Boing Boing » Japan

Sheet-metal Millennium Falcon model

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:50:56 +0000

The Millennium Falcon Metallic Nano Puzzle looks like a delight. It's one of those puzzle/models that you punch out of thin, laser-cut pieces of sheet metal and assemble with tweezers and pliers, and the finished model is quite a beauty. It's $15.30 plus shipping from Japan. It looks more complex than the models I've done to date (most took less than an hour to complete), so be prepared to spend some time on it.

Star Wars Metallic Nano Puzzle (Millennium Falcon) (via Geekologie)

Osaka's fascist mayor defends WWII policy of sexual enslavement: "a comfort women system is necessary. Anyone can understand that."

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:15:59 +0000

Toru Hashimoto is mayor of Osaka and co-founder of the Japanese Restoration Party. He's previously called for Japan to be run as a dictatorship; now he's made public comments defending the WWII Japanese military policy of enslaving women and giving them to soldiers to rape. He says that it was a necessary expedient to support hard-working soldiers.

He said last year that Japan needed "a dictatorship".
In his latest controversial comments, quoted by Japanese media, he said: "In the circumstances in which bullets are flying like rain and wind, the soldiers are running around at the risk of losing their lives,"
"If you want them to have a rest in such a situation, a comfort women system is necessary. Anyone can understand that."
He also claimed that Japan was not the only country to use the system, though it was responsible for its actions.

Japan WWII 'comfort women' were 'necessary' - Hashimoto (Thanks, Jack!)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons/aska27)

Cake-topped parfait

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 12 May 2013 19:23:46 +0000

A chain of Osaka cafes sells a crazy parfait, topped with a ginormous piece of cake:

On a recent day out in Osaka, our reporter stopped by a café and ordered a truly hard-core parfait. It wasn’t that the parfait was so big, and no, it didn’t contain any shocking ingredients. What blew our minds about this parfait was its topping.
It was a slice of cake, and it was so big it wasn’t even trying to fit into the glass. Our reporter had this sweet-tasting tag-team at the Semba branch of Osaka-based café MIOR.

Who Needs a Cherry on Top? Osaka Café Crowns its Parfaits with Cake [Casey Baseel/RocketNews24]

(via Super Punch)

Portable watermelon fridge

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 03:05:36 +0000

Tama-chan is a portable watermelon refrigerator on wheels. The Japanese device retails for 19,950 yen (about $200) and can handle watermelons or similarly shaped comestibles, such as poultry, roasts, or severed heads. The device itself weighs 6.3kg, and charges from a car lighter socket.

ポータブル温冷庫/The Portable Watermelon Fridge — Could It Be The Perfect Gift For The Person Who Has It All?

(via Digg)

Japanese folk music glitch hop

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:14:28 +0000

Daniel Ryan describes his music as "a mix of Japanese folk music and glitch hop." This isn't normally my sort of thing -- I pretty much only listen to music with words -- but I played this one three times in a row this morning. There's a lot of clever stuff going on here that I lack the vocabulary to describe but possess the aesthetic apparatus to appreciate. According to one redditor, the folk song is this track off the Samurai Champloo soundtrack.

Nagasaki

Filter can separate water from Coke

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 22:21:55 +0000

The sheer awesome filtration power of the OKO filter is on display here as a fellow from Japan's RocketNews24 uses it to separate the clear, relatively benign H2O out of the Black Waters of American Imperialism. If it can turn Coke into water, the entertainment industry should consider using it -- after all, they've spent the past 20 years trying to get the food coloring out of the swimming pool. In any event, I wonder how you dispose of the sludge that remains in the bottle?

I tried drinking by clear and colorless cola [filtration] 's great! Taste to be worried about? (via Kottke)

Sushi tuna model that decomposes into individual delicacies

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:00:53 +0000

Francesco sez, "A Japanese company has released a plastic figure of a tuna fish. The figure is 33cm long and features a working table and the traditional 'Maguro bōchō' knife to cut the tuna. This figure costs ¥29,000 (USD292) in Japanese hobby stores."

I love that it's themed for the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, which may be the most memorable place I've ever visited.

Maguro Figure: il modellino perfetto per gli amanti del Sushi! (Thanks, Francesco!)

