In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in colour. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in [...]
Over on Collacubed, a couple of the staffers went on a trip to Japan and paid a visit to the CupNoodles Museum in Yokohama, about 30 minutes from Tokyo. Opened last fall, the interactive museum chronicles the history of the instant ramen noodle created by Momofuku Ando in 1958. Included in the museum is a [...]
While running the family masonry business which crafts tombstones, memorials and religious statuary, Hirotoshi Ito has been creating and exhibiting his own stone art in Japan and abroad in hopes to promote the value of stones as an art medium. For his personal works, he use various kinds of stones ranging from granite and marble [...]
Photographer Charlie Kirk has spent a lot of time in Japan capturing the faces and lives of the people who live and work there. His amazing black and white photo series on the islands gives the country a timeless feel while still being unmistakably modern. Click the pic to see more.
Maru, the Japanese celebrity cut has just turned five today – although the video says he’s only turned four. To celebrate, Maru’s secretive owners have posted a highlights reel of the kitteh’s best bits from the past few years. Click the pic to cackle uncontrollably at your screen.
Cat ‘Luca’ sleeps in his basket as a waitress serves some food to customers in Vienna’s first cat cafe May 7, 2012. After three years of negotiations with city officials over hygiene issues, Austria opened its first cat cafe last Friday. ‘Cafe Neko’, “Neko” meaning cat in Japanese, was opened by Vienna resident Takako Ishimitsu, [...]
In 1964, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier and correspondent Robert Morse spent time documenting one Japanese generation’s age of revolt, and came away with an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling wilfully toward oblivion. In Rougier’s photographs — pictures that seem to breathe, at once, a reckless energy and an acute despair — we [...]
“The Salaryman Project” is a photo-series by Bruno Quinquet, a French photographer living in Tokyo. With his project, Quintet has tried to build an aura of mystery around the archetypal (and quite often, unfairly lampooned) figure of the male Japanese office worker (aka the salaryman). Quinquet says of the project: “To reference in the same [...]
We all know about Japan’s infamously overcrowded train system, but photographer Michael Wolf’s project on the faces of those commuters crammed in is something else. Click the pic to the project in full.
A couple of hundred miles to the south of Tokyo in the Philippine Sea lies the island of Aogashima. Administered by Tokyo and part of the Izu Archipelago, the island’s 205 inhabitants (2009) enjoy a type of solitude that many will never experience. This island is known for having a volcanic caldera within a larger [...]
