Frankie's Profile:
I'm a magazine publisher writing about Japanese pop culture bewteen Tokyo and Rome. I also do consulting for Japanese companies interested in oversesas Otaku market. I've been a techno DJ and musician till the mid nineties before starting to surf the dot com boom...
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Recently I've been interviewd by Japanese TV
The legendary Matt Alt has just released his new book about Japanese Monsters. It's a must have for any otaku and asian cinema frek out there. For now it'sa only avaible in Japan but after summer Kodansha International will release it in bookstores in Europe and USA... After drinking together during the Shizuoka Hobby Show, what I personally like of Matt is the fact that he is not one of the anime writers who always complains about the current situation of the market and how the manga culture was better before...
Yesterday evening I wanted to make some Kaarage (Japanese fried chicken) so I googled it and found a couple of great blogs about Japanese cooking: Just Hungry and Just Bento. On the bento blog I found out that in march a new Oekaki Bento book will be released. Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes by Christopher D. Salyers is a compact hardcover book with page after page of full color photos of bentos mostly made by Japanese mothers for their little children. It's not how-to book but a pocket sized coffee table book (even tough there are a couple of how-to pages). A book about these high elaborated bentos is not new but this one is finally in English and is pretty cheap if compared to the Japanese import books.
I just found Ahoaho-expo: a Japanese blog with tons of strange Japanese vintage books and magazines (like this Stereoscopic erotic magazine from the 60s!). I'm sure that (super retro otaku) Patrick Macias will love this blog full of old gems!
Today in March Rabbit (Akiba) I bought Vocaloid cv 01 Hatsune Miku Book from DTM Magazine. The book (but actually I should call it a mook since it's an hybrid between a magazine and a book) is a 98 pages of "how tos" comes with a poster, mouse pad and a DVD (with both video and rom tracks).
Today I found this new book in a bookstore in Shibuya. Omnibot Fan Book, published by Mycom, has been written by Techn'o'taku a famous Japanese otaku who loves design, techno and toys. The book covers the history of toy robots from the early sixties to the just released i-Sobot (that's the natural evolution of the Omnibots produced by Takara Tomy more than 20 years ago). In the next few day will try to take some photos of the beautiful designed pages of this book.
