Michael John Grist, who travels Japan and the rest of the world documenting modern ruins — places abandoned or destroyed — found this former strip club in Ibaraki. In addition to these photos, Grist also took video of his tour through the burnt ruins of the club.

Akeno Gekijo Strip Club Haikyo, Ibaraki [Michael John Grist via Atlas Obscura]

io9 pal Katayama writes the popular Tokyomango blog and has recently published a series of pieces on Japanese men who marry cartoon characters (she's covered this phenomenon for the New York Times Magazine, as well as in the BoingBoingTV segment above) . Dismayed over the oddly serious, and occasionally insulting, responses from Western audiences, she recently analyzed the idea of "Japanese weirdness" over on BoingBoing. Katayama writes:

Why do so many love to gawk at this mysterious, foreign "other" that is Japanese culture? There are plenty of strange things going on in the US too, but when it happens in Japan, it's suddenly incomprehensible, despicable, awesome, and crazy. This fascination doesn't just end with angry commenters, either. Over the last couple of decades, it has spawned a huge industry of magazines, blogs, and products themed around Japanese culture marketed to Westerners by Westerners who are also obsessed with Japanese culture . . . [But the fact is] that none of this is meant to be taken seriously. One important premise of Japanese popular culture is the commitment to have fun and not take offense. Japanese humor works on many different levels and its nuances can be hard to explain to people who didn't grow up with it.

If you're one of those people who watched our wedding video between the man and his DS girlfriend and said things like: "He's such a loser" "He takes it too seriously LOL" and "God help this poor soul" - not to mention the racist comments about Japs and nukes and one-inch dicks - you just don't get it. You're not in on the joke. You're the one taking it too seriously, and you might be imposing your own biases and hang-ups on someone else's situation.

Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you're all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.

I think her comments here apply to far more than videos of Japanese men marrying anime characters. She's talking about a strong tendency in Western culture to misinterpret Japanese goofiness as something seriously weird. In science fiction, this misinterpreted humor is used as a way of showing an "incomprehensible" or bizarre future world.

Obviously some of William Gibson's early works exhibit this fascination with Japan, as does the movie Bladerunner. These days, Western SF has also turned its eye toward the "weirdness" of China (think Firefly, or Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age) and India (Ian McDonald's River of Gods). And in recent indie flick Moon, our abused clones were manufactured by a Korean company. Is the West doomed to misunderstand the Eastern present as some weird version of the future?

via BoingBoing

In honor of the upcoming Ultraman movie, Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie, several monsters from the Ultraman franchise appeared on a Japanese variety show to "audition" for parts in the movie. They showed off their most menacing dance skills for the assembled Ultramen, an impressive feat given those unwieldy-looking rubber suits.

Ultra Monsters dance to ‘Thriller' [Pink Tentacle]

To see Pope's article in its full-resolution glory, check out "It Will Come From Japan!" at GQ.

[via Forbidden Planet]

If phatic language is language which smooths over social tasks and reassures us rather than conveying information ("How's it going?" "Good, how about you?"), then phatic images are images which smooth over social issues, and they are one of Japan's biggest exports. From Hello Kitty to Pokémon to any number of big-eyed franchises, the Japanese love of kawaii (cuteness) is well known, parodied as just another weird Japanese thing in the Mister Sparkle episode of the Simpsons, but perhaps part of a common human urge. "We humans are a self-centered race," said Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics. To prove his point, McCloud drew a series of abstract squiggly shapes, then turned them into faces by adding a single element to each one: an eye. Instantly, the weird lines became noses and mouths, the random shapes turned into goofy faces.

It's comforting to imagine nonhuman things as humans, whether they're toys or vehicles, foods or animals, or Pipo-kun, the mascot of the Tokyo police force. For corporate mascots and advertising characters, the cuteness softens the message. To quote Mary Poppins, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

A little sex in the sugar is even smoother. The male-dominated world of hardcore anime and manga fans had always had a taste for cheesecake, but in the '80s it had more of a science fiction and mecha edge; now, the girls themselves were growing in importance, as cutesy tweens and teens did cute things in shows like Azumanga Daioh (beloved by both 13-year-olds and grown men) and a variety of more "adult" anime and manga continuing the dubious tradition of the early '80s lolicon ("Lolita Complex") anime/manga subculture. Oldschool fans grumbled, bemoaning the loss of their hard sci-fi and their Gundam military action, but the kawaii-ization and, arguably, infantilization of geek culture marched on. Di Gi Charat, a 1998 gag manga about the green-haired, cat-eared, maid-outfit-wearing corporate mascot of the "Gamers" store chain, became popular enough to be spun off into a series of graphic novels and anime shows-the equivalent of a TV show based on Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar.

But Digiko merely worked at Gamers - she represented a cute, maid-outfit-wearing Gamers employee, not Gamers itself. On message boards and drawing desks, geek culture soon developed an even purer expression of cuteness, moe anthropomorphism, the representation of inanimate objects or concepts as cute girls. What better way to dress up boring, abstract concepts? Fans created Wikipe-tan, a character representing Wikipedia, and the OS-tans, based on various operating systems: a cat-themed Mac OS X girl, a gnu-horn-wearing Linux girl, etc. ("Tan" is the Japanese suffix "-chan" pronounced in a cutesy baby voice.) Nothing was safe from anthropomorphism. In Bincho-tan, the characters represent different kinds of charcoal. Demonbane reimagined the evil books of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, including the Necronomicon, as cute girls-the better to bond with the sorcerers who 'read' them, of course. Maru Asakura's manga 090 Eko to Issho ("090 Eko and Me") is a romantic comedy about cellphones who turn into girls. Like Life, a pornographic computer game "visual novel," features girls based not just on cell phones but vacuum cleaners, coffee pots, refrigerators and traffic lights-talk about objectification.

