Kamen Rider

Look at this 'Collector Spotlight: Yexel's Toy Museum'. Hmm, is he a son of a rich family or something? He has everything from Micky to Tomorrow's joe, everything! This and this is the web site of Kotobukiya he mentioned.

I didn't know that the TV series of Kamen Rider 'Kamen Rider Dragon Knight' has started in the U.S. Here is the trailer. It will be remade from Japanese 'Kamen Rider Ryuki'. Kamen Rider is a very long series that had started in 1971. You can see all Kamen Riders in this video on Youtube. It is such a long series, though the most famous one would be the first Rider. The main actor was Hiroshi Fujioka, but since the first series got to be such a big boom in this country, I must say he had to be typecast for Kamen Rider as a 'tough friend of justice'. And it was getting to be a 'Tough, straight sports guy having a muscle brain'. Here is a long TV ad of Sega Saturn where he appeared. And recently he is on ads of beer. Ha ha ha, see? You know such an image. I picked Kamen Rider in this post before 'Trauma and Shockers'. Now kids are becoming adult enough to sense the sorrow of enemy shockers.

I found this site today. He took photos of bridges over Kanda River that is the dirtiest river in Tokyo. Over middle age Japanese have a certain type of image for Kanda River. 'Young, Poor, Sorrow'. Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary had much effect on Japanese folk singers before, in the early days Japanse folk songs had the character of protest songs but they became more pop and more popular music later. One of the categories of Japanese songs is 'Yojohan folk'. Yojohan means four and half tatami room and Yojohan folk means a song about life, love, dreams and collapse of poor young people who live in such small rooms. Kandagawa (Kanda river) is a representative example of Yojohan folk sung by Kaguya hime. It's a song about a couple who are living in a three Tatami room around Kanda river, meaning they might be students of Waseda Univ. Here is the video from Youtube. 'Don't you remember? We went to the public bath together covering our necks with red towels instead of mufflers'...orz. It's not my taste, though I guess the bridge site looks nice when you know such background.

Comments

[mari]

hi, yes we tend to forget kanada river run in suginami and more west tokyo, maybe it will be better than center of tokyo.

[Mark]

In Suginami Ward it seems clean. It ran right behind my apartment when I lived there. Lots of carp swimming in it, and little algae.

It's just that it's a concrete sided river -- that kind of sucks. But the walking path beside it was really nice.