My friend Ale found the newest innovation from the guys who made the bust roller. The box advices the users to use it at least 15 minutes a day, boring… effective?

Here it comes a new edition of my “Sleeping Japanese” pictures collection.

• Sleeping Japanese 1
• Sleeping Japanese 2
• Sleeping Japanese 3
• Sleeping Japanese Remix

Sí, estaba dormitando medio zombie en esa posición.

¡Encima de una fuente!

Josecrem found this fabulous sign and took this picture:

“Bring your dog’s shit back to home”

These are two similar signs I’ve found in Japan:

I visited Miyajima last fall but I did not have yet time to upload the pictures I took and share them. It is one of my favorite places in Japan, it is near Hiroshima and you can visit Miyajima easily staying in a hotel in Hiroshima and taking the ferry. But the option I took I think it is much better, I stayed in a hotel in the Miyajima island. Staying in Hiroshima is boring so I would suggest to stay in one of the hotels-ryokans in Miyajima and enjoy the island when it is quiet. During the day Miyajima is filled with tourists coming with the ferry for daily trips. But during the night there is not much people in the island and you can enjoy walks next to the sea, bothered only by deers and tanukis and enjoying views like this one:

Miyajima (宮島), also known as Itsukushima (厳島), is a little sacred island. It has tons of Shintoist shrines and some Buddhist temples. The whole island is considered to be sacred land and in fact the name says it Miyajima (Miya宮: sacred shrine, jima=島：island).

The island in itself is a Shinto shrine, many Gods live in the island and some people even consider that the island is a God. It is not allowed to die or give birth in the island, animals can’t be killed in the island and trees can’t be chopped. In fact there are tons of monkeys, deers and tanukis wandering freely in the island. Shinto tradition considers deers as God messengers.

The most famous shrine in the island Itsukushima, a world heritage. It is considered one of the most beautiful sceneries in Japan and also in the whole world. It was built more than 1.500 years ago and of course it has been rebuilt many times. The big torii gate is the most photographed part of the shrine, when the tide is low you can even walk until the door.

In the old times it was not allowed to walk on the island, that is why the Itsukushima temple is all built above the water of the sea in the beach like a pier. To enter the island a little boat passed by the torii gate to purify and enter the sacred territory. The torii gate is 16 meters tall and it is designed to be able to resist typhoons.

This are some of the pictures I took in Miyajima last fall:

Low tide.

My friend Albert and me in front of the famous torii gate.

Mini-shrine I found in a hidden beach.

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“8-bit music” is an electronic music style composed using only computers and video game consoles from the 8-bit era. Songs made with these machines are called chiptunes and Japan is one of the countries with more active people and notable the world of the 8-bit music.

One of the latest new 8-bit music productions is 「8-BIT PROPHET - TM Network Tribute Generated by Chiptune + Vocaloid」a new CD created by Vorc Records that will be on sale from the third of this month in Japan. It is a tribute to TM Network, a important Japanese group from the eighties. It is all chiptune and the voices are all by Hatsune Miku (A Yamaha voice synthesizer). The songs are made by K->, Tanikugu y Kyonomori, and there is also a bonus track by Saitone.

The most popular chiptune group in Japan is YMCK. Also in Japan, my friend and comrade from Spain Ale/Pepino, has a group with a singer called Ai, they where in the first chiptune festival in the world in New York together with YMCK. You can listen their songs or download them from here. These are two of them:

Faster Than Time (inglés) (MP3)

Nishitetsu (japonés, maqueta) (MP3)

Ai and Ale performing life. Picture Diego.ws.

And this last video is also from another Spanish chiptune group based in Barcelona called Meneo.

Gen Kanai sent me this article about a young Spanish guy who has managed to become a professional car racer having trained almost exclusively playing with the video game series Gran Turismo for Playstation. This demonstrates once again how “serious” video-games can be, it brings to my mind the novel Ender’s Game. Another case also related with Gran Turismo is how the control panels from the video game are starting to be used in cars in the real world.

From virtual to real!

Last week the first cases of swine flu were confirmed in Kobe and days later in Tokyo. Japanese people are taking many precautions against it and have started buying tons of surgical masks. In the area of Kobe and Osaka more than 4.000 schools have closed and kids are supposed to be studying at home. During the last days I can see much more people than usual wearing surgical masks and it looks like it is very difficult to be able to buy new surgical masks since they are sold out everywhere. Some people have thought of it as an opportunity and during the last days there are tons of surgical masks at Yahoo Auctions being sold at high prices.

Some are trying to make money, and some others are trying to create new fashion trends But I thinkmexicans are better at this

I while ago I was in a barbecue somewhere around east Tokyo and the most impressive thing were the “super nice romantic views” we could enjoy eating and drinking:

It fascinates me how Japanese are able to elevate highways everywhere, sometimes it helps a lot to ease traffic in Tokyo and Osaka. But there are some extremes that I don’t really like, some exaggerations, like when they put highways on top of rivers to save space! This is what happened for example at Nihonbashi, where they build a highway on top of a beautiful river with a beautiful bridge and now it looks like…. after many years it seems they want to get rid of the highway and put it underground, we will see. These are some more pictures I took during the barbecue:

Did you notice the Dragon Ball girl in the video at the beginning of this post?

In some of the most crowed areas in Tokyo and Osaka sometimes you can find yourself in a “human lane”. It is nice to have everyone walking in order but in summer it can be hard

In which lane am I walking?

In Shinjuku there are even some sidewalks with rules concerning pedestrian traffic. For example, this sign is indicating that on the right lane from 9 in the morning until 6 in the afternoon it is a one way lane. But on the left lane the direction changes depending on the time. These “extreme” rules are needed only in districts like Shinjuku where more than three million people commute by everyday.

Haripako sent me this awesome video featuring one of the latest Namco video-games for Wii (WiiWare) in Japan. It is one of the most bizarre games I’ve seen lately, the objective of the game is to catch a “protein bucket thief” who likes to always get the proteins from others in a gymnasium. It is pretty awesome to see how they made a pretty decent game from a so “absurd” idea:

The game’s website is also pretty cool.

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