The bill is back

An earlier – and previously abandoned – attempt by the Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara to introduce a (Tokyo only) bill to deal with issues of representations of sexuality and access to them by minors (under 18s) in manga and anime is back with changes. Difficulties arising from the bill's vague language are mentioned here (by Dan Kanemitsu) and a general concern that it will lead to censorship rather than successfully deal with any problem sex is broached here (by Roland Kelts). While there are many who think that there is a problem in Japan around depicting certain images in manga and anime and so might welcome any such guidance, there are plenty who think that publicly proscribing (ultimately by self-regulation rather than making an actual crime) certain drawn-images of fictional characters is not a way forward. Where to draw the line, so to speak?

Mishima

It's 40 years ago today that author Yukio Mishima killed himself. This month's Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan magazine has my cover design for the memory of Mishima. The text cuts Mishima's neck to recall his decapitation by his seconds at his seppuku. Mishima was one of several artists – authors, film directors, painters – who added to my first attraction to Japan. Henry Scott Stokes' article for the magazine is here.

Pond's advertising fail

Don't know who was responsible for passing this one. It uses the all-female entertainment troupe Takarazuka to promote Pond's cream. So far, so good. All the chosen performers are in costume, but one is dressed as a uniformed Nazi. Fine for her – she's in character and the photo is from a performance. Not so fine for Pond's. Hint to advertising agencies: you generally don't use Nazi stormtroopers to promote anything. (While cross-dressing Nazis promoting cosmetics borders on the comedic – especially linking her to the "cold" cream product –  I don't think that was the intention. Nor would it have been a funny ad if it was!)

The main copy simply reads: "We are using Pond's cream."

Hmm, a taste "fail" in the blindingly obvious category.

Via Japan Probe

Paint it black…

…and every other colour you can't now see.

What does a painter do when he goes blind? Becomes a blind painter. I only saw this short film after a mention in The Guardian last week. It was made a few years ago, but it's worth a link. Painter Sargy Mann, at this point blind, is filmed by his son Peter painting what he remembered when almost blind.

Great quote

"There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book"

Patti Smith has won the US National Book Award for her non-fiction book Just Kids.

Unnecessary 3D conversion of the month

This weekend the celebrated Battle Royale was rereleased in 3D. Underwhelming news for that already wonderfully OTT film. The preview online is in 2D, naturally.

"My perfect child"

Over on the New York Times site there's an article about the Photoshopping of school photos – a service offered by the photography companies that takes the photos.

Being both photographer and designer I've done a share of Photoshopping. Mostly (apart from when it involves fashion and models) it's a presentational thing: minor stuff, post-photograph tweaking akin to the pre-photograph physical checking of the hair, cleaning the teeth, maybe sucking in of the stomach, tightening a belt or choosing your better clothes. It only makes sense because the photo will be somewhere else where it'll be your public image for a while.

But surely school photographs aren't that. For a start the above are adults, and for when it involves an element of "PR" not portraiture. Secondly, surely school photographs are a memory of where you are/were at in some stage of your youth. In the picture the NYT uses to accompany the article, a scab from a playground scrape is Photoshopped out (see the detail above.) An "ugly" scrape, but looking back, surely one would say, "ah, that was the year you had a tumble", rather than, "oh look, perfect again". (Seems the background is your choice too, judging by the green-screen behind the boy in the left photo.)

What are children thinking about themselves if they or their parents opt to remove a birthmark, shorten hair etc. What are we doing, choosing to present ourselves this way? (David Mitchell, writing about something else, had a good take recently, wondering why we've changed to smiling constantly in photos from the Victorian straight-face.) Now some can even choose to have our children present a "perfect" face – the only plus side is that so far it's only a very few who do.

Eye madness

This collection has 960 animated gifs. Not sure why they're there: the page has no links and if you shorten the address, you get nothing. So there you are. I guess they're there for something other than demonstrating much work…!

(via Pink Tentacle) 

Finding things down the crack of the sofa

Over on the informative Fastco Design blog they've highlighted one of the chairs I saw at this year's Tokyo Design Tide. (As I mentioned, chairs were a definite feature of the exhibition.) I saw and also liked this chair – by Daisuke Motogi – which is made of multiple cushion-cubes, as you can see above, between which you can place and store anything you might usually use while also using a comfortable chair – books, mobile phones, magazines, trays etc etc. Neat idea. My only concern is, you know how much dust gets into the crevices of sofa cushions, and that problem is multiplied here! Still, neat idea…

Back then

Clubbing and nostalgia ain't what they used to be, says one standfirst in the collection of Catch the Beat: the best of Soul Underground 1987-91. Luckily nostalgia still is around, and two-decade-old memories of soul, dance, hip hop, jazz and more are, too. The book was published this month and my copy arrived from Amazon only this morning. It's a collection literally reprinting the pages of what started as a fanzine ("produced in a haze of furious energy … with some big sheets of card, yards of copy and a lot of Spray Mount" as editor David Lubich says in the introduction) and morphed into a magazine.

