Girl's festival "Hina matsuri" will come soon on 3rd March. The family who has a daughter will display "Hina Ningyo (dolls)" and eat traditional rice snack "Hina arare". The Bride of Hina Ningyo wears "Jyuni hitoe" ("twelve-layered-robe"). Recently a Japanese actress Norika Fujiwara got married and she wore Jyuni hitoe when she had a wedding ceremony in Ikuta Shrine. By the way Boy's festival is "Tango no Sekku" on 5th May, at that time family who has a son will display "Koinobori(carp shaped flags)" and "Kabuto(feudal helmet)". The Yoshitoku is the famous doll maker of such Hina dolls, Kabuto, Japanese traditional dolls. Then they released "Darth Vader Kabuto and armor".Look at this, hmm cool. He looks very cool, I have never seen a foreigner who can fit Kabuto like that. That Kanji means "Sir Dark come." You can see that Darth Vader in the Tokyo Gift show in April.
I was surprised to read this news. As an architecture fan, of course I know Kisho Kurokawa. He designed "Nakagin Capsule Tower Building", "Kuala Lumpur International Airport", "Osaka Sony Tower" and recently "National Art Center Tokyo" opened. I wrote about him in this post "the metabolism was city design concept".
He indicated Wednesday he may run in the forthcoming Tokyo gubernatorial election on his official site. On the page, he lists 15 campaign policies. They are: If current governor Ishihara doesn't withdraw his candidacy, he will run in the governor election; He doesn't get a salary and doesn't use the official governor's quarters or official vehicle; He serves only one four-year term; He cancels Tokyo's bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics; He will support a part of capital relocation, hold lands in the center of Tokyo for redevelopment and make those lands urban greening. etc. Hmm, very interesting. Ishihara shows a strong attitude as usual. Do you know in the Ishihara page of wikipedia, there is a topic "alleged racism." Not only about other races, he made bad comments about old women and homosexual etc. Crazy? Yes, but he would get a good credit rating because of the tough remarks. I will watch this news.
I'm very impressed by that Darth Vader armor. Very likely we'll see someone try to recreate this as a full-size costume at some science fiction convention someday.
I think perhaps Darth Vader's original helmet was inspired by Japanese armor. I could be wrong about this; it also looks a little like a German WWII helmet, if the lower part of the German helmet were elongated. Of course, Vader's helmet was probably designed to deflect sword attacks to the neck, just as Japanese helmets were.
From what I recall, the Japanese weren't very interested in the film "Star Wars," at least not when it first appeared. I can understand this. Much of "Star Wars" seemed inspired by Japanese martial arts; the Japanese might consider this a boring retread of their own culture.
I can imagine Americans might not be interested if a Japanese director made a film about cowboys and gunfights. Then again, I might like to see that ;-)
Posted by: bshock | Friday, February 23, 2007 at 05:44 AM
Cancel the Olympics bid? No way! I want the Olympics to come to Tokyo.
Posted by: Mark | Thursday, February 22, 2007 at 10:51 PM