Speed

I know I said I’ll write again after I return to Japan but as I unlocked my drawers earlier, I found some treasures whose volume surprised even myself and I thought to share.

Back in 1998 when the Japanese wave swept across Asia, I was hit pretty hard by one 4-member girl group, Speed. It was these girls that got me interested in all things Japanese including the language and started my journey towards working and living in Japan today. When I tell people I was really in to Speed, I have this feeling they cannot feel the extent to which I was crazy over them.

As I opened my drawers today, the first thing I saw was this…

I flipped the cover of the file and there unleashed tons of Speed-related articles be they in English, Mandarin or Japanese

I also found this newspaper article

If you take a good look at the newspaper article on the left, right at the bottom is the picture of 4 guys. I’m the one on the far right. This was taken during a Speed event held at (lo and behold!) Sparks disco! Yes, I know that name is freaking old. They closed like eons ago.

In this very same drawer also holds all my collection of Speed publications.

Every single Speed photo album and official publication is here. In between which were 2 random magazines with them on the cover.

Did you even know they had a comic book? (See top left) And a biography on the right, which I’ve never read because I didn’t understand a single word of Japanese then.

I went to my CD drawer and saw…

DUST!

OK that’s nonsense. I did see dust but more so, this.

I do have other drawers for CDs which hold all English, Mandarin and Japanese CDs but this one only had space for Speed stuff.

Here’s a close-up of the mountain of CDs, most of which I’ve never opened.

Here’s a far shot.

If you’ve noticed, for a lot of the albums, I have 2 copies of each. Usually one opened and the other not. There’s no reason to open both right? But I didn’t really buy them for collection. I bought them because the Japanese version and the Taiwan print had different freebies. Also, I believe the ones that I’ve never watched or listened to outnumbers those that I have. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, look at the 2 boxes at the top left. The cover doesn’t seem to feature any Speed members but I have them in the same drawer simply because, it’s a drama where one or some Speed members guest stars. Yes, I was that crazy. I also had some burnt CDs not in the picture. In those CDs were the TV programs that Speed appeared in which I downloaded with my 56kbps dial-up modem back then. I had to download them in parts and rejoin the parts with a *.bat file. If you know what I’m talking about, we’re probably around the same age.

There was a point in time that I thought I had wasted so much money on these things but I never thought to sell them because they remind me of my beginnings. Of how I first came into contact with all things Japanese. They represent the start of my love of Japan and they are what brought me to where I am now, what I am now.

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