Hypebeast: Nigo Cedes Roles at A Bathing Ape
Nigo steps down as President/Director of A Bathing Ape! I should write more about this, but I am about to step on a plane.
I will be back on the 9th with lots of new content. Sorry for the lack of blogging over the last few months.
Tuesdays 19 May – 21 July
19:10-21:00
I will be teaching a ten-week intensive introductory typography seminar at Temple University Japan
All About Typography teaches the connotations of type & typography: the visual reading of language.
The class is an in-depth look at typography (designing with fonts) for both beginners and experienced practitioners. The class is a working examination of Western typography including lectures on type history, type classification, and contemporary practice. Practical exercises, as well as in-class critiques will help broaden students’ understanding of typography practically and critically.
All About Typography’s syllabus is based on a handful of proven typographic education projects developed by design faculty from the best graphic design departments in the world: Yale, CalArts, London College of Printing, and Cranbrook.
The class will conduct projects to explore typographic expression, learn correct typesetting practices, and increase design acumen: how to say things clearly with graphic design.
The class will host guest lectures by some of Japan’s top graphic designers.
The class is Mac-based, but will apply equally to PC-based environments.
Course reading:
Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton
Assorted handouts
More information:
www.tuj.ac.jp/cont-ed
Néojaponisme contributor Patrick Macias is giving a lecture at Temple University Japan, Azabu-juban Campus on March 13 entitled “Otaku Power – Trivia/Desire and Transformation”. The lecture will go from 6:30pm to 8pm.
Weekly Shonen Sunday 週刊少年サンデー and Weekly Shonen Magazine 週刊少年マガジン are celebrating their Golden Jubilee together on the 17th of March this year. (Both published their inaugural issues on the same day, a truce reached only after racing to be the first weekly manga magazine shaved two months off Sunday’s initially planned lead time.) More here, including a cover gallery.
Speaking of which, the cover of this week’s Sunday pays tribute to the very first Sunday cover, with Matsuzaka Daisuke in the role of Nagashima Shigeo.
Global Voices Online: Japan: Alpha Blogger Awards 2008 (Part 1)
Here you have it folks: the best of the Japanese web. Anyone else feel underwhelmed? Seriously, the second best is a site that gives you the most basic common-sense information about pregnancy.
I don’t want to use the word “ugly” for the featured blog formatting, but is there a law or something against breaking preset template in this country?
How many years until there are “professional-grade blogs” with mass readerships that are not horribly-corrupt product-placement schemes, fake celebrity diaries written/vetted by mangers, or re-prints of tech press releases?
Maybe the Japanese are not paranoid of the internet: they are just bored.
My clever translation of “Mother Goose” in Japanese = おガァさん
Give a round of high-fivers and highly-esoteric “van Doesburg Points” to Team Néojaponisme for getting RMP (“real madd props” [sic]) from the list of lists. Listen to this, lesser peoples of the net:
Néojaponisme (www.neojaponisme.com)
Possibly the hippest cat on the block, this site is run by a group of cooler-than-thou arty types, mainly based in Tokyo. They certainly know their stuff, and hitting the site regularly enough leaves you with the satisfying feeling that you’re kinda hangin’ wid da in-crowd. Don’t get any big ideas, though. You’re still too dassai to approach them in reality.
If you approach us at parties, we will inform you that dasai has one “s” and then go back to being horribly nerdy misanthropes with persecution complexes. Alas, I speak for myself.
No, we kid, we kid. We always appreciate compliments and show our gratitude by being completely uncomfortable on how to react and descending into strange self-parody.
Also, a personal triumph: MEKAS. — Best Poser Site. I think he means “cultural elitist” for “poser” since the best “poser” site would be a site posing to be cultural elitist, right? My idea for Best Poser Site would be a collection of photos capturing all the guys in my high school who ran out to get chain-wallets and Dinosaur Jr. T-shirts in early 1994. A special page would be dedicated to Straight Edge tattoos for guys who stopped being straight edge after about three months.
29 year-old delivery man Ike Takao of Kagawa Prefecture was arrested for sending bomb threats to the video game company Hudson Soft. One threat included “Bring 80 trillion yen in cash to Takamatsu Station! Or else I’ll keep sending bombs to your company until everyone is dead!” After being arrested he said, “I sent them my opinions and hopes for their games, but they didn’t make the games better, so I did it.”
Among his opinions — Momotaro Densetsu: momo not big enough to fit small boy. Bomberman: not enough bombs.
Japan: Blurry Lines Between Buzz and Truth – McDonald’s Quarter Pounder Debut
My love for Global Voices Online grows. This is a great summary of the “Quarter Pounder Line-fixing Debate” plus a chance to hear real Japanese opinions on the matter.
I hope to write a longer essay on this at some point but “fixing lines” seems to just be one tool in a big arsenal from Japanese companies of sculpting an image of popularity into the mass media before that popularity is even achieved. Clearly companies everywhere want to achieve this, but the uniquely centralized and streamlined media system makes it a lot easier in Japan. The internet is getting in the way though! Now smaller members of the conspiratorial party have a place to whisper to millions.
