made-in-Japan cultural goods has skyrocketed in the global marketplace
during the past decade. The globalization of Japanese "cool" is led by youth
products: video games, manga (comic books), anime (animation), and cute
characters that have fostered kid crazes from Hong Kong to Canada.
Examining the crossover traffic between Japan and the United States,
Millennial Monsters explores the global popularity of Japanese youth
goods today while it questions the make-up of the fantasies and the
capitalistic conditions of the play involved. Arguing that part of the
appeal of such dream worlds is the polymorphous perversity with
which they scramble identity and character, the author traces the
postindustrial milieux from which such fantasies have arisen in postwar
Japan and been popularly received in the United States.
More info at amazon.
tickets or election posters. I have seen 40 year men in business suits
carrying mobiles that have soft toys attached to it. It is kind of nice to
see that anything being cute is not associated with age or maturity but
the fact that anything being cute only makes that thing that much nicer.
Here is a dinnerware scrubber that also has to be cute.
Yes I got it, will probably never use it. Why ? Its too cute.
So one day I really wanted to eat Indian food and my team was also enthu for
having some Indian lunch. So we go to this Indian restaurant near our office.
Now going to Indian restaurants in Japan has big advantage for me, its the
only place you are sure to find vegetarian food.
So we go to the place and order food.
The foods is good, first time I was offered chopsticks with an Indian thali
(there is rice in it, how else do you eat rice ? ).
They were playing hindi music too (althought Sridevi laughing in the
Chandini, Chandini song was a bit irritating I must confess. )
And of course the highlight for me....Indian plastic food.
Now all Japanese restaurants have plastic food, that is the exact replica of
the actual food outside the restaurants so people can "see" the food they
are buying and decide. Now this amazes me coz they are really exact perfect looking.
The plastic nan looked really good and so did all the curry.
I really want to go check out the fake food factory to see how they make it.
Really want to.
speaking Japanese. I came across this nice sweatshirt and went to try it in the
fitting room. Now thats when I come across this poster in the room :
Hmmm...so I cant read Japanese...but the univeral language of visual tells me
to not cover my head with a bag..no,no, it tells me to cover my head with a bag !!
Indeed it does, for I can see a box with bags lying around.
Strange...so is it to prevent hair from getting on the clothes you try ?
So I click a pic of it(thats why I carry my iphone around).
I ask Jun, my team mate who knows Japanese what it means and turns out
you require to put a bag on your head to prevent the make-up from your face
getting on the clothes.
Of course.
Korean festival, just that my Korean team mate Hee Jun prepared some
yummy Korean food(and special vegetarian Korean food)
Thanks a lot Jun for the yummy food !
And then we saw a Korean movie.
Its not a new Korean movie, but anyone who has not seen it yet
should see it, its called "Volcano High".
Its takes the teacher Vs student concept literally where you have a
high school where there is a student gang and a teacher gang battling out
in "Matrix" style action.
You know you really want home cooked good Indian food when you start spending more time staring at Indian food photos rather than "Explore" on Flickr.
Sigh !
And its been totally great.
Its also the one month anniversary of :
- Living in a country where they don't speak any of
the languages I know.
- Living in a country being a pure vegetarian where
the concept of vegetarianism is as unknown as multi-dimensional time travel.
- Living as the only Indian girl in Osaka( this point might be debatable
but trust me I have seen a few Indian business men in Osaka but haven't
yet seen a single Indian girl in Osaka.)
- Living without Internet during weekends and no internet at
my apartment( its a bold step for me ).
- Living without a cellphone or any contact number.
- Living without IM chatting for a month .
- Living without being a member of any social networking site or
being active on any of them.
Now the last four things are by choice. Since I am in Japan I am
trying to test out the zen way of life,the simple living concept,
less is more etc. And it has turned out great.
Having internet at only specific times makes me prioritize my
tasks when I do have internet.
During the weekends I get to go out, get back to my hobbies,
do some reading. Not checking your email every few minutes doesn't
change anything, not checking your email in 2-3 days also not does
change much !
Not having a cellphone didn't make even a slight difference in my life.
You have public telephones to make calls and I use Skype to chat
with my family.
Not IM chatting has been interesting. I stopped chatting when I had
really insane amount of work. But now it turned out a social experiment
for me. I have come to the conclusion that if someone actually wanted
to contact they will email me anyways. And its much better than having
a huge list of friends where you realize that there has actually
hardly been any conversation with 90% of them since long and all
they end up is just being names that become online and offline on your list.
As for the social networking experiment. I was researching on a
design project where I had to study current social networking
habits and was surprised to see how much in detail people gave
and absorbed information and their need to be ever connected .
I was a member of many social networking sites, being moderately active.
So I wanted to see if I could exist without them. So I went ahead and
deleted my Orkut, Twitter, Friendfeed, I still kept my facebook and
flickr account but didn't contribute anything on them(had to keep at
least 2 -I feared too harsh withdrawal symptoms) .
And of course I have this blog which I would say is kind of a form
of social networking. Observation on becoming relatively “anti-social” –
Didn't affect my life as much I had imagined, I can definitely live
without those sites.
I suggest everyone especially people of my generation, who feel
they need to be forever connected and need to have “feeds” to
every freakin' thing their “friends” have been up to, to give this
a shot- be only connected when the need is there, rather than every
freakin' moment you are awake.
Seriously its not as bad as you imagine, trust me I lived with an
iPhone 24/7 that provided me ever ready connectively and now I don't
even have an active cellphone here.
