UPDATE: Konami cancelled the MSG4 launch event... seems that the image of Solid Snake overlooking the stabbing rampage in Akiba has touched other people than me...

During the sixities Manson never killed anyone (almost personally), the good thing in this case is the fact that we don't have an "otaku guru" telling people to kill everyone... that guru in a certain way has been Shoko Asahara. He has never been an otaku guru but, before the sarin terrorist attack, he was in synch with the otaku subculture... Now the akiba killer is just a crazy guy who choosed Akiba since on Sunday there isn't a more "media dense" area in the World. There isn't a group behind him, nor a subculture supporting his hate/killer instincts, he just wanted his 15 minutes of fames, so it's pretty impossibile to stop this kind of tragedies...

20 years have passed since Tsutomu Miyazaki. In all these years the otaku culture permeated the Japanese society (and jpop culture) so, this time, I think the "Otaku is  socially dangerous" meme will not get grip in the Japanese mediasphere almost not as before... I feel this bloody sunday is more the otaku "September 11" than anything else...

The italian monthly magazine XL (published by the newspaper La Repubblica) has just posted my reportage about the Dreamparty: the Japanese hentai game show. There is also a photogallery with some hentai game images provided by Light.

Few days ago Julie sent us this super cool cosplay from a past edition of Wonderfestival!

I found this image on netamichelin so I don't know who really made this  really cool Intel Inside parody! I'm going to print the Miku (Vocaloid 2) sticker and put it on my PC!

(via Danny Choo / Tantei File) There has been much talk and comments on boards around the Japanese Internets regarding how police in Shinjuku have been stopping people who dress like some otaku - requesting a bag and pocket check with the excuse that they are looking for weapons. Tantei File decided to put this rumor to the test by sending out Ozumi-san to Shinjuku dressed in camouflage trousers, a bandana, chain and keys hanging off his trousers and leather gloves.
Tantei File who also list what types of people the police do spot checks on - this list was provided by a police officer.

• People wearing camouflage trousers or jacket
• People with chains or keys (hanging off trousers)
• Looks weak (!)
• People wearing a bandanna
• People wearing leathe

I think this is a new low for the Japanese Police especially beacuase Shinjuku is a Yakuza paradise and Police would never stop a Yakuza to check for weapons or drugs!! But, yes, stop a geek is easier that having to face an armed Yakuza...

Yesterday, in Akiba, I spotted this two guys seeling some really cool T-shirts inspired by the Japanese online community 2channel. If you want to see more pictures you can visit Akiba blog (thanks to my camera that died after this shot I couldn't take more photos of these T-shirts)...

I just come back to my base after the Comiket marathon.
I meet many old and new friends like Danny Choo, Amano ai, Hobibox staff (my old company), Blasterhead, Sharpnel and many doujin and eroge makers. I should make proper post  but right now I'm drinking a big bottle of sake from Aomori so...  just click here for a big Comiket posts selection madew by Ponyapepe.

If you are in Tokyo tomorrow let's celebrate new year at Warehosue in Azabu Juban (but of course don't forget the Akiba otaku shops sales before heading to the party)!!!!
Party on!!

Happy new year!!!  Akemashite omedetou!!!!

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.

A Japanese toy otaku has created a customized version of Kaiyodo Danboard figure thanks to Miracle Deka and gashapon Wii Console, Wiimote and games from "Wii real figure Collection". I'm sure that if he would sell the printed custom decals for the original Kaiyodo's figure he could make a lot of Yen! When I see works like this I think that if Andy Warhol were alive  he would be an otaku artist with a studio in akiba doing things like this customized  toy...




Meme Linking Update (12 dec): Today this news popped up in several Japanese blogs and news aggregators like NewAkiba and Revoltech Express. The only Japanese site that gave us credit is News Walker Net that actually linked us a couple of days. ago. Arigatou gozaimashita News Walker!!
 

I just found out that also the cult Akiba shop M's Pop Life Department got a great selection of sexy Christmas costumes. (old "sexy xmas" post here). M's is my favourite audlt shop in the world. What makes this shop unique is that it has been created to attract  sukebe oyaji like me but also couples interested in discovering new ways to have fun sex. The Japanese artist Mizuno Junko has collaborated with several project produced by M's (actually I think this kind of collaborations are way cooler than the "traditional"  marketing projects made by KidsRobot or other so called streets brands). 
If you don't know this Akiba sex temple you should take a look to this  great reportage by Akibamap (translated by Sweat Pink blog).

