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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

May 30, 2007

This Week in Magazines

PlantedEasy TravelerMac Power

  • BRUTUS (617) features a look at “Rakugo x Musician,” by covering collaboration or mixes between the two fields (rakugo is a traditional Japanese comedic form). The insert is an entire rakugo comic, from the series “Classic Rakugo Comics,” as well as a CD of performances.
  • PEN (199) offers up a very detailed guide to Kamakura, presenting it with a beautiful cover shot filled with bamboo trees. They also include a guide to Tokyo whiskey bars, and this issue’s designer profile is on the unit so+ba.
  • TITLE (89) touts an issue devoted to “Department Store Paradise!” It’s a rather nice feature, with tours of various depa-chikas, a piece on the Matsuya Ginza branding by Kenya Hara, and a look at department stores from around the world. They also imagine a few new ones with their “My Dream Department Store” piece, in which they asked a few creators, including KDa and D-BROS, to imagine their dream store. The Napster column — that’s the name for their music column — has Kaji Hideki offering a guide to music from Glascow, mentioning the likes of Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian, and The Vaselines.
  • The lastest issue of EASY TRAVELER (16) has design as a theme, which includes talking about various locales with more emphasis on the architecture. As always, EASY TRAVELER is fully bilingual (Japanese/English).
  • PLANTED (4) has their “entertainment” issue, which kicks off with a “Disney Flower Hunt” (a guide to flowers at Tokyo Disneyland and Disneysea). They also have a piece on “Movies on Plants,” following it up with a guide to “20 Plant Movies.” They also cover the maintenance of grass in soccer stadiums, and then take a look at underwater plants (that last piece is illustrated by Shoji Kawashima).
  • The main feature in this month’s MACPOWER (210) deals with environmentally friendly creativity. It also includes a nice article on typography, profiling a few designers and their works, and presents a gallery of photos from the gorgeous Tama Art University library.
  • CASA BRUTUS (87) concerns itself with world heritage, with a cover feature appropriately entitled “All About World Heritage.” The insert for the issue does the same for Japan: “All About World Heritage in Japan.”

I picked up a few of these for the cafe, which you can see listed here.

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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 is March 5.

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.
PechaKucha Global Cities Week

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.

Neojaponisme

He serves 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.

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

Colophon

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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