An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla

Kore ga hoshi

The budget for Top Secret DVD Project X has been approved, so I’m going to play a lot of videogames, pop pills, and lay in a heap in celebration. Then, as soon as that’s out of the way, quickly travel to NYC and select locations in San Francisco for the shoots.

The contracts for Top Secret Writing Project 109 (no, it’s not TokyoScope 2) should be in the can by the end of the month, around which time I’ll returning to a strange and exotic country known as Japan. Time will then begin to move very fast as I try to dodge deadlines in a café in Koenji while in an ESPY trance.

Wish I could name the names and players, but for now, no dice. Forgive the secrecy, but I had to tell someone something.

Hime Club

Yeah, I know. I was on TV in Japan earlier this month. I’m sure you’re all sick to death of hearing about on this blog. Me? I haven’t even seen the show yet, even though the DVD of Eigo de Shabrea Night finally showed up in the mail the other day. I’m sorta scared to watch it. I’m a nut that way.

As if to lead me into temptation, NHK updated their show site with a brief summery of what we said and did there in Akihabara with all those people standing around watching me and the maids and stuff. The writing there is awesome and plays like a parody of this blog’s more baroque moments.

Examples: “Commander Shaku leads her intrepid ESN team to darkest Tokyo…Foreigners are flocking to Subculture Central…In this ‘maid cafe,’ a man awaits Shaku.”

Uh, that would be me. Guess I should crack open some Ovaltine and finally watch the show. I think it was this pic (one that seems to say it all) that did the convincing.

Commander Shaku and me. ESPY for life, baby.

tsuchinoko

Anime News Network just announced the Japanese publication of the new book Ken-Otaku-Ryu "Hating the Otaku Wave.”

As ANN puts it, “the 224 page book vilifies otaku and is a counter-piece to the recent positive press that otaku culture has received from Japanese and international media. Among other things, the book focuses on and attacks moe and lolicon interests and states that otaku discriminate against women.”

Oh da rub: My next book, Otaku in USA, is coming out from the exact same publisher as Hating the Otaku Wave.

Even smaller planet: Hating the Otaku Wave contains the transcript of a discussion between two of my most terrifying drinking buddies: Yoshiki Takahasi (AKA slasher) and lit-prize winning writer Masaya Nakahara (AKA Violent Onsen Geisha), both of whom are, I can tell you, most definitely “hating the otaku wave.”

For laughs, I sent Yoshiki a link to ANN’s forum so he could read the reaction to news of the book. He sent me back an email that contains the following commentary which suggests that maybe it heralds less of a backlash than we all kind of secretly are wishing for…

"The chapter titles were announced before the book was published, and those titles are meant to upset otaku fuckers, so they got upset *until* they got the book itself. Actually, the book itself is selling well now. Surprisingly, most of the reviews are quite supportive.

Those readers got what we were trying to say, which is satire. Our point of view is not "We fucking hate Otaku Die" but more like "We don't fucking understand why people are so crazy about Moe".

The book contains two symposiums. In each of them, me and Nakahara were asking the guest (a Light-Novel writer and Manga script writer/critic) what is this Otaku bullshit all about. We found out so many pathetic Otaku things like there are so-called Naki Games (games which make you cry...because the virtual girl you fall in love is a fucking blind or handicapped), that Otaku people are not interested in anything but Anime and Manga which they can understand, and stuff. It was quite fun and interesting to know those things.

The US reaction to news is kind of close to the reaction here *before* the book was published. I think the book won't be translated, so there's no chance these US otaku really understand what our book really says."

So there you go...

Gothic Humberts

From the "Why Didn't We See This Coming?" department.

March 2006 will see this opening of the first Butler Cafe in Japan. Name: Swallowtail. Location: Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, in that increasingly well-known hideaway for female otaku known as Otome Road. URL: http://butlers-cafe.jp.

The establishment, which will be decorated in high old European style, will aim to transport female customers to a world where they are rich beyond belief, or a princess in a royal dynasty. But this is just the starting point for where the fantasy goes next. The butler serving your table is a stoic old family servant. Both of you have the hots for each other; just barely contained under the surface. But to go anywhere with those feelings would lead to disaster.

