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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

New T-shirts in the Mail

Go Japan!

I just placed an order for 5 t-shirts from Threadless, and I have you, my faithful readers to thank. These are all coming to me free, thanks to the points I received as a result of some of you ordering some tees while following this link. Unfortunately, the vast majority of their tees are currently sold out, but I still managed to find some that I liked (like “Go Japan,” pictured above). It’s going to be nice to have some new tees to wear (and to add to the four Threadless shirts I already own)!

Category: Fashion, Meta

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4 Responses

  1. goodtimes says:

    Threadless are terrible quality, fall apart well fast and the print practically rubs off its that poor.
    Cheap to buy but also tacky.

  2. Jean Snow says:

    I have 4 tees from them, have worn them quite frequently over the past 2 years, and they still look nice, with the design not rubbing off at all. Maybe you got a bad batch?

  3. Momus says:

    This “Go Japan!” design reminds me too much of the way Koizumi got “Ambitious Japan!” plastered all over shinkansen trains. Metaphors of society as a sport, with winners and losers, tend to be neo-liberal. It’s the very opposite of the ideals of the Slow Life movement. Go where, Japan, and to whose benefit? What exactly is the “finishing line” for a whole society?

  4. Jean Snow says:

    I see it as going and claiming a place (playing a stronger role) in the world community. Japan still always seems to be relegated to the background, especially in these days of booming China.

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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.
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, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, and The Japan Times. He also manages the gallery space at Cafe Pause.

He writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the fourth Thursday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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I'm also a proud member of the Pecha Kucha Night family, working on various projects, including updating Pecha Kucha Daily, a blog that highlights the creativity coming out of PKN events worldwide.

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I serve as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

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