AKB48, the weirdest, biggest pop group (and ISP) around

Okay then: AKB48. Here we go.

Today, AKB48 announced that they are launching an internet service provider, which was a little surprising, given that they are a pop group. What was a little more surprising was the promotion they launched with the website.

Yeah: look again. What's she doing with that baby? It gets worse. What the white text is saying is 'watashi to akachan tsuranai? or 'Won't you make a baby with me?'

I'll explain later quite what is going on. First, let's talk about AKB48 themselves. The girl in the picture is Yuko Oshima, member of 'idol group' AKB48, holders of the Guinness World Record for largest pop group. How many members? No, it's not, it's 59 (at the moment at least).

AKB48 are split in to four teams, team A, team K, team B, and team, er, four. There are also trainees. AKB is a shortening of Akihabara, the Tokyo 'otaku' district known for tech stores where you can negotiate the price, lots of manga, and lots of teenagers. On the 8th floor of a peculiar shop called Don Quijote (known to locals as Donki, you can buy pretty much anything you can think of, 24 hours a day) sits the AKB theatre where members of the group perform every day. Tickets are handed out by lottery.

As if that's not enough, AKB have spawned three further groups – SKE48, SDN48, NMB48 – all based in different parts of Japan. In total there are 152 girls. Now, at least. Another two groups (one in Jakarta) have been announced. There may be more.

The music is standard high-pitched J-pop. Here's an example. What I particularly love about this is the 50s French black and white melancholy opening, followed by the jarring, sudden shift as the video cranks into sunny J-pop-land.

So far, so good. The details of the many side groups, collaborations and "derivation units" can be found on this overly descriptive wikipedia article.

To the elections. It stands to reason that you can't fit all the girls into one PV (promoted video, the commonly used term for a music video), so you've got to choose. The top 21 elected get to star in the video, and the numbers 1-12 do the singing. The next ten sing the B side. The rest – don't do anything.

Earlier this year, a new member appeared: Aimi Eguchi. Here she is:

Good looking? She's fake. Doesn't exist. Made up. Made up, in fact, of component parts from six other girls in the band, much to the shock of the otaku who had fallen in love with her. This goes some way towards explaining what happened.

Which brings us back to Yuko Oshima and her baby. It is, the ad is basically saying, your baby, if you sign up to the AKB ISP. You can make babies with Oshima-san. How? Well, remember that face-blending technology they clearly came up with to create Aimi Eguchi?

I think that's a real AKB48 fan; I think that's what they all look like. If you don't like Oshima-san, and many fans have very strong preferences indeed, worry not, you can blend your face with many of the members. Here's the site.

What next? Who the fuck knows. But they're expanding, that's for sure, so watch out.

by tom

PON PON PON

Kyari Pamyu Pamyu is my new fave pop star. This song has been eeeeeeverywhere in Tokyo over the summer but I am late to the party on the video. I have been thinking for a while about what kind of critique on the Harajuku aesthetic I could write to accompany this, but every time I start to write a sentence, all I can think of is RIBBONS BOWS PRETTY COLOURS OOH PRETTY PRETTY PON PON PON WEI WEI WEI.

For something a little more informative on Kyari, read this article and look at these pictures.

Sumida-gawa lantern festival

It's Obon: a time to remember the spirits of one's deceased ancestors. Obon manifests itself as festivals across the country, through summer, but here in Tokyo, the main one is the Asakusa Samba Matsuri, in which lanterns are floated down the river with messages inscribed upon them.

I wanted to share photos of this but it turns out that taking photos of small laterns lit by smaller candles from across a large river is pretty tricky. It's a good time for some night-time cityscape-type shots though.

The little orange lights in the river are the lanterns.

Now's the time to whip out the yukata, a light, summery kimono.

It's pretty hard to tell from this next picture but there's a huge queue of people with lanterns, which are let down a slide into the river and float out towards the sea. This is accompanied by chanting.

All this happens in front of this.

This is the Asahi complex - office on the left (it's supposed to look like a pint of beer with a foamy head) and "Super Dry Hall" on the right, with what has become known as the Golden Turd (kin no unko) perched on top. Believe it or not this is Philippe Starck's creation.

