Culture Japan Episode 6 Review: “Impressive rides with anime graphics (itasha) explored” (J!-ENT Straight-Up Reviews)

“Danny Choo’s passion for, and uncanny access to, Japanese pop culture is a big draw for me or anyone with even a slight interest in Japanese pop culture”

TITLE: Culture Japan Episode 6

TYPE OF SERIES: Japanese Pop Culture

MEDIUM: Streaming Video

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS EPISODE

OFFICIAL SERIES WEBSITE

“Culture Japan” is not only the name of the web show, it is also the name of the related website with a enormous following.

“Culture Japan” episode 6 caught my attention from the initial intro of the series.

The “Culture Japan” slogan is: “Your Portal to Japan”.  Watching episode 6, I felt that I had stepped through that portal and had arrived in Japan. That portal is still open, as I have been very reluctant to cease watching the episodes in a non-stop fashion.

Danny Choo, the director and host of “Culture Japan”, has a list of accomplishment and success that strike me as very impressive. Here’s the rundown, Danny Choo resides in Tokyo and runs a small web and TV production company called Mirai Inc.

Danny Also works with Japanese companies such as figurine/doll manufacturers, anime/game producers, print publishers, e-commerce retailers to name a few.

Danny Choo resume also includes working as Computer Engineer at Japan Airlines, Website Manager on the management team at Amazon and as CGM Product Manager at Microsoft.  Danny Choo also speaks Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and English.

The vision of Danny Choo for “Culture Japan” was to be a medium where he can share Japanese culture with the world.  The show is currently broadcast on Saturday on Tokyo MX TV and broadcasted in Asia through the Animax Asia Network.  Currently, Danny Choo is working to get it broadcasted on television in various countries but for now, people can watch it through live video streaming service, Crunchyroll.com.

A great portion of “Culture Japan” episode 6 covers the” Ita-G Festival 2010″.

The “Ita-G Festival” features cars (itasha), bicycles (itachari), motorcycles (itansha), and other transportation belonging to anime fans and otaku (fanatics).

I did mention that these vehicles belong to  anime fans and otaku, right?

So, it is safe to assume that these vehicles had a special flare to them; the special flare being stickers, graphics, and memorabilia of their favorite anime series or characters which transforms them into itasha and so forth.

Danny Choo was also part of the festival with an itasha featuring his very own character: Murai Suenaga which is also available for purchase as a FIGMA action figure (and also other various Mirai Suenaga related merchandise).

Danny Choo’s passion for, and uncanny access to, Japanese pop culture is a big draw for me or anyone with even a slight interest in Japanese pop culture.

This episode was bursting with so much information and addicting coverage of the itasha culture; I immediately became engorged and addicted to this show at the same time. I am sure the episodes that follow will be chocked full of the same passion and access to the Japanese pop culture that I have quickly become enamored with.

Culture Japan covers different subjects each episode but there are reoccurring segments such as the AmiAmi sponsored figure countdown. This segment features Richard Wilson along with Danny Choo as they countdown the top ten anime and manga figures available.

After watching episode 6 of this Danny Choo Production, I would blindly recommend this show with great enthusiasm to otaku of all caliber. But not only otaku but to anyone who has even a passing interest in Japan pop culture. I honestly felt like I was watching a live version of “Newtype” magazine (a longtime, popular Japanese magazine that covers otaku culture from anime, manga, models, etc.).

While watching Crunchyroll.com, anyone can watch it for free but there will be continuous advertising that will self-interrupt the viewing for a minute and then return back to the show.  Premium members subscribed to Crunchyroll.com will not have their viewing disrupted by ads.

I thought Danny Choo did an excellent job as the host of Culture Japan. I was impressed at how Choo conveyed  his love and fiery passion for Japanese culture in episode 6 of “Culture Japan”.  If you want to be in the know of itasha culture and enjoy following host Danny Choo as he brings Japanese pop culture to the world, I recommend to you episode 6 of “Culture Japan”.

Now if you want seconds and thirds and fourths…  You get the picture.  Spoil yourself by watching all the episodes available online. For now my portal to Japan will stay open.

Emergency Information (in English) for those in Japan

In Japan, we have a lot of viewers in the country but also family, friends and clients.  J!-ENT will do our best to post any important information for those who have love ones in Japan or those who are currently living in Japan.   By updating this page and having it in our front page to help people.

If you are searching for someone in Japan, please use the GOOGLE PEOPLE FINDER as you can get information in Japanese and in English.  Also, view Facebook Japan page and TIME OUT JAPAN for any other pertinent updated information.

