Chapter 2: Hobbies and Work
Hexadecimal
In sixth grade, I played a variety of games in addition to Pokémon. Since I didn’t have the latest games, I always played at my friends’ houses. I often visited friends who owned a PlayStation or Sega Saturn. We often played “Choro Q,” “Culdcept,” “Final Fantasy VII,” and others. One day, I went to a friend’s house to play “Monster Farm” as usual. Since we often played together, I knew what monsters my friend had, but that day was different. All the parameters of my friend’s monsters were maxed out. After pestering my reluctant friend, he revealed his secret. It was an unofficial peripheral device called “Action Replay 2” that could alter game data (specifically, data in memory). By connecting this device to the PlayStation and entering strings of code like “3009AED1 0064,” you could magically reach level 100, unlock hidden characters, or acquire all items in the game.
However, after playing with maxed-out levels, the game quickly became boring. I no longer felt the satisfaction of carefully developing my character and repeatedly challenging strong enemies. But more than the game itself, I became extremely interested in how the “Pro Action Replay” worked. I was fascinated by how these strings of characters could elevate a character’s level to 100. I often went to bookstores to read “Game Labo” magazine, which featured cheat codes. As I entered various codes with my friends, I began to recognize patterns. I learned that entering 0x64 would set an in-game parameter to 100, while 0xff would set it to 255. I gradually understood that these strange strings of characters were called “hexadecimal” and formed the structure of games and computers. While reading Game Labo, I discovered that games were created using computers, that computers could be used to find game cheat codes, and that there was something called the Internet where you could find information about any game. I gradually began to want my own computer.
My First Part-Time Job
I have a sister who is a year older than me. Since we were close in age, we always played together when we were little. When we first came to Japan, we played games together, but by this time my sister was already in her first year of middle school and wasn’t interested in video games. One day, she suddenly told me she was going to start delivering newspapers. Our family was still poor, and neither my sister nor I received an allowance. My sister, now in middle school and needing more money than before, had found a way to earn it herself. Thinking this was a good idea, I decided to start delivering newspapers with my sister at the local Shinano Mainichi Newspaper company. At first, I was assigned about 80 houses in the neighborhood. Every morning at 5:00, I went to the entrance of the local community center to pick up newspapers that the sales office had previously stacked. I stuffed newspapers into my bicycle’s rear rack and basket, and spent about an hour going from house to house in an area with few apartment buildings. On Sundays, the number of flyers increased, making the newspapers twice as bulky as usual. When that happened, I couldn’t deliver them all at once, so I loaded half the newspapers, delivered them, and then returned to the community center for the remaining half. After 6:30 AM, people would start calling the sales office if they hadn’t received their newspaper, so I had to finish before then. Getting up early was tough, but being barked at by dogs was always unpleasant. On rainy days, newspapers would get wet, resulting in complaints, so I had to wrap those houses’ newspapers in plastic, which further increased the bulk. When I was a child, Nagano had heavy snow in winter, making newspaper delivery especially difficult. New Year’s Day was particularly challenging, with newspapers three to four times bulkier than usual, plus heavy snow. However, I received a 5,000 yen New Year’s gift for delivering newspapers on New Year’s Day, so I persevered through frostbite many times looking forward to that. My only days off were once a week and once a month on days when there was no newspaper. My monthly salary was about 15,000 yen. As I became more experienced, they allowed me to increase the number of houses I delivered to. At most, I delivered to about 120 houses a day, earning about 20,000 to 30,000 yen per month. I continued this from the latter half of sixth grade until the third year of middle school.
For me as an elementary school student who had just started delivering newspapers, 10,000 yen was an enormous amount. On payday, I always went to buy games. I spent most of my earnings on games, but as I became more interested in how games worked, I gradually wanted a computer. However, since computers were expensive, I decided to save my newspaper delivery earnings little by little.
A Machine for My Own
In January 2000, having entered the local Tobu Middle School the previous year, I headed to the computer shop LAOX with 70,000 yen I had saved from newspaper delivery and 30,000 yen my father helped me with. My target was the budget computer I had been eyeing, the Sotec PC STATION M250.