Amano Ai (photo gallery here,  here and here), after working at Tokyo Motor Show, is now partecipating at Osaka Motor show as  Race Queen for Exedy (a Japanese company considered the world leader of performance sports and racing clutches that was a technical sponsor of the Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drift movie)
I just found this new video with Ai chan from the Japanese TV show Hyper Race Queen on Sky Perfect TV.  Actually there are 4 videos: video 1, video 2 and video 3 (the quality is not perfect but still watchable). Ai chan is kawaii and super sexy!!
I love Amano Ai!!

I think this is an example of what happens when a Japanese modeller has too much time on his hands (probably because the new gunpla kits from Gundam 00 are not so much interesting)... The experiment is meant to test the mechanical resistance of Apollo chocolate lollipos from Meiji. Video of this exemperiment here.






(via GameNyarth) 

This beautifull Gundam 00 illustration is from Mugen Kidou doujin circle that will exhibit on 31th December during Comic Market (don't miss the great  "how to guide"  created by our friends at Heisei Democracy.)
Today the Club 54 has released Wan Ryumin Niujoku another doujinshi dedicated to the female characters of Gundam 00.
There is just a month till next Comiket so doujin world is starting to fight for visibility and releasing "major" doujing manga before the event seems a technic to attract more customers at its own circle table during Comic Market (コミックマーケット).



Akiba blog has posted some very NSFW photos here, here, here, here, here and here.

Now we only need to start to save up for the Comiket 3 days doujin marathon shopping!

Tonight, around 3am, Fuji Telebi will broadcast a new documentary dedicated to Otaku women in the NoNFIX documentary slot (a cult late night, low budget show). This doc has been shooted during last Comiket (actually I was in the press room when they were trying to obtain a press pass and I happy to say that Comiket organizers are really concerned about Comikers privacy and for TV crews is not easy at all to shoot during Comik Market). If you are in Tokyo area and you like Boy's Love you can't miss this show!

We are again in the time on the year when we stop downloading japanese porno from Javtalk and we take the dust off the Sega Saturn to play once again Christmas Nights... This year is a little bit special since the Christmas anthem Jingle Bells is celebrating the 150th annyersary so the japanese cult label Vap on 28th November will release a "compilation album" (translated page here) with the collaboration of some of most famous Japanese otaku artists (like the new Akiba Sperstar Aya Hirano (wiki)  "Love Gun" from Death Note and Lucky-Star).
The cover has been created by the Japanese "Horror Comedy" genius Ren Oshikiri (if you can't access the page outside Japan you can try this proxy) who works for the weekly magazine "Rude Rude" and has illustrated many tankobon and CD jackets.


(from wiki)  JINGLE BELLS

Dashing through the snow

In a one horse open sleigh

O'er the fields we go

Laughing all the way

Bells on Bobtail ring (Or Hear our voices ring)

Making spirits bright

What fun it is to laugh and sing (Or What fun it is to ride and sing)

A sleighing song tonight

(chorus)

|: Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;

Oh! what fun [joy] it is to ride

In a one-horse open sleigh. :|

Although less well known than the opening, the remaining verses depict high-speed youthful fun. In the second verse the narrator takes a ride with a girl and loses control of the sleigh:

A day or two ago

I thought I'd take a ride

And soon Miss Fanny Bright

Was seated by my side,

The horse was lean and lank

Misfortune seemed his lot

He got into a drifted bank

And then we [we—we] got upsot.

|: chorus :|

In the next verse he falls out of the sleigh and a rival laughs at him:

A day or two ago,

The story I must tell

I went out on the snow,

And on my back I fell;

A gent was riding by

In a one-horse open sleigh,

He laughed as there I sprawling lie,

But quickly drove away.

|: chorus :|

In the last verse, he picks up some girls, finds a faster horse, and takes off at full speed:

Now the ground is white

Go it while you're young,

Take the girls along

and sing this sleighing song;

Just get a bobtailed bay

Two forty as his speed

Hitch him to an open sleigh

And crack! you'll take the lead.

|: chorus :|

Ai chan has posted many super kawaii photos of her working at Tokyo Motor Show as companion for the legendary japanese brand Excedy.  The show will close next sunday so if you are in Tokyo this could be a good chance to meet her! If you can't you can watch her in this new video we spotted on You tube.

November issue of Wired is dedicated to Manga invasion of US market and "how Japanese comics are reshaping pop culture".
Back in the days when I wanted to be a (post) cyberpunk writer, after visiting Comiket I proposed to Wired an article about Comiket and doujin culture. Anyway, Daniel Pink has written a great article about doujinshi and is nice to see that this theme is still interesting after 10 years I proposed it to Wired! (just a note: it's the first time I read an article about doujin culture and the Comiket is not cited even tought it got 4 times the attendees of Comicon! ^_^')


If you read the article on Wired.com  there are a lot of comments that point out that "there is a version of anmoku no ryokai (tacit understanding) at work in America already". What probably it missed is the magnitute of doujin culture industry in Japan. One thing is a Star Trek fanfic distributed on the net and one is having several shop chains, like Toranoana, focused only in doujin (selfmade/homebrew) manga, music CDs and videogames (doujin game scene is so big that many doujin games has even been ported to consoles)...