The Sky Tree, a new TV tower and the world's second tallest building, pokes out on the far left.

by tom

500 and something individual Buddha statues, and some old warehouses

Today was a bank holiday: Ocean Day. Apparently, the key activity for today is going to the beach. You see, July is usually bloody hot and sunny, so one presumes what evolved was a national, mid-summer beach day. Sort of like an institutionalised sickie.

Turned out cloudy in the end, however, so we took off toward Kawagoe, home of old-style warehouses and 500 individual statues of Buddha. The warehouses line a lovely street that evokes Tokyo of old, hence Kawagoe's nickname, Little Edo (Tokyo used to be called Edo, you see). But it was the 500 Buddhas - actually 538 - that sold the place.

The go-hyaku Rakan, as they are known, were carved between 1782 and 1825. They whisper to each other:

Fall asleep - or crouch in desperation:

Pick their noses:

Look smug with their kookie specs on:

They, er, pull open their chests to expose their hearts:

Sleep some more:

And 500 and something other things.

Good times. Kawagoe is a half hour train from Ikebukuro, and these guys live at the Kita-in temple. Those warehouses I mentioned earlier look like this.

Mmm, big roofs. Kawagoe is doable in an afternoon. Try the many purple sweet potato ('murasaki imo') flavoured snacks sold on "Confectionary alley", and particularly seek out the same tuber's purple ice cream, also to be found in Kamakura, which is right tasty.

by tom

Toyshop beer

Mums! Does your child dislike drinking their milk? Are they bored of juice? Think coke's too full of sugar and e-numbers?

Why not give them BEER?

That's right, beer. Or at least, I think it is. I found these bottles in Kiddy Land, a giant toy shop in Harajuku. The labels say 'kodomo biru' which means 'children's beer'. Or possibly 'beer made from children'. Could be either, really.

Chloë

Naive Lady

My new fave toilet roll:

Why yes, I DO have a jug, a wooden bird and a tiny house in my bathroom. Don't you?

posted by Chloe

Strange fruit

Has someone done you a good turn? Want to show them a token of your appreciation? What's better than a box of kiwi fruit! Especially ones that are golden on the inside:

No? How about some frighteningly expensive grapes? This will impress them - a small punnet of grapes for fifty quid. Show them you mean it. (Yes, that's a 5,800 yen price tag. Look it up).

from tom

Tasty

Yeah can I get a sprite, a banana and some crunky ball nude please.

(I think they are chocolate)
tom

Latest obsession: Otousan, the Softbank dog

Softbank (generally pronounced "sofutobanko"), one of the two largest mobile phone companies in Japan, are represented by a white shiba inu dog which pops up in their ads. This I knew.

Today, however, I found the TV ads on YouTube, helpfully subtitled. It turns out that the dog is called Otousan, or "father", and has a Japanese wife and two grown-up kids, although even leaving the dog part out it's clear one of them has been adopted. Let's start with this one:

See what I mean? With me so far? No? Well, let's push on. Otousan is a curious corporate mascot, being as he is rather bad tempered, curt, and a talking dog. He does, at least, have an interest in modern telecommunications, if not one that he's very keen to share. Let's see him in action with his new iPhone:

Now this being Japan, there's no reason for Otousan's fame to stick to TV. His real name is Kaikun, though he really is a dog, and Kaikun/Otousan is now selling books all by himself, such as this one, showing Kaikun on a day in Tokyo - hanging out, drinking beer, taking a dump.

Given all this fame, why is Otousan so grumpy? Perhaps because his brother is Quentin Tarantino? (Sorry I could only find this subbed into Spanish, should be a little easier to follow than the Japanese):

Well, well. Do you love Otousan yet? Even if you don't, you probably won't want him to come to any harm. I mean, these ads are nice and light-hearted, so nothing bad will happen, I expect.

Holy crap! What the hell? Otousan! Otousan, are you ok? Otousan!! You're a cute company mascot, you can't just die, while talking about phone plan options! And why is that girl the only one to see the whole talking-dog thing is actually pretty odd?

