My Crisis

I've spent my childhood dribbling and shooting hoops on a basketball court in Ota. Like most other families that had suffered from the Second Kanto Earthquake we were given a flat in hastily assembled panel houses there. The Tokyo bay was but ten minutes away from our place, the filthy green film of its waters sticking to our hands like oil. From the garage roofs where we liked to hang out we could clearly see the rotting carcasses of Aqua City, and further on the silhouette of an artificial island that carried on its back the Development Complex like a giant dormant sea turtle.
My parents had arrived in Tokyo just three years before the earthquake. I was off on a school filed trip to Nagasaki when it stuck. Upon my return home I found out that there was nowhere to return, just like that. Luckily for us, nobody in our family had died in that hell.

After I graduated from school my parents moved out of the Residential District, just a year before Mason tore it down making room for "TICP". I rented a small cheap one-room appartment in the city, not willing to pay a yen over that - the Outer District started right from under my window - and then proceeded to spent the entire year doing nothing, earning just enough in order not to starve to death by hacking licensed software as a favor for a few of my friends. It was next to impossible to live in that neighborhood, partially because of the smell, rising from out of the blasted sewage pipes in the Fault, and partially because of the possibility of getting gutted by overly active youngsters that seemed to swarm the place at sunset. That's why I lived mostly at my girlfriend's place, just a short five-minute walk from Tinsel City. I worked there after she would leave for the day, with my computer on my lap.

Tokyo was my city. Its weird entanglement of lives upon a demolished foundation of an entire culture, all that remained of which were the language and a few local region names, the dust and the sweet suffocation from heated pavement, the ever-so-strong smell of filth and raw sewage from the Fault, evident even in the plush apartments of Tinsel City… That was my kind of drug. I've heard that in New York one could veer off Fifth Avenue, walk one block and find oneself in a ghetto, while here you had to drive halfway through the city to find yourself staring down Hell. You couldn't call the Fault any other way…

Back then I had the impression that I ought to see everything and try everything out for myself. I've submerged three times into the dusk of the Paradise Loop, the second time around had barely made it out alive, with a cut on my arm and a blood infection spreading like grassfire. I inhaled strange vapors from even stranger brews with people of the most incredible appearances deep at the bottom of the Fault, where sunlight lingers less for than six hours a day. Having borrowed a suit from a pal and paying for everything with a fake credit card, I drank myself stupid in Shinjuku with some strange person, about whom I was later whispered stories, each one more frightening than the one before. I soaked myself in the air of Shibuya, dissolving into the crowd of local colorful gangs, and helped peddle stolen electronics there in a shop called simply "Denya", while in the next room, separated from me by a wall, a fat college student soldered microchips into them, having tossed his books from Kando in a heap into the nearest corner. I listened to a tanned Latino mechanic of about my age banter about El Salvador in the "Naito Gaun" bar, while his companion, a guy with a strangely tired look in his eyes and a sad grin on his face nodded in agreement, not listening to a single word he said. I helped to clear away the rubble and carry off the bodies and the wounded after that incident on the highway in July, when my hands couldn't curl into fists because of the blood caked on them. I was arrested three times, and last time jumped the bail the very same day, making my way to Yokohama by means of the sunken tunnels to change money for a shipment of some wicked doping mixture from a Russian kid that managed to get to the capital illegally all the way from the Third Zone, from former Vladivostok…

And all of this went on with the Tower looming in the background of our lives, the enormous topless cone, a full kilometer high, the dim strings of serpentine lights racing across its perimeter. You could see it from anywhere; it simply forced itself into our life, although I still remember Tokyo without it. When its construction had only just begun, me and my pals took the subway to watch the first layers being assembled. Shortly afterwards, it was no longer necessary to ride anywhere - you could watch the dark artificial copy of mount Fuji grow on the horizon right from your very own window. We lived, loved, wept and all the while it stood and so it shall stand. It is a city within a city, a hive within an even larger hive. You get the shivers when you know that somewhere high above there is someone, who is looking down at you, at the city, from his thousand-meter throne of power.

I've been twice to "The Replicants" concert, although I myself prefer "Acid Rain". Priss with all her wild vocals is by all means superb, but the voice of Johnny Takayashi is still my personal favorite. My girlfriend dragged me over to see "Vision", and our seats were so high I couldn't even make out the stage - it was just a giant glowing smudge. After that concert I found myself suddenly with a bad case of blues, so I ran off back to Timex city, where I spent the better of a week getting severely drunk with two geeks, who were pestering me with details about the advantages of K-12S over K-11s and arguing about the probable sex of the Knight Sabers.
All of this can still happen. All of this could have happened.

