Just in time for a new beginning ...
from Smashed and Sinking we have a list of 10 things learned from Japanese TV. Picked from the list:
1) All food on earth is ungodly and orgasmically delicious.
3) All I really needed in life is a speedo and a catchphrase
9) Japan single-handedly keeps poster board companies in business. It’s like the news and variety shows never even learned that computer graphics were invented
Io9 has an excellent article on how the scifi interpretation of Japan changed over the years. From Blade Runner and Nueromancer to Steven Speilberg's A.I.
U.S. science fiction used to be fascinated with Japan, from Blade Runner to Neuromancer. Everything Japanese was cooler, sleeker and shinier than our grubby American aesthetic, and Japan was destined to dominate. And then, Japan's futuristic status waned. What happened?
Back in the early 1980s, Japan's ascendance seemed assured — there were a host of business books claiming that Japan had lost World War II, but won the peace through superior economic policies. Books like The Enigma Of Japanese Power by Karel Van Wolferen became unlikely bestsellers. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians like Ishihara Shintaro started flexing their muscles — Ishihara made waves with a book called No To Ieru Nihon, or The Japan That Can Say No (to the United States.)
Sadly, Japan's economic hegemony ran out of juice in the early 1990s, when their real-estate bubble burst (sound familiar?) and the country spent an entire "lost decade" mired in stagnation. The vision of Japan as future economic uberpower was replaced by a creeping irrelevance — but Japanese pop culture remained as influential as ever, maybe even more than during the powerhouse days.
The Shared World project asked five scifi/fantasy authors what five cities they find our earth the are the most fantastical. The results are a little surprising. No cities in Asia, and no cities in the USA.
Our own planet is often surreal, alien, and beautifully strange–and cities tend to focus our fascination with these qualities. Sometimes the exoticness comes from finding the unexpected where we live, and sometimes it comes from visiting a place that's foreign to us. Everyone also has a different idea of what "fantasy" or "science fiction" looks like in real places.
Ever closer to completion, now the lights, sound and steam is on for the Odaiba Gundam ...
Now all we need are rules for movement and combat ...
photos via Danny Choo, btw)
The life sized Gundam being assembled in Odaiba, Tokyo is almost complete. Pew Pew!
(photo via Ken Lee)
via Pink Tentacle:
“Unko-san,” a new anime series about a brown turd-shaped fairy with lots of luck, is fast becoming the rage among high school girls in western Japan. Short episodes of the anime are now showing in the Osaka area on Kansai TV’s “Otoemon” music program. The stories revolve around Unko-san — whose name is a play on the Japanese words for “luck” (un) and “crap” (unko) — and his quest for happiness on Lucky Island, which is populated by a host of other poo fairies.
Read more...
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