goyablog » Japan

Long walk on a short pier

goyaboy — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:07:30 +0000

Safa and I went to the Seal Beach Pier (California) today during the trip to grandma’s. I decided to have fun with my Lensbaby Composer and Lomo effects as she walked down the pier. After being landlocked for a couple years it was nice to see the ocean. 70 degrees, breezy, salty air and faint fishy smell made for a very enjoyable hour there. Safa didn’t like the fish flopping about in plastic bags that fishermen had on the pier — said it was mean to catch fish and let them die a slow death like that. She’s right — it’s best simply to whack them hard on the ground to knock them out or else slit them with a knife at the base of the head. The realities of the Food Chain aside, she had a good time.

Cellphone fiction

goyaboy — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:24:16 +0000

Maybe — but probably not, at least not in the U.S. — there is a literary role for Twitter. That’s the premise behind an interesting Salon report on the latest cellphone-based fad in Japan (of course, Japan): keitai shôsetsu, or “cellphone fiction.” In short, it’s short short fiction, maybe 500 words or less, that was first produced and consumed on cellphones. The tech-culture background to this phenomenon in Japan is that for a long time cellphones (which seem to have been born smart in Japan while they had to be nutured in smartness in the U.S.) have been the number one means of internet connection for the masses. There is, rather surprisingly for such high-tech country, less per capita personal computer ownership. On second thought, though, it’s not that surprising given space considerations in small apartments and the long commutes by train in cities like Tokyo. Subnotebooks are very popular, but cheaper super-smart cellphones are even more popular. Japan is also the land of manga fan fiction galore, so a wedding of fan fic and cellphones ends up being rather predictable. What’s also predictable is that keitai shôsetsu are dominated by young girls, who have long dominated the fine art of texting. According to Salon, keitai shôsetsu subculture hit its stride in 2007 and has since been going mainstream, spawning an industry of short short fiction that while read on cellphones is often produced much like any another fiction but designed for this medium and, dare I say, genre. Quality and benefits of keitai shôsetsu aside, what is interesting about this intersection of high tech, pop cult, and fiction is the shaping of the literary genre by the technological medium. Historically, literature has seen its share of technological revolutions from scratching on tablets to printing presses to typewriters to word processors, etc. and they have arguably had their effects on publication byways and genre formation. But I wonder if a form/genre has been so tightly tied to the medium and shaped in such a radical way. I haven’t thought much about it (maybe all of 30 seconds), but it seems to be the case. One might cite the analogy in film with the effect of music videos had on form, but still it’s not the same. The other interesting thing is the effect that the compressed form has on narrative and word selection. I think this has unquestionably positive aspects insofar as necessity is the mother of invention. This is another thing that fits Japan well. Japanese are famous for doing more with less and this is another good example of that. In the U.S. the closet thing to this as far as form goes is Twitter, but the function and social context of Twitter is vastly different. Apparently there is some Tweeting that moves in the direction of story, but I doubt it’ll go anywhere.Finally, there’s another social context that seems to be bound up with pop culture/girl culture/otaku fantasies/softcore porn in that many stories have suggestive bits from these that serve as a shorthand trigger for the reader to fill in. That too is interesting from the perspective of narrative formation, generic expectations, implied reader, reader response, etc.

The author of the Salon piece, Barry Yourgrau, claims to be the first foreigner to have his short short fiction translated into Japanese, uploaded to one of the keitai shôsetsu sites for download onto cellphones for a small fee. In some cases authors sell hundred of thousands of copies. He sold a respectable 100,000+ with some of his. He are three of his pieces untranslated into Japanese:

Meant for Each Other

You make a date through the Internet. You meet the girl for the first time at a sake bar. She gulps down a whole bottle of sake by herself. “Okay,” you think. “I guess we know what sort of problem she has. But man, is she cute.”
After two more bottles, the girl falls asleep on her bar stool. “That’s our sweetheart,” grins the bartender, shaking his head at the girl’s snores.
“You mean you know her?” you inquire, uneasily.
“Sure, she’s here every night, with a different guy,” says the bartender. “Whoopee, whoopee.” He winks.
“Really,” you reply. You eye the unconscious girl slumped headfirst on the bar counter. And you decide no matter how cute she is, this first date will also be the last, thank you very much.
And this is how you two meet, you and the love of your life. Four months later you get married and move into a lovely apartment together, where you start to raise a large and happy family.
How you get from point A to point B is a long, complicated, heart-warming, and in many ways wonderfully unbelievable story. But alas it requires someone with far greater narrative powers than mine to properly relate.

