“Her hair is dyed a dirty yellow. She wears colored contact lenses to make her eyes look blue. Her dresses barely cover her panties, let alone her thighs, and showing her shoulders is a natural. Barely legal now, she’s been living with her lover since she was 15. And now, Hitomi Kanehara, a 20-year-old high school dropout, has become one of the youngest ever winners of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award.”

Read the rest of the article at the Mainichi Daily News site.

A bunch of police officers waiting at a crosswalk in Ikebukuro.

Tonight is the opening party of the Suitman Tokyo Invasion show at the Tokion Shop. More info here, and have a look at the great poster for the show here. I know a few people going, but I can’t make it because, like I’ve said in the past, weeknight things are a no-no for me because I get back from work too late and I’m nowhere in that area.

The new issue of bilingual magazine OK FRED is about Japanese music. Check out the site for more details on what’s inside.

Takeshi Kitano is at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam to help promote ZATOICHI, and it seems like he’s having a good time there (from AICN): “Mr Takeshi started with apologizing, explaining that this was the 3rd screening he had to introduce that night, the first two being screenings for invited VIP’s and that between screenings he had had a couple of glasses of wine, and that he in fact was a bit drunk. He was sorry that he was drunk especially since we actually paid for this screening. He then went on to say that there have been a lot of Japanese sword fights recently in movies, naming Kill Bill and the Last samurai, but that Zatoichi was the first real Japanese sword fight movie, because well, he was Japanese. And those other movies were fake American Japanese sword fight movies. As most sword fights only last very short with two hits as most he wanted to show that.”

Tetsuya Ozaki’s new OUT OF TOKYO column takes a look at journalism in art, and how it is reflected in the ART iT magazine.

I got an email from a reader today recommending me an upcoming show by German electropop diva Barbara Morgenstern at Aoyama Cay on February 8 (which also includes Maximilian Hecker), and now I find a description of it at REALTOKYO. Sounds quite interesting, and lucky for me it falls on a Sunday (I can never make it to weeknight shows because of my job). Here’s the blurb from RT: “While his brother operates under the family name Hecker as a representative artist of the Austrian label Mego, Maximilian has released music that combines the sweetness of bands like Travis, or Elliott Smith of the now defunct Hood, with a feeling of solitude on Kitty-Yo. On his Japan tour he brings along Monika artist Barbara Morgenstern, another torchbearer of the current German pop avant-garde who attracted attention by employing the services of Pole in the past, and also appeared on a compilation of Cornelius’ Trattoria label. The Goethe Institut and Headz are co-hosting this unpredictable and potentially surprising evening of music, which makes it the place to go for some artistic refreshment.” More Japanese info can be found here.

It was recently announced that an upcoming new DVD box set covering all previous Pizzicato Five video works (like the fabulous READYMADE TV trilogy) would soon be released, and it’s now listed at HMV’s Japanese site. It’s going to be expensive, but I think I’m going to save up for it. For me, P5′s visuals were always an important part of the complete product, and that goes for the album packaging as well as the videos. It put you in the mood, in the spirit of the music that Yasuharu Konishi was creating. For a look at the amazing graphics used by P5 throughout the years, this is the book to get. It offers a beautiful tour of the history of Pizzicato Five graphic design. I have it, and love it. So yeah, I’m clearly going to be getting the READYMADE TV BOX. And appropriately, it comes out on March 31st, the anniversary date of their break up.

Saw this huge poster at the train station on my way home from work tonight. It advertises the release of a new edition of Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic manga series AKIRA.

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

Robert Duckworth writes a great entry on his blog about the “new ramen.” He describes it as “hands-down the hip-hop of modern Japanese food, presently cutting a wild, flavorful, transform scratch all over the culinary world of Tokyo.”

A big congrats goes out to Jeremy Hedley of Antipixel for getting his blog nominated at the fourth annual

Jan 22, 2004

A big intersection in Ebisu.

The second issue of REALTOKYO‘s bilingual art magazine ART iT is now out. I’ll pick it up today on my way to work. They’ve also launched a new website for the magazine.

A reader sends me a link to this great radio piece from NPR on ramen. It talks about the trauma of getting a bowl at Ramen Jiro, and I was so surprised to see the pic as there’s a Ramen Jiro in Ikebukuro! I’ve walked in front of it a million times, and I always say to myself that I need to go, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Yuko never wants to go because from outside it looks really low-rent, sort of like a local mom and pop ramen shop. But that does it, I need to go this week!

I find it quite funny that I seem to have developed this “ramen otaku” image from the site. You’d be surprised at the amount of mail I get from people sharing their love of ramen, or asking me if I’ve been to certain shops (and recommending some). For those who want to know more about the aura that surrounds ramen, a must-see movie is certainly Juzo Itami’s TAMPOPO.

Last night we watched two Ghibli releases, both of them not directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The first one was TONARI NO YAMADA-KUN (MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS), and I can’t recommend this enough. The animation style is very simple, like what you see in the image here. It’s based on a newspaper strip, and follows the trials and tribulations of a family called the Yamadas. It’s episodic, so you get little slices of life, and I don’t know how many times me and Yuko were almost on the floor laughing. It’s not as well known as other Ghibli releases (and is far from looking like one also), but do not overlook it. The other one was NEKO NO ONGAESHI (THE CAT RETURNS), a sort of follow up to WHISPERS OF THE HEART. This one feels more like a traditional Ghibli film, with very lush animation. This was good too, and had some good really fun moments. I got a kick out of hearing Mari Hamada (Modern Choki Chokis) voice one of the cats.