TOKYOMANGO

I just came back from a screening of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new movie, Tokyo Sonata. It's a two-hour drama about a middle-class Japanese family of four. Their stories unravel after the father loses his job and doesn't tell anyone. Kurosawa is most famous as a horror film director (Pulse, Cure) but he said when introducing Tokyo Sonata at the SFIAAFF screening today that this look at some harsh realities of Japanese family life might just be scarier. I have to agree with him. The awkwardness between husband and wife, mother and son; the inability to speak out against an unreasonable, abusive father; the shame that prevents family members from telling each other the truth; these things ARE really frightening. And Kurosawa uses horror film-like cuts and lighting in several scenes that make it feel even scarier. It works. The movie is great, and will be showing in SF area theaters starting later this month. It's also showing tomorrow night @ 6PM at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive.

What could possibly feel better than dropping a giant turd while preparing to do a virtual ski jump? Not much, I'd imagine. Japanese coffee company Georgia painted public toilets at several ski resorts to mimic a ski jumper's perspective, wrapping the walls in illustrations of mountains and drawing skis where the feet go, and a giant slope on the front wall. Apparently, the toilet paper holder says:

“Seriously kick-ass intensely sweet for the real coffee super zinging unstoppable Max! Taste-explosion!”

I wish my toilet looked like that. I'd sit on it all day.

Coloribus via Boing Boing

President Obama has officially become a sushi menu item. Apparently, you can get this at a Japanese restaurant in Washington, DC called Perry's.

Tokyo Sushi Academy via AltJapan

The SF Int'l Asian American Film Festival starts today, and that means we in the Bay area get a full week and a half of awesome Japanese and other Asian movies at the lovely Kabuki theater. This year they're having an entire Kiyoshi Kurosawa weekend—in case you don't know him, he's the man behind some of the first and most famous J-Horror movies. They're also showing Tokyo! by Michel Gondry et al, which I'm super excited about.

Tonight's the opening night party. I'm actually lounging on the couch with my dogs, watching the box set of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. But starting this weekend, I will get off my ass, hit the theaters, and update you guys on what I saw.

27th SF Int'l Asian American Film Fest home page

Some highly talented Boing Boing reader with impeccable taste made these awesome Mario World cookies on March 10th–because MAR10 is Mario Day, she says. How did I miss Mario day?? Crazy.

Tessie's Facebook via Boing Boing

I think the way this cell phone charm is advertised as having "beautiful curving lines" on Strap-ya is very Japanese. The product is just a simple leather strap, but the creators carefully shaped and solidified it to resemble sexy woman curves. I guess that's not so unusual, since if you look at lounge chairs and cars and other products they're often made kinda like this too, but the thought of some cell phone strap maker sitting there wondering how to make it look curvy entertains me.

In 1985, a group of excited Hanshin Tigers baseball fans stole a Colonel Sanders statue from a Kentucky Fried Chicken and threw it in Osaka's Dotonbori River. Sanders was wearing star hitter Randy Bass' uniform at the time, and the fans did it to celebrate the Tigers' championship. Bad move. The Tigers haven't won a title since, causing frustrated fans to call this the Curse of the Colonel Sanders.

The awesome news is that, earlier this week, Colonel Sanders miraculously appeared near the riverbank. He was missing his arms and legs, but investigators found those nearby, too, and put him back together again. Randy Bass, who has since returned to the US and is now a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, says:

"Now that they’ve found the Colonel, the curse is over and it’s time to put your money on the Tigers."

(Thanks, Hans!)

The talk at ETech went well. We had a full audience, and I didn't notice too many people checking their email while Fumi and I did our thing. The talk title was Demystifying "Weird" Japanese Toys and Tools, but a lot of people said they left even more mystified than before. Oh well! The one sucky thing was that some unruly audience member stole my 5-second stopwatch after I passed it around for the audience to play with. So I will make this plea just once on my blog: If you're the person who stole it—and yes, we think we know what you look like because you were sitting behind my friend playing with it obsessively before it went silent—please give it back!

Garth write in to tell us about a fun bilingual magazine that no longer exists. Lucky for us, some of the articles are online:

Eat Creative is this design house in Tokyo that started out publishing a magazine called Eat. This magazine was similar to Benetton's Colors magazine in that each article was in two languages and each issue had a theme. In the case of Eat, it was Japanese/English and the themes were always food related. They stopped publishing this magazine several years ago when they realized the could be more successful just doing design work for other companies.

I remember there was a two page spread on interesting Japanese gourmet ice cream
flavors; lettuce, sperm whale, etc. There was also an interesting/slightly-disturbing article on people that drink their own pee.

