First-World Problem

When I was growing up, we looked to Japan as being at the vanguard of technological advancement, these were the people who brought us the  digital watch,  the Walkman, the calculator and then the calculator watch and then of course the Game Boy. Every bit of stock footage of Japan on TV in the 70s showed flashing lights and a landscape out of the sci-fi movies. The Japan of the 21^stCentury is still in the technological driver’s seat. I’ve already mentioned toilets that can launch missiles, restaurants where you order via iPad, tills that count the money for the cashiers and deliver the change, and of course the bar where you are served by robot women, the list is endless. So, you would imagine that the Japan  of 2018 would have incredibly fast internet to power the race to the future. 

And at times it does. If you get online at 3 am the internet is so fast you can watch the second half of a rugby match before the first half has even ended. In fact, anywhere from early morning to about 4pm the internet is fast and efficient. But then comes the witching hour. 4pm, the schools have released their day prisoners and those kids have got home, taken off their blazers and straw boaters and are logging on to Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite or Call of Duty. There are 38 million people in the Tokyo and Yokohama region. I would imagine at least ten million of those are teens.  At 4pm when ten million teens start playing on their PS4s or Xbox1s of their Commodore 64s, the whole of the internet, grinds to a halt. It is no longer an information superhighway, it’s an information country lane where you are stuck behind a tractor which, in turn, is stuck behind a blind shepherd herding sheep. There’s no way round, there’s no way through, all you can do is sit and watch that little circle spin around and around and around and get occasional still pictures of rugby players in action. In the past, I’ve kept up with games on Teletext on old TVs, text commentary on the Internet and on Twitter on my phone,  but nothing is as depressing as trying to guess what is happening in a game by putting together the slender clues that painfully slow internet provides you with.  

Then, as the clock ticks around to midnight, it miraculously starts working again. I guess, Japanese parents in houses and flats across Japan are sending their spotty teenagers to bed. Playstations, Xboxes and Sinclair Spectrums are shut down for the night and the bandwidth is free for me to watch the post-game interviews and the presenter telling me that I’d missed a cracker of a game before wishing us all a cheery goodbye.