Nuclear contaminated water leaking from storage tanks at Fukushima site

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:17:04 +0000

Over the last couple of days, Japanese electrical company TEPCO has announced that they found leaks in three of the seven underground tanks used to store contaminated water at the site of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. They've also admitted that the tanks aren't reliable. And here's where we get to the fun part: Despite that fact, there aren't many other options. The water is stuff that's been used to cool down fuel rods that melted during the April 2011 disaster. You have to put water on the fuel rods, or they could overheat again. But once you're done with that water, it's not particularly safe, either, so you have to contain it somehow. And until other options can be built these tanks are the only place to put it. The third, most recent, leak was found when TEPCO tried to move water from the known-to-be-leaky tanks to another they thought was in good shape. This is just a mess.

Japanese teen trend: "Dragon Ball attack" selfies

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:30:52 +0000

"Numerous Japanese teens, it seems, are uploading photos of themselves doing the Kamehameha attack from popular manga and anime series Dragon Ball," writes Kotaku's Japan-based correspondent Brian Ashcraft. There's a photo gallery and it's awesome. Brian had an earlier post at Kotaku about the broader trend in Japan of young women staging photos with manga-style martial arts. Below, one such image found on 2ch, Japan's largest bulletin board, with the heading, "Schoolgirls Nowadays lol".

(Thanks, Brian Lam!)

Tickets from the Studio Ghibli museum are made from snips of film

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 02:40:24 +0000

Tickets at the Studio Ghibli museum near Tokyo are made from snips of actual film from Miyazaki movies. This ticket shows Satsuki from the masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro.

I went to (Miyazaki) Studio Ghibli Museum near Tokyo, Japan. The tickets are made up of cut up film cells. My ticket is from Princess Mononoke.

Have yourself 3D-scanned and turned into a human gummi

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 03:59:43 +0000

FabCafe, a 3D printed confectioner in Shibuya, Tokyo, is offering nine lucky blokes the chance to have their bodies 3D scanned and rendered in gummi, the most wondrously magical of all the edible substances. It's in honor of White Day, the Japanese give-your-female-lover-a-present holiday on March 14 (they also did custom chocolate-lollies of one's 3D scanned head for V-Day). These are so amazingly amazing and they point the way to a future where cheap scanners will render entire rooms as voxels to be output in gummi, wherein you can pay to be encased while you slowly, deliciously eat your way out. Coming soon to a Shibuya Love Hotel near you (maybe).

Chew on this: FabCafe lets you create a gummy replica of yourself for White Day (via OhGizmo)

Another look at Fukushima's legacy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:59:24 +0000

Recently, I linked you to a report on the World Health Organization's estimates of the long-term risk of cancer and cancer-related deaths among people who lived nearest to the Fukushima nuclear plant when it went into meltdown and the people who worked to get the plant under control and into a cold shutdown. The good news was that those risks seem to be lower than the general public might have guessed, partly because the Japanese government did a good job of quickly getting people away from the area and not allowing potentially contaminated milk and meat to be consumed. The bad news: That one aspect isn't the whole story on Fukushima's legacy or the government's competency. Although the plant is in cold shutdown today, it still needs to be fully decommissioned and the site and surrounding countryside are in desperate need of cleanup and decontamination. That task, unfortunately, is likely to be far more difficult than anybody thought, with initial estimates of a 40-year cleanup now described as "a pipe dream". One key problem: The government cut funding to research that could have produced the kind of robots needed for this work, because it assumed that nobody would ever need them.

Takeru Kobeyashi eats a 12" pizza in 60 secs

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:09:13 +0000

As I watched competitive eater Takeru Kobeyashi consume a 12" Domino's pizza in one minute, I realized that I could probably do this, and that if it wasn't Domino's, I could probably do it twice. Not that I'm supposed to. Carbs don't agree with me. But if you need to dispose of evidence in pizza form, and Takeru Kobeyashi is busy, I might be your guy.

Takeru Kobeyashi Eats a whole Pizza In One Minute

Friendly, trusting Japanese system for lining up for sports tickets

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:05:49 +0000

Murdo sends us a video showing "an Englishman in Japan showing how the Japanese queue for local football games. They stick sellotape to the ground with their information on it, marking their places in the queue so that they can return to that point in the future. They even do it the night before the actual queue forms!"

Japan Culture Shock! Unbelievable lining up queue system at Japan sports events! MUST SEE!

New Hiroshima bombing photo shows split mushroom cloud

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:21:54 +0000

A photograph that shows the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud split into two sections, one over the other, has been released by the curator of a peace museum in Japan. It was discovered on Monday among a collection of some 1,000 archival items related to the bombing, all of which are now in the possession of Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima city.

"Studies by the Imperial navy and others have already discovered that the cloud separated, but the photo confirms it and is thus valuable," a museum official told the Japan Times.

