Archive for the 'JAPAN' Category

2ch Copypaste of the Day: What the Average Citizen Knows about Robot Anime Series

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Taken from a 2ch copypaste that’s making the rounds today

Gundam: That story where Amuro and Char fight

Eva: Pachinko

Macross: Singing

Geass: Never heard of it

Votoms: Follows a main character named Chirico Cuvie (Kiriko Kyuubi), a former special forces Armored Trooper pilot and former member of the Red Shoulder Battalion, an elite mecha force used by the Gilgamesh Confederation in its war against the Balarant Union—both interstellar nations within the distant Astragius Galaxy. Gilgamesh and Balarant had until recently been locked in a century-old galactic war whose cause was long ago forgotten. Now, the war is ending and an uneasy truce has settled. Chirico Cuvie is suddenly transferred to a unit engaged in a suspicious mission, unaware that he is aiding to steal secrets from what appears to be his own side. Chirico is betrayed and left behind to die, but he survives, is arrested by the Gilgamesh military as a traitor, and tortured for information on their homeworld. He escapes—triggering a pursuit extending across the entire series, with Chirico hunted by the army and criminals alike as he seeks the truth behind the operation. He is driven to discover the truth of one of the objects he was assigned to retrieve in that operation: A mysterious and beautiful woman who would become his sole clue to unraveling the galactic conspiracy. ((The original post copy/pastes the first section of the Japanese wiki summary of the series so I’ve done likewise with English here. ))

Spreadsheet Compilation of Various Japanese Popularity Metrics for Summer 2009 Anime

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

At school, not wanting to drive home in my long break between meeting my advisor and a film screening cause of rush hour. Therefore, this hastily-done silly translation of a spreadsheet some 2cher made of various popularity rankings for summer season anime. Any questions should be answered by the notes, but if not, just post a comment! Click for large, obviously. Oh, and Stolen from Yunakiti, just like all the cool guys do.

2chtl

Reitaisai 6 Penalties: Christmas Comes Late for Me, a Tale of Big Sight East 3

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

As many of you may know, Reitaisai moved from the West-4 hall at Tokyo Big Sight last year, where from all reports the event was crowded and ridiculous and chaotic beyond anyone’s imagination, to the larger East 4/5/6 halls this year.

What was not announced was that the Reitaisai organizers also rented the East 3 hall, for the purpose of line control. Yes, they rented a 3.5 million yen/day hall for the purpose of making the event less of a living hell by lining up the first x thousand people to show up inside the event hall. Upon discovering this hall, I felt a little less bad about having to spend $19 on an only-event catalog. I took it somewhat easy, getting up at around 6 and arriving at the hall at a little past 7, and just barely made it in the nice climate controlled room where many thousands of other Touhou fans were, many of whom probably were hanging around the Big Sight all night.

As at all doujin events, there is a page in the Reitaisai catalog and all related materials that states that you SHOULD NOT line up overnight, or even get there really early in the morning, suggesting that you instead arrive at an hour when normal people will be awake, in other words, when you won’t bother them. Of course, a lot of people don’t actually follow this rule, creating tensions between the rule-breaking overnighters (徹夜組), the on-the-fence first trainers (始発組), and the rest of us plebes who more or less follow the rules and wish grave harm upon the first group and mild harm to the second.

Most conventions state that there will be some sort of vague penalties for showing up early. I’m fairly sure Comiket isn’t actually able to follow through with this threat, and they’re already pretty well equipped to deal with the crowd. Reitaisai last year, on the other hand, didn’t hand out any penalties, and the event was pretty chaotic. Sunshine Creation was fairly well known for actually dealing these out, moving some people to the back of the line, or I believe in one case making the overnight folks shovel snow if they wanted to keep their place in line. Of course, this can always backfire, as apparently at last Comic1, the 100 or so nerds who were cordoned off as a penalty by 5 staff members decided that their collective inertia could not be stopped by these 5 staff members if they all moved together, and basically just plowed into the event hall. tsk tsk.

Back to Retaisai, though. Like I said, I just barely made it in east-3, and I could hear people around me mumuring about penalties and whatnot, some calling the building we were in a ペナルティほいほい, “Penalty Hoihoi”, a play on the Japanese for “roach motel”, “Gokiburi hoihoi.”

Well, it turns out they were right! At 9:45, 15 minutes before the event started, the periodic announcement by the cheerful female announcer reminding us to please buy a catalog if we hadn’t yet was replaced by another announcer, this one male, and much less cheerful. He informed us folks in the hall that we all probably knew that lining up early was expressly forbidden. In classic Japanese chewing-out style, he let us know how much of an annoyance we must have been, partying outside all night when there’s a hospital with a giant cancer ward just next door, and that we should probably feel bad about ourselves. Oh, and there would be some changes made to the line.

