watashi to tokyo

This one is tannokojo's animation. He? She? did really good.

I like this fast food recommend chart. Which shop I can eat in Japan? Can you guess? We have Dunkin Dounuts, McDonalds, Subway, Domino Pizza, Pizaa Hut, DQ, KFC, Arbys(maybe) Wendys(hard to find though) and Burger King(finally). I personally needd tacco bell.

This is hot news in Japan, World's worst photo-fit helps capture suspected murderer . Because the photo-fit is really bad and funny also that face looks exactry Hanawa-kun of animation "Chibi Maruko-chan".

My voice.com research the most popular biscuit in Japan. The number of respondent is over 13,000 people of 30's, 40's and 50's years old. Here is a ranking.
Country Maam (Fujiya) : soft type with choco chips. For me too sweet.
Ritz (Nabisco) : I can't stop eating this one.
Oreo (Nabisco):Don't worry we don't have green tea oreo.
Arfort (Bourbon) : big chocolate attached biscuit.
Harvest (Tohato) : Very thin buiscuit with a lot of sesamis. I like this very much/
Coconuts Sabre (Nisshin Cisco) : It was made in 1965. long selling buiscuit.
Bisco (Glico) : rich vitamin and ca so that this can be emergency foods.
Moon Light (Morinaga) : it good taste of egg and butter. I like this too but can't eat a lot cause it's sweet.
Choco Chip cookie (Bourbon) : it's just regular chocochip cookie, nothing special
All raisins (Tohato):soft type cookie with a lot of raisons. I didn't know they released apple!

Boys band empire in Japan

Yesterday, NHK released the list of artists that will appear on the annual "Kohaku Utagassen" (Music Show) on New Years Eve. After a long interval, four singing groups from the Johnny's association will appear on the show. The Johnny's association is a well know boy band factory. They train cute boys from the time they are young and produce teenage boy bands who can sing, dance and act. The owner of Johnny's is Johnny Kitagawa, he made the company about 40 years ago and has been consistently successful in the Japanese entertainment biz despite some scandals.

Even though they are hardly known in Western countries, some bands are famous in Asia. But I guess you know Nino, he appeared in the Eastwood movie "Letters from Iwo-jima" and got acclaim for his appearance. He belongs to the boy band "Arashi", one of the most popular bands in Johnny's.

Johnny's bands are girls dream basically, but many people, especially guys think it is terrible that Johnny's bands dominate the charts and dramas on TV. But it's business girls intense love for cute boys that make good business in Japanese show biz, it's true. Actually not only financial success, but some of Johnny's boy are chosen for their talent, like Nino. Jin Akanishi is a member of one of Johnny's bands KAT-TUN, he acted in the movie "Bandage" directed by music producer Takeshi Kobayashi. He can sing well.

Right Place

The biggest short film festival in Asia, "Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2010," has started to accept entries. You can check out the details here. As for Japanese short films, I like "Right Place" a lot. It’s a glimpse into the world of an obsessively neat man working as a convenience store clerk who believes there is a "right place" for everything. I read that this film won the Young Director’s Award/ Best Short Film at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and the Rain dance Film Festival/DIESEL Film Festival Award.

Kazuo Umezu

Sometimes I write about Kazuo Umezu, a well known horror manga and gag manga creator, who was brought to court because his neighbors complained about his trademark "red and white" house disturbed the scenery. He is such a popular guy and a documentary about him has been released: "Gashi (his way of say hello), I am Kazuo Umezu." I guess he is just a nice guy. By the way, I found some photos of the inside of the Umezu house. I like that chandelier. It has an image from the manga Orochi.

I notice that Google real time translation works very well. One advantage is that they use very natural Japanese. It translate hungry into“harapeko,”a very casual way to say it. I typed in “convenience store,” but it translates it into "konbini" (conveni) in Japanese, which is so much more natural for Japanese people. I love it!

I found two nice arts events in NY that I would love to go to: "Waste Not" and "Makeshift Museum Shows Off Mario Oddities."

Toto started their high tech toilet live show. The site is a live camera in a Toto show room in the Shiodome building. They have just started, so the site offers very little content, I will check it again later.

New meme, his walltet is velcro type

名コピペ (Mei copipe)" means "nice copy and paste," which describes funny jokes or stories on the internet that people then copy and paste to their own blog or on Twitter, so the story gets spread around on the net quickly to become a kind of meme. One well known "mei copipe" on the net in Japan is "My boyfriend uses a velcro type wallet. What a ****!" The story is about a couple who went to a nice restaurant in nice clothes and enjoyed a nice dinner. But when it was time to pay the bill, the guy smugly said "I’ll pay" and took out his wallet. The wallet was a cheap velcro type and the noise of the opening velcro echoed across the restaurant. Girls loved the story and agreed with the girl's feeling. Guys also sympathized with the BF, adopting a "never mind" mentality. I often see this Ascii art or an imitation of it on the internet. I knew someone made an original song and played it on nico nico doga. Today I read that someone made it into an iPhone app. So silly.

chocolate model cell phone

This video healed me a lot today...  