Here then is another hydra head of moe to consider: the heartburn of hidden painful love. And instead of it being directed towards the picture of youth (i.e. bishonen), as per usual, the romantic ideal is now a much older man; intelligent and loyal.

The idea originated from an OL who got drunk with her company boss, confessing to him that she was a female otaku, or kishoji (“rotten woman’). Her butler cafe idea was thrown out as a joke, but the boss liked the ring of it. He asked her to write up a proposal. With that, he was able to get K-Books, one of the kingpins of the female otaku racket, to invest.

Currently, K-Books is running a series of Help Wanted ads and holding auditions for butlers-to-be. Since good help is hard to find, drama schools are being combed for raw material. Target age range for staff tops out at 60 years old.

Get ready now for some old dude in a tux to hand you some tissue next time you leave the station and lots of anime about people drinking tea.

Dasai gaijin yori mo sugoii

When we were grubby little kids back in the day in the sunny California suburbs, we wanted to make Super 8 stop-motion Godzilla movies, our own homebrewed episodes of Ultraman, or just some off the cuff Star Wars fan films.

But a new group of SoCal kids (mostly Asian American with one token white guy dropped in by accident and/or for aesthetic effect) have taken it upon themselves to recreate their own music videos for songs by rumpy J-pop acts.

And so, you MUST check out their amazing videos for Orange Range’s Hana and NEWS’ Cherish. Don't delay. Do it today.

Mind blowing moment 109: when a DVD for Richard Gere’s version of Shall We Dance makes an appearance (Get it? An American remake of a Japanese media sensation…).

Also, for those of you keeping score, this blog is now a little over one years old. I didn’t think I would end up talking about Johnny’s jimsho acts and gay cowboys, but this is where the winds of change have shipwrecked me.

I celebrated by bringing a bunch of rumpy J-magazines, including Fine Boys and the fearsome Johnny's-dominated Popolo to a salon, and randomly pointing at pictures inside in the hopes of getting a haircut that would look good on a Radio Shack camcorder.

It came out ok, I guess.

So can I be in your next video, guys?

Kozure Okama

This just in: American girls are mining the missing link between gay cowboys and fruity J-pop from the Johnny’s jimsho. Now, not only is it raining men (un-ironically, it should be noted) but it’s only a matter of time until the Shonen Club will have an opening for a new ranch hand on the spread.

In the wake of Brokeback Mountain’s sweep of the Golden Globe awards, the boy’s love genre has officially gone mainstream in America. Now, there’s an impressive amount of crossover going on between burgeoning Brokeback fandom, complete with homemade icons and wallpapers, and Live Journal communities devoted to imagining yaoi-styled mash-ups between Johnny’s acts like Tsubasa and NEWS.

I’d like to link directly to them, I really would, but girl otaku are fucking scary, man, and I can’t imagine any good coming from it, beginning with hate mail like “Shige and I PWN YOU AND KUSA SO BAD AHAHAHAHA XD”. But take my word for it. This thing is real. Think about it: Bareback could be a big hit in Japan, and Johnny’s acts could be the next Backstreet.

If only LJ had been around in 1969, or thereabouts. Then maybe something major would have happened when those Ultraman monsters briefly appeared in Midnight Cowboy.

8 of Cups: Indolence

Now open for business and pre-emptive power lunches.

My new blog.

Astral Herpes.

My dream journal, of absolutely no use or interest to anyone.

All the same, I hope it takes you to...The Place (pictured below).

Moshikashite I LOVE YOU

Total TV Casualty. Now I’m mixed up with Nippon Television (NTV) to help them whip up something on the otaku scene in the USA. Maybe they can introduce me to the monkey and the bulldog…

Gal Gay

December somethings and love.

I am surrounded by a million screaming women.

An immense sea of adoration. Eyes forward, arms – fat and thin - waving heart shaped pin lights, cycling through Christmas tree colors timed to the beat of the human heart. Pink Floyd: The Wall if it was about human happiness…and boys with hair like this:

All praise then to Tsubasa, the Johnny’s jimsho pop star du jour. A solo concert tonight, titled “Tsubasa Imai 1st tour 23 to24.”