So what happens to Otousan? Well - and I think this is my favourite one:

He's OK! OK, I tell you! Goddamn.

There's another one after this but I can't find any subtitles. From what I gather from the comments and some guesswork, Otousan (in hospital, covered in bandages), is still going on about this 10 month plan thing and the doctor finds it a bit weird that they call him father, which is understandable.

So there we go. Search for "softbank dog english subtitles" on YouTube to find more - there's many, many more. Long live Otousan!

from tom

Ikura desuka? Hyaku en desu!

Today I went to the 100 yen shop in Azabujuban. It is my new favourite shop. In a city where a melon can cost £30 and six thin slices of cheap white bread costs £1.50, finding a shop where everything is super-cheap is pretty bloody amazing (100 yen is about 70p, so this place is like a pound shop but BETTER). Would you like to see the funny Japanese things I bought? Here we go...

Yep, kitchen sponges. Not the most exciting thing, but we need some and I like the pastel colour arrangement, and they say 'Let's clean the kitchen! This is my favourite goods!' on the front. SOLD.

Next, a notebook with this delightful little scene on the front. It opens from the back (yes yes I know that's what all Japanese books do, I still think it's cool though) and the inside pages are just boxes, occasionally with pictures of the sun or other kinds of weather, so you can fill in what the day's like. I'm going to practise my kanji in the boxes, as the notebook is 'highly recommended to student'.

Next, a little lunch box. When I say little, I mean little - maybe four inches wide. I'm going to make teeny-tiny lunches to put in it, which the box assures me will make my daily life overflow with happiness.

Lastly - I didn't buy these but now I look at the photo again I am kicking myself for leaving them in the shop. They are tartan and lace slippers to wear while you are doing the housework. 

So there we go. Hyaku en, happy Chloe. I may go back there next week to get the tartan slippers, and perhaps also pick up a toilet seat cover shaped like a cartoon bear and some aloe vera juice.

Posted by Chloe

Shinjuku Gyoen: that's right, more blossom

Yep, we're not done with the whole cherry blossom thing yet. Almost there though: it's coming off the trees thick and fast. A few pictures to share from the lovely Shinjuku Gyoen park, which has to be one of the most beautiful parks I've ever been to, and certainly justifies the 200 yen entrance. 

 The park is overseen by the skyscrapers of Shinjuku, the kind of thing one would normally associate with the area, including the NTT Docomo building, the third tallest skyscraper in the city.

Isn't that lovely.
from Tom

Hanami in Yoyogi Park

Hanami is a traditional term meaning "get shitfaced under cherry blossom trees". The blossom itself (sakura) lasts about three weeks and right now, we're in the middle of it.





Yoyogi park was a riot of pink and drunks on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. When in Rome, and all that.





Isn't it pretty? Yes, yes is the answer to that. Especially arty shots:





Yay look! The background is all blurred, which means it's a great photo. Even if I do say so myself, and I do.


Today has been a mixture of rain and earthquakes so I imagine all the blossom has gone. Quite a reminder of the temporality of earthly life, etc, etc, blah. At least I can still get my sakura themed starbucks frappuccino (it has a weird looking pink dust showered on top of it!) and various other blossomy goodies. 


Tom 

A month later: earthquakey reflections

Well it’s been ages since the earthquake, so you’re probably done with hearing about it. However I wrote this shortly after it happened and never posted it. So now I will, for posterity’s sake if nothing else.


So let’s start with the earthquake itself. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake, preceded by strong foreshocks and succeeded by many, many aftershocks, struck at about a quarter to three on Friday afternoon, in a patch of the sea about 80km from land, and about 380km from Tokyo. This measured in at shindo 7 in Sendai, and shindo mid-5ish in Tokyo (the shindo scale measures the effects in different places. It goes up to 7).

I’d been in Tokyo about a week and this would be the second earthquake. The first I had really failed to notice, sitting, as I was at the time, in a small room talking to someone on a video conference in China.

I was another video conference - this time, in the main part of the office, with headphones in, when this one happened. There was a sense of movement, and then general commotion. Nothing serious at this point. I carried on the video conference.

