TOKYOMANGO

Beautiful fruit-shaped designer sticky notes

I love these sticky notes shaped like fruits. They are called kudamemo (kudamono = fruit in Japanese, plus memo) and you can buy them individually or in crates of six. They're so pretty!

D-Bros via Moco Loco

Cool new concept for bicycle pit stops

Check out this ingenious concept for bicycle pit stop areas by Tokyo's Store Muu Design Studio. Basically, anybody riding a bike could just ride straight into one of these tables, which locks the front wheel and provides them with an instant table to rest or snack on. The cyclist can stay on his/her seat and just have a regular seated meal. Japan has tons of bicycles, and parking them has become harder and harder as the crackdown on randomly parked bicycles continues. So this is a great solution for those who need to stop for a bite but don't want to get their bikes confiscated. I can totally see a fast food chain or restaurant wanting to install these, but I can also see it causing huge clusterfucks on sidewalks and promptly being banned.

via Shibuya246

Related stories:
Bicycle rule crackdown!
Video: the hen that rides a bicycle
Giant subterranean bicycle parking lot
Gallery of pimped out dekochari bicycles

Foot pee! pack smoothes out callouses

This is not the first time I've seen urine-based beauty products in Japan, but calling something a Foot Pee! Pack takes it to a whole new level.

via Tokyo Times

New toy simulates giant fireworks inside the house

Sega Toys has an awesome new toy called Uchiage. Its structure is similar to a miniature planetarium &mdash it uses multiple lenses pointed towards the ceiling to project light patterns that look just like a giant burst of fire. The cool thing is that it's completely safe, still beautiful, and you can even program it to project customized messages or images in the sky. How much are you willing to bet that somebody will use this to propose marriage? It goes on sale August 1 for about $150.

Product page (Japanese)

Related stories:
Jupiter-shaped planetarium for a starry bath
Homestar planetarium cell phone strap
Sega Toys' touch sensor robot speaks its own language
Sega Toys clock counts down to your final moment
Super realistic robotic animals from Sega Toys

British girls imitate ganguro gyaru trend

According to the BBC, there's a new subset of British youth that thrives to be just like the Japanese ganguro &mdash you know, the girls with the bleached blond hair, super tanned skin, and crazy makeup. I read somewhere that for Japanese women, making themselves up this way is a deliberate form of rebellion against the traditional aesthetic of jet black hair and pale white skin. I wonder what it means when Caucasian girls with naturally lighter hair pick up the trend.

Nike is turning Miyashita Park into an athletic wonderland

Big news from my brother in Tokyo! Nike Japan is spending a gazillion yen to transform Miyashita Park in Shibuya into a giant playground with a skate park and a rock climbing wall.

Right now, Miyashita Park is best known for booze, drugs, illicit sex, and homeless people. If all goes as planned and this facility is completed next May, it will become one of the healthiest places in Shibuya. Interesting! A decade ago I would have been pissed that the hub of many of my childhood sins is being disintegrated, but now that I'm older and super into rock climbing and gearing up to run the Nike half marathon, I'm actually pretty excited. Many locals and homeless advocacy organizations are protesting the decision, however. I suppose Nike would have been better off tearing down a bunch of izakaya instead &mdash that way they wouldn't have to displace inhabitants or deprive the city of one of its few peaceful parks &mdash but Miyashita was probably easier to negotiate.

Link (Japanese)

Trailer: The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (NSFW)

A couple of years ago at a film festival in San Francisco, I watched this movie, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, a soft porn film about a girl who gets superpowers after being shot in the head. The film is set against the backdrop of the second Iraq war, and there's a scene in the film where the girl has sex with George W. Bush's finger on a rooftop. You get a glimpse of it here in this trailer, though really, you should watch the entire movie just because that scene is just remarkable in that so-bad-it's-good Japanese b-movie way.

Buy The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai on Amazon

PARC theme day on Boing Boing Gadgets

Hey guys, if you have a sec hop on over to BBG to check out the stories Steven and I are doing on PARC, the esteemed Palo Alto Research Center. Don't miss photos and diagrams of the first ethernet cable in the world, the carpet on which graphical user interfaces were conceived, a mirror that helps you comparison shop, a gallery of caution signs, and interviews about what it's like to work there.

Economy gives rise to a new population of protesting youth

There's an interesting article in the NY Times today about a group of young Japanese who are gathering on the streets to protest the shortage of jobs in the current economy.

Demonstrating in public is not common in Japan, and often has the connotation of a radical, peace-disrupting, unwanted activity. “This is the most significant rise in activism I’ve seen in years,” one Tokyo University professor quoted in the article says. “A movement is brewing among young Japanese.”

Interesting! (Thanks, Brian!)

Dan Osman, one of the craziest rock climbers ever to have lived

Dan Osman was a Japanese-American extreme athlete perhaps best known for the video (below), in which he speed-climbs a 400+ foot tall rock wall without a safety rope in four minutes. (I spent this past weekend in Lover's Leap, the area in South Lake Tahoe that he did this in, and climbed the same rock.) Osman later became hooked on free-jumping, which is kinda like bungee jumping but for much greater heights in much more dangerous conditions on a normal rope that doesn't slow you down at all. He even set a Guinness Record for it. Then, in 1998, he died doing when a rope failed him when free-jumping a cliff in Yosemite. A QA guy from Black Diamond, who made the rope, did an evaluation and concluded that it was a freak accident caused by the rope rubbing against itself &mdash something resulting from human error, a slight miscalculation in the angle at which he jumped.

