A pair of action-packed Ultraman Monster paintings by Toshio Okazaki were published in Shōgakukan’s 1979 edition of Ultra Kaiju (Shōgakukan Nyūmon Hyakka Series #97).
From the incomparable Pink Tentacle, which you should visit immediately to see these in full size and in detail with each monster named.
Satoshi Kon passed away yesterday at the age of 46. He directed and created high concept animated feature films and television series.
His directorial debut was the beautifully twisted Hitchcockian thriller Perfect Blue in 1997. I saw it my sophomore year of college, and it’s stuck with me, like broken glass jabbed into my brain, since then. The way he dealt with the concepts in that movie, especially the creation and destruction of celebrity, are incredible.
He followed up his debut with award winning films like Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers. They’re less scarring, but still just as intriguing as his first film.
After those two, he took a break from the big screen to bring the bizarre Paranoia Agent to the small screen.
His last release was Paprika, which won him the most exposure for his mind bending works.
Kon was a visionary and an advocate of his medium. There were decades of work ahead of him, and the world is diminished by his passing.
Coming to DVD and Blu-Ray July 27th from Tokyo Shock!
The kappa, in Japanese folklore, are water goblins that are closely associated with a certain town in the country. Unfortunately, the area is also home to a militant splinter group of researchers dedicated to developing amphibious super soldiers based on the kappa of legends. When their experiments result in murders by some escapees, the appearance of an actual kappa, and the triggering of an atomic bomb, the consequences are of epic proportions. A monster arrives in the midst of the nuclear fallout, and Japan’s defenses are helpless against it. Mankind’s only savior is an irradiated water goblin that is on the rampage with death in its eyes.
Yes, this exists. And yes, it is already sold out on Amazon.
Via BBC News:
He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo – but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed.
Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.
They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he “doesn’t want to see anybody”.
Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges.
Welfare officials had tried to meet Mr Kato since early this year. But when they went to visit, family members repeatedly chased them away, according to Tomoko Iwamatsu, an Adachi ward official.
Authorities grew suspicious and sought an investigation by police, who forced their way into the house on Wednesday.
They discovered a mummified body, believed to be Kato, lying in his bed, wearing underwear and pyjamas, covered with a blanket.
Mr Kato’s relatives told police that he had “confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha,” according to a report by Jiji Press.
But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower’s pension payments via Mr Kato’s bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.
The pension fund had long been unable to contact Mr Kato.
“His family must have known he has been dead all these years and acted as if nothing happened. It’s so eerie,” said Yutaka Muroi, a Tokyo metropolitan welfare official.
I love comparing/contrasting crime in the States vs crime in Tokyo. In America, stuff like this happens every day. People keep cashing social security and pension checks for dead relatives long after they’ve been stuck in the ground. But at least we know you don’t have to hang on to the body. Only in Japan would you keep the body around and tell people that he was both still alive, and transcendent like the Buddha.
You almost have to respect them for that extra mile they go. We just dump the deceased in a hole in the ground. The elevate them to near godhood.
Note to everyone: When I die, I want you to preserve me, then build in an animatronic skeleton. You know, so you can trot me out every holiday and have me wave at people. Should be a hoot around Halloween.
There’s a whole series of these, all of them referencing pop culture and classic art.
And all of them are awesome.
I’m telling you, Pink Tentacle is absolutely amazing.
Not simple a frequency this time. I couldn’t find just the audio of this interview, so you get to look upon the face of a brilliant, but shattered man.
Sixty five years ago today, the Enola Gay, a United States Airforce bomber out of Tinian in the West Pacific dropped a nuclear gravity bomb, called Little Boy, on the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. The Japanese had seen the Enola Gay and her two escort planes coming. They had even raised the air raid alarm. But after seeing that there were only three bombers, the raid was called off and no fighters were scrambled. The Japanese felt that it would be a waste of gasoline to engage the bombers, and three of them could do no serious damage to the city.
At approximately 8:15 local time a second sun exploded over the Hiroshima.
The world was never the same again.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
This has been your Friday Frequency.
That’s a demonstration of the Telenoid R1, a telepresence communication robot…thing.
The idea is that the R1 will act as a physical, minimalist representation of a far, far away person sitting in front of a computer. Through a webcam, the R1′s software tracks the physical movements of said person, and moves the R1 robot accordingly. That’s the rationale to blame for the creepy as shit movements of the wormbot that you see in the video.
Right now, porn’s tech heads and lawyers are exploring the real time, peepshow-esque things that came be accomplished with the iPhone 4′s Facetime application. Just think of what they could do with the R1′s hardware slapped into something like a RealDoll. Dial into a pay per minute/pay per act service and have a real human being digital service you through nothing more than a webcam and a broadband connection.
Who needs a virtual sex doll when science is bringing real ones to our doorstep?
The worst part of this?
The really creepy people are the ones that want fuck the damn thing as-is.