Then a bit more, and I stopped the call, and people went under desks. Then a big, big shunting feeling. I remember it being like serious turbulence: mostly a rumble, then suddenly the plane moves much further than it should, and you’re overcome by a sort of empty feeling as something normal becomes something scary.

That passed, and then it happened again. Most people were under desks by now. I should mention that my office is floor 26 of a big skyscraper - big high, but also big wide - and importantly, modern. Such buildings are built with all kinds of dampening instruments that disperse the energy into the ground and into swaying and circular motion. Apparently. Right at this point, I could hear the thing move - hear it, an awful creaking sound, while looking out our big window at Tokyo very far down, and getting as far away from the window as possible, as that’s the thing that will break.

Between these two quakes about half the office set off down the stairs (26 stories worth, remember), and I was in the half that stayed. I’m quite glad: I think under a desk, with people shouting ‘whoa!’ and laughing, is better than halfway down stairs, where the shaking could throw you down. The building just shook away merrily, stopped. Some people were scared, most felt... how do i put this... a sort of “blimey” feeling. Among the Japanese, who have been through hundreds of earthquakes, general agreement that this was the strongest.

The aftershocks continued through that day and the following week. Working after the shaking itself was a write-off, but no-one really wanted to leave, and anyway, Chloe and I decided we’d meet in Roppongi anyway. (It took half an hour for me to reach Chloe, who had left her phone in the flat and gone outside. That was the worst part of the whole thing). I went to look at the city from the other side of the building - on my side, it all looked perfectly normal, except for the number of people on the streets - and saw Chiba oil refinery explode.

One thing I did want to point out was that all through this the best reports were coming not from the western press, who did in all a terrible job of covering the story (obfuscating Tokyo and Northern Honshu, looking for catastrophe and not providing useful info) but through Japanese news and in particular, for us, a dedicated group of bilingual Tokyoites on Twitter. I never would have thought Time Out Tokyo would be so useful, but they did an incredibly good job, working long hours and keeping people informed.

That was then. Since then we’ve been back to England, and I’ve been to New York and California for work. Now back in Tokyo, time to put this episode to bed and get on with settling in here. 


Tom

Cheese please!

(Originally posted 8th April 2011)


I think one of the things I started to miss first of all when we got here was cheese. I love cheese. But after my first couple of grocery shops I realised that my naive hopes of still being able to keep my fridge stocked with Brie and Manchego and Parmesan and a huge block of good old Cheddar were incredibly unrealistic. As my English friends who have played my game of 'guess how much the Boursin costs' will know, cheese is really expensive here. There's also not much of it around. When you find some, it's generally wrapped in tiny amounts that I could eat on two crackers. Or it's just not good - I ate some 'Camembert' and it tasted exactly like Dairylea triangles.   


I found out today that if you want a big selection of cheese, you can get it from, um, Amazon.co.jp. I thought you'd like to see the first one that caught my eye...  

Of course, I could forget all about mozzarella and enjoy a brand new cheese experience instead. As far as I can tell, this appears to be a bag of bits of fish wrapped in cheese: 


 


Or if we're ever feeling a bit naughty, we could order the adult hard cheese set: 



Um... does anyone want to post us a Somerset Brie and some charcoal biscuits? Pretty please?


Chloë

All shook up

(Originally posted 18th March 2011)


We haven’t been too keen to write about the earthquake. Partly because a major natural disaster and possible nuclear catastrophe isn’t really in keeping with our ‘look at all the fun we’re having in Tokyo’ blog theme. Partly because it seems somewhat disrespectful to those in the north to be writing about our experience in Tokyo – what we went through is nothing compared to what’s been going on further north. And partly because it doesn’t yet feel as though the experience is properly over.


But so many friends and family at home (hi kids!) have been asking us what it was like and if we’re OK, and we haven’t explained much yet. So, here’s my report, and Tom’s is writing one too that he'll post later, so you can vicariously experience Japan's most severe earthquake from the 26th floor of a skyscraper... 


