Tokyo Blog

The Motoman SDA10 is a Japanese robot manufactured by Yaskawa Electric’s robotics division. It seems to be really versatile, as it can handle a number of different tasks without any problems - even fiddly jobs like putting a disposable camera back together out of lots of tiny individual parts! It’s amazing how fast it moves from position to position during the assembly process, and I can totally see robots taking over the world in the next 100 years. Taken from Fuji TV’s The Best House 1-2-3, a popular Japanese TV show.

Big thanks to the team at Cerego for offering the services of their amazing social learning platform, iKnow. Everything is totally free, and the site blew me away! I’ve only tried one lesson, so I haven’t properly explored all the features of the site, but I have an account set up, and it’s monitoring my learning progress! The lesson I tried was delivered in the form of an interactive Flash movie. You can tell that a huge amount of work has gone into this project, especially the approach to teaching, which is designed by some boffins in-house.

Basically, if you’re learning Japanese, or some other foreign language I recommend it. It’s far-and-away the best thing available of its kind. Disclaimer: I don’t know what other languages are available at present. It does seem to be aimed mostly at people learning Japanese right now…

UPDATE: If you check my account, you will notice I took a lesson for dummies. For anyone thinking I should be a lot more accomplished at Japanese considering the amount of time I’ve been over here, I am. I was just testing it out. I’m super busy with an interactive project of my own right now, but will be doing a proper lesson on iKnow pretty soon. If you join, look me up!

Here’s how it looks when I stand on my balcony (at night), in my new neighbourhood of Kotobuki. I’ve only had chance to have a short look around, but already I can tell this area is going to be so much better than Shinagawa (which I can’t recommend at all; too boring and no atmosphere). Already I’ve found an old paper merchant, a german beer bar, a small shrine nestled between old buildings, and a retro camera shop, and that’s just on my street! A little farther afield, and you’ve got a traditional Japanese toy shop, an incredibly old-looking bookstore, and lots of shops specialising in the model robot kits you can get over here. There are several toy companies on my street, and you can see the Bandai headquarters from my balcony, so it would seem, unbeknown to me, that I’ve moved into the area of Tokyo specialising in toys. Christmas shopping is going to be much easier, but I’ll have to take less clothes with me when I return to the UK for the holidays. I fly back to Japan on New Year’s Day. I thought it would be a nice idea to be sipping champagne at 30,000ft on a Virgin Atlantic flight to Tokyo on the first day of 2009. Time will tell if I’m right or not, got to watch I don’t get into too much of a mess welcoming in the new year.

The 5 O’clock Chimes of Takanawa from Stephen Smith on Vimeo.

I shot this footage from the balcony of my apartment so I could capture the strange music I’ve been hearing every evening at 5 o’clock. When I’ve been walking in my neighbourhood, I’ve been looking up under the eaves of public buildings and at the pylons and powerlines, trying to work out where it comes from, but I can’t find the source. So everyday at the same time, you get this haunting melody drifting through the cold night air. Today it chimes out my last evening in the neighbourhood of Takanawa, Shinagawa before I move on to Kuramae near Asakusa tomorrow.

Japanese Salaryman - Virtuoso Performance in the Key of Awesome from Stephen Smith on Vimeo.

A Japanese Salaryman, wound up and overworked, unleashes a fireball of musical self-expression on a Friday night in Tokyo. I came to the conclusion that he is by far the coolest salaryman I’ve ever seen: he fell asleep on his keyboard during the interlude.

Two weird videos from YouTube, possibly by the same animator, not sure. My friend Maya told me that the Shinbashi clip features sound from a Ramens sketch (The Ramens are a surreal Japanese comedy troupe). Takadanobaba!

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.

UPDATE: I found some more that I forgot to add:

Jones hands out stuff on the streets of Tokyo
Jones as airport security
Jones leaves Earth then comes back
Jones works at a hot spring
Jones hangs out in Akihabara
Jones works on a rice farm
Jones appears in a samurai flick
Jones helps construct a house
Jones joins a tunneling squad

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.