Story is everywhere today, but give Pink Tentacle your traffic. They are awesome.
Boris, aka boris, and BORIS, is an experimental rock band from Japan. They specialize in making sounds that musical reviewers try to categorize as “stoner metal” or “stoner doom metal”.
I don’t know what any of that means.
However, I do know that Boris is batshit crazy.
You see, there’s not just one Boris. There are three Borises.
BORIS – all uppercase, is the more listenable mainstream stuff. The track I’m going to have you listen to below, “Pink”, is an example of this kind of music. Loud, rough, but there’s melody and pop there at the core.
Boris – uppercase B, the rest lowercase, is more experimental. Long, slow waves of feedback appear. Traditional song structures may fade away into explorations and thematic fugues. You’ll probably find yourself wondering if they’ve fallen over dead against an amp on at least one track.
boris – all lower case, makes “Boris” seem downright coherent and bubble-gum. This variety of Boris often appears in collaboration with other noise artists like Merzbow. This stuf is unintelligible to most, and it can even be physically painful to listen to. Be wary of people who listen to this kind of boris.
But, BORIS is excellent. And this is one of my favorite tracks of their’s. The hard-rocking “Pink”.
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This has been your Friday Frequency.
What’s now decay and rot once was bright and brilliantly full of hope: Who lived here? What were their lives like? What happened? How did it all come apart? How did it all crumble to almost nothing?
In the case of Hashima Island, or Battleship Island (Gunkanjima in Japanese) as it’s often called, hope and optimism became dust and decay because one black resource (coal) was replaced by a cheaper black resource (oil). Populated first in 1887, the island – which is 15 kilometers from Nagasaki – only began to really, and phenomenally, become populated much later, in 1959.
Via Dark Roasted Blend, with many more pictures and information, along with more things about abandoned urban spaces.
Here is a collection of vintage bromide cards showing various pachimon (imitation creatures based loosely on famous TV and movie monsters) at iconic locations around the world. Published by Yokopro in the 1970s.
From Pink Tentacle, which you all should be reading.
Hajikkaki (はぢっかき) has a round white body with short arms and legs.
Via the amazing Pink Tentacle:
The Bakemono Zukushi handscroll, painted in the Edo period (18th-19th century) by an unknown artist, depicts 24 traditional monsters that once used to spook the people of Japan.
The Japanese probably have more creatures of folklore than any other culture in the world. They get hyper-specific in attributing what monster (yokai in Japanese) has dominion over what space. For example, a wall in an abandoned building might be haunted by one kind of monster, but a forgotten umbrella in the same building, or the dark attic will be haunted by completely different yokai. Not all of these yokai are evil, mind you. Most of them are tricksters and annoyances, and some are benevolent – mainly nature aspects, etc. Takashi Miike made an excellent family adventure movie about them a few years back called The Great Yokai War, I highly recommend that you check it out. I wrote a bit about it here.
The last from Laurel, and admittedly not happy. But, I’ve had an obsession with Hiroshima lover imagery for a while, and this let my play with it.
Title: Bright as the Sun
Word: Unabashed
200 words about a tragic, but timeless love:
It was our wedding day.
The ceremony was over, and I slipped my uchikake on over my white kimono. The ornate gown was my grandmother’s. Its survival through the fire bombings was a small miracle.
In the courtyard he waited for me. His traditional obi vest traded for a modern suit. A new cane, purchased for the wedding, supported him. Quickly and gracefully, I descended the steps and took my place at my new husband’s side. From here on I would be his support. I would keep him standing in place of the leg lost in the war.
He pressed his head into mine and inhaled deeply.
“Boku no sakura.”
My cherry blossom.
As we stepped out from under the red painted gate of the temple a second sun erupted in the sky. For a moment I thought that the heavens must be so jealous of our unabashed love they had sent another sun, hoping to outshine us. My husband pulled me close, and my skin felt warm from the blinding light and the heat of his body.
When the light faded, we were as shadows. Eternally embracing in the scorch marks left on a shattered concrete wall. Hiroshima lovers.
Because they’ve dredged up a story that’s horrendously old about an Japanese eroge called RapeLay and they end it with this stinger:
“No one should play a game where the only way to win…is to rape.”
Yes. Because something I wrote about nearly a year ago, and something Something Awful lampooned three years before that is even close to news?
At this point anyone who is aware of the eroge market in Japan knows it is fucked up and vile, but the fact that you’re resurrected a dead story to try to stir up some sensationalism is utterly pathetic.
I know you’re losing the 24 Hour News War, CNN, but at least man up and try to do some real journalism before your death rattle.
Please?
It is perfectly safe for work, there’s no nudity or language or gore, despite what the “This video may not be suitable for minors” tag on the YouTube page might have you believe.
Now, not only do I dare you to watch this, but I dare you to tell me, in all honestly, that there is not something…off…about a culture where this is not even a blip on the radar of Weird-Shit-That-We-Produce-On-A-Daily-Basis.
