Three Steps Over Japan

Cul de Sac

2012-01-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

Kagoshima is a big city, at least on par with St. Paul or Minneapolis. But it's built in with a number of large hills, and because of earthquakes, there's a law preventing buildings from being constructed above a certain height on the slopes of the hills (being at the top of the hill is ok). So, we get these little cul de sacs in the crooks of the hills that may only have one way in and out, with no tunnels to the other side. These photos were taken from the backside of the hilltop hotel parking lot, facing west.

The little parking lot down there looks like it belongs to a department store, company office, or maybe even for the hotel. If it is for the hotel, though, it's a nasty little walk up the hill every morning for employees. I think, rather, it's for one of the apartment buildings to the left of the photo.

Looking to the south, at the mouth of the cul de sac. You'd think that this would be a great, upscale place to live to get a little peace and quiet from the rest of the city. In fact, most of the buildings are rundown, and at least a couple look like they've been completely abandoned. It's the "trailer park of Kagoshima".

Review: Kurogane

2012-01-26T17:37:00.000-08:00

Kurogane is a relatively common Japanese name, so doing a google search on it will bring up several different hits. The one I want to introduce this time is the manga by Kei Toume, creator of Acony. Kei (born April 13, 1970) is an established artist with a very particular style, with an emphasis on "seinen" (young adult male) stories. Manga Fox has 11 of her titles fan scanilated so far, while the Japanese wiki shows 14 completed series.

I like the artwork on Acony, so I wanted to try out some of Kei's earlier works, starting with Kurogane (AKA: Black Steel). Regrettably, the files on Manga Fox are from the Del Rey officially licensed books (which aren't available here in Kagoshima). I would like to hope that if you're interested in this title that you'd at least buy them used, if not new.

(Images from Manga Fox. All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Kurogane, by Kei Toume, Grade: B
The basic story is fairly straight-forward, although a bit twisted. Jintetsu is a young teenage boy living in the Edo era (roughly 1700's) as an assassin-for-hire. Right at the beginning he dies and is found by an inventor that resurrects him in a semi-mechanical body. A second corpse, Haganemaru, a samurai, is repackaged as Jintestu's sword. Since Jintetsu's throat (ripped out by trained dogs) was never repaired, Haganemau acts as his voice. The story then consists of Jintetsu's adventures as he wanders between towns, either taking commissions or meeting new friends or adversaries. Of course, there's the occasional "misunderstanding" as the boy is mistaken for someone else and arrested or attacked. Although he is a killer for hire, Jintetsu does have a weakspot for people trying their hardest, and he will help them out even if they're sworn enemies.

The artwork is kind of erratic, and not at the same level as Acony, but there are similarities between the two that pop up consistently. The backgrounds are highly detailed, and the fight sequences are more than simple poses (not in the same class as Vagabond, though). Kei is good at showing Jintetstu's emotions even within her self-imposed limits (the boy's face is a steel mask, with just one eye showing). Most of the stories revolve around honor (or the lack thereof), greed and the basic human desire to survive against insurmountable odds. Probably, the main message is that once you choose your own path, remain consistent to it.

What I liked was in seeing Gennai Hiraga's static electricity generator in the bottom right panel of the scene set in the inventor's house. This is the same generator that you can build from Gakken. I'm betting that the inventor, Genkichi, was based on Gennai.

Summary: An Edo-era assassin is killed and brought back in a puppet-like body. Along with his talking sword, the boy wanders Japan and has various (mostly-) humorous adventures. Kind of a cross between Mushishi and Blade of the Immortal. Recommended for anyone that likes Kei Toume's other works.

Small Adventures #27

2012-01-25T18:40:00.000-08:00

When I first came to Kagoshima, I thought that the big brown brick building at the top of Shiroyama was part of the Kagoshima University campus. Turns out, though, that it's the most upscale hotel in town. It's about 1 block long and maybe 10 stories tall. The north end lobby is on the 4th floor, and the south end lobby is on the 1st. A terrace on the east side overlooks the city and has a great view of the volcano. During the "end of the year" period last month, I had a small bonnenkai party in the French restaurant on the top floor, although the food was a French-Japanese fusion that didn't work all that well (bonnenkai = "forget the old year party"). At the end of the meal, I was exiting the south lobby when I noticed a small sign advertising free classical music performances twice a month, with the location alternating between the two lobbies.

Every so often, I'll climb the stairs behind Terukuni shrine, either for the exercise, or to take sunrise photos of the volcano from the observation point at the top of the hill. The walking trail passes right under the hotel terrace, and comes out at the bus parking lot in front of the souvenir shops closer to the observation point. It's a 2 minute backtrack to get to the hotel's north entrance. On Jan. 22nd, I climbed the hill (took a little under 20 minutes from the apartment to the observation point, 7 minutes from the bottom of the stairs to the top) to try to track down that poster again and find out when the next classical performance would be. Going through the hotel, I decided to go out on the terrace and take photos of the water fountain shooting spray into the air with the volcano in the background. The sky was perfectly clear and bright, deep blue, as was the water in the bay. I noticed some tables to the side, covered with dayglo 12" tall wax block candles, and took a couple of shots of that with the intent of coming back at night and getting matching pictures of the candles when they were lit. Then I continued to the south end, and saw the poster with the announcement that the next performance would be on the 23rd at 2:30 PM. From there, I went down the back side of Shiroyama and took additional pictures of stuff that caught my eye.

The next day, I returned up the staircase behind the shrine, and went into the hotel. The performance consisted of 4 members of a Japanese philharmonic orchestra, playing harp, flute, cello and clarinet for 45 minutes. The music included works by Hayden, and a Japanese composer. The lobby seating space was packed with about 50 people, and the entire thing was well received. I video recorded one of the songs with the digicam and took another 10 photos of the performance.

Back in the apartment, I started copying the files from the SD card to my laptop, and when the video file, which was taking the majority of the time, was through with the transfer, I pressed delete to clear off the SD card. A few seconds later, an error message popped up saying that Windows couldn't find the next file to copy. That's when I discovered that the transfer hadn't finished - it's just that Windows had closed the progress box on me prematurely. So now, only 25 of the 35 files had made it over, and the SD card doesn't have a recycle bin on it. Thinking that I might get lucky, I pressed CTRL-Z, the standard Windows "undo function". Rather than undoing the last delete, Windows undid the file copy, and in the process lost another 13 files. I copied the files again, and this time I only got 12 of the 35, plus the huge video file. I was left with the first half of the photos from the concert taken prior to the video, and a couple that were taken on the way back from the hotel that day. Among the lost files were the ones of the candles and the fountain with Sakurajima. (The video itself wasn't worth keeping because I could only shoot it from behind the crowd and the performers were blocked out of view half the time.)

The next day, I went back up again, and headed straight for the terrace, only to discover that the tables and all of the candles were gone. Apparently they had been put up just for a 1-night event. Further, the sky was all overcast, and Sakurajima looked dull and gray in the distance, ruining the shot with the fountain. Not only did I lose what probably were great, unreproducible photos, but I'd made that third trip up the stairs for nothing (discounting the exercise from it). Stupid Windows.

What I'm reading now

2012-01-24T15:14:00.001-08:00

I grew up with newspaper comics. The ones I remember are Li'l Abner, Wizard of Id, B.C., Peanuts, Doonesbury, Pogo, Buz Sawyer, Marmaduke, et. al. Over time, most of the conventional strips got stupid (Family Circus, B.C., Wizard of Id), became too mainstream (Peanuts, Garfield) or disappeared (Pogo, Calvin and Hobbes, Far Side, Bloom County). But, I'd always turned to the comic section the second I opened the paper, and after that was done, I'd check the front page to make sure the world hadn't ended or something. After coming to Japan, I found that the majority of Japanese newspapers don't have manga, and the English papers have virtually no western strips (just Dilbert, Doonesbury and maybe Peanuts). So, I've spent more effort online looking for either digital comics syndicates, or webcomics. Which brings me back to the above issue that most newspaper strips aren't worth reading anymore. I find most webcomics to be a waste of energy as well. But, there are a few that I do like.

Webcomics:

Scary-Go-Round:
Light-hearted monster-hunt/adventure series set in England. Fun characters, silly monsters.

Order of the Stick:
Silly D&D-based adventure series with everyone drawn as stick figures. Lots of wordplay and crude jokes.

Doc Rat:
Pun-filled gag strip featuring a rat that is a medical doctor in an anthropomorphic universe. Sometimes, there are longer storylines and darker plot elements. The artist is a full-time Australian doctor that draws cartoons on the side.

Girl Genius:
Phil Foglio. 'nuf said.

Erf World:
Another D&D-style series, this one based on a unique rule set that is explained as the story unfolds. Marginal artwork and too many jumps in viewpoint, but sometimes funny. Unfortunately, the artist had a death in the family, and while she's recovering the writer has gotten lost in the ozone in a serialized text novel.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
He's a doctor. And a ninja! He fights pirates, and giant lumberjacks. The story makes absolutely no sense, but stuff dies occasionally so it's all good.

Traditional Comics:

Back when newspapers were first trying to make the transition to the internet, there were something like three different websites that carried comics, run by the different syndicates. No one site had everything I liked, and at one point, one of them started requiring a membership to look at the strips. Over time, there were mergers and stuff, and now it looks like GoComics is the last one left standing. Most of what they carry is dreck, in the bad sense of the word. Almost 20% seems to be reruns and old archives (Calvin and Hobbes, Boondocks, The Norm, PreTeena, Bloom County). But, once every one to two years, I'll go through the full index of strips to see if there's something new that catches my eye. One of the reasons that I decided to write up this entry is because I've found some new stuff that I like.

Basic Instructions:
Now, this one is subversive! Scott Meyer gives underhanded advice on how to survive your friends, family, coworkers and boss, with a lot of knife twisting thrown in. One of my favorites, but only comes out 3 times a week.

Brewster Rockit:
Brewster is a spaceship captain whose brain was turned to mush after being probed by aliens one too many times. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but there are some chuckles, and I find myself making a bunch of stupid jokes in the online comments section. Best if you're an SF fan, or if you just like science.

Calvin and Hobbes:
It's all reruns, but it's still funny.

Cul de Sac
Adventures of little 4-year-old Alice and her wiser, more finicky 7-year-old brother, Petey. The world is very twisted and unpredictable as seen through their eyes. Plus, Richard Thompson can draw good background setups.

Dilbert:
Because.

Doonesbury:
Gary Trudeau has always been good at making conservatives angry, and that's good enough for me. Besides, I like early Zonker and Bernie, and present-day Toggle.

Endtown
I've written about Endtown before. Heck, I'm the one that wrote up the entry on wikipedia. Anthropomorphic mutants try to survive in a harsh post-The End environment against monsters and genetically pure humans. Great art, great story, great characters.

Foxtrot:
I used to love the original strip, but Bill Amend went into semi-retirement, only running new strips on Sundays. It's still funny, but has lost any sense of character development or plot that it used to have. Now it's just three kids (a science nerd, a self-obsessed teenage girl, and a sports jock wannabe) that bug each other. Not quite at the "cute for cute's sake" stage yet.

Get Fuzzy:
Rob Wilco, his psycho cat Bucky, and his idiot pooch Satchel. Lately, the strip has been in reruns, so there's some concern that Darby Conley may be suffering from health problems or something. For the most part, Bucky is a parody of modern-day conservative extremists, and most of the gags revolve around his being obnoxious.

Monty:
Originally Robotman and Monty, this was a commissioned strip that the publishers created to sell a product. Eventually, the strip outlived the product and the Robotman character got dropped. The early strips were just insane, with a lot of surreal humor. Lately, it's more just a series of set gag pieces where either Monty reacts badly in public, his friend, Moondog, gets obsessive about food and beer, or it's a lampooning of the rich and elite. Most days are just "meh", but there's still an occasional zinger that makes it all worthwhile.

Non Sequitur
I like Wiley's off-the-wall sense of humor, and his political gags skewer the far-right extremists. But, he's also good at telling children's tales. Fun stuff.

Tank McNamara:
I used to love Tank for his clumsy way around women, and Dr. Tzap's mad scientist shtick, but the jokes have gotten fairly formulaic, and Tank and Tzap don't really have any character development anymore. It's still funny sometimes, but I may drop it in a few weeks.

The Norm
It's in repeats, but I do like Norm's slightly off-center look at dating and living in the workplace. And there are strips that I hadn't seen the first time around.

Brand New Strips:

Incidental Comics:
I just starting reading this one this week. It only comes out a couple days a week, but the artwork is pretty elaborate. The jokes are relatively intellectual, mainly about art and life, sometimes about math or arithmetic. Fairly surreal, in the vein of Far Side or Bizarro.

Lost Side of Suburbia:
A fairly dark collection of short stories with children being kidnapped by fairies, trolls and other baddies. Kind of like Gahan Wilson for kids. Nothing really disturbing yet, but good artwork and interesting ideas. I don't really like the preachy nature of some of the dialog, though.

TerraTopia
TerraTopia just started recently, and it's a kind of a serialized illustrated children's fantasy story. Every day there's one page of text with an accompanying picture. The art is really high-grade, but the writing is unpleasantly flowery at times. It's still too early to say what the story is about, but it features wizards, monsters, a boy from London, and a female shape-changer. I'm down to checking in on this strip about once a month to see if the story's progressed or not.

What I stopped reading:

Barney & Clyde:
This started out promising, about a homeless guy and the rich president of a big pharma company meeting and becoming friends. But, lately, it's gotten formulaic with silly puns and carping about modern life.

C'est la Vie:
Some French people take up living in California. Initially, I liked this one because of the weird jokes and strange scenarios, but again it got formulaic. Then again, the artwork looks like it's been ripped off from a Disney comic - very derivative.

Lio:
Even when Lio was first advertised as a "soon to be carried strip", I thought it was a weak rip-off of Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson. But, I made it one of my favorites on GoComics, and because of that I read it every day along with the other titles. Finally, I had to acknowledge the fact that it can never measure up to Gahan's work, and I mercifully pulled the plug on it.

Pibgorn:
I originally started reading Pibgorn because the idea of a fairy finding her way into the human world and having adventures was rather intriguing. But, Brooke McEldowney forgot how to tell a story and at the end all sense of continuity disappeared. Now, he's recycling the artwork and adding commentary, where mainly he just likes to use lots of big words and complain about his readers not getting his jokes.

PreTeena:
A precocious pre-teenager, named Tina, tries to make sense of her life between school, her friends, and her fashion-obsessed older sister. It was quite funny for a while, but Allison Barrows discontinued the strip and now it's just in reruns that I've seen before.

Rose is Rose:
I used to love Rose! Once, it was hip, off-the-wall and entirely original. Now, it's just like every other cartoon about a cartoon family - family-friendly and resorting to "cute for cute's sake". Bleh. Still has great artwork, though.

Yenny:
Yenny is a teenage Puerto Rican girl living with her single mother in a cottage by the sea. She's obsessed with fashion and wants to become a model, but her feet are too large for normal catwalk work (they're huge!) The character designs are very sexy, but Yenny reminds me too much of Bugs Bunny in drag but without the fur. Plus, David Alvarez has been slipping his schedule, with gaps up to a month between new strips.

My New Gakken Blog

2012-01-23T18:26:00.000-08:00

I mentioned this before, but I want to increase my visibility more.

google has decided to discontinue its knol system, and replaced it with something called annotum. I don't like the new application at all, but in trying to move my knol files over, I had to create an account on the wordpress blogging system. I figure that because I have the account anyway, I might as well use it for hosting a Gakken-dedicated blog.

The new blog has been up for close to a month, and I've been rerunning a past review of the Otona no Kagaku kits per day. I also have the knol files converted and accessible from the menu at the top of the page, and I've added some supporting pages for a short history of Japanese science, and translations of the news announcements from both the Otona no Kagaku homepage and their Facebook page.

Right now, there's only about 15-20 page views a day (compared to the 50-75 for the old Otona no Kagaku kit list knol alone), and half of that seems to be either spambots or browser robots. I'm thinking the problem is that yahoo and google haven't registered the blog in their search lists yet.

I've got another 4 backlogged kit reviews to post from the numbered mook series, plus maybe 6 reviews of the unnumbered kits (the sound vibrator, the synth, the vacuum tube radio, etc.) This will take me right up to the release of the desktop vacuum robot (#33). The official release date is set for Jan. 30, but it usually takes 2-3 days for new products to reach Kyushu. Then, it may be another day or two before I can build the kit, take the photos and write up the review. So, if the timing works out right, the kit #33 review will be the last one published on a daily schedule and I'll drop down to maybe a post a month, depending on how often Gakken comes out with new press releases, or new kits.

P.S. : Gakken has run out of blank blocks for purchase for the Denshi mini kit. They have also teamed up with the rock band White Stripes to produce a WS-themed version of the theremin kit (available in the U.S. for $50). Finally, Gakken celebrated getting 2000 likes on their facebook page by writing a new sketch for the Japanino POV kit.

P.P.S : They've also just announced kit #33 as their latest kit on the Otono no Kagaku home page. And they've taken down the link for "Next Up", so there's no hint now about what #35 is going to be.

Commentary: Grand Jump

2012-01-22T18:43:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)
(Cover shows Bartender a Paris.)

Grand Jump is one of those magazines that aren't included in the wiki list. This may be either because it's too new, or too low-profile. It comes out every 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month, and is 330 yen for 430 pages.

GJ doesn't have much in the way of well-known titles. Probably the best-known artists are Hikaru Yuzuki and Takeshi Okano. Yuzuki's Amai Seikatsu: Second Season, is a silly little sex romp that had originally run in Business Jump. He also did the raunchy Cinderella Express, among about 15 other titles. Then there's Takeshi Okano, who with partner Shou Makura, had produced Hell Teacher Nubee, and are now doing Reibaishi Izuna Ascension (Spirit Medium Teacher Izuna) as kind of a spin-off with one of the Nubee characters.

(Amai Seikatsu)

GJ is aimed at adult males, but there's not that much overt sex, as opposed to what shows up in the Young title series. Probably the most explicit title in GJ is Mankitsu (manga cafe) by Haruki (who also has about 15 titles to his name). The artwork is a mix of very good and very bad. The stories range from mahjong and street fighting, to science and interoffice affairs.

(Reibashi Izuna Ascension)

Probably the best art is in Mankitsu, Amai Seikatsu (The Sweet Life), My Night is as Beautiful as Your Noon by BOHA by Ylab and the recently started Wazumashi Kazuha by Tsuzuku Yabuno (Lost+Brain). In terms of story, on the other hand, I can't really recommend anything based on just this one issue. Bartender a Paris might be promising in the future - the first chapter ran in this issue. It's a spinoff of Araki Joh's Bartender series, but with a different artist (Osamu Kajisa). The story starts out with a young Japanese bartender getting on a plane for France and starting up a conversation with a rich, cranky old man. He tries to talk to a woman in the seat next to him, but she ignores him (it's an in-joke reference to Arai's Sommelier). In Paris, the guy immediately loses his passport, cash and hotel reservation. In desperation, he tries to go to a bar to get a drink with his remaining change, but the owner of the place summarily beats him up and throws him on the street. Coincidentally, the cranky rich guy can't sleep and goes out for a drink at his favorite bar where he encounters the Japanese bartender. The boy is challenged to show his stuff, and he makes a high ball, going so far as to pack his hands in ice for several minutes to avoid heating up the glass when he handles it. Typical Araki over-the-top presentation, and the artwork isn't that great, but it may improve eventually.

(Imouto no Jinteze)

One title that has caught my eye, though, is the new Imouto no Jinteze (Little Sister's Synthesis) (now on chapter 3), by Hinako Konno, written by Fumihiro Juuzen. In this chapter, the young girl Chie Jinno and two classmates in school are introduced to the works of Gauss and several inventors by their female science teacher. The first half of the chapter is taken up with an explanation of Gauss's solution to "what is the total of all of the numbers from 1 to 100". It's a nice way to learn science in easy to digest bits.

(As for what the solution is: The point was that the assignment, "find the total by adding up all the numbers from 1 to 100", was supposedly intended to just keep students busy for an hour doing a manual calculation. But there's a shortcut. If you add 1 + 100, you get 101. 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101. It's an obvious pattern, up to 50 + 51 = 101. So, to find the answer fast, just multiply 101 * 50 to get 5050. You can use the same approach for adding up 1 to 1000.)

(Wazumashi Kazuha, doing the linking rings trick.)

Grand Jump doesn't have a lot of attraction for me, but I do want to try getting the first volume of "Little Sister's Synthesis" if/when it comes out.

(My Night is as Beautiful as Your Noon)

(Mankitsu)

---------------------

Dates for 1/23 to 1/30:

Birthdays (18):
David (mathematician) Hilbert, 1/23/1862
Brothers Hildebrandt, 1/23/1939
Ernie Kovacs, 1/23/1919
John Belushi, 1/24/1949
David Gerrold, 1/24/1944
E.T.A. ("The Nutcracker") Hoffmann, 1/24/1776
C.L. ("Doomsday Morning") Moore, 1/24/1911
Warren Zevon, 1/24/1947
Robert (Boyle's Law) Boyle, 1/25/1627
Shotaro Ishinomori, 1/25/1938
Philip Jose Farmer, 1/26/1918
Paul Newman, 1/26/1925
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1/27/1756
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1/27/1836
John Banner, 1/28/1910
W. C. Fields, 1/29/1880
Tommy Ramone, 1/29/1952
Dick (Rowan and Martin) Martin, 1/30/1922

Died (11):
Johnny Carson, 1/23/2005
Jack LaLanne, 1/23/2011
Kieth ("Retief") Laumer, 1/23/1993
David (comic) Frye, 1/24/2011
L. Ron Hubbard, 1/24/1986
Charlie Callas, 1/27/2011
Jack Parr, 1/27/2004
John Banner, 1/28/1973
Shotaro Ishinomori, 1/28/1998
Jimmy Durante, 1/29/1980
James (Professor Backwards) Edmondson Sr., 1/29/1976

Cloud

2012-01-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

It's hard to make out, but every so often, Sakura-jima belches out some impressive ash.

