A Taiwanese toy company name Wind Hobby reportedly has come out with a radio-controlled toy Apache helicopter that can shoot BBs while in flight. Flight time is eight minutes between charges.
One? Heck. . . I’d like to get a squadron of these. . . I wonder if they play Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries during attacks . . .
Via The Raw Feed
Cyndi Lauper is in Japan right now doing a series of concerts. I saw her on the TV the other day as she did Time After Time, much like the following performance she did on TV in 2005.
Caught this commercial for the Intel Centrino 2 on TV last night.
27-year-old Japanese ex-porn (AV) actress Nao Oikawa (she retired from boinking in front of cameras in 2004) seems to have completed the move from blue movies to mainstream pop idol via a girl group named G3 Princess, which also includes Yumi Sugimoto and Rina Aizawa. Ms. Oikawa is the one on the right in the following video.
For a peek at a censored but very not-safe-for-work XXX video that spotlights some of Ms. Oikawa’s more salacious talents, click here.
The Peanuts, a female pair of Japanese twins (Emi and Yumi Ito), who were a major presence in the Japanese music world back in the ’60s, are planning to release a new album to mark the 50th anniversary of their debut back on 1959.
Here are a few of their better known songs in Japan.
If you are old enough, you might remember them as the duo who sang the original Mothra theme.
They even appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.
1966: Pipeline
1990: Various
2008: Nara TV Commercial
Akihabara maid cafe Hibaritei (where all of the maids are cross-dressing men) is always looking for new ways to push the envelope.
Their latest “game” is snorting various food products (wasabi powder, hot sauce, etc.) and enjoying the reactions of the snorters as the effects of the stuff they inhale has an effect.
Previously, they had challenges of eating food with a certain extremely spicy “Death Sauce” but that was probably not challenging enough so they resorted to sniffing it into their noses. The first item was wasabi powder. There is no effect when you eat it but you’ll get a headache if you sniff it. At first, you don’t feel anything but it hits you hard after awhile. The shop owners, staff and even customers were involved in this strange challenge. Later on, two more customers came in and were dragged into the third round of the challenge.
After the warm up came the real thing - the Death Sauce. One tiny drop of Death Sauce can numb your tongue so you can imagine the deadly effect it may have to your nose. Suddenly, the whole maid cafe was filled with strange noises as the other customers watched on amused by our strange customs. The boys’ face were all as red as tomatoes and their eyes were bloodshot. If a new customer enters the shop he may be wondering why is everyone crying. Later on, they resorted to using ice to soothe their noses which was a funny sight to watch.
And if a verbal description doesn’t do it for you, here is a video. . .
Via Akibanana
Remember the popular horse riding simulation machine named Joba (here and here)?
Well, it seems that some fan clippers could not help imagining what it would be like to watch their favorite female video game characters riding an equestrian contraption. Some of the kind of NSFW results after the jump.
Video highlights from the 2008 Asakusa Samba Carnival in Tokyo.
The event started off hot and sweaty then the clouds opened up and the rain poured down. The samba performers kept going though they were soaked to the bone. The Samba girls looked none the worse for it though.
That is the name of a this year’s campaign held by Japan’s Paradise TV to raise money for research aimed at the prevention and spread of the HIV virus and AIDS.
Events includes five two-handed squeezes of the breasts or buttocks of adult video (AV) actresses for 1,000 yen, as well as servings of food reported flavored using the precious bodily fluids of an AV actress.
Last year a similar Paradise TV event (for which an AV actress demonstrated her handicraft for 3,000 yen) raised some 2 million yen.
All the juicy details are over at Captain Japan’s Tokyo Reporter.
More on this event in the JAPUNDIT Archives here.
On a recent trip to Tokyo, I was drinking in Golden Gai with a friend of a friend. The tiny bar played great song after great song, and all of it vintage Japanese rock. I mentioned how much I was enjoying learning about all the great bands from back in the day that never got any exposure in the US, but lamented that—Juain Cope’s book Japrocksampler not withstanding—finding a good English-language source for information on these bands was tough.
That’s when my friend told me about Jrawk. Run by an obviously knowledgeable and dedicated fan, the site intends to be nothing less than a repository (or database if you will) for Japanese rock music. It has interviews, album reviews, live show reports, and more, and all of the music covered is at least worth a listen. If bands like Flower Travellin’ Band, Nagisa Ni Te, or Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her is your thing, or if all you know about Japanese rock is Cornelius or Boris, you should really check it out.
(The site is pretty new, but it’s filling fast with content, so don’t let the sparseness deter you.)
It’s fair to say that when he “started playing that country gold” more than 50 years ago, there was no country and western scene in Japan. What there is today is largely down to his tireless efforts, and those of his friends.
