For something really different this weekend, here are three videos showing Tamasaburo’s performance of Sagi Musume, with English voice over comments.

Slate.com has a nice gallery of Hiroshi Hamaya photographs to accompany a post about his retrospective book (Fifty Years of Photography 1930-1981).

Born in 1915, Hiroshi Hamaya began his career studying aerial photography and started his Yukiguni (Snow Land) series, which focused on farming practices and daily life in the remote mountains of Niigata prefecture, in 1940, then followed it with his Ura Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast) series in 1954. His work was included in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Hamaya later became the first Japanese photographer to work for Magnum, in 1960. After covering the demonstration against the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, he returned to aerial and landscape photography, personally adopting an anti-government stance.

When Westerners first began to visit Japan in the mid-1500s they were struck by the refined beauty and quality of the country’s arts and crafts. It was a kind of beauty and quality that they had never seen before.

This special quality of Japanese things was so commonplace that the Japanese themselves did not consider it unusual. Everything they made, including simple household utensils, had the same quality.

Japan’s traditional arts and crafts owed their special character to a merging of cosmic and Shinto concepts of harmony, sensuality and spirituality — ­a cultural factor that remains very much in evidence and in force among Japanese artists and craftsmen in present-day Japan.

The Shinto concept of harmony included the size and shape of things, how they were to be used, and their relationship with people. The spiritual element in Japanese things incorporated the essence and spirit of the materials used, and was based on both respecting and revering these inherent qualities.

The sensual element in Japanese arts and crafts was reflected by the things that people automatically find attractive ­harmony in shape, in size, in the relationship of the parts, in the interaction of colors, in their feel when touched, and in the vibrations they project.

After generations of refining their designs and techniques, Japan’s master artists and craftsmen achieved a kind and quality of beauty that transcended the obvious surface manifestations of their materials ­a kind of beauty that was described as yugen , meaning “mystery” or “subtlety.”

Quoting from my book The Elements of Japanese Design:

Yugen beauty referred to a type of attractiveness ­ beneath the surface of the material but in delicate harmony with it ­ that registers on the conscious as well as the subconscious of the viewer. It radiates a kind of spiritual essence.

The skill and techniques that were going into Japan’s arts and crafts by the 10th century became so deeply embedded in the culture that they were not distinguished from daily life, and were reflected in everything the Japanese did, from designing and building castles, gardens, homes and palaces to the creation of hand-made paper.

Despite the mostly Western façade that today’s Japan presents to the world yugen beauty is still very much in evidence in the arts and crafts, in traditional restaurants, inns, shops, wearing apparel and elsewhere in many unexpected places.

Yugen is another Japanese word I recommend that other people learn and use because it clearly identifies a concept that in other languages requires several sentences to explain­and in itself is an example of the traditional Japanese propensity to refine things down to their essence.

This compulsive reduction tendency of the Japanese is also dramatically demonstrated in their ability to design and manufacture miniaturized hi-tech products and in using nanotechnology to create new processes and new materials.

For a definitive look at the Japanese view and creation of yugen beauty, see Elements of Japanese Design - Key Terms for Understanding & Using Japan’s Classic Wabi-Sabi-Shibui Concepts.

The Tokyo Design Festa is a semi-annual event where artists, craftsmen, performers, musicians, film-makers, and what-not gather from all over the world to exhibit their creations.

It’s a weekend of artistic chaos!

It’s up for votes on Current TV.

Help a Blogger out, why doncha?

The Tokyo Design Festa - a chaotic ensemble of art

Tokyo Design Festa

Anime fan wearing an all handmade costume

Here’s a little avant-garde weirdness from Tokyo Design Festa.

She’s from Taiwan and was one of the performers at the Design Festa - vid coming up soon on that!

Music by SevenCycleTheory

NPR’s All Things Considered has an interesting biography (audio, 7:30 min.) of Japanese hibakusha (Atomic bombing survivor) artist, Ikuo Hirayama, who is now in his 70s.

Many of his friends died. Hirayama grew ill from radiation sickness and his white-blood-cell count plummeted, but eventually he recovered. He left Hiroshima, adopted Buddhism as a way of honoring the dead, and took up painting, practicing an ancient technique called Nihonga, in which colors are blended from ground-up mineral pigments, then attached to the canvas with glue.

Hirayama became famous as a painter of Buddhist images and of the Silk Road, the highway that brought Buddhism to Japan. His Silk Road paintings convey Hirayama’s belief that the road, with its exchange of commerce and ideas, showed that cultures can interact constructively. The paintings epitomize a sense of hopefulness and cooperation, peace and tranquility, the antithesis to Hiroshima, 1945.

