It is hard to imagine now but Japanese cars used to be seen as cheap economical cars – good value, but not good fun. Hino were the first Japanese sports-car makers with their Contessa 900 sprint looking very reminscent of Alfa Romeo’s and the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, although the Contessa didn’t last long as Hino [...]
Check out this amazing film by Henrik Hansen about custom motorcycle engineer Shinya Kimura work works at Chabott Engineering in California. My father is a mechanical fitter by trade and much of this film reminded me very much of him. The close-up shots of Kimura-san’s workshop tools reminded me of my Dad’s garage at home [...]
Amazing short film about Japanese tattoo artist Yoshihito Nakano aka Horiyoshi III. Nakano is based in the Japanese port city of Yokohama and hopes to pass his business on to his son. Whilst Nokano uses an electric needle for the design outlines, he uses a traditional bamboo needle for the fills of colour on the [...]
Japanese consumer electronics companies like Panasonic, Hitachi, Toshiba, Pioneer, Denon and Sony have traditionally relied on providing great value and great engineering. A great example of this is to look at the amount of ‘Made in Japan’ products that feature in hi-fi collectors stores like Audioscope. However Japan can no longer compete on great prices [...]
Yahoo! Japan selected Google as its search partner in Japan. It is suggested by commentators that this is contrary to how the parent company handled things. But let’s review: Microsoft won the Yahoo! search business only after: an attempted hostile takeover (though its arguable Microsoft was that serious about it as Yahoo!’s position as lead [...]
Anime meets CGI experts and a digital agency uptown. Nike chase from ilovedust on Vimeo. According to Better Never Than Late: Ilovedust, AKQA San Francisco and Nike Japan.
Amazing picture from the International Space Station by Japanese astro/cosmo-naut Soichi Noguchi 野口 聡一. I love how intricate it all looks.
I tried 2chan.net earlier on today to have a poke around and see if I could find any memes to write about here. Unfortunately the site is down. According to a Japanese newspaper article, it is due to Korean cyberwarriors who took down the iconic site because it some of the forum posters had complained [...]
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #FFFFFF; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Doraemon as a dodgy looking bun from the Japan Centre, originally uploaded by renaissancechambara. A for effort, C for execution.
I was listening to a mix by Japanese DJ SoccerBoy when I came across this page on his site. It featured a section of the documentary film made about the traditional dolphin cull in a small village in Japan. The text on the page reads: “Whites don’t kill dolphins, Yellows do” HUMANE + ECOLOGY = [...]
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