Music by:The Exotic Ones

The last of the old takenoko-zoku group still rocks away

Tokyo rockabilly dancers of Harajuku Park

Tokyo’s Harajuku Park has become internationally famous over recent years mainly for its collection of high school students decked out in wild Goth outfits and makeup. Just about every Sunday they can be found sitting around in groups with their similarly attired peers coolly ignoring the camera flashes exploding all about them.

One of the current Harajuku Park denizens

The folks over at BoingBoing TV have written in to alert us to something called TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba.

Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it’s shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details.

This is a video shot in Omotesando on Christmas Eve. Though the night was very cold, some henna gaijin* decided it was just the right time show Japan what he’s got, much to the amazement and amusement of those around him.

Sent in by The Hairy White Prince, a JAPUNDIT reader who maintains a blog called Rare Treats.

* “Henna gaijin” is Japanese for “strange foreigner.”

I took my first trip to Japan in 2004. When I got back to New York I found that I missed being there and seeing all the unique things about it, especially seeing what people are wearing on the street. Tokyo people really put themselves together well and you really notice it when you come back in the USA.

Anyway, when I got back I searched the Internet for websites about Japan and found a couple that were just pictures of everyday people on the street. One of them was Japanese Streets. At the time the website was a little difficult to navigate so I never really got hooked on it, but today I got an email in my Inbox stating that they’ve just relaunched the site with a new design and more content. I just looked at it and now it looks like a real website

They have pictures of regular people (not fashion models) on the street and they’ve kept their old archives online which could be interesting if you want to see what Japanese people were wearing in 2004. They even added videos and some other stuff, too. I don’t have any affiliation with the site and I don’t know the guys who run it, I just think it’s a cool website if you like this kind of thing.

Remora wrote in today to remind us that August 16 is the 30th anniversary of the death of The King – Elvis Presley, which will be marked by special events in Japan and elsewhere.

• Japan is the second largest market in Asia after Australia for sales of Elvis music.
• A statue of Elvis stands in Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku district, courtesy of financing by ex-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and his brother Masaya.
• A website named Elvis World – Japan provides Japanese readers with up-to-date information about the latest news in the Elvis universe.

Fumakilla, a pesticide manufacturer, has introduced bug spray promotional campaign that makes use of heat-sensitive, color-changing stickers placed in urinals at public restrooms around JR Shinjuku station.

In ordinary dry conditions, the special stickers depict a housefly in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, but as users take aim at the stickers and relieve themselves, the fly image transforms into an advertising message. According to a report in the Pink Tentacle:

The stickers are printed with a layer of special, heat-sensitive ink developed by Pilot Ink. When the sticker is exposed to a certain amount of heat, this layer of ink becomes transparent, revealing an advertisement printed underneath. Dai Nippon Printing, who manufactured the stickers for Fumakilla, designed them to withstand the rigors of being placed in a public urinal for extended periods of time. Fumakilla says that in addition to serving as a form of advertising, the stickers provide men with a convenient target to aim for when using urinals, which leads to a cleaner restroom environment.

The company has also launched a website featuring a simple Flash game called “Ippatsu Meichu,” which allows players to test their fly-shooting skills in a virtual lavatory. But if players not only miss but make a mess, they get a visit from the angry toilet lady. [EBT]

Only his or her hairdresser knows for sure. I happened to be listening to the CBC radio (like NHK only Canadian) today and they said there was a big Cospay Con in a horrible suburb of Toronto that got 15,000 people attending.

Although they were (of course) dressed up in funny Japanese anime costumes, this seems a good thing. However, the report brought up Crossplay, which I had never heard of before.

According to Wikipedia, “Crossplay is cosplay in which the person dresses up as a character of the opposite gender. As the name implies, it is a portmonteau of crossdressing and cosplay. In most countries that play host to hobbyists who would call themselves cosplayers, female-to-male crossplayers (females costumed as male characters, sometimes abbreviated “FtM”) are far more common, due to a variety of social and cultural factors.”

There seems to be some degree of social stigma attached to this form of cosplay but the FtM variety is usually no problem, since girls have no problem wearing pants and something like 90% of the good anime characters are male–so they probably get sick of being Sailor Moon all the time. But obviously a guy wearing a dress involves a bit more social stigma (at least) so that is rarer. MtF crossplay is far more common abroad than in Japan, apparently.

There is a pretty good very recent article on this in TokyoPop titled “Let’s Cosplay: Crossplay.” It’s worth a read if you are interested, but begins like this:

Twenty-three random cosplayers; twelve crossplayers–it’s striking when you think about it but this is the typical ratio at most events. A scream chased me across the Dealers’ Room: “Hey, Dr Black Jack, are you a boy or a girl? Cause if you’re a boy, I’ll totally leave my boyfriend for you!” I almost felt bad answering: “Sorry, I’m a girl.” Even then I could tell she considered it a minute before answering, “Oh, well.”

It ends up after a rather interesting discussion like this:

Cosplayers build giant weapons because we like the way warriors in anime explore the nature of violence and individual strength; we build mecha because we like what mecha says about warfare; wings because we like the theology debated through anime’s angels and demons; cyborg body parts because we are interested in the future potential of technology. Crossplay is just like these, a way of engaging in one of the oldest, most widespread, and most interesting themes of shoujo and of anime and manga as a whole, and if seeing a male Catgirl Nuku Nuku walk by makes you think about the fact that strap-on breasts are more unsettling than strap-on cat ears, then that kind of question is itself what crossplayers love most about anime.

I do think they have a point there–strap-on breasts are no more unsettling than strap-on cat ears (think about it) or they shouldn’t be anyway? I always thought that Cosplay was basically for fun among teenage girls and didn’t think that Crossplay had actual religious or philosophical aspects to it?

I also checked the J-List for Cosplay items and most of them involved either Hello Kitty or AV–the former more than a bit scary and the latter rather interesting (especially the Bunny Girls…).

This whole business of Cosplay seems more complicated than I at first thought. And some source also said that (really) most Japanese outside of Akihabara and Harajuku know basically nothing about it–it’s just something that mainly jumps off the screen for Western enthusiasts of J-pop?

We do have the only Maid Cafe outside of Japan in that same horrible suburb of Toronto that the Cosplay Con took place in, though. But I patiently wait to be enlightened on the whole matter of Cosplay and Crossplay. And then there’s the matter of Mana too–what’s that all about?

Haagen-Dazs Japan treated around 80 people to a relaxing time on luxury beds, as they listened to classical music and sampled the company’s new “Dolce” ice cream at the Laforet Harajuku museum in downtown Tokyo.

Haagen-Dazs. . . Bed. . . Hmmmmm. . .

I really don’t know what the big fuss is about. Frankly, I’m not terribly impressed with Harajuku or the surrounding areas. But I suppose I can see why there is so much fascination about it.

For those of you curious to know more about the area of Tokyo, take a look:

Online Videos by Veoh.com