watashi to tokyo

super high vision TV by SHARP

Sharp came out with a "Super High Vision TV", the quality is 16 times that of regular high vision. It looks like it's in 3D but it's not, it looks super realistic.

Here are some interesting maps, the areas marked in blue are where pictures are taken by locals and the red areas are where tourists take pictures. Yellow area pictures could be by either.

 

Gopan is a bread baking machine, the name "Gopan" is a portmanteau of Gohan (rice) and Pan (bread) in Japanese. Because Gopan makes bread from rice! You put rice in the machine, which breaks it down into rice powder and then bakes it into bread automatically. Gopan is very popular and it was difficult to buy them last year. Rice bread was hard to find before, but now we can easily find it in shops. I read that a new rice bread shop opened in Akayasa, I wanna try it.

 

 

New the Ballad Of Narayama

The Ballad of Narayama is a movie by director Shohei Imamura. The movie won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Wiki says "The film is set in a small rural village in Japan in the 19th century. According to tradition, once a person reaches the age of 70 he or she must travel to a remote mountain to die of starvation, a practice known as ubasute. The story concerns Orin, who is 69 and of sound health, but notes that a neighbor had to drag his father to the mountain, so she resolves to avoid clinging to life beyond her term. She spends a year arranging all the affairs of her family and village: she severely punishes a family who are hoarding food, and helps her younger son lose his virginity. The film has some harsh scenes that show how brutal the conditions could be for the villagers. Interspersed between episodes in the film are brief vignettes of nature – birds, snakes, and other animals hunting, watching, singing, copulating or giving birth". Here is a video with English subs but I won't recommend it, it's too sad and the practice of ubasute has left its mark on Japanese folklore, where it forms the basis of many legends and poems.

The Ballad Of Narayama has been made into films twice before. This year there will be another one called "Dendera", but it's not just a sad story like the other two. In the new Narayama, the old women try to survive and create their own villege in the mountains and they take revenge on the villagers who exiled them. Here is a trailer and I was pretty impressed watching it, because so many famous actresses appear in this film, they play the elderly people who were abandoned on the mountain.

 

Hiyashi Chuka Hajimemashita

World's Most Patient Cat

This site picked the most "exciting posts on Wiki". I enjoyed them very much, and most of them I have never read before.

Roaring Forties

Bread and circuses

Thought experiment

Daigo Umehara

 

Tamago kake gohan

 

Red rain in Kerala

 

There are special foods that we can only eat during a certain season/time. For example, holiday foods like Easter eggs. We eat Osechi only at New Year's, and Nanakusa Gayu is a food that is only eaten on January 7th. As for seasonal foods, we can buy fresh bamboo in spring, and fresh chestnuts only in autumn. We can eat bamboo any time of year, but they are not fresh in any other season. Finally, we have certain foods that we eat in hot or cold weather. We love to eat Nabe in winter time but it's too hot in the summer. Hiyashi Chuka is a cold Japanese noodle dish and most shops will only start to sell it around this time in early summer. To inform people of the start of Hiyashi Chuka season, many restaurants post a flag declaring "Hiyashi Chuka Hajime Mashita" (we're starting hiyashi chuka). Since many many people love "Hiyashi Chuka", it's become a common phrase. Actually, this guy has a comedy song called "Hiyashi Chuka Hajimemashita".

Hiyashi Chuka consists of cold noodles with cucumber, ham, egg, etc served with a sweet and sour soy sauce. It's a very simple and reasonably priced meal, usually costing around 300yen or so if you make it at home and 800yen in shops. The Chinese restaurant "Karin" at the ANA continental hotel had their "Hiyashi Chuka Hajimemashita" this month, and they received one star in the Michelin guidebook. Their Michelin starred Hiyashi Chuka looks very rich! But it costs over 2000yen. 

 

Manga dish plate!

I once wrote about uniquely themed restaurants in Tokyo in this post. These restaurants are a kind of entertainment, so people will probably soon tire of them and the restaurants will have to change gears quickly. Diamond Dining Corp has a lot of entertainment restaurants, I checked out their site after a long time. I realized that they have some "Alice in Wonderland" themed places. Maybe Alice will be a popular theme. Here is one in Shinjuku and this is another shop in Shinjuku too.