Popular ¥99,800 PC with a new model
Equipped with INTEL® Celeron™ processor 500MHz
“PC STATION M250”
8x DVD-ROM drive, 10GB HDD,
ATI RAGE PRO TURBO graphics system, 8MB VRAM,
15-inch monitor, modem, speakers, and various application software including Just Home
(OS is Windows 98 Second Edition)
With my heart racing at such advertising, I entered LAOX and headed straight to the computer corner without looking sideways. I knew the layout of LAOX better than new employees after frequenting it so often. Arriving at the computer corner, it was time for my once-in-a-lifetime gamble. “Since Windows 2000 is coming out soon, can’t you make this cheaper?” I asked the clerk, pointing at the PC STATION M250, delivering the line I had carefully prepared. “Well, Windows 2000 doesn’t really matter for ordinary people,” the clerk replied, dismissing my preparation easily. With my eagerness making me unable to continue the negotiation, I handed over the firmly held 100,000 yen to the clerk, and in exchange, I finally got my hands on the machine I had dreamed of.
My long relationship with computers began with my first computer, mispronouncing “install” as “insutōru” and struggling with the difference between clicking and double-clicking.
“A computer without the internet is just a box.” Familiar with this saying, I immediately signed up with an internet provider after acquiring my computer. It was in my father’s name, but I paid the fees myself. Since I had been entrusted with all kinds of household procedures from a young age, this was a piece of cake. The internet at that time used a dial-up method, connecting through a telephone line. I think many people remember the modem making sounds like “beep-papapa-beep” while connecting to the internet. After my family went to sleep at 11 PM, the Teleho Time until the next morning, when phone rates became fixed, was my golden time. I continued a lifestyle of staying connected to the internet late into the night, researching game information, and then going out for newspaper delivery in the morning. Eventually, our home internet progressed from ISDN to ADSL, and my knowledge about computers gradually deepened.
Games and Programming
After getting a computer, I mainly used it to play games and search for game information. As I researched the mechanisms of Pro Action Replay and games to modify them, I gradually became interested in programming. I realized that programming could be used to create games. Although the importance of IT education is emphasized now, and many non-specialists know the term “programming,” it was still a time when the internet was just beginning to penetrate ordinary households, so there was no one around me who understood programming. In this environment, a book about the Perl programming language that I picked up at a bookstore was the first solid information about programming I encountered. Since Perl was free and supposedly understandable for beginners, I prepared an environment to develop Perl and started learning with this book as a reference. I created programs that output birthdays, tic-tac-toe games, and programs to check book ISBN codes. All these programs were text-based, and I was dissatisfied that I couldn’t do anything graphical. Eventually, I learned about another programming language called “Visual Basic” or “VB” for short. True to its name “Visual,” it allowed me to easily create graphical things. Using the free version of VB, I made simple games like Whack-a-Mole and an Invaders-style shooting game. However, the free version had significant constraints, such as not being able to create executable files, so I began to think I needed to spend money to buy software. As I researched, I discovered that programming development environments had academic versions for students and teachers, which could be purchased for about 20,000 yen. 20,000 yen was equivalent to one month’s salary for me. At first, I intended to buy Visual Basic, but as I researched further, I learned that Basic was a simple language, and to do serious development, I would need to learn the more difficult C language. I also found out that there was a development environment called “Visual C++” or VC++ for short to learn C. Since I was spending a significant amount of money, I decided to buy the more useful but difficult option, and in my second year of middle school, I purchased “Visual C++ 6.0 Standard Edition Academic Version.” I assumed that since it had the same “Visual” in its name, it would work the same way as VB, but it wasn’t that easy. Looking back now, I understand that VC++ is not something a programming beginner can immediately understand. Understanding VC++ requires extensive knowledge. So, I tried typing in the content from the book that came with the software, but I hardly understood any of it. Eventually, I found a website called “Programming Even a Cat Can Understand” on the internet, and I studied C language there. However, I still couldn’t do graphical programming and was limited to writing and playing with text-based programs.