The World's Largest Papercraft Project

2012-01-20T19:06:00.000-08:00

I like They Might be Giants, and I'm on their mailing list. Recently, there was an announcement of the "When Will you die" video, which has the BIGGEST papercraft project I've ever seen! (A 12' tall version of the pink hearse monster truck featured on their "Join Us" album.)

Now, they've announced a PDF file with the designs for making a smaller desktop version of the monster truck. Most cool!

Review: Gamble Fish

2012-01-19T15:45:00.000-08:00

There's a certain class of manga that focuses on tricks, gambling and misdirections, that includes Liar Game, Kaiji and Gamble Fish.

Gamble Fish, by Hiromi Aoyama (writer) and Yamane Kazutoshi, Grade: B-
I actually read Gamble Fish about a year ago on Manga Fox, when they just had the first 40 chapters or so. They're now up to 81, and I decided to give it a try again. The number one drawback to this class of manga is that the main characters all know more about a particular trick or game than the readers do, so the readers are led around by the nose until the author chooses to explain what's going on. This is compounded by all of the characters in a given scene acting in severe shock when a revelation is made. In small doses, these reactions are amusing, but given that they occur roughly once a chapter, it gets old really fast. And that's my biggest complaint with all of these kinds of stories. That, and the amount of expository explanations of the tricks just drags the story down. As a result, I just skip several pages at a time to get to the parts where the story starts moving again.

Of the three titles, Gamble Fish has the better artwork. The faces of many of the characters are a little too cartoony and stylized, but the backgrounds and body art are very polished. On the other hand, in terms of clothing details and etchi body designs, Yamane is on par with Oh Great's Air Gear. Again, though, with all of the times the characters get shocked, surprised, or just stripped down to their bare skin, per chapter, it gets kind of old.

Even the title, "Gamble Fish", wears poorly on this manga. It sounds too much like a girl's love story manga, such as "Banana Fish". But, there s a logic to it - the main character is a gambler, and he sees his targets as fish to be caught in a net and exploited. As for the story: Middle schooler Tomu Shirasagi has just transferred to the elite private school, Shishido. He immediately sets out to badger the most headstrong students into gambling against him. Initially, the stakes are just 100 yen, but with each game he vows to double it and wrap up by getting several million dollars out of everyone and shut the school down. However, since many of the students come from rich families, they bump the stakes up fast themselves, and they all lose. So far, the games include hide and seek, pool, cards, dice and survival "capture the flag". Pretty soon, the demonic sadist head teacher Abidanai surfaces as the main antagonist, and the games include riders for Tomu either being expelled if he loses, or dying. Tomu takes gambling to extremes, with his plans including having a finger lopped off with a chainsaw, or his eardrums punctured with a stick. In the case of the finger, he did spend a month in the hospital having it reattached. No word yet on how his hearing will be restored.

The real question then becomes "what is his motivation for all this?" So far, the details have been slow in coming. His family dates back at least 400 years, to the age of Toyotomi, when they were powerful advisers. When they were betrayed by other families, their crest - a sword hilt guard - was seized and the members either fled or were killed. The crest is now in the hands of the headmaster of the Shishido school, and Tomo has reason to believe that his father is Abidani's prisoner. So, one of Tomo's goals is to get either the hilt guard or his father back. Currently, Manga Fox has 10 of the total of 19 volumes uploaded and translated. Depending on the release schedule, the end may be in sight. Or maybe not.

I'm torn over this title. On the one hand, it's stupid and juvenile. On the other, the artwork isn't that bad, and the plots twist around so much that I can't guess where they're going to end up next. I do consider most of the female characters to be shallow, predictable stereotypes, and their falling in love with Tomo after being "conquered" is a lazy writer's gimmick. But the "reader service shots" are part of the appeal of this kind of story. At least it's not as mentally insulting as Air Gear.

Summary: A middle school student enters a private school with the intent of using his gambling skills to bring the place to its knees. Lots of mind games and cheap tricks intermingled with the reader service. In the same vein as Liar Game and Kaiji. Recommended only if you have too much time on your hands.

Announcement boards

2012-01-18T18:17:00.001-08:00

The December JLPT test was held on the Kagoshima University campus. The stairs in building 1 were lined with announcement boards for clubs looking for new members. A couple of the announcements used anime/manga characters.

Big Issue - Reiko Saibara

2012-01-17T15:10:00.001-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

I've talked about The Big Issue before, but not recently. It's a small, bi-weekly magazine that comes out on the 1st and 15th of each month for 300 yen a copy, and is sold by homeless people as a way to give them some kind of an income. Occasionally there's a cover story on a popular manga artist, so when I moved down to Kagoshima I immediately went online to see if it was available here. According to the website, someone does sell it in front of the Kagoshima Chuo train station, but until just a few days ago I hadn't seen any traces of them. Then again, there haven't been any issues that I've wanted to buy, so I wasn't looking very hard.

Finally, on the 12th, I was walking from the station along towards the main post office on my way back home when I saw an older gentleman holding up the latest copy and trying to get someone to pay attention to him. Since I didn't want that one, I was about to just keep going past him when he shouted out that he also has some of the back issues. Now, in Tokyo, I would only occasionally see Big Issue vendors more-or-less by accident, so there were a few times when an issue would come out that I wouldn't know about it until a month or two later. Specifically, there was the Jan. 1st, 2011, issue on Gegege no Kitaro that I really would have liked to have gotten. So I turned around and went back. The gentleman very eagerly pulled out a stack of the back issues, and apologized that he didn't have anything manga-related that I hadn't already bought. At that point, I was almost just looking for an excuse to give him the 300 yen ($3.60 USD) because it'd represent a major portion of his day's sales, when I saw the above cover.

Reiko Saibara is not one of the most visibly-talented manga artists on the market, but her stories are very popular because they're more or less autobiographical, and she does a lot of interesting things. Like visiting Egypt and Africa, or getting drunk and then writing about it. Her Mainichi Kaasan (Everyday Mother) was turned into a TV anime series and a live action movie.

The rest of the magazine has lots of articles on charity work around the world, animals, nature, and current movie reviews. Definitely recommended if you can find someone selling a copy on the streets.

(Interestingly, based on the list of back issues on the back of this issue, Saibara was also featured on April 1, 2007, which had already been sold out at the time of this publication.)

2012 Kagoshima Speech Contest, Prelim

2012-01-16T18:24:00.001-08:00

As mentioned in the last few Small Adventures posts, I'd signed up for the 17th Annual Kagoshima City Foreigner's Speech Contest. The preliminary round was last Saturday. Leading up to the prelim, I'd been spending 3-4 hours a day practicing the Japanese speech and getting to the point where I had it mostly memorized. In the last few days prior, I was focused on speaking it out loud clearly, and getting the timing to within the 5-7 minute requirement. I'd wanted to get as many chances to practice in front of an audience as I could, but I had to teach a last minute English lesson on Wednesday morning, when the first class of the new Japanese speaking community course would start. This left me with having to go to the Thursday night class, where I could only give the speech once, but at least I got a little feedback and the assurance that I could read from the paper copy during the prelim if I needed to.

My prelim presentation group was at 10:30 AM, Jan. 14. I arrived early to get a little practice in with my Wednesday morning class teacher, and the only real change was the addition of a short sentence introducing myself, and another sentence to thank the crowd for listening to me. At 10:30, 6 of us (including one other person from my Wednesday class) were told the rules for the contest. We then had our photos taken (the 10 finalists would have their pictures in the brochure for the Jan. 21 round, and the top 4 speakers would be featured on the website and on the poster for next year's contest), and then we went up to the second floor of the International Exchange building to wait our turn. The third of my Wednesday class members that was participating was in the 9:30 AM round, and I got a chance to watch him. There's a bell that's rung at 5 minutes telling you that you've reached the minimum time, and a second at 7 minutes for "time over". The third person came in just under 5 minutes, costing him some points on the total scoring.

The first group wrapped up and it was our turn to get up on stage and sit in chairs in the corner. There were 5 judges in the main seating area of the auditorium, and 20-30 audience members - either other participants or their friends. When our round started, the MC introduced each of the judges (who were either university professors, or somehow connected to the Exchange center). I was number 2 in the group, and I knew I was in trouble because I was looking at an audience rather than at the back of my eyelids for remembering my lines. I messed up my introduction and had trouble with several places in the first paragraph. Halfway through I settled down and finished off with no further trouble at about 6 minutes. None of the others in my group gave mistake-free presentations either, but at least half of them seemed more polished than me, in that it was like watching an amateur actor delivering their lines. The one from Vietnam yelled his lines like an angry Japanese politician, and one Chinese woman was as cheerful and beaming as a Miss Universe contestant. At least two of them included specific references to the contest within their speech.

After we were done, one of the Exchange Center people gave us envelops as we walked off stage. The packets included fliers for 2 upcoming events (an introduction to a hospital that caters to foreigners, and a seminar for foreign and Japanese parents that want to exchange ideas about child rearing in Japan) and a gift cert. for 1000 yen ($12 USD) at a national bookstore chain. The three of us from the Wednesday class got together with our teacher, told each other that they had the better chance of winning, and then we went to lunch at a restaurant in Tenmonkan to release stress.

There were 24 people signed up for the prelim, and were all divided up into 4 groups. The first two groups presented in the morning, and the second two would be in the afternoon after a lunch break, to wrap up around 5 PM. We'd been told that the Exchange center would only call the 10 that made it to the finals and to expect the call between 7 PM and 9 PM. After 9, if there was no call, too bad. Regardless, everyone would receive letters with the results some time during the week. Everyone I talked to told me that of our 3-person group that I had the best chance of making the cut. However, from what I saw in my round, the judges were going to have a really tough time narrowing the list down to just 10 names. At 4 six-person groups, only 2 or 3 people from each would pass.

Update, Sunday: Still no phone call. I sent email to the other 2 from my class and they said they hadn't gotten selected either. The most depressing part about all this is that I spent at least 40 hours preparing for the contest, and there's absolutely no purpose to having written the speech. I can't use it anywhere else, and the majority of the vocabulary isn't used in regular conversation. There won't be another speech contest until next year, and I don't know if I'll be in Kagoshima then. So, my speech is kind of pointless at this stage. Oh well.

Update, Monday: Got the letter in snail mail. "Thank you for participating. We're sorry but you weren't selected. We hope you have good fortune in your future." I was really hoping for some kind of feedback, like being told that I was number 24 out of 24, or a brief explanation of what the judges had been grading on. Right now, I can't tell if it was a grammar problem, that I didn't bow deep enough, if my choice of topic was too frivolous, or that I stuttered too much. Hard to correct something if no one tells you what needs improvement.

Commentary: Weekly Shonen Jump

2012-01-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

It may seem odd that I haven't commented on Weekly Shonen Jump before, and, in fact, I did make a mention of it over a year ago when they included the papercraft version of the Merry (the ship from One Piece). I've been holding off until the publishers decided to run another one-of-a-kind freebie. Well, now is as good a time as any.

(Punchout calendar holder)

Weekly Shonen Jump is easily THE most well-known manga magazine on the market. At its peak, in 1995, it had a world-wide circulation of 6.5 million copies. (Probably due solely to the serialization of Dragon Ball). In 2007, it was 2.7 million copies. There is an English version of the magazine in the U.S., put out by Viz as well.

(Pages for January and February of the calendar, plus assembly instructions.)

Along with past titles like Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, Doctor Slump and and Hell Teacher Nubee, Jump currently has Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, Hunter x Hunter, Gintama and Beelzebub, along with the insanely-long running Kochira wa Kameari. All of the popular titles have been licensed for U.S. release, and are also currently being fan scanilated. This means that there's really very little point to discussing those titles here now. In fact, you probably know more about them than I do.

(Every New Year, Jump has the artists do 4-panel gag strips with their characters. Here, with Kameari, the gang wastes all 4 panels complaining that all they ever do in here is normal stuff.)

As the name implies, Shonen Jump is targeted at younger boys, primarily in the lower teens range. As such, the stories tend to simple adventures, fighting action, school intrigues and slapstick comedy. The artwork is all over the board, but as the artists mature when their series runs more than 1 year, their techniques generally improve quickly. Currently, the titles with the most sophisticated art are Bleach and Kochira wa Kameari. But, I think that most of the storylines are a little too silly or superficial. So, the one that I gravitate towards the most is Kameari (which is sillier than most) because of its great insight into otaku culture in Tokyo and Akihabara. If you want to know what fad is trending now, Kameari will be lampooning it.

(Kurogane 4-koma page.)

As for the freebie - it's a small punch out desk calendar featuring all of Jump's main characters. The calendar sheets are double-sided and double-folded on 3 pieces of paper. It's not that big, and therefore is perfect for placement on a crowded desk.

(Kagami no Kuni no Harisugawa (Harisugawa of the Land of Mirrors))

If you like manga, you probably like the stories that appear in either Shonen Jump, Shonen Sunday or Shonen Magazine. Jump will also probably be at the top of your list, too.

---------------------

Dates for 1/14 to 1/21:

Birthdays (16):
Fujio (Tensai Bakabon) Akatsuka, 1/14/1935
Hal Roach, 1/14/1892
Robert Silverberg, 1/15/1935
Jim (Wildwood Weed) Stafford, 1/16/1944
Steve Harvey, 1/17/1957
Andy Kaufman, 1/17/1949
Mack Sennett, 1/17/1880
Oliver Hardy, 1/18/1892
Danny Kaye, 1/18/1913
Robert Anton ("Illuminati Trilogy") Wilson, 1/18/1932
Edgar Allen Poe, 1/19/1809
Andre-Marie Ampere, 1/20/1775
Arte Johnson, 1/20/1929
DeForest Kelly, 1/20/1920
Nancy ("Beggars in Spain") Kress, 1/20/1948
Benny Hill, 1/21/1924

Died (4):
Doodles Weaver, 1/17/1983
Curly Howard, 1/18/1952
Rudyard Kipling, 1/18/1936
George Orwell, 1/21/1950

250 yen, 560 pages.

Sigh

2012-01-14T18:47:00.000-08:00

Back in October, I wrote about the Kagoshima Stamp Rally. Because I went out of my way to get all nine stamps (actually, 10 stamps on one of the cards) from areas around the city, I was kind of hoping to get at least a "thank you for participating" post card in the mail. I knew the deadline for submitting the entries was Nov. 30, and that there going to be some kind of decision regarding the prizes some time in December, but when the first of January came and went, I got to wondering what the exact details of the contest were. On Jan. 7, I went back to the brochure with the rules, and it said that the drawings were going to take place in the middle of Dec., the lower-level prize winners would be notified by mail, and that the two top winners (one for getting all 9 stamps, the other for honorable mention) would receive notification by phone. At that point, I resigned myself to the fact that I hadn't won.

This last Friday, I had my first group English lesson for the new year, and one of the students, the one who drove me around to get 5 of the stamps in one day, told me that there'd actually been an official ceremony with the mayor of Kagoshima last week, awarding out all of the prizes, and she'd gotten a ceramic tea serving tray worth 5000 yen ($60 USD). Congrats to her. And I guess this proves that I got squat.

Small Adventures #26

2012-01-13T14:44:00.001-08:00

Japanese department stores are really nothing like those in the U.S. The bigger ones (those that take up a full block and are at least 7 stories tall) are self-contained cities that are similar to small-scale indoor shopping malls. The basement will be taken up by food stalls and a grocery or produce store. Floors 1-5 may be divided up into clothing sections for women, men and children. Then the upper floors will be a variety of restaurants and possibly an art gallery or movie theater.

As mentioned in Small Adventures #24, I'd entered the local foreigner's Japanese speech contest, and I needed a quiet place to practice speaking out loud for several hours a day leading up to the preliminary round on Jan. 14. I tried going into the International Exchange Center on the previous Sunday, but no matter where I went in the building, there were people milling about. I found a quiet bench on the second floor, but when I took a restroom break, I came back to find that someone else had taken over my bench. Besides, the Center closes at 5 PM and isn't open on Mondays. So, I wanted to find an alternative space.

The Daiei department store is right across from the main train station, and is much closer for me to walk to (under 10 minutes, rather than the 20 for the Exchange Center). Similar to the above description, Daiei has a drug and grocery store in the basement, and a bakery, grocery and liquor store on the first floor. Women's and kid's clothing on the 2nd and 3rd floors, men's on the 4th, and housewares, stationery and a small video game arcade on the 5th. There's a couple small restaurants at the far end of the 4th floor, and a coffee shop on the 7th. The 6th is made up of medical clinics. The 7th has the store's information office, a big open lobby space with benches and a few personal computer workstations (looks to be free use, but I haven't tried logging into them yet), one large room where people can read magazines and newspapers for free, and some small meeting rooms. Both days I visited that floor, several people were in one of the meeting rooms playing Go. They all carried their own Go sets with them. The 8th floor has a basketball gym, and a small exercise room with lockers and probably a set of showers. Also on the 8th floor is what seems to be a rehearsal space (the doors have always been closed, but once it sounded like some high school students were giving a classical recital to their parents; and another time there were voices and background music, either from a very old-fashioned movie, or some troupe practicing a stage play.

The lobby space on the seventh floor turned out to be the most practical for me. Although there usually were several people just coming in for an hour or two to read a book, or a high school couple making flirty eyes at each other, I was free to pick out one set of benches and pace around as I read my speech out loud. Oddly enough, though, when someone new came into the area to sit and read, no matter how empty the place was or where I was standing, they'd always pick the bench about 8 feet from me.

The best part of being in a department store is that, rather than paying full price for the drinks in the vending machines on the 7th floor, I can stop on the 1st and grab a soda or a bottle of coffee for 30% off and some snacks from the Mister Donut just around the corner from the bakery section on my way up.

The most interesting thing I've seen in Daiei so far was the group of 100 Japanese women wearing European-style skirts and blouses in the basketball gym, practicing something that looked like either a square dance, or a waltz-style folk dance. I challenge you to find something similar in Mall of America.

Review: Desert Punk

2012-01-12T16:45:00.000-08:00

1997 was a strange year. It saw the start of a new manga, called Desert Punk, in the magazine Comic Beam. DP later came out as a 24-episode TV anime series (licensed in the U.S. by Funimation). Manga Fox has the first 5 of the 14 volumes scanilated, and I've just started learning about this title.

Desert Punk, by Usune Masatoshi, Grade: A-.
DP is the name of the main character, a sneaky, underhanded "handyman" working in the Great Kanto Desert (what's left of central Japan after the End of the World As We Know It). The Desert is occupied by various bands of bandits, and the villages have a kind of bounty hunter system set up to protect them. Handymen serve as jacks-of-all trade, accepting jobs that can range from delivering a package, to defending a water well from thugs. Desert Punk has established a name for himself as "the demon of the desert", primarily because he fights dirty. While he claims to have never failed a mission, every few chapters sees him being bested by a rival. His biggest weakness is women with large breasts, and this generally leads to his downfall. Offers of large sums of money, or the possibility of seeing a naked woman are his two main motivators.

DP the manga is filled with black humor and silliness, in the vein of Appleseed and Dominion. Some of the situations that he gets himself into are pretty funny, and the interaction between himself and his new apprentice, Kosuna, sometimes turns into as much of a brawl as when Punk fights the enemy. Along with Masamune Shirow's earlier works, DP shares the same sense of humor as early Akira and possibly Dorohedoro. The artwork is really good, with emphasis on the different kinds of weapons in use. In the first few volumes, there's not much of a storyline. Punk takes on various jobs that bring him to different parts of the desert, and into conflict with just about everyone he meets. He does (unwillingly) adopt an apprentice, and is occasionally saved by a trio of former childhood frenemies. His reputation grows, and eventually other thugs start tracking him down to make names for themselves. Otherwise, though, there's no interwoven story arc yet (that comes later).

Summary: A rather unattractive "handyman" for hire, known as Desert Punk, lives a Clint Eastwood-like "man with no name" existence in the desert that used to be central Japan. Lots of silly jokes, and tongue-in-cheek fights. Recommended if you are over 18 and not easily offended.

Small Adventures #25

2012-01-11T16:38:00.001-08:00

Last November, I got a small temporary job teaching English at a conversation school about a 15 minute walk from the apartment. One of the two teachers at the school had returned home for a 3-week vacation and I was asked in to cover a couple of 1, 2 and 3-student lessons a couple of times each week. It wasn't great money, but it did help cover part of the expenses that month. After the teacher returned, the owner of the school had me come back to teach one specific student that had an erratic schedule and wanted lessons during the week when the other two teachers were tied up at other schools. Again, it was just enough to cover for lunches in December. Then the holidays came up and the work dried up.

In September, I started taking Japanese lessons at the International Exchange Center. 10 lessons, 2.5 hours every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 11:30, for 1500 yen total ($20 USD, a very nice deal). The group was split in 2, one half focusing on conversation and the other on writing kanji. About halfway through the course, the teacher told the speaking group to create our own speeches as if we were going to enter the foreigner's speech contest to be held in January (the preliminary round is on Jan. 14). On the last day of the course, in mid-December, the conversation group gave our speeches (5-7 minutes each) and the writing group had to present 1-2 paragraphs that they'd written based on a favorite kanji character. That day was just before the deadline for entering the speech contest itself, and I figured that if I was going to put that much effort into writing one that I might as well go all the way. No entry fee, one first place prize of 40,000 yen ($480 USD) and one honorable mention. There's no way I can possibly win, given the number of graduate foreign students studying at the neighboring university that are sure to also compete, but I figure that I might get a little visibility this way.

