Remember that smoking lounge I found in Akihabara a while back? Now comes the smoke station, tiny booths for your smoking needs. This one is located on Omotesando.
Category: TB.Grafico • Tokyo Walking
Jean Snow lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming in Tokyo -- sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for the following online/offline publications: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Game|Life, and The Japan Times. He also manages the gallery space at Cafe Pause.
Jean Snow is a daily contributor to Wired magazine's game blog, Game|Life, covering game news from Japan and beyond.
Arcade Mania is currently on sale through Amazon Japan, with the same edition available for pre-order on Amazon US (to be released January, 2009).
Tokyolife: Art and Design covers Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives. Jean Snow provided coordination assistance.
The Superfuture Superguides are a series of PDF travel guides to some of your favorites cities, updated monthly, and obsessively compiling the best places to shop, eat, and drink. The Tokyo guide is edited by Jean Snow.
He is also the design/culture editor at Neojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx, here.
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 October 6.
Categories
Art & Design
Media
City Life
Tokyo Boy
Find out more about how to advertise directly on this site here, or by contacting me.
the smoking lounge was/is gross.. we had one in the college i attendend.. though it was just a room. and underground. [but my whole dept was underground] anyways. something about the “smoking booth” just seems way cooler. it also has the funny side effect of making smoking a solitary act, verse a social act. smoking is so not as fun by yourself as it is with other people.
Pardon me for being so naive, but is that some sort of vacuum machine to catch smoke or just a designated smoking spot? Enlighten me.
p.s. love the blog, it’s a favorite read of mine.
Casey - Los Angeles.
Just a designated spot. Nothing that high-tech.
I believe it’s illegal to smoke on the streets in Tokyo, or at least many areas in Tokyo, so these designated smoking spots are popping up everywhere. Usually, they sport ads by Japan Tobacco.
I think the no-smoking ban is only in effect in a very few areas. They are, however, trying to enforce a no-dropping-cigarette-butts-on-the-street rule:
http://www.tourism.metro.tokyo.jp/english/basic/basic09.html
Speaking of JT, check out their zen-like “manner” posters:
http://www.jti.co.jp/sstyle/manners/ad/change/gallery/index.html
Wow, so Tokyo is even more harsh than California on smokers. Unusual. I wonder how it is in Europe.
seen on the side of a cigarette machine in 1999
http://museum.50megs.com/tokio/t03.html