Awed from afar.
To make sure everyone clearly understands the message, a multi-lingual garbage collection rules by the Kawasaki Municipal Government workers’ union is now available in Japanese (hiragana), English, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Spanish and Portuguese.
via Japundit
See the Japanese Chart for Week Ending 06th May 2007 for a ranking of video games sold on all platforms. Looking at the chart, the very first thing you will notice is that you won’t find PS3 or Xbox 360 on the list, not even a shadow of these consoles. Luckily for the PSP it managed to grab a few slots on the list. But still I wonder, isn’t Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are supposed to be hot? well, maybe not in Japan and to quote one of the commenter from the site:
Nintendo owns Japan, as well as this generation.
via Kirainet
More on the field of arts, a comprehensive article about Ukiyo-e which are Japanese woodblock prints and paintings is an interesting read that will let you find out that it is what those familiar Japanese artworks you might have seen in and out of Japan are called.
The above image is an ukiyo-e by Katsushika Hokusai a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. I saw this image used as an image header on a blog i came across before, now I know what it is.
via PingMag
Since I have a 100+ unread entries from Japan Probe’s feeds, I’m only going to post today’s entries only.
First off, read about why Americans and Japanese Read Faces Differently. Is it really due to tatemae? and probably it will help you figure out those Japanese emoticons.
Still via Japan Probe, another study that found a Perceptual Divide Between Asians and Americans.
If your not up to some scientific studies stuff for today then checkout Japan’s “top three” of almost everything you can think of starting with a group of hundreds of islands called Matsushima.
And for fun, create your own Toro(the Sony cat) from paper. It’s a limited paper-folding project offered in downloadable PDF or JPEG form until June 30th.
For real I’m quite overloaded with information right now, so I’ll continue with the posts tomorrow. But before I go here’s an interesting read: Japanese Culture: A Primer for Newcomers and my favorite excerpt from it(haven’t finished reading it yet) is below…
Do not feel that you will ever have to completely understand the Japanese, since the Japanese don’t completely understand themselves either.