The next Japanese conversation course is just starting up, with the first Wednesday lesson on Jan. 11, from 10 AM to 11:30 AM. This would give me just one chance to practice in front of an audience prior to the preliminary round 3 days later. Tuesday night, the 10th, I was out at a quiet public space, trying to memorize my speech when I got a cellphone call from the English school saying that the student I was teaching last month had gotten their work schedule for the week, and the only time they're available for two back-to-back English lessons would be Jan. 11 from 10 AM to noon...

Small Adventures #24

2012-01-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

Most people probably know about the Kevin Bacon Effect, or the Kevin Bacon game. Originally, the game consisted of linking two otherwise unrelated actors based on which movies they'd appeared in that also featured Kevin. Some researcher decided to study this concept and determined that you can link any two people together through just 6 steps (i.e., I know the manager of my department, he knows the regional manager of Toastmasters in Texas, who knows the regional Washington, D.C., Toastmasters manager, who knows Dick Cheney, etc. So, if I ask around, I could conceivably get a chance to be introduced to Cheney. (Fake example.)) Some of the current social networking services (specifically linked-in) are built based on this premise. The idea being to maximize the number of people online that can find you for your skill set or for increasing the number of contacts you can exercise.

Bottom line is, the more people you talk to, the more that know who you are, the greater your chances of the unexpected happening.

Last Summer, I went to the Kagoshima City aquarium. As I was getting ready to leave, one woman at a cash register in a souvenir shop near the exit asked if I was an English teacher. I had to apologize to the group I was with for delaying them, in order to talk to this cashier. She said that she wanted to study English, and was wondering if I had a business card so she could contact me later to discuss the details. I gave her my card, and that was it. She didn't email or phone me after that.

Suddenly, a couple of nights ago, I got a call. It was the woman from the aquarium. She stated that she'd been talking to a friend of hers who works for a tourist group in the city, and the friend needed to find a foreigner for something her company is working on. The aquarium woman remembered my business card, and suddenly I'm talking to some travel planner out of the blue about play-testing a new city walk tourist brochure for a couple of hours one day next month.

Sure, why not. I might find more chances of handing out my business cards along the walk.

Tensai Bakabond

2012-01-09T18:10:00.001-08:00

If anyone knows more about "Tensai Bakabond" (a parody of Vagabond), let me know. I think this is hilarious.

November-December edition of the "related articles in the media"

2012-01-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

Here's the batch of articles to show up in the media from November-December, regarding anime, manga and related stuff.

Generic New News
===============

Japan Times

'Gegege no Kitaro' artist Mizuki's WWII works on display in Yokohama

Comic anthologies offer visions of hope after 3/11

'Cosplayers' tout tsunami recovery

Miraikan uses anime to teach

'Masked Rider' heroes feted at Yokohama show

Daily Yomiuri

Anime's impact on personality and the world

New card game sure to win players' hearts

Overseas anime market online only

TV surprises in store as Jean Reno plays a certain robot cat

New generation takes on challenge of portraying Lupin III characters

New website to provide info on media arts

Carefree 'K-On!' makes leap to big screen from comic strip

Nakano capitalizes on its mecca status

Fujiko Fujio A on comics and self-righteousness

Anime warms Russian, Japanese ties

L'Arc-en-Ciel blaze a global anime music trail

Asahi

Lupin III franchise relaunches website

Manga explores human feelings in aftermath of March 11

Nerima animation carnival set for Nov. 19-20

'Ryujin Mabuyer' gets manga adaptation

Japan aims to squeeze more cash from Hollywood

'Tiger and Bunny' film anime coming to mobile phones

Anime portrays heroic story of tsunami-hit railway

Latest volume of 'One Piece' manga lands place in record books

'Zetman' anime adaptation to air in April 2012

Exhibition held to mark release of 'Evangelion' art book

Hatsune Miku goes global with DVD release

'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.,' 'Hipira' win 3D awards

Square Enix launches 'middle-aged' manga

Viz Media's SuBlime line to focus on yaoi manga

Chopper meets Hello Kitty in new Sanrio line

'Madoka Magica' nominated for SF award

Escape games offer a way out of ordinary life

Russia, Britain join World Cosplay Summit 2012

Young anime artist makes commercial debut

"Little Battlers eXperience" to be Data Carddass game series

Evangelion energy drinks poised to hit stores

Kyoto Seika University starts manga website

'Tamagotchi' turns 15, still a big seller

SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 to return to Singapore, its birthplace

Season 2 of "K-On!" available as streaming video

Present-day 'Invaders' are lovable, bumbling bunch

'Madoka Magica' film trilogy project planned

Anbe created "Ika Musume" manga over dinner

Captain America tries out the Kewpie look

Publishing heavyweights see light in growing 'light novel' market

Studio Ghibli retrospective slated for U.S.

'The Tibetan Dog' to premiere in Japan in January

Japan Post to issue 'Dragon Ball Kai' stamps

'Space Battleship Yamato 2199' TV series to follow feature film

Kadokawa and Dwango working together to launch online manga services

'Ordinary life' anime finds a special place in fans' hearts

Kosuke Sugimoto wins big at TBS DigiCon6

"Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights," published in English

"Cruel Angel's Thesis" No. 1 anime karaoke song for 2011

'Kinnikuman' makes comeback with new series

Santa can't find Kamen Rider belts

Feature film adaptation of "Blood-C" to hit cinemas next summer

Anime explains cycle of life on atomic level

ShoPro releases Japanese version of 'Les Cites obscures'

E-book store attracts customers in Shinjuku

'K-On!' rakes in $4 million in two days

Film director gets details right in 'Magic Tree House'

Updated 'Evangelion' book hits the stores

Female producer helps supercharge 'Kamen Rider'

U.S. nominates 3 Japanese works for Annie Awards

King of anime songs releases commemorative DVD set

Angouleme comics festival nominates Japanese manga

Oscar-winning artist Kunio Kato releases new book

Plastic model developer has 'The Force' with him

Hungry Bird

2012-01-07T18:03:00.000-08:00

This is one of the strangest birds I've encountered in a while. I was walking down the main street in front of the Kagoshima Art Museum, and one bird came swooping down at me, followed by a second that seemed to be chasing it. The first billowed its wings open to stop in front of me and the second flew off. Initially, the first one had looked like a owl. Then it hopped up on the fence railing and looked down at the carp pool for a snack, looking like a kiwi.

Here, it looks like a 'fisher of some kind.

Now, like a hawk.

Finally, it resembles a light-colored raven.
Very strange. It's also very brave, letting me get within 5 feet of it for the photo without reacting at all.

Junzou Ishikawa exhibit in Fuchu

2012-01-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

There's a disadvantage to living in the countryside. While there are art museums and galleries here, they usually feature traditional western or Japanese exhibits (ukiyo-e, Rembrandt, Dali, etc.) But they'll carry fliers for anime or manga-related showings taking place in museums elsewhere. I can understand this when the flier is for Kumamoto or Fukuoka, which are both large cities on the Kyushu island.

(Junzou Ishiko)

But this time, the flier is for the Junzou Ishikawa exhibit (石子順造) at the Fuchu Art Museum, in Fuchu City (within a 20 minute bike ride of my old apartment west of Tokyo). I doubt anyone will remember Junzou, but he was one of the art critics that wrote articles for the Garo gekiga manga magazine during the period that I was documenting a couple of years ago (1965-1975). One of his main articles was about the art of Yoshiharu Tsuge. And yes, I really wish I could go check it out.

(Cover of the flier.)

The exhibit runs from 12/10/11 to 2/26/12. 700 yen for adults.

Review: The Minotaur's Plate

2012-01-05T17:05:00.001-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Fujio F Fujiko was one half of the team (along with Fujio A Fujiko) that created Obake Q-taro while living at Tokiwa Sou (the apartment block that Tezuka lived in during the early part of the 1950's). He also created Doraemon, and Fujio A assisted him on it until the two of them officially split up in the early 80's. Due to the influence and targeted audience of Doraemon, Fujio F has developed a reputation as a children's author. On the other hand, Fujio A left in part because he wanted to delve deeper into adult black humor, authoring Smiling Salesman among other titles. The reason for mentioning all this is that Fujio F did try his hand at darker "Twilight Zone" stories, which seems to have gone mostly under the radar. They're still fairly naive and light-hearted when compared to Fujio A's work though, but I think there is an attempt to address similar issues.

The Minotaur's Plate, by Fujio F Fujiko, (c) 1995, Grade B.
The Minotaur's Plate is a collection of 13 short stories that ran mostly in Big Comic and SF Magazine during the mid-1970's, and packaged together by SB Publishing. It's a bit much to summarize all thirteen stories, so I'll just mention a couple of them as representative works. On the whole, the artwork is very cartoony. The character designs resemble that of Doraemon, indicating that the audience is still mostly young teenagers. Many of the designs have the rounded facial features found in Tezuka's earlier works, showing his continuing influence on Fujio F's style even 20 years after Tokiwa Sou. While many of the panels have very stark or plain backgrounds, in the scenes in front of a mansion or in a park, the background art can be very elaborate and detailed. As mentioned above, the stories follow a "Twilight Zone" or "Night Gallery" pattern, with a set-up, a build-up and then a twist ending. But for the most part the twists are designed to not give children nightmares, unlike with Fujio F, or some of Tezuka's own psychological studies.

(Oyaji Rock)

The first story, entitled "Oyaji Rock", has a salesman strapping a large boulder onto his back and going outside to attempt to sell it. In the afternoon, exhausted, he sits down at a park bench, where he strikes up a conversation with a younger guy. Turns out that when the U.S. fell into the Pet Rock frenzy, a Japanese company decided to capitalize on the trend, and in typical Japanese tradition, over-engineered the gag to create "oyaji rock", or "old man rock". It's his job to sell it, but of course no one wants a big boulder in their apartment that does nothing. The second guy then replies that he's also a salesman, but that he pedals a time machine belt. The first one grabs the belt, verifies that it works by jumping ahead 1 hour, then starts placing phone orders to his home office for large numbers of the rocks, and he then moves into the past so that he can defer the actual sale order sheets. He creates a running Ponzi scheme until the time belt salesman demands his 70% cut on the profits. The rock salesman protests over the details, so the belt salesman grabs the belt and deposits the rock salesman 1 hour into the past, just before when the two of them met. When the guy recovers, he's sitting next to his rock, thinking that he'd just had a strange dream.

In "Jiji Nuki" (Exclude Old Man), an old guy living with his son and their family is starting to hate his life. He stays in his room alone, staring at the photo of his deceased wife. One day, the son and his wife are watching TV with the volume turned up, disturbing his rest. When he goes down to eat dinner, there's only four places set out because the daughter-in-law forgot about him. The grandson talks him into going out to fish, but it's raining and when he comes back, the grandson has taken over his room for a party with some punks. The old man decides to go fishing anyway, and in the middle of the cold downpour, dies. He goes to heaven where he meets his wife and they relax while watching TV broadcasts of what's happening on earth. He sees his own funeral, with his friends and neighbors crying over his coffin and relating stories of how great he'd been. The old man rushes to heaven's admissions room and demands to be sent back home. He awakes inside the coffin and that night everyone's happy to see him again. But, one month later, things are even worse than before, with the grandson's friends' garbage strewn all over his room. When the granddaughter comes in to play cards, she explains that her mother's description of the joker is "oyaji nuki" (remove the old man). Taking this to mean that the daughter-in-law hates him, the old man summons his son and kicks everyone out of his house. As he's laughing maniacally, he wakes up to find himself back in heaven's receiving room. The administrator explains that this had been a dream to let him see what would have happened if he returned to life again. He asks if the old man still wants to go back, and he grudgingly decides to stay with the ghost of his wife, while the still-living pay their respects at his grave.

"Gekiga ObaQ" (Dramatic Story ObaQ) takes place about 20 years after the end of the Obake Q-tarou series, with the incompetent ghost Q-tarou returning to earth and visiting his old friend Shou. Initially, Shou is happy to see Q, but he's married now and working in a deadend job, and his wife doesn't like having Q around. The rest of the gang have also grown up and gotten on with their lives in society, as office workers and the like. However, they get together for one more drinking party, and during the midst of it, Q gets Shou to give his wife an ultimatum. The next morning, Shou is attempting to shake off his hangover when his wife tells him that she also has something to say - she's pregnant. Shou is elated to be a father and he happily goes off to work. Realizing that Shou is no longer a child, Q flies off into the sky and disappears.

(Minotaur's Plate)

The title story, "The Minotaur's Plate", starts out with a spaceship filled with Earthlings roaring through a particular solar system. Inside, the crew has run out of food and water, and only one member, a young man, is still alive, He crashes the ship on the closest planet, and is rescued by a girl wearing a Greek-style dress. The boy recovers, and feeds himself at what seems to be a banquet. When he thanks the girl for the feast, she replies with "what, ok, you mean the pet food?" Initially, the two of them hit it off pretty well, but at one point she pricks her thumb on a rose bush, and her entire family panics, calling a doctor. The medic arrives, but he's got the head of a bull. Eventually we learn that on this planet, humanoid cows are the primary lifeforms, and the regular humans are raised as livestock. The girl has been chosen to serve as the centerpiece dish of the upcoming minotaur festival, and all the earthling can do is watch as she's wheeled into the main kitchen. Later, he gets picked up by another passing spaceship. Onboard, he's eating steak, but crying at the same time.

(1000 Year Reunion. The attention to detail here is very impressive.)

In "Hyon Hyoro", a young boy receives a letter from someone and takes it home to show his parents. It's a ransom note written in a childish scrawl, demanding the return of something called "hyon hyoro". The child says that he got the letter from a large rabbit, and his parents punish him for lying. Later, the rabbit teleports into the boy's room, and when he tries to introduce it to his mother and father, they over-react and decide that they've been working too hard and are hallucinating. The rabbit hints that it's from a parallel planet, and is planning on abducting someone if hyon hyoro isn't returned to him at the park at midnight. The police are summoned but they refuse to accept that the 5' tall rabbit is real, until they all injure themselves failing to arrest it. The rabbit demonstrates that, while it's very good-natured, it does have psychic powers that it's willing to use. The following day, the police stake out the park as expected, and the father brings a suitcase full of gold and cash to the phonebooth that the rabbit is waiting within. The father shows up 5 minutes early, and the rabbit is a stickler for following the rules, so they wait until exactly midnight. The rabbit opens the suitcase and asks what this worthless paper is in there for. The adults say that don't know what a "hyon hyoro" is, and the rabbit goes ballistic, answering that it's the most precious treasure in the world. The rabbit turns into a monster, and then suddenly there's silence. The next morning, the boy wakes up and goes through his toy box. He pulls out a pearl and yells to his mother that he hadn't been lying, that the hyon hyoro had fallen from the sky and hit him on the head a few days earlier. He runs outside holding the pearl, calling for his mother. Then he asks where everyone's gone.

(Tripping Over a Tree Stump)

In the final story, "Tripping Over a Tree Stump", a young editor is sent over to the house of a famous writer in order to get him to finish a manuscript by the deadline. The writer smokes several packs of cigarettes a day, drinks heavily, has a pet monkey that his wife bought him, eats raw fish, and has a toilet that smells of natural gas. During the course of the day, the editor watches as the writer puts off his work to play with the monkey, drink and watch TV. He also beats his wife mercilessly. He tries calling up a girlfriend to go on a cruise that afternoon, but the girl refuses, saying that she wants to go driving with her own boyfriend. The wife arrives with a packed suitcase and the writer attacks her again, saying that he'll be the one that decides if he goes or not. The girl comments that the writer s going to kill his wife one of these days, then she exits the house. The writer notices that his whiskey bottle is empty again, and the editor runs to get more alcohol to save the wife from another beating. He wanders through the house looking for the liquor cabinet and notices the wife's scrapbook lying out on the floor. It's filled with newspaper clippings of people that have died in various ways, such as from an explosion caused by lighting a match next to a gas leak, getting rabies from wild animals, mercury poisoning from raw fish, cancer from smoking, liver disease from heavy drinking, and tripping over a toy that had been left at the top of the stairs. As he returns to the den, he notices the wife carefully setting an empty whiskey bottle at the top of the stairs.

Summary: Fujio F tries his hand at black humor in the 1970's, and the results are collected here. The artwork is dated, and never really holds up to Fujio A's much darker tales. However, there are some interesting ideas mixed in, and most of the plot twists do work pretty well. Recommended if you like Night Gallery-type jokes.

Junketsu no Maria background art

2012-01-04T19:25:00.000-08:00

Ok, here's one for you manga fans. Masayuki Ishikawa is the artist behind Moyashimon and Junketsu no Maria. If you go to his website, you'll see that it has a wicked-good background image from Maria. Two things - the site uses frames, and there's no direct way to get at the background image. No direct way. It's a copyrighted image, and I don't have permission to reprint it here. But it is a sweet piece of art.

Pepsi One Piece figures

2012-01-03T18:27:00.001-08:00

Hot on the heels of the Pepsi Pokemon (Collect 'em All) series, we have the new 24-figure One Piece set. Most of the figures are either bland (old boss characters) or run of the mill (Luffy and gang). The only one that looked at all interesting was Dracule Mihawk. 88 yen at the Taiyo grocery stores. Roughly 140 yen at conbini nationwide.

Gegege no Kakeibo, chapter 16

2012-01-02T18:10:00.000-08:00

Shigeru Mizuki (Gegege no Kitaro) is nothing if not prolific. He has a new series in Big Comic (the same magazine that carries Golgo 13, Yuukoku no Rasputin and Yukinobu Hoshino's version of J.P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars). This time, it's Gegege no Kakeibo (Gegege's Household Accounts). You may remember that Shigeru's wife, Nunoe Mura, wrote the book Gegege no Nyobo back in 2008 to relate her account of how the two of them got together and went through the tough times of getting Kitaro published. It was turned into a TV series in 2010. Gegege no Kakeibo is Shigeru's version.

The 1.10.12 issue of Big Comic has chapter 16 of the manga, entitled "From Shinjuku to Choufu". The story picks up with Shigeru drawing a manga page and giving it to his female assistant. The main reason he chose a woman to help him with the pages is that he's doing contract piece work for shojo magazines making girl's manga. However, he's suffering from a toothache that's preventing him from focusing on drawing, so he goes to look for a cheap dentist. While the cost is only 200 yen ($1-$2 USD at the time), it still cuts into his budget. Then he learns that his little brother has found a job in Tokyo, and bought a house in the countryside area of Choufu (it's now just a suburb of Tokyo, 30 minutes away from Shinjuku by train on the Keio line). Land is much cheaper there than in Shinjuku in Showa era year 34 (1959), so that Summer he found a small house and put a 700,000 yen down payment on it. Then he, his brother and their father loaded all of his belongings into a push car, and pushed it all the way out to Chofu. When they finally reach the place, the other two learn that it's surrounded by fields. Shigeru muses that he's about to enter debter's hell, and his brother tells him that if he ever manages to pay off the loan, the place will be his to keep.

[Note: My apartment used to be across the Tamagawa river from Chofu. I'd ride past it on my bike for exercise 3-4 times a week, and sometimes go in to the Chofu train station for clothes shopping.]

Gegege no Kakeibo, chapter 16

Bookstore Stairwell Wall

2012-01-01T18:16:00.000-08:00

(The advantage of living near a bookstore that carries manga.)

Unofficially, I started commenting on manga magazines last February, but I didn't really start to do it consciously until June, and I didn't go on a mostly-one magazine per-week schedule until July or August. In 2011, I've covered 28 magazines aimed at men and boys and there's still no end in sight. I'm guessing that at least 4 new magazines have started up this Fall, and that's ignoring all of the stuff for women and young kids (which represents a minimum of 5 times the amount of shelf space).

Magazines I've Commented on in 2011:

Afternoon
Big Comic
Big Comic Original
Big Comic Spirits
Big Comic Superior
Comic Ran
Comic Ran Twins
Dengeki Daioh
Evening
GanGan, Monthly
Ikki, Monthly
Manga Times Special
Manga Town
Morning, weekly
Morning Tsu, monthly
Newtype-Ace
Sunday GX
Shonen Ace, Monthly
Shonen Champion, Monthly
Shonen Champion, Weekly
Shonen Sunday. Weekly
Ultra Jump
Young Animal
Young Champion
Young Gangan, bi-weekly
Young King
Young King Ours
Young Magazine

To recap, I normally don't buy any of these magazines on a regular basis. But, if I did, I'd put Afternoon, Evening and Ikki on the shopping list.

----------------------

Dates for this week:

Birthdays (16):
Roderic (Pope Alexander VI) Borja, 1/1/1431
Isaac Asimov, 1/2/1920
Urasawa Naoki, 1/2/1960
Victor Borge, 1/3/1909
Anne McCaffrey, 1/4/1926
Hayao Miyazaki, 1/5/1941
Rowan Atkinson, 1/6/1955
Danny Thomas, 1/6/1912
Charles Addams, 1/7/1912
David Bowie, 1/8/1947
Terry Brooks, 1/8/1944
Graham Chapman, 1/8/1941
Stephen Hawking, 1/8/1942
Soupy Sales, 1/8/1926
Larry Storch, 1/8/1923
Boris Vallejo, 1/8/1941

Died (8):
Victor Bouno, 1/1/1982
Jack. C Haldeman II, 1/1/2002
Kelly Freas, 1/2/2005
Erwin Schrodinger, 1/4/1961
Momofuku (Cup Ramen) Ando, 1/5/2007
Avery (Burns and Schreiber) Schreiber, 1/7/2002
Nikola Tesla, 1/7/1943
Galileo Galilei, 1/8/1642

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T14:33:00.001-08:00

Happy Year of the Dragon from Kagoshima!

