Tokyo Blog

Recently I’ve been noticing a few different ways in which the internet has been important. Last week, I went to Tachikawa in the Western suburbs of Tokyo. In order to find my way from the station to where I was going, I checked the place out beforehand on Google Maps. Furthermore, I opened Street View and ‘walked’ from the station and around the surrounding streets to get a feel for what the area looked like and any landmarks. When I stepped out of the station a few days later it was weird, because I recognised the location. Which makes perfect sense, because I already spent some time exploring a virtual version, albeit paused at last winter.

If your localisation of Google hasn’t got Street View yet, I’m sure it’s coming. Tokyo was one of the first to get it, and the amount of data that is required must be enormous. It’s really useful for navigating.

The other thing I noticed in a recent news story was the prevalence of the internet in a shocking child murder case in the UK. The case of Baby P involved the baby’s mother, his step father and a lodger. The three of whom have been repremanded over their likely involvement in the boy’s death. What happened though, is that underground news sites and unofficial sources leaked the names and addresses of the three on the internet, which eventually found their way onto popular social networking site facebook. An angry mob soon assembled in cyberspace ready to lynch the individuals responsible for the child’s death (which was horrific). The saddest thing for me is that the child’s death could have been prevented if it wasn’t for the negligence of the UK authorities.

The internet played a big part in exposing the identities and, as it so often does, put the power (of knowledge) back in the hands of the people - good or bad.

Tommy Lee Jones has been appearing in adverts for Suntory’s Boss canned coffee for a while now, and his face is all over the city. Further more, he’s created ads for TV which are now available for viewing on YouTube! Please have a look:

Jones working at a host club
Jones at a gyudon restaurant
Jones working at a warehouse
Jones working at a supermarket
Jones working at a delivery company
Jones working at a delivery company II
Jones working at a karaoke club

Oh and by the way, Jones plays the part of an alien visiting Earth, which would explain a lot of the unusual abilities he has (teleportation, the ability to close his ears, etc.).

It’s Suntory time.

There’s a couple of reasons why I want to post about something as seemingly mundane as this, the first one being the price: Only ¥6700 for this Canon printer (£47, $69), which I thought was super cheap. The second point is the wrapping and prepping service I received at Yodobashi, Ueno. I had to wait several minutes for my printer to be ready, but I watched in amazement as the guy got busy getting my printer ready for transportation. You can see from the picture above that a lot of love went into it. One thing you won’t notice is that the entire box has been hand-wrapped in clear plastic and secured with sellotape. After that, the other things you can easily see from the photograph. For exmple, there’s a Yodobashi Camera branded sheet of paper attached to the top of the box to prevent damage from the hard plastic handle that you can just make out in the picture. After that, the box is wrapped in both directions with strapping which is stretched around the box and heat sealed using a special machine at the end of the counter in the store. The handle they use has a groove along the top, the perfect size for the strap to fit into. Once the final strap is tightened and sealed, the handle is extremely solid. But it doesn’t stop there. In order to prevent any discomfort from the handle or strap cutting into my fingers, a piece of bubblewrap is wrapped around the handle and taped. Finally, the guy doesn’t pass me the finished product over the counter. Instead, he walks around until he is on my side of the counter and hands me the box, bowing deeply. I propel myself down and out of the shop via the escalator, having been put in a better mood by the outstanding customer service in Japan (it was a dark, rainy day that day, hence the clear plastic wrap on the box).

There’s nothing cooler than speeding through a neon-dripped Tokyo night in one of these taxis, now a metropolitan icon in its own right. The immaculately clean interior and exterior and driver-operated automatic doors enhance what is already a very Japanese experience. Doilies on the seats and the driver’s white gloves betray the Japanese obsession with hygiene.

If you’re wondering where you’ve seen one before, Bob Harris has a similar neon retinal burnout experience in the opening scene of Lost In Translation whilst riding/sleeping in the back of one of these vehicles, before swinging into the Park Hyatt Hotel in Shinjuku. Riding in a Crown Classic is one of those cultural experiences that lies outside the gamut of usual Tokyo sightseeing, and should be on the to-do list of anyone planning to visit.

BTW: I ate at the restaurant and drank at the bar in the Park Hyatt Tokyo, featured in Lost In Translation, and the views at night from the floor-to-ceiling windows are amazing. I don’t know why I didn’t blog it then, it was a pretty long time ago now.

I’d like to put up this link to Justin Hall’s site about his time in Japan. The site might look a bit dated now, but his style is interesting. The site is a sprawling mass of interlinked pages, which means you have to explore the site in a very non-linear way. Some content you might never get to see unless you take a certain ‘route’ through the hypertext. This guy was documenting his life online before blogs even existed, and his writings about Tokyo and Japan were one of the things that inspired me to go to Tokyo in the first place. The other major influence of course being Jean Snow.

My friend Trent McBride sent me a link to this new animation by Japanese Motion Graphics Company, Wow. It’s an exploration of typography and the Japanese art of Ikebana, or flower arranging. For me, it’s a load of really nice zenned-out visual effects set to a soothing backing track. I’m a sucker for such things, and definitely a new fan of Wow.