The International Forum in Yurakucho, about as international as old Edo tonight. No round-eyes save me, but a host of gaijin here: Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, all of them rendered in double XX chromosome. Womens. Only a handful of men strewn about, by accident: dragged in by girlfriends, playing dad, or doing usher duty. I have to climb a fortress of solitude up in here to find a urinal. I see Richard Chamberlain in the pit below me, surrounded by dying sailors.

Word on the street. Tsubasa is on the way down, while other Johnny’s groups like SMAP and NEWS still burn bright. Wouldn’t know from the sell-out show tonight.

A lot of ladies, at least, still seem to love Tsubasa the Mighty, but I don’t see the appeal. Some sub Timberlake-Michael Jackson moves, and the usual G.O.D. approved keytar anthems but…he’s not enough of a freak to maintain the stage by himself. Thirty plus dancers on stage doing backup, the Johnny’s Junior of legend, who often get as many shouts of “kakoii!” from the hens as he does.

Still, Jay is a fan, which means I have to tag along or risk being battered and fried. She buys two Tsubasa seats in an idol shop in Harajuku. Tickets are scalped and have someone else’s name printed on them. Fuck it, I figure, wishing we could have gone to see Morning Musume or Melon Kinbei instead…

(We went to Tokyo Disney Sea. Slasher, Betty, Date Rape, Me. We saw Kago and Tsuji from Hello! Project / Morning Musume walking around, filming some crap TV show, trailing behind famous hakujin-gaijin in a Goofy cap, leading legions of personal assistants. I freak out, dancing, hooting. Everyone then mortified thinking I wanted to molest them or holler “Moe!” But just happy to see two trash celebs in person, minor deities made of shit, public face of your media masters).

The main hall covered in a hovering shampoo-meets-perfume vapor. The women are in bunches, mostly. Ages from grubby little girls to upped middle-aged women. “That’s how far Johnny’s goes back. They’ve been fans since they were teenagers.”

Two dudes, dressed like Kabuki-cho hosts (tight black suits, amazing Dragonball Z hair), enter the hall pre-concert, at the center of an entourage, surrounded by bodyguards. The crowd freaks out, like a chicken farm someone’s blown a trombone at.

What would they do if they could chase them down, Beatlemania-style, in the Ginza tonight? Tear their clothes off and fuck them right in front of the giant duty-free designer brands there...

“You don’t understand anything about women if you think Johnny’s is about sex,” she says.

Interrogation. Feels like someone is staring at me, wondering why I’m even wondering about something as primal as a woman’s fantasy of what the society of men really is. Sure enough, a necklace of eyes on me.

Ushers in green, standing like stormtroopers at the exits up front, staring back into the audience as intensely as the girls look forward. Searching for signs of video cameras and cell phones, I figure. And none of them can even see me, let alone care. Maybe. I’m just a small thing floating around inside someone else's weird fantasy for a change.

MI6 Vs. ESPY

I’ve just been hired to do consultation work for the BBC’s television programme Japanorama. Now, to come up with insane people and situations to pit Jonathan Ross up against…

Hanape Bazooka

Inside a dark club in Hatagaya, Tokyo, three young girls are up on stage, dressed in matching black and gold china doll dresses. One holds a bass, the other, a guitar. Behind them is the drummer. They look a bit nervous; like cute little woodland creatures caught in the headlights, maybe. But that’s understandable. Tonight is only their second time that their band, The Feminine, have ever played a show for a paying audience.

Suddenly, the guitarist, Reina, rips into her strings. Coarse, hot sound comes blasting out. The thudding caveman stomp of drummer Nao’s beat backs her up. The music is primitive, boarding on moronic. But there’s no mistaking it. This is real rock and roll. Dig the lyrics:

“My baby does the hanky panky.”

The band breaks into a full-throated scream. It’s the howl that’s been heard in a hundred frat house and juke joints. Then it’s official:

The Feminine rock.

The garage scene is small in Japan, although it’s gotten a shot in the arm from the internationally known Guitar Wolf and the appearance of girl-group The 5,6,7,8s in Kill Bill Vo. 1. But both those bands possess members in their 30s and even 40s: old enough to have been alive when rock dinosaurs ruled the earth.

