Check out this CNN report on love hotels &mdash apparently, love and sex are recession-proof. Good to know.
To learn more about love hotels, check out these books:
Love Hotels: An Inside Look at Japan's Sexual Playgrounds
Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan
Check out this ingenious concept for bicycle pit stop areas by Tokyo's Store Muu Design Studio. Basically, anybody riding a bike could just ride straight into one of these tables, which locks the front wheel and provides them with an instant table to rest or snack on. The cyclist can stay on his/her seat and just have a regular seated meal. Japan has tons of bicycles, and parking them has become harder and harder as the crackdown on randomly parked bicycles continues. So this is a great solution for those who need to stop for a bite but don't want to get their bikes confiscated. I can totally see a fast food chain or restaurant wanting to install these, but I can also see it causing huge clusterfucks on sidewalks and promptly being banned.
via Shibuya246
Related stories:
Bicycle rule crackdown!
Video: the hen that rides a bicycle
Giant subterranean bicycle parking lot
Gallery of pimped out dekochari bicycles
This is not the first time I've seen urine-based beauty products in Japan, but calling something a Foot Pee! Pack takes it to a whole new level.
via Tokyo Times
Sega Toys has an awesome new toy called Uchiage. Its structure is similar to a miniature planetarium &mdash it uses multiple lenses pointed towards the ceiling to project light patterns that look just like a giant burst of fire. The cool thing is that it's completely safe, still beautiful, and you can even program it to project customized messages or images in the sky. How much are you willing to bet that somebody will use this to propose marriage? It goes on sale August 1 for about $150.
Product page (Japanese)
Related stories:
Jupiter-shaped planetarium for a starry bath
Homestar planetarium cell phone strap
Sega Toys' touch sensor robot speaks its own language
Sega Toys clock counts down to your final moment
Super realistic robotic animals from Sega Toys
According to the BBC, there's a new subset of British youth that thrives to be just like the Japanese ganguro &mdash you know, the girls with the bleached blond hair, super tanned skin, and crazy makeup. I read somewhere that for Japanese women, making themselves up this way is a deliberate form of rebellion against the traditional aesthetic of jet black hair and pale white skin. I wonder what it means when Caucasian girls with naturally lighter hair pick up the trend.
Big news from my brother in Tokyo! Nike Japan is spending a gazillion yen to transform Miyashita Park in Shibuya into a giant playground with a skate park and a rock climbing wall.
Right now, Miyashita Park is best known for booze, drugs, illicit sex, and homeless people. If all goes as planned and this facility is completed next May, it will become one of the healthiest places in Shibuya. Interesting! A decade ago I would have been pissed that the hub of many of my childhood sins is being disintegrated, but now that I'm older and super into rock climbing and gearing up to run the Nike half marathon, I'm actually pretty excited. Many locals and homeless advocacy organizations are protesting the decision, however. I suppose Nike would have been better off tearing down a bunch of izakaya instead &mdash that way they wouldn't have to displace inhabitants or deprive the city of one of its few peaceful parks &mdash but Miyashita was probably easier to negotiate.
Link (Japanese)
A couple of years ago at a film festival in San Francisco, I watched this movie, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
Buy The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
Hey guys, if you have a sec hop on over to BBG to check out the stories Steven and I are doing on PARC, the esteemed Palo Alto Research Center. Don't miss photos and diagrams of the first ethernet cable in the world, the carpet on which graphical user interfaces were conceived, a mirror that helps you comparison shop, a gallery of caution signs, and interviews about what it's like to work there.
There's an interesting article in the NY Times today about a group of young Japanese who are gathering on the streets to protest the shortage of jobs in the current economy.
Demonstrating in public is not common in Japan, and often has the connotation of a radical, peace-disrupting, unwanted activity. “This is the most significant rise in activism I’ve seen in years,” one Tokyo University professor quoted in the article says. “A movement is brewing among young Japanese.”
Interesting! (Thanks, Brian!)
