• Ghibli Museum
• Inside Omotesando Hills

You can read all of my Gridskipper posts here.

Kotaku has huge coverage of the Shigureden interactive museum in Kyoto, in which you roam all sorts of environments (based on a traditional Japanese card game) with a specially tricked-out Nintendo DS as your guide. Looks fascinating, although it does seem as if you’d need a minimum of Japanese ability to take everything in. There are a whole bunch of pics up, so just go to the Kotaku site and scroll down, but you can also try here, here, here, and here, with an intro to the museum here.

I’m sure you already all know about the recently announced Nintendo DS Lite (out in March), and I quite like the image you see above, as it helps put the new console’s dimensions in context (more comparisons in this Joystiq entry). I’m quite liking it — love that it’s white — and since I’ve pretty much lost my DS to Yuko because of DOUBUTSU NO MORI, I’m seriously considering picking one up when it gets released.

A shot of some street art taken on one of the walkways over Omotesando Dori.

Patrick Macias has the scoop on Japan’s very first “butler” cafe, and it’s coming to my hood of Ikebukuro. I think the maids have nothing to fear though.

Japanese film site Midnight Eye updates with some new features and reviews, including a look at their best and worst of 2005. I didn’t really get to see a lot of Japanese films last year, so I can’t really comment on their picks, or add my own.

The new (well, relatively new) Bape Cafe!? in Harajuku. I took this shot a couple of months ago, and forgot to post it. Me, I just don’t dig the rattan chairs at all.

I put a PDF version of the event flyer online, which you can download here (or from the link in the sidebar). Feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested in the event. It also includes a map to the cafe.

This month’s edition of my ON DESIGN column is now online at THE JAPAN TIMES website. Pictured here are the Rooshopper tote bags.

A site called Harajuku Super Station has put up the image you see here of the inside of Omotesando Hills, which opens in a couple of weeks (February 11). Link via Martin Webb.

Oh my, great news: Kotaku is reporting that it looks like REZ — by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who is also behind the PSP’s excellent LUMINES and the DS’ METEOS, which I’ve yet to play — is going to make it to the PSP. If you’ve never played REZ on the Dreamcast or PS2, shame on you!

Meanwhile, late last week I received a few DS games I had ordered from eBay: MARIO AND LUIGI RPG 2, METROID PRIME PINBALL, and CASTLEVANA DS. These games rock!

It’s no big secret that I’m a big fan of event merchandise, and you gotta figure that I’d do something for Canadian Style on top of the t-shirts. I’ve set up some stuff at CafePress, mostly a few things that I’ll probably order myself, but I figured that I’d make it public in case anybody else would care to order anything. I was rather happy with the Mamma Gun merchandise I ordered from Jesper’s CafePress store (especially the bags, the journal, and the mug).

Another shot of Roppongi Hills, here with the Louis Vuitton store to my back and the TV Asahi building to my right. All the pics I’ve posted today were taken during my visit to Roppongi Hills a couple of weeks back, which you can read about here.

The Louis Vuitton store in Roppongi Hills, designed by Jun Aoki.

Another shot of the TV Asahi building in Roppongi Hills.