Japanese film: pt 2

(Notes on Japan through design: 5 - Film)

It was going to see The Bourne Inception (in which Leonardo diCaprio replaces Matt Damon and fights for his identity in dreams instead of reality: at least I think that's what it was, they seemed to have missed "The Bourne" out of the title) that made me think I should do a couple posts on the film experience in Japan. After mentioning the upcoming Ghibli earlier this week, I thought it worth noting that there is so much more effort in both promotion and its combining with film goods within the cinema in Japan than there is in the UK, for example. My local cinema is not alone in having a product shop – mobile phone straps, characters, 3D-image hand fans for Toy Story 3, books, cards, posters, brochures…

But even without a shop, many films are promoted with brochures, and all with B5 leaflets, a single page or a folded 4-pages. Usually just the poster and a synopsis etc, occasionally just a tad more. Here an upcoming anime, Colorful, gets two poster alternatives and an image made of quotes from the film. (Each poster is pretty neat.) Even the upcoming Karate Kid gets a 2-page spread guide to an exercise aimed at children (which you can follow through on YouTube – join in after 30 seconds or follow the guide in print.)

Photos of a time without cameras (and places where they're not allowed)

…more from The New Yorker's Photo Booth blog. I'm going to have to stop linking… and just suggest anyone checking here, checks there regularly. Love these portraits of historical re-enactors taken with an old plate-camera. Years ago, I was commissioned to take a summer of events in England of these sorts of re-enactings. People are fully into it, and it's quite fascinating. (Mine was just a reporting job in which English Heritage kept all the slides. Nothing like this wonderful selection by E.F. Kitchen from her book, Suburban Kinghts. Have to say, judging by the cover, I'm not impressed with the book design however…)

While you're on the Photo Booth blog, check the "spy" photos, by Trevor Paglen from his book Invisible, of a few days previous. Come to think of it, these two make a strange coupling – recreating a time without photos, photographing a place from a distance, where cameras are not allowed.

Japanese schoolgirl colour sense fail

Today we were photographing a peacock, noticed through the fence of a local chicken run, in full display – and the owner kindly invited us in. One of nature's greatest displays, in suburban Tokyo

Three schoolgirls walked past:

"Ah, the peacock is displaying! … 

I'd like them better if they were pink."

Hmm.

Is it a new platform for consuming data…?

…no, it's a new platform for consuming dinner.

I like this take on the iPad's multiple uses – the iDish.

via pink tentacle

China builds the world

Details from two great recent photographs as China builds the world. Pictures in full: an oil spill in which the clean-up is hands-on, including one worker rescuing another, captured by a Reuters photographer and used, for example, here. And a factory worker glances round at the photographer in a winning photograph by Lu Guang on the Photo District News site.

PDN photo via mestudio

Japanese film: 1

(Notes on Japan through design: 5 - Film)

A couple of posts on Japanese film. Firstly: the new Studio Ghibli film, The Borrower Arrietty, is out this month. Ghibli, and particularly helmsman and director Hayao Miyazaki, are feted outside and inside Japan. Only this week, visiting European friends were going to the Studio Ghibli Museum (near my house), while Nicolas Cage was asked about Japanese films on morning TV and mentioned his love of Ghibli films. But the love of the Studio's films is not only an outside-of-Japan view. Any Ghibli release is celebrated and promoted within Japan, and Spirited Away remains (as far as I know, and despite Avatar) Japan's most successful film.

This week, the magazine Brutus magazine was Ghibli-themed, with an interview with Miyazaki, various synopses, various approaches to the subject of the films. And, something that print design still has as a raison d'etre: a pull-out, 4-page "collectable" set of character cards from all the films. Meanwhile, Tokyo Metro has an exhibition of Studio Ghibli posters.

Personally, Studio Ghibli's fantasy works sometimes for me, and sometimes not. But I loved Totoro and Ponyo, and the realistic (non-Miyazaki) Tombstone for the Fireflies. And I'm looking forward to The Borrower Arrietty as it's based on the Borrowers books I loved in childhood.

