The Post-Bubble Countryside

I think Alin can read my mind. For the past month or so I’ve been obsessing over PDF zines after having discovered the PDF-Mags site — it even lead to me bringing up the idea of producing a PauseTalk PDF zine at that last meeting, something I’ll talk about more in detail in a future post. So then this past weekend what pops up on Alin’s site? A great little “PDF book” featuring “fragments from a journey along the road formerly known as Tokaido, aka Kokudouichigosen, National Route #1 from Kyoto to Tokyo in summer 2000.” Alin is a friend of PauseTalk, and so I look forward to seeing what he’ll bring to the project.

Category: Art • Photography

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Jean Snow lives and breathes design and pop culture 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.

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 September 1.