Japan Railways (JR) recently unveiled the design for its newest shinkansen, a.k.a., “Bullet Train.” It’s called the “Kamome,” which translates as “Seagull.” The shinkansen is an iconic and groundbreaking high-speed transportation technology introduced in Japanese over 50 years ago. Newer train designs have come online over the decades, especially sinceContinue Reading
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics will open this week in the here and now of 2021. The world’s biggest sporting and media event will go on mostly as planned, albeit a year later. The delay is, of course, due to the COVID pandemic. It will be a summer Olympics like noContinue Reading
It’s now August 2020, which is when, had the global COVID-19 pandemic not upturned life as we knew it, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics would have been happening. it would be more than halfway through its run. Instead, the Tokyo games will be held in 2021. The even will still officiallyContinue Reading
High-rise condo building reflected in windows of a modern glass-and-steel skyscraper in Akasaka, Tokyo.
It’s time again to randomly browse our bookshelves at HQ and re-discover a forgotten coffee-table tome. Today we’ve pulled out a book on Japanese graffiti art. Its title is “RackGaki,” a modified phonetic spelling in the Roman alphabet of the Japanese word for graffiti usually written as rakugaki. Indeed this bookContinue Reading
Amid the labyrinthine back streets that comprise Ura-Harajuku are many examples of commissioned semi-legal street art in little niches of spaces. This artwork is on a wedge of dividing wall between the Ships clothing store and an adjacent building.
The Naka-Meguro neighborhood of Tokyo has a distinct feel. It occupies one side of a steeply sloped hill and the expanse of flats bisected by a creek between Daikanyama and Meguro. It’s fashionable in a moneyed-but-hip, indie way, a place where successful creative professionals have settled and where street artContinue Reading
The optics and media of Japanese political election campaigns are fascinating for their restraint and orderliness. Campaign posters for the various politicians are put up in designated places in local neighborhoods and often in clusters, like the ones pictured above in Tokyo’s fashionable Naka-Meguro area. The politicians each appear in postersContinue Reading
Japan has a long-established, globally recognized and highly-developed sense of aesthetics, especially when it come to design and graphic communications like advertising. This large indoor billboard poster for Coca-Cola at Ark Hills Tokyo references the Japanese summer tradition of hanabi (massive fireworks displays) as beautiful flat, abstract graphics.
American street artist DFace artwork often works with iconic pop-cultural imagery, often American retro-comic book styles and skeletal graphics. Here in Tokyo he’s de-constructed a Japanese icon, “Kitty -chan,” better know around the world as “Hello Kitty,” revealing her skull.
There’s a new shopping-dining complex hear our temporary HQ in the Daikanyama neighborhood of Tokyo. It’s called Log Road. The complex is beautifully designed and landscaped. Its wood exterior exudes an organic warmth. The buildings occupy a narrow, architecturally challenged space adjacent and parallel to a key city railroad line.Continue Reading