World goes round

This week's Newsweek Asia (left) and Newsweek Japan covers caught my eye. Who'd have thought only a couple of month's back that the future of flying would be compared to (then-damaged company) Toyota's Prius, while the decisions of (can-do-no-wrong company) Apple would be questioned. The Japanese coverline says "Apple's dead space" (or "Apple's blind spot").

Although, demonstrating editorial independence, the cover story was listed next to an Apple ad online. (Already seeing iPads in use on the subway. However, coming home the other evening, all those seated opposite me were asleep or gazing into space, while one young woman had a paper notepad and pen and was busy doodling/writing/drawing/composing or…? Maybe she was setting a trend.)

Artist of the floating world

Today sees the launch and launch concert of first-time-as-solo singer Alicia. I designed and illustrated her CD jacket etc. The single is called Ukiwa (浮き輪), which means "float" (as in "rubber ring"). So I managed to get my credit as "Ukiwa-e by…",  or "float picture by…", which is obviously a pun on ukiyo-e (floating-world picture). Oh, the satisfaction of making a pun in a foreign language – even if it only works for me.

Anyway, there's only a small Hokusai wave, but a sensual surrounding sea, I hope. It's being promoted as a summer "beer song", so I also had to take a photo of Alicia guesting at a beer festival which showed her and the beer and audience. Trickier than you may think, since she only did a couple of songs and the audience was below her stage. Fortunately she had two spots, so, between appearances, consulting with the MC to promote a "cheers to Alicia" gesture, and the audience having drunk plenty of beer before the second appearance, resulted in a few successful shots. (Someone has uploaded a short video of the event dubbed with the recorded song here.) Alicia's a really nice person: so all luck in launching the song and her appearance tonight at Sweet Basil.

Fingering the suspect

Another interesting New Yorker article – probably better read in print as it extends to 17 pages online, and we all know our reading attention is short online. Nevertheless, I did read it online. It's about faking art, exposing fakes, finding masterpieces, fingerprinting for authenticating an artwork, and the strange admixture of all these and how they come together in the combination of possible crime and possible art.

Part (and only part) of the article features the "found" Leonardo pictured here (and discussed in The Daily Telegraph here): is it or isn't it? For what it's worth (nothing), I'd say it's not. There's something just too modern about her gaze: she seems well fed, well medicated, and like she hasn't seen medieval streets. Purely a subjective and uninformed opinion, naturally.

Summer, heat (and film-developing)

The good thing about the Japanese summer is it's festival time. This weekend was the local junior school's bon-odori festival: kids wear summer kimono etc; younger and older siblings hang out as do parents and grandparents. There's dancing round the central drummers, game- and snack- stalls around the perimeter. It's evening so the temperature has dropped a little. (That's the bad thing about the Japanese summer – heat, humidity and more heat.)

Also went to the beach this weekend with some friends visiting from Europe. We left very early, but at 6am on a long-weekend's Sunday in Shinjuku it was already crowded – with people starting a day trip, clubbers who hadn't got home (or sobered up) and for some reason a businessman scanning a report (6am, Sunday? a long weekend?). It was hot at the beach, but I tried out my "new" Polaroid camera and the Impossible Project's film at both the festival and beach. Ideal developing temperatures are, it says, 17-25C degrees and the film just doesn't really make it in a Japanese summer (where the temperature was 28C when I woke up this morning and heading to about 34), so the results are so far not good. Therefore, though, there is an accidental feel of 50 years ago – should you want that!

Found kanji/found fonts 5

"Muri" (無) – "un-" or "bad" on its own. In combination, "Impossible/Can't do", 無理, for example. This sign had faded so all the kanji had cracked at the joins

Getting off at the next stop

On swiping the screen:

"…On trains, the number of those people doing that strange masturbation-like gesture is multiplying.”

Animation-meister Hayao Miyazaki on the iPad – which he hates. Thank God for a comment coming from someone with a contrary and creative point of view.

One more cup of coffee for the road

Just an excuse to use the second quote in two days from a Bob Dylan lyric in the post-heading. And a chance to use the photo of the smiley-face that appeared in my coffee (and regularly does in family-restaurant Grazie's coffee). Some pointless – and obvious – research on pouring two cups of coffee.

Forever Young

There's a neat little site called Young Me/Now Me in which people upload current pictures of themselves posed to match an old photo.

