Airsoft with James in Chiba

[SORRY THIS IS GOING TO KILL YOUR BROWSER PROBABLY, I installed nextgen gallery to manage my images but it doesn't automatically thumbnail singlepic inserts... I will have to write something myself later]

Last Saturday, James invited me to goto an Airsoft game. Although I had some reservations about this, thinking perhaps that running around with toy guns pretending to be soldiers was a little otaku, I soon remembered that I am a man with a pair of bollocks, and consequently believe running around with toy guns pretending to be soldiers is infact cool and fun.

Irrespective of the “boys with toys” pheonomenon, I now do think that airsoft is really good fun and highly recommend that you give it a go. Anyway, on Friday night we popped to Akihabara to pickup some extra bb’s for the game. Here are some pics from the airsoft shop (note that if you click on a picture now it will be shown full size in a floating frame without leaving the page):

On the way back home we passed this odd statue of a naked woman draped in a nightshirt and a Fedora.. Ahh Japan.

The next day, we left Kanda at 8:00 for Chiba.

James seemed somewhat unimpressed with my attempts to photograph him:

It took probably 30 minutes to get from Kanda station to Chiba.

From Chiba, we had to take a monorail to somewhere else. In the monorail station I for some reason inserted my Suica card (like the stupid Oyster card) into the slot for the paper tickets instead of just placing it on the Suica area. I think I was daydreaming or something. Anyway, it fucked up the machine, but the guy just came out and took it apart to get my card back:

I found the monorail station very exciting, because monorails are cool don’t you know?

After waiting for a while, it arrived:

We got on.

And I observed this silly notice:

When the monorail stopped at our destination, we got off and started walking to the airsoft place:

Several things were observed along the way:

It would be nice to own that little sports car.

OK so we have arrived.

This was the first time I had played Airsoft.

In Airsoft the weapons are replicas of real weapons used by militaries worldwide. The weapons fire small plastic 6mm balls called bbs (beebees). bb stands for ball bearing, but these are plastic, and they are not used for bearings, but you understand the derivation.

The guns are setup so that the maximum energy that the gun transfers to the bb is just less than one joule, this is because for a bb to penetrate an eyeball you need more than one joule. This is therefore a compromise between safety and firing accuracy and speed. Whilst protagonists must always wear eye protection, this low limit ensures that in the event of an accident, it is unlikely that the eye will be permanently damaged, unless the bullet is fired at very close range directly into it.

Shooting is only allowed within the netted area.

In the image above you can see someone within the netted area, who has himself been shot and is leaving the game.

There are many different types of game you can play. As an example consider the game where each team has a flag to defend and it is the goal and objective of each team to steal the flag of the other team. The flag is in a fixed position next to an airhorn mounted on a wooden post, “stealing” of the flag is indicated by sounding this airhorn.

It is obviously very difficult to make it to the enemies flag since it is being heavily defended, but since the enemy is also attacking your flag, this means that there are gaps in the defense.

The game will also end if one team kills all members of the other.

You die when you get shot by bbs from the other team (I suppose it should also be same team too if you were being realistic). When you get shot, assuming you feel it, you should shout “I’m hit”, or just “hit”, or in Japan “hit-o” and then leave the game. When you leave the game you walk out with your gun held above your head or your hands up so that nobody else shoots you.

When you leave the game you are not allowed to communicate with anybody else, since this could be cheating. You should simply leave.

The guns are mostly electric powered. The battery drives a motor which cocks a spring and the spring energy is then released to propel the bb. This can be done several times a second, that is, the guns fire on full-auto. Usually there is a setting for this and typically the gun will have 3 settings: off, semi-auto, and full-auto. Obviously some guns like pump action shotguns, do not have full-auto fire.

Pistols are usually gas propelled and are charged up using a CO2 gas canister a bit like a lighter refiller. There are some gas powered rifles but these are quite rare.

The mix of genders is probably about 90% male 10% female. I guess this is to be expected. You can see one of the women in the above picture, using her mobile phone.

There I am ready to go into battle. I have James’s electric powered AK47 with folding stock as my primary weapon and underneath my hoodie I have a gas powered handgun. That AK is pretty cool as it has a working mechanism so the mechanics of the gun sound real when it fires.

