Tomorrow night (January 25) at SuperDeluxe is the first PechaKuchaNight of 2006, PechaKuchaNight Vol.29

PechaKuchaNight is the best regularly occurring art/architecture/design event in town. It’s a sort of “open mike” opportunity for designers, architects, and artists to give short “20×20″ presentations about their current or past projects. “20×20″ because each presenter is limited to showing a maximum of 20 images, and limited to talking about each image for a maximum of 20 seconds.

If you want an idea of what to expect, read the PingMag report on PechaKuchaNight Vol.27 or see the list of presenters from Vol.28 in November.

It starts at 20:20pm. For directions, see the map (日本語 | English) at the SuperDeluxe site. Or see the SuperDeluxe listing at the Tokyo Art Beat site.

P.S.: One more month of PechaKuchaNight, and the building that my company is in runs out of floors and hence out of buttons on the elevator. I guess I’ll need to find a new job.

Potential employer: We think you’re great and we’d really like to hire you.

Me: OK, how many floors does this building have?

I’m not good at drawing, Sorry!!

This is my answer to a game which I played with my colleagues in Hokkaido last weekend.

The game is — We are given a same subeject and have to draw it without references.
For example, if the subject is ‘monkey’, you need to remember how it looks and draw it in 1~2 minutes.

Simple simple game, but we enjoyed it very much. Because each drawing has its own characteristic and really funny.

I don’t tell you the subject of this now, please guess what I drew :)

I assume that most foreigners in Japan already know this, but I didn’t realise fully until today. It is obligatory to have your alien registration card (”Gaijin card”) on you at all times in Japan. If you are stopped by the Police and they ask to see your Gaijin card, you’d better have it on you: otherwise you can receive a court summons, a financial penalty or even end up deported or in jail…
Pachipro, writing over at Jeff’s Sushicam has a nightmare story of popping out one evening without his card.
Arudou Debito has a whole section on Gaijin Cards and the laws involved, but the simple advice is carry it with you, or face the consequences…

Thanks to Blogd for the image

Behind the livedoor scandals, the big case is almost left out. The Huser scandal is almost gone.

(to know about this, please find articles here)
I think police started inspecting livedoor on that day so people forget about Susumu Ojima, President of Huser Ltd, who has strong connection with congressional representatives. So Ojima can get away from strong bashing from people. This is very sad.

This photo isn’t so nice. I suppose it’s because I was drunk :-P

Last Sunday, I stayed at Tokyo Business Hotel in Shinjuku. I had a party with my friends at the English Pub, HUB from 9 p.m., and my last train to get back home is 9:31. I didn’t want to get out the party in the middle, so I searched Yahoo! travel and found the cheapest hotel beforehand.

It took more time than I expected to get there on foot from Shinjuku station, about 20 minutes. I guess I was so tired that I felt it took so long. I arrived there around 11:30, and took a bath. There’s a fairly big public bath in the basement. On that day In the night hour, no one except me took a bath, so I really felt relaxed.

In the next morning, I had to get up before 5 a.m. to get on the first train. Of course I had a job on Monday! A front desk cleak was so nice in such an early morning. Perhaps I’ll use there again.

A common university entrance examinations “center test” were held in last weekend at 721 locations in Japan. The center test work as “entrance exam” for many national university, and for a few national college and private college, the score can be the pass-fail criteria. Since this year, they take listening English test. I couldn’t find the listening test, but every year we can try the test next day of exam. Here is this year English test. (first page is accent position. choose a correct pair.) Would you try it?

By the way, I talked about “a cold cataplasm” with my foreign friends
but some asked me what is that? I checked “湿布”(shippu) on online dictionary and they say it is cold cataplasm, hot compress, cold compress. But some people wrote it is very hard to find them in other countries. Then I realized they are so Japanese stuff?? Cold cataplasm, cold/hot compress is like a gel patch containing a substance to reduce pain or swelling.

I found so many site about heating pad in the U.S, you will imagine it. The difference is Japanese patches are disposable, and not only herb, some medicinal component are included. When we have shoulder stiffness or alleviate the tension in your shoulders, we use cold patch. Cold patch is work fine to set up inflammation or acute pain. And when we have chronic pain or stomach pain, we use warm patch.

