TOKYOMANGO

Piggy Bank turns Saving Money into an Interactive RPG

 

In August, toymaker Takara Tomy is releasing this ultimate piggy bank for gamer geeks. It's called BankQuest: A Tale of Savings, and it's a dungeon-shaped vault with a LCD screen that turns your penny-saving experience into the ultimate role-playing game. Every time you feed it a coin, the screen will update you on how much you've saved and tell you what weapons you can buy with that money. The more you save, the bigger weapons you can buy, and the closer you get to successfully beating the Money Monster.

The RPG piggy bank will retail at about $40.

Nana, a Film About Two Unlikely Best Girl Friends

I  just watched a movie called Nana. Based on a best-selling shojo manga that sold over 22 million copies in Japan, it's a cute story about two girls who are total opposites that become best friends. One is a super girly girl who wears lots of pink and will give anything to be with her boyfriend; the other is punk rocker who sacrificed the love of her life for her music career. The two meet fatefully on a train ride to Tokyo, and when they meet again at an apartment for rent, they become roommates. They're both named Nana.

At first, I thought the story sounded really cheesy, but I found myself really enjoying the movie. Both characters are extremely likable despite their shortcomings—Nana the girly girl can be really annoying, and Nana the punk rocker has a bad temper and an attitude but the're both genuine and endearing. You end up falling in love with both by the end of the movie.

Come to my Book Signing at Double Punch

Save the date: I'm having a book signing at Double Punch, a fun Japanese toy store in North Beach (San Francisco) on Sunday, July 13th from 1-3pm. Stop by to buy my book and get it signed, to check out some cool figurines and t-shirts, or to just hang out!

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The Aging Japanese News Reporter

I don't know if it's his job or if he just ran out of hair dye and botox, but this news reporter does seem a lot older now than he did a few years ago.

Link

A Brief Tour of the Japanese Web

When I was in Japan reporting on the feature about Nico Nico Douga, my friend Ichiroo showed me all these different applications on his laptop. All were immensely popular forms of time-wasting entertainment in Japan. (One of the strangest things I heard that week was that Japanese school girls all have the McDonalds web page saved on their cell phone favorites—and every time they reach a new destination, they download a coupon, stake out the nearest McD's, and buy cheeseburgers.)

I wrote a short article about the quirky world of the Japanese web as an online extra to the Nico Nico piece:

I'm sitting in a smoky room on the second floor of a Tully's Coffee in Western Tokyo, looking over the shoulder of Ichiroo Kiyota as he types on his laptop. Kiyota, an executive at Six Apart Japan, is showing me around some of the most popular — and useless — Web apps in the country.

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