Ginza Tanaka jewelry shop in cooperation with toy manufacturer Bandai Co. has produced a 30 million yen platinum figure of the cartoon robot Gundam.
The figure is 12.5 centimeters tall and has a 0.15-karat diamond on its head.
Check out this 30 cm tall basswood Gundam model from Bandai.
Each component is hand carved by a craftsman to fine detail, so production is limited and no two are exactly the same.
Price: 57,400 yen
Following up our report on Ultraman golf balls comes another Ultra product: Ultraman wine!
Only 777 bottles of this limited edition commemorative wine (site in Japanese) will be sold, each with its own special Ultraman stemmed glass, to mark Ultra 7’s 40th birthday.
Price: 9,800 yen
Other Ultraman commemorative products available from the same source (Japanese required) are:
Ultraman Wine Glasses - 4,800 yen
Ultraman Leather Wallet in Black or Red - 14,800 yen
Via Plastic Bamboo
A good idea to encourage people to go and vote in the upcoming Upper House elections ! A campaign run by the the National Police Department featuring a wordplay on a famous quotation of Amuro Ray, a Mobile suit Gundam character, “Amuro, ikimaasu” (Amuro will go!), replaced by “Elections, ikimaasu”!
“Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is…There is no conclusion yet.” — Tezuka Osamu, 1969
David Pescovitz notes in Boing Boing that San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has a huge retrospective on Tezuka Osamu, the pioneering master of manga who created Astro Boy and so, so much more.
The exhibition features 200 works, including original art, covers, posters, anime, adult manga, and film screenings. A lot more information about Tezuka and the exhibition is available on an impressive dedicated website.
Artist, writer, and entrepreneur Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989) is regarded in Japan as the “god of comics,” and revered worldwide as an artistic master. He was the driving force behind the international phenomenon of manga-Japanese comics-and their offspring anime, Japanese animation. Creating over 700 manga titles-and drawing more than 150,000 pages-during his lifetime, Tezuka is best known in the West for Tetsuwan Atom (Mighty Atom or Astro Boy) and Jungeru Taitei (Jungle Emperor or Kimba the White Lion), both of which originated from his manga, and were serialized internationally for television in the 1960s. Today, Tezuka’s work is acclaimed for its complexity, originality,
and a powerful dynamism.
Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga, which took nine years of complicated negotiations to organize, is the first major exhibition of Tezuka’s art outside of Japan.
The exhibition was organized by Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in association with Tezuka Productions. Curator Philip Brophy said:
Tezuka is venerated as a driving force of the manga and anime industries in Japan. This exhibition will reveal the striking originality of his manga; its technical inventiveness, extraordinary dynamic range, and its close relationship to his anime. From the people who remember Astro Boy on TV when they were kids to the late teens of today-who are in tune with Japanese pop culture-this exhibition will appeal to a wide audience to whom the bold and sharp sensibilities of the comic form are exciting and relevant.
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is a public institution whose mission is to lead a diverse global audience in discovering the unique material, aesthetic, and intellectual achievements of Asian art and culture.
Holding nearly 16,000 Asian art treasures spanning 6,000 years of history, the museum is one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian art.
K-2 from over at the K-2 Journal points us to a very well done and totally hilarious video about otaku that was produced by a group of Argentinians.
Continuing our travels with U.S. cartoonist Bill Griffith, who writes and draws “Zippy” in hundreds of newspapers around the world, including the Taipei Times and the Japan Times, a recent panel titled “Pacific Rim Shot” depicts a Taiwan-owned airlines called EVA AIRLINES, owned by the Evergreen Corporation, and famous for putting Hello Kitty on the side of the plane as it flies the skies between Japan and Taiwan, among other routes.
Griffith, who has always had a fascination with Asia, often places his cartoon characters in Japan or Taiwan, and in this recent panel, we can see the EVA Airlines plane and Zippy’s “dream,” as the cartoonist puts it.
Coming to a theater near you. . . Tamagotchi - The movie!?!
Someone asked me the other day, why the PacMan game character was named PacMan. I had to admit I didn’t know. So I visited the Internet, and found out that “the original title was pronounced pakku-man (パックマン) and was inspired by the Japanese phrase paku-paku taberu (パクパク食べる), where paku-paku describes (the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.“
Now I know, too. The sound of one mouth eating.
Gundam freaks around the globe will be happy to know that the Fuji-Q Highland Amusement Park in Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi, Japan, is building a GUNDAM CRISIS attraction that will be a 1:1 full scale rendition of a Gundam hanger.
GUNDAM CRISIS is scheduled to open in July.
Via Engadget
You probably have heard by now about Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing (Motto: “Disney is too far, so please come to Shijingshan “) and their blatant use of unlicensed characters, such as Cinderella, Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, and others.
