Amigas in Japan!

[redrumloa]

There must be at least a healthy Amiga following in Japan! I just shipped out my 4th Amiga 500 to a buyer in Japan tonight. Japan is the #1 country these have been exported to. Sweden was the #1 country for 64s.

[Coder]

Cool! They where also present in Thailand. It turned out I am living about 2 mins away where they use to have an Amiga club. Anyway that user from Japan should be a target for an upcoming project I have. ;-)

Coder

[TjLaZer]

Wow how many have you sold?  I recently bought one from FamilyAffair on eBay.  It was like yours mint in a blue box.  I was happy to find it as I use to have one exactly like that in blue box that I bought new in 1988.  It was later stolen from me in 1993.  

[OSS542]

There is a national Japanese User's group that I am aware of.
There is or was a local User's group in Osaka, and another in Kyoto.  There are a number of independent users as well.  I maintain the alife program Tierra where I work at a research facility (which lets me maintain the Amiga port).
Tierra Home Page
A new release of Tierra is due in the next couple of days for Linux/Unix/Windows.  The Amiga port will follow shortly after that.  I'll keep you posted on that. There is still life Amiga-wise around these parts.

[redrumloa]

Wow how many have you sold?

About 40 so for.

[A4kT]

Hi,
I'm the other Amiga owner in Kyoto
OSS542 and I meet semi-regularly to purloin parts from one another. I still have an A4000T -128mb fast - Retina BLTZ3- 640MO - PCMCIA-SCSI drive (wrote the driver!) (Aminet scsi_pcmcia.lha) CD reader & Yamaha 4-4-16 burner - IOBlix - TBC-III - Neriki desktop genlock - 1.44mb floppy.....  two UW-SCSI drives 10 gig.

I moved to Japan in '93 and an Amiga 2000 was my lifeline to civilization via the internet - aah the memories of configuring AmiTcp and ...ppp

I used to regularly correspond with a Japanese guy in Aichi (way north of Kyoto)  he lived in a dogbox of a flat and had I think 4 or 5 A4000's, same number of A2000's A12000's and a couple of A500's turns out that he couldn't even invite me to come and see them as he was sleeping very close to his front door  with only a snake aisle to the toilet. He showed me how to read/write/print Japanese on an Amiga.

Way back, years ago most TV commercials in Japan (for a short period) were made with Amiga/Toaster setups.

There is as OSS542 says, a Japanese Amiga Users Gr oup but there is also a BBS still operating but the name escapes me for the moment.

I used my A4000T with Pagestream and the help of ShapeShifter to create a new phonetic English teaching system.
I owe a lot to my Amigas (gave my last A2000 to OSS542)
My A4000T gets fired up every night to keep it alert but it also now has a companion on the other side of the desk... a 1.25Ghz MDD Mac with 1.5gig mem & DVD burner and a poorly implemented Amiga emulated - but fast.
They complement each other but the A4000T still beats the Mac every time booting up.... 25 seconds flat.

I've given up trying to explain what an Amiga is to Japanese visiting my home - most still don't know what Linux is yet But the Japanese when they get their minds made up are rabid and ferocious collectors. I should imagine a night with a bunch of Japanese Amiga nuts would be overwhelming in it's intensity.
All in all, quite a nice, civilised, fun  bunch of people

Viva Amiga

 :-D

[redrumloa]

I'm the other Amiga owner in Kyoto

Are you the one who just bought this last A500 from me?:-)

[Iggy_Drougge]

I've been an Amiga user in Tokyo, thanks to Mr. Kubota, the only still-remaining Amiga user in the capital as far as he's aware. He lent me a spare 100V PSU, which I accidentally brought home, leaving my 220 V one in Japan to rot. As a result, my A4000 has been out of action for several months now. =(
Anyway,  Mr. Kubota has three A4000s in various configurations. He remarked that he found it odd that I jumpered mine for NTSC operation when he had jumpered his for PAL operation in order to view demos. He's also got A3000s, A2000s, an A1200 and an A600 which he's built into the Mac SE-like case of an indigenous computer from Fujitsu called FM-Towns. It's a very cute hack.
There is still an Amiga retailer, I think it resides in Nagoya. Also, if you happen to visit Shimokitazawa in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, you can find a video studio wiith a big Commodore-Amiga sign outside their shop.

It's just a shame that Commodore never managed to release a double-byte AmigaOS (OS3.2 was supposed to have this), since I think that the Japs would be more inclined to use the Amiga had it supported their language (the current solutions are home-brewn and of limited usefulness, let alone comfort).