The predominant moe culture is one of sweetness and light and panty shots, but Japanese military & robot fans did not miss the moe bandwagon for long. Among the countless anthropomorphic experiments were robotized girls, aka mecha musume, made up of girls crossed with heavy equipment, robots, tanks, planes, etc. Cyborg doll/machine women have always had a huge following, and somewhere there must be a missing link between Battle Angel Alita's Gally, Ghost in the Shell's Major Kusanagi and Vikusen's Loli Airplane Machine.

Humikane Shimada, who coined the term "mecha musume," hit every fetish imaginable with Strike Witches, an alternate-universe WWII story whose heroes are young girls (check), magic-users (check), with animal ears and tails (check), who wear WWII airplane propellers on their legs like Transformers amputees or cybernetic stocking-fetishists (check, check, check, CHECK).

The magazine MC Axis, launched in 2006, focuses exclusively on the sexualized linkage of women's bodies and military weaponry.

Compared to this stuff, Yukio Hirai's Pixel Maritan is a mili-moe (military moe) manga you could show to your grandfather. The pink-haired Maritan, who first appeared in 2005 in a book/CD set intended to teach Japanese readers how to speak colloquial English, is the cartoon representation of the U.S. Marine Corps. Maritan's purpose is to teach Japanese fans how to swear like a Marine, through adorably testosterone-packed gag comics. "It's fucking English time!" reads the cover text on one of the several Maritan books. Within, you can learn phrases like "Your puny little ass is mine!" and "To show our appreciation for so much power, Marines keep heaven packed with fresh souls!", translated by actual Marine Corps members stationed in Japan.

Lightly digitized pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (Maritan's enemies) are common, and a photo section in the back shows Japanese women hanging out with Marines and riding tanks and so on. According to a friend who works on the series, the Marines stationed in Japan are generally fond of Maritan and eagerly contribute to all this. Maritan's origin story is a parody of so-called mahô shojo "magical girl" shows (like Sailor Moon), in which the heroine usually visits Earth from some fairy realm on a mission of good. In Maritan, the title character comes from the magical realm of Paris Island and introduces herself by crashing a fighter jet into the house of the "Japanese" character. Soon we meet Army-kun (a "dogface" private with dog ears), Navy-san and Jiei-tan, a diligent girl with glasses who represents the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

American military bases on Japanese soil are not exactly beloved by the populace, but Maritan's adulation of the American military, however ironic and hipsterified, shows that Japanese politics are still generally in line with the U.S., 60 years after World War II. Jiei-tan's most notable trait is a heavy book chained to her shoulders-the book represents Article 9 of the Post-WWII Japanese Constitution, which forbids Japan from maintaining any sort of armed forces. (The Japanese Self-Defense Force is technically an extension of the Japanese police). Japanese public opinion is generally pacifistic, but a sizeable minority supports overturning Article 9, with some fans of mili-moe probably among them. In 2004, at the request of the U.S., Japan deployed non-combat troops to Iraq, in the first foreign deployment of Japanese troops since WWII. For the deployment, Japan dusted off their 'official' military mascot, Prince Pickles, the sort of JSDF equivalent of Pipo-kun.

Pickles, together with the general concept that anime and manga might promote Japanese nationalism, was praised by Japan's then-Minister of Foreign Affairs, the right-wing anime lover Taro Aso. With his tubby salaryman-manga look, though, Prince Pickles looks distinctly behind the times, and his female companion, Miss Parsley, isn't exactly the cosplay choice du jour either. For really effective propaganda, the military-industrial complex has to be, you know, sexy.

"But the coals were murmuring of their mine, / And moans down there / Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men / Writhing for air," wrote the gay World War I poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) in his poem "Miners." Although moe usually refers to works about girls enjoyed by men, manga and anime have a large female readership too, and thus we enter the realm of bishonen ("beautiful boy") stories, which are often full of men writhing and moaning. In 2003, Hidekazu Himaruya, a Japanese designer/artist living in New York, started drawing a gag webcomic in which the countries involved in World War II were anthropomorphized as good-looking, endearingly incompetent boys. The strip proved so popular it was picked up by a print publisher, redrawn for the graphic novel editions, and adapted into an ongoing animated series. Hetalia Axis Powers was born.

Hetalia (available online here among other places) is an almost plotless reinterpretation of World War II with people, mostly boys, playing the role of countries. Germany is serious and hardworking (when the series begins, it is getting tired of making cuckoo clocks to repay its WWI debt to France); America is a gung-ho, hamburger-eating idiot; Japan is old-fashioned and mild-mannered; and Italy…well, Italy is a frivolous idiot who loves pasta and flirting with girls. (The series title, "Hetalia," is a composite of heta- ("bad/incompetent") and "Italy.")

The characters are theoretically at war, but the manga is basically a series of loosely connected gags about WWI-WWII trivia and, more often, the stereotypes of different countries/ethnicities. The manga is annotated by the creator, who points out little bits of WWII trivia. The gag in which America can't recognize the other countries on the map is pretty dead-on, but most of the humor in Hetalia is on the level of the other countries asking Italy "what do you think?" and Italy shouting out "PASTAAAAA!"