Though the Chinese government seems to be taking steps to correct the situation, I couldn’t help but laughing at a comment by the park’s management, in which they denied copying Disney characters, and that the Cinderella figure actually was that of a “Chinese country girl.
What do you think?
Check out this Mobile Suit Gundam figure made of pure platinum.
The five-inch tall three-pound figure was created in a collaboration between Bandai and Tokyo jeweler Ginza Tanaka, and has 89 separatte parts.
Estimated value: 30 million yen.
Via Pink Tentacle.
We’ve heard a number of times that people around the world just can’t seem to get enough of Japanese anime and manga, and for many people these are their only sources of information about Japan.
That’s great, but it seems that like anything else, a love for anime and manga can become such an obsession that. . .
“Manga and anime are now Japan’s new ambassadors” or so claims Japan Times 25th March editorial. This write-up would have been just another rehash of what we have been hearing for a decade if the author didn’t go a step further in his reflection by trying to highlight some larger ramifications of this “mixed blessing diplomatic representation“. It is true that pop culture “has the power to form a picture of a country in the minds of other nation’s people”, but as the author conveys, a lack of a broader knowledge about a culture may lead to serious misunderstandings and stereotypes. Looking at Japan from the outside through Anime and Manga may give a distorted image of the country to your average non-Japanese Otaku who spends hours in front of his screen ,especially if we take into account the fact that violence and sex are the two prevalent elements in most mainstream exported anime and manga works, and which do not correspond precisely to the daily life in Japan (unless you can prove the opposite!) .
But then I wonder why western mainstream audiences embrace mainly violent and lewd works that tend to give images based solely on the fantasies of their authors, or as the Japan Times Editor-in-chief puts it “the artistry of a Kurosawa film or the richness of a Tanizaki novel feels missing from most of the story exports these days. Yet, maybe the very best of any culture can never be exported on a grand scale but remains reserved for a smaller interest group”. This leads us to think about the hand behind the appointment of these ambassadors. Putting aside the not-so-legal ways of media sharing such as internet , which caters mostly to the smaller interest groups cited above, the process of exporting Anime and Manga goes through monopolistic giant western Publishers, read Viz Media, who publish only what would sell, regardless of other factors. Yet it’d be inappropriate to say that these publishers are the ones to decide about what to import, since they would never sell what the crowds won’t buy, simple marketing logic.
My point is that the majority of Anime and Manga exportations are ,far from being ambassadors, just entertainment mediums that depict Japan as western audiences want to see it. People who consume such exports have their own image of Japan that is, based on my observations,light years far from the real thing. It is true that these works are produced domestically for Japanese audiences, but hey, the purpose they serve in Japan is way different: they are more of a relief valve from real life, a short trip to the realm of fantasy, often rich with exaggerations and stereotypes that Japanese have about their own culture. I prefer not to delve into other considerations, such the huge loss of the intrinsic “cultural and artistic value” during the process of translation… Luckily, as the author points out, this Anime and Manga craze seems to be already encouraging Japanese language study in many places around the world.
I agree that Anime and Manga could be a good way to introduce Japan to the uninitiated, but no further than that. Culture can never be explored through subculture.
Have your say in the comments section if you disagree/agree!
Although I enjoy some anime mainly the feature films such as Akira (アキラ) or Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊), I am not entirely certain that I would want to go to a convention on the subject. But clearly there are many who do. This is one part of Tokyo I just never found that interesting.
Any idea how much the maids at these conventions get paid? I’m just curious. I understand they can make up to 4000 yen ($38 dollars an hour) an a hour which is ok I guess for a part time gig in Tokyo.
Anyways the Tokyo International Anime Fair is on now. Check it out! Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Kiyoshi Ota.
A cosplay visitor to the Tokyo International Anime Fair checks her mail.
Proving it’s not all misguided marketing campaigns that get kawaii wrong, footage of a recent J-Pop event in London:
As if mutant ninja frogs weren’t enough, now we get word that a genetically modified mouse came close to escaping from captivity recently at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.
The incident was serious enough to earn a rebuke from the Education, Science and Technology Ministry, which called for stricter controls to ensure that no genetically modified animal is every released into the wild (except at your local supermarket).
The mouse is one of a group of 40 whose immune systems had been genetically destroyed.
Narita International Airport, by the way, is not that far from Tokyo Disneyland. Phone calls to Mickey were not returned.
Fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful Tonari no Totoro might always have looked at the Nekobus and wondered - “What if…?”
Wonder no more. Someone had to do it. With a hat tip to the guys over at Neatorama, who’ve pointed us in the direction of a Spanish-language Japan blog, “Kirai (Un geek en Japón)“, feast your eyes on a very real Nekobus…
See the rest of the photos over at Kirai.net (where, incidentally, you will also find some photos of the lovely stained-glass windows at the Ghibli Museum).