 

「んだ～バカヤロウ」... It's very hard to translate such bad words in a polite manner. I can say that it means "What? Fu** you!" Anyways, that is the name of a bar in Nagoya where you can release stress. For a fee, you can beat somebody's head in with a beer bottle (not regular bottle, an extra fragile one) or pour water on someone like in Flashdance :-) etc. I don't have any interest in it though. I don't think I could release my stress by doing such things... My stress might be darker and deeper. :-(

NTT Docomo collaborated with jewelry maker Qpod and released this chocolate cell phone. Not just the cell phone, but the earphones, straps, and other accessories are cute too. Of course I don't need it.

If I have to use a strap for my cell phone, I would prefer this "fresh shrimp" one. If you pull a string, the shrimp moves as if it's alive. The same maker released this one too: clam water pistol. Hmm…what silly products.

The Japan Packaging Design Award 2009 event will be held in Dic Color Square. When someone buys something just because the packaging is nice, we call it "pake gai" (I wrote about this before but I can't find the post anymore). When I search for "pake gai" in Google images, I can find the type of packaging that people love. Seiko-tei's cookies are well known as gifts that girls like to buy. I think this one was chosen for some award this year. I like this one, it's a tin that contains Shiseido Parlour cakes. Shiseido Parlour was the first place to sell soda and ice cream in Japan. Since they are the parent company of cosmetic maker Shiseido, their packaging is beautiful and feminine.

Yusaku Matsuda 20th memorial

Black Rain(1989) is an American movie directed by Ridley Scott, starring Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia. But For Japanese, the movie is well known as the posthumous work of Yusaku Matsuda.

He started his career as an action star and became famous after being in the comedy action TV drama "Tantei Monogarati (The detective story)". People loved his offbeat character very much and his style of acting acting influenced a lot of fellow actors. In the 90s he was elevated to the ranks of Japan's most talented actors and he got a Japanese oscar for his role in "Kazoku Game"

He knew he had cancer during the shooting of Black Rain and he died the next year in 1990. It is his 20th memorial year and a documentary film about him, called "Soul Red", will be released.

Don't laugh series; "don't laugh at SPA"

I found this TV program, "can't laugh at SPA". It's one of "Don't laugh series". Someone add English subtitles. Some part might be hard to catch, but most part will be understandable. Try it.

Drunk people

Did you watch this video? This is very hot among the Japanese blogs. Since my American friends said that America and Canada have strict rules about public drunkenness, I thought that it’d be rare to see drunk people in public. In Japan, you can see a lot of drunk people all over Tokyo at night.

Anyways, for Japanese people (including me), the instinct to go home is very powerful. Even if we’re so drunk we can't stand or sit down, we try to catch a train to go home to sleep in our own beds. Here is a good video.

This s an idea for sleeping boxes at the Beijing International Airport. Japanese businessmen could spend the night comfortably in there, because it looks bigger than the pods in a capsule hotel. Here is a report of a capsule hotel.

I love this! It’s not just Asians that make funny Engrish mistakes! This one was found in Latvia: "Easy to go, Hard to live." Ha ha ha ha

A new eternal series toy has been released. We had eternal puchi-puchi, eternal edamame, and eternal pull-off tab. This time, it's eternal tokoroten, Tokoroten is a kind of sweet Japanese jelly. It’s made in this manner. On the internet, some people say that it’s like squeezing a zit, right? You know the feeling. Ha ha ha

new street computing style in Akihabara

There is a new phenomenon in Akihabara... a standing typing style called "Koike Style" (named after Mr. Koike, who was the first to do it). Anyways, why don’t they just use an iPhone?   

Tatsuya Ichihashi was finally arrested today. His cosmetic surgery “after” photo was pretty shocking to us, and all Japanese people kept a lookout for him.

This is another Japanese curry fan's post, she wrote down her recipe too. She cooks curry udon, but penne or macaroni or Chinese noodles are good too. If you make the curry sauce a little bit thick (using less water), it would be good with bread too; you can make a hot sandwich. Curry is really good for chilly winter nights, try it.

 

Lipton Tea started a new sweets collection. This is the 7^th series and this time, they collaborated with DAMEL. When you buy a bottle of Lipton tea, you can get one of those dessert keychains. Since they are exquisitely designed, the Lipton sweets collection is a very popular series and there are a lot of collectors.
The 1st series was Pierre Herme.
The 2nd was Westin Tokyo teatime.
The 3rd was the sweets collection.
The 4th was Pierre Marcolini.
The 5th was the sweets collection II.
The 6th was Delray.
They can be good free souvenirs :-).

This is a funny site: "create the facial _expression on a real face." The upper right one is "eyes turning round," which means "to marvel at something" in Japanese. Eyes turn into dots has almost the same meaning. Can you catch the meaning of each phrase from the face? How about this? We say "the face below the nose sinks down," which sort of means "be soft on women" or "thinking of something ecchi!"