Edgar Allan Poe Rice Ball (Medieval Landscape)

Disease strikes a distant town. The victims develop loathsome sores all over their bodies; at the same time they’re maddened by extreme lascivious impulses. Down street after street door after door is splashed with a crude red cross: inside, the lunatic disfigured coupling rages on nonstop — men, women, even children — until exhausted dawn, until death.
In the hills beyond town, a monk makes his way along a darkening road. He chews a stale rice ball for his supper as he goes, so as not to interrupt his march. His sandaled feet move one in front of the other inexorably. His staff leaves a trail of dots behind him in the dusty distances. At last he comes around the side of a hill and he stops. The prospect of the dim town spreads before him. A look of disturbance moves over his face, as he slowly chews the last of his rice ball. Even here the uneasy wind carries the grisly minglings of lamentation and carnal grunting. The monk becomes watchful; he looks uneasily around him and grips his staff in both hands. Two figures are moving feverishly in the darkness ahead. They seem to prance toward him, half-naked, hideous, moaning hoarse endearments. The monk calls to his god as he raises his staff and prepares to meet them.

Woolly

A man goes for a swim in a creek. When he gets out of the water, he sees a sheep standing on the bank, watching him. The man looks at the sheep. The sheep looks at the man. Slyly, the man smiles. He checks up and down the creek. There’s no one in sight. The man steps toward the white, woolly mammal. “Here sheepy, here woolly,” he says softly. The sheep backs up slowly into the bushes, looking confused by the state the man’s in. But the sheep is only faking.
Later, the man dresses by the creek. The sheep lolls next to him, watching him, warm-eyed. The man combs his hair and says, looking down the creek in the direction of his off-road vehicle, “So that was a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll be back up this way sometime. I’ll get in touch.” He puts his comb back in his pocket and gives the sheep a quick pat. He gets to his feet. “Okay?” he says, dusting off his pants.

There is something intriguing about the form; perhaps I’ll experiment with it (without the intimations of twisted sex….)

The (Tentative and Unformulated) Work Plan

goyaboy — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:02:22 +0000

Besides Life Getting Complicated as my sabbatical leave begins, there is also the little something called research and writing that I must do. Unlike a certain friend who will remain unnamed who is planning on spending sabbatical time taking tennis and Photoshop lessons (okay, just in afternoons after a mornings of work), need to decide how to divide my time between the Old Stale Project and the New Shiny Project. Rationally, I should finish the old project on postwar Okinawa tourism which was only partly completed (that’s putting it charitably) during my last leave, having been derailed by yucky divorce stuff from which I re-railed only a couple years ago (I think meeting Sara might have had something to do with that). Emotionally, I’m better aligned to break ground on the new project, loosely conceived as a follow-up to my first book (but not really) in dealing with issues of contemporary media/consumerism as monster. I’ll sort that out later; I imagine I’ll work on the Old during the summer and see how it goes before jumping into the New after that. Most immediately, however, is a book review of Michael Dylan Foster’s fun Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai. The nice thing about doing this review is that it’s among the stuff I wanted to read first for the new project, so I’m killing two birds with one stone. Truth be told, I read it in manuscript and have known about Foster’s project for a long time as he was working on it as a dissertation, so this is in effect a re-read. I did the first chapter this evening and plan to spend the next couple days reading it. It’s good, so this is practically pleasure reading. The book is in some respects close to mine, at least one chapter in particular, but that’s cool–at least he cites me properly, unlike Marilyn Ivy in her book (still pisses me off–and she actually was miffed at my somewhat subtle swipes at her in my intro. But I digress…). I wonder if I’ll be asked to read it a third time when Foster goes up for tenure (oh crap, that again…)