Salonpas is a major brand of those patch, you may check patch in their ad videos, here (.mpg video) and here (.mpg video). Since we can buy it easily at drug store, in winter season, it is very convenient for sudden fever. Baby (cheek like an apple :-) I can see she has fever!) and adult, we all use it.

Not for pain, we use it for healing and relax. Especially women (of course me too!) use them for leg fatigue (.mov video). After taking bath, cold and good smell patch is very comfortable for bloated legs. Even a office, we may use for small one for neck. If you like it, I heard they started it to export it to the US. Please check drug store.

Anyway when you have a light ankle sprain, you may try instant handmade patch by yourself. Knead flour and vinegar together, it should be ear lobe like consistency. Spread it our into 1/3 inch on the part. Then covered it with saran wrap or wet rag and hold it more with cotton gauze or something. In this way, curiously the paste will be dried in only inflammation part. You can try as much as you like it, usually in next day the light sprain will be better.

News sources here are reporting that 33-year-old millionaire and Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie has just tonight finally been arrested on charges of securities fraud. Prosecuters are asserting that Livedoor executives carried out some monkeyshines to inflate the company’s share price and also did some clumsy water-into-wine parlour magic to try to make the company appear profitable at a time when it was actually operating at a loss. Three other Livedoor executives were arrested along with Horie: the company president, CFO, and marketing president.

In case you’ve not been following the news lately: The fun began last week, when a crack team of expert box carriers raided Livedoor’s offices and carted off evidence which prosecutors claim incriminates Livedoor and its executives in fraud. The raid and statements from prosecutors caused Livedoor’s share price to nose-dive and to take most of the Nikkei Index down with it. Things got a lot grimmer when it was reported that an executive of a company whose offices were also raided as part of the investigation, Hideaki Noguchi (who is also apparently of personal friend of Horie) was found dead down in Okinawa, in what police are saying was a suicide.

The back story behind all this news is the drastic change in fortune for Horie that has come about in the past week. His youth, his personal wealth and lifestyle, the brashness of his business actions, his battles against the old guard (and their efforts to do everything they can to stop him), and especially the tone of his public comments over the last few years have turned him into a media celebrity here. That in spite of the fact that he and Livedoor have not exactly had a sterling record of success in recent memory (he failed quite spectacularly in attempts to buy a baseball team and to take over one of the biggest TV networks here, and Livedoor is now widely perceived as a company without much skill at innovating but with a lot of experience in copying other companies’ successes).

In the past, when circumstances have not turned out in his favor, he’s sometimes said things like, “Everything’s still going just the way I planned.” It’ll be very interesting to hear what spin he ends up putting on these latest events.

Last weekend, my colleagues and I went skiing and snowboarding to Rusutsu Resort in Hokkaido .
It was really great place, we had a lot of powder snow every day :)

Here is a photo of souvenir to my friend. They are region-limited snacks.
“Baby star ramen”

(more…)

As DLA said in his post, snow finally arrived in Tokyo on Saturday. The cold weather has continued, but yesterday (Sunday) and today have been fine, so we have been able to enjoy Tokyo in white. It looks pretty good!

My almost-eight-year-old daughter Satori took this photo. She shot it at the Shinagawa JR station while we were waiting for a train to Shibuya.

I go through Shinagawa station almost every weekend, and take the Keikyu line from there to pick up Satori in Yokosuka, where she lives with her mother. Often we end up coming back through Shinagawa to Tokyo, and going to Kodomo no shiro or to a museum. Sometimes we go to Kawasaki to watch a movie, because the theaters there (Cinecitta and the one near the Keikyu station) have more showings dubbed in Japanese. The theater at the Prince Hotel is nice too, but doesn’t have as many dubbed showings.

Anyway, I’m thinking about buying Satori a digital camera for her eighth birthday. She loves to take photos. She seems especially fascinated with taking pictures of her own shoes and the ground around her feet. But as far as pictures of shoes and the ground go, hers are usually not so bad. So if I give her a camera, there’s no telling what she might get fascinated with next. Or maybe she’ll specialize and become the world’s most accomplished photographer of ground-and-shoes images.

(This posting was moblogged direct from keitai.)