In my third year of middle school, Microsoft announced a new member of the Visual family called “Visual C#.” VC# was marketed as having the ease of VB with the complexity capabilities of VC++, and I immediately jumped on it. Indeed, the advertising wasn’t false, and with my now somewhat proficient C language skills, I quickly became able to do graphical programming with VC#. At that time, I was hooked on an online game called “Ultima Online” or “UO” for short, and I wrote programs to analyze it. To play “UO” officially, I had to pay 3,000 yen every month, equivalent to one week’s salary for me. I couldn’t afford that, so I played by connecting to personal servers running “UO Server Emulator” programs that mimicked UO servers. This way of playing was not officially approved, so I definitely don’t recommend it. However, this server program was publicly available, and its source code, which served as the design document, was also public, so I downloaded it, modified it, and played with it. I also wrote programs to analyze internal images of “UO.”
I also wrote programs to extract images of characters appearing in wireless communications within the game “Metal Gear Solid,” which I was playing at the time. Looking at sequences of numbers and analyzing them while guessing the type of image data made me feel like a “hacker.” If I had been in a metropolitan area like Tokyo, I might have found someone to guide me earlier, but since there was no one around me who understood programming, I learned many things through self-study.
Along with programming, I was also interested in computer graphics, or CG. At that time, “Final Fantasy X” was released on PlayStation 2, and witnessing the evolution of graphics in the series, I couldn’t help but be interested. Of course, there was no one around me who understood CG, so I often read “CG World” at bookstores. My desire to create CG myself grew stronger, and I purchased “Shade,” Japan’s first 3DCG software. Although “Shade” wasn’t a major software, its simplified version cost around 30,000 yen, so I spent money to buy it. The standard software in the 3DCG industry was “3D Studio Max” or “Maya,” which cost hundreds of thousands to millions of yen, so they were completely out of reach. In the end, I couldn’t create anything successfully, but the CG basics I learned then are still applied in my daily work.
Another thing I was into at that time was creating New Year’s cards. Every year after getting a computer, I made New Year’s cards with it. These cards were a bit unusual; I composited myself into scenes from popular movies of the old year, such as “Harry Potter,” “Men in Black,” “Zatoichi,” and “The Last Samurai.”
I continued creating these New Year’s cards for about a decade until I joined Google, and I heard that many households eagerly anticipated them each year. I enjoyed creating things and surprising people with them.
Note: Games I Played in Middle School
During middle school, I spent most of the money I earned from newspaper delivery on games and computers. I often played games like the “Final Fantasy Series,” “Xenogears,” “Metal Gear Solid Series,” “Tekken Series,” “Ore no Ryouri,” “Seaman,” and “Shenmue.”
I played all of Square Soft’s (formerly Square Enix) “Final Fantasy” from 6 to 10. Besides the game systems, I was always amazed by the evolving graphics. I particularly remember the impact of Final Fantasy 8. The opening movie that began with full CG against a backdrop of orchestral music. Seeing life-sized characters moving around, I couldn’t believe such realistic games existed. Even after completing it once, I wasn’t satisfied and played the game thoroughly while reading strategy guides.
I was also hooked on Square Soft’s “Xenogears.” This game wasn’t hugely popular, but it had a “chuunibyou” (adolescent delusions of grandeur) storyline that incorporated various elements like religion, social issues, science fiction, and philosophy. The protagonist of this game was a young man with dissociative identity disorder, having various personalities - a mild-mannered one, a lonely one, and a violent one - always pondering what his true self was. This setting resonated with me as a sensitive middle school student. Around the same time, I read “The Minds of Billy Milligan” by Daniel Keyes, a story about a young man with 24 personalities, which made me think deeply about what personality is and who I am.