100% Design Tokyo was my first visit to an event in Tokyo Design Week, and it was really cool. I’d read about it before I came, when I was still living and working in the UK, so I knew pretty much what it was about. Being there in person is different altogether, of course. I had a good time looking at the professional design pieces in one section, which contrasted with the quirky and more experimental pieces in the student and undergraduate showcases. There was also a bunch of interesting stuff in the container area (a collection of industrial containers you sometimes see on the backs of lorries or trucks with installations and exhibits inside). It’s held at Jingu-Gaien near the baseball ground in the Aoyama area. I’m afraid yesterday was the last day though.

If you are on facebook, allow me to direct you to the group Nobody Sleeps Like the Japanese Do. For foreigners in Tokyo, it’s common knowledge the Japanese people can and do sleep anywhere and everywhere. Here is photographic proof of just how awesome the Japanese ability to kip actually is. I was amazed when I first arrived here. I came to the conclusion that they don’t get enough sleep during the night due to work or staying up late after work, and so they supplement their sleep with power-naps throughout the day. It should be noted that in some cases, the people in these photos are just drunk.

There’s been some new output from Tokyo Plastic recently, in the form of two short animations. I wasn’t keen on The Electric Koi, but there was something satisfyingly 90’s about their other offering The Praying Machine. It’s a piece of animation set to decidedly Photek-inspired music. There isn’t much meat to the plot, but it’s good visual nourishment in the Tokyo Plastic style rendered in a mix of cell-shaded 3D and illustrations. Have a look.

I finally managed to get inside the new H&M store in Tokyo’s famous, upmarket shopping district of Ginza. It was a weekday evening, so I was confident I would be able to get in. However, come on a Saturday and you will still queue 150 metres down the street. No exaggeration.

Despite the fact that there was no queue, the shop was packed. The first thing to strike me was the floor plan near the elevator. Three floors of women’s clothes, with only the basement dedicated to men. I was on the ground floor (which is known as the 1st floor in Japan), and had already seen the women’s clothes on display when I came in, and I was already thinking that it was, as I feared, going to be very different from H&M in the UK. I already expected this to be the case based on my shopping experiences in H&M stores in Barcelona and Lille, both of which were quite different from each other. I went down to the basement level and looked through the racks for a bit, but nothing really jumped out at me. H&M in the UK is definitely more adventurous than it’s Japanese counterpart. In Japan, H&M is more like Gap. No bright colours, no design prints, and a muted palette. Most of the stuff is either black or grey, and verges on smart-casual. Last time I was in the UK H&M stores, it was more like a cyberpunk 80’s revival. The two couldn’t have been more different. Zannen.

I did an interview for the web designer review site Spicy Web Designers. I haven’t got much else to say, I just wanted to share the link. Thanks for reading!

When I left the UK economy looked like it might be on the verge of recession. In fact, there was talk of a global recession in the not too distant future. I didn’t realise how much this was going to affect me though. The pound against the yen is my biggest woe. When I arrived in Tokyo, it was up at 215 yen to the pound. Now it’s plummeted to 174 yen to the pound! This is crazy! It’s bad for me, because I sometimes get paid in pounds and then move it all to my Japanese bank accounts. Looks like I might need to put my prices up. Down with Labour.

UPDATE: I know it’s not necessarily the fault of the Labour government and that there is a bigger picture, but I just like to dig them at any opportunity because I don’t like them.

It’s been out since July 22nd on DVD, but I still haven’t seen it, and yes, it’s yet another film about Tokyo! I have no idea how good the film is, but it seems to have received a few positive reviews and the clips I’ve seen look promising. Now I’m living in Tokyo, I have less of an urge to watch films about the city. Before, I used to scour the TV guide in the UK for anything relating to Tokyo, Japanese design, etc., and I’d always enjoy watching movies featuring Tokyo. Lost in Translation is the obvious example, but I love watching Kitano or Miike flicks too, because they were often set in Tokyo.

UPDATE: As andersdu points out below, this film is not set in Tokyo at all, but set in Japantown in San Jose! Still wanna watch it though.

Here you can see the jewel-encrusted items on sale at Shibuya 109, a large department store consisting of several floors of fashion and accessories aimed at ‘Shibuya boys’ and ‘Shibuya girls’. I can’t remember how much the bike cost, but it was A LOT. Ker-ching.

Tokyo! is a new film recently released about, well, Tokyo.

I don’t know why I didn’t post about it before. I’ve known about it for a while, forgotten about it, and was reminded of it when it launched in cinemas across Japan recently. A friend of mine went to see it, but struggled with the fact that there were no English subs. Our Japanese is OK, but not good enough to understand dialogue in a Japanese film. I’ve yet to see it. I might wait until it comes to DVD so I can get the English subs.

To whet your interest though: the film consists of 3, half-hour segments, each one directed by a different director. The three being Bong Joon-Ho, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax. I won’t go into the individual storylines. Instead, I will direct you to PingMag’s excellent article on the film.