Jean Snow [.net]

Month: September 2016

  • Reason Behind Forms

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    I’ve been a longtime fan and supporter of the work of Nosigner (aka Eisuke Tachikawa, whose monicker is now the name of his firm), covering many of his early works in my “On Design” column and elsewhere, and it makes me happy to see that he’s gotten to a point where he’s headlining his own show…

  • Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa

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    Issue 8 of Singles Club — a fantastic subscription service I’m just discovering that releases vinyl singles that have a track on one side, and an interview with the creators talking about the project on the other — features a collaboration between Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa, and you can listen to a track (“Payapaya”)…

  • Rainy Harajuku

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    I love the colors in this set of four photos tweeted by TokyoFashion from a rainy Saturday night in Harajuku.

  • Manifest Destiny

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    I love board games and card games, and strangely enough I’d never heard of Manifest Destiny, a Japanese indie publisher that makes tons of card games, most of them designed by a person who goes by the name Kuro (real name Yasushi Kuroda). A lot of them seem to have English releases (or are multilingual, with English PDFs…

  • Ginza Place

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    The latest project from my former employer (and good friends) Klein Dytham Architects is a gorgeous one, and takes the form of the brand new Ginza Place building in Ginza, which hosts swanky new showrooms for Nissan and Sony. It opened today. Here’s how KDa’s Mark Dytham describes the project: Our latest project, Ginza Place, opens…

  • Mother 1+2 Piano Concert

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    If I was in Tokyo today, I would have made a point of going to Joseph’s Pico Pico Cafe for a piano concert of music from the first two Mother games (known as EarthBound in the west) by Kousuke Hata. You can also purchase two CDs of his Mother music at the cafe.

  • One Hundred Views of Bathing

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    “One Hundred Views of Bathing” is a really fun photography project in which the artist, Mariko Sakaguchi, takes self-portraits of herself bathing in a tiny wooden tub in various spaces — basically, places you wouldn’t normally expect to see a person bathing. Found via Tokyo Soup.

  • A Primer on Japanese Typography

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    AQ‘s Eiko Nagase has written a fantastic article on using Japanese typography, that you should read now. It’s also going to lead to an upcoming book on the topic, A Primer on Japanese Typography, that you can pre-order here.

  • TV Commercials by Studio Ghibli

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    Over the years, Studio Ghibli (or its alumni) has produced quite a few animated TV commercials. My friend Christopher was digging these up, and shared a few, like this one for Nisshin (pictured), this one for JR West, this one for sake, for bread, and again for bread.

  • Popularity of Historical Manga

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    The latest Monocle Minute newsletter talks about how there’s currently a resurgence in the popularity of educational manga, like the series covering Japanese history pictured. Japanese publishers, ever on the lookout for the next big thing, have alighted on an unlikely boom: educational manga. A spike in sales of history comics was kick-started in 2013…