........................................................................................................

The concrete city, where crossing the street takes you into the blessed kingdom of civilization, and where a step to the side brings you to the Fault - a rift left by the monstrous earthquake of 2025. The Genom tower still stands - a giant burial mound for some, a lighthouse of salvation for others. A city, where underneath MegaTokyo's most prestigious district abandoned trains circle the Paradise Loop, day and night, non-stop, having become home to drug-addicts and prostitutes. Brightly lit and comfortable appartments next to Shibuya, and the shacks of the Residential District.

The world where I grew up.

Here's that bar, "Hot Legs", where Priss and "The Replicants" gave their first concert. Here is the ADPolice building, where a talented mechanic Joey Magpie almost got shot by officer Leon McNichol; where a cute red-head named Nene Romanova works. And over there, in Timex city, is Professor Raven's garage, and if you take the northwest highway, just ten minutes away, you'll find a strange automobile service station with a peculiar name - "The Early Bird". It is rumored that Genom will gladly pay any price for the head of once presumed dead Katherine Madigan, who rode into Genom CEO's secretary office over the corpse of Brian J. Mason and later stained the Tower's floor with her own blood. And over there, in the bay, Aqua city crumbles under the death agony of F.G. Frederic. Here is Genom's lab, where reconstruction is in full stride after that berzerk boomer escape the week before.

This world was created and developed by Toshimichi Suzuki, designed by Kenichi Sonoda and later on by Hiroaki Goda and Satoshi Urushihara, while Shinji Aramaki, Hideki Kakinuma and Masami Obari designed the mecha. This world was shown in 8 episodes of "Bubblegum Crisis", 3 episodes of "Bubblegum Crash", 3 episodes of "ADPolice Files" and graphic novel "Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal" by Adam Warren. This is a world to which I intend to add something, for I lived there. Since the moment when I picked up the first VHS, to the moment when I sat through the closing credits of "Bubblegum Crash".

In comparison to this, the castrated creation of "Bubblegum Crisis 2040" and the 2000-year remake of "AD Police files", with those awful, lacking any charisma characters, stands out not just as a monstrous parody, but as a downright challenge. A challenge, a spit to the face of a world where not only I grew up, but a lot of other people as well.

THIS IS OUR WORLD.

