At Shinjuku Stn when entering the Mosaic Street that leads the way up to the MyLord (to be pronounced Merôd) department store you can find the so called MyLord Box. It is an interactive light instellation, that is especially nice when it is dark outside. The programm is changing every few minutes: sometimes it is all blue with white light-clouds appearing whenever you touch the screen, then it is snowing and the snowflakes are piling up around the spot where you touched it, and the other time it is gray with colourful lights popping up. It is quite entertainig to watch it and how the passer-bys react and interact. I thought it is quite amazing how many people, no matter what age was curious, tried to touch it, giggled, watched it for a while..
For all those of you who don’t have the possibility to see and touch it live and direct i uploaded a video here [click!].

Tokyo really is a place where more or less everything is available if you are willing to pay (sometimes a lot) for it. This can be wonderful: shopping or even just walking around and have a look at all the beautiful, delicious, strange or funny things is a lot of fun! Especially when it comes to food I often feel like in heaven here. However there are things of which I think they are just not right! Minke whale-, bear- or sea lion curry are definitly part of those things!
Don’t get me wrong: I also love to try food that I never had before. Give me some veggie I’ve never seen before and I will be happily excited like kids on christmas. But I am absolutely not appreciative of eating animals that are in danger of extinction, especially when people from an affluent society with plenty of other foods eat those meatproducts just out of curiosity or fun! It is not like someone is starving here without whale meat.
Furthermore I guess no one buys this in an endeavour to appreciate the meat – canned and soaking in curry sauce it surely won’t have any distinctive flavour. So it is all just about the idea of eating some “exotic” animal and about the colourful packaging. I found those cans in a shop for presents and all kinds of knick-knack – not in a grocery store – I don’t want to know how many people bought this as a oh-so-funny christmas present… I guess most of the cans will never be opened, they will just get dusty on the kitchen shelves of the presentees. What an unhappy end for a grand whale…

Happy holidays!

For three days now strong wind, rain and humid heat are the heralds of Typhoon No 9. Tonight it will finally reach Honshu and sweep over Tokyo. So you better stay home with some icecream and a good book and listen to the rain beating on the roof… Ki o tsukete kudasai (= take care)!

Last weekend I have been to the great SuperDeluxe club to attend the evening session of Pecha Kucha University Vol.1, a cooperation between the regular Pecha Kucha Night (organised by Klein Dytham Architecture) and Temple University. It was a very interesting night with so much input that I needed some time to get things in my brain in order to write about it. The overall topic of this first Pecha Kucha University was “Youth and Imaginative Labour: East Asia and Beyond”. There were in the fashion of the Pecha Kucha Night several speakers and every one of them had the time of 20 slides à 20 seconds (6min40sec) to present their idea, paper, research, whatever in connection to that topic. Most talked about various efforts to earn money with the internet, some were representing their favourite niche of youthculture and I didn’t really see the connection to the term “labour” all the time. But who cares, most of the prestentations were quite interesting and some very entertaining – like the one by a guy who was costumed as Goku from Dragonball. He came with a dancing crew of mostly male (!) cosplayers dressed in “moe” style who performed their dance two times – because of the great response from the audience… But there were also informative and rather academic lectures, all held by students from abroad (mostly Korea and HongKong). I wonder why there were no Japanese speakers?! Because the speech had to be hold in English, I guess.. the old problem.
After those presentations followed the screening of the fantastic movie Avalon, introduced by THE guru in the field of Japanese cinema, Donald Richie.
And as if all that wasn’t input enough there was a HipHop afterparty hosted by Zulu Nation Japan, with a Spoken Word performance by Marcellus Nealy and live painting by Rinpa Eshidan. I strongly recommend to have a look at their website – their work is amazing and they are something like “youtube celebrities” with one of their videos been watched more than 2 MILLION times.

As I said, this was Pecha Kucha University, not the regular Pecha Kucha Night, which is about architecture and design. If you are interested in that, going to SuperDeluxe club should be your plan for tonight, when young designers, architects and so on meet there again for another round of Pecha Kucha. And for all those of you who are not in Tokyo: Pecha Kucha Night has spread all over the world and you can attend it in more than 80 cities! All of upcoming events are listed on their website.

Some photos [click!] and a video [click!] of the famous 新宿の目 (Shinjuku Eye) by the artist Miyashita Yoshiko. It can be found at the west exit of Shinjuku station since 1969.
Although it is so “eye-catching” most people just rush by without paying attention to the huge piece of glass art – no matter how hypnotizing the pupil might spin…

I hope you all had a nice Tanabata weekend and didn’t miss the chance to make a wish :)

In my first article as a guest blogger in Tokyo I want to write about one of the most enjoyable things here in Japan: O-matsuri! When I arrived end of May I was told I am just in time for matsuri season – yay, many festivals that offer a fun glimpse on Japanese culture!
Matsuri offer the opportunity to relax, to celebrate, to have a lot of fun – even when you are just watching and eating (like I did) and not actively taking part in carrying a mikoshi. At the shrine-festivals you won’t see any earnest salary men in black suits, no: here people are enjoying themselves and many are dressed in yukata and special matsuri gear. That can look very pretty and sometimes.. uuhm.. quite exciting ;)
What amazes me the most is the array of games for children never seen before somewhere else in that form. Those distinctly Japanese (correct me if I am wrong) kid’s entertainments include many water games, which are thought to be refreshing during hot summerdays. For example fishing rubberballs or other toys out of a swiftly moving water stream, which is enjoyed mostly by the little ones.
Although the animal rights activist in me had to keep both eyes shut, it is great fun for schoolkids to try to catch real goldfish (and I read sometimes even tiny turtles – aaw) with round paper-covered frames. This demands a lot of skill because the paper soaks and rips easily, especially when the victim flounders and struggles not to get caught and the little fisherman keeps his scoop underwater for too long. But some way or the other the kids seem to become experts pretty fast and you can see many of them walking around proudly with their prey in small plastic bags.

I don’t want to know how most of those goldfish end up.. Since they are a symbol of prosperity, I hope that they get treated well and do not go down a toilet flush!
I assume that this game is one of the reasons why the image of a goldfish (as well as the sound of glass wind bells, the taste of zarusoba or watermelon and watching fireworks, that are also displayed at matsuri very often, just to name a few things) make Japanese people instantly think of the summer.
There are also games without water at matsuri, but all demand a certain skill. For another game, that is more or less exclusivly attended by little girls, you really need to have a calm hand and a lot of patience. You buy a tiny fragile plate made out of pressed sugar with the outline of a flower or some other pattern perforated in it and you get a pin with it. Now you have to try to “cut out” the pattern with the pin without breaking it – if you succed you get twice as much money back as you paid. This seemed quite tempting, so I tried… and failed badly: the flower broke in thousand pieces after a few seconds. I am not sure if anyone ever got one Yen back…
While girls are sweating concentrated over there sugar flowers, boys try their luck at a shooting stand. Well, this is not something especially Japanese, rather a worldwide phenomenon, but it fits into the picture I had of most games at Japanese festivals. It seems like they all try to bring forward abilities that were needed in an oftentimes harsh life on the Japanese countryside back in the days prior to the introduction of konbini and vendingmachines at every corner. When you had to be able to catch a fish if you wanted to have something between your chopsticks for dinner and you had to be skillful and patient to sew clothes or make tools and stuff for everyday life. And elements like water and fire for sure played a decisive role in that kind of life and so they still do at the matsuri, as matters of purification, symbols of life and just for fun at the games there.

And if you catch a goldfish there, pleaseplease be nice and let him have a pleasant life in a pretty pond..

tokyo, japan, matsuri, games, festival