This is our friend Amano Ai new otaku column published by the legendary japanese gravure idol magazine Beppin School!  The column is dedicated to figures, dolls and garage kits. Ai chan will run this column for the next months and first part appeared in the october issue.

Doujin event Sunshine Creation 37  has featured several doujin dedicated to our beloved virtualoid idol Miku chan!
These are some photos taken by seiyunews:

Today, M4125, a new Maid PC, has been presented at Akihabara Maid Cafè Maid Station. The core of this new otaku fetish PC is the infamous Mini ITX developed by : a 17 x 17 cm low-power motherboard form factorVIA Technologies. Mini-ITX has similarities to ATX, microATX, FlexATX and BTX form factors, but is significantly smaller: 170 mm (6.7 inches) by 170mm.
There iare many photos on Akiba Blog.

Today during the Frankfurt Bookfair I met William Pollock the master mind of the (already) legendary No Starch Press from San Francisco that recently released the geek bible: "Forbidden Lego".
During the next year seems that William will release some otaku oriented books, but we can't say anything right now or he will  kill us with a  Lego gun...



ps after attending so many events in Japan it has been kind of strange (or better, sexually shocking) to see so many grannies working as companions...

XMOE is a new japanese video hyper aggregator focused on anime and moe videos. It aggregates moe videos from Youtube, DailyMotion and other  Japanese popular video sharing sites like Veoh, AmebaVision, GUBA and Pandora.tv

Yesterday Broccoli held a conference at UDX in Akiba to announce the new AKIHABARA GAMERS (AKIHABARAゲーマーズ本店) shop that will be opened during 2008.
As stated in this official PDF the new shop will be located between Medialand and the actual Gamers shop in akiba. The old building has been torn down few months ago and recently that corner has been used for street promotions like the Red Bull free giveaway held recently...

NSFW: Cosplayers vacumbed in a futon plastic bag (vacum bed) is a new fetish spreading among japanese underground. It's a variation of  Rubber fetishism and Total enclosure fetishism (a form of sexual fetishism whereby a person becomes aroused when having entire body enclosed in a certain way).  HPsart just posted a video where a cosplayer of cult anime character Suzumiya Haruhi is vacummbed in a Futon bag...

Yesterday more than 15.000 people attended the Akihabara speech of Taro Sato (left in the photo), Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs and possible successor to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo who had announced his plans to resign. Taro is a geek and loves manga so much that after Abe announced resignation shares of several manga publishers have rised significantly since he could be elected as new Prime Minister next 23th september. According to CNN Money,  Broccoli, which runs a string of retail stores catering to gamers and publishes comic books, rocketed 71 percent to close at ¥157. Here is a complete photo reportage of the event.

Oggi e' il primo giorno del Comiket: la fiera del fumetto (doujin) piu' grande del mondo.  Sul prossimo numero di GAMERS troverete un reportage completo, per il momento vi consigliamo di leggere il reportage di Shingo.

I nostri amici di Heisei Democracy hanno appena postato il quarto episodio di HDTV dedicato ad Akihabara: la terra promessa per ogni otaku!

Il gamer giapponese XB-LIM ha creato delle mappe navigabili di Dragon Quest 1 (MSX/NES), Dragon Quest 2 (MSX/NES), Dragon Quest 3 (NES/SuperFamicom/GBC) e Dragon Quest 4 (NES/Playstation) in stile Google Maps.

The japanese Dragon Quest fan XB-LIM has created a Goggle Maps like map of  Dragon Quest 1 (MSX/NES), Dragon Quest 2 (MSX/NES), Dragon Quest 3 (NES/SuperFamicom/GBC) and Dragon Quest 4 (NES/Playstation). It would have been really usefull if we had this kind of Google Maps back in the 80s!


Dragon Quest 1 map from Map Libs

Nonami Takizawa  è una gravure idol con delle curve poco giapponesi apparsa anche del drama Akihabara@deep ispirato all'omonimo manga (qui sul tubo potete seguire quasi tutta la serie sottotitolata in inglese).

