Kuhaku

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Sep 15, 2004

Kuhaku Kuhaku

KUHAKU is a book just published by Chin Music Press, and it looks really nice. One of the people involved lives not far from here (we’ve talked about cafes in the area). You can read interviews with the authors and view art here, and they even have a canned coffee review section (I’ve probably moblogged a lot of these in my quest for the perfect can of coffee).

I also like how they go about describing the book:

Kuhaku is… about Japan, 112 mm wide, 180 mm high (perfect for your bag), covered in light grey brill #4003 cloth with a 2c foilstamp and 2c silkscreen (perfect for your sense of touch), laid out with minion pro 12/10 on 120g munken pure (perfect for your eyes), 224 pages long filled with 16 stories / essays / accounts and over 10 illustrations featuring kozyndan and peyote, with two full color chapters, by 10 authors and 3 artists, designed in over 20 different locations, printed in Iceland, packaged with love.

What’s not to like. You can order it directly from this page.

Update: You can pick it up now at Book 246 and the Tsutaya at Roppongi Hills, and it will eventually pop up in other interesting bookshops in the city (Intelligent Idiot, Nadiff, and the like). They are presently working on getting some distribution going in North America, so it will also be available there in the near future.

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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.

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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.

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