The photo had appeared in history books about Hiroshima, but the whereabouts of any copy of the photo or the negative was unknown until now, according to the museum. (...) The materials were contributed by a late survivor, Yosaburo Yamasaki, in or after 1953. It is not known who took the photo. It will be displayed at a museum located next to the school from this spring.

Along with Japan Times, AFP reports that the black-and-white photo was likely taken some 30 minutes after the bombing on August 6, 1945, roughly 10km (6 mi) east of the impact center. That site is located in what is now the town of Kaita, Hiroshima Prefecture (Google Maps link).

"The existence of this shot was always known in history books, but this is the first time that the actual print has been discovered," a curator at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum told AFP. "A shot showing the mushroom cloud split into two like this is very rare." More at Discovery News.

(Image: HONKAWA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL / AFP)

What you can learn from the million-dollar tuna

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:34:24 +0000

On Saturday, a bluefin tuna was sold at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market tuna auction for $1.76 million. Which is a little crazy. (Also crazy, the size of the fish in question.) But the amount paid for this specimen of a chronically overfished species doesn't really represent simple supply and demand, explains marine biologist Andrew David Thaler. It shouldn't be read as a measurement of tuna scarcity, he says, but rather as an artifact of culture (and marketing).

Voltronoid Mickey Mouse & friends transforming robot toy

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 03:03:46 +0000

Bandai has released the Chogokin King Robo Mickey & Friends, a voltronoid multi-robot toy made from classic Disney characters. It's about $132 plus shipping from Japan:

7 little robots combine to make one big one! The 7 little bots are:
* Mickey Mouse (Jet Mickey)
* Minnie Mouse (Sky Minnie)
* Donald Duck (Diver Donald)
* Daisy Duck (Aqua Daisy)
* Goofy (Land Goofy)
* Pluto and Doghouse (Dash Pluto and Doghouse)
* Steamboat Willie (Ace Willie)
Stands 22cm tall in combined King Robo Mickey form! Made of diecast metal, ABS plastic, and PVC vinyl.

Inspired.

Chogokin King Robo Mickey & Friends by Bandai (Thanks, Erik Krogh!)

Caturday: dig this 2013 Japanese cat meme calendar

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:20:51 +0000

I enjoy following Sakurako Shimizu, or "sakuracos," on instagram for daily cute-cat-photos from Japan. I was delighted to see that she has produced this attractively-designed "cat meme calendar," available on Etsy for $15.50 USD, with adorbzable photos of Fuku, Goma, and their furry friends.

Sony ceases production on cassette player/recorders

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 04:02:15 +0000

Sony will no longer make its cassette player/recorders. In other news, Sony was still making cassette player/recorders.

Sony to discontinue the production early 2013 of Cassette Player/ Recorder

Gold Christmas Tree

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:42:25 +0000

Reuters:

The tree-like ornament is made of 88 pounds of pure gold, standing about 7.9 ft high ... It is decorated with pure gold plate silhouette cutouts of 50 popular Disney characters and draped with ribbons made of gold leaf. The price tag? A mere $4.2 million.

Apple's Siri vs. Japanese-accented English

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:36:25 +0000

In this video, an increasingly frustrated native Japanese speaker discovers that Siri is unable to parse the spoken English word "work" when voiced with a typical Japanese accent. (kenjikinukawa via Joi Ito)

Mail-Order Ninja's Kickstarter revival

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:41:45 +0000

Josh from Reading With Pictures sez, "A Kickstarter campaign (now in its final days!) to revive the award-winning graphic novel series and nationally syndicated comic 'Mail Order Ninja!' Originally published by TOKYOPOP and distributed as a strip by Universal Press Syndicate, the series fell into publishing limbo when TOKYOPOP closed its doors. That is... until now! 'Mail Order Ninja' is the certified awesome tale of an ordinary little boy named Timothy J. McAllister living an ordinary little life in the ordinary little town of Cherry Creek, IN. But when Timmy orders his very own ninja from a mail order catalog (Arch-nemesis sold separately.), life in Cherry Creek will never be ordinary again!"

MAIL ORDER NINJA Returns! (Thanks, Josh!)

Manga plates turn your food into comics

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 23:11:54 +0000

Francesco sez, "In my blog on Wired.it I posted a new series of wonderful 'manga inspired' plates created by the Japanese designer Mika Tsutai. Positioning the food in the right way Geek Chefs can tell a story or almost make the food more fun! Each plate costs 2980 Yen and for now is available only in Japanese design stores."

