The Japanese do not half-step when it comes to anything, most especially video games, where hardcore gamer geeks have oohed and ahhed over game systems that come out in Japan years before they hit the American market. So to those who remain convinced that while you pound away at your XBox 360, there sits a Japanese kid with a chip in his head who's playing Halo 4 in his mind during math class, this should come as no surprise: Japanese arm wrestling machines will break your freakin' arm in half.
A Japanese game maker said Wednesday it would withdraw arm-wrestling machines from arcades after three players -- two of them foreigners -- broke their arms..."We had done careful simulations on the possibility of injuries before putting it on sale, but unexpected accidents can happen with game machines when people are too excited or fail to follow instructions," a company spokeswoman said. "But I'm afraid some foreign nationals couldn't understand the instructions well as it was written only in Japanese," she said.If we're to learn anything from this, it's that you always need to read the instructions before using anything. This may be standard operating procedure in Japan, but like most Americans we'd be hogtied if we read the instruction manual before using anything: toasters, rocket launchers, cars, that home death ray we've been dying to put together...
So we'll just shorten it to this: if you're using a Japanese Arm Wrestling machine, and you start to lose, just let go. Because it will break your arm in half and not even give you so much as a Hello Kitty doll as an apology.