 

Holy shit! What the hell is this? Manga plates by Mika Tsutai

 

Honor system shops are easy to find in Japan. Here is a collection of photos of such shops, usually they sell fruits or wild vegetables they find in the woods like takenoko (bamboo shoots). There are some around my home and sometimes I buy vegetables from them.

 

Another food topic from the US: "Four local chefs turn the most famous dish at McDonald's into a five-star meal."

 

 

Tokyo Shock Boys

Crazy comedian group Tokyo Shock Boys (Dengeki Network) video. They are not so popular in Japan, but they are well known in Europe.

 

I didn't know that they appeared in an Australian TV ad.

 

 

Cool Kikkoman ad

The Japanese-born pianist Suguru Ito performs his own Czardas Paraphrase

I want to watch this movie: "The Echo of Astro Boy's Footsteps". It's a movie about the legendary sound effects technician "Matsuo Ohno" (link via Twice Zonked, a great blog!) He added the sound of Astro Boy's footsteps and wielded influence over all Japanese animation sound effects.

This is a pretty cool Kikkoman ad. Originally, the company name Kikkoman was written with the Kanji "亀甲萬", which means a million turtle shells, and it's a type of Japanese crest. Turtles symbolize fortune in Japan because they live very long, sometimes longer than human beings.

 

 

They did

I wrote that somebody added a protest of "the Fukushima nuclear power plants" to Taro Okamoto's artwork "The Myth of Tomorrow". It might be the art group "Chim↑Pom". This is a promotional video for their new exhibition and we can see that they tried to set up something under "The Myth of Tomorrow" in Shibuya Station. I didn't know much about them, but I'd like to know how did it. Basically, I appreciate their form of protest.

 

Fake Gundam and lonely BBQ

Even though we had bad news about "Yukhoe" recently, Japanese people like Yakiniku very much. But, like BBQ, Yakiniku is a meal that we are supposed to enjoy with others, not alone. However there are some people who demand "I want to eat Yakiniku even alone". So this is a  video of a Yakiniku shop named "Alone". You can eat Yakiniku by yourself in a partioned space.

I don't know why but I totally missed this news! A yellow fake Gundam appeared at a theme park in Chengdu, China last year and drew strong protests from Japan (maybe Sunrise?). 

Then, they rebuilt it again with some spikes and belts. Here is the fake one at night with lights on... orz.                          

The funny thing is that some Japanese person made an anime opening sequence for this fake Gundam. This is very good!

The smallest seven eleven in Japan

A Japanese eyeglass shop made this:

The smallest 7-Eleven in Japan.

"Death toll in food poisoning at 'yakiniku' chain reaches 4". 4 people died from eating the raw meat dish "Yukhoe". Apparently, when you serve raw meat, you're supposed to trim the outer layer off and only serve the inside part, but this store wasn't doing that. Also, there's no government regulation saying that restaurants have to trim their meat when serving it raw, so no laws were broken. I didn't know that. I like raw meat, but I won't eat it until the regulations are fixed.

 

Kyoto manga museum

Japanese gadget of the day? Necomimi Neurowear, cat ears you can move with your brain waves

Ancient Japanese Tsunami Stones Kept Villagers Alive

 

I didn't know of this place: Kyoto Manga Museum. The museum is in a renovated building, it used to be an elementary school before. The museum admission fee is 800yen, and you can read any manga from their collection of 50,000 manga volumes. Classrooms  are used as reading rooms and the gymnasium is used as an event hall. It seems like a manga heaven for manga lovers. 

I don't read manga so much, but I like to read cooking manga. In Japan, cooking and food is a big theme in manga for adults. Oishinbo is probably the most well known cooking manga. Bambino! and Antique Bakery were made into TV dramas and even into a movie in Korea. I wrote about cooking manga before in this post. 

Nifty Portal Z reported on an interesting event today at the manga museum. It was a "try food in manga" event. We have a lot of blogs about cooking foods that appear in manga, but I have never seen this kind of event before. The author of "Cooking Papa" cooked some dishes that he wrote about in the manga and had museum visitors try them. He cooked a kind of miso soup, rice with hot peppers, and some Japanese sweets called "Kintsuba". I am very interested in the event and foods, I hope we can have such a place in Tokyo too.