Neighbors lose legal battle against unsightly house
There are two kinds of residences in Tokyo: dull, generic ugly houses and uniquely ugly houses. Most dull, generic ugly houses have no aesthetic: they are essentially tile-covered boxes in odd geometric shapes. The worst ones are formless masses covered in stucco. They are not “post-modern” or modernist houses that start to look ugly in a few years. They are born ugly.
There are also some ugly houses that are quite interesting. These are mostly houses from rich people who can hire their own architects.
Once in a while there are some visually attractive houses, but for some reason, they are all in unadorned reinforced concrete.
So the owners of dull, ugly houses in Kichijoji tried to force insane manga artist Umezu Kazuo to make his uniquely ugly red-and-white striped house more dull ugly. They lost. A great day for uniquely ugly houses.
A note: I think we’ve complained about this before, but the problem is clearly not that Japan does not know how to make handsome houses. Traditional Japanese houses are amazing! They’re beautiful! Even the Japanese like them and preserve them and pay lots of vacation money to go visit and stay in them! And yet no one has figured out how to make a modern building with a traditional Japanese-exterior? Instead they just build a wooden box and throw some tiles on it. Could it not be related to the fact that the Japanese construction industry is the most corrupt industry in Japan, maybe after entertainment?
Workers urged: Go home and multiply
I think Canon has the right idea here, but I don’t really think we are in “Japanese-companies-make-employees-go-home-early-to-make-babies trend” territory yet. This, however, would be a pretty amazing thing to see implemented across the board. I wonder why Canon has been the first to act.
This is good timing with the recession too. There is just going to be less work for everyone in general, so yeah, send people home already.
That being said, does anyone think that two days a week is going to cure the birth rate? Companies may want to consider, I don’t know, permanently fostering a better culture of work-life balance. Two days a week is kinda like, you should be at work doing nothing at a snail’s pace for twelve hours, but these are drastic times and we have to let you out! So go forth and multiply! But once you have more children, start working twelve hours again.
(I apologize in advance for the Western-bias in being pro-low work hours. I don’t know whether it’s from Plato, Christ, or Marx, but I have this odd idea that personal identity should also be allowed flourish outside of the office walls.)
The Japanese fashion site MEKAS. that I edit started a new Twitter yesterday (http://twitter.com/mekas), and I went a bit crazy with 140-character observations as I read through the new March fashion magazines.
CanCam — not a gyaru magazine — for some reason had a “Gyaru Inside-Joke Vocabulary Dictionary,” and there were a few choice entries:
• アナル (anaru) is apparently not just a way to say “anal” but an abbreviation of “あ〜、なるほど！” (a naruhodo, “Oh, I see.”)
• Yes, We CanCam, meaning 迷わずに『CanCam』を買うこと — “buying CanCam each month without fail.” There is no way anyone actually uses this.
• ユダる (yudaru), literally “to Judas,” meaning “to back-stab, betray.” You could probably also read the verb as “to Jew” since “Jew” is yudaya in Japanese, but this connotation is not really the Japanese language’s fault. The entire character of Judas was written into the Jesus story as a way to blame Jews for his death (Judas = Judah), since crucifixion is so clearly a Roman form of execution. At least, that’s what Bishop Spong says.
• 永眠 (eimin, “to sleep forever”), which normally is a poetic way to say “to die/to pass away,” but gyaru use it as “to zonk out/to sleep deeply.”
I have only one problem with Japanese people in blackface: it’s totally inexcusably awful. I hate to be shrill about this, and outrage in this case feels like almost like a cliche, but how many more of these are we going to have to see?
Let’s assume for a minute that this sudden rash of Japanese blackface in the wake of Obama’s presidency is well-intentioned. Comedians and yuksters want to look like Obama, so they darken their faces. Does no one know that this is not okay outside of Japan? And more to the point, do people understand that putting these images on the internet means that non-Japanese will view them and say, wow, this Japanese man in blackface in imitation of Obama is a total bummer and a blight on the Japanese nation?
Obama will be president for at least four years, if not more. Someone needs to drop the hint now — in some kind of well-orchestrated national campaign — that Japanese comedians and actors can’t do their Obama imitations in blackface (or even worse, crappy blackface) for the entire span of the Obama administration. Otherwise, this problem is only going to get worse.
Spike Lee’s Bamboolzed is not his greatest work, but it definitively tackles the core issues at the heart of the blackface debate. (Wait, is this even a “debate”? You just are not supposed to do blackface in contemporary global society. Case closed.) Can we send a boatload of Region 2 DVDs of this film over here and pass them out?
I leave you with hopefully one of the last examples of Japan’s Blackface Era: a truly terrible Obama in blackface and fuzzy black wig in the world of Super Mario.
©2012 Neojaponisme
