As we’ve seen with many a site and company, 2009 was a very rough year, and our dear Tokyo Art Beat — itself a non-profit — was hit as well. So if you can, PLEASE help TAB keep going by making a donation here. PLEASE!

MUJI posts a beautiful flash-based essay — mixing visuals and text — on its global site, explaining the rationale behind the company’s line of products.

Azito is an online gallery that deals with sales of Japanese contemporary art worlwide, including works by the likes of Takashi Homma, Kenji Yanobe, and Keiichi Tanaami.

Pictured above, “New Waves,” a print by Homma.

Just a note to say that I continue to update my new gaming site, GAME, on a regular basis, with a new selection going up every couple of days. The latest additions are the flash “experience” Every Day the Same Dream (pictured above), the latest PixelJunk release (Shooter), classic PlayStation-era platform/puzzler Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, and the PS3 Breakout-homage Shatter.

Also, I am open to the idea of sponsorship, although it would need to be done in a way that fits the site’s aesthetic (meaning no “block” ads). If you’re interested, get in touch.

HENGE is certainly an intriguing item: it’s a “transformable interior object,” or model if you will, that goes from an aircraft-like mode to full robot. It’s self-produced by Tomoo Yamaji, who lives in Takarazuka (Hyogo prefecture), and he’s selling the limited edition model through his online shop. Below, a video of the transformation process.

Plants+ is the web spinoff that came out of the now-defunct Planted magazine, and here’s a video (via Click Opera) of Ito Seiko and Lucas Badtke-Berkow (founder of TOKION and Paper Sky) talking about the web venture, with English subtitles.

What do I do on Friday nights? Well, this last one I decided to build a site from scratch from an idea I had earlier this week (last Saturday night, actually) and the result is now online, and called Game. As I explain in the “About” page, the idea is simply to recommend games — these are not reviews, I will only include games I like — using a format that’s short and to the point. Also, I wanted a look for the site that was at an extreme opposite to what gaming websites usually look like.

Why do this? It’s been just over a year now since Arcade Mania came out, as well as me leaving Wired’s Game|Life blog, and I started missing writing about games. Anyone who follows my Twitter feed will know that I tend to recommend a lot of stuff there, but I wanted to do something that had a bit more permanence.

For now, my plan is to add 2-3 games a week, and they don’t have to be absolute new releases — right now, anything released in 2009 is still fair game I feel. Also, games will cover every platform, so expect flash/browser games, iPhone games, console games, etc.

I hope at least a few people find this useful, and I invite everyone to follow along on the site (and you can of course subscribe to the feed as well).

Tokyo-based graphic designer Michael Thorsby (PMKFA) has just re-launched his website.

I’m happy to announce that a brand new version of www.pmkfa.com is open. With new content only and hundreds of images from projects that PMKFA have been involved in, everything downloadable as PDF’s so you can view the work offline, a extensive press archive and functions so that you can view the website in the way You prefer through the Preview Index Mode & Stack Mode functions.

If you followed the link in my last post about next year’s Web Trend Map Atlas, you’ll find Oliver mention that the project will be done in collaboration with “Books We Make.” Visiting the website, I see that it’s a new project by Craig Mod, and I’m quite upset that I don’t know anything about it.

When it comes to searching on the web, Google is king pretty much everywhere in the world, but not Japan. Nope, here, Yahoo! still reigns supreme, and Google has just started a new big push in the country to try and get more people using the G-rated search engine. The new campaign includes of course plenty of TV commercials (like the one above), but also free wi-fi access in a few participating chains (Tully’s, Pronto, and Lotteria) in Tokyo and a few others places — but the catch is that you only get 30 minutes of use. Japan Probe has more.

Color me jealous: former Tokyo resident Adam Greenfield — and current head of design direction at Nokia in Finland — is one of the people behind the newly-launched Do Projects, which has the following goals:

Develop words and images that make the people who encounter them re-see themselves and the world around them; find the most appropriate containers for our ideas; craft the kind of books that please their readers in the details of their conception, design and construction as much as in the things they say; and figure out what “do-it-yourself” might mean in an age when new production technologies, informational and logistical networks give the independent amateur producer unprecedented power to reach out and make things happen.

Such a great idea. The first project is called Tokyo Blues, a photo book of Nurri Kim‘s investigations of Tokyo’s PVC plastic construction tarps. It’s available both in print, or as a free downloadable PDF.

Beautiful (and simple) site design featuring the illustrative work of Yorifuji Bunpei. Via Paul Baron.

Information Architects (iA) has begun selling the template for its site as a proper WordPress theme, and is using a “dynamic pricing” strategy to determine the selling price — they talk more about the strategy here. It’s currently selling for $33, but that will be for the first 100 purchases only, which will be followed by a price adjustment.

Nike is opening a new store in Harajuku tomorrow (November 14), and the shop’s website is now showing a time-lapse video of the construction (or at least of the exterior’s temporary display).

SoccerBoy — aka Tokyo Fun Party‘s very own Takashi Otagiri — has a new DJ mix up on TCY Radio Tokyo, a “rising ‘pirate’ internet radio station based in Tokyo.” The track list for the mix, which was created with Takahiko Kan, can be found here.