Some more great shots by Tatsuo, this time of rainy Tokyo.
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Month: October 2016
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Launching Koya Bound
It’s been great following Craig‘s work on the Koya Bound book, from Kickstarter campaign, to getting the thing printed, to the massive task of signing and stamping all those books, to finally properly launching it this week at an event held at the Leica Salon in Ginza. A big otsukare to both Craig and Dan on a fantastic project.
I’m of course a huge fan of GameCenter-CX and Arino Kacho, regularly watching old episodes. But more than just a gaming celebrity, Shinya Arino is also a Japanese comedian, part of a duo called Yoiko, and his partner is Masaharu Hamaguchi. Nintendo has often partnered with GameCenter-CX to promote some of its releases — notably Super Mario Maker and Pokémon games — and one of these special web series takes the form of GameCenter-DX, where Hamaguchi takes on the roll of Executive Director (quite the promotion, considering Arino’s lowly “section chief” title). Where Arino sticks to retro games (Super Mario Maker being the understandable exception), Hamaguchi only plays new games, and the latest video has him playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s similar to what we’ve seen in the demo videos from E3, but fun to watch nonetheless.
Swery65 (aka Hidetaka Suehiro) is a well-loved game designer (Deadly Premonitions) who has recently returned to his family roots of being a monk. What I didn’t know was the massive tattoo work he’s had done, which he reveals in this Instagram post. Read more about it in this Eurogamer post.
Update: Well, color me embarrassed. The full body “tattoo” you see in the photo was actually done through body painting, done for the shoot. It’s still an impressive piece of work.
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Japanese Professionals
Really great ad by Nissan revealing the matter-of-fact care and professionalism you tend to see in everyday work life in Japan. I showed this to my wife, and to her, she didn’t really see what was so special about the ad, which I think supports the premise of the ad. The ad is part of the following campaign.
Andrew has completed a fantastic project in which he’s drawn some of Muji‘s most iconic products. Here’s how he describes the project:
To celebrate 25 years of being in Europe, Muji asked me to draw 25 of their most iconic products. You can collect all of them as postcards, in stores all over Europe, as well as being part of an in store display coming soon.
Gotta catch ’em all! Pictured, the classic wall-mounted CD player, designed by Naoto Fukasawa.
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Emoji at the MoMA
The original set of 176 emoji created for NTT DOCOMO in 1999 (supervised by Shigetaka Kurita) has been added to MoMA’s permanent collection. Read more about their creation in this Medium post.
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Halloween in Shibuya
Halloween being a big deal in Japan is a new-ish thing, and it’s been growing over the past few years. Pictured, costumed revellers out and about in downtown Shibuya this weekend. Found via this tweet.
According to this tweet, what you see pictured is the copyrighted sheet music for the original coin sound in Super Mario Bros, composed by Koji Kondo. So simple yet so iconic.
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Japan Expo 70 Stamp Poster
I really love this poster that brings together pavilion stamps relating to Japan’s 1970 Expo. Designed by Alessandro Rinaudo, it’s a Kickstarter project with 2 weeks left, and currently at about 60% of its goal.