Currently the museum is exhibiting “She Draws Comics: 100 Years of American Women Cartoonists” with Wednesday the 27th of January being a special open day for the museum with the opening of the Kyoto Seika University Graduation Exhibition. Student works will be on display. Also, from Wednesday the 27th to Sunday the 31st of January during the Kyoto Seika University Graduation Exhibition admission to the museum will be free.

How does a symbol become a universal symbol?

Like the peace sign and the smiley face. How would one read a peace sign before having the knowledge that it is a peace sign.

If you don’t know Japanese what would this sign mean to you?

In Japan, a good restaurant will display replicas of what’s on the menu. Craftsmen perfectly reproduce the food – it takes as much skill as the real thing. Now, if only they dusted these every now and then once they were in the windows.

DesignTide Tokyo is a trade show conceived with the vision of continually proposing new products, scenes and ideas. While focusing on interior design and commercial products, this event also brings together carefully selected work from a wide variety of fields. DesignTide Tokyo is also an exhibition space for designers and artists to share ideas and outlooks, presenting from Tokyo to the world.

Do Friendly Trucks make a friendlier, more peaceful society to live in? Do they improve the quality of life?

So what do you do when you can’t read Japanese? Get a dictionary? Nope…create a font that has the phonetics embedded. At least that’s what the people at Johnson Banks are thinking. Driven by trips to Japan and continual frustration at being unable to read the language, Michael Johnson and his team at Johnson Banks have been trying to design a Katakana typeface that has English phonetic sounds embedded: ‘phonetikana’.

Photos of Ikebana at the 2009 Japan Fest in Atlanta last weekend. More great photos and videos to come of the event so stay tuned.

She told me her name is Daisy.
Isn’t she gorgeous? We just met, but already I can tell we are going to get along just fine.
She loves showing me the sky.

Discarded Pinwheel, Found in Japan
Posted by Joanne Gover Yoshida, from FOUND IN JAPAN  http://foundinjapanjgy.blogspot.com

Call for submissions

BionicBong is seeking contributors for its literary magazine on things Japanese. Guidelines are simple. Stories should have a Japanese feel to them, be creative and not more than 1500 words. Deadline for submissions is July 31, 2009.

Did you know that in most Japanese cities you can enter a booth that transports you to youth, joy and child-like fun for only 400 yen? You choose where you want to go—
into a manga, to outer space, or onto a carousel horse that rides through eternity.

Or you might prefer a bike ride in the countryside of your dreams.

If you are the abstract thinker, you could simply place yourself into a pattern of never-ending dots.