Forbidden PSP

Sony is releasing their new portable game system, the PSP, on the 12th of December in Japan. To help create buzz, they’ve partnered with, wait for it, a mannequin company.

Emanuele, friend and wakeboarder extraordinaire, desperately wanted to see the PSP while he was visiting Japan, but we couldn’t find any of the so-amazed-by-the-PSP-that-their-jaws-are-on the-floor mannequins to save our lives. As luck would have it, though, one day before he was to fly back to Italy, we were walking past a high-end home furnishings store when I spotted them.

We rushed inside to gawk. The thing that amazed me was the lack of security — no armed guards standing around to make sure one of these things didn’t walk off. Emanuele snapped one picture, than deleted it because he wanted to take another. As he was getting ready to take the picture, one of the folks shopping in the store came up and told him that it wasn’t allowed.

I was a bit taking aback, until I looked closer at the woman and noticed that in addition to her trendy clothes and hip purse, she also had a “SONY STAFF” badge around her neck. Apparently Sony decided to have their PSP guards blend in with the local environment. Cute.

So, we rushed home, broke out the forensics software and undeleted the image off of Emanuele’s memory stick.

Here’s the verboten PSP pic, along with a snap of mannequins taken from outside the store: