Some random finds, all Japan-related:
Japanese all-women punk band Gito Gito Hustler. MP3 or Real Audio files here. Found via Yakitori!, itself a new find. As best I can make out Yakitori! is a blog originating from somewhere in Tokyo. Mainly just links.
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George, a fan of my photo diary, alerted me to another site of Tokyo photos, TOMATOCOW, by Koichi Morita. Some nice stuff therein. I particularly enjoyed the series of shots of Shibuya at night. He also has a blog of sorts (see the “Scribble” link).
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A wonderful post from always-erudite Jonathon Delacour on the art of asking questions to Japanese.
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My brother Kimo alerted me to Ruin-Japan a few weeks ago, a collection of photographs and online exhibits (including always-engaging Quicktime VR’s) of various abandoned Japanese hotels and buildings. See their links page for more sites of this type (most of them Japanese). This site I found particularly haunting.
(This reminds me, I need to ride my bike over to the “love hotel” nearby and do some photography there. It isn’t abandoned (yet?!) but sure looks like it, especially in the daytime when it sticks out like a sore thumb among the tiny rice fields surrounding it and its porthole-style architecture makes it look like it belongs at the Salton Sea.)
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Speaking of architecture that hasn’t been ruined yet, view a fascinating display of the tallest buildings in Tokyo courtesy of SkyscraperPage.com (found via What Do I Know). I was amused that No. 40 on this list, measuring in at 120 meters tall, is not a building at all, but rather the Ushiku Buddha statue in Ibaraki prefecture, which I visited during my trip last year.
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On the urban topography theme, Mid-Tokyo Maps is a fascinating site from the Mori Building Co.. These maps however are not your usual guidebook variety, but rather a collection of sociological maps “illustrating the problems and potential of re-making Tokyo into a thriving, attractive and internationally competitive city”.