Sunday, December 20, 2009

Japanese Souvenirs

I managed to bring back some pretty cool stuff from Fukuoka. Here's a little print I picked up. It reminds me of a pteradactyl, though I think it's supposed to be more like a raptor, or even some other nondinosaur creature.




Here's a flyer for the band we hung out with on Saturday night:


These are their cartoon representations:



This is a cool think I never saw before, although I've started to notice it around Korea a little bit, and on packages from home and such. It's a data-matrix code. You just take a picture of it with your cell phone and it takes you to the website. It seems to be exploding into use.



This is a stuffed doll from the coolest thing I saw in Japan. I was looking around this store called The Loft, where I got the print above and some other stuff. They had this display of these characters called Mame-Shiba, and were playing 30-second spots on a little tv. I watched it for a long time. It was very funny. They were animated commercials, in which some person was in a normal situation, eating. Then a little live bean would fall out of a bag, or get picked up on a spoon, and say something to the person. I didn't quite understand what the beans were saying, but it would deeply affect the person, so he wouldn't be able to eat his food. After looking around at the merchandise and seeing shirts and caps saying "Did you know...?" in English, I figured the beans were giving some disgusting fact about the food on the plate.


Since I've been back, I've used the internets to figure out what the beans were saying, and I was almost right. They just give somewhat random gross or weird trivia facts that don't have anything to do with the food they're in (are), but still make people lose their appetites. Here's a link to a Mame-shiba video on Youtube. There are links to other videos there, as well.
Here's the jacket I bought in a mall there. I think this is probably the first item of clothing I've ever bought purely for fashion. The sleeves are only elbow-length, so it's not very functional. But it has lots of zippers and snap buttons, and it also has wires in the collar and along the length of the zipper, so I can shape it. It's cooool. There are pictures of me with it on in my last couple posts.

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