More than anything, reading Hetalia gives the impression of a Japanese creator retelling fading European stereotypes for a Japanese audience for whom such things are just entertainment, divorced from any context of prejudice. One gag is based on an old saying: "Heaven is when the cook is French, the officer is British, the engineer is German, the banker is Swiss and the lover is Italian. Hell is when the cook is British, the officer is German, the engineer is French, the lover is Swiss and the banker is Italian." In the end, though, even this is just a shallow gloss on the cuteness and wackiness of the characters. In true moe anthropomorphism fashion, the characters in the series are so divorced from their historical analogues that fans can make music videos about the deep OTP love between Lithuania and gay crossdresser Poland without knowing anything at all the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Hetalia is basically no more political than "It's a Small World," and there are places it won't go. While the Axis powers are the "good guys," Hirumaya scrupulously avoids any mention of anti-Semitism, swastikas or Nazism, aside from Germany's occasional complaints that he has a "crazy boss." Considering that Nazi-esque uniforms show up occasionally for fetish value even in mainstream, bestselling manga like Hisaya Nakajo's Hana-Kimi (censored in the VIZ edition; Nakajo's original comments read "I know it's bad, but I just love Nazi uniforms!"), it's a remarkable show of restraint.

It wasn't restrained enough. When a Hetalia anime was announced for January 2009, Koreans protested the show on the basis of the manga's Korea character, depicted as a sort of pest to Japan. In one scene in the manga, Korea grabs Japan's nipples; Korean protesters considered this a reference to the Japan-Korean struggle over ownership of the Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo island to Koreans, Takeshima island to Japanese). The producers of the anime countered that the Korea character wasn't included in the anime anyway, but faced by angry Internet petitions and a statement by Korean congresswoman Jeong Mi Kyeong ("I think this is a crime against Koreans…this is an illegal and insulting act"), they canceled the TV airing of the anime. The cancellation probably had little effect on profits; the anime still went on to become a hit on mobile phones and the internet. Although all the stereotypes in Hetalia were equally cheesy, the West-on-West stereotypes were cobwebby and unlikely to offend anyone, whereas the Korean stereotype brought up memories of Japanese war crimes about which Japan has been notoriously unrepentant.

Is all moe anthromorphism a trivialization of serious events? A glorification of violence for gun-happy nerds who've never experienced a real war? Is it even possible to do a meaningful cartoon representation of such vast concepts without resorting to stereotypes? One manga which might pull it off is Timaking's 2005 Afghanis-tan, a small press manga in which the countries of Central Asia are represented as little girls. Afghanis-tan, a hard-suffering farmer girl, is based on the real-life photograph of "Afghan girl" Sharbat Gula who became famous from a 1985 National Geographic cover (and whose name, incidentally – "Rose Sherbet" – already sounds like a manga character). When the story begins, Afghanis-tan is tired of being picked on by big girls Russia and Britain. She makes friends with Pakis-tan, Uzbekis-tan and her other neighbors. Some jokes are just simple cuteness: Afghanis-tan is too little to carry her AK-47 rifle, aww! But others are both dark and astute, as when little Afghanis-tan becomes enthralled with Pakisu-tan's favorite show, a mecha show called "Space Detective Tayariban." (He's a force for justice in a wartorn world, get it?) Soon all the girls in the neighborhood are arguing: "Let's play Northern Alliance!" "What are you saying? We should play Tayariban!"

For all its jokes, Afghanistan is basically a serious educational manga; it's loaded with historical info. Unlike Hetalia, it's also got something like a plot; the climax of the short manga comes when Afghanis-tan's house becomes the base of scary stray cats (Al Quaeda) and one of them bites the rich girl, Meriken, on the hand. Meriken's misguided rage wreaks havoc on the –tans, and makes Timaking's position on the Afghanistan War clear. After a three-year hiatus, in 2008 Timaking returned to geopolitical manga with Pakisu-tan.

"Come for the cuteness, stay for the historical geopolitics," might be the slogan of Afghanis-tan. Afghanis-tan manages to combine both moe and a message; and in a subtler way, so does Pixel Maritan (in fact, its pro-war, pro-U.S. message is the exact opposite of Afghanis-tan's). Pasta jokes I'm not so big on, but one thing is for sure: with the success of Hetalia, other sweeping, shallow mixtures of politics, war and marketable character design are sure to follow. The Last Temptation of Christ: The Manga, anyone?

"Invisible Manga" columnist Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, manga editor of Otaku USA magazine, and the editor of numerous manga series. His graphic novel King of RPGs comes out in January from Del Rey Manga.

"What a hideous and polluted land I have come to unawares!"
-the Shinto deity Izanagi upon viewing the Underworld, as quoted by Ian Buruma in Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (1985)

On October 7, Joe Holloway, a 53-year-old County Councilman from Wicomico County, Maryland, displayed photocopies from Akira Toriyama's martial arts comedy manga Dragon Ball before his shocked fellow council members. On display were topless girls, jokes about dirty old men and girls' panties, crotch-patting, and a naked monkey-tailed boy with a Maurice Sendak-esque baby penis-this in a book rated "for teens aged 13 and up." The mother of a 9-year-old child had found the manga in the school library and alerted Holloway, who went to the council rather than contacting the school board. "The drawings and story lines are disgusting," Holloway, a Republican grandfather, said. Although some county and state library officials spoke out in favor of graphic novels and parental responsibility, the book was quickly pulled from the school library. The blog Delmarva Dealings ran the post title "Wicomico Schools Peddle Smut to Children."

