Tristan Thai, producer of G4techTV's Icons show, recently had the opportunity to travel to Japan to interview bigwigs at SNK Playmore Studios and Team Ninja Studios in Japan. Here's his journal of his experiences on the trip:

Tuesday/Wednesday

With my bags packed, I wearily step out of the front door at 7 a.m. to get to the airport on time for my departure flight to Osaka. Passing by apartment units 10 and 11 on my way downstairs, I smell the steamed mantou and char siu bao that conjure up images of my youth with breakfasts spent in front of the tube sipping on steamed soy milk. I hear the slight murmur of voices down the hall--parents whispering to their kids in Chinese to get the table ready as the blips and bleeps of a Nintendo GameCube plays in the background. Like Proust and his madeleines dipped in tea…

…OH, WHO AM I KIDDING. (Author’s note: Yeah, who is he kidding? A Marcel Proust reference in a G4TechTV column…how pretentious! Don’t worry though…more pretentious references are forthcoming.) So basically, the trip to Japan consists of flying into Osaka and shooting interviews and b-roll footage inside the SNK Playmore offices for an Icons episode on SNK. The company is most known for their NeoGeo arcade consoles, though certainly also for its fighting games like Samurai Showdown and the King of Fighters. The second leg of the trip will be in Tokyo where Icons will get an exclusive look inside the Team Ninja offices in addition to a sit-down interview with the mysterious and mercurial Tomonobu Itagaki.

Upon touching down at Osaka’s Kansai International Airport, Justin (Senior Manager of Games Editorial at G4techTV) and I meet up with an SNK rep named Shinya, who drives us to our hotel, situated conveniently next to the SNK Playmore offices. After freshening up, Shinya takes us out to a delicious tonkatsu wako dinner before our scheduled shoot date tomorrow.

Thursday

I meet up the next morning in front of the SNK offices with our camera crew, who introduce themselves as Shimizu and Rocky. Shimizu, small and ferrety looking with a bandana on top of his head, is our DP. The sound mixer, Rocky, big and muscular with a scruffy goatee and ponytail reminds me right away of the kind of low-level tough guy you see in Yakuza movies who’s usually the first guy offed. I later ask him during a lighting set-up how he got the nickname “Rocky.” He tells me stoically, “Because I look like Japanese Sylvester Stallone.”

The SNK representatives finally come down and greet us. Some of them instantly recognize me as one of those orange-shirted fellas at E3. They take me up to Noise Factory, SNK’s in-house development studio responsible for games like the Metal Slug series. I’m introduced to Keiko Iju, the President of Noise Factory. To my great surprise, the person responsible for the Ikari Warriors series, Sengoku, and some of the latter Metal Slug games among others, turns out to be this tiny, matronly Japanese woman. Despite her shy demeanor and reservations about how good she’ll be on camera, Ms. Iju is surprising quite comfortable and candid during the interview. At least, this is what I can only surmise since Ms. Iju’s lengthy responses to questions like, “Talk about your involvement on the Metal Slug games,” would in turn be answered by the translator as, “She think they fun.” Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.

In any case, the interview goes on for about an hour when all of a sudden, it happens. Horns blare outside on the streets below as I glance over at our sound mixer Rocky, insuring that our sound is okay. Right at this moment, Ms. Iju talks about Ikari Warriors and how she needed to create half-naked Rambos as characters. “Noooooo!” I think to myself as the image of a half-naked Rocky, the so-called “Japanese Stallone,” penetrates into the dark recesses of my brain. Luckily for me, this image is fleeting as I quickly move on into a discussion about Samurai Showdown. Thankfully, the thought of a half-naked Rocky doesn’t infiltrate my head ever again until the moment I decide to recollect and recreate this stupid anecdote.

