downgrade in pay, and ample free time? Well, any malady is anodized by a simple catch-all: ASS.

So I bought gay porn for people.

Duh!

Despite my lack of intelligence, employability, muscle mass, or a future, I did have SOME strengths. See, I was an inveterate anime and film fan growing up, and I researched that shit like I could turn around and spin it into gold. With that gem in my pocket I ended up making it over to Comic Market, the twice-a-year salute to amateur fan comics (doujin) that excites the otherwise stolid 300k-odd people who line up in the morning to buy books of Naruto getting boinked by Kakashi. I was there on the regular after I caught the fever.
What’s up, my people?

At my first Comic Market I picked up some doujin after my friend suggested that I sell some online. After waiting weeks to get off my duff and put ‘em up they were gone in days. Turns out that the Boy’s Love market overseas was not being properly addressed, and discerning fan-types needed a guiding light that could get them that rare GD Mechano book or out-of-print CD they’d been dreaming about. Somebody who lived there. Somebody with time on their hands. Somebody who was totally into that kind of thing and needed others to pay for his tendency to go wandering (and wondering) through the streets of a city that looks like an arcade game. Somebody like my dumb ass.

I had the website. I had the name. I had the guts and the system. I had Tokyo. I was, and am, Tokyogetter.
The next two years transmuted into a whirl of website postings, chat board rants, custom orders, buying runs, AIM convos, drop shipped packages, and innumerable jaunts to the post office. I treated my day job like a used condom. No more work to do? Out at 2:30 PM, ya’ll: I gotta hook up this girl in Malaysia with some Prince of Tennis shower scene books. School not in session? Rad, I’ll be making moves down at Comic City, where I’ll buy another 700 bucks worth of random goodness for people and draw hateful glares from the vendors who know I’m only keeping the ones I think are REALLY* funny. Half-day: Still makin’ full pay.

I traveled all over as TG. I hit Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo, Kobe… bam. You name it. I was even on TV once or twice, stomping around all of my haunts and looking at toys to buy. A whole world of nerd culture was constantly mutating and re-orchestrating itself in front of me, like some kind of hydra-headed shape-shifting monster obsessed with its own survival and perpetuation.

The money stopped mattering. The nature of the necessity warped its own DNA, re-situating itself as a perverse (yet harmless) quest for to fulfill my undying need to explore, confront, amuse, and understand the strange and complex parts of my psyche that I’d never dare put into words. It was like I was stuck in a productive version of a LiveJournal post as I acted out a duty that was ultimately for the sake of my own self-satisfaction. Please don’t get it twisted: there were confusing times and there were sad times all the while, and the dough wasn’t punch-your-mom-in-the-face great, but the experience itself was worth its weight in gold a thousand times over. I was calling my own shots and making my own moves and really looking forward to looking out at the world and saying “alright, where do I go today? What part of you do I unravel?”

The coolest thing about the whole she-bang-a-bang was, and will forever remain, the people factor. I just kept meeting sensationally exceptional folks from all over via the grid and doing work for them. They were AWESOME to talk to. A few of my buyers even made it over to Tokyo and we’d go grab food or go shopping. There were some d-holes in the mix but that’s life… I’d put them on a flake list and tell them to hit the bricks, awaiting the next email from the next person who wasn’t a vindictive jerk and who appreciated the effort involved in being TG. I knew who my people were and I knew how to get them that weird bag or strange DVD set that they wanted, and by God was I going to disport myself while avoiding “real” life or die trying in the process.

I continued not because it was exciting but because I COULDN’T stop. I was a construct and a rogue warrior in a world where everybody seemed to be in total submission to a vague and gray authority. It gave me a goal and it let me loose upon a city where I didn’t know many people. Market was part of it, but it was also a chance to see Tokyo and bond over passions with intriguing people… although for the most part mine involved exponentially fewer depictions of black and white stick-men crying after confused gay sex. I read and researched all kinds of cool stuff. I got my Japanese chops up by making mail-orders. I made friends. I took pictures. I traded things. I even sold Christian Bale nerd-porn to Entertainment Weekly. By the end of my time in Japan people were getting my card and saying “Ah! You’re him!”

WTF?!?

Why did I bounce? Why would I ever leave? Well, 2008 brought some serious personal issues to the fore for my family as well as the end of the economy-as-we-know-it (ie GOOD). The world felt like it was crumbling under my feet. Up and down and right and wrong had started to become concepts that I strongly identified with, but that meant sweet FA to anybody else. I felt crushed. I had options, but I was ready for a change and I wanted to return home to be closer to my family and get out of a funk. It wasn’t TG. It was never TG. I had a broken heart that felt like it would never mend.

Still doesn’t, actually.

I now live in California where I run Tokyogetter.com via proxy and ship out custom orders from Japan, but it’s not me on the streets doing the buying. We still kick ass, of course, and would love to hear from you if you were looking for something.

But back to where we started… “Circles, circles, everywhere, area is pie R squared.”

Necessity.

Necessity is a funny thing, and it can lead you to a state where you find yourself forming habits. I have to admit that sometimes I wish I was back there… lazing around Akihabara on a Tuesday afternoon, my iPod playing Asian Kung Fu Generation or Joy Division, and making small-talk with shopkeepers while checking for my orders before dinner with my buddies from Australia. I can’t act like I don’t miss it. I wake up now and there’s a kind of grayness that sometimes makes me long for the cold streets of a cold city, a world beyond semantics. I remain grateful for it all, and I hope that all of the amazing folks who supported me and depended on me know that I came to love them not only for their patronage, but for their hearts and their warmth.

The pleasure was mine.

-Tokyogetter
California, USA.
(Earth)

• = Exception? Naked Ape’s color work collection.