There's a great story about the life and death of Dan Osman in Outside Magazine.

"Adopt" Bubbles, Michael Jackson's famous chimp

Remember when Michael Jackson brought his chimp Bubbles on the Bad Tour to Japan in 1987? I always wondered what happened to Bubbles &mdash apparently, he is now living in Florida at the Center for Great Apes.Here's an excerpt from his profile page:

Bubbles was born in a biomedical laboratory, but taken from his mother and sold to a Hollywood trainer while still an infant. He was purchased for Michael Jackson and soon gained fame as Jackson's pet chimpanzee. He appeared in television shows, movies, and music videos before he “retired” at age 6 or 7. When Bubbles was only 5, he toured Japan in a promotional tour with Michael Jackson. While there, he sat in on interviews with Jackson and "moonwalked" for the press. But, as he grew too strong to be around people, he lived most of his life at the trainer’s California animal compound in the company of an older chimpanzee named Sam. Both Bubbles and Sam arrived at the Center for Great Apes in March 2005 with a large group of chimpanzees, all from the entertainment world.

You can donate to Bubbles or even adopt him exclusively for a year and visit him at his sanctuary for $10,000. Pretty cool!

Bubbles' home page (via @PerezHilton)

Andrea Innocent's cute Japanese ghost illustrations

Australian artist and TokyoMango reader Andrea Innocent makes these beautiful, fun illustrations of Japanese folklore and culture. She says:

Basically I am a story teller in pictures and Japan is my muse. A couple of my works have in fact been inspired by posts on your site.

So cool! The one shown above is of Kuchisake Onna, a legendary Japanese ghost whom I used to fear when I was a little girl. You can read about that here.

(Photo via innocentgirl's Flickr)

Uniqlo might buy the GAP

One of my all-time favorite stores in Japan is Uniqlo &mdash it's like the GAP, except the styles and cuts are a lot more contemporary and its cheaper. Now we're hearing that Tadashi Yanai, the guy who founded UNIQLO and the richest guy in Japan according to Forbes, might be buying the GAP.

Link

Related:
Uniqlo calendar with stop-motion scenes of Tokyo
Uniqlo to send clothes to refugees
New Years lucky bag: Uniqlo vs MUJI
Uniqlo NY will have robot shopping guides

Gundam decked out in pink jewels

Wow. Someone in China made a blinged out pink girly Gundam with bejeweled armor and glittery flowers on his legs for the robot anime's 30th anniversary.

Link (Japanese)

Billie Jean performed in Tokyo, circa 1987

My friend Alyssa said the first concert she ever went to in her life was this one, MJ's appearance at Yokohama Stadium for his 1987 Bad Tour in Japan.

Michael Jackson Live in Japan DVD came out three days ago

I don't know that much about this DVD, to be honest, but it's called Michael Jackson: Live in Japan, and according to Amazon it was released on June 23, 2009, two days before he died.

Michael Jackson: Live in Japan [Amazon]

Buy a desktop robot that resembles a diapered baby

The cam baby is a cute child robot that resembles a 1-year old human baby in diapers. It has just learned to walk, so it waddles towards you when you clap your hands and say, here baby baby. It makes cute little bot noises while it walks, and its LED eyes flash and go piko piko piko! When it falls, it starts crying. You can own one for $26.

Buy yours here.

Japanese comedy skit from the 80s parodies Michael Jackson's Thriller

I've posted this before, but here it is again because it is, in my humble opinion, one of the best tributes to Michael Jackson originating in Japan. Around 1:58, Ken Shimura, who has just confessed to his girlfriend that he becomes a henna ojisan (a weird middle-aged man) when there's a full moon, jumps out of the bushes and starts dancing to the chorus of Thriller played on a Japanese flute. This clip is from the late 80s, I think, or possibly the early 90s.

Rest in peace, MJ.

Colonel Sanders without his makeup

Remember the story from a few months ago about the Colonel Sanders statue that came floating onto a riverbank after being stolen from a KFC in Osaka over 20 years ago and chucked overboard? Well, here's a picture of him next to a newer version of himself. I think he looks much more approachable without the glasses and the makeup and the white suit. The happy human behind them is the president of KFC Japan, who no doubt eats a lot of chicken... or does he?

via Mainichi

Oishinbo, a famous manga that teaches you all about Japanese food

I read a lot of manga when I was growing up, and so did my mom. She was obsessed with this one series called Oishinbo, a story about a food critic and his culinary adventures across the country &mdash it was so detailed and precise that you learned a ton about Japanese food and how to enjoy it just from reading.

Several volumes of Oishinbo are already available in English &mdash Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyoza, Oishinbo: Sake, Oishinbo: Izakaya--Pub Food, and Oishinbo: The Joy of Rice are some of them.

I can confidently say that, if you want to learn about the intricacies of Japanese food, or if you want to know why Japanese people are so obsessed with white rice (last winter, I went to a restaurant in Tokyo where their specialty was white rice), reading this series is the best and most fun way to do it. The newest volume, Oishinbo: Fish, Sushi, and Sashimi, comes out in July and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Oishinbo, Volume 1 by Tetsu Kariya