The question the existence of a band like The Feminine poses is…what is it about old American music that reigns in young Japanese girls?

“I like this kind of music because it’s simple and easy,” says bassist Yoshimi, clad in after-concert vintage clothes that look like they were pilfered from Laverne and Shirley’s wardrobe. Simplicity is a crucial factor for someone who has been playing her instrument for a total of three months. Her favorite band is The Sonics, a ‘60s era R&B combo from the American Northwest. They’re the kind of band known only to nerdy record collectors in their own home country. But that’s how it works in Japan. If you want an alternative to karaoke-ready J-pop, you have to dig deep to find what you love.

Reina, coiffed with a Beatles haircut, is the best musician of the bunch. She’s been playing guitar for five years now, long enough to be able to effortlessly toss out Chuck Berry riffs and to have honed in her own sound. “I plug the guitar directly into the amp and turn the gain all the way up.”

Yoshimi and Reina, both 21 years old, have been friends since Jr. High School. Their lives were changed when after they heard a CD by maximum Japanese rock and roll combo Thee Michelle Gun Elephant when they were teens at the local library. Soon, they found themselves taking the train from the suburbs to Tokyo’s Nishi-Shinjuku, a mecca for record collectors. Forming a band was the next logical step.

The Feminine have been around all of three months, playing live about once a month, on average. Do they dream of someday becoming huge rock stars and playing arenas, even if that meant giving up the garage rock sound?

“We like this kind of music because it’s not A-class. Its B-class; a junk sound. We just want to keep playing live and having fun,” explains Reina, who also has a message for America, the land where The Feminine get their inspiration.

“Let’s twist the night away,” says Reina.

“Thanks for the music,” adds Yoshimi.

And then they’re off to catch the last train home.

Miyatokan

When the writer Nagai Kafu − in rebellion against the High City and intent on upon losing himself in low, traditional places − sought to become a Yose performer, a spy tattled on him, and he was dragged home and presently sent into exile beyond the ocean.

Katsuben

Matt Alt on last weekend's SuperFest...

The Winter SuperFest was what it was: comfortable as ever, but nothing
to write home about. It's a decrepit old convention held in an decrepit
old building, the sort of place that an event ends up in rather than
seeking out. It's not a particularly cheery place or a "scene" for
strutting one's stuff. It's the last stop on the line for the version
1.0 otaku, the guys who grew up on Thunderbirds and don't give a shit
about dressing up or resin kits of girls or staying on the cutting edge
of the latest trends. The countless little dealers that come in from
the suburbs to hawk their wares from cardboard boxes they hauled into
town in their Hondas make it less like WonderFest than a gypsy version
of Nakano Broadway. Yamato Takkyubin, who knows a good thing when they
see it, set up an encampment in the main lobby that was visited by a
string of disheveled middle-aged otaku mailing industrial pallets of
Leiji Matsumoto gashapon and UFO Catcher prizes back to themselves. The
scattered kids in attendance were obviously being dragged and would
rather have been anywhere other than a sweaty room full of clones of
their father excitedly discussing the "lost" episodes of Ultraseven. By
mid-morning small pockets of schoolchildren had drifted into unused
areas, Wi-Fi'ing their Nintendo DSes together in a last-ditch attempt
at salvaging their last day of the weekend.

Much gaming. Me stuck inside San Francisco playing Fight Night 2 until my hands cramp. A new boxer in town. Goes by the name of Astral Herpes.

Mondai ni

Megumi is 24. She dresses up like a schoolgirl. And for enough money, you get to be her teacher and tell her what to do.

She works at an imekura in Ueno, Tokyo. An “Image Club." But she’s quick to point out, “there’s no real sex involved.”

Megumi goes to a Buddhist college and has been working at the imekura for four years now. She’s also a licensed sumi-e artist. Her mother makes kimonos. What she wants to be doing in five years make me giggle: “teaching English.”

We meet at the Doutor café. Takeshita dori. A permanent shade of cold and black over the city and it’s barely late afternoon. The only time to meet is now because, “I go to sleep around 5am and wake up around 2pm everyday.”