I've picked up my copy of the book because I was a small-time contributor. One cover feature that I photographed appears – on Hank Shocklee, most famous for producing Public Enemy. I was in New York and stopped by his offices to take the pictures of both him and his aspiring new project, The Young Black Teenagers (a group of white rappers). They didn't make the impact that Hank himself has. Truth be told, in the intervening years, although I certainly remember Hank Shocklee (smart and courteous, and, for me, his reputation preceded him) I'd forgotten that I'd also photographed The Young Black Teenagers on that job until I saw the reprinted magazine page in the book. It prompted the memory of trying some shots outside in a NY alley, where one passerby asked of them, "Are you the Beastie Boys?"

Nostalgia: good thing it's what it used to be.

Top, one of the photos from the shoot in colour; above, from the book

Crime story

Last week I finished Jake Adelstein's hard-boiled autobiography of working the police beat when he was employed by the Japanese-language Yomiuri Shimbun. (A bit slow of me, I admit: I had waited for the paperback.) The book – Tokyo Vice – is an easy-to-read, page turner which would be interesting enough just as the story of an American journalist (eventually "more Japanese than American") working in an all-Japanese environment, covering police and crime (including, for example, the Lucie Blackman case, but also a multitude of entirely local-to-Tokyo crimes). Most often, such "outsider" views on particularly Japanese working methods retain a totally "outsider" perspective. But Jake's life here in Japan was as an "insider" (if we need to use such terms of reference) and his stories of working methods are told from that perspective.

That would be interesting itself, but Jake's added twist is his uncovering of the story of a major yakuza boss who had a liver transplant in the US and whose visa (which would normally be nixed because of his known membership of the yakuza) was arranged via the FBI in exchange for information – much, but not all, of which the boss reneged on supplying. For his troubles, Jake faced (very real) death threats to himself and his family. He eventually decided that publication was a safer bet – with everything public the reasons behind the threats would presumably disappear or at least be diminished.

All most definitely an underbelly-look at Japan. One of the conduits he sought to publishing the story was the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan's small in-house magazine, Number 1 Shimbun – which I happen to design. So it gets a mention toward the end of the book when he's ready to publish and the story has been submitted to the magazine's editor. Unfortunately, and hurtfully, Jake writes, he was accidentally cc'd on an email from the editor who wondered at the story and Jake: "…is this guy a little nuts?"

That's true, I'm sure. But as designer (with no input on content of course) I was at the meeting to discuss content for the issue at that time. At first sight Jake's story seems over-the-top (as it can do still, even when reading it as laid out factually in the book!) and can lead to that initial question: is he on the level? But a little in Number 1 Shimbun's defence: as he writes on the same page in the book, The Washington Post spent more than a month verifying Jake's story – with the resources and staff, both journalistic and legal, to do so. The FCCJ magazine has no full-time staff and very (very) few resources. After the initial reaction, and because of the need for extensive verification, it was decided that there was simply and unfortunately neither time nor resources to do such in-depth fact-checking. As Jake writes, the magazine nevertheless came around fairly quickly, publishing but with omissions, and in a later issue following up with a story on Jake. Having lunch with Jake before I took his picture for that first article in 2008, hearing the story (and of his then-current job investigating human-trafficking in Japan funded by a government agency in America) was still extraordinary.

In its style, the finished book reads as a one-off cross between newspaper reportage and the Barry Eisler's fictional John Rain thrillers. Enjoy (if that's the right word for reading some of the details of crime in this book and noting Jake's predicament) a swift and revealing read – even without particular interest in Japan you may find it hard to put down.

Shock tactics

The "casual" sexism of many a housewife-oriented ad pales almost into insignificance when you are confronted with the truly misogynistic that has appeared in the history of design and advertising. Some of the ads featured on a Digital Journalism blog posting – a collection of sexist, but also racist or just disturbing, ads – are explicitly shocking, some would be essentially illegal today. Others are "laughably" questionable – even if the laugh gets stuck in the throat when the next image might literally question whether it's always illegal to kill a woman. Consigned, I hope, to history, even if its disturbingly recent history.

1 phone, 3 dimensions

I have almost no interest in 3D as a general concept (Avatar, schmavatar) but this is a refreshingly quirky, one-off and almost analogue (and almost without use!) imagining of 3D for the iPhone and iPod. By Japanese designer Jitsuro Mase (and exhibited with Directions, Inc at Ars Electronica back in September). All smoke and mirrors – well, mirrors, anyway.

Via fastcodesign

Coming home

The illustration above is a sketch of Washington DC by a Japanese envoy in 1860, from a group making the trip only six years after Japan was forcibly "opened" to the world. Nice little piece in The New York Times about their experience and return to Japan 150 years ago this week. Image from the Library of Congress.

via Roland Kelts

Phone for telephone calls

Very nice mobile phone from John Doe design in Amsterdam– for making calls. Yep, no internet, games, camera, screen, email, apps… (Hmm, I guess I need that mobile email, otherwise I'd go for this if it came to Japan!)

via cooltiger on Facebook

Is it just me…

…or are these achievements a little under-celebrated. As remarkable achievements, but also for a certain beauty. The crash of lead ions creating temperatures of over 10 trillion degrees and exploring the very edges of matter (in the Large Hadron Collider and pictured above). And NASA photographs from a comet fly-by.

