Creativity Now Tokyo

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Oct 28, 2004

I picked up a flyer for the “Creativity Now Tokyo” event, organized by TOKION magazine, and it does seem like something quite cool. From REALTOKYO:

Tokion magazine presents a Harajuku-style “conference” event at Laforet Museum. A brief look at the official Website shows a mixed lineup of speakers including Uchida Yuya, Fujiwara Hiroshi, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Aida Makoto, Shingo2, Nakajima Hideki, and others. But upon closer inspection the combination of participating figures from the fields of art, music and media begins to get interesting: David Elliott, Ozawa Tsuyoshi, Terry Ito, Iijima Ai, Haino Keiji… Due to careful separation by topic we won’t experience starlet Iijima at the side of Haino Keiji, though, and it will probably be moderator Ukawa Naohiro who ends up playing the leading role by navigating through the multi-faceted program.

And the official blurb:

Tokion Magazine is pleased to announce the First Annual Creativity Now Conference Tokyo. The U.S. event was held on October 2nd and 3rd, 2004. This year Tokion is bringing the conference to the Laforet Museum Harajuku in Tokyo on November 6th. This unique symposium will bring together top figures in art, design, photography, music, film and political marketing. The people shaping today’s popular culture will spend a full day exchanging ideas, methods and inspirations before an audience of 500. Creativity Now will consist of several panel discussions and individual presentations. A large cross section of the creative community is expected to attend. Creativity Now Tokyo will prove to be the definitive cultural gathering of the year.

It happens at the Laforet Museum on November 6. It’s something I would love to attend, but at 4500 yen, and probably Japanese-only speakers, I’ll give it a miss.

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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.

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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