In other news, I’m happy to announce that, okagesama de, my son passed his high school entrance exams. Since his long year of studying for several hours a day is behind him, we’ve been making a list of all the things we want to catch up on, including catching the new Harry Potter movie and Gundam Unicorn series. I remembered that we hadn’t tried out the Macross Trial Frontier that comes on the Macross Frontier Blu-ray disc yet, so I grabbed it and we sat down to play the game on my US-imported PS3. It’s a positively awesome upscaled version of the Macross games for PSP I love so well, but as we played we kept having trouble with the menus, cancelling when we intended to execute an option. The reason was related to an interesting cultural wrinkle between Japan and the West: here, a circle (maru) always means “yes” or “correct” while an X (batsu) is always “no” or “wrong.” So while gamers from America and Europe expect the X button to execute the current menu option, in Japanese Playstation (and PSP) games this is reversed. We’ve had similar cultural issues with the coffee maker we use at J-List, a large 12-cup model purchased in the U.S., since the girly-man coffee makers they sell here are laughably small. The Mr. Coffee switch displays a 1 for “on” and a 0 for “off,” and invariably one of our Japanese staff members will put the switch in the “circle” position, expecting the coffee to flow then wondering when nothing happens.
The O and X buttons on Playstation 3 and PSP are reversed in Japan.
