watashi to tokyo

herbivore Boy

Good job! post-it stop motion. making movie is fun too.

Nintendo made a mysterious page on their official site. Here it is. People assume it will be the return of Tingle from the legend of Zelda and Nintendo will release a new game of him. We had Freshly-picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland before, so it may happen. But I am not sure it will be released in North America, because they didn't sell Rosy Rupeeland there. Do you know why? People in North American had a cool image for Zelda and they don't think Tingle fits Zelda, so people don't like Tingle as in Japan or other countries in Europe.

I picked an article about how the herbivore boy is trend in Japan. Today I found CNN had an article "Japan's 'herbivore men' -- less interested in sex, money". It's an interesting article, check it out.

This one is funny, Excel-style 2ch viewer, we can read 2ch at work with this program.

It is fun to read people's reaction to the real size Gundam. I remember PinkTentacle had a good post about building a real size Gundam before. And I remember this one too, Gundam in Japanese painting. Check other Tenmyoya Hisashi's art works here.
By the way, thank you for many comment to this post "why highly-educated girls want to be house wife". Like I wrote in the comments, I feel I can get my freedom from independence economically, mentally, etc. I want to do, go, choose, live on my own will. It might be hard if I keep house. That's the biggest reason why I want to work.

fish fell from the sky, this time.

Japanese people drink vinegar for their health, and in some JR train stations there are black vinegar bars where you can drink a small glass of vinegar. Now we have milk bars too, you can choose among different brands of milk or flavored milk like coffee milk, strawberry milk or maybe "fruit milk." I am not sure what fruit milk is because we hardly ever see it in stores. It tastes like orange + banana with milk.

A few strange news items from Japan: I wrote before that tadpoles fell from the sky and today, fish fell from the sky in the Ishikawa area. What is going on there? We don't know.

TV Asahi did a feature about the ordinary third son of Kim Jong Il on their new show. I guess TV Asahi paid a lot for the photo. As for Korean media, he is an architect from South Korea.

A guy's PC was stolen and he called the police. Tthe police caught the criminal but the criminal told the police he found hemp in the room where he stole the PC. So the guy was arrested in the end. How stupid.
UNIQLO launched new promotional content on their webpage: "UNIQLO calender." It's a time lapse movie, you can see various areas of Japan, but everything looks like a diorama. Very cute.

why highly-educated girls want to be house wife

Finally the real size Gundam appeared in Odaiba. It is18m tall, here are making-of movies.
This is an artwork in Canada, it's a project by Kurt Perschke, who is traveling around the globe with this ball. Hmm, it reminds me of the ugliest building in Tokyo. Look t this, it's almost the same.

In Tachikawa, a canned food bar opened. At the bar, you can eat over 100 kinds of canned food, some that are very familiar, and some that are very rare. In Japan, the most popular canned food is tuna salad named chicken of the sea. Next would be hagoromo salmon, then cooked sardines with soy sauce or miso. As for rare canned foods, we have cooked salmon hearts, sea lion meat curry, bear meat curry, and canned ramen. By the way, my favorite is cooked salmon with bones, because the bones get very soft and a little bit crispy, I like that part.

I was pretty shocked to read this article: "Why highly-educated girls want to be housewives" (web translated). Highly-educated girls in their 20s want to quit their jobs and become housewives. They don't care about their academic background or careers, even if they graduated from the most prestigious schools in Japan, like Tokyo University. According to government research, to the question "Do you think that husbands should work, and wives should keep the house?" the highest number of yeses came from people in their 60’s, but next highest response was girls in their 20’s! One girl broke up with her Tokyo University boyfriend because he had hoped she would keep her career after marriage. For ladies in their late 30’s and 40’s, a career meant status, because for their generation being a housewife was the easiest thing that anybody could choose. However, for highly-educated girls in their 20’s, being a housewife seems to have some kind of status. With their backgrounds, we can see that they have self-confidence and pride. Usually it is very hard for women to find good job after raising kids in Japanese society, but maybe they think that they can do it without any problems. Most of all, they think that they won't be able to find a guy that they need to work or help. They think they can just live happily with their husband’s money. Hmm… interesting, but I am a little bit worried about our society’s educational system. What did they learn at the highest seat of learning that makes them think this way?

Anyway, my mom was a housewife; she hardly went to work for as long as I remembered. I am not sure if she wanted to go to work or if she liked housekeeping. I won't ask her about it because it'd be sad if I knew that she has regrets about her life, I really hope not. The one thing I can tell is that she is weaker against stress than I am. I won't say that resistance to stress is good or important, but my toughness has helped me out a lot.

raise the castle

This movie "Chikujo seyo! (Raise the Castle!)" looks funny. The ghost of one tono-sama and his two samurai appeared in a depopulated village. They died without making their wish to "raise a castle" come true. They were bitterly disappointed and appeared in the village to make their wish come true. At first, the villagers were annoyed by the tono-sama's very arrogant attitude, but finally they started to build a castle out of cardboard. This story was originally a manga.

Check this out! That is sand art by Ukraine's Got Talent’s Kseniya Simonova. It's great.

 I thought that Jaleco would finally get out of the red, but maybe not. But they started a regeneration project. Now they are asking for new monster designs. Jaleco said that they will use the winning monster in their new game. However, people didn't take the challenge seriously? Here are the monster designs that people submitted.

Kodoku no Gurume (Solitary Gourmand) is a manga that introduces common eateries and daily dishes that regular Japanese people eat like ramen, curry, and even convenience store lunch boxes. If you are interested in Japanese culture, don't miss it. (Thank you Japanese Navigator, what a nice blog!)

tadpoles fell from the sky

This is another program "Silent Libraly" of the funny TV show that I mentioned sometimes.

