Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan is the blog of Simon Gibson, a New Zealander living in Tokyo, Japan. Focused on New Zealand, Japan, web design and other shiny things.
A nice video from National Geographic showcasing Tokyo architect Yasuhiroi Yamashita’s Penguin House. It is quite fascinating to watch this and to see how he utilises the height of rooms to give a greater feeling of spaciousness to the houses he works on.
What interests me with Japanese architecture is how they manipulate space and light to create some beautiful living environments. Little in the way of traditional building techniques and materials are evident - for me, I would rather go all the way - completely traditional, or on the other hand something like the penguin house.
If people anywhere in the world are likely to go overboard when doing things then the Japanese would have to be right there at the top, and deco-tora or deco-trucks are a rockingly great example of this.
Taking the decoration of the vehicles to almost unimaginable heights, the owners of these trucks add all sorts of magical lighting, paneling and decoration to make their trucks works of art. The photo above is from pingmag, who have an interesting article about an exhibition of photographs of these pop culture icons by Japanese photographer Masaru Tatsuki. From their post:
This pretty colourful aspect of Japanese pop culture has been extensively explored by photographer Masaru Tatsuki who spent ten years with the truckers of Japan’s highways. Today PingMag walks over to Masaru’s current exhibition at Harajuku‘s Little More Chika gallery to catch up with him about his new photo book.
And it isn’t just cars and trucks that get decorated - I once saw a deco-chari, a decorated bicycle, done up to look like the rider was in the cab of a big rig! Now that was something special!
Just been having a bit of browse around the internets and I stumbled acorss a blog by the name of The Humanaught: A China Blog On Suzhou Expat Life. Wow it is pretty! Wordpress is an amazingly versatile thing.
Found these great representations comparing China and Germany through design up at China Digital Times. The designer Liu Yang, is a Chinese born German designer who uses the simplicity of good graphic design to communicate the cultural and social differences between the two countries.
This first one shows the differing attitudes to lining up to buy tickets. If you have been to China you will know that those scrummaging skills developed on the rugby field are highly valuable:
The second image is more interesting, being a depiction of the self:
The blue sections of the images refer of course to German culture, with those in red denoting the Chinese equivalent. Interestingly, Japan would be German in the image of the people lining up, and Chinese in the image depicting the self.
It is difficult of course, to pare down cultures as diverse as German or Chinese into simple images, but these I think are very effective.
We went to Germany for one night a few years ago and I remember being quite surprised as to how relaxed everyone was. When we went through immigration there were two immigration officers having what must have been to them quite a fascinating discussion. They didn’t even look at us as they stamped our passports!
On our way back out it was much the same, except we saw them round up a person of middle eastern descent. Ah, the joys of being white. I guess some stereotypes are true after all.