I just joined Smell Club (Nioibu)

goyaboy — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:02:54 +0000

The other day on NPR there was a spot about “Smell Club,” a Japan-based web site where you can geotag smells from around the world. It’s an interesting notion to describe place and space via smells rather than the usual sights. The idea, as I understand it, is that once you come across a scent at a particular place, you note it, try to describe it, and mark via Google Earth where it is/was. Smells that persist at a particular spot would seem to be the best candidates. I thought I’d check it out and join for the heck of it (above is my account info). Below is an example of a geotagged smell (pineapple on Kumejima, an island west of Okinawa Island in the Ryukyu Islands:

Now all I have to do is sniff around Nashville (I’m already thinking of the Hog Heaven BBQ shack near Centennial Park) and make a report. Should be kind of fun — and who knows what kind of smell fetishists I might meet online.

8/15

goyaboy — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:50:16 +0000

Well, at least this year the Japanese Prime Minister (Fukuda) had sense enough not to worship at Yasukuni Shrine on this the anniversary of the end of the Asia Pacific War. However, three ministers and two former PMs did. Sara and I visited Yasukuni for the first time just a couple weeks ago and went to the controversial military museum there, the Yushukan. I must say, the curators there sure did a great job aestheticizing the space and making the idea of war seem very beautiful. But of course, that’s what all militaries ultimately do, right? We weren’t allowed photos within the exhibit, but I did get the one above, a small statue of a “soldier” (that’s the caption) that greets you at the hall entrance. I also, simply to spite them, stealthily got this shot of a Ohka (Cherry Blossom) suicide plane (basically, a flying bomb). You can clearly see that “No Photo” logo in the lower left:

Indeed, the Yushukan glorifies (the) war and presents a clear narrative of Western aggression (via imperialist encroachment in Asia) that Japan was forced to defend against. Like any partisan history, there’s a grain of truth to that, but there are many many other grains to consider. Take, for example, the narrative at the Osaka International Peace Museum that begins very forthrightly with Japanese aggression versus continental Asia from 1931. Seeing these two presentations of the same period of history back-to-back was fascinating. I highly recommend it next time you’re in Japan.

Umm, April Fool’s…?

goyaboy — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:59:48 +0000

That’s about the only explanation I have for no posts in April (until now). Even now I shouldn’t be fiddling on the web while I have several chapters to read for my next class session. We’re reading Ian Condry’s book Hip-Hop Japan this week; had fun with it in class today as we talked about the issue of the racial origins of hip-hop and its practice in Japan. Showed the class this video of Japanese b-boys (breakdancers) affecting African American style, and yet not…

[MEDIA=5]

And then played this song by Japanese rapper Zeebra, called “A-S-I-A-N-S”:

[MEDIA=4]

So if you were one of my students in class today, how would you respond to the question: “How is race being deployed in the Japanese context of the b-boys and the rap song?”

paprika

goyaboy — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:19:31 +0000

I’m excited. Students from my anime class (grads from my first-year writing seminar in the fall — oh heck, let’s just give their names: Levy and Kevin) informed me today of the upcoming U.S. release this summer of the latest animated film by Kon Satoshi (Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent). It’s called Paprika. It sounds like vintage Kon; it sounds awesome. Here is a plot summary from Anime News Network:

In the near future, a revolutionary new psychotherapy treatment called PT has been invented. Through a device called the “DC Mini” it is able to act as a “dream detective” to enter into people’s dreams and explore their unconscious thoughts. Before the government can pass a bill authorizing the use of such advanced psychiatric technology, one of the prototypes is stolen, sending the research facility into an uproar. In the wrong hands, the potential misuse of the device could be devastating, allowing the user to completely annihilate a dreamer’s personality while they are asleep. Renowned scientist, Dr. Atsuko Chiba, enters the dream world under her exotic alter-ego, code name “PAPRIKA,” in an attempt to discover who is behind the plot to undermine the new invention.

And here is the U.S. release trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m soooooo there!