In response, Greg Latshaw, a journalist for the Del Marva Daily Times, made the brilliant observation that "The book, 'Dragon Ball Volume 1: The Monkey King,' is laid out like a comic book." The word "manga" doesn't even appear in Latshaw's article, nor does this summer's already-forgotten bomb of a Hollywood film adaptation Dragonball Evolution (which excised the panty jokes anyway).

Despite its recent rise in popularity, manga, like most pop culture in the kaleidoscopic media landscape, is invisible if you don't know to look for it. The fact that it's published right to left, in keeping with the original Japanese format, surely deflects the eyes of a percentage of nosy parents who might otherwise figure out what their kids are reading. Manga is just the Japanese word for "comics," one of the many forms of graphic novels. But to serious fans, manga is a language of its own, a private space.

Created for Japanese readers, manga exhibits different "community standards" from those in America. In manga, it's perfectly fine for a villain to chain the hero to a cross in a kid's show; and it's common to see lots of bare breasts in a teenage boys' comedy like Negima! or Tenchi Muyo!. Aware of these cultural differences (which are often censored in American editions), many manga fans defended Dragon Ball's right to mix nudity with martial arts scenes. "Every single example you can pull out of the DragonBall series for 'offensive material'…are childish mockeries of offensiveness," said a commenter on Anime News Network." "Nudity does not mean pornography, and Dragon Ball is strictly 'naked people are funny'," said another. Other Anime News Network commenters, however, pointed out that Dragon Ball is labeled "for ages 13 and up" and shouldn't have been in an elementary/middle school library anyway (though the fact that it was also pulled from the local public library was more troubling).

Meanwhile, just a few days before the Wicomico story broke, another battle was being waged across the mangasphere. When Yen Press announced their plans to publish the Japanese wolf-spirit fantasy novel Spice and Wolf with a paranormal romance photo-cover rather than the original big-eyed manga-style cover, fans exploded with outrage. The light novel blog Ranobe Cafe was fairly even-handed about the new cover itself, but closed with an urgent request that Yen Press retain the English subtitle from the Japanese edition, "Merchant Meats Spicy Wolf." ("This tagline is IMPORTANT. The author has admitted that the tagline's mispelling (sp.) of "Meets" to "Meats" is eluding (sp.) to something not yet shown in the story.")

The complaints about the cover itself, however, had a common thread of surprising prudishness. Here are just a few comments posted by fans:

"I find this cover prurient and distasteful." "This is absolutely horrible, you are trying to GAIN customers by putting a blurry nude woman on the cover?" "It's too erotic." "I think it's shameful that you feel you have to resort to a cheap tactic like nudity to sell this book." "Low class person who enjoys reading trashy romance novels…filthy American adult novel…Twilight fans and sleazy romance novel fans…cheap erotic novel…trashy romance novel…trashy sex-romance novels…degrading…"

Never mind that the heroine of Spice and Wolf does, in fact, appear naked for much of the first volume, and that one nude scene is even illustrated in the Japanese edition. Regardless of the trashiness of the cover, the message was clear: People felt the Americanized version of sexuality was disgusting and crass, and considered the original Japanese sexuality subtle and delicate. It's the kind of "fetishizing the Japanese" sentiment that could have been expressed 120 years ago by European visitors to Japan talking about geisha and gathering artifacts japonais.

As much as American manga publishers might deny it, one of manga's big appeals to Americans is not its "high quality" but the fact that it is Japanese, and has a Japanese sensibility. There are incredible manga in many genres, such as cooking manga (Oishinbo and Iron Wok Jan), football manga (Eyeshield 21), and manga about lovesick alien ovaries (Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu), but America's current #1 manga, Naruto, is a ninja story. Naruto, whose highly realistic artwork is actually very Western-influenced (by way of Katsuhiro Otomo), offers Americans the thrill of Japaneseness without challenging them too much.

For hardcore manga fans, though, Naruto and Dragon Ball are already too Westernized. In the classic 1991 anime Otaku no Video, proselytizing anime fans overcome the haters, take over the world and sail off on a spaceship into the stars, but most manga and anime fans are more like the ones in the 2002 manga Genshiken: perfectly happy in their private fandom but not so eager to spread the message. The easy availability of scanlations (online bootleg translations of manga) makes it even easier for hardcore fans to self-marginalize by removing any economic weight from their opinions. CMX's censored edition of the martial arts manga Tenjho Tenge in 2005 infuriated hardcore fans, but those were the ones most likely to just read the scanlations anyway. If you look around, you can find free scanlations of almost any popular manga online. By the 2000s, manga and anime fandom had entered the age of the hikikomori (shut-in), becoming increasingly withdrawn and insular, obsessed with fetishes like cat ears and maid uniforms.

When the alternative is Dragonball Evolution, who can blame hardcore fans for refusing to assimilate? The truth is that I, too, am guilty of Orientalism; I think manga are objectively some of the best comics on Earth, but I also read it for the weird, the extreme, the sincere craziness which you can't find in American young adult comics and fiction.