Kumade

2011-12-30T18:23:00.000-08:00

I've never seen a Kumade (Bear's Paw) ornament used for New Year's before, but there's instructions for making one at the Yamaha papercraft pages, so I decided to make it for the upcoming holiday. It's one of the easier projects to construct. The only tricky part is in cutting out the gold coins and masks, then trying to figure out how to glue the coins correctly. Stands about 5" tall. Hopefully it will do its duty and attract good fortune next year.

Review; Sayonara Nippon

2011-12-29T17:56:00.001-08:00

Most people know of Katsuhiro Otomo from either his Akira or Steamboy movies. Some may have seen his work in Robot Carnival, Memories or Metropolis. But, he's been drawing manga since 1973, when he graduated from high school, although he didn't really get rolling until 1979. One of his earliest pieces was Sayonara Nippon, released as a collection of short stories in 1981. The Akira manga began serialization in 1982, and while there's a notable improvement in the character designs and pacing from Sayonara, the background artwork is just as good.

Sayonara Nippon (Farewell Japan), by Katsuhiro Otomo, Grade: B+
As mentioned above, SN is a collection of short stories, but they mostly have a common theme and overlapping characters. In the first story, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", the owner of a small bar, a dowdy older woman, gets bored with waiting on a sleeping drunk and three deadbeat members of a rock band. To shake things up, she decides to wave the band's tab in exchange for them backing her up at a nightclub. When showtime arrives, the band is shocked to see her all glammed up, and even more stunned to discover that she's packed the place with top staff members of various record companies. Turns out that back in the day, she was a knockout torch singer. The band members fail to sign a record deal, and the old woman falls asleep at the end of the night before the group photo is taken. Later, she's back behind her bar with just the photo as a souvenir, and the band members continue to bicker over which of them is the worse player.

(The bar owner, and the photo at the end of the torch song performance.)

This is followed by "Sayonara Nippon" parts 1-5, which revolve around a starving karate and judo master who is attempting to take over his late father's dojo in New York City. Over time, he befriends a Japanese woman living on the floor above him in the hotel, and a black kid that wants to take up lessons for free (the kid's father is a pro boxer, who beats the crap out of the karate master in exchange for a $50 fight fee to be used for the dojo lessons). Later, the "hero" rescues a white woman who's being assaulted, then gets insulted by her when he finds her coming out of a brothel with a client. She does relent and returns the gi jacket he'd given her (because her clothes were torn in the assault) with a Japanese flag sewn on the back.

In the next chapter, a Japanese businessman on a trip to his U.S. branch office gets lost in Harlem, and because he doesn't understand English, thinks that the black guys trying to point him in the right direction are trying to rob him. He gives the two all of his belongings and runs away. The businessman encounters the karate master and begs for help in getting money. (The master's response is "just go into the bathroom and cry"). Later, as the two Japanese are working at a restaurant to raise some cash, the businessman sees the two black guys and alerts the karate master. The fight is brief and succinct. But, when the master discovers that the two are undercover cops on a stake out, the situation gets muddled. Eventually, the businessman gets his stuff back and happily returns to Japan, leaving the karate master behind to gripe about not having gotten paid for his efforts.

(The karate master getting attacked in his dojo by angry gang members.)

With "Sayonara Nippon 4", a traveling Japanese guitarist makes his way from LA to NYC and decides to crash at the dojo for a few days. He's recognized by the girl on the floor above as a former band member from a big group in Japan, but the guitarist is realizing that there are a lot of people better than him. He then hitchhikes his way back to the west coast to return home. The karate sensei, on the other hand, is starting to develop an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and is getting close to losing his job as a part-time dishwasher at the restaurant.

(Points if you recognize the reference.)

Part 5 is probably one of the funniest things I've read from Otomo, ever. A Japanese cart vendor selling tai-yaki in NYC goes toe to toe with an Italian pretzel vendor. Initially the turf war consists of the tai-yaki vendor offering an "eat 30 tai-yaki and they're free campaign", while charging customers fifty cents per tai-yaki when they fail. The pretzel vendor tries the same thing, but the Japanese guy hires a shill who can wolf down all 30 pretzels easily. The Italian counters by hiring the karate master for two days in a row to eat the 30 tai-yaki. The first day goes without a hitch, but the second day, the tai-yakai are made double-size and the sensei gives up. The other shill returns for more pretzels, this time bringing a homeless guy with him. So, the sensei brings 5 homeless guys along himself. Eventually, both carts are swarmed by homeless guys that take all the money as well as the food and both carts. When the two groups run into each other at an intersection, the Japanese and Italian vendors declare war on each other and the rumble begins with both sides being backed up by hordes of homeless. The sensei prepares to attack, but the other shill simply asks how much he's getting paid. The shill is getting $5, and the sensei got $3. The shill adds that he went to Harvard, and this is the best money he can get afterward. The sensei and the Harvard grad then stand side-by-side and watch the brawl unfold.

(Jazz and small club venues make several appearances in SN.)

Chapter 7, "The Saint Comes Along the Road", follows several people as they interact within the Japanese music industry. The president of a record company is living a colorless life, both at work and at home. His assistant is about to be tasked with producing the record of a no-name young female singer. The singer runs away from her rich parents to work in a restaurant to succeed on her own. The three musicians from "East of the Sun" drop in on the record company assistant in order of bum money off him (they'd gone to school together and as their senpai he's forced to help them out). One morning, the company president receives a letter saying that four friends he'd made when he was working in New Orleans are planning to fly to Japan to meet him. The president then tasks the assistant - who can speak some English - to act as a tour guide for the 4 black jazz musicians. The 4 Americans are incredibly lively and shake things up wherever they go. They talk the assistant into booking a small club in Shibuya for them to perform for a small party for the company president. The next day, the female singer arrives at the studio, but the three deadbeat musicians are late - the one had hocked his drums already, and none of them have the money to take the train to the gig. Instead, the three run across Tokyo. Only the lead guitarist can cover the full 4 miles, and even he arrives 2 hours after the start time. The president gets called on the carpet by a rep of the corporate umbrella that owns the recording company, who complains that the company hasn't released a good record yet and it may be time to let the president go. He returns to the studio to find that his 4 friends are the ones backing the girl in the session and the sound coming out is really good. They're all using electric instruments, because even they had to change with the times (they're playing part-time at a disco club on Royal Street). When they finally leave for their flight home, the company president starts feeling that his life has infinite possibilities again.

(The chapters all have realistic splash pages that don't actually show up in the story itself.)

"The 'A' Murder Incident" wraps up the book. A Japanese part-timer is having a bad week. On the way home from his job, he walks in front of a construction site and gets hit on the head by a falling bucket. In compensation, the work crew gives him 50,000 yen ($125 USD at the time), but he has to share it with three of the deadbeat neighbors in his apartment building. When he gets to his room, he finds the dead body of Hiroshi, his neighbor, propped up against the outside wall in front of his window. He tries to figure out who could have killed Hiroshi, but the only suspect he can think of who had a grudge is himself. Two of the deadbeats come back to the apartments with a bottle of sake and descend on the guy's room to do some drinking, and one of them decides to play "tell a secret", adding that he once killed someone. The injured guy accuses the friend of killing Hiroshi and opens the door to show them the body. Later, the other two are walking along the street commenting on how someone can have forgotten that they were a murderer, while the injured one is at the police HQ trying to explain that someone else had done it and it's just a matter of figuring out their "trick". The detective in the room is looking annoyed. (The entire story revolves around the one guy suffering short-term memory loss after receiving a concussion.)

Summary: "Sayonara Nippon" is a gritty look at life in the ghettos in NYC and Tokyo, filled with fighting and some drugs. It's a brief introduction into the much grittier world of "Akira", minus the really black humor that Otomo revels in. If you like Otomo's later work, then you may be disappointed by SN. But, it's still funny, and several chapters have been fan scanilated already. Recommended.

Tintin and Tezuka, again

2011-12-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

A year ago, (Jan. 7), I speculated on the possibility that Osamu Tezuka had originally been influenced by Herge's Tintin. My rationale was that parts of the story in Shin Takara-jima are very similar to that in Red Rackham's Treasure, published 3-4 years earlier. The problem is that Tintin is drawn really well, and if Tezuka had one of Herge's books in front of him to copy in 1946-7, his first manga would have looked a lot more polished. That, plus I have no proof that Tezuka had access to the Belgian newspaper that Tintin was serialized in.

(Back cover art, showing the modern version of Tintin and Snowy for contrast.)

On the other hand, I've never really studied Herge's works all that closely, and I hadn't paid attention to his growth as an artist, either. So, when I received 4 Tintin books for Christmas (Tintin in the Congo, Tintin and the Picaros, The Castafiore Emerald and Tintin in the Land of the Soviets), I was particularly interested in the fact that the cover for Soviets is much more primitive and crude than all the others. Turns out that just as Tezuka hated what his mentor, Shichima Sakai, had done to Shin Takara-jima, Herge disliked the overly heavy handed anti-communist propaganda his editor had insisted on for his own first story. The difference is that Tezuka completely redrew Shin Takara-jima for later reprint, while Herge redrew and recolored everything BUT Soviets for the book releases (the earlier, cruder Tintin stories having originally appeared in black and white in the newspaper serials). According to the wiki entry, because Herge refused to do a book release, Soviets became a collector's item and a number of pirate copies came out. In the 70's, Herge relented and authorized an official book reprint, but with virtually no changes. (Compared to Tezuka, whose estate didn't authorize the original unretouched version of Shin Takara-jima to be reprinted until the 2000's.)

(Here we have a speeding car. Compare this to Petey's car in Shin Takara-jima. Notice how the headlights give the vehicle an anthropomorphic feel.)

Which means that with the unretouched Soviets we have access to Herge's earliest work (dating back to 1929), and we can compare that with Tezuka's own first story (released in 1947). And yes, the visual similarities are striking. Note that the other stories immediately following were equally crude but were redrawn to look the way they do now in modern reprints. Shin Takara-jima is what you would get if you copied early Tintin, and then changed it somewhat to "personalize" it. The Tintin in Soviets starts out very rough. At one point I thought I was looking at a 35-year-old man - pudgy and with bags under his eyes. There are a number of panels where the characters look like they've been copied directly from Windsor McCay (which is reasonable, given that Herge had stated that he really liked Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)) while in others Tintin himself is just a round ball with a stick nose and two little dots for eyes.

(Tintin received a black eye in a previous panel that leaves him looking like a zombie here.)

If you're a fan of Herge, then you probably already have all of the Tintin books. If not, then Soviets is definitely worth getting just to see Tintin proto version 1.0. If you're a fan of manga, it's worth getting Soviets to put it side-by-side with the original version of Shin Takara-jima to see if I'm wrong or not. I still have no proof that Tezuka had access to the unretouched Tintin artwork when he first started out, but I am willing to buy into this particular conspiracy theory.

(The polar bear is classic Windsor McCay. After a year of practicing, Herge is finally figuring out how to draw Tintin consistently, but still having trouble with Snowy's legs and trunk.)

Sunrise, again

2011-12-27T17:45:00.000-08:00

I was thinking of getting the sunrise again, for Christmas morning this time, but the sky was overcast and there was no point in getting up early for it. The next morning, I overslept by half an hour, but by checking out the webcam, it was obvious that, again, the weather was cloudy and there was no shot. That night was clear, though, so I set my alarm for 6 AM for the 27th.

It's getting close to freezing now, but there are sill people at the top of Shiroyama doing radio exercises, several of whom hung around to take photos of Sakura-jima, and the sunrise, afterward. My camera just does not handle night shots well, and low-light areas come out grainy. I took 52 photos, and only 12 came out well enough to be useful.

Lots of texture to the clouds this time. During the 1.5 hours I was on Shiroyama, the volcano was spitting out ash. Eventually, it thinned out enough to ride the air currents.

You can see the twisting to the clouds to the right.

Clouds look a little angry right now.

The sun finally starts clearing the hills in the distance. From this point, the camera gets swamped and the details of the sun's disk disappear into one huge white blob. Interestingly, while trying to frame the shots, I looked at the sun long enough to get an afterimage on my retinas that lasted 15 minutes. When I closed my eyes, the sun's disk as it cleared the hills appeared perfectly. Looked weird when I aimed at the sidewalk and the subtracting of colors made the afterimage turn a misty blue-gray.

False color image enhanced to better show the volcano ash riding the air currents.

Annotum sucks.

2011-12-26T15:12:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I was updating one of my knol articles over at the Google knol system when I noticed a statement at the top of the screen saying that knol is being discontinued in May. This bothered me a lot, because my blog article index is written up as a knol, as are my lists of Gakken Otona no Kagaku kits. In fact, I was in the process of typing up the English translations of the Japanese circuit names for Gakken kit #32, and my plan was to upload it as a new knol in a few days. And now, I'm being told that knol is being taken down. Sigh.

However, there was also a note saying that knol is being replaced by something called "annotum", tied in with wordpress. This is a little strange since wordpress competes with google's blogspot, which I'm already using. Anyway, since I'm not being given any choice, I set up a wordpress account and clicked on the link to export the knols over to annotum, This step worked pretty flawlessly. Then I tried to create a new article for the Gakken kit #32 entry. That was a nightmare. Annotum is badly implemented, and the steps for putting paragraph breaks into the document just ended up adding new blank sections at the bottom of the editor to what seems to be an academic paper. There are 50 different experiments for the Gakken kit, and I had just added section 9 when I accidentally clicked on "publish" when I really wanted to preview the document. When I went to edit it (annotum strips out carriage returns and puts everything into one big block of text), suddenly ctrl+enter worked for adding paragraph breaks and I'm now faced with having to move 9 sections of text (one per circuit) back into the main body again. I just gave up, deleted the new article, pasted my document from Word into a new knol, and exported the knol into annotum (which went without a hitch).

A couple days go by, and I decide I want to check the Otona no Kagaku kit list to add the release date for kit #33 (the desktop robotic vacuum cleaner) because Gakken just announced the official date (Jan. 30). This is when I discovered that for some reason, one of the pictures of the kit covers was resized wrong in annotum. There's no easy way to resize it, and no way to access the html code for the page. Then I find out that annotum demands to have image files hosted on its own server, meaning that I'd have to grab all of the cover images from Gakken and upload them to google, probably violating copyright laws. Then suddenly ALL of the hot links to the Gakken covers got stripped out and the entire page turned naked on me.

This is stupid. There's no point to my using annotum. But now, all of my knol articles are tied up in this crappy software because they've been exported over. Fortunately, knol has an option to bundle up all of the old articles into one big zip file that I could download to my laptop. Unfortunately, it's all in ONE BIG FILE. I spent a full day clipping out each of the 27 articles one by one, and fixing the mess created by google in this latest step ("a name=" code was stripped out, anything in kanji was corrupted, and the HTML code was "pretty-printed" in such a way as to mess up the final display format). On top of having to fix all of the links between the files. Double sigh.

The point is that my knols have been moved over to tsoj.manga.org. Additionally, I have the circuit descriptions for Gakken kit #32 uploaded now, if you're interested in them. But, I'm not willing to just give up the Wordpress blog account, so I'm going to use that for only writing about the Otona no Kagaku kits.

Commentary: Monthly Shonen Ace

2011-12-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

Monthly Shonen Ace is another one of those monster-sized phonebook magazines aimed at the audience of Afternoon, with a 974+ page count, and a 690 yen price tag.

Ace is targeted at older teenagers and college students, with genres that include SF, fantasy, sword and sorcery, school life and girls with guns. The artwork on the whole is above average, and there are quite a few popular titles and artists, including:

(Steins Gate)

Sora no Otoshimono - The TV anime aired last year.
Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu
Code Geass: Renya of Darkness
Keroro Gunso
Ratman
Blood-C
Steins Gate
Deadman Wonderland
Baka and Test
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Fate / Stay Night
Guyver the Bioboosted Armor

(Hitsugi no Chiaka)

Promising titles include:

Hitsugi no Chiaka - Sword and sorcery adventure following a young fighter. Chapter 2 runs in this issue.
Shinai Mijikashi Koiseyo Otome - Combat maids and Dansou shinobi
Tokyo ESP - Silly story, great artwork
Tokyo Ravens - ESPer fights
Tower of Aion - Manga based on the MMORPG
Bibliotheca Mystica de Dantalian - Post-WWI mystic power hunter mysteries

(Debi Maji)

Of the entire magazine, I think the only title I have any interest in at all is Deadman Wonderland, which has great artwork, action-packed fight scenes and good-looking characters. My main complaint with DW is that the story got weird in the middle and hard to follow. I had been reading the scanilations of Baka and Test, because the basic premise caught my eye, but there haven't been any new translated chapters out in a while.

("Mio and boar", from the Nichijou series.)

As for freebies... There are no foldout posters in this issue, but there is the one piece-it-together-yourself figure from Nichijou shown on the cover. It's very well-made. It's also part of a planned 3-figure set, with the third figure coming out next month. I bought this issue mainly because the figure looks moderately festive and I wanted something to put on the seat of the papercraft sleigh I'd made for Christmas.

(Guyver)

Summary: Lots of girls with guns, knives and scary mystic powers. Good artwork on the whole, and many well-known titles. I got this issue primarily for the freebie, but I'm glad that it gave me the chance to read the latest Baka and Test chapter. Recommended.

A warning - while there's no overt sex in this issue, there is some female nudity. If this offends you, then don't read this magazine.

Dates for this week:
-----------------------
Birthdays (10):
Steve (comedian) Allen, 12/26/1921
Charles Babbage, 12/26/1791
Alan King, 12/26/1927
Stan Lee, 12/28/1922
Nichelle (Lieutenant Uhura) Nichols, 12/28/1932
John von Neumann, 12/28/1903
Davy Jones, 12/30/1945
Rudyard Kipling, 12/30/1865
Micheal Nesmith, 12/30/1942
Roderic (Pope Alexander VI) Borja, 1/1/1431

Died (7):
Jack Benny, 12/26/1974
Ambrose Bierce, 12/26/1913
John D. ("Travis McGee") MacDonald, 12/28/1986
Robert (Boyle's Law) Boyle, 12/31/1691
Randall ("Lord Darcy") Garrett, 12/31/1987
Victor Bouno, 1/1/1982
Jack. C Haldeman II, 1/1/2002

Merry Anpan

2011-12-24T17:43:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas! (For those of you that celebrate it. Hoppy Holidays for everyone else.)

(There's a restaurant near the Kagoshima-chuo train station that serves fixed menu lunch and dinner sets, and they have an Anpanman figure out front to help advertise them. Recently, he's been gussied up for the coming season.)

Comment: Classic Children's Comics

2011-12-23T18:51:00.000-08:00

（All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)
(It's a big coffee table book. It was too large for the scanner.)

As a consequence of helping out Aaron Neathery a little on his Endtown webcomic, I found myself the recipient of one of the coolest Christmas gifts ever - a personalized copy of The TOON TREASURY of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. Spiegelman should be recognizable as the editor on RAW magazine and creator of Maus. He and RAW publisher Mouly got together and shifted through mountains of pre-Comics Code kids comics to distill down to a bare 375+ pages of prime examples of great art and storytelling. Artists in the collection include Walt Kelly (Pogo), Harvey Kurtzman (Mad Magazine), Carl Barks (Donald Duck) and C.C. Beck (Captain Marvel).

(Carl Barks at his best. Donald as a gopher just keeps cracking me up.)

The Treasury is a fast read - you can go through the entire book cover to cover in 4 hours, but it's better to spread it out over several days and enjoy the artwork. There's an amazing diversity in the stories (Little Lulu, Gerald McBoing-Boing, Fox and Crow, and Dennis the Menace) and style (contrasting Carl's Barks' "Donald" with Dave Berg's "Fantasticland Alice"). Nothing, though, can compare with Basil Wolverton's "Foolish Faces".

(Flopper the Frog, from Flip and Flopper.)

I read some of these comics when I was a kid in the 60's, and they're even better now. Although, I wish I could have discovered Dick Briefer's "Frankenstein" a long time ago; there's a lyrical whimsy to the monster that underlies its cartoony style and kid-friendly setup. Don Arr's "Flip and Flopper" is wonderfully twisted as well, with its statement that there are "22 miles of string in an acre of stringbeans". Gotta love that kind of conversion formula.

Of course, what makes the book special is Aaron's signature on the inside cover page, featuring Gustine. But I can't guarantee that you'll get an autograph of your own like this if you order the book off Amazon (order it anyway - who knows, you may get lucky). Highly recommended.

Quick review: Yuukoku no Rasputin, vol. 2

2011-12-22T17:47:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

A year ago, Yuukoku no Rasputin volume 1 came out (dated Dec., 2010, which means that it hit the shelves at least a month earlier). This is the manga version of Masaru Satou's novel Kokka no Wana. Masaru had been a Russian foreign affairs officer stationed in Moscow between 1998 and 2002. "Yuukoku no Rasputin" is a fictionalized account of what happened leading up to his arrest and and eventual conviction. The artwork is by horror artist Junji Itou (Gyo, Spirals) and Takashi Nagasaki produced the adapted script.

The primary groundwork leading up to Mamoru Yuuki's arrest - his dealings with the Russian government and some tit-for-tat public works that get twisted into "proof" of embezzlement - is laid out in volume 1, and then further illustrated in vol. 2. This time around, we're witness to more of the cat-and-mouse games the prosecutor, Takamura, uses against Yuuki in order to bring down Yuuki's boss. The premise of Masaru's account is that the boss, based on Muneo Suzuki, is the victim of party politics, and was railroaded for being on the losing side of a political war, that the entire case against Yuuki and his boss was simple misrepresentation of normal activities in the foreign affairs office. In this sense, volume 2 is one big mind-game played out between the "human information vending machine" Yuuki, and the guy that "keeps plugging in 100 yen coins", Takamura.

(Yuuki (left) uses mental gymnastics to hold his own against Takamura (right).)

