The Last Japanese Hands a Console Will Feel

The Last Japanese Hands a Console Will Feel

Every console I sell comes from Japan. None of them reach my bench having already crossed an ocean. They come from a house a few towns over, or a lot a dealer is clearing. Many arrive filthy — grime worked into the seams, residue gone sticky on the buttons. And when I open them up, more often than not there is dust packed inside, sitting on the board itself. The Famicom especially; you would not believe what thirty years settles in there. I clean every one, inside and out. The buyer will never open the shell. I do it anyway. By the time I tape the box shut, it looks like someone cared — and in the places no one will ever look, someone did.

Then it goes. To Texas, to Germany, to someone in Australia I will never meet. A Japanese Super Famicom runs on 100 volts and puts out the same 60Hz signal as an American machine, so in North America it simply works. But in Europe, where everything runs at 50Hz, the buyer often has to open it up — drill a small hole in the shell, fit a switch, lift a pin inside. Someone over there will give it a scar so it can speak their language.

That scar does not exist yet while the machine is in my hands. Neither does the foreign power adapter it will need, nor the second wave of wear from a teenager in a country I have never seen. I am holding it at the one moment when its whole life abroad is still ahead of it.

People imagine that an old console carries its history into your hands. Mine work the other way. I am not a stop along the road. I am the place the road begins. When I press down the last edge of the tape, I catch myself wondering where this one will end up — whose room, whose hands, whose language.

I will never find out. I only get to send it off clean, at the start of a journey I don't get to watch. If that is the whole of my part, it is enough.