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, USA, Theater)

goyaboy — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:06:21 +0000

I saw Letters from Iwo Jima a few weeks ago on the invitation of a colleague and I guess I proved that I’m not a typical American by not overwhlemingly liking it as many others have. It’s a very good film — I especially liked the muted palette — and there was a certain (but not much) daring to do a film of an iconic American victory in WWII from a Japanese perspective (sort of) and in Japanese, and yet it all seemed pretty predictable in its “daringness.” I had to agree with another colleague of mine who (always being very critical) said that it was flawed by having all the right “PC” scenes in it. I know exactly what he means. All of the sympathic consessions to the enemy (in order to validate it as “from the Japanese perspective”) are so predictable as to make a supposed risky film rather formulaic. One perhaps unintended effect in the film was the fact that the two most appealing Japanese (the commander and horseman) were both depicted as having had experience in the US, which to me suggested that that’s the only way for a Japanese to become “civilized” and likable by Americans. Your typical American would likely be wowed by the film (or be angry at it for showing “Japs” as humans). I wasn’t. But still, it’s a very good film worth seeing, just not the Best Picture many thought it was.

Why the U.S. Goverment Doesn’t Care about Yasukuni Shrine

goyaboy — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:01:32 +0000

There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. government doesn’t join China and Korea in condemning Japanese officials’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese war atrocities, and the general whitewashing of Japanese war history that has been pushed by some Japanese conservatives, but the latest declassified documents from the CIA sums a lot of it up: The U.S. was willing to turn a blind eye under Cold War conditions in order to profit in any way possible from Japanese war crimes and war criminals. Unit 731 is probably the most infamous such compromise, but the latest laughable revelations of the CIA recruiting Japanese war criminals for potential intelligence on Communist activities in Japan are just as indicative of U.S. attitudes back then — any kind of ethical sense was trumped by ideological correctness. Maybe that happens nowadays too, but it seems as if capitalistic correctness is the trump card now, with ideology simply being the handmaiden of the economic.

Japanese Neo-Nationalism

goyaboy — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:41:39 +0000

Japan’s new prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is living up to his reputation, advocating revision of Japan’s Constitution to eliminate Article 9 (the no-war clause) and the fostering of “patriotic education” that will instill a sense of pride in Japan’s youth. That’s just great. Let’s combine rearmament with the kind of nationalistic education that was used to mobilize Japanese youths in the 1930s — and claim it’s all in the interest of world peace. What is it with these types who wrap themselves in patriotic (jingoistic) rhetoric, who actually believe that patriotism is an unalloyed good? As far as I’m concerned, patriotism has caused more harm than good in the history of humankind. I have never placed an identification with country/nation above other kinds of identity and frankly, I simply do not see the desirability to do so. That is not to say I dislike or do not appreciate the United States as a place to live and even be proud of (pre-Bush). But does one have to be a patriot not to be branded an ingrate or worse, a traitor?

The Big Time

goyaboy — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 06:32:41 +0000

You know you’ve made it as an (academic) author when your work is cited in a Yahoo Discussion Group dealing with Japan-related role-playing games (RPG):

I actually find this citation to be the most gratifying of them all.

Japanese CMs

goyaboy — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:43:27 +0000

Japanese television has always had, IMHO, the best commercials. This web site has collected some very good ones from YouTube. I especially like numbers 18 (samurai cockroach), 10 (great concept well executed), 9 (too cute for words), 6 (too close to home), 5 and 1 (for their take on a stereotype of Japanese), and 2 (because American broadcasters could never get away with this even though they air commercials with more overt sexual content and do get away with it).

Winebot

goyaboy — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 01:56:08 +0000

Japanese robotic researchers are just plain cool … and crazy. It takes a bit of wild-eyed thinking to come up with anything interesting and cutting edge and Japanese technuts are real good at that. They often come up with stupidly wacky things, but out of all that wackiness breakthroughs arise. Now, I don’t know if the Winebot is a breakthrough, but it’s pretty darn clever. It can discern wine and cheeses, and foods in general with the taste sensor it is equipped with. How cool is that? Of course it isn’t perfect and practical applications, such as identifying ripe fruit before you bite into it, are few and far between at the moment (I really wish I had this robot around this summer as I was getting repeated bad luck with peaches). It starts going haywire after the wine is opened and breathes, and apparently is identified a reporter’s hand as prosciutto and and a cameraman as bacon. Makes me wonder what I’d be identified as — don’t say ham!