I mean, when a guy is dressed like that and playing bass, it is rock and roll. When he’s dressed like that and not playing bass, it is just down right creepy.
Blame Ectoplasmosis for this.
Fair warning from line one, this video has some anime tits in it. Well, hentai tits, if you want to be genre-specific. They are only up there for a half second or so, three times in total, over the course of the video, but I just wanted to put that out there before you people started griping.
Anyway.
This video is called Akihabara Majokko Princess. It is directed by McG, a mass media agent provocateur let lose by the global media concerns to kill our brains. His oeuvre, as you can see, is a questionable, if not prosecutable one.
Which makes his most recent endeavor a puzzling one.
Quick note: that video might get taken down because of previously mentioned cartoon mammaries. Google it if it vanishes.
Yes, that would be Kirsten Dunst bouncing around in the Akihabara district of Tokyo dressed like a reject from an acid trip a fetish love doll an anime character to her own version of The Vapor’s “Turning Japanese”. Now, normally I’d shrug and move along after watching this. But there’s one niggling catch to this. You see, the mad king of Japanese pop art, Takashi Murakami (the guy behind “My Lonesome Cowboy” (that link is soooooo NSFW)), is running an exhibit at the Tate Museum in London called Pop Life, Art In A Material World. And McG has some how managed to get himself rolled into it. And that music video? That’s his entry.
Which gets me thinking. Maybe I’ve missed something here. Maybe McG wasn’t just swiping a song that had a surface level reference to Japan. Maybe he picked that song because he was re-imagining the masturbatory implications of the song in terms of the Japenese cultural obsession with the fantasy world of anime. And maybe, beyond that, he’s trying to make a statement about how the West’s attempt to assimilate this otaku culture is also masturbatory and self-gratifying without doing anything to advance our own culture.
Which in thinking these thoughts makes me think another:
I hate myself for giving McG this much credit.
I’ve decided that I’m going to tell myself that Murakami just told him what to do and that McG is incapable of creating something multilayed and interesting.
Remember how I told you about that horrific Japanese eroge “Real Kanojo” (”Real Girlfriend”) a few days back? Well, turns out all those special…um…”effects” the game was touting only happen if you’ve got a fairly beefy computer. People with less powerful machines are greeted with remarkably different results. As seen below:
Kotaku has the full gallery of such disasters here.
This is a still from a Japanese eroge (erotic-game) called “Real Kanojo” (“Real Girlfriend”). You have the ability to virtually…umm…whatever is going on in that picture to an impossibly proportioned digital doll. Those crazy perverts even built in a facial recognition system into the “game”. If you hook up a webcam, the pixeled succubus will react to your facial cues.
Via Kotaku.
“There are so many issues we have to solve, and the biggest challenge is that the market in Japan is shrinking — they key is gaining success in the US and Europe,” stated the exec. “At the time of the original PlayStation the Japanese market was one third of the global market, and production costs weren’t that high — so we were able to generate profit from that market alone.
“But now we’re in the era of the PlayStation 3, and the Japanese market is only one fifth of the global market — when it comes to production costs, those are swelling, so it means that unless we gain success in the overseas market our studio will go bankrupt,” said Kobayashi. “It’s a crisis we recognize.”
Found on Kotaku this morning from Yasuhide Kobayashi, the VP of Sony’s Japan Studio.
I know it is the running joke right now in gamer circles to deride the Japanese for lazy game development, and for the most part its earned. The last great Japanese games were early to mid through the PS2 life cycle, which was almost a decade ago at this point. But to see a decline of this magnitude is amazing.
It also makes me wonder about way the numbers are being judged. Titles sold or dollars spent? Japan sells more hand-held units than anywhere in the world, and a DS game costs about half of what a XBOX 360 or PS3 game costs. The numbers could be skewed toward places where people sit on their asses in front of giant flat screen TVs instead of where people play games on commuter trains.
This is something that popped up while I was out. It is the trailer for Noboru Iguchi’s new move, ROBOT GEISHA.
Now, I know your brain is bleeding a bit right now, but try to stay with me for a second. Iguchi is the guy who brought us MACHINE GIRL, and he’s working with the special effects people from TOKYO GORE POLICE. So, what you just watched might well be the most amazing piece of B-level Japanese gore porn ever made. Well, provided they don’t get the shit sued out of them for stealing the music from “Live and Let Die”.
So, here’s a picture of a claw game that spits out fake plastic breasts.
From Japan, of course.
I’m not even going to talk about the fact that the name of the game is the code word for the successful surprise attack by the Japanese against Pearl Harbor in World War 2.
Nope, not gonna mention it at all.
My name is Zachary Whitten. I live in Memphis. I work at Combustion. I make the pretty things on the Internet work. I drink. I plot and I scheme. I occasionally write things that will probably never see the light of day.
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