Sega’s “Shenmue” was a game I was looking forward to before its release. I became an instant fan after seeing a preview on a disc that came with a used copy of “Virtua Fighter 3” that I happened to buy. I watched this preview over and over again. In that preview, I listened to Sega producer Yu Suzuki saying, “This game is not an RPG, it’s FREE,” and I couldn’t wait to see what kind of game it would be. I was excited about the game system, and the fact that the game was set in mainland China was also one of the reasons I was looking forward to “Shenmue.” Just before buying my computer, at the end of 1999, I bought “Shenmue,” which was finally released, at 7-Eleven right after finishing my newspaper delivery. I usually didn’t buy new games to save money, but this time was special. Since school was on winter break, I stayed home all day playing “Shenmue.” The term “FREE” was well-chosen; I quickly realized this game had a degree of freedom far beyond previous games. People in the town lived according to their own rhythms, and I could become one of them, exploring the town, buying drinks from vending machines, racing forklifts, or playing in the town’s arcade. Being able to play games in the game center within the game was revolutionary. It was a game that could be considered the forerunner of what is now called the open-world genre. I also purchased the subsequently released “Shenmue II” at the time of its release. When I learned that Yu Suzuki, who had left Sega in 2016, was crowdfunding to raise money for the development of the sequel “Shenmue III,” I contributed without hesitation. As of May 2017, development seems to be progressing smoothly, and I’m looking forward to playing it.
I also played Konami’s “Metal Gear Solid Series” a lot. “Metal Gear Solid” is an action game about becoming a spy to stop a nuclear launch by infiltrating enemy territory. The game system was innovative, unlike previous fighting games, where you had to infiltrate without being spotted by enemies. After completing the game, it concludes with the following message: “Even several years after the Non-Proliferation Treaty was concluded, there are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world.” I was shocked that such messages could be conveyed through games. Around that time, on September 11, 2001, multiple terrorist attacks occurred in America, and I witnessed firsthand on the TV I happened to be watching an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center building. Seeing America invade Afghanistan under the pretext of the War on Terror, I felt anxious about the future of the world, even as a child. Later, my class conducted street fundraising at my suggestion, and my group stood at the station for two days, collecting about 200,000 yen, which we donated to Afghanistan through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I remember receiving a thank-you letter from Sadako Ogata, who was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at that time.
Computer Doctor
I quit my newspaper delivery part-time job in the middle of my third year of middle school. I had found a better-paying part-time job. My sister, one year older, had been working part-time at a local Chinese restaurant during middle school by lying about her age. Imitating her, I started working at the local McDonald’s, claiming to be a “high school ronin” (someone who failed the entrance exams and is preparing to retake them). At McDonald’s, I started with an hourly wage of 680 yen, which increased by 10 yen gradually. On weekdays, I worked 4 hours from 6 to 10 PM, and 8 hours on days when school was closed. I earned about 60,000 to 70,000 yen per month, so I hardly worried about money. After taking the high school entrance exams, in April 2002, I graduated from middle school and entered Nagano Yoshida High School, which was near our home and where my sister, one year older, also attended. From around that time, my playmates were mainly people from my part-time job or high school friends. Our play centered around outdoor activities like karaoke or barbecues by the river, and we hardly ever gathered at someone’s house to play games. The friends I played with in high school have maintained contact, and even after entering university and becoming working adults, we continue our relationships as important friends.
From this time, I gradually played fewer games, but I was still engrossed in computers and programming. Since I repeatedly bought parts and updated them, the Sotec PC STATION M250 I bought in my first year of middle school had almost no trace left except for the 15-inch monitor. I added memory, hard disks, graphics cards one after another, and eventually replaced the motherboard and case as well. By this time, I had become self-proclaimed as a computer doctor, often solving acquaintances’ computer troubles. Through word of mouth in the Chinese community, people who heard that I could build computers myself often asked me to assemble computers for them on a small budget.