Hiroshi Ishiguro, Hideyuki Nakanishi and Yoshifumi Kitamura .
We first enjoyed an Italian buffet Japan-style(vegetarian for me)
courtesy of Professor Asada at one of several restaurants on the campus.
Professor Asada, is renowned for his robotics work. He demonstrated CB2,
a child-like robot with a bio mimetic body, which was created to study the development of early cognition.
I was so lucky to meet the highly renowned Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro,
whose work with humanoid or android science is recognized world wide.
He gave us a very brief presentation on the multiple projects he and his
students work on in his Intelligent Robotic Lab. He created Repliee R1
a child robot patterned after his 6-year old daughter( which is himself
said people found creepy!)and the latest version - Repliee Q1,
an adult female humanoid :
He is most famous for Geminoid – an exact replica of himself, that is
controlled by motion-capture interface and can imitate Ishiguro
enabling him to be in two place at once!
And finally to the Human Interface Engineering Lab where Professor Kitamura
and his graduate students demonstrated seven 3D interactive projects exploring sophisticated intuitive user interfaces including ActiveCube,
allowing the user to construct and interact with a 3D environment,
Video Agents, an interactive environment in cyberspace using autonomous agents,
and Delphian Desktop, exploring a kinematics-based interface.
Came across this really tiny hummingbird flying and collecting nectar near Osaka University.
It was really hard to get a good shot of this super fast bird. But was lucky we got to see this pretty bird.
So when I saw this display outside a bookstore in Tokyo, I had no idea what
the book could be about. I was just hoping it was nothing offensive about the
elephant god.
Well thankfully turns out to be a book on astrology..somewhat on the lines
of "Ganesha says.." .
Ahaa..the many exports of India...curry and fortune telling.
Its that wonderful day every Friday when for 600 yen, thats about $6, we can
ride around anywhere and everywhere as many times we want on the
subway system in Osaka.
Its done to encourge people to go green by abandoning their cars and
using the subways that day.But for us, it means city exploring and shopping
day.Its the day we go around Namba, Umeada and other districts to explore
the wonderful city of Osaka.
Girls.
Xbox. Nintendo. DS. Wii. PSP
Long lines. Crowds. More crowd.
Games. New Games.
Crazy gamers. Swag.
Cos play.
People from all over the world.
Really crazy gamers.
My team mate Ben with the Cooking Mama Chef.
Shibuya is the fashion district of Tokyo, it’s the very place where
fashion trends are born.It’s said that trends first are seen in Shibuya
and then end up coming to New York and LA months later.
After that we head off to a Maid Café.
Hmm ….that requires a whole new blog entry. Later.
Off to Akihabara – the electronic district where you get huge range
and awesome discounts in electronics. I checked out some lenses for
my camera. Great prices.
Note to self : Next trip to Tokyo, carry lots of money.
Next we head off to Senso-ji Temple. Kaminarimon Gate, the front gate
of Senso-ji Temple, is known worldwide as the face of Asakusa.
"Kaminarimon" means "the gate of thunder" .
Built by Taira-no-Kinmasa in 942, Kaminarimon Gate enshrined statues
of Fujin, the god of wind, at the front-right and Raijin,
the god of thunder, at the front-left of the gate.
The gate’s official name, Furaijinmon, is written on the back side
of the gate’s large hanging lantern.
The lantern is 4 meters tall, 3.4 meters in circumference and weighs 670 kg.
Pack up your bags coz we are heading to the city of Godzilla himself,
yes ladies and gentlemen-we are off to Tokyo !
So I was really excited about my 5 day trip to Tokyo where we were to
Visit some labs where we were invited and then spend the weekends
At Tokyo Game Show 2008 !
The highlight of the trip for me was the Shinkansen ride(Bullet train).
And the best part, we were riding on the latest and the fastest of the bullet
train series-Nozomi N700 series.Here are some of photos of the train-
We travelled from Osaka to Tokyo in just 2 and half hours. And the trip was awesome.The train of course arrived 5 minutes before departure and exactly at 7 am we were off. The ride was so smooth given we were travelling at the speed of 300 km/h (186 mph).
We got great view of the country including Kyoto and of course the beautiful Mt.Fuji. Btw, when we enquired when we could look at Mt.Fuji, the uniformed trained attendant said -“Between 8:45 to 8:47 am” – now that’s the kind of precision Japanese have.
Artifical Island of Tokyo
When we arrived at Tokyo, we went off to visit Odaiba where the
Digital Human Research Center conducts its work.
Now Odaiba is basically an artificial Island built up of garbage
and debris and left over to settle for years(50 years I think)
after which The government sold it to corporations at a huge profit.
The island is also famous for some of the strange building design there,
Like the Fuji Television building –
There we received a tour by Dr. Kagami who heads the Digital Human
Interaction Team and he and Dr. Joel Chestnutt demonstrated their work.
At the lab we got the latest look at the upcoming technologies and
I got to try out some awesome Virtual real-time 3D sketching.
Here is my team with the robot at the lab :
Then it was on to the Miraikan – the National Museum of Emerging Science and
Innovation to meet with Dr. Akihiko Shirai, who gave us a tour of all the interactive
exhibits and a demonstration of Asimo !
Here we spotted the awesome global with multiple screens :
After that we headed off to our hotel. Unfortunately(fortunately) we were
staying at the grand New Otani hotel rather than one of the capsule hotels of
Tokyo(The stay at New Otani was sponsored of course, I couldn’t afford that room myself).
And that was just Day one in Tokyo.