I was in our apartment in Shibuya when the main quake struck, halfway through a bowl of pasta and incredibly expensive vegetables. Everything started gently shaking and I thought ‘oooh, an earthquake!’, then the shaking got worse and I put down my lunch and stood in a doorway. Then it got really bad – things falling over, furniture and lamps moving back and forth like rocking horses, and out of the window I could see telephone wires swinging back and forth and buildings moving from side to side. I grabbed my keys and shoes and ran down the fire escape from the fourth floor into the street. Our usually quiet little back street was full of people – nobody screaming or crying but everyone very obviously scared. The quake still hadn’t stopped, and telegraph poles were moving back and forth and the manhole covers popped out of the ground. Standing on the ground was like being on a boat; it made me dizzy and a bit queasy. After a while it subsided and I went back inside with the apartment block’s other residents, but a BIG aftershock came a few minutes later (I’ve also heard that this was the main quake and the previous one was a particularly powerful foreshock) and we had to run outside and lie on the ground. There was a funny reaction from the kids living in the building – some of them were terrified, crying and clinging on to their parents. Others were delighted when the aftershocks hit, and treated the whole experience like an unexpected theme park ride. One little girl ran back outside shrieking ‘Hooray! Another earthquake!’


After the quake and the main aftershocks were over, we weren’t sure what to do. Carry on as though nothing’s happened, or panic and freak out? When I finally managed to get back into the apartment and retrieve my phone (sorry about the zillion missed calls, Tom!), we decided to be British, found some friends and went to the pub. Many G&Ts, beers and bottles of sake later it all seemed like a fairly exciting experience, and the aftershocks that rumbled the restaurant we were in. 


Since last Friday we have felt countless aftershocks – some big enough to make me grab my bag and run outside, some just minor tremors. Apparently there have been over 200 aftershocks so far, although Tokyo hasn’t felt all of them. I’m not sure I’ve really stopped feeling dizzy, and have been imagining things moving when they’ve been completely still. But what’s freaked us out most (along with thousands of other people, I’m sure) has been the nuclear threat. It seems as though there’s a new problem every day, and the news reports and ‘expert’ opinions say ‘everything’s fine, it’s nothing to worry about’ one minute and ‘APOCALYPSE! You’re all going to die!’ the next. We have been yoyoing between feeling completely relaxed about it all, then massively panicked.  


Hopefully soon everything will be back to normal and we can carry on with our daily life of taking photos of dogs dressed as schoolgirls and learning the Japanese words for their million different kinds of fish. What’s been happening in the north is horrific, so whatever we’ve been through, though scary, just pales in comparison.


Chloë

Suntory Boss

(Originally posted 13th March 2011)

Yup, in Japan, Tommy Lee Jones is Suntory Boss, cold coffee in a can sold in the many, many vending machines.

Tom

Our first dinner

(Originally posted March 13th 2011)

We know, we know, it's been a whole week and a day since we moved here. And we've been been meaning to set up this blog so you can see what we're up to but, well, then there was a bit of an earthquake so everything was paused while we waited for the ground to stop shaking. (It, um, still hasn't quite stopped...)
But now we've finally got around to writing some bits and pieces, so here's a little picture of the restaurant we went to on our first night here:



We wandered from our apartment in Aoyama down to Shibuya, which is a central area full of bars, clubs and crazy neon lights. This is a ramen restaurant where you stand outside looking at the huge picture menu, then order from the machine below. You are then given a ticket which you take inside and pass to a cook, and within a few minutes you have a steaming hot bowl of ramen. Who needs waiters when you have machines...?

Chloë

Konnichiwa!

(Originally posted 9th March 2011)

 Well, hello, or as they say around here, konnichiwa, ohayo gozaimasu, things like that. We've been in Tokyo about a week now, and it's been rather eventful. We will get to the specifics of that in due course, but for now, let us introduce this blog. The plan is to post pretty much anything of note, particularly the funny, quirky side of Japan that we love so much, and I imagine once we get the hang of doing this from a phone, we'll probably be posting quite frequently. We'll also put up updates and things like that.
Follow us on Twitter for post updates.
Chloe @chloeruth
and
Tom @thomaspursey

Tom