Dan Osman was a Japanese-American extreme athlete perhaps best known for the video (below), in which he speed-climbs a 400+ foot tall rock wall without a safety rope in four minutes. (I spent this past weekend in Lover's Leap, the area in South Lake Tahoe that he did this in, and climbed the same rock.) Osman later became hooked on free-jumping, which is kinda like bungee jumping but for much greater heights in much more dangerous conditions on a normal rope that doesn't slow you down at all. He even set a Guinness Record for it. Then, in 1998, he died doing when a rope failed him when free-jumping a cliff in Yosemite. A QA guy from Black Diamond, who made the rope, did an evaluation and concluded that it was a freak accident caused by the rope rubbing against itself &mdash something resulting from human error, a slight miscalculation in the angle at which he jumped.
There's a great story about the life and death of Dan Osman in Outside Magazine.
Remember when Michael Jackson brought his chimp Bubbles on the Bad Tour to Japan in 1987? I always wondered what happened to Bubbles &mdash apparently, he is now living in Florida at the Center for Great Apes.Here's an excerpt from his profile page:
Bubbles was born in a biomedical laboratory, but taken from his mother and sold to a Hollywood trainer while still an infant. He was purchased for Michael Jackson and soon gained fame as Jackson's pet chimpanzee. He appeared in television shows, movies, and music videos before he “retired” at age 6 or 7. When Bubbles was only 5, he toured Japan in a promotional tour with Michael Jackson. While there, he sat in on interviews with Jackson and "moonwalked" for the press. But, as he grew too strong to be around people, he lived most of his life at the trainer’s California animal compound in the company of an older chimpanzee named Sam. Both Bubbles and Sam arrived at the Center for Great Apes in March 2005 with a large group of chimpanzees, all from the entertainment world.
You can donate to Bubbles or even adopt him exclusively for a year and visit him at his sanctuary for $10,000. Pretty cool!
Australian artist and TokyoMango reader Andrea Innocent makes these beautiful, fun illustrations of Japanese folklore and culture. She says:
Basically I am a story teller in pictures and Japan is my muse. A couple of my works have in fact been inspired by posts on your site.
So cool! The one shown above is of Kuchisake Onna, a legendary Japanese ghost whom I used to fear when I was a little girl. You can read about that here.
(Photo via innocentgirl's Flickr)
One of my all-time favorite stores in Japan is Uniqlo &mdash it's like the GAP, except the styles and cuts are a lot more contemporary and its cheaper. Now we're hearing that Tadashi Yanai, the guy who founded UNIQLO and the richest guy in Japan according to Forbes, might be buying the GAP.
Related:
Uniqlo calendar with stop-motion scenes of Tokyo
Uniqlo to send clothes to refugees
New Years lucky bag: Uniqlo vs MUJI
Uniqlo NY will have robot shopping guides
Wow. Someone in China made a blinged out pink girly Gundam with bejeweled armor and glittery flowers on his legs for the robot anime's 30th anniversary.
Link (Japanese)
My friend Alyssa said the first concert she ever went to in her life was this one, MJ's appearance at Yokohama Stadium for his 1987 Bad Tour in Japan.
I don't know that much about this DVD, to be honest, but it's called Michael Jackson: Live in Japan, and according to Amazon it was released on June 23, 2009, two days before he died.
Michael Jackson: Live in Japan
The cam baby is a cute child robot that resembles a 1-year old human baby in diapers. It has just learned to walk, so it waddles towards you when you clap your hands and say, here baby baby. It makes cute little bot noises while it walks, and its LED eyes flash and go piko piko piko! When it falls, it starts crying. You can own one for $26.
Buy yours here.
I've posted this before, but here it is again because it is, in my humble opinion, one of the best tributes to Michael Jackson originating in Japan. Around 1:58, Ken Shimura, who has just confessed to his girlfriend that he becomes a henna ojisan (a weird middle-aged man) when there's a full moon, jumps out of the bushes and starts dancing to the chorus of Thriller played on a Japanese flute. This clip is from the late 80s, I think, or possibly the early 90s.
Rest in peace, MJ.
Remember the story from a few months ago about the Colonel Sanders statue that came floating onto a riverbank after being stolen from a KFC in Osaka over 20 years ago and chucked overboard? Well, here's a picture of him next to a newer version of himself. I think he looks much more approachable without the glasses and the makeup and the white suit. The happy human behind them is the president of KFC Japan, who no doubt eats a lot of chicken... or does he?
via Mainichi
Send tips to mango [at] tokyomango [dot] com