Scrambling around Ura Harajuku like things in the spider pit. Her dress is conservative: basic jeans, black winter down coat with fur-lined hood. Black hair cut in kind of a glamour mullet (laughing later: “this is like, the worst hair style to have in America, right?”). It reminds me of a country singer somehow. She stops in a store and buys a set of silver rings. There is a laugh over some red and yellow plaid pants made out of mohair.

“You try them on.”

“No, you try them on!”

Mexican place in Shibuya. The way she orders food is impressive mystery. The staff comes up and presents options. She gives full eye contact and says nothing, nodding her head somewhere between a yes and no, but mostly just side to side, impossible to read. The waitress slides away spooked.

“I guess I’m kind of an actress, playing a role at the Image Club. That’s why I like Morning Musume and Ayaya. They kind of do the same thing. Ayaya is supposed to be, what, 19 years old? But there’s a rumor that she’s actually 25. Of course, I lie about my age at my job too.”

Qualifications? Someone once told me they nearly landed a job at one of those places. They looked young, had the right face, but simply didn’t have the chest for it. No one came out and just said it, but it was obvious.

“I’m the most popular girl there,” Megumi says with no hint of ego or pride. “At first, I wasn’t too crazy about working there, but now I’m starting to enjoy it. But still, this is high-risk, low-return stuff. I have to keep the job a secret from my friends and family.”

“Cops and politicians. They come in all the time. They don’t say that’s who they are, but you can tell by the way they look. The cops have this strange look in their eyes and are usually really sadistic.”

“One time, a German guy came in. His friend who was Japanese introduced him to the place. They looked really funny. The Japanese guy was short, and the German was huge. It was kind of strange at first, because he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do once his time started.”

Later, at a dining bar, waiting for the trains to start, we do the tarot. Celtic Cross. No reversals. The Three of Swords keeps coming up again and again: A heart pierced by thin blades. It looks pornographic to me now. Imagination eclipsing biology at hourly rates. All over the world soon.

“I have a pen pal in France,” Megumi says, between a beer, after telling me she’s reading Camus. “She’s 16 years old. But it’s kind of hard to communicate with her. All she wants to talk about is anime and manga."

Mondai ichi

November something.

And this is maid massage.

Her nametag reads Koma. Sleepy eyes in the Volks doll head. Low bangs hang just above them. 5 yen sized spots of talcum powder resting in a bunch all down the front of her black apron. Says she loves Zeta Gundam, Rose Maiden and that well-known children’s entertainer, Marilyn Manson. As if to prove it on the spot, planted in her bottom lower lip is a piercing, a silver ring erupting out of her lower jawline.

She says she’s…young. She looks the part, but has to be lying. Hasta be. Either way, Watanabe Denki is taken aback. “When I was growing up, none of the girls had piercing, or even tattoos. Now, it’s like they all do.”

Koma massages your feet and hands but it’s mostly your brain she works. Making you talk so much that you never realize how insane the situation really is until you stumble out on the Akihabara street below.

She throws tea and water at us before we pay. The name of the game now is Avoid Looking at the Next Customer Sitting Next to You, but we can’t help it. Koma’s next must weigh at least 350 lbs, stuffed into pleated navy-blue Super Men’s pants. “Jappa the Hutt.”

“I want to rescue her!” I tell Watanabe.

“You are MOE!”

Earlier, in the basement at Yamigawa-soft looking for the bathrooms. The trip takes us past the front of yet another newly opened maid cafe. A waiting line of sophistos stands in front, caught in various annoyed and impatient poses. The thousand cell phone stare. Second glance: all the customers are woman. Are the men all getting massages?

“They are probably media people,” speculates the visibly annoyed Watanabe, like a landlord who doesn’t like the color of the children being bussed in. “Reporters, TV people…”

In a shop, stone’s throw away from Akihabara station, there’s a wall of one-use-only sex toys. Thousands of foam vaginas packaged like beer cans. They go from 500 to 1100 yen a pop. Cheap. The cans are made out of all-plastic products. Recycle them on a Tuesday. On the front are lolicon anime and manga illustrations. Pastel colors. Stuffed animal nearby and tears everywhere. If that’s not your demographic, there are CGI beach bunnies, inspired by the Dead or Alive video game. A can of Kunoichi seems like the only concession to what we think of as anime. Looks like rejected character designs for Ninja Scroll on the wrapper. There’s the occasional porn star brand to be found, but for the most part, real women don’t figure into the product line.