Here we go again….

goyaboy — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:12:11 +0000

Every August 15th, eyes in Asia are cast upon the Prime Minister of Japan, waiting to see if he is going to visit Yasukuni Shrine. It’s always officially an “unofficial visit,” done by the PM as a “private individual.” Of course, there is no such thing as Prime Minister Koizumi the private individual; his very self and persona are imbricated with prime ministerness. He is a public figure, period, whether he likes it or not and his actions in highly-charged public places like Yasukuni are by definition public. If he wanted to do a private observance then it should be unannounced, under cover, in the dead of night, with no press coverage. If he did that, then I’d believe — and even admire — him. As it is, he can not simply take off the prime ministerial hat (with that hair, I doubt he can safely wear a hat) by simply changing his clothes, not using pubic money to buy flowers, and declaring that this is a private visit. It’s far more complicated than that. So, let’s get over that stale argument and accept the fact that his visit yesterday, 8/15 JST — the 61st anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific or V-J Day (U.S.) or war defeat day or Day of Liberation (Korea) — was, like all the previous visits by him and past PMs, an official, public visit. As usual, it drew a lot of criticism among Asian nations and even domestically within Japan. And, on the other hand, a retired LDP politician and critic of Koizumi’s visits also had his house and office burned down, presumably by rightwing nationalists. Clearly, this is a big deal, but what exactly is the big deal? Given the glorification of the war at Yasukuni and its enshrinement of some pretty bad guys, it is indeed politically insensitive for the PM to visit the place. After repeated warnings from China and Korea not to go, it can’t help but look like Koizumi is going out of his to piss them off. Now, on the other hand, in his defense (a position I don’t particularly like but needs to be addressed), what, objectively speaking, is wrong with him laying a wreath at Yasukuni? Is it the perceived condoning of Japan’s wartime aggression? The seemingly spiteful snubbing of foreign warnings (à la George W. Bush)? Even if that’s it, should his actions be dictated by Chinese and Korean opprobrium? I wonder what would happen if nobody issued warnings and complaints, if no press reported the PM’s intentions; would he still go?
Obviously if Japan had won the war, there would be no questioning of Japan’s PM paying observances at Yasukuni. It would seem natural, even if guys who commited war crimes to win the war were enshrined there. There are plenty of allied soldiers who committed (unconvicted) war crimes and they get a hero’s treatment at their graves. If one answers that Japan’s cause was not just, that is was the aggressor, the same still applies — had they won, their cause would have been just. So, we seem to be left with the uncomfortable but clichéd conclusion that to the victors go the spoils, among which includes the right to memorialize the war dead whomever, however, whenever. Losers seem to have those rights restricted to varying degrees, usually in inverse proportion to their own political/economic power (more power, less restriction). Japan’s postwar history of war memorialization under real and virtual U.S. occupation and influence has interesting points of comparison and contrast with memorialization of Confederate war dead in the United States. Despite defeat and repudiation of its lost cause, Confederate memorialization is allowed to flourish under certain contexts and certain political conditions (e.g. the period of “reconciliation” between (white) North and (white) South — think “reverse course” and U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in the Japanese case; i.e., the one power — the U.S. — that could put the smack down on the PM’s Yasukuni visits and actually has a historical right to do so, never raises a speck of criticism against its best buddy ally in East Asia). I really wonder what would happen if W. had called up Koz and strongly urged him to forego his visit: “Hey Junitchy-row, say I make ya a deal. You don’t go to Yasookooni and I’ll take you to Graceland” or something like that. The lack of such criticism from the U.S. is tantamount to the U.S. condoning the PM’s visits to Yasukuni. This dimension of the debate has always bugged me because it is never appears in the debate. Isn’t that weird?

