November 20th, 2009 | Author: van | Filed under: Bizarre, Culture | No Comments »
What is this? Why, it’s a guest post by JHYPE friend, Jasmine! – van
Hello Kitty. At a glance, she’s a black outline of a cat with six whiskers, two beady black eyes, a little button nose – and no mouth.
The official word from Sanrio is that Hello Kitty speaks from the heart; and as Sanrio’s global ambassador, she is not bound by language.*
Beyond that, there’s no pinning her down; she’s been everything from princess to witch to black egg (hello, Hakone!) and sumo. She has travelled all around the world, and even beyond.
Her merchandising is possibly even more diverse than Kitty-Chan herself. According to the London Times, there’s an estimated 12,000 Hello Kitty items on the market, with some 600 new items introduced each year.
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November 8th, 2009 | Author: van | Filed under: Art, Manga | No Comments »
Welcome to Manga Monday, where I’ll introduce you to a manga series I’ve read and loved in the past. If you’re not clear on just what manga is, the Wikipedia entry would be the best overview – but in simplest terms, manga is the term for Japanese comic books.
First up is Beck, the story of ‘Koyuki’, a young boy who takes up the guitar after saving an odd-looking dog – Beck – from some neighbourhood kids. Beck’s owner, Ryusuke, is a young American-Japanese guitarist in a rock band, and to Koyuki, it’s just the change his self-described boring life needs.
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November 7th, 2009 | Author: van | Filed under: Bizarre, Culture | 2 Comments »
We’ve all read the books and – for those for whom books are anathema – the websites about the zany Japanese inventions designed to improve day-to-day life.
Butter in a glue stick, slippers with a retractable rod in the heel to squash cockroaches from a distance, double-headed jugs so you can pour two glasses of water at a time, and my absolute favourite: the hardhat with a suction cup on the back, so you can attach yourself to the train window on the way home and fall asleep without your head falling into your chest.
The problem with these inventions is that they seem to ignore one fairly major factor in the success of a new product: will it embarrass me?
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November 3rd, 2009 | Author: van | Filed under: Culture | No Comments »
Take ten ‘Japanophiles’ and ask what it is that draws them to the ‘land of the rising sun’ – the odds are good that, as long as they’re not all from the same anime club, you’ll get a different answer from each of them.
Delve a bit deeper, beyond the simple declarations of love for Japanese cars, animation and girls/boys, and most will acknowledge that the general way of life in Japan – the ‘Dò’ – plays its own part in their fascination with the country.
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November 2nd, 2009 | Author: van | Filed under: Japanophiles | No Comments »
Not that we consider this some sort of bizarre race, but if blogging about Japan were a contest, Peter Payne would utterly decimate us here at JHYPE.
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November 2nd, 2009 | Author: van | Filed under: JHYPE | 6 Comments »
Hey there, welcome to JHYPE.
As you’ve hopefully figured out from the little blurb beneath our funky logo (katakana, is there anything it can’t do?), JHYPE is all about sharing our love for Japan. Sure, it might border on obsessive from time to time – even fanatical – but that’s what having a passion is all about.
JHYPE is very much in the ‘incubation’ stages. We’re figuring out exactly what we want from this blog; what we want to share, what we think you might like to see, how it should be presented and how often we should offer it (it’s not a day job, so time is a factor).
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