I don’t have my hoodie up for fashion’s sake. A shaved head makes a good target and is quite conspicuous. It hurts if you get shot in the head. I have a full face mask.

I initially took my camera into the games but then I came out only to discover it had fallen out of its stupid pouch (remember I told you about this damn pouch on the camera post I made before). Luckily someone found it the next round, but I didn’t take it in again, which is unfortunate because it would have been nice to make some videos.

My cousin Eve commented on an old post saying something like “less of the macho posturing and more of the culture”, because we had just met James at a gathering (we are not allowed to have parties in Kanda house, hehe) we had in Kanda house and he was showing us the guns.

I can imagine her perhaps thinking the same thing here, but actually this is culture. Contemporary japanese culture, not ancient Japanese culture. Airsoft was invented in Japan, it is a popular sport so partaking in some games with other Japanese people is immersing myself right in the culture, or rather a particular subculture. But isn’t that what experiencing cutlure is all about?

I don’t mean to pick on you Eve, I’m just using you as my scapegoat. Some people come to Japan and they spend their entire time looking at ancient relics and talking about esoteric rules that Japanese follow. By doing so, they often miss what is right in front of their eyes; the real Japan as it is. Not how the lonely planet guide and the etiquette books say it is. I swear some people still think its the Edo period here or something.

The Airsoft game day cost 3000 yen including food. So about 15 quid. This sounds quiet steep, but only 34 people attended and the organiser has to hire out the field and staff the facilities, so I guess its OK. Anyway, I think it was worth it because I really had fun. This is what the lunch looks like:

Some kind of curry and salad. It was nice. 500 yen (as part of the 3000 total). And in an interesting Juxtaposition here is a Caterpillar:

At lunchtime James wanted to fix his gun because it wasn’t aiming correctly, the guy next to him was helping.

There you can see the shooting gallery. A game lasts between 20 and 25 minutes, so if you die early on you can come here and shoot off a few rounds. Speaking about rounds, nobody really plays with realistic sized magazines, but rather people typically use high capacity magazines with perhaps a 400bb capacity. This makes it more fun because bbs are not bullets and so they bounce off bits of wood or whatever.

People are generally very honest in Japan so you can just leave your stuff around and not worry about it. Actually Airsoft is a game that requires high morals when it comes to honesty because it is usually your own judgement as to whether you have been hit.

It is rare and not encouraged to challenge people about you hitting them with a shot, but you can do if you want. There were some proper otaku (geek maniac) people playing and I swear I unloaded about 30 rounds onto one of them and he didn’t die.

Sometimes you might not feel being hit also, for example if you had padding on. Sometimes they have referees but we didn’t.

The last game we played was like some kind of real-life deathmatch. If you don’t know what a deathmatch is, let me explain. It is a timed computer game, usually an FPS game, and the goal is to get as many kills as possible, when you die, you respawn at a random point on the map.

Well we played like a live version of this. When you got killed you had to goto a special point for your team and press the button on one of those counter things that bus conductors have, then you had to go back to your teams base and restart. The game lasted an hour. It was really fun. Our team won. The only problem was that my visor kept steaming up.

When I do this again I am going to buy some goggles and then wear some other kind of protection for my face because otherwise the breath goes up into the visor bit and steams it up. Believe it or not you can actually install a small fan into your visor to prevent this.

At the end of the day, on the way home, I saw this strange bar:

One more thing about Airsoft that I want to say is this. It really made me think about war and how terrifying it must be to be a frontline soldier. In airsoft it doesn’t matter if you die, other than you might be annoyed, but obviously in real life the story is different.

When you fight in this jungle-like environment it is impossible to see if someone is hiding waiting for you in the bamboo, but you can’t just sit there all day. You can’t win a battle by sitting around. Someone has to advance. Sometime it will be you that has to advance and try and take a new point. You may get cover fire from your team-mates, but the enemy guns are going to be well trained on you.

What about in WWI where thousands were advanced knowingly in archaic formation into German heavy machine gun fire. I visited The Somme in France once and there is a tree called “The Danger Tree” which marks the point where you come into range of the enemy guns. That must have been fucking terrifying.

I recommend you play airsoft because not only is it fun but somehow at the same time it is a sobering experience and will give you an insight about warfare that you cannot obtain by reading books. It gives you some idea what it is like, although of course trivially diluted.