Mementos of J-Pop Video Past

 I was cleaning out my drawer where I kept my checkbook and bills, and came across a stack of old video rental membership cards. I had, of course, the accounts at all three Tower Records and Blockbuster, but what blew me away was seeing all my old J-POP Video store cards! Back in the days before the internet explosion, just about the only way to get ahold of your favorite J-pop Music Programs like Music Station and Hey Hey Hey Music Champ as well as variety shows like Downtown DX, SMAPxSMAP, and those wonderful FNS “NG” drama shows was to rent them from the Japanese video stores that dotted the Honolulu area!
 I first joined most of these places for Japan Superhero stuff, but once I found you could rent not only the new music shows, but older shows like SOUND ARENA and those elusive RED AND WHITE KOHAKU shows of yesteryear, it became a MUST visit. Since no one video store carried them all, you had to go searching to see what each place had to offer, and to get your weekly fix on J-pop related music and shows, you had to have multiple accounts at ALL of the stores! Japan Video, Nippon Video, Video Japan as well as bookstores like BunBunDo and Hakabundo, I had accounts at all of them, though some I visited very infrequently and the others almost every other day!
  Folks nowadays will NEVER know the thrill of going into the stores and seeing the latest episodes of Music Station ready for rental (and these were about two weeks behind the Japan airtime), MAN, I remember running to the racks and snatching them up, reading the spines of the VHS tapes to see what guests were on that week!  It was pure joy to go home and immerse yourself with the latest catch, and that was actually something that we enjoyed it so much, because BOY, the quality of those rentals sure SUCKED. First off, they re-used the same VHS tapes over and over again, so you can imagine, the generation quality was shaky at best, but the WORST thing about rentals HAD to be the fact that for SOME reason, they only dubbed the shows in MONO! I remember when you’d accidentally get an episode still in stereo, you’d be more excited than a kid finding onion rings in his fries!
  To even DREAM that there’d someday be a way to download or stream watch just about ANY Japanese (or Korean) Music or Variety show on your computer at the touch of a button and have it all in Hi-Definition, thunderous Stereo sound and mere HOURS after airtime was just unimaginable, and I’d never want to go back to the old ways, but boy, I gotta say, coming across these rental cards touched a part of my heart that I’d forgotten all about and made me very nostalgic for those old days!