Come avevamo segnalato il 30 giugno ad Akihabara si è tenuta una manifestazione di otaku. La partecipazione è stata superiore al previsto con varie centinaia di cosplayer, videogiocatori, otaku  modellisti comunisti e alieni che protestavano per la difesa di Akihabara e richiedevano cose come l'abbassamento delle tasse per i doujinshi e nuove sovvenzioni per la produzione del PVC (ovviamente utilizzato per le stauette e i toys acquistati dagli otaku).
Gli amici di Heisei Democracy hanno postato un reportage completo della manifestazione con un breve video.
La cosa che ci domandiamo è: vedremo mai manifestazioni simili per difendere i videogiochi come Manhunt 2 o Operazione Pretofilia?!

  Oggi si chiude la fiera del giocattolo di Tokyo. L'edizione di quest'anno è stata caratterizzata dalla massiccia presenza di giochi destinati a un pubblico adulto. I produttori di giocattoli hanno grandi difficoltà a far crescere il mercato frammentario dei giocattoli per bambini e si sono resi conto delle potenzialità del mondo degli adulti appassionati di giochi e hobbistica. In pratica il mondo otaku sta influenzando anche il mercato dei giocattoli e inizia ad uscire dal ghetto dorato dei negozi underground di Akihabara. La fiera si è svolta presso il Tokyo Big Sight  nei padiglioni dal primo al quattro.
La Sony ha presentato il card game per PS3 The Eye of Judgement., la Bandai oltre ai gunpla e ad aver annunciato ufficialmente Gundam 00 (serie tv che inizierà ad ottobre), ha mostrato l'intrigante DuelPod (già visto la settimana scorsa al World Hobby Fair)  e il puchi puchi che sembra destinato a riscuotere un enorme successo.


In pratica si tratta di un portachiavi che simula le bolle di plastica degli imballaggi che tutti amano far scoppiare. Il bello è che si possono far scoppiare bolle all'infinito (ecco un video per capirne meglio il funzionamento)!
Altre novità interessanti, oltre alle bellissime figure della Kaiyodo e della Konami, erano i kit di montaggio Dayablock (una sorta di Lego giapponese) dedicati ai Transformers, i toys per appassionati di air guitar (apparsi anche in vari programmi tv giapponesi) ,



Evangelion Handy Magi System: La Sega Toys ha presentato una riproduzione dei Magi (i tre supercomputer che gestiscono il quartier generale della Nerv chiamati come i re magi: Melchior-1,  Balthazar-2 e Casper-3). Questo toy è dotato di microfono e quando si pone una domanda al Magi il supercomputer risponderà con i messaggi  a schermo "Passed/Supported" o "Rejected". Inoltre, sono presenti le voci delle voice actor originali giapponesi di Misato e Ritsuko Akagi saying, L'uscita è prevista per il 6 ottobre e il prezzo sarà di 1000 Yen. La Sega Toys prevede di venderne più di 100.000 pezzi.


Mekatombo: insetti robotici volanti telecomandati.

Choro Q Elicopter: i micro elicotteri telecomandi della TakaraTomy (che somigliano molto ai micro elicotteri che si possono acquistare da qualche settimana nei negozi di modellismo italiani).

 I bellissim AIRBOTS: robottini telecomandati che volano grazie a due eliche.

 

DuelPod che abbiamo presentato in esclusiva (almeno per l'Europa e gli usa) la scorsa settimana grazie alla presentazione ufficiale della Bandai avvenuta durante il World Hobby Fair).

 

Questa volta siamo curiosi di scoprire se riusciremo per l'ennesima volta ad avere il record di Google: provate a cercare "World Hobby Fair" o "DuelPod" e scoprirete che siamo in cima alla prima pagina dei risultati.

(Post in progres - Fonte: Impress - GA)

 

Postiamo con piacere il video realizzato oggi ad Akihabara dal nostro amico Danny Choo!

MOE Scoop!!!
La Haruhi mania contagia anche le console Sony e, dopo l'annuncio della versione PSP, sulla rivista Famitsu sono apparse anche le prime immagini della versione PS2 che verrà intitolata Suzumiya Haruhi no tomado e sarà disponibile a gennaio 2008. Nel gioco si impersona  Kyon che tenterà di realizzare un videogioco insieme agli altri membri dell' SOS dan e il gioco creato sarà realmente giocabile!!
Chi non riesce a resistere, può tranquillamente acquistare uno dei tanti videogiochi doujin ispirati a questa incredibile serie animata.

 

(via Canned Dogs)

Bellissimo video della Tokyo anni 30 segnalato dal nostro amico Pico Pico.

Dalla nostra rete di informatori di strada abbiamo ricevuto la notizia che il 30 giugno si terrà una manifestazione di otaku ad Akihabara. Si tratta del primo evento di questo genere a cui sono chiamati a partecipare "otaku e cosplayer di ogni credo e religione, modellisti comunisti e alieni"!