Charlie Nagatani and his family also run a ’saloon’, Good Time Charlie, in Kumamoto city. When I spoke to him there recently, he was a busy man. But that’s his default setting - “He can’t stop,” his son told me, “He’s like one of those fish that has to keep swimming.” In between stints on stage, Charlie went around the tables chatting with every guest, many of whom are personal friends, all of whom are fans. And when not playing host, he was busily taking orders over the phone for tickets for ‘Country Gold‘ (more of which later).
I asked Charlie about how all this started.
“A friend of mine remembers when you used to play at the clubs on the US military bases when he was in the Army about 40 years ago, based at Brady Air Base, out in Saitozaki. When did you first get into C&W and how? When did you start playing C&W?”
Camp Brady reminds me of a good ol’ days and we used to go there often to perform at clubs way back in around 1968 as well as Itazuki Air Force Base, Sasebo Naval Station and Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station. Well, on my 20th birthday one of my friends who used to work at Camp Wood US Army Base in Kumamoto presented me a Happy Birthday present and that was a country & western band. I first listened it and felt something strong in my mind. Soon I dropped out of studing at University and decided to start a band to be a country music singer. It was 1956 and country music changed my whole life. I felt it has something different compared to other music ( simplicity / sincerity / sadness) and moreover I loved its melody and lyrics.
Every time I’ve been to the bar, Good Time Charlie, he’s been there and played a set.
“How long has GTC been open? Do you play every night that you can?”
I’ve been running Good Time Charlie for almost 33 years and playing 7 nights a week except New Year’s Eve and January 1st.
The interior of the saloon is a country fan’s dream. The place is plastered from floor to ceiling with memorabilia, from photos of country legends, to vintage posters advertising the likes of Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Loretta Lynn. A cabinet contains gifts and awards, including the prestigious Jim Reeves Memorial Award, which he was awarded by the Academy of Country Music in 2005, “in recognition of outstanding contributions to the acceptance of country music throughout the world”. In an alcove hang thank you notes from presidents of the United States, and certificates denoting Charlie’s honorary citizenship of 33 American states.
But there seems to be a close connection with the state of Montana. How did that come about?
Regarding Montana, Kumamoto is a sister state with Montana so most of the Governors who visited Kumamoto come to my club to enjoy our performance of country songs from old to new and I was given an honorary citizenship by former Governor Ted Schwinden.
“So why is C&W so popular in Kyushu? I don’t think the following is that big in Tokyo, but what is your sense about the popularity of C&W in other parts of Japan?”
The reason is there are lots of country music fans in Kyushu, I was born and raised up here in Kumamoto and I really love my home town, so I wanted to remain local to spread it out to all over but it was so hard to keep it and very hard to let them know how wonderful the music is, although I know it’s easy to do it in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. It took a long time to make country music fans around me but I always believe that country music is the best music in the world. Many American friends wonder about me because I was born in Japan and they all ask me why I love their country’s music culture so deeply more than anybody else in USA.
Country Gold is an open-air festival held every October against the stunning backdrop of Mount Aso, attended by up to 20,000 fans, and to which Charlie has attracted some of the biggest country and western stars. This year the festival (Sun. Oct 19) celebrates its 20th anniversary.
“How did Country Gold start? Was it planned or did it just sort of happen? Were you determined then to see it grow into the international occasion that it is today?”
When Former Prime Minister Hosokawa (he was our Governor before he became Prime Minister) built the world biggest out door stage at the foot of Mt. Aso called ASPECTA, he consulted me about doing a country music show there. I sent a letter to the CMA (Country Music Association in Nashville) saying that I’d like to open a country music festival in Japan so will you please introduce anyone who can help me plan it. Then I received a few letters from agents and I picked up one of them and started it and that was 1989 so this year will be 20th Anniversary! I can’t believe it. I thank Judy Seale who I picked up that first year and still she is working with me (20 great years and we are both getting old…). I’ve met many, many wonderful people through this great music in Japan and the States and it’s a treasure which money can’t buy.
Since news is slow today, here is a video of what I think is probably one of the very best Japanese songs ever written: Koibito yo by Mayumi Itsuwa (1980).
If you want to see one person’s translation of the lyrics into English, check out this version.
Slate.com alerted me to a new movie which may be of interest to many Japundit readers. Sukiyaki Western Djando sounds bizzare to me but RottenTomatoes.com, my movie website of choice, attributes an impressive 68% positive reviews and the Slate.com review is positive as well.
Rotten Tomatoes’ synopsis is as follows:
Two connoisseurs of violence–prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike and American icon Quention Tarantino–team up for this genre mash-up. SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO follows two clashing clans in Japan as they both try to lure a talented shooter to their side. Tarantino makes a brief appearance in this film that pays homage to both the spaghetti western and classic Japanese cinema.
