The Studio360 Japan special airs tomorrow on NPR, but you can listen to all the segments online starting right now. Super exciting! Basically, Studio360—an award-winning arts and culture radio show hosted by Kurt Anderson—got a grant to go to Japan for two weeks and find a bunch of insightful, contemporary stories that will paint a larger picture of what's going on there right now.
I went out and met some amazing young women, including Toast Girl and Erina Matsui, who are breaking the mold of conventional aesthetics and expectations and doing really cool shit through their art. Leital, one of the producers, and I went everywhere from Golden Gai to Takashi Murakami's studio to interview these artists. Then we met up in NY to edit the piece together. You can hear my segment right here:
Everything else is right here:
Studio360 in Japan!
I noticed something that I've seen before and never asked anyone. One of the women interviewed stated, as one of her resume bits, that she's "blood type A". Why do Japanese celebrities state such an odd piece of data with reference to themselves?
Posted by: farleyk | February 05, 2009 at 07:59 PM
Nice piece Lisa.
I don't mean to sound pretentious, but I (www.enfu.com) noticed in your video that you mentioned that your parents gave you a name they couldn't pronounce because Japanese do not have the letter 'L' in their language.
I would say that anecdote is confusing because Japanese CAN pronounce the 'L' sound phonetically, its just written as an 'R' when romatized.
Ra Ri Ru Re Ro actually sounds like La Li Lu Le Lo which means people in Japan would prounounce your name with an L.
So your name romatized would be Risa but they will just pronounce the R using an L.
I'm sure you already know this so I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
Posted by: enfu | February 06, 2009 at 10:42 AM