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.

At the end of March a new part of the Tokyo Bay area was opened up, with 4 new stations on the Yurikamome line and roads and bridges connecting Ariake to Toyosu and Harumi.
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The Tokyo Tower Halo, only visible when us Tokyoites have been especially well-behaved.
By the way, is it just me, or have there been no minor tremors here recently?
Is the big one on its way?……

This is Marunouchi North Entrance of Tokyo Station. Currently, I am coming here once a week because of my job.

I like here — red brick wall building, many working people rushing at their office in the morning, homeless people sitting on stairs sometimes.
There is a gallery and hotel inside This building.

If you have spare time at Tokyo Station, it might be a good idea walking around this nice building.

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?

Tonight I’m headed out to SuperDeluxe for PechaKuchaNight Vol.26, this month’s number of what is the probably the best regularly occurring art/architecture/design event in town.

PechaKuchaNight is a sort of “open mike” opportunity for designers, architects, artists, etc., to give short “20×20” presentations about their current or past projects. “20×20” because each presenter (supposedly) 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, see the list of presenters from last month and from a couple of months back.

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.