Otaku Encyclopedia Launch Party

From left: Akiyama Masumi (designer), Asaki Katsuhide (photographer), Patrick W. Galbraith (author), Andrew Lee (editor), and Akashiro Miyu (illustrator).

We had a great turn out for the launch party of The Otaku Encyclopedia last Friday. The party was held at a maid café in Akihabara, called Café Schatzkiste. The poor maids were only expecting around thirty people to show up so didn't know what hit them when the hordes of otaku-bloggers, media, and minor celebrities started to poor through the doors. At least fifty people must have shown up and the place was packed.

I managed to convince Patrick to show up in costume, and it was great to finally have the team who made the book together in one room. Akashiro Miyu, who created "Moé-chan" the book's cute character, made a special trip from Osaka, and it was great to finally meet her. Asaki, who took most of the portraits in the book, and Akiyama Masumi who designed it, were also there.

Some of the other people who showed up included Danny Choo, who showed up in his Stormtrooper outfit, and Anno Haruna the game idol who is interviewed in the book.

Quite a few people were snapping away throughout the event and you can see their pix here:

Photos by Steven Nagata
Photos by Pietro Zuco
Photos by Jonny Li

And here's what people have said about the event or the book on other blogs so far:

Danny Choo
Anno Haruna (she's the game idol interviewed on page 86 of the book - Japanese only):
Paul Papadimitriou
Zuko
The Western World
Kotaku
Akiba blog (Japanese only)
Hobby Blog
Anime Vice

The Otaku Encyclopedia!

I am finally emerging from under the mountain of moé* I have been buried under for the past six months, to tell you that finally The Otaku Encyclopedia is on sale in Japan! This photo of it on display at Kinokunia in Shinjuku was sent to me just now (thanks Haru!) proving that the book has gone on sale about a week earlier than I'd been told it would be! I guess I better hurry up with the website design... but until then you can see what Danny Choo (see previous posts) had to say about the book.

* moé is the latest otaku buzz word, and basically means to get all hot and sweaty over some budding 2D cutie. But you can buy the book for a better definition ;)

Arcade Mania! on Japanese TV!

I woke up early this morning to watch Brian Ashcraft on NTV's morning show "Zoom in Super." He was interviewed a few days ago about Arcade Mania! and all of us involved in the book have been dying to see how it'd turn out. And it was fantastic!

The show had basically decided to do the story because they'd seen Arcade Mania!, and ran a 10 minute segment about foreign tourists flocking to Japanese game centres. They spoke to lots of people about what they thought of the arcades and opened with a shot of the book's cover. Then they spoke to Brian (who I gotta say came across really well despite being scared shitless) and showed the book again inside and out. It was really nice to see the book getting such good exposure.

Here are a few more pix Brian and I took off the screen:

Arcade Mania! vs Pingmag

I swear it's a total coincidence that the last post was also about something up on PingMag. No, really! If I wasn't so lazy I might have posted something in between, but no... Anyway, Ping had nice long chat with Brian Ashcraft the author of Arcade Mania! Hopefully this is the start of lots of press on the book and we'll sell lots of copies!
Read the interview here...

Arcade Mania! launch party

A quick reminder that the launch of Arcade Mania! is tomorrow night (Saturday 27th) so if any of you who happen to read this blog also happen to be in Tokyo, please come along!

Here is a link to the invitation on Kotaku

Yokai Mania! Arcade Attack!

I've been rather busy over the past few weeks rolling out the websites for both Yokai Attack! and Arcade Mania! But both are finished now and getting good feedback.



The launch party for Arcade Mania! will be at Cafe Pause in Ikebukuro on the 27th September. So if you are in Tokyo make sure you come. The author, Brian Ashcraft, has put the invite up on Kotaku, with a link to my site! Nice of him to call me a "wizard". I expect the job offers to start rolling in!

Yokai Attack! site
Arcade Mania! site

Yoda Attack

There's been a bit of a buzz the past few days over Facebook refusing to give a Japanese woman an account because her family name a Jedi to the same it is.

Blogs everywhere have picked up the story and even Lucasfilm posted it on their official blog.

But just who is the Facebook Yoda?

Well I am pleased to say that she is none other than Hiroko Yoda one of the authors of Yokai Attack! Which ironically enough now has a Facebook group.

So join up and rub shoulders with a Jedi.

Shoko Attack!

Anyone who watches as much Japanese TV as I do is bound to know who Shoko-tan is. She seems to be everywhere at the moment, on countless celebrity panel shows, or performing songs from her new album, or ensuring people have good manners in ads for the Promise finance company. She also has an extremely popular blog.

On one of those many TV shows she appears in, I saw that as a kid she was really keen on Yokai manga. So when I met her the other day (for an upcoming book project I will tell you about eventually) I just had to give her a copy of Yokai Attack! She seemed pretty pleased with it and even exclaimed that it would be good practice for her English.