La cucina invasa dai manga!! (Thanks, Francesco!)

Blood type determinism in Japan

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:01:49 +0000

On the BBC, Ruth Evans describes a widespread Japanese superstition about the relationship between blood-types and personality. Apparently, the modern junk-science belief originates with a crank called Masahiko Nomi who published a "a book in the 1970s" about it, and his son Toshitaka has continued the family tradition with more woo books and an "Institute of Blood Type Humanics." However, Evans implies that the origin of this belief is the eugenics-grounded ideology of the Imperial militarist Japanese government of the 1930s, who "formed battle groups according to blood type."

It's apparently a very widespread belief. Employers ask prospective employees for their blood-types. Dating sites use blood-type to make matches. Blood-types form part of the plot in manga, anime and games. And big companies, sports teams, politicians and teachers are all known to discriminate based on typing:

The women's softball team that won gold for Japan at the Beijing Olympics is reported to have used blood type theories to customise training for each player. Some kindergartens have even adopted methods of teaching along blood group lines, and even major companies reportedly make decisions about assignments based on employees' blood types.
In 1990 the Asahi Daily newspaper reported that Mitsubishi Electronics had announced the creation of a team composed entirely of AB workers, thanks to "their ability to make plans".
These beliefs even affect politics. One former prime minister considered it important enough to reveal in his official profile that he's a type A, whilst his opposition rival was type B. Last year a minister, Ryu Matsumoto, was forced to resign after only a week in office, when a bad-tempered encounter with local officials was televised. In his resignation speech he blamed his failings on the fact that he was blood type B.
Not everyone sees the blood type craze as simply harmless fun.
It sometimes manifests itself as prejudice and discrimination, and it seems this is so common, the Japanese now have a term for it - bura-hara, meaning blood-type harassment. There are reports of discrimination against type B and AB groups leading to children being bullied, the ending of happy relationships, and loss of job opportunities.

Japan and blood types: Does it determine personality?

DIY Strandbeest kit in a Japanese hobby magazine

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 14:16:15 +0000

Francesco Fondi writes, "Last saturday Gakken celebrated the 10th anniversary of the series 'Otona no Kagaku': an hybrid of magazine and book with an educational toy attached to each release. Beside showing the complete collection of the cult toys released in a decade, Toshiyuki Nishimura chef editor of the pubblication, presented the Animaris Imperio: a new kit based on Theo Jansen mechanical animals. In the past Gakken already released two Strandbeeste kits but this time the model is not a scale replica of a real Theo Jansen self-propelling animal but a custom biped design created only for Japan."

Gakken Otona no Kagaku Animaris Imperio: gli animali meccanici di Theo Jansen - Arte e modellismo

Thoughts from a Japanese Media Pirate

Japanese Media Pirate — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 05:34:58 +0000

The following was submitted for publication by a reader who asked to remain anonymous — Rob

I just finished Pirate Cinema and felt the need to write something about it, because it concerns a cause that's near to my heart. I saw myself in protagonist Trent McCauley, who makes new movies by chopping up footage from popular films, despite the consequences of getting his Internet taken away or being fined or imprisoned in the book's near-future scenario.

This is because I do the same thing. I'm one of those people who remixes different media and posts the finished pieces online. I combine Japanese television dramas, films, PVs, and clips from variety shows with mostly American songs, however, because I like the contrast of Japanese visual media with American music.

When Trent talks about seeing a film in your head and needing to make it and put it out there, I know exactly what he means. I recognize the same need in myself. Once, for a two-year period, I had a music video in my head for the Japanese drama Honey and Clover, set to The Swell Season's Falling Slowly. I created what I envisioned, and to this day, I still love watching it because I'm proud of what I created. It's something I made to convey a certain feeling, and even after making it with that feeling in mind, what resulted was a layered piece with unexpected themes running through it.

The way I obtain Japanese media is through the net and through sharing with other fans. I'm not clear on international copyright law, but I know that some kind of law is being broken when we download these videos. For now, with us fans and our fandoms, it's a very gray area. The Japanese companies know that we share videos, but they don't do much to stop it. The worst they usually do is shut down a streaming video site where these shows are hosted.

For those that do English subtitles for Japanese media, there is always a battle between those creating the videos, who offer the work for download free-of-charge, and the streaming sites who take the files without permission, post them to their own websites, and receive revenue through advertising. It's not that subbers want a cut of the profits; they simply don't want for-profit streaming sites to draw corporate attention to their work. By posting the videos to a streaming site, Japanese companies can see the encoded logos on the videos and then order those groups to shut down their operations even though those groups do not make any money from their works.