The artwork is solid, trademark Junji grittiness, and the pacing is slow and deliberate. Don't expect "The Bourne Identity" here - no big brawl scenes or car chases. Just one person's attempts to keep his sanity within the Japanese penal system as a criminal suspect, where even the opportunity to enjoy a spoonful of ice cream has to be considered part of a "relaxing vacation". Recommended.

(Fictional version of Muneo Suzuki.)

Doc Rat Caption Contest Winner

2011-12-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

Back around June, I was introduced by Aaron Neathery to the Doc Rat webcomic drawn a by real-life Australian doctor who goes by the pen-name "Jenner". At the time, I was visiting the comic's web page and I noticed the link "Prizes". Turns out that Jenner draws a stand-alone joke panel every 2 months and then challenges his readers to come up with a caption for it. Best caption gets used in the final artwork, and the winner gets the signed original in the mail. With nothing better to do, I submitted a caption for the July-August entry, and admittedly I felt that the joke was really weak. A day or two later I got an email from the artist telling me that I'd been the first to in send an entry. Then, time went by.

(Caption Contest drawing #49, from Doc Rat, by Jenner, with the winning caption. All rights to these images belong to Jenner. Image posted here with permission from the artist.)

The Sept.-Oct. entry got posted and time continued to go by without a July-Aug. winner being announced. So, I sent an email in asking if he'd gotten busy and fallen behind schedule (it usually takes about a week or 2 for him to tabulate all the entries, pick a winner, sign the art and mail it out, so it's not something that happens right away), and yes, things had gotten hectic, but he promised to catch up on the backlog. About a week later, I got another email announcing that I'd WON the July-Aug. prize. Cool. I still think that my joke is weak, but now my name is up on the Past Prizes page, and I'm not going to complain about that. (Although I'm afraid it may hurt my chances for winning a second time, and I think the Sept.-Oct. picture is much funnier.) However, he'd gotten busy again and didn't actually get around to mailing the drawing out until Dec. 5th. It's taken almost 6 months since I first learned about the contest to get the artwork in my hands, but better late than never.

("Doc Rat" sketch that was included on the outside of the package next to the mailing address. All rights belong to Jenner. Image posted here with permission from the artist.)

Dolphin Port illuminations

2011-12-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

The second of the illuminations mentioned in the Update newsletter is at Dolphin Port, a 5-8 minute walk from City Hall. I didn't notice the number of LEDs for the display, but it may be under the 100,000 of the City Hall lights. The displays are spread out around the shopping complex, with the most eye-catching one being the Christmas tree setup at the main front entrance.

A number of the displays are animated, either with alternating strings of lights turning on and off, or small motors driving limited-motion creations. I went on a Thursday at 8 PM, when there was little foot traffic. The air temp. was probably around 45 degrees F, and much lower than the people here care for. Additionally, now is the time of the Bonnenkai parties (end of year drinking parties), and a lot of people may have been at those. Then again, Dolphin Port is just a few blocks from the Tenmonkan shopping complex, which also bleeds off a lot of the traffic that would rather go somewhere covered and with a lot more shops.

(The two smaller white figures between the snowman and the reindeer are Moomin and Miffy, which are both very popular in Japan now.)

(A panorama view of Dolphin Port shot from the edge of the bay, facing away from Sakura-jima.)

City Hall Illuminations

2011-12-19T16:30:00.000-08:00

There's a local monthly newsletter that is produced by the city of Kagoshima, called Update. I've been grabbing a copy from the Kenmin Kaikan (International Exchange Center) whenever it comes out. The only real drawback to it was that the newsletter wouldn't come out until the middle of the month, after half of the listed events had already occurred. But, it has nice pictures, and some background information on the area. Unfortunately, the publishers have decided to discontinue the paper edition as of January, so the only version remaining will be the online one.

The December cover story is on illuminations in the Kagoshima prefectural area. Most of the lighting displays are reachable by car, and in the U.S. I wouldn't hesitate visiting them all. But here, without a car, and not being able to get to most of them by train, I'm only interested in the ones I can easily walk to. There are two within 20 minutes of me - Shiyakusho, and Dolphin Port (as mentioned on Sunday, there's no real illumination at the Chuo train station). "Shiyakusho" translates to "City Hall", and it's on Izuru Douri (Izuru Street), just a couple of blocks from the Kenmin Kaikan. In front of City Hall, facing the bay, is a wide walkway between a couple city streets, and this is where they put up 100,000 LEDs. It's fairly plain compared to the display in Shinjuku, but people in the area do come out to take photos anyway. At 7 PM, 8 PM and 9 PM, the lights are turned off for about a minute, and then turned back on.

At the far end of the walkway, near the entrance to the Sakurajima ferry, one of the hotels put up its own lights.

Commentary: Young Champion

2011-12-18T18:19:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Young Champion is the third of the magazine-style magazines that I got, and is definitely the raunchiest. It is at the same level as Young Animal. The cover typically features scantily-clad young women, with 1 or 2 photo pin-up spreads inside. This month's girls are from SKE-48, the Nagoya-based branch of the "-48 project" that includes the more well-known AKB-48 in Akihabara, Tokyo.

(Demekin, by Hijime Yuu and Masaki Sata. A story about biker punks)

Three of the titles are overtly sexual in nature, falling in the "soft-porn" category, while still being censored according to Japanese morality laws. The others are a range of slice-of-life, office worker, street gang and adventure stories. Most have just average artwork, and the only title recognizable to western fans is the hyper-violent Wolf Guy.

(In "Touhai", a group of guys are playing in a life-or-death game of mahjong against a serial killer. If they lose, one of their relatives or friends gets hung by the neck from a noose. By Shinasaka Koji.)

I didn't see anything that showed much promise, although on the upside the magazine did include one freebie - an SKE-48 clear file.

(Ayumi Tachihara's "Jingi S", AKA - "Jingi-tachi". I should mention that when I first came to Japan, I discovered Ayumi's "Maji!" in a used bookstore and read the first couple books. It was about members of the yakuza, and lasted 50 volumes, from 1987 to 1996, running in Shonen Champion. He also created the 33 book Jingi.)

Summary: Sex, blood and gore. Only two recognizable titles (Wolf Guy and Jingi S). No plans to buy future issues.

Lucky Amu Christmas

2011-12-17T17:55:00.000-08:00

The open space in front of the department store inside the Kagoshima-chuo train station is set up for Christmas now.

As a reminder, Christmas in Japan doesn't have much of the religious connotations that it does in the west. For the most part, it's a time for romance between couples. The "religious" holiday, which is spent with friends and family, is the first few days at the beginning of the new year.

The space on either side of the tree is designed for couples to have their photo taken together. The volcano is clearly visible behind the tree when you're in the plaza, but is completely washed out in the photo because of the contrast imbalance.

Later, I decided to go up to the train station to see if they had anything in the way of seasonal illuminations, like what can be found at the south side of Shinjuku station. While the AmuPla Christmas lights were turned on, only a couple of trees along the street car line had any lights on them at all. This struck me as kind of strange, since Chuo station is the largest train station in the city and has the most foot traffic, so why no dedicated illuminations? Walking down to Tenmonkan along the streetcar street was equally dark and uninteresting. It's not until you get to the Tenmonkan shopping complex 1/2 mile away that there's anything like Christmas lights on the street poles, or the sides of the buildings, and those are there just as part of the shops' advertising (like what you'd find in a mall in the U.S.)

-------------------------------------

Dates for the week, Dec. 18-25

Birthdays (11):
Alfred Bester, 12/18/1913
Jack. C Haldeman II, 12/18/1941
Michael Moorcock, 12/18/1939
Keith Richards, 12/18/1943
Steven Spielberg, 12/18/1946
Josepf Stalin, 12/18/1876
Charlie Callas, 12/20/1924
Harry Shearer, 12/23/1943
Fritz Leiber, 12/24/1910
Isaac Newton, 12/25/1642
Rod ("Twilight Zone") Serling, 12/25/1924

Died (8):
Majel (Nurse Chapel) Barrett, 12/18/2008
Foster Brooks, 12/20/2001
Carl Sagan, 12/20/1966
Victor Borge, 12/23/2000
Karel ("R.U.R.") Capek, 12/25/1938
Charlie Chaplin, 12/25/1977
W. C. Fields, 12/25/1946
Dean Martin, 12/25/1995

Me

2011-12-16T18:53:00.000-08:00

One of the first tasks of the Japanese conversational lessons I've been taking since September was for each of us to give a 20 minute speech in Japanese, at 2 people a day. When my turn came, I spent about 15 minutes teaching people how to make the Celes origami (took me 8 hours in advance to cut up and pre-fold the 180 strips needed to make the 6 balls to hand out at the end of the class). Someone took photos of each of us and handed out copies some time later. These are the two that I was given. This was at the end of my speech during the Q&A, when I was asked where I got the pattern for the Celes, and I chose to use the opportunity to talk about Otona no Kagaku and show off my robotized version of the Rhino.

Misc manga

2011-12-15T17:45:00.001-08:00

I mentioned in the review for "Girl Who Leapt Through Time, After" that I'd gotten some manga from a guy that was cleaning his shelves off at his family's home before returning to school in the U.S. I kind of cherry-picked titles from some photos he'd given me, so what I got was either stuff that I wanted to read (Acony, Gunslinger Girls) or that caught my eye and I was curious about (Black God, Girl Who Leapt Through Time). There are a couple books that I don't feel like doing full reviews of, so I'll just comment on them here.

Gunslinger Girl is probably the most infamous of the titles in the U.S., so I don't need to go into much detail. It is an action-filled story, and if you like weapons, you'll probably want to read this one. My problem with it isn't from the ethical angle of having young girls mechanized and turned into government-sponsored assassins, but instead is more art-related. Basically, the artist can not draw cigarettes. The adult characters almost all smoke, and the cigarettes all look like little twigs in their hands. This inability to cope with scale often includes the sizes of the weapons, so that an adult holding an Uzi looks like they've got a toy prop. This distracts me from the rest of the story.

I've seen Black God many times at the bookstores in the U.S., and I just can't get past the cover art on volume 1. Is that supposed to be a boy or a girl? Is she really fighting people on the streets barefoot? And her fighting style is boxing? So, I wanted to get volume 1 just to get a little more of a feel for the manga. And yeah, it's dumb. Doesn't help that it's a fake manga by two Koreans. I've written before about how I think that manwha that tries to copy the look and feel of manga just doesn't work for me. In part it's because the art's not all that good, but it's also that it feels like a cheap rip-off storywise. The incidental male characters in Black God are mostly jerks, which I find boring. No interest in reading this one any further.

Manga Fox has HandxRed, which I read scanilated before getting first two volumes of the original Japanese books. The story is by Hideyuki Kurata, and the art is from Hoshi Itsuki. I haven't seen anything from Hoshi before, but Hideyuki is pretty well-known, with Cloth Road, R.O.D. - Read or Dream, and Train+Train. Actually, I thought Train+Train had a really good premise and some decent artwork. It's a shame that the ending was so godawful weak. I could never get into R.O.D., though, which I considered silly with uninteresting character designs. Which brings me to HandxRed. Jim and Luca live in a fantasy universe where magicians at a specific school are raised to fight on the front lines of a war. Luca learns some forbidden arts and betrays Jim in order to get immortality. As a victim of a curse, Jim spends 100 years in limbo, and is only allowed 10 days on earth trying to track down Luca before the curse kicks in again. It's not really a bad storyline or plot, and the art is fairly decent. Most of the characters are likable, while still able to be irritating, too. The problem is that after following Jim through some time-hopping adventures and laying down the basic premise, the manga gets lost in a flashback for 1.5 volumes and wrapped up in a twisted future that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'll probably follow any new chapters that show up on Manga Fox, but I won't go out of my way to do so.

Along with "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - After", I also received the manga version of the original 2006 movie - Toki o Kakeru Shojo The story is described pretty thoroughly in the wiki page. The artwork in the manga isn't bad; certainly better than for "After". It's an easy read, and the character designs are pretty clean. My problem with it is that the story is dumb. A girl learns to travel through time literally by leaping through it, and then uses up all her chances by repeatedly doing all-night karaoke and cheating on her tests. The "time slip" method seems to simply let her consciousness travel through her body to an earlier period (she can go back but not forward), and her body never seems to age. There's at least one other time slipper who can travel physically, but the author doesn't bother with the danger of him meeting himself. When she discovers that the number of times she can time slip is limited, she wastes them by trying to keep her two male friends from trying to date her (which would break up the current group dynamic), only to cause one or the other of the boys to die in a train accident. At the end, she acknowledges that liking the boys is ok, but that's about as far as she gets. Granted, Japanese 17-year-old girls have a reputation for being self-absorbed airheads, but this is a bit much for me to swallow. Still, the movie is very popular here, which I guess means something one way or the other.

(The initial accident where the heroine learns to time slip.)

Finally, I present Telepathy Girl Ran. Originally a light novel by Atsuko Asano, TGR has been adapted for manga by Toshitsugu Iida, and as an anime TV series. I'd tried watching the anime on NHK a number of times, but it struck me as being a little too juvenile. But, I had a shot at vol. 3 of the manga, so I figured that I might as well at least try checking it out. And yeah, it's aimed at young girls. Young Ran Isozaki can read people's thoughts when she touches them. Midori Naha is a new transfer student that develops a crush on Ran's older brother. She has similar powers to Ran's, but the two of them don't always see the same supernatural stuff around them the same way. In volume 3, A friend of Ran's father invites him out to his cabin in the mountains, and Midori, Ran, and Ran's friend Rui tag along on the trip. At the cabin, they meet the man's pet monkey, and hike out to an area where some flowers are growing under some rocks. The flowers seem to be connected to an incident in the man's past, and they attack Midori when she gets too close, cutting a gash in her hand. At the end of the book, the group returns to the cabin without resolving anything. The artwork is good, if stylistic and aimed at a young female audience. Both Ran and Midori and look very cute at times, but the other characters often come off more poorly. Not my cup of tea.

Reindeer and Sleigh papercraft

2011-12-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

Along with the Kadomatsu papercraft, I also downloaded the Reindeer and sleigh from the Yamaha site.

I started with the sleigh. It's 4 sheets, and again I used 0.18mm stock. The actual file is in PDF format, which can be imported into Gimp one page at a time. The design is a simple white on white, so in Gimp I painted the pieces brown and tan just to see what would happen. The first few parts assembled fine, but the undercarriage sled warped from the glue. Fortunately, it's not normally visible, and it did warn me about what would happen with the larger flat blocks on top, so I made sure to place a small book on top of each one as the glue dried. The only real problem I ran into was that the sled cowling was drawn about 0.5 cm too short in the original plans. In fact, the paper runs out right at the top edge of the hood, where the glue strip part should start. I covered this with a folded length of paper to act as a reinforcer and to make it look like the white trim was intentional. Overall project time was 4 hours.

I then tackled the left-side reindeer. This was the trickiest thing I've made from Yamaha so far. Again, there's not enough written instructions to know how to put everything together. Also, you have to pinch the paper along the center lines of the legs and antlers to give them more of a 3-D effect. This alone took forever. What gave me the most trouble though was in figuring out how to attach the rear legs. There really needs to be markings on the body itself to indicate the glue tab points. By the time I got to the forelegs, the glue had dried enough on the back that I couldn't pull the back legs off to reposition them. The result is that it looks like the thing is squatting. Total time, 2 hours.

When I got to the reindeer with the raised front leg, I knew more about what I was doing, and I rolled the paper of the body to make it wider and puffier. I wrapped the glue tabs from the legs so that they'd attach better, and I spent more time determining how the legs would stand before attaching them. Then I discovered that the antlers attach to the head, and the head to the neck, in a different way than what I used on the first reindeer. So now the head looks weird to me. At least the reindeer stands up better than the first one does. Total time, 2 hours.

The next flaw in the design is that the circular harness that the two reindeer fit inside for pulling the sleigh was drawn at least an inch too long. The resulting harness loop looks twice as big as in the assembly instructions picture. I had to cut both loops and resize them to fit the reindeer better. I get the feeling that the artist altered the artwork for the sleigh just before publishing it, and neglected to test build it to see if he'd screwed anything up. This is definitely a case where you need to check each subassembly several times before gluing anything. Because another thing you'll catch is that the back of the sleigh is too heavy for having only two supports at the front half. I'm using a pencil sharpener to prop up the back end and hide the sagging.

Still, the entire display looks fine from a distance, and it's serving its purpose as a big greeting card (rather than my going out and spending $15-$25 for something the same size from Hallmark).

Kadomatsu papercraft

2011-12-13T15:29:00.001-08:00

Right after finishing the JLPT test, I wanted to tackle a Christmas-related papercraft project to use as a kind of Christmas card. Naturally, the only place I went to was the Yamaha entertainment site. The first project that caught my eye was the kadomatsu. It took about 3 hours to complete. It was only after I had it done that it occurred to me that this decoration is used more for the New Year's celebration. According to the papercraft write-up, there should be two of these, one on either side of the front entrance to ensure good health and longevity for the year. I have to decide whether I want to make one more towards the end of the year. It's actually a little tricky, because the inside caps are a tight fit inside the bamboo tubes. Also, there's little in the way of written instructions, so I was left guessing to exactly what the correct steps should be. It didn't turn out too bad. I used 0.18mm thick paper, which is good enough for this project. It stands about 4" tall.

Moon Wheel

2011-12-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

On Dec. 10th, 2011, there was a full lunar eclipse over Japan. (In the U.S., it was only partial, since the eclipse would be just starting as dawn was breaking. In Japan, it was supposed to start around 6 PM, when it was already dark, and peak at 11:30 PM. I say "supposed to" because it was raining in Kagoshima that night. The sky was perfect in Tokyo of course, so a bunch of other people got the photos that I wanted. Wouldn't have mattered much though, because my camera can't handle night shots well. I keep wishing I could afford a better camera, but that won't happen until I get full-time work.

Anyway, the next night, naturally, the sky was crystal clear and the full moon hung above the city at 7 :30. So I decided to go around to the west side of Amupla, and see if I could frame the shot against the ferris wheel on the roof of the building. Only 1 of the 20 photos came out at all usable.

Commentary: Newtype Ace

2011-12-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Of all the genres in manga, the one that I've never really developed a taste for (and there are a few of them I don't like, actually) is "giant robots". The idea of single-person big mecha shooting it out in space is kind of silly. The suits are ill-designed to zip around in a vacuum, and most of the design is wasted by having all of that hydraulics and gear work needed for running around on a planet's surface. It makes more sense to create two separate machines dedicated to those tasks - a tank, and a battle cruiser, and populate them with 5-20 people that can take on individual tasks.

But, that's just me.

(Tiger and Bunny 4-Koma)

As I was going through the magazines on the shelves at Kinokunya, I really wanted to get something with good freebies, and a Christmas theme. My choices seemed to be limited to one publication that included a pair of patterned boxer shorts (that wouldn't fit me), another desk clock, or something with another clear file. Hoping that January would have better options with the "New Year's gifts", I kind of closed my eyes and grabbed the one with the clear file.

(Fukusou no Ma-ku Merudo, ("Mark Meld Congestion"))

Newtype Ace is a new magazine launched last September as a team-up between Newtype and Gundam Ace. The stories all revolve around giant robots, and are placed in the Gundam, Macross and Fullmetal Panic! universes. Some of the artwork is fairly lame, and a lot of the stories are interactions between characters, rather than being battle adventures. There are a number of Yon-koma jokes, and some articles on the making of related anime.

(Border Break mecha designs.)

If you like Gundam, then you'll love this monster of a monthly magazine. Freebies included two foldout posters (one by Masamune Shirow), and the clear file. 580 yen, 700 pages.

(Poster 1)

(Shirow poster)

-----------------------

Dates for Dec. 11 to Dec. 18.

Birthdays (20):
Hector Berloiz, 12/11/1803
Jamie Foxx, 12/13/1967
Kenichi ("Gunsmith Cats") Sonoda, 12/13/1962
Morey ("Dick Van Dyke Show") Amsterdam, 12/14/1908
Spike Jones, 12/14/1911
David ("Bill the Galactic Hero") Bischoff, 12/15/1951
Tim Conway, 12/15/1933
John ("Keep the Giraffe Burning") Sladek, 12/15/1937
Arthur C. Clark, 12/16/1917
Philip K. Dick, 12/16/1928
Randall ("Lord Darcy") Garrett, 12/16/1927
Piet Hein, 12/16/1905
Ludwig van Beethoven, 12/17/1770
Jack L. ("Well World") Chalker, 12/17/1944
Alfred Bester, 12/18/1913
Jack. C Haldeman II, 12/18/1941
Michael Moorcock, 12/18/1939
Keith Richards, 12/18/1943
Steven Spielberg, 12/18/1946
Josepf Stalin, 12/18/1876

Died (6):
Bettie Page, 12/11/2008
Peter Boyle, 12/12/2006
Blake Edwards, 12/15/2010
Lee Van Cleef, 12/16/1989
Dorothy L. Sayers, 12/17/1957
Majel (Nurse Chapel) Barrett, 12/18/2008

Small Adventures, #23

2011-12-10T17:25:00.000-08:00

Normally when I write up one of these "small adventure" entries, there's no accompanying photo. The reason is that if I'd taken a picture, I'd write it up as a regular blog entry. This time is a little different in that the adventure occurred when I'd specifically set out to take photos. It's just that only one turned out at all well.