As Naruto and Bleach creep into the mainstream, the truly hardcore fans are the ones who keep manga disrespectable-the female fans reading yaoi guy-on-guy pornography, the (shudder) guys who play galge (girl games, aka dating simulations), the retro freaks reading "gar" macho-man manga of the kind that stopped being popular with Fist of the North Star in the 1980s. I'm not suggesting we embrace everything thoughtlessly; I wouldn't want Americans to become comfortable with the ways some manga artists draw black characters, just as I wouldn't want the sexual harassment in manga, including Dragon Ball, to become assimilated into an anti-feminist backlash by clueless weeaboos. (A college-age fan once explained to me at length how the breast size jokes in Slayers weren't sexist because "She's flat-chested, but she's the heroine! It shows that a heroine can be flat-chested!") On the other hand, I love the disrespectful Japanese attitude towards Western religion, I love the violence, I love the imagination, I love the sincerity.

Perhaps the sincerity most of all. Manga can be funny and cynical as hell-look at Excel Saga-but there is something refreshing about most manga's earnest attitude, its lack of hipster irony. It makes for great stories. (Sadly, it also attracts fans who have no sense of irony about things like changing the cover of Spice and Wolf.) At this moment, while manga is engaged in a battle between mainstreaming and marginalization, it's worth mentioning that manga publisher VIZ's very same Dragon Ball was censored once before, in 1999, after parental complaints led to it being pulled from Toys 'R Us. The result satisfied no one-parents still complained about the semi-dirty jokes which remained in the censored edition-and VIZ went back to the uncensored edition a few years later. It was the uncensored edition which Joe Holloway called "disgusting."

But when teenagers smoking cigarettes is enough to get popular weekly boys' manga SHONEN JUMP magazine pulled by retailers, despite an "ages 13 and up" label, how can you win? In American culture, where you can't show the briefest nudity in less than an R-rated movie, the really surprising-and encouraging-thing about the Dragon Ball incident is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. I would love for manga to become more popular, but I also embrace its sub-cult nature. Long live the invisible manga, the manga that gets overlooked because it's not about ninja or fox-eared girls. Long live manga that doesn't pass through American cultural filters. Long live filth.

"Invisible Manga" columnist Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, manga editor of Otaku USA magazine, and the editor of numerous manga series. His graphic novel King of RPGs comes out in January from Del Rey Manga.

Tanijiri is a Japanese designer who was hired to create the interior of Diesel's "Denim Gallery" in Tokyo. He decided to aim for a strange blend of the organic and industrial in this tangled forest of white pipes that crawl over all the walls in the store.

via Archinect

A few years ago, students at the Obama Fisheries High School in Fukui Prefecture developed a method of processing the monstrous jellyfish into an edible powder, which has been used to make cookies. But lately, raw caramel has been all the rage in Japan, prompting the students to try their hands at sea creature-based caramels. Adding sugar and starch syrup to the jellyfish powder, they have produced a sweet and salty candy.

It was a NASA-designed food safety management system that kicked off this jellyfish cuisine in the first place, and the high school is looking to give something back to the space program. The students have a meeting this week with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to make their caramels an official part of the menu aboard the International Space Station.

Space caramel made from giant jellyfish [Pink Tentacle]

Hatoyama, wife of the soon-to-be-prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, made her claim in a book published last year called, fittingly, Very Strange Things I've Encountered:

While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus... It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.

And can we expect Miyuki's experience to influence Yukio's support (or lack thereor) for a Japanese space program? Potentially, because as she continued after explaining that her former husband told her that her experience was just a dream, her current husband is much more understanding:

My current husband has a different way of thinking. He would surely say 'Oh, that's great'.

That's it. The bar's been raised way past Barack reading Conan comics. Michelle, we're now waiting to hear about your alien kidnap experiences.

Japan's new first lady says rode UFO to Venus [Reuters]

The album, succinctly titled Gundam Rock, is due out September 9th and will contain English language covers of the theme songs from Mobile Suit Gundam and the movie trilogy, as well as covers of the background music. He also plans to reenact the opening narration and the speech Gihren Zabi makes during his father's funeral:

This isn't Andrew W.K.'s first tribute to Japanese culture. Just last year, he released a 14-song album covering J-pop songs, including Daisuke Inoue's "Ai Senshi," which served as the ending theme to the second Gundam movie:

[Anime News Network via Japanator]

Hailed as one of the greatest Japanese cyberpunk movies of all time, Tetsuo: The Iron Man is about a salaryman hit by a car who gradually starts turning into a car himself. Finally his body becomes a mass of steel and wires, and his penis a giant drill - which he promptly uses on his girlfriend. Impressionistic and dark, the movie at times looks like an industrial music video. All the effects are stop-motion animation and prosthetics, with manage to capture the gooey, rusting look of a man halfway between office worker and deadly machine.

The new movie comes over a decade after the sequel. Tsukamoto said through an interpreter that he made it with US-based Ace Productions. It's about an American named Antony working in Tokyo, married to a Japanese woman. He makes the agonizing transformation into Tetsuo when their son Tom is killed by the same evil driver who creates the Tetsuos in previous films.

Tsukamoto hopes that Tetsuo: The Bullet Man will be a good way for newbies to the series to get into it. He said that if you watch Bulletman it makes a perfect entre to the two previous Japanese films. He says he chose to film his first English film in Tokyo because that city is "a true cybercity - the most cyberpunk city in the world."