When MegaUpload was shut down, the Japanese media fan community was in an uproa, as it was our main way to directly share our sources and creations. Patchy torrents are now all that remains, along with a handful of somewhat reliable cloud servers. Those aren't even guaranteed, and in the bleakest of moments we worry that we'll have to resort to the days of recording to video or DVD and sharing videos that way.

We're slowly rebuilding, but we've been hit hard. All of our archives are gone. Communities that had thrived for years—places you might find a long-forgotted drama from 1987—are gone. The videos that I had made and hosted on MegaVideo are gone. All of the files I'd hosted and provided for people are gone. Even the ones I had created myself, for classwork and without any copyrighted material, are gone. They exist only offline, in random external drives, where they cannot be shared.

This isn't to oppose copyright. I agree that we need copyright law, but also that we should have access to everything. I'm all for supporting artists and buying their work, but is anyone suffering for the existence of mashups? Personally, I feel for my parents, who live week-to-week on my Dad's garment factory paycheck (where he makes jeans for less than $10 a pair, which end up priced at $300 in the store) supplemented by odd jobs my mom takes up. They're suffering too. Can you say the suffering of media companies is equivalent? I don't think so. I think we should be able to use these things the way we want to.

I know a lot of people who would be happy to have an all-inclusive Japanese media archive and wouldn't mind paying a small fee for access to everything. Wouldn't it be great to see Japanese dramas and films licensed in much the same way as anime site Crunchyroll? It started out hosting media without permission from any rightsholders, but went on to build good relationships with them. They used to be a streaming site for Asian dramas, films, and anime, but after going legit, the focus is now on anime. They have some dramas, but few popular or well-known dramas that are in high demand.

I plan to support this stance and hope that, in the near future, we can make it a reality.

Japan competes with Panama to pass the world's worst copyright law

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:55:08 +0000

Japan has extended its shockingly bad copyright law, passed in June, which provides for 10-year prison sentences for people who upload copyrighted works without permission; under the new law, downloading a copyrighted work without permission also carries up to two years in prison.

The Japanese copyright lobby has also renewed its demand for mandatory network surveillance, through which black boxes with secret lists of copyrighted works will monitor all network traffic and silently kill any file-transfer believed to infringe copyright.

The ISPs would have to pay a monthly licensing fee for the privilege of having these black boxes on their networks.

Kawaii Catastrophe: Japanese insurance brochure depicts adorable disasters that can befall your home

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:30:29 +0000

Author Matt Alt, who lives in Tokyo, writes:

Kawaii. The aesthetic of Japanese cute. You love it or hate it, but you can't escape it, as Hiroko and I learned when renewing the insurance on our house. Japan being Japan, the pamphlet that explains the different levels of coverage features helpful super deformed illustrations of the catastrophes that can befall homeowners. We aren't insuring our house through Playskool. One of Japan's biggest banks gave this to us.

Check out the rest of the illustrations.

House with a skate-ramp

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:22:12 +0000

The Skate Park house was custom built for a Shibuya, Tokyo couple, integrating a skate-ramp, a piano studio, and many lovely design flourishes. I think the stair-rail looks like it'd be awesome for grinding, too -- or at least soaping.

The owners of this house, a young married couple, made a special request in regards to the design of their house, located in a quiet residential neighborhood in Shibuya ward. They wanted both a skateboard park and a piano rehearsal room to reflect their own individual interests.
There was no need for a car park on the site, so to take advantage of space a private entrance courtyard was designed. The sliding glass panels of the first floor open up onto this enclosed area and allows for the workshop and studio to expand outwards. The studio has a skateboard bowl imbedded into the floor with multiple angles for plenty of different interaction.
The piano room, located at the back of the studio, is raised about 2 feet from the ground to help with the sound-proofing of the room as well as creating an inherent stage performance space. When the doors open up onto the studio, the expanded space with the bowl transform into guest seating and completely changes the atmosphere from a mere practice room to a public concert hall.

Skate Park House (via Core77)

Robotic Lego ball contraption to beat them all

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:00:38 +0000

Akiyuky on YouTube has uploaded a 7 minuted video overview of her or his astounding Lego Ball Contraption, a robotic rube goldberg device in 17 modules, each more fiendishly clever than the last. The accompanying blog (in Japanese) has lots more detail. But honestly, you can just sit agog for seven glorious minutes and soak it all up without having to try and parse out Google Translate's rendition of Akiyuky's explanation.

LEGO TECHNICからくり部屋 (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)