Back last summer, I'd gone down to Dolphin Port at 4 AM to catch the sunrise coming up behind the volcano. I was hoping for a bright red silhouette, but it had been a cloudy morning, and the sun was actually rising some distance north of the northern slope. So, over the last few weeks, I've been watching the weather and monitoring the Sakurajima webcam to see if the sun's path had gone far enough south to try going out again. On Nov. 28th, I had to get up early anyway, so I planned on returning to Dolphin Port before the sun came up around 6:30. In fact, I neglected to set my alarm and woke up at 6:15. I put on my winter jacket, grabbed my camera and made it out the door 5 minutes later. The sky was overcast enough that I couldn't get a feel for how cloudy it was with it that dark out, and the buildings surrounding me blocked off the view of the volcano so I couldn't tell if it was cloud-covered or not. On the other hand, the sky was lightening up fast enough that the 20 minutes needed to get to Dolphin Port would cause me to miss the shot.

Instead, when I got to Terukuni Shrine, I turned left and made my way around the south wall of the shrine and to the back in order to get to the path leading up to the observation deck at the top of Shiroyama. I'd run the 6 blocks to the steps, so when I started climbing I got out of breath almost immediately. It's 107 meters (350 feet) to the top, kind of like walking up 30 flights of stairs, and I had to stop twice to bring my heart rate back down. The stairs open up on the back of the parking lot in front of the souvenir shops, and at 6:30 AM, there were already 4 guys out with leaf blowers, cleaning off the sidewalks and parking lot. Most of them greeted me with a friendly "ohayo gozaimasu", and one congratulated me on making the climb up. At this point, I was regretting putting on the jacket, because I was sweating heavily and the air temp was probably in the low 60's (last week, it got down into the high 40's during the night).

I made my way to the observation point, and found 20 people of various ages all doing "radio taiso" (stretching exercises to the music playing over the radio). A few minutes later, the music ended and most of them just disappeared into the trails. The parking lot was empty and few of them seemed to be workers at the souvenir stands, so I can't imagine why anyone would hike up the hill just to do radio taiso. No idea where they all went afterward.

The sun still hadn't cleared the horizon, but the sky was already getting pretty bright. As I was watching the ash coming off the top of the volcano and blowing across the bay just north of me, I tried to gauge whether there'd be a good photo or not. Didn't look like it. About this time, a young woman walked up to the observation point and we got to talking. Turns out that her apartment is close to mine, and she regularly jogs up the main trail in front of the hill (behind the history museum) and pretty much takes a photo of Sakurajima every morning. She showed me one of the pictures taken a few days earlier and it was exactly the kind that I'd been hoping for that morning. Sigh.

At 6:50, another group of about 10 people suddenly gathered and music over the PA started up for a second radio taiso for the morning. When it finished, the woman came back over and told me to try contacting one school for a teaching opening, and mentioned that there's a foreigner's meeting circle at the city municipal office that I hadn't known about, making the trip up the hill worth the effort. She then jogged back down the way she came and I returned via the stairs again. The sun never did come out. Stupid sun.

I still don't understand why anyone would climb up 35 flights of stairs just to do morning stretches.

Blue Ball

2011-12-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

Saw this one while walking to the International Exchange center for my Japanese class.

It's either a large ashtray, or a small time machine.

Review: Space Family Carlvinson

2011-12-08T17:55:00.000-08:00

Ok, now here's one that surprises me - there's no wiki entry on Lucu Lucu. Manga Fox has the complete run, and there's a good write-up on author Yoshitoo Asari in Japanese, but nothing in the English wiki. Lucu Lucu was one of the more popular gag manga in Afternoon magazine, and was very funny, in my opinion. But there's very little written about it on the western side. According to ANN, Asari also worked as the designer on one of the Evangelion movies, assisted on the character designs for the Evangelion TV series, and wrote the equally bizarre Wahhaman manga.

An earlier title that has even less visibility is Space Family Carlvinson. I ran into this manga back in the early 1990's when I first came to Japan and was browsing a used bookstore in the anime color book adaptation section. The book used stills from the OAV to retell the anime in print form. The slapstick humor was hilarious and the story setup was just insane. So, when I had the chance to pick up the original manga for free, I jumped at it. I wasn't disappointed.

Space Family Carlvinson by Yoshitoo Asari, Grade: A
A traveling troupe of alien performers sideswipe another spaceship and cause it to crash on a nearby planet. The only inhabitants of the damaged ship are two adult humanoids (presumably Earthling humans), who died in the crash, and their surviving infant daughter. The actors decide to take care of the baby until a rescue ship arrives, and in order to provide a stable environment for the girl, named "Corona", set up their tent on the planet and enact their longest-running show to-date as her "family". It's a sit-com, so every chapter is just one joke after another, with some sentimentality as well, as the characters bond with each other. There's no point in recapping the chapters, so I'll just highlight the main characters.

Mother: A large furry rat. She's the defacto leader of the troupe, and the one who was driving the ship when it clipped the Earthling craft.

Father: A battle robot. The dimmest bulb in the box, but the most devoted member of the troupe when it comes to caring for Corona.

Corona: The star of the series, more or less. A 4-year-old girl with a curiosity streak a mile wide. Very similar to Arale-chan from Dr. Slump but not as indestructible.

Tur-kun: A creature pulled straight from a 1980's Hollywood horror flick. Identified as Corona's "pet squirrel". At one point, is shown with the full name "Turbo" (where "bou" is a suffix added to boy's names). Loves to get into close-up shots to the reader for the shock value. In one chapter, he states that he is a pet squirrel, not a cauliflower.

Belka: An elf-like humanoid who loves weapons and fighting. When panicked can generate enormous strength. When over-heated, becomes brain-dead. Spends most of her time acting as the local police force.

Andy-kun: One half of an android (the legs and head part). The hardware technician in the troupe. Speaks with a metallic accent.

Parka: Not exactly sure what Parka is, or its role in the troupe. Mostly it just stands in one place.

Note: The title is an obvious play on The Swiss Family Robinson, but the story lines have nothing to do with each other. Another possible connection is with Lost in Space, but again there's no overlap in stories or character designs. Carl Vinson was the Democratic House Rep for Georgia for 50 years, and served on the House Armed Services Committee. He was a strong advocate for the Navy, and the USS Carl Vinson nuclear aircraft carrier was named after him. This carrier was docked in Japan for a while during the early 80's, and may be the reference for the title of the manga, which ran from 1985 to 1996. The OAV came out in 1988.

There's also a papercraft page if you want to make your own Family.

According to the Japanese wiki, "belka" comes from "berserker" and the design for Parka is a parody of the Japanese cover of the Fred Saberhagen Masque of the Redshift Berserker short story.

Pocky One Piece Board Game

2011-12-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

I broke down and bought the One Piece Giant Pocky anyway. $4 USD for 5 large chocolate-covered baked pretzel sticks. I think the regular sized Pocky taste better, but the big ones aren't that bad (just over-priced). I was amazed, though, to find that the game board inside the box was a large poster-sized fold-out sheet measuring about 3' by 4'. It's a very elaborate game, with the playing pieces and a single die printed on the back of the box. I don't have anyone to play with at the moment, but it's still a very good deal for the price. Probably one of the best toy tie-in bargains I've seen so far.

Glico One Piece Bisco

2011-12-06T14:56:00.001-08:00

The snackfood maker, Glico, has had One Piece tie-ins before, but now they're going full-out with many of their brands covered with images of Luffy and gang. There's a good six different fronts for the Bisco biscuits, but most of the backs are the same - either a "spot the differences" 2-card sheet, or a "find the matching Chopper" 3-card set. Out of 20+ boxes, only one had the below maze on the back. With the boxes of chips and packets of cookies, there's just an image of one of the characters on the front. On the other hand, the giant Pocky boxes have playing pieces for a board game on the back, and a suggestion that there may be the board game itself inside (although, the Giant Pocky is $4 USD for 5 sticks and I haven't justified spending the money for it to find out what's inside the box.) The Bisco snacks are 150 yen (about $2) for 10 packets of little vanilla cookie sandwiches.

(The text tells you to collect all of Chopper's friends along the way to the goal.)

JLPT Take 3

2011-12-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

I first took the Japanese Language Proficiency test in July of 2010, in the city of Fuchinobe, about an hour out from Tokyo by train. It was the first time the new N3 test was being offered, and about 500 people were at the women's university in Fuchinobe for that one test (250 each in 2 lecture halls). I have no idea how many total test locations there were around Tokyo, but there must have been several. N2 and N1 were also being held at the same time. It was easy to find the test rooms, because the line of people stretching from the train station to the campus was about 1 kilometer long, and broken only at the intersections where dedicated police were directing traffic. Along the way, there were other officers holding signs pointing where to turn at the corners. I just barely passed that one, with 60% (minimum passing score was 60%).

The next N2 test was held that December, and I applied on a whim just before the September 30th deadline to get a feel for how hard it would be. I got the vocabulary, grammar and kanji study books from ASK publishing, and read them on the train during the 1 hour rides to and from work in Akihabara for 2 months leading up the the test. I was again assigned to Fuchinobe, and there were again 250 people in the lecture hall where I had the exam. I really got lost with the questions, and scored 28%, which was a lot lower than I'd thought I'd gotten. The 700+ kanji and 2000 combinations, plus grammar kept throwing me for a loop.

I'd planned on taking the N2 again last July, but with having to move to a new city after the March 11 earthquake, I figured that it would be better to wait. I'd brought the kanji book with me, and got a new copy of the grammar book. This time, instead of bothering with vocabulary, I got the reading practice book from ASK, and started some pre-study at the end of August. Thinking that the application deadline was at the end of October, I almost missed out of the Dec. 2011 test. On Sept. 25 I discovered my mistake and ran to Kinokuniya bookstore only to find that they'd sold out of the test application forms ($7 USD) weeks earlier. Unlike in Tokyo, there are only two stores in Kagoshima authorized to sell the applications. Luckily, the second one was Junko at Maruya Gardens, and they still had 20 copies left. I got everything filled out with the $60 entry fee and 2 passport photos and in the registered mail by the 27th. At the end of November, I got the test voucher back, and I took the test on Dec. 4th.

Remembering the setup in Fuchinobe, and having a Google map showing the test location at the Kagoshima University 2 miles away from my apartment, I didn't really think I'd need to scout out the campus in advance. Fortunately, I took the tram out on the 3rd, and spent 15 minutes looking around for the building. The next day, I left the apartment at 10:45 AM, picked up the next tram just before the light changed, and got to the campus by 11:15 (stopping at a grocery store along the way to get some canned coffee and doughnuts). On campus, there was no indication of a test being held at all. Most of the signs were just pieces of paper taped on the building doors stating which floors each test was on. No police, no one holding signs along the way, nothing. No lines. Very few people walking around, either.

The test started at 12:30. N2 was held in 6 small classrooms, 3 on 2 different floors, 24 people per room. Rather than being just 500 people at one among many test sites in Tokyo, this time it was only one site for 150 people in the entire prefecture. We had to wait 10 minutes during the instruction phase so that everyone in the entire country would start answering the questions at the exact same time, and it takes longer to hand out the question sheets in Tokyo than anywhere else. There was a 30 minute break in the middle where we could go outside and rest. The majority of the test takers were Asian. Several that I talked to were from Taiwan. My room had 3 other people from the U.S., and I only saw one black woman, who sounded African-American. The one American guy I talked to was an English teacher on his second year in the JET program, from Michigan. (I know that there were at least 2 women from Indonesia taking the N3 test, because they're in my Japanese conversation class on Wednesdays.)

The common consensus from people that had failed the test before was that it was much harder this time. It certainly felt that way to me. At least half of the kanji made no sense to me, and during the listening section, several of the questions went by so fast that they didn't even register. I'm hoping that at a minimum I fail with a higher score than I'd gotten last year. I'd settle for 50% (passing is still 60%).

What's interesting though is that this time, my attitude at the end of the test had changed. It doesn't feel like an arbitrary exam with a bunch of needless memorization and a pointless test score at the end. A lot of people will cheat on the test to get a passing score, either for school or to get accepted for a job. But, to me, it really is a measure of language comprehension. If you know Japanese, and you use it in daily life, you'll get at least 60% on the listening test. You still need at least 60% for reading, kanji and grammar as well, but that's doable if you focus on harder reading materials (one American I met at the test, who was going for the N1, said that he likes practicing with the Japanese version of the National Geographic magazine because the language used is so pretentious).

The question then becomes, are the available study books useful for self-study for the N2? I'd say, "no". They're not focused on what shows up in the test, there's not enough examples for the grammar points, and the books from ASK seem to be better suited for use in a classroom with a dedicated instructor, since they don't have enough explanation. Another thing I dislike is that the ASK books have the hiragana pronunciations right next to the kanji, which makes it harder to memorize the kanji on later re-readings. Ideally, the books should be in software format, with the ability to turn furigana on and off at will, and the practice questions randomized so I can't be allowed to memorize answers based on the order the questions are asked. I'm seriously considering writing a software version of the book in Java just for my own use. In any event, I won't be getting the official results of the test back until Feb., 2012. With luck, I'll finally pass it next July.

Commentary: Manga Time Special

2011-12-04T16:47:00.000-08:00

Manga Time Special is one of several spin-offs of the Manga Time brand name (according to the wiki entry, there have been at least 9 spin-off titles), issued by the rival of Manga Town. Special, unlike the name implies, is nothing special. Again, it's primarily 4-panel gag strips. The only saving grace is that the topics of the gags changes a lot, and some of the artwork is pretty good. But, again, I only like yon-koma in small doses - an entire magazine dedicated to them seems like a waste of money to me.

(Ruri Miyahara's "Love Lab")

There are no artists here that would be recognizable to casual western fans. However, there was an ad for volume 2 of "Kanata is My Bride", by Aro Hiroshi ("Futaba-kun Change" and "Yuu and Mii"), published by Manga Time. Doesn't look like his style has changed at all since the 90's.

("Dance! Antoinette-sama", by Some Nishiura)

(Ad for "Kanata is my Bride")

Summary; Again, unless you can read Japanese and like short 4-panel gags, Manga Time Special is ignorable. 300 yen, 200 pages, monthly.

("O-ga-chan" by Tohiro Konno. The joke here is that the girl with the horns is an "oni" (demon), hence the name "ogre". In the right strip, she's cold so she puts on pajamas that make her look like a cat. However, she behaves like a dog. In the left panel, her friend is eating a meat bun. The friend offers half, but Ogre's portion is meat-free and she collapses in shock.)

Kewpie Thor

2011-12-03T15:40:00.000-08:00

Probably one of the most common form of parody figure is that of the Kewpie-version. There have been toy figures and cell phone strap versions of Ultraman monsters and Evangelian characters done up in Kewpie format. Now, in anticipation of the release of the new Avengers movie in Japan, we have a website promoting Kewpie Thor and Kewpie Captain America. In one of the "photo manga", the three main Avenger dolls comment on what's important - power, friends, money, etc. They're interrupted by a bald Samuel Jackson who yells out "Hair!"

---------------------

Dates for Dec. 2 to Dec. 10

Birthdays (14):
Werner Heisenberg, 12/5/1901
David (Firesign Theater) Ossmann, 12/6/1936
Steven Wright, 12/6/1955
Eli Wallach, 12/7/1915
David Carradine, 12/8/1936
Sammy Davis Jr., 12/8/1925
Sam Kinison, 12/8/1953
Flip Wilson, 12/8/1933
Ashleigh Brilliant, 12/9/1933
Redd Foxx, 12/9/1922
Buck Henry, 12/9/1930
Neil (Monty Python composer) Innes, 12/9/1944
Ada Lovelace, 12/10/1815
Tetsu ("The Dagger of Kamui") Yano, 12/10/1923

Died (10):
Dezi ("I Love Lucy") Arnaz, 12/2/1986
Marty Feldman, 12/2/1982
Marquis de Sade, 12/2/1814
Robert Louis Stevenson, 12/3/1894
Forrest J Ackerman, 12/4/2008
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 12/5/1791
Werner Klemperer, 12/6/2000
John Lennon, 12/8/1980
Robert ("The Tenth Victim") Sheckley, 12/9/2005
Richard Pryor, 12/10/2005

Gakken Kit #32, the Mini Denchi Block

2011-12-02T18:13:00.001-08:00

Gakken has been moving steadily into the electronics realm over the last 1-2 years, starting with the DC motor car, then the theremin, Poulson recorder, guitar and the Japanino. Kit #32, the latest one out, is the first real step into electronics design. With the previous kits, the electronics concepts were still masked by the surface application (i.e. - producing music, or writing software). But, the 25 block mini Denshi kit actually requires you to learn how transistors work and to calculate current flow in order to avoid blowing out the more sensitive parts.

Kit #32, Mini Denshi Block, released Nov. 30, 2011, 4000 yen ($50 USD).
Includes suggestions for 50 different experiments.

(The kit is about 4" x 6". Shown here with the earphone, microphone cup, and two jumper wires (used as contacts, sensors, switch plates and jumpers.) You can remove the ear piece from the earphone and replace it with the cup to turn the earphone into a microphone for the amplifier speaker and PA circuits. The decal at the top left corner refers to the wiring of the contacts running along the left side of the case. Primarily, the left side contacts are for the radio tuning coil.)

The mini Denshi ("electronics") set is a scaled-down version of the EX-150, but the principles are the same. You start out with a plastic holding case, and 25 plastic cubes. Each cube contains one part - a wire, resistor, transistor, diode, LED, capacitor, etc. The holding case has fingers at the bottom to allow you to snap in each of the components as you like. Contacts on the inside of the case touch the contacts on the sides of the cubes to form the circuit. The holding case also contains the battery pack (3 AAA's), a power switch, an adjustable coil and a speaker. Actually, building the suggested circuits is pretty simple, since the cubes are all clearly marked and you just have to follow the pictures. The case itself requires assembly (mounting the speaker, switch, decals, battery holder, etc. The suggested time is 20 minutes, and it took me about 15. The main challenge is in routing the wires to avoid having them float or get pinched.) If you want to have a bottom cover over the wires and circuit board, you're encouraged to punch out the plate from the main box and stick it in place using double-sided tape. I didn't bother with it because the plate is just cheap cardboard.

(Back view. Cardboard backplate not included. You can see the speaker, speaker driver board, batteries, and radio tuning coil at the top of the case.)

Now, as for the theory behind the kit... Well, I went to a technical school for 2 years for an associate's degree, and then a university for another 4 to get my BSEE. This is not something you'll pick up after reading a blog entry for 5 minutes. Suffice it to say that you can get some information from wikipedia, and the Gakken site will probably have English instructions by the time the kit makes its way to the U.S.

Some highlights - current flows from positive to negative. By convention, "ground" is 0V. With the 3 AAA batteries, the power pin will be around +4.5V. It doesn't take much to destroy a transistor or a diode, so if you don't know what you're doing, just be real sure to closely follow the pictures in the mook.

There is a relationship between voltage, current and resistance. It's called Ohm's Law, and it looks like:
Voltage = current * resistance. or,
V = I * R

If you have a 10 milliamp fuse, you need at least:
R = 4.5V / 0.01A = a 450 ohm resistor or bigger

in series (in line) with the fuse to avoid burning it out. Since LEDs are like 40 or 50 mA fuses, you should put a 220 ohm resistor in series with an LED to protect it as a general rule. Fortunately, the 2 LED blocks (1 red LED, the other green) both have the resistors already wired in for you.

If a diode, LED or transistor is damaged, it usually dies right there. If it's dead, forget about the circuit working any more. So, BE CAREFUL.

It's hard to draw an electrical circuit to look like something in the real world. Instead, we use special symbols to represent the individual components of a circuit. The total circuit picture is called a "schematic diagram" (or "circuit schematic"). When you look at the cubes of the kit, you'll see these schematic symbols stenciled on the top of each one.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the direction of the component matters for diodes, LEDs and transistors. If you put the part in backwards, the circuit won't work. You may not damage the component, but the thing you're trying to build won't do anything, or, at least, won't do it right. Additionally, certain kinds of capacitors do care which direction they're facing, and can suffer physical damage if plugged in the wrong way. So, again, be sure to have the blocks in the circuit look exactly like they are in the pictures in the mook.

Regarding the mook - it's 124 pages this time, roughly 2/3's of which is dedicated to the assembly of the kit, and the descriptions of the 50 circuits you can build. There's another 6 circuits identified as "Denchi mini 120%", which can only be built if you have 2 kits. Many of the circuits are kind of silly, such as making variations on the "turn on the LED with 1, 2, or 3 switches" - these are essentially the same circuit but using extra wires. Some of the circuits attempt to teach how AND, NOR and XOR gates work, but again, it's just one transistor with different switch wiring configurations. The Lie Detector and the Love Compatibility circuits are also very similar. Probably the more interesting projects are the crystal radio with 1-transistor amplifier, and the analog synthesizer. If you've got 2 kits, then you can make the 4-transistor radio.

Articles in the mook include artistic photos of old circuit boards (including a Korg 800DV synth, and a Hitac-10 mainframe computer), art projects using the denchi blocks to make running figures, a story on the history of the denchi block product dating back to 1966, and a study in optical illusions and how the wiring of the human eye and brain allow illusions to work. No real theory of electronics, history of the science, or biographies of the scientists involved in it this time. The manga at the back of the mook talks about animal sex.

Suggestions for modding the kit include: putting it in a rabbit pouch to turn it into a purse; driving LEDs to make an illuminated photo of the Big Dipper; driving larger circuits for a synth and a rhythm box; making a Geiger counter; and wiring up to a Japanino to make an LED bar volume level display. I would argue that if you're going to build the rest of the support circuitry for a Geiger counter, that there's no real need to put the denchi block kit in the circuit because it's so bulky compared to the rest of the assembly. But, if you have the denchi block kit, I guess you're going to want to make the most use of it.

The kit works fine for making the various suggested circuits, and it is very well-constructed. The spring contacts do push the blocks apart a bit so you'll need to keep pushing them down into place as you assemble the experiment to ensure electrical contact. But, on the whole it is a good introduction to simple electronic design, without requiring the use of solder and an iron. Meaning that it's good for kids to play with. My only complaint is that there's no direct source for cheap blank blocks for adding in more components later (I'd like some more capacitors, other colors of LEDs, and at least one trim pot.) That, and if you get this as an import it's going to be at least $65 USD, which places it on the low side of the bang for the buck scale. It would have been nice to have this kit when I was in tech school.

