March 21, 2011

Japan TV commercials

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commercial break … showcasing weird, funny and just plain fun commercials from Japan. In the midst of all the heartbreak and tragedy sometimes you need a little levity…

Morning Rescue was my favorite to watch during the tsunami, and quake aftermath. Who wouldn’t want a rescue team rappeling into the room to save the day after an epic disaster….

Tepco is enduring plenty of criticism for the lack of redundant systems at the Fukushima no.1 Nuclear power plant, here is an old commercial for Tepco’s heaters/AC units with a Harry Potter look-a-like:

Moving to a new area, brings this young fella more than he bargained for:

 

March 18, 2011

Ochazuke

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Food time out!

Ochazuke is the green tea over rice dish that is beloved in Japan and steeped in tradition.. It is one of those foods that can be both beautifully simple and yet hard to master.

Basic ochazuke is a handful of rice with salmon flakes or or umeboshi on top, flavored with a bit of nori or daikon radish. Over this is poured hot green tea making a soup.

from the Wiki:

In Kyoto, ochazuke is known as bubuzuke. When a Kyoto native asks if a guest wants to eat bubuzuke, it really means that the person has overstayed and is being politely asked to leave.

Now, though, instant ochazuke mixes just use hot water, the tea and other ingredients are powder and freeze dried.

Ochazuke instant is one of my favorite lunches and I am going to have to try this in a traditional way with Salmon and hot tea.

One of the funniest videos I have seen lately from YouTube, the cat cracks me up:

 

March 17, 2011

Japan Tsunami

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Here is the post I have been needing to make for several days now, an 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan. The earthquake didn’t cause anywhere near the amount of damage as the resulting Tsunami that flooded the coast. Destroying everything in its path, up to six miles inland, whole towns and villages were wiped out.

One amazing thing in all the mess is the way the internet became the best resource for information. With virtually realtime commentary and news from Twitter feeds of various people living in Tokyo to the English broadcast of the NHK and Japanese TV. The link to the live UStream broadcast  of NHK World (English) is here NHK Ustream. Some really good folks to follow on Twitter with news and translations of press conferences are @gakuranman @kenmogi @HirokoTabuchi and @stevenagata.

The Japanese people are stoic and efficient but the scale of this is simply staggering and our hearts go out to the people of Japan.

 

November 17, 2010

The Walking Dead

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Finally a Zombie apocalypse that gets it. Surviving the apocalypse is about humans in a stressful situation, that delicate balance between freedom and individuality and acquiescing to the demands of a group. There is the conflict that drives the drama and tension. Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic was adapted for TV and is being aired on AMC.Currently a six part series, AMC has already greenlit a second 12 episode season.  Zombie lovers like me are rejoicing. Kirkman says that he will never reveal the cause of the zombie uprising in the comic because its not central to the story or characters. The  stress of surviving day to day in the dangerous world of post-apocalypse will challenge people much more than our current TV/couch lifestyles ever could. From the website:

The Walking Dead is an epic, edge-of-your-seat drama where personal struggles are magnified against a backdrop of moment-to-moment survival. A survivalist story at its core, the series explores how the living are changed by the overwhelming realization that those who survive can be far more dangerous that the mindless walkers roaming the earth. They themselves have become the walking dead.

Three episodes in and I am hooked. Great cast, characters and writing are making this the best thing since Lost. I am ambivalent about the cheesy CGI blood splatters and willing to discount them if it keeps production costs down since that is not the focus of the show. This show is flying in the face of the reality TV takeover and giving scripted shows a chance.

 

 

August 11, 2010

Droid 2

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The Motorola Droid 2 got leaked out just a bit early, from Engadget:

And that, folks, is our first in the wild look at Motorola’s second generation Droid. It’s not officially supposed to hit retail until tomorrow, but that obviously hasn’t stopped a delivery truck from unloading a few at a nondescript Sam’s Club. We’re still waiting to hear back on whether or not they’re actually being allowed out of the store today, but hey, tomorrow ain’t too far away.