One of Hirayama’s most powerful works is a huge, six-paneled canvas called “The Holocaust of Hiroshima.” It’s a striking painting; most of the canvas is a blood-red sky, filled with wisps of dirty clouds. In the upper right, the Buddhist god of wrath looks down upon the city. Hirayama says that despite the sorrow and destruction portrayed in “The Holocaust of Hiroshima,” the painting offers a message of hope.

Popee is a brilliant series of animations that is longer being made, apparently because of complaints that it might be bad for kids. It is no more violent than Tom & Jerry, but certainly creepier and incomparably esoteric.

For better or worse, my daughter loves these. The same animator also made a series called Stain, well worth watching.

Takashi Murakami’s life sized hentai action figure has sold for $15,161,000 according to Sotheby’s website.

The piece of part of his show currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum. I went to see it a couple of weeks ago and it’s a really fun show.

A picture of the piece is below (NSFW):

May Day in Kyoto not only involves a parade honoring International Worker’s Day, but also marks the opening of verandas in restaurants in Pontocho along the Kamogawa River.

A pair of maiko (apprentice geisha) shoes at the entrance of a Pontocho restaurant.

The restaurant where I ate had a little screen separating our area from the veranda next door. When I looked over, I spotted a camera crew setting up equipment. A little later, it became clear why the cameras were there.

A little breeze hit the screen, and in the opening, I could see a smiling maiko.

I’m pretty sure this was some kind of news crew documenting the start of the May and the opening of the verandas, which will be accessible till September 30th.

May is also the start of the Pontocho geiko dances at the Kaburencho.

Someone managed to catch a snippet of the dances last year, and upload it onto Youtube.

We also enjoyed some tea, made by a maiko.

Japan’s oldest “modern” robot — the 10-foot, 6-inch GakuTenSoku — has been awakened in Japan. Gone are the inflatable rubber tubes of the original 1928 android build by biologist Makoto Nishimura. The bot now tilts its head, moves his eyes, smiles, and puffs out his cheeks thanks to a $200,000, computer-controlled, pneumatic-servo makeover. While nothing compared to his modern offspring, GakuTenSoku still manages to creep us the hell out. On display at the renovated Osaka Science Museum starting July 18th.

japanese robot nostalgia from engadget.

I’m pretty sure TPTB meant “No graffiti.” But the most appropriate English phrase in Japan is often rewritten to become what a Japanese person feels would be the correct expression, if only English were spoken as it is supposed to be. Or so a certain translator tells me.

(Photo taken at Himeji.)

Once upon a time, train stations in Japan clicked and clattered. It was common to give your ticket to a ticket man who clipped a hole in your paper ticket. While waiting for the next passenger, the ticket man rattled his hole puncher rhythmically. Icoca, Suica, Pasmo and other automated systems have mostly rendered the ticket man obsolete.

But one meticulous person took some of those spent tickets and put together a mosaic. I think I saw these creations somewhere in Osaka–I just can’t remember if it was at Kix, or some other station (I was jet-lagged). A rather creative use of old tickets, I think.

Top photo via.

Something to relax by this weekend.

This was from a monthly dance event in Tokyo called Tokyo Decadance where people dress in wild outfits and such.

This guy wore a combination of Predator and Optimus Prime which he called Preda-Prime. He had two light sabers which he swung around the dance floor.

Music by Koko T.

If you are in New York you might like to know that the Brooklyn Museum is hosting an exihibit of the work of Takashi Murakami.

Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of an exhibition in one of the borough’s most venerable art institutions?

But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending seamlessly with its setting: a sleek, stylish and sometimes silly survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models. The boutique will sell Vuitton bags, wallets and other accessories dotted with the signature Murakami jellyfish eyes, red cherries or pink cherry blossoms for the duration of the exhibition.

More on Takashi Murakami here

New York Times report here

Thanks to David Sanchez

From Pink Tentacle:

Swedish furniture giant IKEA has converted the Kobe Portliner Monorail into a moving showroom before the April 14 opening of a new retail outlet at Port Island. The redecorated train, which features a colorful exterior, bright upholstery and fancy curtains, will carry passengers in style until May 6.

I wish they would have pulled that publicity stunt on a Yamanote train or a shinkansen!

Kinryu-no-Mai or Golden Dragon Dance is performed every year in Asakusa, Tokyo to celebrate the founding of Senso-ji Temple.

On March 18, 628 AD two fisherman found a small gold Buddhist statue in the river. Supposedely, a Golden Dragon appeared in the sky to mark the event. A temple was built for the statue and Asakusa grew from then on.

Music by The Secret Commonwealth. :

A blog called Dark Roasted Blend has posted a report on creative barcodes by a Japanese company named D-Barcodes.

As cool as these things are, I can not recall ever having seen them in use. Has anyone else ever seen them on actual products?

Thanks to Richard Chmura.