Category: Everyday Life

Are my small pleasures escalating?

It started with mineral water – sweet potatoes – potatoes – lamb and mutton – and (I don’t know why) it became (reasonably priced) accessories – and now, will I want to buy some music DVDs?

It was my birthday the other day.
Chris wanted to buy me a CD, so after we went to hand in our income tax forms, we visited Tower Records and HMV. And we couldn’t find any CDs we wanted. But I found the ‘Very Best of Japan’ DVD by accident!
Yes. You may find it hard to imagine, but we like Japan. –Even so, we didn’t know the DVD had been released.

We don’t have a DVD player. To be exact, we have a DVD-ROM in one of our Mac computers. Last year Chris tired to play a home-recorded DVD that we borrowed from our neighbour, but it didn’t work for some kind of reason. However, we thought we could watch a store-bought DVD. We were a little scared to buy it, but we bought it anyway. We thought we could buy a DVD player ‘some day’ in the worst case. –In the end, everything was all right! (Actually, we already have all the songs on the DVD on video cassettes, so we’ll watch the DVD later.)

Then I started to wonder about what Japan DVDs are on sale.
I looked around, and found that ‘Video Hits: Japan’, including all the singles from their Ariola/Hansa years, was released in 2003. Even though it’s only six songs in twenty-one minutes, I feel we want to have their the early work. Although I’ve heard the members of Japan themselves don’t want to look back on that time…

After that, we watched old video tapes of early Japan on the TV in the living room. It looks like they were recorded from TV programs by someone (as a business); the quality is worse than regular bootlegs, but they were pretty expensive. There are many promotion videos from their very early time until after they broke up; but the picture quality is not good and the transition between songs is also bad. (Please imagine tapes that a non-professional recorded from TV, and what would happen when tapes at such a level get old.)
These promotion videos at better quality! We want to get it. Do we? Chris?!

– YS, 16 March 2007

16 March 2007