I guess my friend Alyssa thinks sumo wrestlers are sexy, because she just sent me this video of six chunky, hunky, mostly naked guys in fundoshi doing their version of a sexy carwash. It's actually a really funny Subaru ad.
The latest episode of BoingBoing TV is about a Japanese pop culture documentary called Tokyology. There's an interesting segment about a new law that could put all the electronics parts stores in Akihabara out of business. Before there were maid cafes and cosplay stores and megastores like Don Quixote, Akiba was a treasure trove of vintage electronics. It still is, they've just been pushed into the back streets, behind all the flashiness. It would be a real shame if they went out of business—so a group of young artists featured in the documentary pay homage to them in their "exhibition of vanishing products."
I hung out in Akiba on Monday with some peeps I met and their friends. First, we watched these two very good looking Japanese girls dancing on the street with Stormtrooper, aka Danny Choo. It's kinda like that cosplayer Haruhi dance that was all over the Internet last year—except this one didn't end in a police raid. Then we followed the two girls to another location where we took a bunch of pictures with them. Then we sat down for coffee at a large cafeteria that monitors your health. Pics after the jump.
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Here, a Japanese performance artist wearing a horse's head and a mankini cooks and eats a magic mushroom. The video is set to a tune from Final Fantasy. WTF?
via 3yen
Reading Lisa's entry about mochi deaths, I was overcome with the urge to eat some myself, so I microwaved some frozen mochi squares. As I happily ate them (with natto, no less), I remembered "mochi-kun," an anthropomorphic mochi character in one of the sillier creations I'd seen in recent years: Hal & Bons. It was a DVD series that became a bit of a sensation in 2001. It's a bizarre, hilarious and absolutely pointless collection of animated shorts about a socially awkward but loveable mochi who tries to interview a pair of beer-swigging, couch-potato dogs. In 2006, Katsuhito Ishii (the director of The Taste of Tea) created The New Hal & Bons. A few from the original series have been subtitled and available on YouTube, but I haven't found any subtitled versions of the new series online yet.
This is Yuka Ritty, Japan's newest geeky-chic YouTube celeb. She's actually a grad school student-turned-performer who goes everywhere with her Mac, her white helmet, and other random props, like a mannequin head bought in India. They're all wired together at all times to show the interconnectivity between humans, machines, and mannequins.
The song she performs here is called "Elevator." Basically, she's just singing about what it's like to be an elevator.