Highlights from Slate.com’s review:
Welcome to Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look), the English-language Western by Japanese director Takashi Miike. The all-Japanese cast, augmented by Quentin Tarantino in two cameo roles, learned their English dialogue phonetically and attack their lines as if the words were small furry animals that need to be beaten into submission. The dialogue is crammed with weird, Christopher Walken-esque line readings and bizarre placement of emphases—phrases like “You old biddy,” “Dang!” and “You reckon?” become hilariously divorced from meaning. But, like an alcoholic reduced to drinking sterno, the more you drink, the more brain cells you fry, and the better it tastes. Before long you not only start to understand Miike’s “through the looking glass” English but also to appreciate the cadences. It’s something like the dialogue in Deadwood or Cormac McCarthy’s writing: stiff, alien, occasionally silly but not without a hypnotic elegance all its own.
But why? The answer is simple: It’s a Takashi Miike film. The hardest-working man in showbiz, he’s made close to 80 movies, ranging from the good to the bad to the ugly, and if he’s going to make a Western, then it’s going to pay tribute to the truth that Westerns have never been solely an American undertaking—they’re an international language. With a title that’s one part Japanese (sukiyaki: the everything-in-a-bowl beef dish) and one part Italian (Django: the title character of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti-Western classic), Miike offers up an explosion of influences that mocks the idea of a monoculture that’s immune to foreign influence. Sukiyaki Western Django is a blend of Buddhist philosophy, film noir fatalism, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, and Japan’s very own 12th-century Genpei War. It’s a Wild West pageant of American history seen through Japanese eyes, reducing our entire frontier mythology to an ultraviolent grab for gold.
Miike’s Sukiyaki Western is a way of paying homage to this cross-cultural melting pot, and he shuffles and reshuffles iconic images like cards in a magician’s deck: a victim of a lynching hung from a torii gate; cowboys wearing six shooters and wielding samurai swords; a saloon keeper slinging edamame. It may not make literal sense, but emotionally it feels right. Comic-book writer Alan Moore once said that if we could really view the past it would look more like science fiction than history, and the distancing effect produced by Miike’s style blows the cobwebs off the genre with a burst of machine gun fire.
I caught this amazingly talented guy on an NHK special yesterday and was totally blown away. Get ready to hear the ukelele as you probably have never heard it before.
Here’s a video of a guy who figure out how to get his Wii Balance Board to control the movements of his Roomba.
Of course, the next question is why anyone would want to, but. . .
Via The Raw Feed
My wife is hooked on Kandora, short for Kankoku dorama or South Korean soap operas, and it seems every time I walk through the living room she’s got another one on the TV.
When I ask her what’s so interesting about the shows, she gets very animated. “Oh, they’re nothing like Japanese dramas,” she says. “They’re more intense, and the stories are much more involved and interesting. The characters really change and grow.”
It struck me that she sounded like me back in the 80s, describing why Japanese animation was so superior to whatever else was on TV back then for people to watch (I actually can’t remember at this point).
It seems to me that the human brain is wired to appreciate things that are fresh and new, and when a concept comes along that is totally unique, people are drawn to it irresistibly, which goes a long way towards explaining the revolution that Japanese animation has brought to the world over the past 20 years. My wife is finding that Korean series like Time Between Dog and Wolf, Spring Waltz and Something Happened in Bali are offering her a higher level of drama and depth, sometimes moving her to tears with their (often sad) stories.
The Japanese soaps, with their lighter and more formulaic stories that you can usually guess ahead of time, don’t seem to be doing it for her.
And are all of these offensive?
Here is a pizza flavored pretzel commercial from Japanese TV, which uses the Italian word bongiorno, so I guess it insults the honor of two nations with one stone.
For something really different this weekend, here are three videos showing Tamasaburo’s performance of Sagi Musume, with English voice over comments.
Here’s a trilogy of videos on Japanese beer - one on beer vending machines in Kyoto, another one on a draft beer vending machine in Tokyo, and a final one on historical beers - beers with labels of famous people in Japanese history with short bios.
This first video is from BusanKevin in Kyoto talking about the wonders of outdoor beer vending machines in Kyoto on a hot day:
In response, I did a video on a draft beer vending machine I discovered in a pool hall in Tokyo a few nights ago.
Taste was not too bad but it gave me a huge head of foam which is quite common anyway even with live servers:
Background music by Super Girl Juice.
Later that same night I came across some “Historalicious” Japanese beer which were beer bottles with labels depicting famous people from Japanese history. Get your drink on while learning some Japanese history with Historalicious Japanese Beer - if you can read the bloody small cursive writing on the label:
Crack open a cold one and enjoy the Japanese Beer Trilogy!
