Ok, so my wife and I are on vacation in in Japan right now, visiting my sister who is here as an exchange student. We were in Tokyo the other day, and quite naturally went to the Akhihabara on account of all of us being geeks. We happened to see a sign for an RPG shop called the Yellow Submarine so we decided to check it out just to see what Japan's gaming scene was like. It was kinda neat seeing D&D books written in Japanese and I got a set of dice with the numbers written on them in Kanji but then I saw a few English 4th ed Shadowrun books... Underneath them I saw a 1st ed Shadowrun book in Japanese! Not only that but it was only 3000 yen, so I ended up picking it up just for the novelty factor. The kids at the counter gave me some strange looks at the weird Gaijin buying Japanese books when he obviously hardly speaks a word of the language but hey, I'm starting to get used to weird looks here.

You should have started a conversation about ShadowRun and how you're picking up the book for novelty, having played the game.

<3 thats awesome, man!

Wow, that's way cooler than my story of when I found a 95% whole copy of DMZ in a Eugene game shop for ten bucks. Score, imperial!

I'm going to Japan for a year starting next month, and I'd like to possibly get a SR group together in Tokyo. Do you think you could share this place's address and/or rough location?

It wasprobably less 'why is the gaijan buying a Japanese book' than "why is the gaijan buying a 20 year old book when the 4th ed is right there.?"

Would you be there on December 24, 2011? Anywhere in the vicinity of a certain mountain? Possibly on a bullet train?

Are you kidding? The Japanese damn near invented obsessive collecting of paraphernalia.

Cool find, though.

Oh I don't know, I collected one husband, he's enough.

Anything Shadowrun done in Japanese is awesome, since there is (or used to be) so much Japanese influence on the world. A buddy of mine had a Seattle STreet map written in Japanese. It was just one of those things that felt like it was a Shadowrun artifact for some reason

Bull

Psshaw, I'll just camp out on the slope of Mt. Fuji.

LOL!
By the way. I have to ask. Did one of the admins created the Saeletra account just to make a single post December 24th of the next year?

You know they'll make the account only mere minutes before the post and delete the account right after.

Edit:
No, someone did create the account.

Who dat?

Conversation? I know about a dozen words in Japanese, mostly related to saying please or thank you. It's easier just to ignore the with the weird looks and bow and smile a lot.

A for directions... I'll give it a shot. I still have my map of the area. If you get off the JR Akhabara train station walk about a block West, to Chuo St.then follow it north and turn left onto (I believe) Kandamyoujin St. Just keep you eyes peeled on the left hand side for a yellow billboard with the shop name on it. Follow Kandamoujin about half a block, it will be on the 7th floor of one of the buildings there.

So was the book one of the translated rulebooks, or was it the Tokyo Sourcebook ?

As I understand it, TS is the only Shadowrun game book originally in Japanese. There was also a 5 issue manga, and some other SR books that were not rulebooks per se.

It's the 1st ed core rulebook (in hardcover no less). There was another translated version of (I think) Celtic Doublecross, but those were the only Japanese books. They had a good chunk of the 4th ed catalog and a smattering of 3rd ed stuff but those were in English.

I wonder how Celtic translates into kanji...

I think the fact that I'm American makes me tickled to think of people translating other languages to something other than English. Or people of one ethnicity talking in a 2nd language with a 3rd accent. Like an Indian (from Aisa) speaking French with an Austrian language or something.

Who's Saeletra?

MESBASE: 102/a
DATE/TIME: 00:00:01/12-24-11
AUTHOR: >>STRUCTURE ERROR 0208<<
ROUTING: >>ROUTING ERROR B092<<
SUBJECT: <unknown>
MESSAGE:

Good morning world. Welcome back. Play nice.
-Saeletra

Aaahhh. Mt. Fuji Basecamp. I ran an awesome Oriental Adventures (AD&D) game there for 20 players. (We got snowed in.)

Cool find, makes me wish I had picked up the German version of The Germany Sourcebook for SR3 when I was in Germany. It was hardback and at around 3 times the size of the one that was released in America.

I don't believe Saeletra ever showed up again in print?

No, she didn't. That's the point.