I have a lengthy essay about Gary Hustwit’s documentary “Helvetica” in the latest issue of Idea, on newsstands now.

I have a visual shoutout to the land of milk and honey, Machida-shi, in this new show in Brooklyn.

I just had an interview with Nagoya cutesters Lullatone go live on PingMag.

Marxo and I have work in the upcoming WKTokyoLab show in Los Angeles at Gallery Nucleus. The exhibition is centered around the artwork and writing created for WKTokyoLab’s new book + DVD set, Tokyo.Ten. The exhibition is on November 1st at 7pm.

It’s rare that WKTokyoLab stuff makes it to LA, so for folks curious about some of the more innovative image-making coming out of Tokyo these days, this is a great sampler.

We had a number of really nice offset postcard sets made for the inaugural Meeting Modernity exhibition. There are 8 thick, full color cards in each set, wrapped in handmade, envelopes made by the tireless folks at Los Angeles’ Young Art gallery. Card sets sell for ¥2200/$22 postpaid. Do us and the gallery a favor and pick up a set.

Mild-mannered Sgt Tanuki has just published a slew of great posts reviewing the last five years’ worth of Akutagawa Prize winners. He also goes ahead and reviews whatever filler got included with each winner to round out a hardback book for publication. That’s classy.

Tokyo: A local’s view

You may have heard of this guy Jean Snow. He is on the Néojaponisme masthead.

Group Sounds (Japanese 1960s music) movie trailer

Japanese pop movies all look (and often are) uniformly bad, but this one seems like fun. I like Group Sounds a bit although I think people overestimate its impact on Japanese pop culture of the era. These guys weren’t really “the Beatles of Japan,” since most Japanese also listened to the Beatles and knew that the Tigers or Spiders couldn’t really hold a candle. The old saying went, in a family, the older brother listened to the Beatles, the older sister listened to the Monkees, and the little sister listed to Group Sounds. But yeah, the costumes and typography were great. And this movie actually dug up Tsutsumi Kyohei to work on the music.

DJ Ozma and Tunnels dress up as black women

Sometimes the jokes are so lame that you don’t even get around to worrying about the identity politics.

Okay, let me just come out and say it: lately I have been totally wrong on this “junior idol” boom. (For those that just tuned in, the “junior idol” thing is a new Japanese sub-market of the semi-porn industry that puts girls aged 9-17 in very revealing bikinis.) A week or so ago, I wasted everyone’s time whining about a 17 year-old bikini model advertised as “she may be a high school student, but she’s an adult E-cup!” I tried to parry off “cultural relativist” attacks and “the UK is worse” blows, but all of my huffing and puffing was in vain.

I clearly should have saved my outrage: this week, 14 year-old Saaya Irie is on the cover of Weekly Playboy. “She may be a middle-school student, but she’s an adult F-cup.” The text doesn’t say this, but who needs to say anything! This is a 14 year-old girl in a bikini on the cover of a magazine featuring lots of naked women and articles praising prostitution. This is so blatantly wrong that I don’t even need to feign sarcastic contempt. Wait, too late.

Saaya has found support from Weekly Playboy since she was about 12, but this may be her first cover. Nothing like a 14 year-old girl to catch some eyeballs. I mean, why not use her? She’s finally hit 14! Back when I went to middle school, a lot of the girls in my class were being invited to pose in skimpy bikinis for nationally-syndicated men’s magazines from mainstream publishers. You too, right?

Okay, enough crying wolf for today. Feel free to tear apart my insanely puritan outlook in the comments section.

I know my involvement with Neojaponisme seems random at best. but just stick with me here. I recently left the ML hive to go out an interview the musician Morgan Geist. He has nothing to do with Japan, nor does this interview. I just happened to be a fan, and this might be my first piece of actual journalism. The article was lovingly edited by Nik Mercer of Anthem Magazine, as the actual interview spanned over hours. Morgan Geist has some interesting things to say and is worth the read if you like electronic music, or just reading about being an active musician, producer, label manager, and more.

Anthem Magazine, Morgan Geist interview

I recently saw the Mythbusters episode that debunks this clip. They didn’t have the balls (or screen time or interest) to say it, but the lesson was: Japanese TV is yet again faking another reality segment. No wonder Japanese TV stations so aggressively take down YouTube clips or otherwise the rest of the world would be constantly submitting this nonsense to scientific testing. Pretty soon Adam and Jamie are going to be using ballistic gel to determine Kimutaku’s actual height.

Wouldn’t it be great if Japanese TV had a version of Mythbusters that just busted Japanese variety show segments? You could call it 『怪しい電通』.

Do Japanese TV shows ever have to come out and say, oh, by the way, the guy was on a rope? If Japanese TV was a presidential candidate, it’d be McCain. Always assuring to have a reality-show entertainment complex so happy to embody caveat emptor.

I’ll be Djing the TAB 4th anniversary shindig while mega-homey Shane Lester VJs. Should be a fun time. Print out the official TAB page about it to get a discount at the door.

I’m pretty sure the train poster I saw for this project didn’t specify a romanization of Maakusu: za tawaa. Highlight of my morning commute.

Lest you think that mainstream Japanese men have ceased to lust after underage females in bikinis, note this Zakzak cover girl (link most likely NSFW) and tagline, “She may be a high school student, but she’s an adult E-cup!” I guess the abstracted breast size overrides the pesky age issue. Buy the DVD and support the 17 year-old model’s parents’ dream of one day owning a yacht!

Since most folks don’t seem to notice, click the logo at the top of the page. What you are seeing is a delineation of the formal representation of the の kana from 1910 to the present, executed in a logo super-family format. The MetaのTame identity is featured in upcoming books on identity design from Princeton Architectural Press (USA) and Sandu Media (China).