The foreign guy is Ernesto Hoost who is the K-1 World Champion. I wonder Netherlander would know their champion was outwitted in public in Japan.

We had strange news today. In Ishikawa pref, ladles fell from the sky on both the 4th and 6th of June. Fish or frogs fall sometime and it is caused by a tornado usually, but there were no records of even a small tornado there. So we don't know what happened. Moses's anger? Predictive information of something bad? Or North Korea's new weapon?

I read "Hitoeki Zoku" is a boom now. Hitoeki means "one stop". People get off at the station next to their nearest one and take a walk home. It's good exercise on week days and no one needs money for the gym. 

This is very happy mood flash that you can make melody with rain drop. The was made by lullatone that is Shawn and Yoshimi-san art couple. Kawaii Blog!

Something big objects on the roof collection. I will entry Crab, Wild pig and Gorilla from Japan. That Gorilla is pretty big and real.

Light

I am doing this escaping game "light", pretty good! His game is always good, I really love "VISION". Try!

Jaleco will survive?

Old but cute cupnoodle TV ads :Cheese Alien

Garlic Alien

Katsuobushi is dried bonito flake. We eat it by Onigiri, topping of Tofu etc,. Since it is very thin, when you put on something hot, katsuobushi flake whiff by steam. This nifty portal Z's post is good. She cut katsuobushi as human shape and put on Okonomiyaki, so katsuobushi people dance on it? no looks like they doing sit-ups!

This Beatles game looks interesting. I heard it'll be rhythm game like PaRappa the Rapper.

Talking about game, if you were gamer, you know a game maker Jaleco? They released Maru's Mission or Ninja JaJaMaru-kun etc,. They have some well known game on Nintendo Family computer. But they don't go well recently and stay in the red for 11 business period. On 2ch, gamer talked Jaleco will go bankrupt sooner or later, on the other hand the president of Jaleco wrote "we won't go bankrupt ass**le! You wanna fight?" on his blog. Like that, we saw such battle between gamer and Jaleco. Funny part is they make it good joke, there is old almost broken building in their official site and when you put cursor on it, it br! eaks more. However a few years ago, they started count down on it and when you touch a staff in building, he said "we were in red such long time, we've done very well". I am not sure what will happen after count down. I guess they will get out of the red finally. We will see it 2 days later, maybe the building will renew.

Some from Asia

Since we have summer season soon, we will have ennichi festival soon. This is movie of Kingyo Sukui, I enjoyed to read comments of foreign people. Anyway this blog "Muza Nakamura gate to Japan" is pretty good, photos are beautiful!

I picked him "LEGO God" before in this post. He made "Battle Ship Yamato" by LEGO. This time he made "Kinkakuji" like pop-up book. 　Look at this! wow great!

Coke released "Coke Green tea" coke against "Pepsi Shiso". I have not treid both yet, but I prefer Shiso.

I have terrible acrophobia so I have numb on my bottom foot only to see this pictures"Daredevil Asian Construction Workers". Today I could see such Asian power, this is funny too "Chinese Dating Site On Road" and I can see Asian has unique food culture from this series ;fast food of the World "Europe", "Asia & Australia", "South & Central".

Then after a long interval, I checked uncyclopedia to check some Asian countries, but I couldn't find. But this was good "Engrish". And Japanese was version up too. I laughed at "Oberbiew written by a Japanese" part. Anyway don't miss American and Canadian. It's pretty funny too.

nothing is fun to pick today

Ahhhhhhh… nothing fun to write about today. All the blogs I bookmarked seem to be talking about E3 09 today, people love the Final Fantasy 13 demo the most. Since I am not a gamer, I can't be excited about those trailers. But I like this Final Fantasy 14 trailer. It's pretty good!

Okay, I will post two links I enjoyed reading today. "Another 16 Creative Ads in Unusual Places".

Masterstroke: Man who couldn't even draw stickmen wakes from brain surgery... as a talented artist

Anyways, I am using the "Kokuyo Dot liner," it is a glue tape and it pastes dot-like marks on paper. Kokuyo released a new stamp type. I will buy it!

Wakeari food is boom now

I was pretty shocked to see this: "Countries that are Least Affected by Recession." Japan is No.7? I feel that Japan is still in pretty bad shape. Though I don’t have any statistical data, I can tell just from looking around me. For example, we have the "SUGOMORI" (nest spending) phenomenon, which means that people aren’t going out and are spending more time at home on weekends. Actually, I have not yet taken a trip this year.
In online shopping, "WAKEARI" foods are very popular. WAKEARI means "there’s some reason" and wakeari foods are foods that are discounted for a particular reason: the dry edges of cheesecake bars or broken chocolate or broken mentaiko. Shops have started to sell parts that they used to throw away because people need them now. Gardening items sold well, as people are starting to plant herbs and vegetables at home. If Japan is really No.7, I guess that the situation in the US must be much worse than I thought. It's always darkest before the dawn. I hope I can see sunshine soon.

Sorry for the short post, I will pick some funny items:
I love this one! The Green Space Travel Case, it would be a nice joke, but even such a small green space would make lunchtime wonderful. I am sure of that!

"School Lunches From Around the World" I like this type of post. In the past I wrote about airline meals and company cafeterias.

Do you want to eat brain bread? 3yen.com picked this funny bread.

A long time ago, I wrote that Japanese manhole designs are good. Today, I found this nice photo collection site and they have colorful Japanese manholes, but the site missed this one! Do you know this? It's an original design of the old YouTube maintenance message. YouTube had that before too. You know "All your base are belong to us".