Month: January 2008

Since we set out to make Neojaponisme an austere “journal” and not a fun-town, what’s-up “blog,” the dialogue has somewhat suffered from our limited ability to talk directly and casually to readers. In order to remedy this problem, we have created a new “meta” blog called META no TAME (a palindrome of sorts), located at http://meta.neojaponisme.com.

On META no TAME, we will offer site news, staff news, links to other articles that we think you should be reading, an introduction to Japanese net resources, calls for feedback/requests, and quite possibly, open threads. Although we can’t promise daily updates, we recommend that core readers add META no TAME to their blogroll or RSS reader. We hope that this new blog-in-blog will increase the amount of content we can provide on a weekly basis as well as create more opportunities to discuss pertinent issues.

When it comes to art, design, fashion, and general avant-gardism in the Japanese capital, the blogosphere yields one clear scene-shaper. Jean Snow is a Tokyo creative svengali whose sitemeter reveals that he currently has 2,479 subscribers — in layman’s terms, his is a seriously popular blog. At first glance it’s difficult to see why – it’s a tad chaotic – but spend some time clicking through the hundreds of links on his site and you’re guaranteed to find something interesting, usually adorned with Snow’s creative fingerprints somewhere or other. He’s the manager of gallery and creative hub Cafe Pause, and the author of the smashing superfuture pdf guide to Tokyo (which cost a well-worth-it $20).