Today’s edition of THE JAPAN TIMES has a piece by Justine Parker on foreign creators and journalists doing their thing in Japan’s art and design scene, and you should recognize quite a few of the names featured (yes, yours truly, as well as Pausetalk, get mentions).
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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 August 4 (there is no July edition).
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The piece in the Japan Times seems to be about foreigners doing their thing in Tokyo. To market this as being about foreigners doing their thing in Japan is misleading, because Tokyo is a metropolis and totally not representative of Japan as a whole. The Times writer seems to make this mistake. I think foreigners who live in Tokyo and then talk about their experiences in “Japan” should realize this difference.
Whatever, “nobody.” You’re just bitter cuz you didn’t get a shout out.
Strange of them to mention Tokion and forget the fact that it was founded by a foreigner — Lucas Badtke-Berkow of Knee High Media.
That comment by ‘nobody’ is a stumper. Have I not lived the Canadian experience, even though I have never been to, or lived in, the north or to the maritime provinces (sorry Jean, I’ll get out there someday ;-) ). That’s just crazy talk. These foreigners are in the cultural, political, and economic center of Japan; to say that their experiences are not Japanese, or that they are not accurately reporting to their time in “Japan” is ludicrous.
I pointed out that the article clearly said it was about foreigners doing their thing in Japan. Yet the author only talks to foreigners living in Tokyo. If I were to write a piece about foreigners making an artistic living in the U.S., and then I only talk to artists in, say, New York City, I am not really talking about foreign artists in the U.S. It would be about artists in N.Y. I am not trying to devalue what these people in the article are doing. I am just saying that the article poses as something its not. Tokyo is particulary different from the rest of Japan in that for most people living here, it is a very young city. That is because the young population of the countryside is always moving here. The rest of the country is full of senior citizens who can’t take care of themselves. Japan is not a young country in terms of the age of its population, yet those only living in Tokyo experience it as one.