I am not really in a position to say too much about role-playing in Japan because I didn’t get much chance to do any. This is because, like in Australia, role-playing just isn’t a very well-known phenomenon there. The Japanese computer game market is heavily crowded with some very role-playing-oriented computer games (like the Final Fantasy series) and there really is a lot to keep a young nerd occupied just with them.

Of course most of the foreign games would have to be translated, which is also something of a problem. D&D has been, and there is a native game called Sword World which is popular with players, but there isn’t actually a big role-playing scene. Since I lived in the country I wasn’t exactly in a position to pursue it. I wanted to play in a Japanese group before I left, in the Japanese language, but since I left 2 years before I was meant to, I wasn’t quite ready for the experience language wise and I never got a chance to meet anyone. I certainly knew lots of nerds, but many of them had never heard of fantasy role-playing (even using the Japanese name, “Table talk role-playing” they still hadn’t heard of it).

When she was teaching my partner occasionally mentioned my hobby to some of her more mature, more nerdy students, but she reported that most of them hadn’t heard of it either. Those that had thought it sounded too difficult, but none of them reported any kind of disapproval. The general level of shyness Japanese people have, and their unwillingness to draw attention to themselves or their ideas, means that they don’t respond warmly to the kind of environment role-playing represents – in that sense I think it’s a very western kind of activity. However, there are a lot of stereotypes about Japanese people’s lack of initiative and imagination which get bandied about in connection with their unwillingness to present ideas publicly, and I think those stereotypes are quite shallow and untrue, so one shouldn’t confuse a Japanese person’s unwillingness to join such a group environment with any such stereotype.

Certainly, though, I do think that the traits of diffidence and humility are strongly admired and treasured in Japanese society, and they aren’t compatible with a gaming environment where drunk nerds yell their actions in an imaginary world before an audience of their peers.

Given these combined factors – console game dominance, translation costs and shyness – it’s no surprise that role-playing is not so popular here. But if I go back (not such a big if) I will go to a major city, and then I shall have a better chance of finding out what Japanese RPGs and their players are all about.