He showed us the first 10 minutes of footage from the film, with some sound effects missing. As a fan of the creepy, violent series, I have to say the new film looks very promising. Antony's wife is a paranoid shut-in who hates Tokyo, and Antony's dad is a crazy biotech worker who insists on testing Antony's blood every month because he's afraid he'll die of the same "cancer" his mother died of. (But when we see Antony's blood emitting a tiny waft of smoke, we think perhaps mom might have died of a more Tetsuo-like disease than cancer.)

After the evil car guy kills Antony's son, we see the first version of his transformation into Tetsuo, which looks oddly like a Talking Heads video. I say this simply because he's a white guy in a suit, twitching and making strange faces in front of a screen filled with television static. Later he thrashes around in glowing water, his body rippling with machine parts that eventually emerge from his flesh "like a bullet," as the director put it.

Below, you can see some of the early concept art for the film.

The movie will be completed in September, when it will hit the festival circuit. And the director says he hopes to open it worldwide in 2010.

"Haikasoru" translates as "High Castle" and is meant as a riff on Philip K. Dick's classic allohistory Man In the High Castle where the Axis won WWII and Japan controls what was the Western United States. Helmed by editor Nick Mamatas, Viz Media's new publishing imprint Haikasoru is attempting a second invasion of Speculative Fiction from the Land of the Rising Sun.

I haven't read many Japanese novels other than those of Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami. These two very short debut novels from Haikasoru are interesting but not as world-shaking as I would have liked. They both share some common themes: total war against an implacable alien foe, with a healthy dash of time travel. Apart from that, these are two very different stories that may be worthy of your attention.

First up we have All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and translated by Alexander O. Smith. Nearly all the action takes place in two days (sort of) at a multinational military base in Japan. The Earth has been fighting a desperate war for decades, against alien invaders called the Mimics. They'r organic constructs, vaguely resembling giant bloated frogs but structurally akin to echinoderms like sea cucumbers or sea urchins,. They are bent on xenoforming our planet, eating soil and excreting it in a form that Terran plants cannot grow. Diplomacy or even basic communication is impossible, because the Mimics slaughter anything that gets in their way.

"Nuke the site from orbit" is not a viable solution, so the remainder of Earth's armed forces elects to fight them mainly in close combat in powered-armor called Jackets. Even the heaviest ordinance bounces off the Mimics' stony hides, and their incredibly dense bodies can withstand explosion and fire. Jackets have on-board rocket launchers and FAE grenades with servos that magnify speed and strength. All too often, the soldiers end up face to "face," and have to rely on the "pile driver," a 20-shot bolt gun that fires tungsten carbide spikes against organic javelins the mimics expel with the force of artillery shells. SpaceAge warfare boils down to throwing sticks at each other? Yeah, it's a stretch but; POWERED-ARMOR — that's always cool, right?

The novel starts out hip-deep in action as Pvt. Keiji Kiriya faces certain death in his very first battle against the Mimics. Severely wounded and out of ammo he is spared a death blow when a blazing crimson angel rushes to his side and slices the alien in half. It's the legendary Rita Vrataski, US Special Forces, also known as Mad Wargarita or The Full Metal Bitch. Since she has more kills than any other soldier the brass has indulged her eccentricities. She bunks alone, away from the barracks, and her Jacket is a bright metallic red, not camouflage. She has also rejected the standard-issue pile driver for a custom-made 200 kilogram battleaxe. I applaud this logic; as any seasoned zombie slayer will tell you, "a machete never needs reloading." This frightening valkyrie tries to comfort the mortally wounded Kiriya, distracting him with small talk and urging him to hang on, not to die. But he dies anyway.

Then Kiriya awakes in his barracks with the book he was reading before on the same page listening to the way too familiar inane chatter of of his squad mates. It is hours before his very first battle against the Mimics. The alert is sounded, they suit up and charge the enemy. The battle is different than Kiriya remembers, but with the same result— he dies again. And again. And again... "Okaaay", I'm thinking, "This is like Mecha Groundhog Day or something. I hope this isn't some lame Jim Shooter Special. If it all turns out to be a dream or— ugh— a VR training simulation, I will start throwing kittens at old people!" Well fear not, the local feline and senior population remains unmolested.. Kiriya is in fact reliving the same day over and over again. The mechanism behind this loop is quite an original solution. As Kiriya tries to understand this horrible existence, he rediscovers a bit of his heritage. He finds if not comfort, at least some meaning by applying the warrior philosophy of Bushido as he walks into certain deaths; perhaps forever.

Sakurazaka consciously constructed All You Need Is Kill like a great video game. In this he is mostly successful. The reader will feel immersed into Kiriya's dilemma, not just through the all the action but also through his internal struggle to keep from giving up, to puzzle out what the hell is happening. The glimpses of the outer world as an Earth besieged are grim and well imagined, but some of premises are just hanging by a threat. Most of the characters are very colorful but only there to fill certain slots; the Bully, the Gruff Sergeant w/ Heart of Gold, the Shy Techno Geek. Sakurazaka tries for a grim, gung-ho military sensibility but really only achieves an otaku snarkiness. I would like to stop using "like a video game" in a pejorative sense; there is a great deal of creativity and sophistication going into the storytelling of modern games, nearly as much as there is in the graphics. This sincere tribute to a favorite pastime comes off as a smart and exciting but ultimately juvenile novel. Any hard-core gamers who get their calloused thumbs on a copy are certain get a kick out of All You Need Is Kill. But they know there's better Military SF out there to read.