Without even a “have a nice day”, the PA clicked, and everyone went from being dead silent to excitedly talking to their friends. The guys around me seemed half-scared but half-thrilled, because we sort of followed the rules by showing up after the first train, and even if we did get hit by a penalty, we had already showed up late enough that it wouldn’t reaaally make much of a difference.

At 9:55, our line, 6 wide and 90 deep, and only our line, started to move. We all started freaking out, wondering if we actually were going to be the first regular attendees in. They lined us up right in front of the entryway to the event, and held us there for a little bit, telling us that we shouldn’t run under any circumstances, that we should have our catalogs out, and that we should have our shoelaces tied. When 10 came around, everyone started clapping, as you normally do at these events.

Oh, except for the people who had stayed overnight at the Big Sight. Apparently they weren’t too thrilled about the entry order to the event of East 3 being completely reversed.

as they say on 2ch, 徹夜ざまあ wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Anyway, I ought to go now. Need to install my Seirensen demo!

Worthless Post about 2ch Rumors on Haruhi S2, Railgun anime, more

Friday, March 6th, 2009

I wasn’t going to post this originally since it seemed too out there, but now that Hagaren’s cast has changed I feel marginally more comfortable posting these completely unsourced rumors from a random 2ch post, many of which have already, by pure chance, come true! via yunakiti since I am a busy adult with no time to actually read 2ch

Munto will be 9 episodes long â—‹
Basquash getting aired on 10 channels across Japan, is 2 seasons long â—‹
Strike Witches S2 in 2010, based on the light novel â—‹
April Haruhi airing will be a mix of season 1 and season 2, aired in chronological order
Shangri-La will be 2 seasons long
Asura Cryin’ will be 2 seasons, one in Spring, one in Fall
Seitokai no Ichizon airing in July â—‹
Omamori Himari getting an anime adaptation ○ (this, Seitokai, and SW s2 were posted in late January)
Railgun getting an anime in 2010
The Final Negima OAD won’t be produced by SHAFT (? i might be reading this wrong)
Mangrove doing Seiken no Katanakaji
Many changed voice actors for the new season of Hagaren â—‹
Wolf and Spice s2 in July, 12 eps in all â—‹

I guess we have to sit back and see how this pans out! Maybe it’s all part of Kadokawa’s master plan. even this very blog post.

Straight from Flowering Night 2009: New Info on Touhou Seirensen: Undefined Fantastic Object

Friday, March 6th, 2009

I’m really tired so this is going to be really short:

Zun showed up at the very end of FN2009, and the MC asked him if he could give any information about Touhou Seirensen: Undefined Fantastic Object. After dodging the question for a few seconds with “get the demo on Sunday, you can find out then,” he let slip that

“It’ll be better than Chireiden”.

Thanks, 神主. Of course, this was a few hours after an audience poll of “what’s your favorite Touhou game” where about the same number of people raised their hands for Chireiden as they did for Bunkachou (StB), which is to say very few. Other interesting facts learned from the audience surveys: the vast majority of people play on gamepads, and maybe 30-40% of the crowd was in their teens. damn kids in my fandoms.

He also mentioned that the game will be very “pop”, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the demo to find out exactly what that means.

All the bands were great, but some were more great than others. Also, the Makuhari Messe apparently uses a Bosendorfer as their in-house piano?? wtf

Gallery of Fantastic Art and its Current Exhibit: HOKUTO-NO-KEN 25th CLIMAAAAAAAX!!!!!!

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

The Gallery of Fantastic Art is one of those places in Tokyo that I keep meaning to go by that I never actually bother taking the train to. Either they’ve been in between exhibits or I just plain forget about the place, which is really sad considering that I’ve been checking their website on and off ever since I started being interested in Range Murata.

As the name would suggest, GoFA is a small gallery that displays, well, fantastic art. If you go to AX, you may be familiar with them, because it seems like they run a gallery there every year. Anyway, “fantastic” basically means anime/manga illustrators, mostly from artists who you’re likely to see in Wanimagazine pubs (ROBOT, Gelatin) like Murata, Yoshitoshi ABe, Miggy, Okama, and Kei Toume, but also some older artists such as Go Nagai, Mizuki Shigeru, and, as you probably have guessed by now, Tetsuo Hara. More on that in a second.

