That’s me eating raw chicken heart. Or liver. I forget. That’s Tomono Sho back there, a career writer.
My plans for Tuesday were basically to bounce over to Kobe station and visit some old friends and a few new ones: THe folks at Group SNE, the other big RPG company in Japan. I’ve been friends with a lot of them (including the boss) since back in like 2003 or so when we met accidentally at GenCon (a yearly game convention in Indianapolis). My plans were to meet up with them for lunch, hang out a bit, and then go home. The latter was my plan: I didn’t really have any night plans, but just two days previous I was almost delerious from exhaustion at speaking Kansai-dialect Japanese for several hours nonstop.

What I didn’t realize is that that was a one-on-one meetup. This time, it was me with several people. For some reason, even though I myself was flipping back and forth between normal and Kansai-dialect (and about half the folks I met spoke in that dialect), I didn’t get tired at all. I think it was because of the additional pressures in one-on-one conversations to steer the conversation, think of topics, keep the topic going, etc. With a group of people there’s always someone saying something, so it’s a lot easier. So I decided to stay with them through dinner, etc.
Anyway, we talked about the company, games, gaming, culture, life all through the day. It was a really awesome time, actually. We also ended up hitting a number of restaurants. After lunch, frex, we spent a few hours at a local cafe that specializes in desserts. Oversized desserts. We each asked for a “float”:

Tomono’s float.

My strawberry float, and my hand to compare. It’s basically a strawberry icre cream float, in a strawberry-milk juice, in a fishbowl.

My good friend Kitazawa Kei, and his coffee parfait.

Fujisawa Sanae and her banana float.

OK, so there is a trick, and that is that the fishbowl is pretty much filled up entirely with ice. So it’s basically a scoop of icecream (maybe a hair more) with about a cup and a half or more juice. Take away the ice, and I doubt you have a “large milkshake” at Chik-Fil-A.

In any case, this was the gang I pretty much hung around with for the first part of the day. They all work as writers or designers in the Japanese RPG biz at the company Group SNE, so the hours flew by.

That’s a lot of pictures. I’ll post the second half of the day in another post.