After Ms. Iju, I get the chance to sit down and have a chat on-camera with Kazuya Hirata, SNK’s Director of R&D. Hirata’s involvement with the company traces back to the days of the NeoGeo AES console and to some of the later King of Fighters games. What I remember most about the NeoGeo was that at a price tag of $599 for the console and $200 a pop per game, my only chance of ever playing the system would come with the consent of a certain Yaojen Chang. Now, all of you know who Yaojen Chang is, the name doesn’t matter. Every school had a Yaojen Chang. He was that spoiled rich kid whose parents bought him every system on the market and every video game released with it. He was the first kid to brag about getting the Sega Genesis. He was the kid who had the Super Famicom Fed-ex’d to him from Japan. He was the first get to a 486 computer while the rest of us were still on our 386’s. He was the kid whose parents bought him the $599 NeoGeo. Going back to the interview now, as Hirata-san waxes on about the powerful nature of the NeoGeo, I can’t help but think how much I hate Yaojen Chang.

That night, a group of SNK reps take us out to a sushi dinner. There’s about eight of us and we get seated in a private room. I’m handed a menu by the restaurant hostess and as this is not one of those restaurants with big colorful pictures printed on it for illiterate foreigners like me, I blindly accept SNK’s offer of ordering for me. Yoshihito Koyama, SNK’s Marketing Director’s eyes suddenly pop open as he looks up from the menu, “Do you like squid?” I nod yes. His eyes widen, “Do you like live squid!” Now as my gastronomic sensibilities have grown exponentially since becoming an Iron Chef junkie and reading Anthony Bourdain’s food travel tome A Cook’s Tour, I’m excited over the live squid appetizer that Mr. Koyama orders for the entire table.

Before the live squid arrives though, a set of other appetizers are brought to the table. One of these is some kind of gooey gelatinous cubed substance served in a chilled bowl. I ask Miwako one of the SNK marketing employees sitting beside me what it is. She shrugs and looks at the others around the table, who also shrug in return. As a Chinese-American, I’ve grown up eating all sorts of strange and exotic foods that the contestants on Fear Factor would cringe at the sight of. Looking at what is in the chilled bowl set before me, I immediately recall my late grandmother feeding me such delicacies as fish eyes, which I sucked on and spat out for “better vision.” The sweet gelatinous skin of chicken feet during dim sum each Sunday morning strengthened the bones in my own feet so said my grandmother. Eating pig brains that she stewed up would sharpen my senses. Pig’s feet noodle soup would clarify my skin, stir-fried cow’s tongue made you handsome, while cow’s ears would sharpen my hearing. All told, my grandmother tried convincing me that if I ate this food, I’d grow up looking like Hong Kong matinee idol Andy Lau. Screw Andy Lau, I thought, I better turn into freaking Spider-Man with all the enhanced senses I’d develop. Looking in the mirror nowadays and seeing no traces of Andy Lau, I’ve come to the realization that either my late grandmother lied to me or I should’ve eaten more cow tongue. (Author’s note: In what was a subconscious attempt to evoke faux Asian nostalgia a la Amy Tan, the writer realized midstream how much he despised Amy Tan, thus resulting in the lame non Amy Tan-ish recollection above).

…But I digress. Miwako is the first volunteer to slip the gooey cubed-shaped appetizer into her mouth. After much contemplation, she concludes that what she’s eating is some kind of chilled eel skin and eel fat concoction. Despite looking and sounding quite disagreeable to me, I soon plop it into my mouth and slowly chew. It tastes much like it looks. Slimy and gooey with a slight bitterness, some of it even sticks to the rim of my mouth and has to be washed down with tea. Not bad, I think. Tastes like chicken feet.

The fresh squid arrives soon after. With much of the body already sliced thinly into sashimi, the squid’s head and tail serve as bookends. Koyama-san, wanting to make a point of how fresh the squid is, pokes and jabs at its head with his chopsticks, which as a result still moves and squirms about despite being detached from the rest of its body. A couple of other SNK employees poke and jab at the squirming squid head while chowing down on the squid sashimi. Well, when in Rome… I proceed to poke and stab at the head myself. Finally making my way to the squid sashimi, I have to say, with a little wasabi on top, it’s quite good. As our table finishes eating and staring at the squirming squid, our hostess removes what’s not finished and comes back with the remnants, which returns to our table as squid tempura. Or for Italian restaurant devotees, calamari. Yes-- for those of you who choose to remain ignorant of what you eat, that live squid kicking and screaming its way out of the tank, is where calamari comes from.