Nov 6, 2009
In the US, 7-Eleven has introduced a host of products featuring packaging inspired by NHK’s mascot, Domo-kun. Slurpee cups will be part of the deal, and from this quote by Evan Brody, the company’s marketing manager, you can see that there’s a lot of respect for the character: “consumers love crazy Japanese shit.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
