Wow, you came back from Japan pretty fast. Great report!

The CScout head office in NYC passed along this video from Dan Saffer’s speech at Design Research 2007, and we had a nice little chuckle over here.

There’s a good reason we don’t upload most of our photos to photo-sharing sites (though a big one is that I’m lazy with tagging things). However, after finding one of our tobacco package design-worshipping photos in an ANTI-tobacco report (yikes!), we’re more careful than ever.

I guess the point is that it IS possible to go ’round the world gathering data from the comfort of your desk. That’s the point of the Internet, right? In the end, however, it’s cultural and local knowledge gathered firsthand that actually allows you to make sense of what you’re looking at…and even Wikipedia can’t give you that in the end. Not yet, anyway.

Gragraph home seismograph for earthquake safety

For those of you in earthquake prone areas (or in the general vicinity of Asashoryu), you probably feel tremors quite often, but don’t really know how they register. The Gragraph home seismograph is a new way to chart basic seismic data at home, keep records of it, and also increase safety.

When an earthquake is happening, the Gragraph emits an alarm that grabs your attention, states the intensity, and then recommends precautions (duck and cover) based on the strength. Its calendar function stores previous events and times for your reference as well.

While we’re sure these won’t become as common as smoke alarms, many Japanese are certainly worried about The Big One that is “coming soon”, and take other precautions such as safety lights and emergency water. Safety in general is a major industry in Japan in many areas, particularly when it comes to earthquakes.

Gragraph homepage
Order Gragraph online

Bandai parent and child pajama promotion

Are you all grown up, but miss your Superman pajamas? Life hasn’t been the same since I grew out of my Transformers underwear back in first grade, but it seems there’s hope…albeit to an extreme.

Now Japanese parents have a chance to relive the Salad Days of printed pjs with a new promotional campaign from Bandai. 1000 sets of pajamas from Ultraman, Masked Rider Den-O, Precure, and Geki Ranger will be given out over the next few months in a random drawing.

We’re trying to imagine exactly what kinds of parents would get into wearing these. They aren’t costumes, but pajamas, so the kid will want to wear them every night and beg you to do it as well. The idea is pretty fun, but full of potential danger. Any parent willing to dress as a villain to their kid’s Ultraman is just asking to get beat up.

Press release from Bandai

Italy’s Corriere della Sera and CScout Japan

A while back, the most famous newspaper in Italy, Corriere della Sera (Evening Courier), ran a piece highlighting the Sega Grand Pianist with information provided by CScout Japan.

Many thanks to the paper, as well as to Massimo Triulzi, the author of the piece.

Japanese man documents the life of a vending machine

Loyal readers, you know I would not mislead you. We like marketing, and we like the absurd. If you like these combined, I’ve just found the GREATEST BLOG EVER. I don’t want to oversell it, so here we go. Translated, the name of the blog is:

I take a picture of the vending machine every day (or so). I’m very sorry.

Ryuuichi Terada Ikeda (ごめん！） of Sapporo, Hokkaido has been taking a picture of the same Coca-Cola vending machine nearly every day for over two years, and intensely documenting the changes. While I laughed off the premise immediately, I soon became hooked. Not only does he take daily photos, but he compares the photos to the previous year and draws John Madden-worthy diagrams explaining the daily changes. The addition of new products, stickers, and marketing gimmicks are all there in clear detail.

Every product is listed in its precise position (A4, B12, etc), along with its size and weight, and he even manages to keep up with the label changes from the beverage makers themselves. It’s incredible dedication and, for me, actually quite useful and insightful.

Thanks to Terada Ikeda-san, we can now gauge the general time when the vending machines add the “hot” function for wintertime beverages (after the second week of October). His blog notes also reveal a bit of nostalgia for 2005 when he laments that it now “has too many stickers”. When he’s busy or goes on a business trip, his wife takes the photos for him, so we never go long without an update. On his Flickr page he also shows his love for the Coke machines he finds on the road.

Japan is full of vending machines, and we all take them for granted. Even Mount Fuji has one up there (so I’ve heard), and you’d be hard-pressed to walk more than thirty feet before finding one in an urban area. Someone fills them up, moves pieces around, slaps on stickers, and adjusts the temperature, but all we do is pop in some money and move on. These machines evolve and change with the seasons, payment systems, and marketing from the beverage makers. They are just as much a store as any 7-11.

The sub-heading of Terada Ikeda-san’s blog is “If you don’t have any bread, isn’t it good to drink cola?”. I’m not quite sure…the Royal Milk Tea in B05 looks pretty good.

Found in the September print edition of Henshukaigi

Tags: Vending Machines

Trend: Bath goods as food and desserts

At this point, it’s kind of redundant to go on and on about how “packaging is everything” in Japan, yet we can’t seem to stop. Packaging IS everything here, no matter what the product is. Food, tobacco, and other FMCG in particular get the full treatment, with layers of immaculate wrapping with clean design.