Here's hoping she puts it on her blog!

Yokai Attack!

So, what’s my excuse this time? For not posting in 3 months. Well, yokai actually. The little buggers attacked me. Kept me stuck at home for months. In the dark. Chained to my computer. And when I tried to get away? They crashed my hard drive, and I lost 3 months work. That didn’t please them at all! Made me do all the work over again. In 5 days! Not nice.

But I got them back. Used purple for the endpapers of this book. They don’t like purple you see, so they’re trapped. I hope.

Yokai Attack! Designed by me, written by these nice folks.

Buy it!

After Dark

Until recently, it had been a while since I had read anything substantial in English. While in the thick of my studies I had imposed a personal embargo on anything in my mother tongue. But since the summer holidays began, (and they are now almost at a close), I have managed to catch up on some reading. It's probably no surprise that I tend mainly to read Japanese authors. The most recent being the latest Haruki Murakami book to have been translated into English, After Dark.

Murakami's novels always seem like slices from some larger story. They begin as if we should already know what has happened and end as if there is more to tell. After Dark, is no exception. It reads like a chapter lost from some other unpublished manuscript. Dropped on the street at night and discovered by the reader as they stumble home drunk; there it is lying in a puddle, grubby and inviting.

The story begins at 11:56 p.m. around the time the last trains stop in Tokyo and continues until first light. We know it is Tokyo, but the setting could be either Shibuya or Shinjuku as it is set in the somewhat euphemistically named "amusement district". Mari, a nineteen year old girl, is alone in a Denny's restaurant reading a book. She seems intent on reading all night, but her plans are soon interrupted when Takahashi, a boy a couple of years older, and an old friend of Mari's sister, Eri, enters the scene. Soon Mari, who speaks Chinese, is asked by the manager of a nearby Love Hotel to help translate for a Chinese prostitute who has been beaten by a client. As the events of the night unfold we drift in and out of places that may or may not exist; the concrete reality of Mari's introduction into the dark side of Tokyo and the eerie dream world behind the TV screen in her sleeping sister's bedroom.

Murakami has chosen to write this story from a very detached perspective, and we intrude the lives of the characters as if we are invisible, yet self-aware tourists holding cameras slightly above the action. "We are in a Denny's" or "the room is dark, but our eyes gradually adjust to the darkness" we are told as our guide drags us through the night. Yet while the author's trademark surrealism allows us to slip through the screen of an unplugged TV, the scenes involving Eri and the mysterious masked man are too much like something from a Japanese horror film or something David Lynch would dream up. They seem too familiar and lack Murakami's usual originality. As a result I was a little disappointed in this book.

The last book I had read by Murakami was his collection of short-stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and I think it was a much better read. In the introduction to that book Murakami explained how when he writes short-stories he can't think about novels and vice versa. But After Dark somehow seems to be stuck half way between the two. So while his novels usually benefit from the mystery of that which is untold, here the story just seems unfinished.

Shakyojin

I had a nice surprise the other day when I visited my favourite bookstore, Libro in Shibuya Parco Part 1. While browsing the photography section I stumbled across a book by Nobuyoshi Araki that I hadn't seen before, called Dirty Pretty Things. Basically a photodiary, the book records his trip to London and Paris in October 2005 with hundreds of black and white, and some colour photos.

Araki's books (and he has published more that 300) tend to be divided loosely into those that focus on sex and those that don't – although even his most pedestrian work is infused with eroticism. This collection is pretty much what you would expect from one of Araki's more documentary style books. Lots of candid snaps of the people he met on his trip and great street photography interspersed with nudes of the models who accompanied him. Not surprisingly all the photos documenting the circus his presence inspired are shot in black and white, while the most erotic shots – of his muse Kaori stripping in front of a huge crowd in Paris – are shot in colour, the sudden flesh grabbing your attention as you flick through the book.

While it's a good change to see Araki focusing on cities other than Tokyo, the reason Araki went to Paris and London that year was to oversee the installation of a huge retrospective of his life's work. It was while he was in London that I had the chance to interview him for The Financial Times newspaper. Over a two hour lunch in the Barbican Art Gallery restaurant we had a good chat about the influences behind his work and the controversy that it sometimes causes. As we ate, he wrote some kanji on a napkin to explain his relationship to Hokusai, then paused to pick up his camera and take a photo. Which, to my surprise has made it into Dirty Pretty Things along with the following quote:

"This is my lunch at the Barbican. Beans. They were sweet. I was being interviewed, and I was writing something on my napkin for them. We were talking about art maniacs and photo maniacs. You know, I said I liked Picasso and Bacon just for the hell of it. I told them my rival isn't Bacon but Hokusai. So I said Hokusai was an "art maniac" but I'm a "photo maniac".

He is too. A complete shakyojin.

Now if only I can remember what I did with that napkin?!

For more of what Araki said that day you can download a PDF of my interview with him here...