See Kurt Become a Beautiful Girl

Blogger Lisa Katayama took Kurt to Tokyo’s girl haven: the sticker picture booth.

You can download the video here.

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Design for the (Japanese) World: Vol. 2

More great design solutions that I wish we could bring back with us to the US:

ITEM 1:
Say you’re shopping in a department store with your toddler and you need to go to the bathroom… where do you stick the kid? TOTO, maker of the world’s most amazing (and complex) toilets offers another great product, [...]

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Tokyo Confidential

As we walked down one of the narrow side streets of the Times Square-ish entertainment district around the Shibuya train station, past swank rock clubs and “love hotels,” we came upon an unlit, grimy, highly decorative stone-and-stucco facade that looked to be from the first third of the 20th century – an anomaly in a city where [...]

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Street festival for drummers, breakdancers

On the streets of Shibuya today: drum circles, drumming lessons, and breakdancing. We met a young radio reporter (Pejk spotted his DAT recorder) and he told us it’s the third annual Shibuya music festival, called Shibu-on.
Some video highlights: first, breakdancing unplugged – to hand drums, pan flute and didgeridoo. (No patchouli or [...]

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Kawaii Kurt

The motto of a fictional character of mine was All Cliches Are True. As I was reminded twice, spectacularly, during my first full day in Tokyo.
Of course I knew about the (cliche of the) Japanese schoolgirl subculture, and its devotion to cuteness, uniformity, pinkness, intense girl-to-girl friendliness, technology, and so on. But my visit yesterday [...]

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Purikura

While Pejk and Jenny wandered the peaceful Yoyogi park, I hit the streets of Shibuya with our our freelance reporter Lisa Katayama. Lisa is working on a piece about a new generation of Japanese female artists who are playing with female archetypes – like the schoolgirl – in all kinds of fun and twisted ways. [...]

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Mysterious Mountain Monk

For Tokyo’s size, density, and sprawl (those last 2 things might sound contradictory, but here they’re not), it has tons of parks — big parks, that are astounding both in how carefully they’re kept, and in their ability to block out the bustling city around them. Take Yoyogi Park in Shibuya. It’s vast, [...]

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Made it!

After 14 hours on the plane (and nearly 2 hours on the “Limo Bus”), 360 Team Japan is officially in Tokyo. We’re staying in the heart of Shibuya, the hip and happening “ground zero for youth culture.” (so says LP, and we’re happy to confirm!) Neon, crowds, aesthetic delights overwhelm (think “Lost in Translation”), [...]

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