My friend Albert sent me this picture of another one of those “crazy” Japanese inventions. The concept is quite similar to the legs pillow, but this one is aimed at the women’s market.
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Month: September 2009
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Books and magazines about trains
One of the first things in Japan that caught my attention were trains and also the amount of train geeks around here. A general passion for trains exists in Japan. Train geeks collect books about trains, they travel just to have the opportunity to “try a new train” or to visit a particular train station, they collect pictures of trains and they even know the inner workings of trains and how a certain engine works. At the beginning I was surprised by all these obsessions but little by little I am finally getting it: using every day a train line that transports more people a day than ALL New York lines, using ALWAYS train stations as meeting points, using train stations as a starting point to decide where to buy/rent a house, seeing how all the activity-life-restaurant-businesses gather almost always around train stations… These are facts that have made me realize that it is not only an obsession of some people; trains are a fundamental part of Japanese society and everyday life.
In big bookstores there’s always a section with books and magazines about trains, these are some pictures that I took in Kinokuniya, my favorite bookstore:
Plenty of magazinees about trains and railroads.
The book with the Galaxy Express 999 cover is a boring train schedule catalog.
All this books are about trains!
This book had tons of maps with every minimum detail on how railroads are placed in some stations in the north of Tokyo.
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First Nintendo building
Everything started in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda; apart from Hanafuda cards he also imported some western games, mixed ideas and set up two stores, one in Kyoto and one in Osaka. Playing cards were a novelty for Japanese people and were very succesful at the time. Fusajiro Yamauchi decided to expand his business and in 1933 he legally established Yamauchi Nintendo & Co, establishing as well the first factory in Nintendo’s history. Nowadays Nintendo still sells playing cards in Japan, however its video games division was the responsible for its international expansion. Nintendo is now the leading video games company in the world thanks to the success of Nintendo DS and Wii.
I was searching around online to see if I could find the location of that 1933 first building of Nintendo, however I was not successful until it occured to me to use Google Maps and search for YAMAUCHI NINTENDO!! and it worked! Here you have the pictures of what probably is a reconstruction of the original building on top of the original location. When I went there I peeped inside the building and nobody seemed to be using it nowadays.