One of the latest trends in packaging and presentation revolve around bath goods presented as food, a market that will never dry up among tub-loving Japanese. We’ve blogged about dessert towels (also shown below) recently, but there’s much more out there.

These towels from Daiyo are part of a series of towels called Bienfaits de Fruits and Bienfaits de Legumes. High quality fruits and vegetables in a Japanese supermarket are packaged exactly like the towels, wrapped in foam, and presented nicely in a box as it they’re made of glass. Daiyo also offers parfaits, crepes, puddings, and ice cream floats made of towels and bath foam.

We blogged about the Happy Bathing Time ice cream bath goods a long time ago, but they’re still going strong. You can choose your bath goods like in an ice cream shop, ordered a scoop at a time. Packed in containers that look like ice cream on top of shaved ice, the bath creams and salts come in a large variety and enhance the water with scents and texture.

Le Patissier is still going strong, and had the largest booth at the Tokyo Gift Show. They’ve been selling out quickly in the lifestyle stores and online as well.

For Japanese that love both desserts and baths, these products are a natural evolution. Japanese company Savon de Neige also makes very popular soaps shaped like desserts which have become very popular as well. It’s just a shame to use any of these products for their practical purposes, a problem you never run into with real food.

You can buy Savon de Neige soaps at Kukka in Shinjuku

Bandai’s Mugen Puchipuchi set for release, is not packed in itself

The most anticipated small toy of the Japanese summer, Mugen PuchiPuchi infinite bubblewrap, is set to be released soon. How quickly (and in what quantities) it will actually make it to stores is yet to be seen, but these things are always unpredictable with Japanese toy makers. However, they’ve re-done their website a bit with pictures and video.

If you’ve ever wondered what Bandai or their ad agency’s office looks like, it seems you can get a glance below. The series of pictures on the PuchiPuchi site go through the various situations where PuchiPuchi use is ideal, including getting babes, quitting smoking, and being a hit with your favorite foreigner.

I don’t know how many girls PuchiPuchi will get ya, but it’s worth a shot to see if they’ll “puchipuchi together” like the suave geek above obviously did. Just give this a whirl to your favorite J-girl and see what she says:

一緒にプチプチしませんか。(issho ni puchipuchi shimasenka)

I guarantee she’ll at least laugh, which (if you’re like me) actually isn’t all that different from what normally happens.

Pre-order PuchiPuchi HERE

Uniqlo’s UT shop becoming…a Uniqlo?

For a guy like me who wears jeans and t-shirts almost everywhere, having a broad selection is a necessity. Being past the “ironic t-shirt” phase of my geek life, Japanese clothes brand Uniqlo has been a trusty source of decent shirts that don’t cost more than twelve bucks.

Three years ago, getting a Uniqlo t-shirt meant getting the same Andy Warhol banana shirt as everyone else, but their foray into limited editions made them into a relatively cool brand. The debut of the the UT shop in Harajuku sealed the deal.

The UT shop’s attraction was that it was full of shirts, and only shirts. Lots of them, and with a cool touchscreen menu to find them in their plastic tubes. Now, the UT store is making the next logical step and including jeans and jackets to go with the shirts. A smart move perhaps, but that opens up a question: Why stop there?

Don’t people need socks too? And belts for the jeans? Underwear? The UT shop may be slowly moving from t-shirts-only to being a hip Uniqlo, and possibly pushing the brand in two directions: Hip stores for jeans and t-shirts, and relatively conservative stores for everything else. It’s hard to fill three floors with only t-shirts, so this may be the natural progression, but the presence of anything besides t-shirts completely changes the atmosphere.

There certainly seems to be less customers these days at UT, so the novelty may have already worn off. In addition, an increasingly eco-conscious Japanese society may not be too comfortable getting each t-shirt in a thick plastic container. Perhaps they could work on a similar concept, but on a paper-bag model and using “green” materials and design?

Final Fantasy VII potion - The Test

Just a quick word to the foreign otaku who have been craving a taste of the very limited Final Fantasy VII 10th anniversary potion we blogged about HERE. Well, I got my hands on some in Akihabara, even as they sold out on the first day.

The verdict? Well, the bottle’s pretty cool. I suspect I should have chilled it first instead of drinking it right there in the store. Hmm…how many times can they repeat this little video game/drink experiment and sell em’ out every time? Marketing stuff like this to geeks is too easy…

Sony Rolly available to buy as pre-order

We’ve all been inundated with news, video, and speculation about the upcoming Sony Rolly robotic music player. If you haven’t heard…where have you been? We’ll spare you the gritty details, but we can’t forget the Bluetooth streaming, programmable movement, amazing sound, and a heck of a design.

Now you can buy your very own Sony Rolly as a pre-order in the online shop. We’ve had incredible demand for it thus far, so it’s now available for all.

Of course, before you do anything, watch the video:

Click HERE to buy the Rolly online