I’ve been bumping into Moai statues and wondering about these fake Tokyo Tiki gods for many years now. Besides the famous Shibuya Moai (above left & below right), I have several Moai by my Ota Ward Office (below left).
Actually, the Ota Ward Office and Kamata Station area of Tokyo has a full alien invasion of Moai statues and I have taken the photos below of just a few of them.
All these Moai statues seem to be rather out of place in Tokyo. Finally, a few days ago I stumbled across the very “Japanese” reason for all of them.
It seems that back in 1988 the Tokyo island of Nijima gave all these Moai statues to Tokyo to commemorate 100 years of being under Tokyo’s administrative supervision. The only industry of Nijima Island is tourism and quarrying Koga (rhyolite) stone, which is mostly used to make “moyai art.” In this case, public works to give jobs to the otherwise unemployed in the off-season Nijima folks by making hundreds of Moai heads that are given as public art “gifts” all over Japan.
I love it when this Thai group called, “Neko Jump”, does cutesy, twin-idol, “moe” better than the original Japanese hyper-saccharine music. As the French blogger Tengoku calls it: “L’attaque des clones.“
NEKO JUMP (Cat Jump) [ネコジャンプ] is Thailand’s answer to PUFFY and their Thai video is complete with Japanese background, lettering and graphics. Here they are singing their song, “Pu”—pronounced ‘Poo‘—and they kiss and lose their tops by the end of the video of course.
AFP News. Feb. 20. 2008—Zoo staff spread a net to catch a fake zebra, which made a break for freedum from its cage, as it strolls in the zoo park during the annual exercise for runaway animals at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo on February 20, 2008. Some 150 zoo staffs and policemen participated in the annual exercise.
Previously posted on Feb. 28, 2007….
Every year the Tama Zoo has this “escaped” animal drill. However, the 3Yen found out last year about the scary truth in, Tama Zoo Reveals Secret. Now, there are more revelations about the zoo…
‘Don’t cry children, I was only aping about’ The Daily Mail, 20:55pm on 27th February 2007
As acting goes, it was a little too convincing.
The idea was to test the readiness of zoo staff for the escape of a dangerous animal.
But despite the ludicrously obvious disguise of the runaway beast, its pre-ordained destiny - to be shot with a tranquillizer gun - had children in tears...more...
‘Saru mo ki kara ochiru’ ‘THE NATURE OF MONKEY WAS IRREPRESSIBLE!’ [猿も木から落ちる]
As you see in the above screenshot, Oamos is a noisy search engine with what they call in glorious understatement, “audio-visual display interfaces.” I would not attempt to use the Oamos search engine in the office—the wild squeaks, bleats and pumping techno music might be frowned upon in a normally crypt-like Japanese office.
However, I enjoy that Oamos is designed to make Internet searches fun and it encourages exploring weirder connections among the terms you enter into its search function.
The directions for using Oamos are simple: “Let me inspire you to a topic you choose” —‘gaijin’ (alien/foreigner in Japanese) for example. ENJOY.
Killer jellyfish population explosion warning 08/02/2008 - Telegraph
…The really bad news is that the box jellyfish and another equally poisonous species, Irukandji, are on the move….
…perplexed Japanese salmon fishermen are seen hauling in tonnes of box jellyfish in their nets. The few fish they do haul in are writhing in their death agonies after being stung.
….the Japanese government to protect their fish stocks by wiping out the swarms using a fleet of commandeered fishing boats to drag razor-sharp wire through them backfired spectacularly…because they are genetically programmed to ensure their survival by producing more offspring than normal when under attack…jellyfish are multiplying in the Western extent of the Pacific ocean and threatening 20,000 miles of coastline off Japan...more...
The Telegraph reporters were smoking jellyfish when they wrote the above article. Jellyfish are multiplying wildly because of overfishing but box jellyfish, Habu-Kurage in Japanese, were not the type of jellyfish the government tried “to protect their fish stocks” from—it was 450lb/200kg Nomura’s Jellyfish aka echizen kurage and I reported on them back in 2005 in Attack of the giant jellyfish! (2005) as you see below.
The the real problem jellyfish is not that they are poisonous but they’re just too numerous. As in the below photo I took last summer, just take a peek over the edge of a dock on Tokyo bay. Any place where the waves are somewhat still, amongst the Japanese-love-of-nature litter, the water looks like you could walk across it over the seething mass of jellyfish.