In a side note, the cover illustration was done by Yoshitoshi Abe who did some art for anime such as Serial Experiments Lain and Welcome to the NHK!.

I was far more pleased by Issui Ogawa's The Lords of the Sands of Time (translated by Jim Hubbert). Although it too might still be considered a YA novel, Ogawa's piece is far broader is scope and has a more mature voice. In just 200 pages we get a rich, moving adventure that spans time and space. At the end of the 26th Century, Humanity has been fighting a losing war against a ruthless group of alien self-replicating machines called the ETs. Once standing for "extraterrestrials", ET now has come to mean Evil Things. Unlike Sakurazaka's xenoforming Mimics, these ETs have no agenda other than "Destroy All Humans", something they accomplish with terrible efficiency. Life on Earth, Mars, terraformed Venus and other colonies has been wiped out leaving only a final stronghold on Saturn's moon, Triton. The front line of defense has been entrusted to the Messengers, wholly artificial cyborgs emerging from the vat fully formed with all necessary knowledge. One of these Messenger, Orville (or later, just "O") seeks to understand this Humanity he was born knowing he must serve. Through his intimate relationship with a natural-born human friend he comes to accept that his personal duty is to protect all of humanity. Not just every man, woman, and child that still survives, but every person who was ever born or might have ever existed. Whoa, no pressure there.

Just when it seems the war has taken a turn in our favor, the controlling AIs (yeah, those guys) break the bad news. A bunch of ETs (cribbing notes from the Borg and that loveable loser, Skynet) have expended 37 kathrillion tetrajoules of energy and escaped back into time to wipe out all us bald apes before we even figure out the ability for space flight or changing the channel without getting up. But good news everybody: the Ais have duplicated the technology to follow them back in time and stop them. Oh, but less than good news; nobody from our future, downstream, has come back to help out the 26th Century so it can be assumed that humans are about to be wiped out in Orville's present timeline, not that he would ever be able to return anyway. So it's forward into the past to try and preserve a reality where humans and their AI pals will survive.

This is a blue-hot Temporal War with not just continents or eras as battlefields, but entire timelines. Orville and his fellow Messengers must recruit whole civilizations as cannon fodder, racing to upgrade their technology and stripping whatever resources they can against the tireless onslaught of the ET machines. When things look doomed, the Messengers have to kiss an entire world good-bye and set off for another multiversal beachhead to start the whole process over. Through warped versions of pre-fuedal Japan, the American Civil War, and a Mid-20th Century that Harry Turtledove would be proud of, Orville keeps fighting the good fight. As his sorrow and guilt over what has been lost mounts, his sense of duty and desperate drive for final victory grows even stronger threatening to turn him into the machine he evolved from.

Although it really doesn't match his anti-war feeling, I got a Joe Haldeman vibe from this novel. O is a soldier who hates what he becomes but is driven go ever further because that's the only hope for anyone. For such a short novel (200pages) working on a very broad stage, there's a great deal of passion to be found in The Lords of the Sands of Time. More of a tease than a spoiler— there's a stirring speech to the troops in the penultimate act that has the same punch as Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day Speech. Yeah that's right, I just referenced The Forever War and Henry V for a Japanese YA novel, deal with it.

Like I said before, these aren't word-shakers but I'm glad to see more foreign-language Speculative Fiction made available to us English-language readers. Hopefully we'll see a growing range of works from Haikasoru. They'll be putting out a collection of horror stories by Otsuichi and a hard SF novel from Housuke Nojiri. I'm looking forward to next year's release of The Sixth Continent a novel about the colonization of the Moon by Lords author Ogawa.

All You Need Is Kill and The Lords of the Sands of Time are available through your local independent bookseller or these guys.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the cybertengu as Chris Hsiang. He stole the phrase "Jim Shooter Special" from Alan Beatts.

The smile-evaluating software takes a picture of Keihin employees every morning and assigns smile values to various parts of the face. It then adds those values and delivers a smile scan score. According to an article today in the Mainichi Daily News:

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like "You still look too serious," or "Lift up your mouth corners," will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.

This just sounds like a workplace shooting incident waiting to happen. If I had to pretend to have the perfect smile on every morning - and got criticized if I "looked too serious" - I would definitely go Joker after a while.

via Mainichi Daily News (thanks, Klebert!)

Writes the London Times:

Unorthodox, untried and, said one Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi strategist, "in the realms of economic science fiction", the recommendation has nevertheless begun floating around Tokyo's corridors of power and economists have described Japan as particularly suitable as a testing ground...

Other crazy futuristic ideas include putting a tax on hard currency, and introducing a separate currency alongside the Yen. The Times explains:

All three ideas are based on a theory concerning interest rates and the concept that a nominal rate of zero - as Japan has now lived with for much of the past decade - may be too high. In Japan's case, the theory would suggest that nominal rates of -4 per cent might be closer to what is required to rescue the economy from another deflationary spiral. Having agreed that this might be necessary, the next question is how it could be imposed.

Without physical cash, a central bank can set rates exactly where it likes, runs the argument. Mr Jerram said: "At the heart of the problem of achieving negative nominal interest rates is the idea that physical currency is an anonymous bearer bond with a nominal interest rate of zero." While a central bank can impose positive or negative rates on non-physical assets, transmitting those rates to physical currency is a huge challenge. By permanently removing cash from a system, he added, policymakers are robbed of the excuse that zero is the lowest that nominal rates can go as a deflation-fighting tool.