Date Rape says, “that’s because Japanese men are afraid of real women. I want to kill them all.” Jay’s theory is that this is all a meme somehow. The world has decided that there is no more use for Japanese men. Thus, fragmented fantasy sex and declining birth rates.

On the way back to Draft One, up comes an Mp3 of an old Joseph Campbell lecture. He’s talking about “why it’s such a pleasure to be in Japan.” Apparently, this is where “the radiance trapped in the forms” comes through on a regular basis. He says it just as I walk by a smoky yakitori stand, one that’s been planted next to the shoe store. Stacks of limited edition Converse hi-tops cast sidewalk-shadows on November day.

Radiance means something different to all of us, I figure.

I wonder what Campbell would have made of Akihabara…and what the mythical interpretation of a maid massage parlor would be.

When I tell Honda-san what where I'd been and what I'd done that day, he came up with one on the fly for me.

"You're going to hell."

Hoterukan

Random Japan keeps interrupting the Jisaboke Film Festival.

From episode 106 of SCTV, the one where the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation takes over the airwaves, Joe Flaherty appears in military garb over some familiar looking old footage.   

It’s a candian fact

Did you know that when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Canadian…House of Commons declared war  on Japan immediately and the American Congress did not declare war until the next day? Thus, for 24 hours, Canada stood alone against the treacherous forces of Japan. Did you know that? Well, it’s a fact.

In other news, I tried to get a solid night’s sleep by drinking three pints of Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Pale Ale before hitting the sack. It didn’t work. Now, I’m hung-over AND jet-lagged. Splendid.

Anyone got any cures for a Double-Whammy  out there?

Shitamachi jocho

Liner notes for the Dragon Rock 2 DVD. Figured since they may not appear in English anytime soon, this would be as good a resting place for them as anywhere else. Sex and Death in Tokyo resumes tomorrow...

“I don’t know karate, but I know crazy,” James Brown once sang during that hot, funky, stinky, and utterly sexy time known as the seventies. Brother James’ song, The Payback, where those lyrics originally come from, played like a vision from a soul-dipped prophet. Even if James didn’t know karate, he certainly saw a definite link between the two, which was worth further inspection. And that’s just what the decade that followed did.

There was Bruce Lee, of course, but it was really Tsurugi – not Tsurugi Goten, but Takuma Tsurugi, played by Shinichi Chiba in a series of films for Toei Studios - that really nailed the combination down just right. In every step of Chiba’s black bell-bottoms pants, and every twitch of his massive caterpillar eyebrows came karate AND crazy in equal amounts. Like Tsurugi Goten, some thirty years later, Chiba walked a sublime line between macho and buffoonish, more manga character than man, a territory that even Bruce dare not to approach, because the final result was not just awe-inspiring, but rather… hysterically funny.

Suddenly, the laughter stopped big time: Lee dropped dead, Chiba got older, and so did we. And in the age that followed, Karate and crazy somehow got misplaced in the vast spectrum of popular culture. What sad little lives we had to live then during that epic impasse with only Steven Segal offered up as a kind of compensation.

It wouldn’t be until 2003’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 that people around the world suddenly remembered Japan in the ‘70s had actually been a very outrageous and funky place, what with all those movie stars like Chiba and Kaji Meiko running around. But Dragon Rock 2, debuting on the stage in 1999, was far ahead of this mass marketed, retro-cool curve.

Instead of just merely sighing “natsukashi” and trying to recreate the past, like in a wax museum, Dragon Rock 2 shows us exactly how pop culture went astray. Like a kind of stage-bound Sengoku Jieitai, it contrasts the images of Tsurugi, Jyoshu Sasori, and men in fundoshi waving samurai swords against the sort of people that tragically eclipsed them: waves of talentless idols phenomenon, push-button video game jockeys, and (god help us) what appears to be the entire cast of The Lion King.

