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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

TAB Tees on Sale

TAB Tee

Another chance to get some TAB tees at a nice price (and remember, it helps support the site):

Updated: We’ve again lowered the price of the fantastic 5 TAB shirts to 2500¥ per shirt if you buy 2 (previously 5000¥), until the end of February. Those shirts’ designs were donated by five international artists/designers: Jonathan Barnbrook, Power Graphixx, Paul Cox, Nobory Tsubaki, Buro Destruct to help make a bit of money to support the NPO behind TAB and its 30 volunteers. This is our first line of shirts and we have about 10 shirts left per size. And, we ship international! Get them while they last!

Mac POWER!

Mac POWER

I really need to have a look at MACPOWER, one of Japan’s Mac magazines — Momus explains why.

Canadian Style Signage

Canadian Style Profile

Canadian Style Profile

For Canadian Style, I’ve also created plenty of signage. Above are the profiles for the two featured artists (I’ll post the text in another post): designer Sonia Chow and photographer Marc Xavier LeBlanc (who also created all the Canadian Style music mixes — more on that later). Marc’s card is actually at the same scale as the others, but a bit longer. As with the menu, fonts for English text are in Helvetica Neue 75 Bold, with Japanese text in Osaka.

Canadian Style Red + White/Read + Write

Another component of the event is an interactive installation, “Red + White/Read + Write,” that was conceived by Sonia. More on that in a separate post. What you see here is the instruction card that will be put on the wall.

Canadian Style T-Shirts for Sale

As you all know, we have some Canadian Style t-shirts for sale (which you can of course purchase online), and so a small card for that.

Canadian Style Reserved

Finally, anyone who has been to Cafe Pause has probably noticed that they usually keep one or two 4-seat tables reserved for larger groups, and so I made a sign for that also.

Canadian Style Menu

Canadian Style Menu

As promised, here’s a look at the Canadian Style menu I designed. As you can see, the food selection is maple-heavy, and quite tasty I might add. My faves? The meat pie brought me back home, and tastes pretty much like the kind my mom made. My favorite dessert had got to be the maple pudding — it’s really sweet (more than I’m accustomed to, I don’t eat a lot of sweets), but deliciously so. For the beer, I tend to go for Moosehead when I’m in Canada, but here in Japan we could only get Labbat Blue, so that pretty much settled it. English text is all done in Helvetica Neue 75 Bold, with Japanese text in Osaka.

Animal Fun

Animal Crossing

I’ve alluded a few times to the fact that Yuko has developed a bit of an obsession over DOUBUTSU NO MORI (ANIMAL CROSSING) and that I’ve pretty much lost access to my DS because of it — I won’t tell you how many hours she plays a day, but I think you can already figure out that it’s more than one. Want to know why DSes are selling like crazy in Japan? Just now she told me that she was spending some time with someone she later found out was an 11 year old girl. How did she find out? The other person that was hanging out in the village with them was her father, also playing on a DS right next to her. And the mother? She was in the same room, with her DS in hand, playing one of the popular brain training games. Oh, and the big brother also has his own DS.

I just can’t see the PSP developing this sort of family interaction — and that’s exactly what it is, a new way for family members to interact with each other.

Japanesque Modern

From Kyodo News, under the title “Businesses, academia launch ‘Japanesque modern’ campaign”:

Leading businesses including Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and Toyota Motor Corp as well as universities and designers launched a three-year campaign Saturday to heighten Japan’s brand image based on its traditional culture. A total of 48 companies, seven schools, 11 industrial groups and 20 individuals set up a council to promote the campaign under the slogan of “Japanesque modern.”

The initiative is aimed at boosting the nation’s competitiveness by creating new products and digital and cultural contents that would incorporate Japan’s traditional culture and craftsmanship and also meet the needs of contemporary society, council members said.

Japanesque modern? Is Japanesque even a word?

Densha Trooper

Danny Choo

From The ODK:

Danny Choo rides the trains of Tokyo and Yokohama as the Densha Trooper. Previously he’s made trips to Akihabara and a Ramen Shop.

Anyone spotted him yet?

PechaKucha Night Vol. 29

Pechakucha

If you were like me — I am Canadian Style‘s bitch, and she has no mercy — and couldn’t make it to last week’s PechaKucha Night (Vol. 29) at SuperDeluxe, PingMag has got you covered.

Architecture Photography at Olll

Olll has updated with a few photography galleries of Omotesando/Aoyama buildings, including Herzog & De Meuron’s Prada store, Toyo Ito’s Tod’s store, SANAA’s Dior store, Fumihiko Maki’s Spiral, Kengo Kuma’s One Omotesando, and Future System’s Comme des Garcons store. Link via Dezain.net.

Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles

Remember Robotech (the US adaptation of the Japanese MACROSS series)? Marxy does, and you can view a trailer for the new sequel series, THE SHADOW CHRONICLES, here. AICN has more info on this new follow-up series.

Is it just me, or is there a Battlestar Galactica (the new series) vibe to the space battle scenes in that trailer?

Moriyama House

Moriyama House

Momus on Ryue Nishizawa’s Moriyama House (which also gets a write-up in the latest issue of CASA BRUTUS). Also, why are Japanese homes so cold? (One of my only peeves about living here.)

Marxy and the Studio

Marxy and the Studio

Marxy, Sound Studio Noah, and his follow-up album (NEOMARXISME II – DE LA SOUL IS DEAD).

Update: And a canned coffee review for good measure.

Flickr Feed Problem

I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks like my Flickr feed is suddenly posting plenty of pictures that aren’t mine. Anyone know what’s going on? Are other users experiencing this?

Update: Weird, if I view the feed in Safari it seems OK, but when viewed in Bloglines (I re-subscribed to the feed, just to make sure) I get a bunch of pictures that are not by me (and by people I don’t know).

Feedlounge

Continuing on my theme of moving all my activities to the web, the Feedlounge online feed reader looks rather sweet. Too bad you need to pay $5 a month to use it (which is why I’ll stick to Bloglines).

Also, from using the mobile phone access to Gmail, I’ve noticed that I can actually access my site easily on my keitai, and even post comments (I’ve done so a few times recently).

New DS Feature!

It Prints Money

Sorry, had to share this, it made me laugh (you know, cause it’s sort of true). Good to see Miyamato and Iwata in such good moods! Found at DS Fanboy.

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.

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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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