---------------

Next up, #33. The desktop robot vacuum. Tentatively scheduled for the second half of January, 2012.

Review: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, After

2011-12-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

Toki o Kakeru Shojo is a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui that originally came out in 1967, and has been adapted several times as live action movies and manga. Recently, a manga version (Young Ace, 2009-2010) of the third movie came out, and I ended up getting a copy from someone I've recently met in Kagoshima, who was unloading some of his books prior to returning to school in the U.S. This isn't a manga that I'd normally buy for myself, but since it was offered to me for free, I decided to check it out.

(All the props collected together - spare change, "go" and "come back" time medicine and the photo of mom with the mysterious unknown boy.)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, After, based on the story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, art by Minoru Hashiguchi, Grade C
Akari Yoshiyama is a school girl who has just graduated from high school and is preparing to proceed on to university. She gets together with her mother, Kazuko, for a quiet "date" at a park, and they run into a friend of Kazuko's. The friend shows Kazuko a photo of her as a school girl along with a boy named Kazuo, but neither of them can remember anyone named "Kazuo". Thinking about this, Kazuko returns back to her research lab and is hit by a car. The next day is Akari's birthday, but she spends it in the hospital waiting for her mother to regain consciousness. When Kazuko wakes up, she remembers that "Kazuo", whoever he was, is the person that spurred her into her current line of research - developing a medicine that will let her go back in time to see him again in April, 1972. Akari decides to take on this task herself and goes to the research lab and drinks the medicine. Unfortunately, she gets the date mixed up and ends up deciding on Feb., 1974.

The medicine does its job, and she does a "time slip". When she realizes her mistake, she has to cope with being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She's befriended by a college student named Ryouta Mizorogi, who wants to be a science fiction film director, and who easily believes that she's from the future after seeing her cell phone. The two of them meet the young Kazuko, who still doesn't remember Kazuo. Ryouta introduces Akari to his friend - a cameraman that will later marry Kazuko and father Akari before disappearing to follow his dreams in the U.S. Ryouta becomes attracted to Akari, and writes her into the ending of his film. After shooting the last scene, Ryouta and Akari hand out fliers to search for Kazuo, and then place an ad in the newspaper. Someone does respond to the ad, asking to meet in the high school the next day. Unfortunately, Ryouta gets news that an elderly relative has fallen ill and he needs to take the bus back to his hometown the next day, too.

Akari goes to the meeting point, falls asleep in the room, and wakes up with a start during what seems to be an earthquake. A bookshelf falls over, then freezes in mid-move. Kazuo appears, and announces himself to be a fellow time traveler, from the year 2698. He remembers meeting Kazuko, but had erased her memories as part of the rule that people from the future aren't allowed to affect the past (she'd remembered just enough to know to create her own time travel medicine). He's about to do the same to Akari, but she asks him to wait until she can say goodbye to Ryouta. She runs to the bus terminal just in time, and he gives her a rough-cut copy of the film as a reminder of him. After he gets on the bus and it drives off, her future father runs up, saying he'd misplaced his own ticket, and hence has just missed the bus. Akari suddenly realizes that this is the one her mother had mentioned that's going to be in a big accident that kills everyone on board. She tries to get Ryouta off the bus, but Kazuo shows up and stops her, saying that she's not allowed to change the past. He tries to erase her memories, but she refuses to forget Ryouta. Kazuo sees the film canister and attempts to wrestle it from her, so Akari drinks the medicine that her mother had developed for returning to 2010. Later, Kazuo also goes to 2010 to erase Kazuko's memories again, but Akari still has the film, and she calls her father so they can watch it together to remember "a good friend".

(The "dramatic final scene" in the amateur movie with Akari walking away.)

-------------

Ignoring the idea that a liquid medicine can warp time to the point where you can bring money, clothing and electronics to whenever you're thinking about, the rest of the story is also very silly. It's just another "let's go back and meet your parents when they were young" romp with a little romance and tragedy tossed in. Additionally, the artwork is very poor. Character designs change from page to page, and often there's no backgrounds behind the characters. The Kazuo character has no real purpose in the story beyond meddling with Akari's and Kazuko's lives a little bit. Definitely not recommended.

Pepsi NEX and Pokemon

2011-11-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

I've written before about how Pepsi is doing so poorly for sales in Japan compared to Coke. So, it's led to PepsiCo's doing a lot more product tie-ins, some of which give off a certain whiff of desperation. The most recent one is for Pokemon. There are a total of 24 different cell phone straps this time (compare this with most of the other toys I've mentioned recently, which generally only have 6 variations). Even though the local grocery store sells Pepsi NEX for 88 yen (Coke for 120 yen), I'm not inclined to drop $25 USD to get the full set. Don't know of any Japanese consumer that will.

Actually, I'm satisfied with just this one, the most colorful of those in the cooler case at the time. Enbuoo (N-Boar).

Tully's Stamp and Coffee campaign

2011-11-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

One of the coffee chains here is Tully's, franchised from the company of the same name based in Seattle. When I worked in Akihabara, I liked dropping by the Tully's in the UDX building a block away from my office. They're similar to Starbuck's, but with better coffee. Same high prices, too. Unfortunately, at some point quality of the the Akihabara shop's ice coffee nosedived and I stopped going there a little over a year ago. In Kagoshima, there's a shop in Tenmonkan, right next door to Doutor. Again, the drinks and snacks are similar to each other, but Tully's is actually 20 yen cheaper for a small hot coffee (300 yen compared to 320 yen at Doutor. Still, that's $3.60 USD for an 8 ounce cup, no refills.)

Tully's has tied up with Itoen Foods to sell their canned coffees at convenience stores. Recently, they've also packaged small toy stamps with the cans to pair up with the goodies they sell at their regular stores. There are 6 stamp designs total, two each with the same body - a yellow teddy bear, a white coffee mug, and a black golf bag (I've seen the little beanie baby-style bears, and the cups are a given; I didn't see anything about the golf bag, though). I got the yellow teddy bear, with the "sitting bear" stamp, because it's probably something I can give to one of my students.

As for the quality of the coffee within the can - it's a darker roast flavor, with artficial creamer and sweetener. Not as bad as most of the cheaper can coffees, but not worth the extra 10 yen at the stores. Most can coffee is intended to sit on the shelves for months, so it's going to be pretty foul. Starbucks is just as expensive and equally bad. Essentially $1.50 to $2 for a 6 ounce serving. Better off waiting until you get home and make your own drip pot if you're drinking coffee for the flavor.

---------------------------------

Dates for Nov. 30 and Dec. 1:

Birthdays (7):
Allan Sherman, 11/30/1924
Jonathan Swift, 11/30/1667
Fujio F. (Doraemon) Fujiko, 12/1/1933
Better Midler, 12/1/1945
Richard Pryor, 12/1/1940
Dick Shawn, 12/1/1923
Rex ("Nero Wolf") Stout, 12/1/1886

Died (1:)
Alister Crowley, 12/1/1947

Panson Works World Music set

2011-11-28T18:18:00.000-08:00

Design firm PansonWorks has teamed up with Calpis Soda to present a line of 6 cell phone straps called World Musicians. It consists of Bach on drums, Beethoven on cymbals, Mozart on sax, Brahms on trumpet, Shubert on flute and Rentarou Taki on clarinet. 98 yen at grocery stores, 130 yen in conbini.

(Mozart)

Commentary: Manga Town

2011-11-27T15:33:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned before, there are two publication formats when it comes to manga - the "phonebooks" and the glossy cover magazine style. Because of the differences in thickness, convenience stores usually display them differently, with the magazines going into upright racks, and the phonebooks laying flat on table-like shelves. In a way, this makes it easier to see all of the magazine-types at one time because they're closer together, but it also makes it harder to identify individual titles because they overlap each other, So, when I went to Kinokuniya last time, I decided to just grab as many of the magazines as I could and take the ones I haven't already reviewed to get them out of the way. However, when I realized that there were still 6 or so that I hadn't read before, I got kind of depressed. I spent at least 15 minutes looking over the phonebooks trying to pick ones that had good freebies and a Christmas theme. There weren't any that fit the requirement, so I ended up buying 3 magazines anyway.

(Crayon Shin-chan. His mother rips her pants after eating too much junk food, and tries to decide how to lose weight.)

The first of the three is Manga Town. This is one of the magazines that I don't really care for, in that it's largely a collection of yon-koma (4-panel) strips, with no serialized stories. In and of itself, yon-koma is fine in small doses, but having 200 pages of short strips one after the other is just too much for me. On top of which, most of the artwork is either childish or amateurish. The only strip with name recognition is Crayon Shin-chan. Originally, Crayon ran in Weekly Manga Action, but with the death of creator Yoshito Usui (he fell from a mountain cliff while hiking on Sept. 11, 2009), the title was resumed by his staff members in Manga Town (same publisher) starting in 2010.

(Haken Senshi Noriko - Dispatch Soldier Noriko. In the right strip, Noriko's captain asks her partner if the partner is on patrol alone. She answers that no, she's with Noriko. The joke finishes with "the sewers have their dangers, too". In the left strip, a thief gets nabbed by Noriko and thinks that she's unable to take him down so he just runs away. In the last panel, he's completely exhausted, and pleads to have her let him go.)

The new version of Crayon feels kind of derivative, and is joined by "Shin-Men", a parody of Power Rangers-style action teams where the team is made up of 5 versions of Shin-chan. Kind of too much of a good things.

I don't recognize most of the other titles. One, though, "Shonen Ashibe", was turned into a short-lived TV anime back in the 90's when I first came to Japan. The main characteristic of Ashibe is that he always carries a live arctic seal under his arm.

(Shonen Ashibe. The teacher arrives to the classroom to find one of the students trying to bully money from a classmate. She takes the boy home to complain about him, and the mother yells at him to not extort from those in his own class.)

Summary: Unless you're able to read Japanese, and enjoy the short 4-panel gag format, Manga Town is completely ignorable. 320 yen, 220 pages. Monthly.

---------------------------------

Birthdays for the Week:
L. Sprague de Camp, 11/27/1907
C.S. Lewis, 11/29/1898
Allan Sherman, 11/30/1924
Jonathan Swift, 11/30/1667
Fujio F. (Doraemon) Fujiko, 12/1/1933

Died this Week:
John Carradine, 11/27/1988
Ada Lovelace, 11/27/1852
Godfrey Cambridge, 11/29/1976
George Harrison, 11/29/2001
Robert ("Avilion") Holdstock, 11/29/2009
Bill (voice of Bullwinkle) Scott, 11/29/1985
Carl Stalling, 11/29/1972
Alister Crowley, 12/1/1947
Dezi ("I Love Lucy") Arnaz, 12/2/1986
Marquis de Sade, 12/2/1814

Pacman and Afternoon Lemon Tea

2011-11-26T18:22:00.001-08:00

Kirin's 午後の紅茶 (Afternoon Tea, Lemon flavor) is being packaged with a line of 4 or 5 Pacman cell phone straps. Nothing on the Kirin website mentioning the campaign, of course. The straps are all pretty much the same design, just different colors for the ghosts, and different arrangements between the ghost and the yellow dots. However, in an interesting twist, each strap is designed to be clipped on to the next one, allowing you to make a chain as long as you like. 130 yen per bottle of tea at the conbini.

Coffee Land Rover

2011-11-25T18:35:00.000-08:00

Georgia had been packaging Jaguar Land Rovers with their can coffee. The only real drawback to the design is that the glossy all-black surface washes out in the photo, removing the curves and lines that make the vehicle itself look pretty cool. This is another one of those 1"-long "pull back and let go spring-loaded toys".

Review: Acony, vol. 1

2011-11-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Acony isn't all that well documented in English, but at least the first few chapters have been scanilated on Manga Fox. Fortunately, artist Kei Toume has a pretty good write-up on wikipedia. Kei should be recognizable to western fans as the creator of Lament of the Lamb and Kurogane. Her art style is characterized by a thin, almost wavering line, and very cynical facial expressions. Her background scenes are highly detailed, and her characters are fairly dynamic. Acony is kind of a slice-of-life sitcom, so there's not a lot of action or any fighting at all. Most of the humor comes from a combination of dialog and the physical poses of the characters as they interact. Since you can read volume 1 on Manga Fox, I'm not going to get into too much of a story summary here.

Acony, by Kei Toume, Grade: A
13-year-old Motomi Utsuki has been shipped off by his mother to stay in a boarding house with his grandfather. His mother, Shizue, is described as a sort of headhunter for researchers, and spends a lot of time traveling to other countries, leaving Motomi more or less on his own. When he gets to the apartment building, he encounters various weirdnesses, such as an invisible landlord (he's a 100-year-old poltergeist), and a black-clad girl that plays with scissors and mice. His grandfather, a designer of box art for plastic model kits, doesn't help the boy's understanding of the situation much, just replying "it is what you see". As the weeks go by, Motomi slowly starts to fit in, but never quite completely

("Welcome to the neighborhood. Here's a gift.")

The girl is Acony Lanchester. She looks to be 13, but in fact she'd died in a laboratory explosion 10 years previously and was mysteriously reanimated. Her father is an American who writes gothic horror under a Japanese pen name. Her mother is Yuri Shikajima, a Japanese woman who had been born in the boarding house, but had traveled to the U.S. to attend a university in Massachusetts where she met and married Lanchester. After the explosion Yuri hasn't been seen since. While Acony looks to be a young girl with a lot of free time on her hands (for befriending the bats Chiru and Iru, and messing around with insects), she is in fact 23 and has been home-schooled by her father to qualify for entry into College de Sorbonne.

(Grandpa, Motomi, and Shizue)

There are two other occupants of the building that Motomi has seen so far: Misono and Satou. Misono is Lanchester's editor. During the day she's beautiful and lively. At night, she drinks and plays mahjong until dawn and then just looks like a mess. As for Satou, all we know as of the end of volume 1 is that there are 16 of him.

(Landlord.)

Acony is what we would have gotten if Charles Addams had created Wednesday as an only-child living with a single parent. The dark humor is great, and Acony is obviously at ease with her companions after death. On the other hand, she's starting to notice that after 10 years, her hair and fingernails are very slowly starting to grow again, which may be leading to complications in the future. My only comment is that the scar over her left eye is inconsistent, going over to the side of her face in some panels, and being almost invisible in others.

(Lanchester and Misono)

The characters are all oddballs in one way or another. Even the one "normal" school girl that comes to visit Motomi with two classmates turns out to be a war buff, recognizing the Soviet T-35 that Motomi's grandfather is drawing for his current work assignment. She leaves happily with a signed drawing from the artist. In volume 1, the first few pages are in glossy color, and act as little portraits of the girl, her father, and a doll that decides to own her. It's a fun story, if you like dark humor, and is a pretty easy read in Japanese. Definitely recommended.

Note: I don't really know the spelling for Acony's last name, since it's only given in katakana. The Manga Fox translation also gives it as "Lanchester". I'm going with this since it matches Elsa Lanchester, the actress who played the "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) (she's also Miss Marbles in Murder by Death).

Which one did you see - White or Black?

2011-11-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

Naoki Urasawa's manga, Billy Bat is actually a fascinating story if you know the background. Set just prior to the Kennedy assassination, it ties together the 1949 death of Japan National Railway company president Sadanori Shimoyama, the events leading up to JFK's 1963 assassination, and the fictionalized version of Walt Disney who has stolen the character of a Japanese-American's comicbook (which in turn was unconsciously taken from a character drawn by a Japanese artist just after WW II and supposedly shown up in Jump magazine (the problem being that Weekly Shonen Jump started in 1968. Sunday and Magazine were the earliest successful boys magazines and they both started in 1959). Part of the story revolves around the fictionalized Disneyland, which in real life opened in California in 1955 (one of the characters states that because she's black the one in Florida won't let her in, but Disney World didn't open until 1971). Obviously, not all of the Billy Bat story is based on solid fact, but there's enough reality woven in through everything else to make for a compelling read.

Urasawa, as I've written before, has this tendency to make his intrigue stories twisted enough that it's better to wait for a large number of books to come out and then read them back-to-back several times. This is because he lays down so much ground work at the beginning that the rest of the story unfolds very slowly at the start, but it all ties back together again later when you've forgotten about all of it. Reading the story again, there's the "oh, THAT'S what that was about" feeling that justifies the wait.

Another thing that Urasawa likes to do is include contemporary pop-culture references. One of the sideline characters is a kamishibai artist that becomes the manga artist who draws the first "Billy Bat" strip in Tokyo. This guy, Zofuu Karama, wants to rival Tezuka, and he uses the original copy of "Shin Takarajima" as his incentive, claiming Osamu to be a "rival". Zofuu could be based on Shichima Sakai, the kamishibai artist that gave Tezuka his break in getting Shin Takara-jima published as a rental book.

(Advertising banner at a bookstore, for volume 6.)

Billy Bat jumps around in time and space, from Edo-era Iga province to post-War Tokyo, "modern" LA to Dallas at the time of the shooting. There are real players, such as Lee Harvey Oswald and the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier added to the mix. So, again, it takes time and patience to figure out what all the connecting threads are. I think it's worth it at the end.

(Xavier Park memorial - Anjiro on the left, Xavier in the middle.)

Actually, I consider the Francis Xavier plot thread to be interesting as well. I've written before about the memorials to him here in Kagoshima, His initial landing point when he first visited Japan was just a mile north from Dolphin Port. The Xavier Church is across the street from another memorial set in Xavier Park, just 6 blocks from my apartment (I walk past it whenever I go to Tenmonkan, or to the International Exchange Center). The public records here don't say anything about ninjas accompanying his trip, though. (Xavier's first disciple, Anjiro or Yajiro, actually was from Satsuma, now present-day Kagoshima. Yajiro had killed someone and escaped Japan to avoid sentencing. He went to Goa, where Xavier found him and picked him to be a guide back to Japan.) One other deviation from history is that Xavier is recorded as having died in China, while the manga puts him in Iga prefecture in Japan.

-----------------------
Notable events for the next few days:

Birthdays:
Steven Brust, 11/23/1955
Boris Karloff, 11/23/1887
Harpo Marx, 11/23/1888
Forrest J Ackerman, 11/24/1916
Poul Anderson, 11/25/1926
L. Sprague de Camp, 11/27/1907

Died:
Roald ("The Gremlins") Dalh, 11/23/1990
Freddy Mercury, 11/24/1991

Lipton One Piece Cookie Mascot

2011-11-22T15:47:00.000-08:00

Lipton's Tea and One Piece have teamed up for a Milk Tea Cookie Mascot cell phone strap campaign. 12 strap designs, each looking like a frosted cookie with one of the main One Piece characters on top. I found this one in the Coco conbini, for 130 yen a bottle. Of the designs, only Brook looked all that good, and I liked the fact that he was relaxing with what's probably a hot cafe latte, while being packaged with a bottle of cold tea. Oh, the irony. Interestingly, too, the campaign actually does have a supporting website. Cool.

On the plus side, the straps really do look like cookies, and I get hungry every time I look at them.

Police lights extensions

2011-11-21T18:52:00.001-08:00

What do you do if your cars tend to be smaller than those in other countries? Put your police lights on extenders.

Commentary: Weekly Morning

2011-11-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

I've had a long-running love-hate relationship with Weekly Morning. On the one hand, it has some really dumb, or really badly drawn manga that I dislike looking at. Currently, this includes Cooking Papa (a story where every chapter contains a problem that can only be solved by introducing a new recipe) and Kami no Shizuku (where characters are transported into wild flights of fancy on the mere sip of an over-priced wine). On the other hand, Morning also serializes Chi's Sweet Home (a cute story from the point of view of a stray kitten), and Billy Bat (about a bat). Past manga includes What's Michael, Devil Lady, Gon and perhaps the greatest of them all - Vagabond.

What's Michael and Gon were both great gag strips featuring animals, with pro-level artwork and dead-on comic timing. Chii's Sweet Home isn't nearly at the same level, but the Japanese used is easy to follow, making it good learning practice. I love Naoki Urasawa's Yawara and Pineapple Army, so I'm interested to see what he does with Billy Bat. However, his intrigue/suspense stories tend to wander so far around the map that I prefer to wait until several of the collected volumes have come out and read them start to finish several times. As for Vagabond, this is just pure magical genius, both in the art and the storytelling. Unfortunately, it looks like Inoue fell ill back around the beginning of the year and the series has been on hiatus since then. Book Off has used copies of the last volume, #33, and the story runs up to about where the chapters on Manga Fox end. A year ago last Fall, NHK ran a 1-hour special on Inoue, hyping the fact that Vagabond was nearing its final climax, so I'm betting that if/when he recovers and starts drawing again, sales of Morning are going to explode, as will those for the last book, #34.

(Uchu Kyoudai)

Morning is aimed at an adult male audience, with an emphasis on food (Cooking Papa), drink (Kami no Shizuku), sports (soccer - Giant Killing, baseball - Gurazeni, boxing - Rise Shoulder), 4-panel gags, slice of life (A Lion from the North), yakuza stories, and Edo-era dramas (Hyouge Mono). The artwork is all over the place, with titles that look gorgeous (Kami no Shizuku) and those that are just raw scribbles. A large bulk of them are wish fulfillment (Giant Killing, which pretends that Japan has a world-class soccer team; Silent Service, which pretends that Japan has naval officers that can outmaneuver all other countries, finished; We Are Beatles, which pretends that Japanese musicians are as good at doing rock as the Beatles were; and Uchu Kyoudai, which pretends that Japan has a serious space program). I should mention that Axe artist Shigeyuki Fukumitsu also has a story in Morning. Ignoring all that, I used to buy it religiously just for Vagabond. Now, I just sample the Billy Bat chapters.