WATCHING LIVE JAPANESE NEWS REPORTS

We know a lot of people right now who don’t have access to a TV, especially with the rolling black outs in their area but they do have access to an iPhone and iPad (which some are recharging inside their cars).  Please note that Bic Camera is offering free phone charging at their stores.

All five major Japanese networks are streaming their news online via Ustream.  You can watch the following using the Ustream app for your iPhone or iPad:

NHK |  NHK WORLD (ENGLISH) |  TBS |  FUJI TV |  NIHON TV | TV ASAHI

Also, there is a free earthquake iPhone app from Softbank now available.

I. ROLLING BLACKOUTS SCHEDULE

II.  EVACUATION ORDER FUKUSHIMA POWER PLANT

III.  WATCHING JAPANESE NEWS REPORTS

ROLLING BLACKOUT IN EASTERN JAPAN: Affected areas in Tokyo: (we will try to continually update this information)

UPDATE: Because of the changing schedule, we highly recommend visiting Daniel Kahl’s website as he is posting the latest on the Blackout schedule in English.

The One about KE$HA and her Baby-G promotion in Japan

We posted the press release for KE$HA’s collaboration with G-Shock to promote the Baby-G but it also extends to Japan and the Japanese campaign is pretty cool.  Here is the image that CASIO is using at the moment!  The campaign appears to kick off on February 20th with four performances scheduled in Japan and a special KE$HA night scheduled at Studio Coast on March 25th.

Black Passenger Yellow Cabs by Stefhen FD Bryan (a J!-ENT Book Review)

“Black Passenger Yellow Cabs” is well-written, well-researched but I wish more time was given towards the final chapters on the resolution.   But it is a entertaining, sexually-charged, yet intelligent book.

TITLE: Black Passenger Yellow Cabs

BY: Stefhen FD Bryan

PUBLISHER: Kimama Press

PAGE COUNT: 373

RELEASED: 2010

Formerly from The Denver Post, The Rocky Mountain News, The Phoenix Gazette Republic, The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, since early childhood, Jamaican born Stefhen Bryan was thought obsessed, plagued by depression, suicidal ideation, learning problems and sex addiction. High school drop out both in his native Jamaica and the United States, after 8 years of sheer perseverance and a near nervous breakdown he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from UCLA at 30. At 35 Bryan proved victorious over his depression and suicidal thoughts, but was still governed by sex addiction and an extreme preference for ‘yellow,’ which propelled him in April 2001 to liquidate all his belongings in California and relocate to Japan. Seven years in Asia, Bryan returned to the United States cured of his addiction, self-actualized and ready for marriage.

For anyone who has been interested in Japanese pop culture and have had the opportunity to visit the country, to partake in the culture and to be passionate about it, I have had the opportunity to meet two type of men in my life who love Japan.  The type who love the culture and literally be absorbed by it and those who not only look at Japan as an opportunity to make money and the opportunity to get laid.

As a person who has written about Japanese pop culture, I am of the former but there are so many people I have went to college with, worked with who are part of the latter.  Men who love Japanese women, men who have been absorbed by the sexual part of the culture through hentai/ecchi manga and anime, Japanese porn and/or gravure models.

And once you arrive to Japan, the sex is a big part of the culture and you can find it all around you.  Stores, vending machines and even your Japanese guy friends who are willing to tell you about Japanese women, Japanese love hotels and much more.  Especially Westeners or other fellow gaijin who are willing to tell you about their exploits on the subway or at a restaurant.

“Black Passenger Yellow Cabs” by Stefhen FD Bryan is a book about a man who not only craves Asian women, he is a man with a sexual addiction, who went to Japan and is now writing about his personal experiences and sexual exploits.

Stefhen is originally from Jamaica and at a young age, was already well-endowed and was taken advantage of by younger women.  To put it bluntly, he was raped as he was only a young boy who didn’t know any better, but this was life in Jamaica and it was what lit the match that would burn inside him for many years to come.

Bryan would write, “I grew to become a lesbian happily trapped in a man’s body and from my first sexual experience until recently, sex was the first thing I thought of upon meeting every woman.”

Stefhen is passionate about Asian women and he details in his book of how his interested shifted to Asian women and what brought him to Japan.  Not long after living in Japan, Stefhen was having a lot of sex with Japanese women.  I know for a fact that many Japanese women I knew had always enjoyed Black actors and athletes and also music performers and for Stefhen, he was a Black man who was their Bob Marley or Jay-Z, and he was there to teach them English and somehow he ended up having sex with women, their mothers, fellow teachers and he writes about each women and his experience with them.