Update, Wed. Nov. 10. Related to the theme: I read this last week but have finally seen the picture. As a photo, seemingly unimpressive, but then this is an image of a single atom. Photo by a University of Tokyo team.

A page turner

I've been browsing through my copy of Turning Pages which has just arrived. Nice, contemporary look at editorial print design (from across much of the alphabet-using world). From newspaper to off-mainstream magazines covering grids, covers, imagery, navigation…. Worth a purchase for both fun and reference. Highlights include a commissioned redesign pitch for Vanity Fair by Ken Leung and an introduction to magazines I didn't know like Apartamento (and interiors magazine from Barcelona) or Intelligence in Lifestyle (from Italy) while there's little that's "so what?" in its 272 pages. But beware anything that's introduced as "a new way of reading narrative fiction" as it invariably isn't, just as the example in here is not. Buy – and look inside – from the publisher (linked above) or at a reduction as usual from Amazon.

Japan's woes so great, even superheroes tired

A photo to go with the economic stories about Japan being tired?

Nope, a character taking a break (or creating an opportunity judging by the various people snapping a shot, or children approaching him) at the Tokyo Design Festa: the third design fair in Tokyo in as many weeks. (It must be just the bosses who are tired as the article linked above says.) This one is the flea market version compared to Design Week and Design Tide – with 7,000 participants according to the site. You could be overwhelmed by the number of stalls and the random quality (like at any flea market) or enjoy the display of the urge to create and look for some equally random gems.

Vivian and colour

John Maloof, who regularly updates the found street photographs taken by the now-deceased Vivian Maier, has put up the first colour one on his Vivian blog. An extraordinary shot, for its ordinariness and beauty. Only the very talented and skilled can make the banal seem unique like this.

Tokyo/Metro

Every so often I like to think of my home city as a design challenge. Ever been lost among the lettered lines of the Tokyo Metro…?

Strangely beautiful

A new English-language release of a Suehiro Maruo manga – The Strange Tale of Panorama Island – is released this month. Suehiro is one of the genuinely transgressive manga artists. (As opposed to those in another recent collection of English translations of "alternative" manga, where much work seemed immature and unimpressive.) He gives beautiful lines to the bizarre and the disturbing (and might be recognisable to some from illustrations used on previous CD covers by John Zorn's Tzadik label – eg here or here.) The new book is a story from the classic Japanese author Edogawa Rampo (who took his name from Edgar Allen Poe – just say the Japanese name quickly.)

Suehiro's posters, artwork and manga will be kinky to some, stimulating to others, or often just plain weird. Or, on the other hand, you might know his simple illustration of How to Take a Japanese Bath (take a look inside on Amazon.).

After the fact

S. Neil Fujita. Another designer whose name I didn't know – but whose work itself was familiar, right back to my reading The Godfather with Fujita's famous typographic cover when I was 13 years old. And recognising his famous designs for various jazz album covers.

He died last month. There's an obituary and an interview from 2007 by Stephen Heller on the AIGA site here.

Comic Sans walks into a bar…

…and the barkeeper says, "We don't serve your type here."

The New Yorker contributes to the current taking-to-task of the font.

Tokyo Design Tide

Maybe there are two Japans. The one where innovation and the economy are stagnating or failing, and the one where two major product-design and product-idea exhibitions take place in one week.

Of course, I'm simplifying. But anyway, I went to the Tokyo Design Tide in Tokyo Midtown (the other is Tokyo Designers Week). Apart from the pay-to-enter product-design fair at Design Tide (all laid out in a couple of halls among the architectural "V"-supports above), there were separate exhibitions for mobile company au's iida designs and Alessi collaboration, a small arts/design display where you could vote for a winner, a designer-plus-watch display, and the Design Touch exhibition – for hands-on, electronic design. And more scattered throughout Midtown.

The exhibits were mostly from Japan, but there was representations also from Korea and Europe (Germany, Norway, Sweden, France as well as UK-based Japanese). There were, as there always seems to be, a lot of chair designs. (More noticeable since it seemed that the exhibitors themselves had to stand: hard work over a week of showing!) But among the rest, I'd chose Naoki Kawamoto's Orishiki.

Orishiki

From Tokyo Design Tide:

Orishiki is Naoki Kawamoto's combination of origami and furoshiki.

Above is a glasses case. It is a plastic case that starts out or unfolds flat, and via foldings suggestive of that ori-/-shiki combination, assembles to make a case. But assembles is too strong a word: it looks like it would be fiddly to work, but the truth is, if you hold it in the palm of your hand and give a quick upward flick, it is so well conceived and made that everything immediately falls into place as the (fully functional) case. True: I tried it and it worked first time.

Nice combination of Japanese histories and creativity. Kawamoto is now based in London and looking for an investor/manufacturer to take his prototype to the next stage. He's also made a clutch purse and a suitcase, and more can be seen at his site.