Author Archive

Hatoyama Resigned and All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt

Poor Hatoloopyama. He had a dream, involving crazy fashion. Now you can have some of your own to commemorate another fun shuffling of the chairs in the Prime Minister’s office.

Take this one for instance:

Order it on Amazon
The text on it says, “The Heisei era’s tax evasion king”.

You can find a whole slew of them here. Including a few shirts that use everyone’s favorite word for him recently: loopy.

One is particularly harsh though, in the following shirt we see the characters for love and friendship, along with a dove, split in twain.

Buy on Amazon

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. He is loopy like a fox and enjoying his urakudari.
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This Ad Campaign is Already Dead

You are already dead.
–Kenshiro, star of Fist of the North Star

Atatatatatata!
–Also Kenshiro

This ad seems to be from a couple of years ago, but I couldn’t resist sharing. Here we see Kenshiro powering up; clothes bursting from the raw energy to reveal… a salary-man’s suit. Then he starts to hand out business cards like deadly punches. The subtitles up to this point say, “Getting the job! Townwork [a placement company's periodical], company-worker edition.” The next itteration of clothes-rippingness shows his new job as a delivery guy. The subs here say, “Change of career! Townwork, company-worker edition.”

This commercial requires a familiarity with the anime’s opening song, You は Shock, which I have embedded below.

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. He is already dead.
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See The Tokyo Marathon Live From a Foreigner’s Forehead

Last year, Joseph Tame made history by recording and broadcasting the 10k of the Tokyo Marathon live via his iphone. This Sunday, he’s looking to repeat the spectacle in a more spectacular fashion to get more spectators watching by running 42 kilometers while using more iphones, assistants, and a bunny outfit.

You can go to this site to watch.

Here’s the rundown in video form:

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. He’s moving apartments on Sunday, and will be not broadcasting anything at all for a while.
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Learn the Okinawa Dialect from Byron

Byron may not look like your typical image of an Okinawan dialect speaker, but he grew up in the area and is eager to teach his dying way of speech, called Uchinaaguchi in this series, entitled “Pirin –paran Katayabira.” Byron doesn’t speak English, but he does sing and play traditional Okinawan songs and he plays the shamisen.

That was very different from standard Japanese. This is just an introduction someone put on YouTube. You can see more from the series here.
[via Hiko]

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. He’d like to say, “Guburi sabira” to you all.—

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Swan, Prominent Japan Vlogger, Passes On

I was a causal viewer of Roger Swan’s movie reviews, but my surprise at his sudden passing pales in comparison to the outpouring of shock and grief that I have seen around the YouTube community in the last week or so. To be honest, I don’t have the chops to eulogize him properly. I just didn’t know him well enough, which I regret. But here are some things I want to share with you.

There was a touching video made quite quickly by Tokyo Cooney. You can see that here. There were many other video tributes as well.

And there was a really powerful tribute by Kevin at the blog Dogen, where Swan contributed articles. He says:

If you’ve ever seen the Truman show, then you may be able to understand Rodger’s existence, and its importance to everyone that knew him. He was that normal guy that was on video–all the time. He was that normal guy that everyone watched grow up. We saw him turn from a boy into a man. We saw him grow! And those of us who began watching, be it out of friendship or even a sympathetic curiosity, we all became hooked and hypnotized by Rodger’s complete lack of ego.

Please see the whole post here.

As I was a fan of the horror movie channel he put out, I offer his last video in that vein as a small tribute to a truly interesting vlogger’s memory.

I identified with Swan, as we both shared interests in Japanese novels, movies and culture. His death is a grim reminder of my own mortality, and I think the best thing I can do to honor him is to live my life to the fullest. For I’d like to think he died feeling quite content with all that he had done. Would that we all could heed such a lesson.

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic.
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Review and Preview: Lala Pipo

lala pipo

Lala Pipo was handed off to me a long time ago to read and review, but it took me a long time to get to it because the cover–one of Chip Kidd’s few failed designs in my opinion– presented the book in a way that looked like it was, well, not something I would want to ever read. But the cover image has nothing to do with the contents. It seems like I could reference some saying here. Uh… “Don’t judge a…” It will come to me later.

What Lala Pipo is about is a lot of people (that’s where the title comes from) who’s lives are tangentially linked by the sex and pornography trade in Japan. It is divided into separate stories that follow pitiable characters as they trade their dignity for money or pleasure. The first story, amusing though it was, had me wondering once again why I had bothered to pick up the book, but pretty soon the connections of the overall narrative and theme came into focus and I realized that I had a work of impish genius in my hands.

This is a black comedy. Black-black-lose-hope-in-Japan-at-times black. It is a satire of modern, rotting, money-driven and materialistic Japan, but it does what satire does best: makes you think and challenges your perspective. I hope Japanese people are giving the original Japanese version a read.

If you are interested in buying it, here is the Amazon America link, and here is the Amazon Japan one as well.

I noticed recently (and far too late) that there is a movie adaptation of the novel. It seems to have taken a slightly surreal take, but looks pretty promising. Find it embedded below. Here is the link for the DVD: Amazon.jp.

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. He saves the creepy-covered books for last.
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