A couple of years back we themed the design of Dreaming's CD (夢のアルバム – The Dream Album) in the same way. Dreaming are sisters who sing the Anpanman theme (and have for many years), and this was their first "solo" album. They had decades-old photos taken by their late father which I "matched" in current poses in photographs for my design of the album. It linked with their own childhood and parents, with the childhoods suggested by their main job around the children's character Anpanman – but, finally, also put them in the positions of the adults they are. Everything is just a continuum.

Young Me/Now Me spotted via mestudio

Seeing neither wood nor trees?

There's an interesting report from Terrie Lloyd – a long-time business operator in Japan, originally from New Zealand (and my old boss) – about foreign ownership of Japanese forest, and Japanese mis-management of the same. On the one hand the Japanese are planning on restricting foreign ownership of private forest; on the other, the Japanese-owned land is apparently mostly mis-managed. Where's the balance? Is this more Japanese inexperience with foreigners plus more inadequate indigenous-care of the countryside. Or are the Chinese simply buying up Japanese private forest land for wholly undesirable reasons and it's a good plan to stop them? (If the topic interests you, more here.)

The article reminds me of two asides on the subject.

There's a added sadness to Japan's contemporary under-management of forest land. According to Jared Diamond in the excellent Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed: "An outsider who visited Japan in 1650 might have predicted that Japanese society was on the verge of a societal collapse triggered by catastrophic deforestation…". Yet Japan pulled back from the brink, and top-down coordination and edicts established by the shogun in the following years meant that Japanese forest was maintained, understood, and re-forested so that a wood-consuming human society and forest land could survive together. A lesson that we all could learn from now (or Easter Island could have learned from in the past!) One legacy is that 68% of Japan is officially regarded as forest land today. (For comparison Finland is about 72, Germany or New Zealand about 31, the UK a mere 11%.)

Doubly sad, then, that it's not well managed in the current era. And that leads to the second aside: those living in Japan consume an inordinate amount of throwaway wooden chopsticks (waribashi) – made almost entirely from imported wood (so other countries' forests are consumed). There was a small trend toward the eco-friendly by promoting the carrying your own, re-usable chopsticks with you, to save on the waste. But at least one Japanese expert suggested to continue using the throwaway ones, but sourcing them in Japan. Since they are made from cheap bits of wood, they can be made from the cleared wood of managed forests. To source the disposable chopsticks in Japan wold mean maintaining and clearing the forests, then, and you could kill two birds with one stone: reintroduce the knowledge of how to manage a forest and stop relying on other counties' forests for Japan's mass consumption. So far, nothing has happened.

Japanese workers in print!

The Pink Tentacle site likes to find Japanese ephemera – often disappeared for a while, but sparking curiosity again now. It's current selection of proletarian posters from the '30s is interesting. (The Communist Party is still fully-functioning in Japan, unlike in the UK, for example – standing in the upcoming elections, debating on TV with other leaders. A perhaps unexpected detail about Japan.)

The site's intro is a little simple: "In the 1930s, as the masses came to dominate Japanese society". (Ah, that'll be the masses that then took Japan to war.) And mentioning the "Western" design influence is also a tad questionable. The obvious design influence is Russian – a country which neighbours Japan as well as continental Europe. (Is Russia "east", "west" or "Russian" or…?) Little niggles: the site's selection is excellent.

Selling The Cove

At last the film The Cove is being shown in Japan. The threat from right-wing protests (whose threat of action against cinemas was stronger than their reasoning for the action, which included that the film, "tramples on Japanese culinary culture") meant that for a time no distributor was able to get it easily screened. With the tide finally turned, the film was released in 16 cinemas over the weekend. Kudos to the theatres and distributors. (Though, having not seen it myself, I still can't comment on the quality or stance of the film.)

There was a 30 minute special on the release on NHK here yesterday – on the cinemas screening, the response by cinema-goers, comments from people from the town involved etc – and I noticed the film poster looking quite different to the overseas ones. Its downplayed, almost sepia look, and simple graphic is an improvement – in my view – on the original, very blue posters. The original ones, with the diver heading toward the light of the surface, were quite "Disney" (though probably sell the film well enough). Another version looked like Free Willy with dolphins. Luc Besson has the rights to distribute the film in France, and the poster with his name prominently (bizarre to have the distributor's name rather than the filmmaker's) at last had the surface turning red and upped the drama. 