Eat main page

Mario Kart come true in 3D! From Takara Tomy.

via Boing Boing Gadgets

I'm down in San Jose today giving a presentation on Japanese gadgets and technology at ETech. For those of you who can't make it, here's a video clip that I'll be showing. My co-speaker Fumi and I interviewed these teenagers to find out how they use their cell phones.

Related posts:
Japanese culture at ETech
Boys' Shibuya fashion makes debut at ETech

When Koichiro Iizuka was 21, his uncle told him the truth about his mother—that she was abducted by North Korean spies when he was one year old. Now 32, Iizuka is going to have the interesting opportunity to meet anex-North Korean spy, Kim Hyun-Hee, in South Korea tomorrow. The mother, Yaeko Taguchi, was abducted in Tokyo when she was 22, then taken to North Korea where she was forced to teach spies Japanese. Kim was one of her students. She was later arrested for bombing Korean Air Flight 858m from Abu Dhabi to Bangkok and killing over 100 people who were on board.

Iizuka and his uncle, Taguchi's brother, are hoping to find out a little bit about what she was like. "(I want) to hear about her manners, her habits, and catch a glimpse of my mother," he told the Mainichi.

Link

Otagei is a unique dance form that originated in the backstreets of Akihabara. It literally means "otaku tricks," and entails a series of strange moves, or tricks, that geeks do to send energy to anime singers and maid idols on stage. I had the unique opportunity to see otagei up close while reporting a story about maid cafes for Afar, and learned some of the moves myself. You can, too. Just follow the steps of the guys in the video. We'll be touching on the topic at ETech, too. A much more close-up look at the art form after the jump.

If you've ever walked through the streets of Kabukicho, or walked past a sticker picture booth in Shibuya, for that matter, you know what a hostess club worker looks like. Long and voluptuous wavy hair, light skin, big doe eyes, fake lashes, silky loungey dresses. It's actually now being linked to a new street trend called the agejo—-the modern day version of a kogyal, you could say. A fairly new magazine called Koakuma Ageha leads this trend, with a circulation of nearly half a million per month. The photo shows models from the magazine posing in what are dubbed "agejo dresses." It would make a great Halloween costume! (Thanks, Mary!)

Fumbling with the tiny controls of an iPod is so archaic. The Mimi Switch is a new IR sensor headphone that lets you control music with facial expressions. Created by an Osaka University researcher, it's basically a hands-free universal remote that can operate everything from a music player to household appliances. Of course, the thing still needs work--it's not wireless yet, and its controls are limited. But pretty soon, your morning will be like this: Wink for coffee, wide-eyed for laundry, squint for tunes. You still have to fold your own shirts though.

Link

Bijin Tokei is this awesome new widget by Tokyo-based Phiria Design. It's a simple clock, really, except that every minute the time is displayed on an analog blackboard held up by a hot Japanese girl (or in this case, two hot Japanese girls). It's super entertaining, even if you don't have a Japanese girl fetish.

Get it here for Vista or iGoogle, or check it out online.

via Asiajin

A 13-year old Yokohama boy just became the youngest weatherman in the country. Kazuya Yamazaki wanted to become a weather forecaster since the 5th grade, when he read about it in a reference book. So he studied to take the semiannual forecaster exam, a difficult test that has a pass rate of 6%, and passed it on his fourth try. His mom claims he was a science geek since kindergarten. He told the Mainichi:

"I'm also interested in chemistry, and I want to do jobs like making medicines and discovering new materials."

What a cute kid!

One of the few non-work-related thing I did in Tokyo this past trip was go see some of my kohai from high school perform at a night club in Shibuya. They're actually pretty famous—the guy in this video is Jesse, he was the lead singer in a band called Rize and now has a bunch of outfits that he raps with, including
GICode, which has a new album coming out mid-month. My good friend Colin is their sound engineer, so he made me a CD and got us backstage. That's where I took this video from.

Jesse, my friend Lara, and I always took the train to school together. I had no idea then that he had so much passion for music. After the concert, I was like, hey! You became so good! And he was like, Right? This is all I've been doing since high school! That, and he got a ton of tattoos.

If you're looking for something to do in SF on Saturday night, you could go to 111 Minna and check out their local designers show. My friend Christine will be selling her washi cuff bracelets and earrings, as well as other cool Japanese nature-inspired things like earrings that look like moth wings or silver-and-gold necklaces that flap their wings. If you can't make it or aren't in SF, you can also buy some of her stuff on Etsy.

Related posts:
Pretty silver jewelry featuring cool moving parts
My favorite buy of the week: lotus root jewelry

Taro Aso's a lucky guy. He isn't all that smart, and he barely reads Japanese, but he got to be the first foreign dignitary to meet Barack Obama since he became president. Why do they always take this cheesy happy handshake photo? Click through for a cheesy handshake photo of Taro Aso with Hillary Clinton.