The gallery is a bit tucked away, but still incredibly easy to get to. All you have to do is take the subway to Omotesando station and walk straight out the B2 exit until you hit the Aoyama Oval Building, which is a big oval-shaped building (surprise!) with a Citroen showroom on the first floor. Take the door on the left of the elevators and the door after that to get to the stairs, walk up one floor, and you’re there. Entry is only 500y, and the ticket is usable for a free coffee or tea at the cafe downstairs. (A 300 yen value!)

So yeah, Fist of the North Star art exhibit. It was basically everything I could have hoped for, though it’s a fairly small space. There’s a modest merchandising table at the entrance with a few dvds, magazines, and other goods for sale (I bought this), as well as some anime cels and some larger framed works for sale, including prints from the crazy “7 Artist Ten” (展) project. There’s also life-sized Ken and Yuria figures staring you down as you come in. Some pictures can be found here.

As far as the Tetsuo Hara part of the Tetsuo Hara exhibit, they have prints of the original manuscripts for the entire first chapter of the Fist of the North Star manga, as well as some manuscripts of later famous scenes. Some full color prints by Hara are also on display. All of it looks great, although staring at the famous spread of Raoh raising his fist to the sky made me realize that the proportions or maybe the perspective of the scene seems a little off. Oh well.

If you can make it this Sunday, they’re going to be giving away 3 A1-sized promo posters of the event, since it’s the last day of the exhibit. I’d totally show up, but Reitaisai. Future shows include Kei Toume from 3/20-4/5, Takada Akemi (char designer for KOR, UY ovas) from 4/29-5/10, Abyukyo from 5/16-5/24, and Range Murata from 5/29-6/14. It’s a really nice place to spend an hour or so, and the free drink is a great added bonus. I’d consider taking someone there if I had friends. Not to mention, it’s in the Shibuya area, so you can get some shopping done afterwards, at Mandarake of course. Maybe writing this post will remind me to actually go back next time they have an exhibit on and I’m in Tokyo!

Hiroshima Gets Maid Cafe for Newbies: Maypretty #2

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

The Hiroshima Financial Times reports the opening of a brand new branch of Hiroshima’s Maypretty maid cafe, this one for “novice otaku” (オタク初心者). Located near Hiroshima station, they claim to have toned down the overall otaku-ness of the place, opting for calm, white walls and regular music and soundtracks as opposed to the main Ootemachi branch’s pink palette and anime songs. The menu features maid cafe staples such as omelettes with ketchup drawings on them and oversized cokes. Their blog can be found here.

I guess trying to attract new blood is good and all, considering the recent maid cafe mass extinctions, but I’ll stick to Schatzkiste. Oh wait, they close in 10 days ;__; On the other hand, I’m going to Hiroshima on a school trip in a few weeks, this might call for some maidbloggin’!

via moeplus via 2nn.

Akihabara Hokoten Revival Support Event from 2/26-2/28

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

There is currently an event planned in the area in the old Rocket 5-Gou building (the empty lots on Chuo-dori where the kebab trucks and r4 vendors were over the winter) from the 26th to the 28th of the month for the purpose of gathering support for the revival of Hokoten, the opening of the main strip on Sundays that began in June 1973 and abruptly ended after the tragic events of June 8 last year.

The Akiba-Guide blog (the friendly folks in maid costumes outside of Gamers that hand you maps) has some details about the event, which currently includes petitions to sign, fundraising for live security cameras, and possibly an exhibit of photos from the old days of Hokoten and Akiba in general. If you have any such pictures, they’re looking for people to submit them for the event at the email address found in the post at the link above (info@…). They’ll also be there to listen to ideas and opinions for/against a revival of Hokoten, and they’ve already spoken to a number of stores in the area about their ideas. Akibamap reports that the event is also planned to take place on 3/1, 3/7, and 3/8, so if you can’t make it this weekend, maybe next. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it on the 28th before/after Eizo Onsen Geisha 16, and I hope some of you will think about dropping by, too!

When You Give a Strike Witch a Culturally Significant Award,

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Follow-up to The Real Reason to Go to Japan Media Arts Festival: It’s Art, So It’s Not Embarrassing:

Strike Witches DVDs now have a sticker on the box advertising the fact that they were nominated. How dare they cover up the commander’s face with this trash sticker!!!

The Real Reason to Go to Japan Media Arts Festival: It’s Art, So It’s Not Embarrassing

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Japan Meda Arts Festival has opened up their yearly exhibition at the National Art Center in Tokyo, and while I’m sure some lesser people will go to see the installations of the works that actually won awards, there is now a reason for the devout to go:

2ch reports that they’re screening Strike Witches twice a day. You know why? Cause it owns.