Alex Xatchett '03


		MY CRISIS
BB	BBB	I've spent my childhood dribbling and shooting hoops on a basketball court in Ota. Like most other families that had suffered from the Second Kanto Earthquake we were given a flat in hastily assembled panel houses there. The Tokyo bay was but ten minutes away from our place, the filthy green film of its waters sticking to our hands like oil. From the garage roofs where we liked to hang out we could clearly see the rotting carcasses of Aqua City, and further on the silhouette of an artificial island that carried on its back the Development Complex like a giant dormant sea turtle. My parents had arrived in Tokyo just three years before the earthquake. I was off on a school filed trip to Nagasaki when it stuck. Upon my return home I found out that there was nowhere to return, just like that. Luckily for us, nobody in our family had died in that hell. After I graduated from school my parents moved out of the Residential District, just a year before Mason tore it down making room for "TICP". I rented a small cheap one-room appartment in the city, not willing to pay a yen over that - the Outer District started right from under my window - and then proceeded to spent the entire year doing nothing, earning just enough in order not to starve to death by hacking licensed software as a favor for a few of my friends. It was next to impossible to live in that neighborhood, partially because of the smell, rising from out of the blasted sewage pipes in the Fault, and partially because of the possibility of getting gutted by overly active youngsters that seemed to swarm the place at sunset. That's why I lived mostly at my girlfriend's place, just a short five-minute walk from Tinsel City. I worked there after she would leave for the day, with my computer on my lap. Tokyo was my city. Its weird entanglement of lives upon a demolished foundation of an entire culture, all that remained of which were the language and a few local region names, the dust and the sweet suffocation from heated pavement, the ever-so-strong smell of filth and raw sewage from the Fault, evident even in the plush apartments of Tinsel City… That was my kind of drug. I've heard that in New York one could veer off Fifth Avenue, walk one block and find oneself in a ghetto, while here you had to drive halfway through the city to find yourself staring down Hell. You couldn't call the Fault any other way… Back then I had the impression that I ought to see everything and try everything out for myself. I've submerged three times into the dusk of the Paradise Loop, the second time around had barely made it out alive, with a cut on my arm and a blood infection spreading like grassfire. I inhaled strange vapors from even stranger brews with people of the most incredible appearances deep at the bottom of the Fault, where sunlight lingers less for than six hours a day. Having borrowed a suit from a pal and paying for everything with a fake credit card, I drank myself stupid in Shinjuku with some strange person, about whom I was later whispered stories, each one more frightening than the one before. I soaked myself in the air of Shibuya, dissolving into the crowd of local colorful gangs, and helped peddle stolen electronics there in a shop called simply "Denya", while in the next room, separated from me by a wall, a fat college student soldered microchips into them, having tossed his books from Kando in a heap into the nearest corner. I listened to a tanned Latino mechanic of about my age banter about El Salvador in the "Naito Gaun" bar, while his companion, a guy with a strangely tired look in his eyes and a sad grin on his face nodded in agreement, not listening to a single word he said. I helped to clear away the rubble and carry off the bodies and the wounded after that incident on the highway in July, when my hands couldn't curl into fists because of the blood caked on them. I was arrested three times, and last time jumped the bail the very same day, making my way to Yokohama by means of the sunken tunnels to change money for a shipment of some wicked doping mixture from a Russian kid that managed to get to the capital illegally all the way from the Third Zone, from former Vladivostok… And all of this went on with the Tower looming in the background of our lives, the enormous topless cone, a full kilometer high, the dim strings of serpentine lights racing across its perimeter. You could see it from anywhere; it simply forced itself into our life, although I still remember Tokyo without it. When its construction had only just begun, me and my pals took the subway to watch the first layers being assembled. Shortly afterwards, it was no longer necessary to ride anywhere - you could watch the dark artificial copy of mount Fuji grow on the horizon right from your very own window. We lived, loved, wept and all the while it stood and so it shall stand. It is a city within a city, a hive within an even larger hive. You get the shivers when you know that somewhere high above there is someone, who is looking down at you, at the city, from his thousand-meter throne of power. I've been twice to "The Replicants" concert, although I myself prefer "Acid Rain". Priss with all her wild vocals is by all means superb, but the voice of Johnny Takayashi is still my personal favorite. My girlfriend dragged me over to see "Vision", and our seats were so high I couldn't even make out the stage - it was just a giant glowing smudge. After that concert I found myself suddenly with a bad case of blues, so I ran off back to Timex city, where I spent the better of a week getting severely drunk with two geeks, who were pestering me with details about the advantages of K-12S over K-11s and arguing about the probable sex of the Knight Sabers. All of this can still happen. All of this could have happened. ........................................................................................................ The concrete city, where crossing the street takes you into the blessed kingdom of civilization, and where a step to the side brings you to the Fault - a rift left by the monstrous earthquake of 2025. The Genom tower still stands - a giant burial mound for some, a lighthouse of salvation for others. A city, where underneath MegaTokyo's most prestigious district abandoned trains circle the Paradise Loop, day and night, non-stop, having become home to drug-addicts and prostitutes. Brightly lit and comfortable appartments next to Shibuya, and the shacks of the Residential District. The world where I grew up. Here's that bar, "Hot Legs", where Priss and "The Replicants" gave their first concert. Here is the ADPolice building, where a talented mechanic Joey Magpie almost got shot by officer Leon McNichol; where a cute red-head named Nene Romanova works. And over there, in Timex city, is Professor Raven's garage, and if you take the northwest highway, just ten minutes away, you'll find a strange automobile service station with a peculiar name - "The Early Bird". It is rumored that Genom will gladly pay any price for the head of once presumed dead Katherine Madigan, who rode into Genom CEO's secretary office over the corpse of Brian J. Mason and later stained the Tower's floor with her own blood. And over there, in the bay, Aqua city crumbles under the death agony of F.G. Frederic. Here is Genom's lab, where reconstruction is in full stride after that berzerk boomer escape the week before. This world was created and developed by Toshimichi Suzuki, designed by Kenichi Sonoda and later on by Hiroaki Goda and Satoshi Urushihara, while Shinji Aramaki, Hideki Kakinuma and Masami Obari designed the mecha. This world was shown in 8 episodes of "Bubblegum Crisis", 3 episodes of "Bubblegum Crash", 3 episodes of "ADPolice Files" and graphic novel "Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal" by Adam Warren. This is a world to which I intend to add something, for I lived there. Since the moment when I picked up the first VHS, to the moment when I sat through the closing credits of "Bubblegum Crash". In comparison to this, the castrated creation of "Bubblegum Crisis 2040" and the 2000-year remake of "AD Police files", with those awful, lacking any charisma characters, stands out not just as a monstrous parody, but as a downright challenge. A challenge, a spit to the face of a world where not only I grew up, but a lot of other people as well. THIS IS OUR WORLD. Alex Xatchett '03