A Brush with Death
Around the end of my first year of high school, I nearly died. Born in April, I got my license as soon as I turned 16 and started riding a moped. Eventually, unsatisfied with the moped, I began riding a 250cc motorcycle without a license. I wasn’t joyriding; I was merely enjoying the thrill of riding the 250cc bike. However, good things don’t last long. One night, an incident occurred. After finishing my part-time job and playing a bit, I was heading home as usual. It was raining slightly, and I was accelerating with the desire to get home quickly. As I approached a large intersection with traffic lights, I saw a yellow signal. I didn’t know the meaning of yellow signals when I was in China, but by this time, I fully understood its meaning. The signal was about to turn red. I was in the middle of three lanes and accelerated even more. The next moment after seeing a car in the right-turn lane move slightly, I lost awareness of where I was. My left eye wouldn’t open, and someone seemed to be talking to me, saying “Are you okay? Are you okay?” My only concern was “What should I do, I don’t have a license,” so I reflexively replied, “I’m fine.” My consciousness faded again. I don’t know how much time passed. When I next regained consciousness, I clearly knew where I was. I had crashed into a car and was thrown into the middle of the intersection along with my bike. The person who called out to me, probably the car driver, was no longer there. In the middle of the intersection, I waved for help, but no one wanted to get involved with someone waving with blood streaming from their face in the middle of the night. I desperately tried to lift the bike and move it to the sidewalk, but the severely deformed bike, weighing nearly 200 kilograms, wouldn’t move as I wanted. At that moment, I heard the sound of sirens accompanied by a red light from the distance. “It’s the police, I’m done for.” Thinking so, I resigned myself and waited for the approaching light. The light, which I could barely identify through my blood-clouded eyes, belonged to an ambulance. I was saved. With the help of the paramedics, I somehow moved the bike to the sidewalk. To the paramedics urging me to get into the ambulance, I confidently said, “I’m fine, I’ll go home.” I was more afraid of the paramedics contacting the police and discovering my lack of a license than I was of losing my life. I learned firsthand that humans cannot make normal judgments when panicked. Of course, riding a motorcycle without a license is a wrong act that violates the law, but the 16-year-old me, full of vigor, wasn’t aware of this. Now I fully understand that one should never drive without a license; it can harm not only oneself but also others.
I made it home, but not wanting my parents to find out, I shut myself in my room until morning. I still thought I could keep it hidden. I couldn’t sleep all night because blood kept flowing from my face. In the morning, after my parents left for work, I vomited blood in the toilet. At this point, I thought, “Am I going to die like this?” My sister, who had woken up, was shocked by the situation and immediately called an ambulance. The diagnosis was “left orbital floor and wall fracture.” Thanks to wearing a full-face helmet, I escaped with just an eye fracture. Contrary to my expectation that my parents, who rushed to the hospital, would scold me, they cried aloud. For the first time, I painfully felt with my whole body how much I had been neglecting my filial duties. The treatment required surgery to cut out part of my hip bone and transplant it to my eye. On April 16, 2003, my 17th birthday, I was hospitalized for surgery. The surgery was successful, and I was discharged two weeks later. My visual field and eyesight gradually recovered, and the swelling around my eye subsided after a few months. However, my left eye sank a bit at that time, and my slightly smaller left eye compared to my right became a lifelong reminder of my foolish actions.
Mobile Apps
During high school, with the spread of DoCoMo’s i-mode, playing games on mobile phones became common. Since anyone could freely develop applications for i-mode, I wanted to create my own apps. However, my phone was an AU with student discounts, which wasn’t an environment where anyone could freely develop applications. Around the time I became a third-year high school student, AU’s EZ application was opened to general developers, allowing anyone to develop applications. I wasn’t very interested in playing mobile games, but I had strong desires to create games and to program, so I took on the challenge of developing EZ applications. EZ applications were written in “J2ME,” a type of “Java language,” so I studied Java language at this time. I thought of creating a game similar to “Lode Runner” that was on the Famicom. “Lode Runner” is a game where you control a player character, bury enemies chasing you in holes, and collect gold nuggets. After struggling alone, I managed to get the character moving, but I couldn’t complete the final development. I lacked knowledge of algorithms and data structures needed for game programming. This was the limit of my self-study without a mentor or people around me with the same hobby.
In a manner of speaking, I’ve been developing mobile apps since high school (… well, maybe not).