Plenty of Nothing

Kasukabe and Ohno

www.kawapaper.com

Hideki Matsui

New York Times photo

Stereo

Pink Tentacle has a nice series of animated vintage Japanese stereoviews here. Stereoviews are produced by taking photos of a scene with two cameras placed side by side like human eyes.  When viewed together the two slightly different shots create a 3-D effect.  Or they can be viewed sequentially, resulting in a two-frame movie.

Japanese Green Party Organizational Chart

It's Only a Model

The Emperor and Empress of Japan are in Ottawa as part of their current tour of Canada and Hawaii. Emperor Akihito might not be the tallest man on earth, but this Reuters photo makes the imperial couple appear to be about four inches tall and the Governor-General's Foot Guard look like toys from a toy box. Must be tilt-shift miniature faking.

Drawing Water

Some of my favorite window shopping online is the vintage Japanese ehon available on ebay.  These books usually wind up selling for big bucks, so up till now I've contented myself with stealing images like this one of a three-volume set of woodcut renderings of water.  Nothing expresses coming-to-be and passing-away like an ocean wave, so it shouldn't be surprising that Japanese artists have thought long and hard about them.  But three volumes!  Click here for an article by graphic novelist Ben Towle on drawing water.  Douglas

Carp!

North American sport is a jungle populated by lions, tigers, panthers and jaguars . . . and comparatively few fish.  Here in a poster promoting a Chiba Lotte Marines home game against the Hiroshima Toyo Carp we sense the destructive potential of koi.  Such a fish could . . . cause a lot of splashing.  Good thing the Marines are at hand.  See the full set here.

Japanese Word of the Day: Retsu

For this 2009 season, the first in their new ballpark, Hiroshima Toyo Carp baseball club have adopted the ten-stroke kanji retsu, signifying intensity.  Here is its entry in an online kanji dictionary, along with a sound file.  The calligraphy is by team manager Marty Brown.

Do Bijin Look Like Habsburgs?

No-Sword, in a post dated St. Patrick's Day 2007, links to an essay discussing the tendency of white folk to see manga characters as white.  As we have all read our Scott McCloud we known that the more detailed a portrait the more it looks like the Other, and the simpler the portrait the more we invest it with Self, so that everyone on Earth unconsciously identifies with that '70s happy face.  So the bug-eyed characters of manga should look like Self to everyone, whether Asian or European.  Yes, white people still need to get it through their heads that other people see themselves as Selves.  But, still I wonder, don't the babes in ukiyo-e look like Habsburgs?  Douglas

Eitaku Sensei

If you hurry, there's a 19th-century illustrated volume of Japanese mythology by Sensei Eitaku for sale on Ebay right now.  These two heavenly figures are, I think, Izunami and Izanagi creating the Japanese archipelago with the halberd Amanonuboko.  Amazing?  It's as if Milton drew manga.  Douglas