Month: June 2003

Pics from this year’s penis festival. These are not joke pictures, it’s a real annual festival. I forget where in Japan it takes place though.

More news from the latest Japan report at AICN (read the whole thing here). The SKY HIGH movie, which is based on a late-night drama that was on earlier this year (I know of it because Yuko watched a few episodes) is to be directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, who did the yakuza versus zombie flick…

BATTLE ROYALE 2 hasn’t opened yet (first week of July) and it’s already causing problems. Seems like the distributor, Toei, had to remove posters that were near schools because of protests from the PTA. They didn’t like the following line on the poster: “All persons killed in war, junior high school students…” Found on AICN.

Hayao Miyazaki has directed some beautiful new TV commercials for House Foods, and you can view them online here.

Geez, great news today (from Japan Today): Tokyo replaced Hong Kong as the world’s most expensive city in terms of the cost of living, according to a survey released by a U.S. consulting firm on Monday. The survey, conducted in March by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, compared 144 cities around the world on the cost…

When I was talking about Patrick’s Tokyo Recohan yesterday, I forgot to mention that he now also puts up MP3 samples of selected releases. The links for these are only in his weekly newsletter (in which he announces all the new additions to the site for the week), so subscribe to it and get to…

I was back in Ebisu tonight after work because Charlie had some more comics for me (gotta love getting stacks of free comics, thanks again Charlie). While I was there, he brought me to one of his favorite ramen shops in the area (yeah, I know, this is getting ridiculous, I have to stop talking…

I wanted to mention this a few weeks ago, but it slipped my mind. I was surfing the music channels and I fell on a video that featured the characters from the upcoming videogame VIEWTIFUL JOE. The game (coming out on GameCube this month in Japan, and soon in America) is what looks like a…

Today I saw episode 39 of the series SAMURAI JACK, which featured a definite homage to Monkey Punch’s Lupin the 3rd character. People outside of Japan might not know much about the excellent Lupin III series, since the only thing that has been released in North America (I think) is the Hayao Miyazaki directed film…