I'm wondering if we could see a new kind of caste system emerging in the future, where only the lowest caste and underclass people carry actual hard cash instead of various monetary instruments.

Although blogs like Pink Tentacle have been reporting the tadpole rains of Japan for over a week now, the news is finally hitting mainstream outlets. Apparently small fish as well as tadpoles are falling on various districts in Japan. Usually they're dead by the time they hit the ground. One man claimed he found 13 tiny carp had rained onto his car. Nobody has come forward with a good theory about how they have gotten into rain clouds, nor has anyone been able to explain what might have changed recently to make this happen.

According to the UK Guardian:

One popular theory is that the creatures were sucked up by waterspouts but meteorologists say no strong winds have been reported in the areas where tadpoles were found. One expert said gusts too weak to be picked up by observatories might have sucked up small quantities of water, along with a few unfortunate tadpoles. Ornithologists said it was too early too rule out their feathered friends.

Kimimasa Tokikuni, head of the Ishikawa branch of the Japanese Society for the Preservation of Birds, told the Yomiuri Shimbun that bigger birds, such as herons and black-tailed gulls, might have dropped the tadpoles after being disturbed in mid-flight.

But the startled bird theory fails to answer a simple question: why haven't the "flying" tadpoles been noticed before?

Less unusual but no less alarming have been this spate of mega-hail storms in China recently. Giant hail stones, combined with winds up to 62 miles per hour, crushed thousands of houses and injured hundreds of people over the last week. Xenophilia reports:

Recovery efforts have begun in eastern China following a severe hail storm on Sunday that killed at least 14 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

Hail stones and winds of more than 100km/h (62mph) lashed the province for nearly 90 minutes, uprooting trees and scattering debris across roads.

The Civil Affairs bureau in Anhui province says more than 10,000 people had to be taken to emergency shelters.

I suppose you could call this climate change, since in fact it does represent a change in the climate. Especially the tadpoles. But I have to admit it seems like something a lot weirder than that.

According to Nippon Cinema:

Kouta (Shinya Hashimoto), the leader of a pro-wrestling organization called "Zero", is planning an over-the-top housewarming at his new mansion. The not-so-lucky attendees include his sister Nami (Sonim), TV producer Yamaji (Shiro Sano), and jealous party-crashing rival Ichijoh (Nicolas Pettas). Of course Ichijoh's appearance ignites an epic battle which all but destroys the entire place. Kouta's wife, Asami (Urara Awata) . . . contracts a mysterious disease. Meanwhile, the ratings-obsessed Yamaji concocts a plan to broadcast the most epic wrestling battle ever conceived.

I think we can guess the "mysterious disease" might somehow be related to zombie mermaidism. I like the combination of wrestling with zombies - sort of reminds me of Dead Set, the British miniseries about how the last bastion of humanity in a zombie-ravaged UK are the people on the sealed-off set of TV series Big Brother. I also suspect that the title Oh! My Zombie Mermaid might be a reference to Oh! My Goddess!, the silly/sexy anime series that often gets so annoying you wish that everybody would turn into brain-eating monsters so they would stop giggling so damn much.

The rocket lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima Island. Below is a gorgeous image of it.

SOURCE:
Japan Launches Rocket with Greenhouse Gas Probe via AP

Image via STR/AFP/Getty Images

No it's not a spaceship, or a game show set, or even the backdrop to a J-pop music video. It's an immersive advertisement for gaming.

Called the flatflat store, the space was created in a very long, narrow space by Sako Architects to sell game products from NHN Japan. Visitors to the store get instant access to hangame, an online games portal, and hange.jp, a games portal for mobiles. Walk in and use one of the store's big-screen interfaces to the portal, or just open up your mobile device and start playing.

Of course you'd want to visit a surreal, videogame-esque space in order to play videogames.

Space Invading via Designboom

One immediate result is that everybody has to immigrate to Japan. So the country has to throw its doors wide to a multicultural crowd of refugees, who live in shantytowns all over the island. At first the Japanese are enchanted by all the American movie stars and politicians who flock to their country, but (as you can see in the clip above) the honeymoon is quickly over when overcrowding and xenophobia kick in.

Foreigners are forced to become maids and thieves, famous actors are reduced to selling underwear with their lipstick stains in them, and a Tom Cruise-like actor (who keeps waving his Oscar around) is deported to a watery grave for stealing a piece of candy.

Released in Japan in 2006, and distributed in the US with English subtitles by Synapse Films last year, The World Sinks, Except Japan is a weird and pleasingly bitter satire of Japanese politics and pop culture. It was especially interesting to me as a Westerner, since the stereotypes of whiteys are so clueless (a Texan girl speaks English with a French accent, for example). And yet the movie is self-aware enough to make fun of the Japanese tendency to use pop culture as a way to work out frustrations with foreigners.

This movie really has everything: Global apocalypse, panty-chasing scientists, tragic interracial love, giant monsters, Japanese men being waited on by Western maids, and a scene where a washed-up Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis (played by Japanese actors) are ordered to "act out a scene" from their movies for a drunken Japanese salaryman with a few yen. Must be seen to be believed!

Check out The World Sinks, Except Japan at Synapse Films.