According to the blogs the Droid 2 is not different than the current Droid, just with a faster processor, Android 2.2, and a different keyboard.  Also from Engadget:

You already know the specs by now — a 3.7-inch multitouch display, 5 megapixel camera, DLNA streaming, 8GB of onboard memory and a 8GB microSD card

Why are we getting an update that is a mere incremental improvement, why with some overclocking and the awaited update to Froyo. The current version pretty much equals Droid 2. I really don’t want to use a 3G connection as the path for a mobile hotspot although it would be nice to be able to use it for laptop internet connecting. I hope this is not a sign that Motorola is desperate for sales or wants to compete with the iPhone 4.

 

April 11, 2010

Hanami via Flickr

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Roaming through Flickr to find nice photos for Hanami, beautiful cherry blossoms everywhere.

Big thanks to those on Flickr who posted these pictures. Jasohill, Kyotonils, Blue Lotus, alfiegoodrich, jpellgen.

 

March 28, 2010

Ramen

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More excellent photos and restaurant reviews from Brian over at Ramen Adventures:

His articles always make me hungry. Check out his review of the Hirugao at Tokyo Ramen Street. Brian and Daniel from How to Japonese have made a video review together of it, but what are those guys making in the percolator things? The broth for ramen? To much background noise for me to hear it in the video. Tokyo Ramen Street is definitely on my list of places to visit in Japan next time we go.

 

March 24, 2010

Tokyo Architecture

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Mix in the cramped living spaces of Tokyo with the expense of land and the myriad legal requirements of building codes and you get some really unique houses and buildings.

From ArchDaily comes this example of a house split in two:

 

February 12, 2010

Sho Kosugi and the ninja movie craze

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Back in the halcyon days of the early 1980s when America was still climbing out of the 1970s, the hot trend in movies (between Star Wars movies) was the Ninja movie. Despite the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment garnered by the economic problems of the USA, the ninja was adopted whole heartedly by American teen boys looking for a new martial arts hero. The trend was started by the Golan and Globus brothers production of Enter the Ninja with Sho Kosugi. Two more films were made in the Ninja series with Sho Kosugi going on to star in followup Revenge of the Ninja and several more martial arts films. Even in the cheap and somewhat shoddy Cannon films productions Kosugi’s work as a martial artist stands out. He garnered much praise and he still stands out in the pantheon of martial arts stars. It also pays to remember how unusual it was for a Japanese to star in an American movie production. From the Sho Kosugi website:

The Ninja sensation was so big that when Pat Rod, of the Hollywood Reporter, was in countries like Greece and Turkey she said,”Movie enthusiasts there never asked me about Stallone, Cruise, or Harrison Ford; it was always,’Have you ever met Sho Kosugi?’”

He did recognize that the ninja craze was a fad and moved on to more general action movies by the late 80s. But his sense of timing left an indelible impression on the ninja craving fans.

Sho Kosugi went on to found the SKI Institute in Hollywood teaching everything from taiko to gymnastics along with other martial arts schools in Japan. His two sons, Shane and Kane have also appeared in movies and are occasionally competitors on the Sasuke TV show in Japan (Ninja Warrior here in the US).

 

February 10, 2010

Manga Translation part 2

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Let’s tackle the bottom of page 1 today which seems to be a thought bubble for Kyon on initial glance. Japanese is read from right to left and vertically from the top to bottom. This is a little disorienting at first but you find it quick to get used to. For the sake of brevity lets do only the first line starting from the left. (BTW, clicking on the image at left will get ypou to the higher res version)

Taking advantage of the furigana we have So no “ore” wa (ha) yoko ninatsute.  Japanese use those sort of half brackets as quotation marks. Sono translates as “that”, ore the kanji in brackets is an informal for man or male person. Wa (hiragana is “ha” but it is pronounced “wa”) means is. the second kanji is yoko or side. The string of hiragana after is ni na tsu te. Plugging this into Google translate is comes out as “the summer to”

Broken English translation is That man is the summer to. Which doesn’t make a whol;e lot of sense as is. So we are going to hold off on trying to translate that into plain English from the broken until we get the rest of the lines translated and can see what the other lines are talking about. Japanese often does not have a word for word translation into English and this makes translating an art instead of a science.

 

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