Some may look at how this book was written as glorified bragging on Bryan’s part and in a way, it may appear that way but part of me was not looking at Stefhen as a guy I wanted to high five and say “you’re the man” or looking at a major mac daddy.  This was a man who writes about his experience but knowing he had a sexual addiction.  And it’s important to note that there are books in which people write about sex and their exploits in passing off tips to those who want to get laid, but this is not one of those books.  This is an intellectual man who writes this book intelligently but smart enough to know that the topics he writes about is something that he should not become too esoteric.

Not only does he write about his experience of being a horny man who can’t wait to partake in sex with a woman, but we also get an explanation of Japan culture, an explanation of his state of mind, his living conditions and even his challenges.

From early in the book in which he writes about his first experience of a 16-year-old taking advantage of him at the age of 7, we see how this plays out.  Having sex with a Japanese girl named Ai and then one day alone with her mother, she jokes about him (again, he does make the point that women keep telling him of how well-endowed he is) and similar to the boy at age 7, he whips it out for his girlfriends mother to partake in and how the mother hasn’t had any pleasure for twenty years because of work.  Stefhen brings up how Japanese men are overworked and are never home and then gives us statistics of those who are overworked in Japan.  Interesting but yet related tangent but that is how “Black Passenger Yellow Cabs” works.  You get a little story about his sexual exploits but also teaching the reader about Japanese culture.

While this book does go into his exploits with Japanese women, he also goes into his sexual experience with Chinese, Korean and other women of a variety ethnicities that he had sex with as well.   Needless to say, there are many women that Stefhen FD Bryan has slept with and part of me was growing tired of reading about the exploits.  I looked at this book as a man who was raped at a young age and now acting out of what he thought women were about…sexual pleasure and I couldn’t wait to get to the end because I was hoping that he would get help.  At the rate he was going, not only was I wondering how many diseases he may get (or spread – the Dr. Akari chapter was quite surprising to say the least), I often wondered if there was anyone in his life to tell him that “enough was enough”.

Unfortunately, if you are a foreign teacher and you’re moving around and you meet other gaijin (foreigners) of guys who want to get laid, they are just going to support the habits of one getting all he can get and in this case, Japan was like a buffet and the ending was like a buffet, you get tired of it.

It’s important to note that Stefhen Bryan did get help with his depression and he did get help to understand what happened to him at a young age, but I use the “buffet” as a metaphor because like any buffet, we all get tired when we had our fill but it doesn’t take long for us to get over that and partake in another buffet.  Is Stefhen Bryan really done?  Was the book a therapeutic way to deal with a lot of women he has slept with and put it into perspective?

I can see many guys reading this book, learning from Stefhen’s ways and also learning about Japan at the same time.  I can also see people reading this book and learning what goes through the minds of some men, especially foreigners but it’s important to note that one should not be judgmental on foreigners, especially on Black men who are in Japan and are also Black and are teaching in Japan.  There is enough stereotyping and a blind ignorance that pervades  Japanese culture towards foreigners to note that all gaijin are not in Japan to get laid (and I know many of my guys friends in Japan will then tell me – not if you’re in Roppongi).

But not all of Bryan’s book is about having sex, there is some important factual information and one of the chapters that I found quite interesting was his chapter on “Abortion in Japan” but his experience was afterward with a girl named Fu and how he had to experience a Japanese and their cultural tie to their parents.  I know first hand how that feels and where in America, things are a bit different, in Japan, blood is thicker than water and in most cases, blood will win over love most of the time.

I did find it interesting to find these breaks in chapters where we go from one chapter about a woman and then the next chapter, we would see Stefhen focus more on Japanese culture.  For example, he would talk about Shoko and then we would read a very informative chapter on socialization in Japan from women’s empowerment to child abuse in Japan and then news stories of murders in Japan and then back to Shoko.  Interesting way the book is structured but I look at it as being a non-traditional book, so I was OK with it.

“Black Passenger Yellow Cabs” is a book that I know many guys will enjoy because I know way too many men who would love to be in Stefhen Bryan’s shoes.  But I’m not one of those men.  I came away reading this book, not happy nor excited but part of me felt sorry for Stefhen FD Bryan.  I’m sure many men may think it’s all cool if you can have partake in as many women as possible in Japan and look at Stefhen Bryan as a hero but I don’t.  If anything, may it be that he is done or even if he unfortunately relapses, he finds that one woman in his life that is not a sexual object but a woman that he can truly love.

