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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Book Cafe Culture

The latest edition of REALTOKYO editor Ozaki Tetsuya’s OUT OF TOKYO column takes us on a tour of a developing bookshop and book cafe culture in Tokyo, and takes a look at the new PAPER SKY produced BOOK246 shop. If Tokyo is to have wars, then let them be book/cafe wars!

“Shortly after the “golden week” this May, Book 246 opened in Aoyama 1-chome on the front side of the first floor of Lattice Aoyama, an old building that has been in the headlines when it was “R”-ed into a designer apartment. The rather small space is produced by bilingual travel culture magazine and self-proclaimed “in-flight magazine for the living room”, Paper Sky, and in its shelves a total of about 2,000 new and old books, magazines, as well as about 100 different accessory items that are related to the travel topic in one way or another are lined up in a tasteful way. At the cosy Cafe 246 that opened at the same time right next door, I talked to one of the shop’s initiators, Haba Yoshitaka. He is a veteran book coordinator who has been working among others for Tsutaya Tokyo Roppongi.”

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PauseTalk

PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition happens June 4.

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

Codex is a weekly music podcast hosted by Jean Snow, recorded in Tokyo. Playlists for all episodes are posted on the site, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds of posts and episodes.

Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.
He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.
PechaKucha

Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.

A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.

 

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The "Jean Snow" logo is written using the free Kirimomi Swash typeface. The "M31" logo is by Ian Lynam, and is part of a series of 31 unique designs. The site's design is based on the Grid Focus WordPress theme by Derek Punsalan.

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