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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Koenji Animal Street

Koenji Animal Street

Nice figures from Kaori Takahashi’s “Koenji Animal Street” collection, which are currently being exhibited at Gallerie Juillet in Koenji until August 14. Via Paul Baron.

Brockmann Figures

Brockman Figures

Added these two Brockmann figures by Groovisions to my collection the other day. They are part of the Brockmann Extreme series. I picked them up at the Shin-Marunouchi Building, at one of the select shops on the 5th floor.

The Missing Spider-Men

The Missing Spider-Men

Added these 2 figures to my Spider-Man gacha-pon collection. I was just missing these 2, so now I have all 6 (except for the secret one — it’s Spider-Man 2099, but they’re selling it for too much). I got them at one of the stores at Nakano Broadway.

The Wonderfulman

The Wonderfulman

I picked up this figure, gacha-gacha style, at Beams T a couple of week ago. There’s a collection of them, designed by The Wonderful! Design Works, in a few different colors (black, blue, and gray). They were produced for Yujin’s Time Capsule series.

Dakara Pig

Dakara Pig

If you buy a bottle of Dakara these days, you get this tiny little figure with it. The pig is seen in recent TV commercials. There are magnets at the base of the pig and the bottle, so when you approach the bottle to the pig you can make it spin (as it does, prancing around, in the TV commercials).

PingMag: Toy Designer Alex Kubalsky

Transformers

PingMag interviews Alex Kubalsky, a toy designer for Takara, who works on the Transformers line of toys.

Takeji Nakagawa

Sci-Fi Wooden Toys

Brian has a post over at Cool Hunting on the very cool sci-fi-inspired wooden toys by craftsman Takeji Nakagawa (or Take-G).

Spider-Man Figure Collection

Spider-Man Figure Collection

I’m usually not particularly attracted to super-hero related merchandise, but I couldn’t resist picking up a few of these Spider-Man gacha-gacha figures. I picked up these ones — Carnage, regular Spider-Man, and Venom — a week ago, and the other day I added the Scarlet Spider-Man. You can see the entire series — seven in all — here. They’re from Yujin’s TIME CAPSULE (“Art Capsule Toy Project”) series.

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 happens June 4.

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.

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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.

 

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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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