Overall, “Black Passenger Yellow Cabs” is well-written, well-researched but I wish more time was given towards the final chapters on the resolution because the book ends rather abruptly.   Nevertheless, the book was quite entertaining, sexually-charged, yet intelligently written that under all the detailed sexual experiences featured in the book, you can still learn a little bit about Japanese society and culture.  If you are looking for book on Japanese culture and sex, this book is for you!

JAPAN: AKB48 – Heavy Rotation

We are still looking for the music video for the #1 song in Japan “Heavy Rotation” for AKB48 that is shown in the single TV commercial (we found one but it was just clay characters, so we believe there must be two music videos out there). And although :30′s long, I’m sure it’s enough to get their fans hearts pumping.

We assume this is a friendly sleep over among friends. Yeah right! Anyway, it’s not the full music video but still a short clip of it and even though it’s 30 seconds long, what we have seen of this clip so far gets our pick for today’s “Music Videos That We Dig!”.

Top 10 Music Video Countdown (Japan)

The Oricon top 10 CD singles of the week is out and let’s see what are the top 10 songs in Japan! Videos courtesy of YouTube (note: not all labels allow embedding and those that don’t are not included in this top 10 video list):

Buy the #1 CD Single in Japan:

New People entertainment center opens in Japan Town (a J!-ENT article by Dennis A. Amith and Photos by Angelo Delos Reyes)

Back in the 1990′s, for nearly a decade, I can remember going on the occasional trips to San Francisco and to shop at Japan Town.

There was a mystique at the time of going to the area.  For one, anime at the time was not as huge as it is now, nor was it distributed at many major outlets.  Japanese music was not easily obtained and for those of us who were fans of Japanese pop culture, our choices at the time before the explosion of online stores on the Internet was the UC Irvine bookstore or visiting Japan Town.

We chose the latter.  We’d plan these Japan Town trips where we would travel to San Francisco quarterly and save our money as if we were visiting a theme park.  I can easily remember how the stores were at the time… getting the latest Japanese music show on VHS for $3 each, going to Mikado Laser and purchasing an import Laser Disc for $69-$99 and a CD for $39.99, going to the their merchandise store to pick up the latest import SNES, Sega Saturn or PlayStation video game for under a $100, going to the smaller Taiyodo to find CD singles or albums the other store didn’t have, then we would make our way to Kinokuniya for the latest magazines, manga and also albums the other two stores didn’t have.  We would then visit a restaurant for sushi or okonomiyaki, go to the grocery store and then visit the little shops that are outside of the mall area and then we were done.

Needless to say, once anime became distributed more frequently, Japanese music became easier to obtain and just literally, the Internet made things much more cheaper and products were easily obtained…our trips to Japan Town ended.

But now there is a reason to visit Japan Town once again.

On August 15th, New People, a $15 million, 20,000 square foot, three-story building has opened up right across the street from the mall area in Japan Town.  The project comes from Seiji Horibuchi, the founder and CEO of San Francisco’s VIZ Pictures and VIZ Media.  And what better time than now.

Horibuchi has been one of the key people in Japan to help introduce Americans to Japanese pop culture through Japanese animation.  I can easily remember back in 1992,  Horibuchi created the first magazine dedicated to anime called “Animerica”.  His goal at the time was to bring American fans information from both sides of the Pacific.  And literally, he was the man who opened my eyes to the variety of Japanese pop culture back then and here he now 17 years later bring Japanese pop culture to America through America’s first Japanese entertainment center known as New People.

The building was designed by the Japanese architectural firm Torafu and features a theater, retail, a concession area and more.

But what is most appealing to a lot of fans that we talked with are the boutiques.  Within the past few years, many designers of popular Japanese fashion labels (especially those dealing with Gothic Lolita design) have been appearing at conventions in America and merchandise instantly selling out in America.

For a  long time, people have wanted access to the clothing sold in Harajuku and now, people have that opportunity with labels such as Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, Black Peace Now, 6%DokiDoki and Sou-Sou being sold at the boutiques.

And what has been evident since the opening of New People is that people have returned to Japan Town. We have heard numbers of tens of thousands of people who have traveled from all over the state and from other states just to experience buying Japanese merchandise at the store and for me, having experienced that excitement during my younger years in Japan Town, it’s great to see that synergy once again.

New People is located at 1746 Post St and is open from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m..  For more information on New People, please visit www.newpeopleworld.com.