That Other Bomb

goyaboy — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:20:57 +0000

I usually post an August 6th Hiroshima A-Bomb entry, but this year I opt for an August 9th Nagasaki A-Bomb entry. My staunch, morally-informed position against the Hiroshima attack has softened some over the years, but not so with Nagasaki. It was unnnecesary and wrong. Period. And upon further reflection, the haste with which the second bomb was dropped has pushed me back into re-hardening my position against the first bomb. Both atomic attacks were wrong, by any reasonable human standard. I believe there was very little question about the bombs being dropped or not; given the wartime context of the time, I don’t see it happening any other way. But that doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. From a moral point of view, there is, IMHO, no way to justify the deliberate targetting and killing of noncombatants, especially in such massive numbers. This means I condemn the fire-terror bombings of cities with conventional bombs as well. My good friend and colleague, Michael Bess, has coming out soon what is sure to be a well-received book on the moral dimensions of WWII, and he had me read and critique the a-bomb chapter. He is smart and thoughtful and nuanced in this chapter, but even after he made revisions based on some of my criticisms, he argues, ultimately and to his credit with much agonizing, that if one considers the other options and the casualities they would *probably* (I’m not so sure about “probably”) bring, it was the best option, and thus morally justified. I really don’t do justice to his argument by simplifying it so much and putting it like that (so don’t get on his case), but what it boils down to for him is that if one does a probable calculation of lives that would have been lost if the bombs hadn’t been dropped and the war continued on to a land invasion of Japan’s main islands, it would have been worse. He makes no distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and the whole idea of real deaths versus hypothetical (even if *probable*) doesn’t convince me. I don’t think you can simply base the morality of the act on hypothetical numbers. I appreciate Michael’s attempt to be nuanced — he claims the book will piss off those on the right and left — but if you ask me whether or not at the moment of the bombs’ droppings the acts were morally justified, I would emphatically state no. Those involved in the decision and act knew full well that they were slaughtering civilians, regardless of what the outcome might be with regard to ending the war and “saving American lives.” I believe that if you start down the slippery slope of ends-justifies-the-means, then anything goes and all morality is tossed out the window; anything can be “justified” at the moment without ever knowing if there will ever be an end that “justifies” those means. Or if there will be any end at all — just look at the war in Iraq.

T-shirt for George W. Bush

goyaboy — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 14:51:17 +0000

T-shirt for George W. Bush

I almost bought this t-shirt in Japan to send to “President” Bush.

Leaving on a subway, train, and jet plane

goyaboy — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 02:19:22 +0000

Just a quick update for you Goyareaders who are waiting with anticipation for more word and images from the Land of Rising Son and Strange Chip Packaging. I’m boarding a subway to Ueno to catch the train to the airport within 45 minutes so I’m signing off now until my return to Music City, USA. The damn AC in my house better be fixed by the time I get there. I leave you with this bizarro photo I took yesterday in the Ikebukuro district:

Sushi at Aozora Sandaime, Tsukiji, Tokyo

goyaboy — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 15:06:39 +0000

Aozora Sandaime, Tsukiji, Tokyo

This is where I took Mie Uchida, the ex-Japan Hall Coordinator at Vanderbilt University, for sushi last night in the Tsukiji fish market district. It was excellent excellent. And expensive expensive. But worth it worth it. My thanks to Alan Christy for the recommendation (see his far more extensive Japan photos at: www.flickr.com/photos/takecrew). Check out the restaurant’s web site at: www.aozora3.com.

Kachidoki Bridge, Tokyo

goyaboy — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:01:01 +0000

Kachidoki Bridge, Tokyo

Is this pretty or what?

Me as Redhead and Bluehead

goyaboy — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:36:02 +0000

Cosplay (costume play) is what hardcore anime fans do to have fun. You dress up as an anime character and, if at an anime convention, enter a cosplay contest. Or, if you’re in Tokyo, you can congregate in Harajuku on Sundays and have photos taken of you. Or, like this “Maid,” you can be hired to hand out ads for Cos-Cha, a cosplay-themed cafe in Akihabara where teenage (and older) males seem to form the entire clientale served by animated cosplaying females dressed like this I assume. I almost went in, but felt weird about being among teenage Japanese boys getting off on being served by “Angels” (as they are called) dressed as characters from Maid Cafe. Upon viewing their web site, it is a good thing I didn’t go — I would have wanted photos but they are strictly forbidden. It seems as if they have weeks themed after particular anime or genres. There is also a blog with “Angel Diaries.” That’s a bit creepy. If you want a set of nice cosplay Maid shots, check out on Flickr Warai Otoko’s cosplay set. Or swim through the entire Anime Cosplay Pool.

In front of a big video game arcade there were life-size cutouts of Asuka and Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I just had to. I think I make a better bluehead than redhead: