Tokyo Metblogs » Joi Ito

Cosplay

Joi Ito — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:22:54 +0000

Melon auctioneer loses money

Joi Ito — Sat, 21 May 2005 12:21:02 +0000

I heard on the headline news section on the radio yesterday that a company tried to auction on the Internet two melons valued at 300,000 yen ($3000 or so) each and ended up getting only 150,000 yen ($1500 or so) a piece. The newswire reported that the company had lost 300,000 yen in the sale.

Oo. Internet bad.

Car Navi – Insanity or Mind Control

Joi Ito — Mon, 02 May 2005 23:24:39 +0000

For those of you who don’t live in Japan, this week is Golden Week. A week speckled with holidays where most people leave on vacation for the whole week. Usually the city is deserted, but lately more people work. Anyway, I decided to drive into the office today from my home in Chiba. The drive can range from 30 min to 2.5 hours depending on traffic. I usually rely on my car navigation system to navigate the fastest path. Before I left, the traffic web site told me that there was nearly no traffic. I was surprised when the navigation system kept trying to steer my away from the expressway. It was SO insistent that it kept trying to make me take every possible exit off of the freeway. For all practical purposes, it was insane. Except for a bit of traffic getting onto the expressway, I had almost no traffic.

On the way home it did the same thing. Tried to make me drive all the way without getting on the expressway.

The inner-conspiracy-theorist wants to say that the police were controlling my navigation system to stay away from expressways to try to prevent some kind of weird traffic that might occur because of a large number of people deciding to travel… or it was some kind of strange test to conduct when most businesses were shut down. Anyway, it was totally annoying and I was lucky I was driving a familiar route. Did anyone else notice this today?

Technorati Tags: car, driving

Kancho

Joi Ito — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 14:22:09 +0000

You probably don’t know what kancho is and you probably don’t want to know… but if you insist, you can read this.

via Gen Kanai

Gokusen

Joi Ito — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 03:48:27 +0000

I just watched the first two episodes of Gokusen. My sister turned me on to the show. It’s probably old news for many people, but it’s fun. You can find English subtitled versions on fan sites and buy the Japanese DVDs on Amazon.co.jp. It’s a story about the granddaughter of a Yakuza clan who becomes a school teacher with a class of rowdy students. It’s sort of cliche new teacher vs. rowdy kids who turn into friends, but the Yakuza characters and philosophy are pretty interesting. The network of English language fan sites and the subtitlers is also fairly extensive.

Here is an English language fan site. You can google for torrents.

Fertility Festival

Joi Ito — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 20:08:42 +0000

On a brighter note. An interesting video on Tokyo DV about a Fertility Festival.

Japanese doctors and pain management

Joi Ito — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:24:02 +0000

I have had several relatives die from cancer and in the case of my mother, my sister and I were in charge of her pain management. Now my fiancé’s father is hospitalized with cancer and is suffering a great deal of pain. I had heard this in the past, but now am experiencing first-hand, the inclination of Japanese doctors to try to explain that a too much morphine or other painkiller is bad. This is ridiculous and very backwards. I am pulling strings to try to get better pain management for him. The level of control they give the family and approach to pain management in Japan compared to the US is extremely behind the times and I would suggest to anyone who has a loved one about to be hospitalized for something that requires strong painkillers to seriously consider going to the US if you can afford it. I may be over-generalizing and I would be curious to know if anyone has had any GOOD experiences in Japan with pain management or oncologists.

PastaZio

Joi Ito — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 17:43:09 +0000

I went to PastaZio in Akasaka today. They just opened October 25 and is a new concept from Global-Dining, the company that runs La Boheme, Gonpachi, Monsoon, Zest and many other cool restaurants. PastaZio reminded me of Hashiya, one of my favorite pasta places in Yoyogi Hachiman. The concept is to make a high turn-over pasta shop designed like a ramen shop. A counter around a big vat of boiling water and chefs hustling pasta as if it were ramen. PastaZio was a bit more fashionable and the taste less Japanese than Hashiya. The volume of pasta was a bit less too I think. There wasn’t enough salt for my taste, but there was plenty of rock salt in a funny pump style salt dispenser at the table to fix that. If you only have 10 minutes for lunch and want some pasta, try PastaZio.

Disclosure: my business partner is on the board of Global Dining and he took me there today.