But all this makes Dragon Rock 2 and Goten Tsurugi sound as if they had some sort of intellectual axe to grind against the present state of things (in reality, it’s only me). It’s clear after about 30 seconds that the whole thing is about as high-minded as a well-executed, perfectly timed fart. And to not laugh at the moment of impact - and to maybe take a small whiff around you - is to deny your own imperfect, half-crazed humanity.

For me, the key scene happens early on when Goten Tsurugi interacts - dancing really - with his own atsui opening title animation, running across a hand-drawn desert landscape like he was an ultra-masculine hairy Roadrunner. Here’s hoping that we haven’t seen the last of his kind and that he never reaches a final destination, because it sure sucked the last time karate and crazy went missing from this particular planet.

The Rokumeikan

Japan strikes back: today, I have to whip up an essay for the R2 DVD of the absolutely fucking bonkers stage show Chokugeki Dragon Rock 2 featuring Sonny Chiba inspired protagonist Goten Tsurugi. The previews for the Goten DVD box (already out) are here, and play like a mini-Teruo Ishii movie on mescaline. Oh, and the box set art is by Katsuya Terada, who did the character designs for Blood the Last Vampire, so everyone's connected.

Hopefully, someday, we can all live in a world where they sell this sort of thing at Best Buy.

Thunderball Sakusen

Tangled webs: funnybook scribe Warren Ellis outs himself as "Internet Jesus," figures me as "essentially Small-Time" and we finally become brothers over Casino Royale, of all things. Here.

And yes, it's true. James Bond has completely hijacked this blog like an Avro Vulcan bomber piloted by Count Lippe.

Oogon-ju wo motsu otoko

Random James Bond thoughts:

Met George "Big Fry" Lazenby once at a very depressing autograph fair near SFO (so depressing that we saw Mickey Rooney in a wheelchair and Adam West looked up my girlfriend). He asked, “What are you” the second I approached him...a very Fleming moment. He signed my OHMSS DVD and immediately afterwards, we ran to Le Video to rent a fucking terrible Emmanuel movie he was in. We laugh at bit at George over here, but he’s a god in Asia for having been in The Man From Hong Kong with Jimmy Wang Yu.

I asked Tetsuro Tamba what it was like doing YOLT. He said that in 1965 he was in a hotel room in England banging some white girl. Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door. He opens it fully naked and there before him stands Sean Connery. He needed to use a phone. Badly. One year later, they were filming a Bond movie together. This, Tamba said, was “destiny.”

“What kind of destiny is that?” Machiyama said after…

My dad had all the Bond books and religiously watched the movies whenever they were on TV. When I was in my 20s, he confessed to me that he *still* fucking hated the Commies for starting the Cold War, which saw him drafted out of college and primed to fight in Korea only to never see action. Suddenly, it all made sense.

I have a fondness for License to Kill *because* it’s so absurdly violent and excessive. I mean, Felix being fed to a shark by Benicio Del Toro? The authors of the book Kiss Kiss Bang! Bang!: The Unoffical James Bond 007 Film Companion (for my chips, the best 007 film book out there) hesitated to even consider it a proper Bond movie simply because it was filmed in Mexico.

I’m on some weird Lorenzo Semple Jr. kick right now. Must be all the King Kong ’76 in the air. I guess this means I’ll have to watch Never Say Never Again again. But if jet lag continues to kill me, I'll put on Thunderball instead. All the underwater stuff puts me out faster than a Ghibli film.

I’m a huge fan of Casino Royale. The last reel is as close as anyone has gotten to filming the unfilmable Gravity’s Rainbow. If Frankenstein’s Monster, or at least a flying roulette wheel does not appear in the new version, I will boo and hiss.

Anyone played the new From Russia With Love video game? Looks cool, but I don’t have a console of any kind. Amazingly, Connery does the voice acting. Was Lazenby not available? Wait, he was probably doing a Yu Yu Hakusho.

Oh, and Carl, do you think that doing those Bond comic may have possibly influenced Takao Saito when he created Golgo 13?