Similar to a booty call in English, getting a “Morning Call” in Japanese can both mean the regular wake-up call one can ask for in a hotel, and also getting call from a lover first thing in the morning.
The Unilever line of deodorants*, AXE, is offering a sexy “Wake-Up Service” at www.0120-084-544.com and at the Japanese toll-free phone number, 0120-084-544. These wake-up call girls will only work on cellphones with a Flash player in their browser and of course calling a Japanese toll-free phone number from outside Japan is going to be problematic.
*Also problematic for AXE is that Japanese detest using strong deodorants like AXE since they think they only non-Japanese stink.
The BareKichi.blog reported on a variety/comedy program on Japanese TV has been running a sketch following the sad lives of the GUNDAM, 28 Years After their prime. The Gundam force is now they are now eeking out a living in a small Japanese company that trades off “PachiSlot” video games based on their Gundam glory days.
Since its Mardi Gras right now, why not enjoy some Japanese masks?
Every Japanese matsuri/street fair has rows of plastic toy masks for sale like these.
Besides traditional Japanese characters like the oni/devil, most of these masks feature commercial characters like Hello Kitty and Pikachu to delight kids at street fairs.
With the Japanimation boom throughout the world, these masks and Japanese faux-festivals have spread in popularity. However, this resulted in some funny reinterpretations and knock-off masks of Japanese characters in foreign markets. The Japanese blog, INTER News, recently ran a headline, “Astonished! Evangelion’s faces abroad are very popular!” about markets in Thailand selling these bizarre Evangelion masks. INTER News writes, “Although I want a Japanimation boom to continue from now on, I want blue-haired Rei Ayanami to stop with the gapping ‘O’ mouth.”
The Rinkya Blog just gave me heads-up on the fact that upcoming live-action DragonBall movie has cast Grandpa Gohan.
DragonBall’s Grandpa Gohan will be played as Randall Duk Kim—best known for his roles as the Keymaster in The Matrix Reloaded and Dr. Crab in Memoirs of a Geisha –in the live-action film scheduled for release mid-August 2008.
Grandpa Gohan is the grandfather of DragonBall’s hero Goku and the one who teaches Goku everything about martial arts. Read more about Dragon Ball… the manga, anime and video game in Wikipedia, as well as the official details of the upcoming movie on IMDB. Right now, Dragonball is shooting in Mexico and as you can see from the Mexican production still below, Goku as played by Justin Chatwin has regular hair.
Don’t expect the Hollywood’s live-action Dragonball to be half as good as the 1989 Hong Kong live-action adaptation, “Dragonball: The Magic Begins…” as you can watch below, ha, ha.
Women bite into big sushi rolls in giant gobbling contest 2008 Jan. 29 - Mainichi Daily News, OSAKA — Female university students battled it out to be the fastest team to gobble down a huge sushi roll in a contest…
“It was a bit embarrassing,” said one of the participants, who gulped down mouthfuls of tea between bites on the sushi roll. “But we won because we put aside our pride”…more…
How can ruin this delicious moment with my inane comments?
Sadly, the damn googlebots demand that I add commentary for this to be listed a “news” so I will have to mention that the maki sushi rolls the girls are eating only make up 10-20% of all the sushi consumed in Japan (as opposed to odd Western ideas that most sushi consist of rolls). The reason that sushi is thought of as a roll in the West is that making maki rolls takes almost no talent and skilled sushi chefs are at a premium outside of Japan.
In the previous report, ‘Borat turning Japanesey and Moai-Tiki gods concur’, you might have been wondering why there a fake Easter Island Moai tiki god statue in hyper-trendy Shibya, Tokyo. 
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I love it when this Thai group called, “Neko Jump”, does cutesy, twin-idol, “
AFP News. Feb. 20. 2008—Zoo staff spread a net to catch a fake zebra, which made a break for freedum from its cage, as it strolls in the zoo park during the annual exercise for runaway animals at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo on February 20, 2008. Some 150 zoo staffs and policemen participated in the annual exercise. 
—Hello Kitty monkey bobble
The Gundam force is now they are now eeking out a living in a small Japanese company that trades off 