The film poster appearing on the news report here had a dolphin jumping above a cooking pot. But, searching online to get a more detailed look, it proved hard to find – I could only find the small one at left or the poster appearing in news photos. Instead, more prominently available is one with the dolphin jumping "out" of the world, as above – colour has been re-introduced, and a quieter "eco-" feeling comes with the use of the earth rather than a cooking pot. I'm not 100 percent sure of the design impact of the pot, which is not immediately easy to read, but it was a quite different approach than the comfortable blue of the original. The poster featuring the earth still looks an improvement on the overseas ones, just a little "softer" than the cooking pot. Not sure which is the final choice of the distributors, but an "eco-" earth one will probably win out…

Comfortable blue; the freedom of the sea; Luc Besson introduces blood; a small variation in Japan unfortunately looking like aquarium's flyer

Thinking of design only

As someone who tends toward the "liberal" which many a gun owner of America would possibly hate, I still found this "shoot and submit" a good design idea. (And you can't do it with an iPad.)

July 4

No particular reason for a design blog based in Japan, and by an Englishman, to celebrate Independence Day (apart from it being my mother's birthday). But there's always a first time.

Nice selection of July 4th images at The New Yorker. PIctured above, one of Rosemarie Fiore's firework drawings – that's paintings made by fireworks.

Meanwhile, overheard in the newsroom: Promo producer: “Getting drunk and detonating shit. That’s how I celebrate America.”

This map of the US is another gem from Strange Maps. (This one sent to them by Radich Kulker)

Making 東京 into Tokyo

Having learned about the CitID project – which is collecting IDs/logos/promotional ideas for your own City – from a non-too-enthusiastic review in Fast Company, I nevertheless thought I'd give it a go. It was, after all, an excuse to work up a kanji/alphabet combination I'd been thinking abut recently.

Kanji and the alphabet don't readily mix (naturally, considering their different origins and ways of representing language) but I thought there was just enough to make an outward looking logo based on original kanji, for an international city keeping in mind its origins.

Maybe I'll be dissed (as Fast Company somewhat too easily did the work of mestudio, for example). Or maybe it happens that the Tokyo metropolitan government is looking for a new logo (this one's available for purchase, of course!)

Combining Japanese writing and the alphabet is tricky (there are two examples from the Johnson Banks company: the rather excellent UK-Japan Year logo from a couple of year's back, and the playful but less successful – in my humble opinion – combination of katakana and romaji). There's always the danger you'll get half of both worlds rather than the best of both, but I hope there's enough of each in this logo. It works best horizontal for prioritising the alphabet, or vertical for prioritising the kanji. And in its transformation leaves room for the overall theme: "Tokyo: plus the surprising", worked into a global approach.

I've submitted it to the CitID site, but they don't appear to be updating (despite one or two Twitter announcements last month) so I'm not sure when – or if – it'll appear. Meanwhile, here's a lighter version as well…

Skip the below

Interesting – and short, so perfectly readable onscreen – piece on the difference between screen-reading and page-reading from The Boston Globe.

(I'm currently reading Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada which would not be the same experience for me on a screen. Immersive, thrilling, I'm going through it with a physical sense of progress – and "ownership" – which, because of the book's intensity, is one additional aspect of reading it which would be lost on screen.)

Political posters

There's an election next week in Japan, so election posters are everywhere. They all follow a basic design – name, face and perhaps quote. I don't know if there are rules on their design, or it's just one followed for convenience. There are rules on their display (apart from on your own property) – roadside signboards are divided into numbered squares and each candidate is randomly assigned a number. This is revealed early one morning at the start of the campaign period, and alert candidates immediately go round putting up posters in the allotted space.

Otherwise, posters bloom on private property on street corners.

The "nazi" symbol in the photo probably doesn't indicate fascism, or even politics. It might be a graffiti tag, a Buddhist symbol, some personal graffito – or a nazi comment. (Searching just B and E online doesn't reveal much!)

Update, 11 July: A post by Tokyo City Lights on the subject