Weekly Morning is 320 yen for about 450 pages. The cover art is usually based on one of the on-going titles. No freebies, but there are drawings for prizes described at the back of the magazine. Odds are that most western fans would get it for We Are Beatles and Billy Bat.

Happy Sympathies!

2011-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, back in the 80's, there was a publisher of intellectual materials that had a catalog that would be mailed out to customers that had on one page a list of famous writers and classical musicians that had been born or died in that month. I no longer remember the name of the publisher, and I was never on their mailing list, I just saw the catalog occasionally at a friend's house. But every so often I think about it, and the names of the people that I consider interesting that would show up in each issue.

I'm just starting to put together a list of names that I want to have included in my database, so it's still woefully incomplete. The emphasis so far is on early film comedians with some actors, and more modern musicians thrown in. If you can think of names to add (I really want more scientists like Pascal and Volte, and classical artists like Rembrandt, plus, of course, any manga artists), feel free to put them in a comment. If I like them, I'll gladly use them.

I'm not going to print the names every day. Maybe once a week, or at the beginning of the month. Depends on how much work this turns out to be. Anyway...

Happy Birthday to:
Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, born 11/22/1940
Harpo Marx, born 11/23/1888
Boris Karloff, born 11/23/1887

Sympathies to:
Carl Stalling (music director for most Loony Toons), died 11/29/1972
Bill Scott (voice for Bullwinkle), died 11/29/1985
Godfrey Cambridge, died 11/29/1976
Leonard Barr (look him up), died 11/22/1980

Belated Happy Birthday to:
Bram Stoker, born 11/8/1847
Daws Butler (voice actor), born 11/16/1916

Belated Symaphies to:
Dwight Frye (Dracula's Renfield), died 11/7/1943
Jack Palance, died 11/10/2006
James Coburn, died 11/18/2002

Umi ga Suki

2011-11-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

Got whale? Drinking on the first floor, singing on the second.

Review: Murder Princess, vol. 2

2011-11-17T17:28:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Murder Princess, vol. 2, by Sekihiko Inui, Grade: D.

Things get complicated for our Princess Alita and the bounty hunter, body-switch Ferith. First, Alita has to come to terms with the fact that her older brother, the esteemed knight Kaito, has become a man-slayer. This is soon followed by reports that headless bodies are showing up around town, and when Alita tries following Ferith outside late at night, she witnesses the Death God Dominikov (one of Ferith's two companions) kill someone that had attempted to kill her. Dominikov explains that he's been demon hunting, lopping the heads of off humans that are doing evil deeds, before they can turn into monsters. The reason there have been a growing number of possible monster cases is that "history has been messed with" - that is, when Alita fell from the cliff she should probably have died, rather than landing on Ferith. This is a bit more than Alita can cope with, and she goes to a church to pray for guidance, making her an easy target for mad scientist Akamashi and his two robot girls - Ana and Yuna. Ana had overheard the situation regarding Alita's and Ferith's bodyswap, and Alita is used as a hostage to lure Ferith to Akamashi's lab. His goal is the same "key" Kaito had demanded in volume 1 - a small carved stone.

(Back cover. Dark Knight and Cecelia.)

Ferith arrives at the lab and says that she'd thought it was candy and she'd eaten it. Ana attacks her to cut the stone out, but the battle is interrupted when the Dark Knight, and Cecilia the magic user intervene to steal both Akamashi's stone and to kill him. Ferith fights the Dark Knight, destroying his helmet and revealing him to be Kaito, in mid-transition to becoming a demon. Cecilia warps out with Kaito, promising to fight the two enraged robots at a later time.

(Inside front cover, re-rendered in American style.)

Alita takes in Ana and Yuna in the castle, and the gang gets filled in on the existence of a magic spring that requires 4 carved stones to unlock its powers. The stones have been divided up among the rulers of the four neighboring countries, and Akamashi and Cecilia had been working more or less together to collect them, until the witch turned on the scientist and killed him. That evening, Alita asks why Ferith became a bounty hunter, and the currently-acting princess says that she'd grown up in a small village which had been attacked and destroyed by some soldiers. She was taken in by a renegade knight that had escaped his battalion, but his former comrades caught up to him and killed him. She learned to fight and tried to become stronger to get revenge on the "Black Eagle" brigade. From there, she met up with her partners Dominikov and Peat, and they became world-class hunters. The group then decides to set out for the spring and to stop Cecilia.

(Inside back cover.)

However, Cecilia brings the fight to the castle, invading with a bunch of demons, plus Kaito. The group engages, with Ana and Yuna deciding to attack the witch. But things get a bit screwed-up storywise and I have to assume that some pages are missing from the volume. While fighting Dominikov, Cecilia says that her real goal is to just turn back the pages of history and restore the dark ages of the past. Ferith engages Kaito, and when she gets knocked down, Alita sneaks up and stabs Kaito in the back of the neck. Kaito recalls all of the fighting he'd done, which had tainted him and turned him into a monster. As he dies, Alita states that life will go on and the people of the country will move past the temptation towards evil. Suddenly the story jumps forward. Ferith is in the castle with Dominikov and Peat, saying that it's time for her to move on and be a bounty hunter again. There's absolutely no word on what happened to Cecilia, Ana or Yuna, leaving me to guess that they'd killed each other. There's also no mention of the two stones that Cecilia had gathered. Ferith makes a comment about taking her "key" and looking for the spring, but she gets talked into staying at the castle and ruling over the country instead. A final closing comment states that in the future, when the people of the country hear "Alita" being called the Murder Princess, they would just laugh the remark off.

(Frontispiece, with Ferith in bounty hunter form.)

Summary: The volume starts out good, with fighting, intrigue and strange plot twists. But it completely falls apart at the end and the final resolution makes no sense at all. Either Inui was rushed, or several pages were cut from the last chapter. Read this one for the artwork, but be prepared to be disappointed if you care about plot holes.

(Ferith as the Princess Alita, Murder Princess.)

Wendy 8081

2011-11-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

I walked past this sign enough times that I finally decided to take a shot of it. They sell t-shirts and knick knacks.

Take lantern

2011-11-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

I was in my twenties when personal computers started hitting the market in the U.S., and becoming (well not really) "affordable". My first usable toy was the Commodore 64. While it did have graphics capability, it only had 64 K of RAM, so the games available were pretty limited. By contrast, I'd worked part-time as a tech in the Physics lab at the university and they had a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, with games on mag tape. One of the games was the original text adventure ADVENT. During my breaks, I used to play ADVENT just to see if I could break my record of fewest rounds to finish. Later, similar games came out, specifically HAUNT and DUNGEON, but they were buggy and I always got stuck somewhere, unable to finish. Eventually, the Infocom company started up and brought DUNGEON to the market under the name Zork I. At this point, I was hooked on text adventure games and I made a point of buying up everything Infocom put out. Unfortunately, their software quality went downhill with each new product and some of the games would simply crash in the middle. I never did finish the Hitchhiker's game because of that. And of course, home computers got better, the C-64 became obsolete and the asteroid hit earth, killing off all the dinosaurs.

Over the years, I'd be reminded of ADVENT, and once in a while I'd surf the net to find a Flash port of the game. But, in the last few days I've gotten more antsy and started digging harder.

I found a port of the original DUNGEON, but the thief never showed up, so I gave up and tried Zork I. There's no save function, but with the walkthrough, I was able to finish it off in a couple of hours. Now I need to decide if I want to play Zork II all the way through, given how much I really NEED that save function...

If you want to flip through the various text adventure games, check out the archives

Sakura-jima lava-covered shrine gate

2011-11-14T17:11:00.000-08:00

In 1914, the mountain on Sakura-jima island erupted. The subsequent ball of fire from the cone lasted for days and was the subject of many local artists, including Seiki Kuroda. Apparently the majority of the islanders had been alerted and moved to safety in advance because the water in the wells had started to boil, similar to what had happened prior to the 1779 eruption. However, over 600 houses were buried under the magma, which then filled up the part of the bay on the east side to the point where it created a land bridge to the rest of Kyushu.

(Map of different lava flows throughout history. The 1914 lava flow is shown in purple.)

The island has since been repopulated, and there are a few thousand people that put up with the ash clouds to live there. Industries include growing daikon and mikan (Japanese radishes and oranges), fishing and ceramics. Most of the houses are at the north side, which is better protected from the winds coming up from the ocean. There are a couple small parks or scenic view areas around the island. The one shown above is dedicated to the lava flow in the area.

This photo was also taken from the south side, but the overcast weather helped hide the crater on this side.

While most of the lava flow is now hidden under the buildings that have been built over it, during excavation work for putting in a junior high school, the torii (gate) of the main temple shrine had been uncovered, buried under 3 meters (over 9 feet) of lava and ash. The village chief ordered the excavation to be halted with the gate still buried, and the school was built around it. It's part of what appears to be a small side alley, but it's blocked off to traffic. The street running in front of the school is on the same level as the ground around the gate, meaning that the entire valley had been filled up with ash to at least the same depth.

While I was there, several tour buses of school kids, and taxis with tourists stopped to allow some sightseeing. There's nothing else in the area, so once they get a look at the gate, everyone immediately gets back into the vehicles and leaves.

From the marker sign:

"Buried shrine gate speaks of the fury of the eruption
Buried in Ash
-- a torii buried in ash from the 1914 eruption --

From three days before, the people knew it was coming. Water in wells all over the island started boiling, shoals of dead fish floated ashore, and the earth shook intermittently.

According to records, the same omens were observed before the An'ei eruption of 1779.

On January 12, 1914 Akamizu-jo on West Sakurajima blew dark smoke at 10:05 am. Ten minutes later, the top of Nabe peak blew off with a terrific explosion.

Thick, black smoke rose 7,000 meters into the sky and covered the whole island. The roar was incessant and cinders fell continuously. The next day lava started spouting. Three billion ton red wave crossed the strait and permanently welded Sakurajima onto Osumi Peninsula.

Here in Kurokami 687 houses were buried in hot ash. Only the top beam of this three meter high torii to Haragosha Shrine can be seen now. Village chief, Nozoe, stopped excavation work to show the fury of the eruption to later generations. It is now designated as a prefectural cultural property."

Commentary: Morning Tsu

2011-11-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

Morning Tsu (2) is a recent spin off from Weekly Morning, having come out irregularly since 2006, and supposedly on a monthly schedule from 2008. It has a rougher feel than Weekly Morning, probably because some of the stories are actually winners of past reader submission contests. There is a lot of similarity between the two publications, in that some of the 4-panel gag strips are by the same artists (or ones parodying each other), and the art styles are all over the place. Having said that, Morning 2 is slightly more expensive for a lower page count (400 yen for 400 pages, compared to 320 yen for 450 pages for Morning), and doesn't have any big-name manga or artists to point to right now, since as of this issue, the creator of Saint Young Men is taking a maternity break. On the other hand, there are several titles that have some promise from some fairly experienced people.

(Morning 2 is one of the only magazines with wrap-around cover art.)

Probably the one artist of any note, is Peko Watanabe with Niko Tama. This issue features the first chapter of Daisuke Nishijima's Subete ga chotto zutsu yasashii sekai. It has a very experimental feel to it, and is about a child ghost in a ghost world. According to his profile, Daisuke has a couple of books and comics to his name. Another one that shows promise is Hayami Rasenjin's Cannons and Stamps, which features a young man in a WW II-like battlefield but with cute furry animal pets. The artwork is very clean, but the character designs are classic "cute kid" style. Finally, there's Fantasium, by Ami Sugimoto, about a kid that has promising stage magician skills. Because I used to do stage magic, I'm usually unimpressed with manga or comics that try to show tricks that don't work that way (i.e. - Magic Kaito and Detective Boy Conan), but the artwork and presentation in Fantasium isn't that bad. I'd have to follow more of the series to say anything about whether some of the secrets behind the tricks are being revealed, but in this episode they're not.

(Cannons and Stamps)

Morning 2 doesn't have anything that I want to read consistently, but there is a "jewel in the rough" quality about the magazine that makes it appealing. Worth sampling over time.

(Niko Tama)

Small Adventure #22

2011-11-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

There's a growing, but still very small, dissatisfaction with certain problems in Japan. Primarily, it's with nuclear power, brought to a head by the continually-growing crisis at Fukushima following the Mar. 11 quake. Even the newspapers are finally disclosing some of the stories, including the fact that the big electrical power company - TEPCO - had suppressed maintenance work on the safety features that had led to the explosion. Additionally, TEPCO had inserted employees at government-led meetings to ask pro-nuke questions, and had them attend political rallies and buying tickets for meet-the-politician campaigns (the agency is barred from contributing to political campaigns directly) as a form of contributing to the campaigns indirectly. The details are slowing making their way to the public, and a tiny handful of the public is getting unhappy with it.

One of the results is that a few people, like university professors, are hosting blogs to complain about the situation more vocally, and setting up gatherings where they can meet and talk in person. Recently, we were invited to one such gathering, where the focus was anti-war, and the highlight was a showing of the Iraq war-related film Route Irish. As for the gathering itself - the discussion was limited to the acting in the film, and even though it was in English with Japanese subtitles, the editing of the film was so tight that I got lost in the middle. It's a great anti-Iraq war propaganda piece, but the story is confusing and I found the ending weak.

Anyway, what interested me was the apartment building that the event was held in. My building is very new and very modern. There are some sliding doors, but they're made of solid wood, and the design as a whole is western, if extremely compact. In contrast, this other place was in an older neighborhood just west of the Tenmonkan shopping complex, mixed in with some offices and the Honganji temple building. The first floor is just an open parking area, with the water pipes running along the ceiling. The pipes were all thick with rust, and I kept looking for dripping leaks (Japanese developers still insist on using iron and plain steel, which turns to rust in a matter of just a few years in the salt air here). The room had the older tatami mat floors, and paper screen sliding doors. The living room doubled as the bed room, with the one futon rolled up and stored in the side closet. The main sliding door was pulled out and leaned against the wall to make room for the kotatsu table and projector. In all, there was just enough space to hold the 8 people that attended. Outside, the hall was plain concrete covered with a cheap whitewash. The apartment doors were big, heavy iron reinforced things that made the hallway look like a maximum security prison.

The most interesting part, though, was the room numbering. The apartment was in the 800's, so we expected to find it on the 8th floor. But it was just a 7 story building and the apartments on the top floor all started with "700". Instead, when we went to the 4th floor, and we found the 800's apartments there.

This is like with hotels in America that don't have a 13th floor because "13" is an unlucky number. In Japan, the word for 4 is "shi", which is also the word for "death". Because many Japanese renters would prefer to not have an address like "death-00", the landlord decided to renumber the rooms instead. The elevator still ran from 1 to 7, but the numbers on the doors went 1, 2, 3, 8, 5, 6, 7. I guess this aversion to "shi" extends to anti-war activists, too.

Leaping Lizards

2011-11-11T16:18:00.000-08:00

Feel free to make up your own caption. This guy was moving so fast that I only had time to take the one shot, from across the street, through traffic, and behind the signal pole.

Review: Murder Princess, vol. 1

2011-11-10T14:39:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

The 2 volume Murder Princess manga was released in the U.S. by Broccoli Books, while the 6 episode anime came out through Funimation. The original manga appeared in Dengeki Daioh from 2005 to 2007. Artist Sekihiko Inui has also written Ratman, Comic Party and Gensou Shuugi (Fantasism). Because this book is available in the U.S., I'm not going to do a full review/summary of it.

(Pete and Dominikov.)

I found copies of both volumes of Murder Princess in Book Off for 100 yen each. Initially I didn't recognize it, but the name in big letters in English kept catching my eye, and the cover art was just interesting enough to justify getting it in the hopes of finding a couple of good pages to scan, The artwork is very clean, but on the verge of being static. Instead of battles, we get combat poses. That's fine for advancing the story, but there's a lack of the necessary tension and build-up for making exciting fights. The character designs are all unique and there's no chance of confusing who's who. The background art is also crisp and detailed.

(Inside front cover. The fake title is "Hell Doctor Akamashi, vol. 1". From left: Yuna, Akamashi, Ana.)

The story is fairly generic, though - Mad scientist develops two small girl robots for overthrowing the king, and as the princess runs for help, she smashes into a world-famous bounty hunter and they end up switching bodies. From here, we have the violent "fish out of water" fighter trying to keep the kingdom together. Ultimately, the villains switch from the evil but incompetent scientist, to the much more cruel and competent traitorous older brother.

(Inside back cover.)

Murder Princess isn't great literature, but it is an easy read, if you just want some fast mind candy to snack on. If you want the full story, you can probably get it used in English at Half-Price Books.
Grade: B+
Recommended.

(Frontispiece)

Organic Fest

2011-11-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

(Note that for some reason mediafire is blocking me out from uploading any more photos to them. I'm looking for another free hosting service. In the meantime I'm experimenting with Picassa again.)

The 2011 Kagoshima Organic Festival took place on Nov. 6th along the pier front next to Dolphin Port. The 5th was a sister event, a lantern memorial for the people affected by the March 11 earthquake, and the reading of a report detailing the effects of the Fukushima reactor meltdown. The PA system for the reading and the music afterward was powered by volunteers pedaling a mama chari bicycle to the left of the stage. I got talked into getting on the bike for a few minutes, and the generator put virtually no load on the back tire at all. A far cry from the gear crunchers that used to power the 3V headlight on my old bike when I was a kid.

The Organic fest essentially acted as a farmer's market for various companies and producers on several of the islands within a few hour's boat ride from Kagoshima. The pier front was divided into three sections - a handmade goods market, cooked food stalls, and fresh produce tables. By far the most popular stalls were for gelato and organic coffee. Others sold oden, curry, yaki tori and cookies and pastries. Several of the tables handed out free samples, most of which was very good. A stage at one end hosted amateur dance acts and pro-organic farming speakers. A couple tents were set up for people to relax and eat, while another tent sorted everyone's garbage into specific kinds of cups, plates, bowls and chopstick piles for later recycling.

(One of the food tables, I think this one is for some kind of stew.)

A children's play area included temporary swings and a bamboo climbing tower.

It had rained heavily on Saturday, and remained overcast all during the event. The weather probably didn't keep people away from the Port, but it wasn't all that crowded. Maybe 200 people while I was there. Unfortunately, the clouds did mess up the photos.

The petting zoo included some chickens, ducks, geese and a goat.

(One of the raw produce stalls.)

A small exhibit showing the steps involved in processing cane sugar. The table sold a variety of sugars, possibly from either Amami island, or Okinawa.

Across the street and up the block from Dolphin Port is the NHK TV broadcasting building, which had set up their own tables in the front driveway for overflow produce shops, and a stage for more professional musical performances. The building was opened to the public for tours, and we were encouraged to watch 3D programming on the big Blu-ray screen in the lobby.

Kagoshima flowers

2011-11-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

There's a small white building right next to the bridge over the street for the Kagoshima train track, on the way from the apartment to the Taiyo supermarket on the other side of the Kotsuki river from me. I pass by it every couple of days when I walk over to buy orange juice (juice is $1 cheaper a pack than at the Shiroyama store that is actually several blocks closer to me. However, Shiroyama has milk that is close to 12 cents cheaper than at Taiyo.) The building has a little wooden sign alongside the door frame, but I've never tried translating it. It kind of looks like a club house, and once there was koto music coming out of an open window, suggesting that there was a music student receiving lessons that day.

On the fence in front of the building are these two plush cell phone strap figures, and there's a small garden alongside the sidewalk leading to the front door. So I took pictures with the intent of writing up a joke about how the plushies were some kind of strange flower that was part of the garden. Unfortunately, the camera refused to focus on the red flowers and the resulting shot came out blurry. The next night, I was going through the photos from the camera and noticed the problem and the fact that I didn't have any usable images of that flower. The next day, I went back, and discovered that ALL of the flowers had died and withered away in the space of just 2 days.

This is what I started with.

This is what came out fuzzy and what I wanted to reshoot.

This is what I found when I went back less than 48 hours later. Life is so fleeting...

Cat Box

2011-11-07T18:18:00.000-08:00

Stencil on a mail box in front of an office near my building.

Commentary: Comic Ran

2011-11-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

(All rights belong to their owners. Images used here for review purposes only.)

After I picked Comic Ran Twins, I realized that it was the sister magazine to Comic Ran. So, a few days later when I decided to go to a coffee shop near the apartment, I figured that I might as well read the original magazine over coffee as well, just to be able to compare the two.

(Shinchou Senki)

In general, spin-off magazines (e.g. - Morning Tsu, Champion Monthly) for some reason aren't as good as the original ones, and appear to exist only as an outlet for artists trying to establish themselves in the industry. This is definitely the case with Twins, in that Comic Ran is the much better magazine. Ran also specializes in samurai and Edo-era drama stories, but the artwork is greatly improved, and the stories are paced better. There's a mix of serious combat and 4-panel gags, with a couple longer comedy pieces as well. As with Ran Twins, I haven't seen any of these titles before, and the only artist I recognize is Takao Saito (Golgo 13), who has Oniheihankachou, and is given writer credits on Kumotori Zanpei (currently drawn by Tetsumi Dokou). Both of these titles have been around for a long time, so if you're a ninja or samurai fan, you may already know them.

(Kumotori Zampei)

There are a couple stand-out stories here, primarily Kumotori Zanpei, Shinchou Senki, and Choujuu Gitan II. Most of the titles follow the same patterns, though - intrigue leads to a fight where the bad guys get cut down and the good guys move on to the next intrigue. If you're a big fan of Taiga drama, then Ran and Ran Twins are for you. Monthly, 380 yen, 350 pages. Published by Leed, Japan.

(Despite the great splash page, Fuu Unji-Tachi is actually a silly gag story featuring an intent, but ill-adapted soldier of fortune and his friends.)