The 60th Sapporo Snow Festival is almost over. Here are a few pictures of this year's sculptures in Odori Park.
I first saw Gamarjobat at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007. Their show was advertised as Japanese physical comedy and the poster had penguins on it. That's literally all it takes to sell me something. I went to see the show with Giorgio, and it was fucking brilliant. (Their 2008 show wasn't quite as good, but calling it 'slightly worse than fucking brilliant' isn't much of a criticism.)
If you haven't seen them before, Gamarjobat are two Japanese comedians, Ketch! and HIRO-PON. They do sketches and some magic tricks and general japes, wearing black suits, sunglasses and mohicans. The Japan Times wrote a special on them last week, so read it for more detailed description than 'they are fucking brilliant'.
When I was in Japan last summer with the Crisis Team we saw adverts that Gamarjobat had filmed for the Tokyo local councils showing on the Shibuya Crossing Screen. They are short clips that warn people not to litter or throw chewing gum onto the streets, that sort of thing. These are them:
I was going to blog this morning, but I got sidetracked. By sleep. And now I have to run off to the countryside to spend an evening with the talented Mr Olli Rose. But before I do, I've just got time to show you this. It's another Oricon survey, this time about the celebrities with the best smile. And in the list of female celebrities they've ranked Ueto Aya a disappointing 2nd. Sacrilege! Blasphemy! The people of Japan think that Miyazaki Aoi has a better smile than Aya! How absurd.
In other Aya-news, she's just been cast in the movie "Baton", directed by Kitamura! Although the news-item does say that it's an animated film. They spend all that money hiring her then don't even show her on screen. How absurd.
I'm not really a big fan of manga, just like I'm not a big fan of anime. Of course, there's some manga and some anime that I love, but people who watch every new release, or who can even get excited by the new releases, kind of baffle me. The vast majority of manga and anime are complete trash, just like the majority of books written in the world are worth less than the paper soiled in the printing process, just like the majority of music released is mind-crushingly boring, just like most films made are spirit-breakingly stupid. So it's not that I don't like manga or anime, it's just that if you look at the titles released every month, you don't need to have read or seen them to know they're almost definitely crap.
Mudazumo Naki Kaikaku: The Legend Of Koizumi is different though. I cannot wait for this to come out in England. It looks like the most epic manga ever. I literally can't wait to get my hands on it.
The premise is this: various world-leaders battle each other in games of Super Mahjong to determine the fate of their countries. Oh yes. The world leaders involved are:
You know what origami is, obviously. It's what happens when bored people start farting around, folding bits of paper trying to make them look like animals, and generally only succeeding in making them look like folded bits of paper. Famously, folding 1000 cranes is supposed to be lucky. Of course if you put the time you spent folding stupid tiny cranes into just crunching the statistics, you'd stand far more of a chance of winning the lottery. Namely, no chance whatsoever.
But you're wrong to be so dismissive of origami - not all of it is complete rubbish. I've found some videos of people on the internet (traditionally the most bored people in the world) making some quite astounding things out of sheets of ordinary paper. Things that might bring out the excitable geek in you, if you haven't yet crushed that geek, and that ability to become excited, in back-episodes of Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps. Here are those videos.
Two schoolboys in Okinawa found an unexploded bomb from World War 2 and brought it into their school as study material. It turned out to be safe as the fuse was no longer intact, but it was still a pretty scary moment for the teachers.
The most surprising aspect of the linked article is the statement that in just two weeks this month, the SDF unearthed and disposed of 445 unexploded WW2 bombs in Okinawa. The Americans really took that place to task. For those of you who don't know, Okinawa was a major strategic field in the war between America and Japan, with one of the largest battles being held there in which almost 200,000 Japanese people died. It was going to be the base from which the Americans launched their invasion of Japan, but soon after they won it they decided to just nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the short term, nuking the two cities was a horrific and inhuman thing to do, but in the long term it probably saved a lot of lives that would undoubtedly have been lost in the defence of a ground-invasion.
As the linked article states, earlier this month a man had part of his face blown off when a water-pipe he was repairing disturbed a WW2 bomb. This sort of thing shouldn't be happening. It's too tragic for words.
