TOKYOMANGO

Mangobot: The Original Speed Racer

From my bimonthly futurism column on io9:

Way before Speed Racer became fodder for one of the season's most highly anticipated blockbusters, it was a simple 60s-style Japanese cartoon. The original Speed Racer was a TV anime series called Mach GoGoGo, aired on Fuji TV—one of Japan's major television networks—in 1967 and 1968. Like many other sources of entertainment in Japan at the time, Go's determination and the superior technology of Mach 5 were symbolic of the country's rapid post-war recovery and the determination that drove it. While you're waiting to head to your multiplex to watch the Hollywood version tonight, let me take you back in time and show you a glimpse of the original.

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Fred Schodt on MangoBot

I wrote about Fred Schodt, Tezuka's long-time interpreter and predictor of Japan's humanoid robot craze, on io9 last week:

In the spring of 1988, Japanese publisher Kodansha released a revealing English-language book titled Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia. The book predicted a new era when humanoid robots would dominate Japanese society in the same way that industrial robots were then dominating behind-the-scenes manufacturing in the country. It was a topic that nobody in the Western world knew much about at all.

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Mangobot: Japan Gears Up to Become A Full-On Robot Nation

On this week's Mangobot, I have a story about Japan's national plan to become a robot nation by 2010:

If you've noticed an unusually large number of utilitarian humanoids hailing from Japan in the last few years, then you probably won't be surprised to hear about the country's official robot initiative. Right now, Japan is in the midst of executing a grand plan to make robots an integrated part of everyday life. To compensate for the shortage of young workers willing to do menial tasks, the Japan Robot Association, the government, and several technology institutions drafted a formal plan to create a society in which robots live side by side with humans by the year 2010. Since 2010 is just a couple years away, I called up a roboticist at the forefront of this movement to find out how it's going.

Continue reading Japan Gears Up to Become a Full-On Robot Nation

On io9: Will Brain Age Help Me Reverse My Aging Process?

This week, I wrote about how I'm playing Brain Age 2 to stay young:

I've been trying to figure out ways that I can defy age. I'm turning 30 this year, which means I will have a harder time remembering things, filtering information, and staying in shape. Since I'm not Ray Kurzweil and I can't afford plastic surgery, I'm banking on Brain Age 2, Nintendo's cognitive training software, to keep me away from wrinkles and Alzheimer's.

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I Met Cornelius! (And Video Commentary on MangoBot)

One of the coolest things about being in Tokyo this time around was that I got to meet Cornelius. I think if I had to choose one musician to represent Japan in the summer Olympics or something, I'd pick him. Or the Southern All Stars.

We met at his studio in Nakameguro and hung out for a bit, and watched mash-up videos people made with his music.

He also gave me live commentary of his Fit Song video, which I put up on my io9 column today.
See it here!

Oh! And I decided to call my io9 column Mangobot. 

My Tetris Brain: Feature on io9

Did I ever tell you guys how I was a total Tetris addict as a child? I wrote a feature about it for io9:

At a young age, my brain was hijacked by the game of Tetris. Now it helps me navigate through life. When I was in the sixth grade, my friend Chiyo and I used to play this addictive puzzle game--developed in 1985 by a Russian engineer--for hours on end with a single 100 yen coin at an arcade in Tokyo. We probably should have been doing homework or at least pretending to, but instead, there we were, every day after school, sitting side by side executing crazy maneuvers with our joysticks. The mantras that I repeated in my head while playing the game at max speed as a pre-teen are totally in sync with some basic tenets of Asian philosophy.

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From io9: Japan's Wackiest Inventor Saves the World with Super Viagra

My column on io9 today features a story about our favorite inventor/politician, Dr. NakaMats:

Yoshihiro NakaMats, 79, is Japan's most prolific - and bizarre - inventor. He claims to have 3,350 patents (Thomas Edison only had 1,093), and that several of them are for the floppy disk. "Everyone knows about the floppy disk," he says. "But I also invented the fax machine, automatic pachinko, and the taxi meter." While running for mayor of Tokyo last spring, he announced that he possessed three secret tools that would save the world from mass destruction: a device capable of turning North Korean missiles around in mid-air, a love potion more effective than Viagra that would reverse the declining birth rate, and a new water-to-fuel technology that fights global warming. The weird thing is that he could be telling the truth.

Read the full story here

Feature About Tezuka's Apollo's Song on io9

I've been asked to write a bi-monthly column on io9 about Japanese culture and sci-fi/futurism. It'll be every other Friday, starting yesterday, and I kicked it off with a piece about Osamu Tezuka's Apollo's Song, a manga about love and sex and clones which is now finally available in English 28 years after it was written.

Read "Can Clones Learn to Love?"...