Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

Besides that last blog post, something else that Satoshi Kon posted on his blog - on August 18th, just a few days before he passed away - was a list of the 100 movies that were "chosen by the Yume Miru Kikai team".

There may be some things about Satoshi Kon's last words that may be puzzling to non-Japanese readers, so I'm going to attempt to clarify some of them. Note that this is not based on any kind of personal knowledge of Mr. Kon or his family, but just on general principles that are atari mae, commonly held mores and principles, in Japanese culture.

Satoshi Kon, the director of anime movies Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress and Paprika, as well as the TV series Paranoia Agent, died on Tuesday, August 24th at the age of 46. (NY Times obituary.) He left behind a rambling but extraordinary document, which his family has posthumously posted on his blog.

As far as I know there's no translation of the whole document into English out there, so here's a rough attempt here it is. (Edit: I've cleaned it up quite a bit since I posted it last night. It should now be quite close to the original. It is indeed rather long and rambling - he wrote it like that. I'm sure he didn't sit down to outline it before he wrote it. I have tried to keep the feeling of the original.) It's not authorized in any way, and if I receive objections from interested parties or see a formal translation up somewhere I'll take this down. In the meantime though, here's a chance to read the words of a dying artist, waiting for his flight to come.

The most recent Mad Men episode reminded me of my father's experiences as a Japanese businessman in Europe and the U.S. back in the late '60s to '70s.

It was quite heartbreaking to see Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang have to pull out of his Olympic event due to injury. I have to admit that I am now very curious to see how his country reacts to a fallen hero with such big expectations on his shoulders.

This Japanese blog post ran across the virtual desktop of my life today. (It was on the del.icio.us/popular list.) It tells a tale of unbelievable service by Nintendo. Here's a rough and somewhat abbreviated translation:

(English speakers, please excuse me. This rant is in Japanese.)

Last week I tentatively opened up a new site dedicated to bento, the Japanese meal in a box. I have been kicking around the idea of such a site for quite some time now but I was not sure if I should open a new site, or just fold more bento-related content into my existing, more general food site, Just Hungry. While there are already several bento blogs out there, I was not sure if there would be enough interest in a whole site dedicated to Japanese-style lunch boxes, so I procrastinated, before decided that I wanted to organize all that information in one, separate location.

In less than a week, the traffic to Just Bento, discounting the lack of search engine generated visits, has almost equalled that of the almost 4 year old Just Hungry. I'm simply astonished.

But then it's not the first time that I've been surprised at just how much interest there is in things Japanese, from non-Japanese people, in recent years. Whether it's anime or manga, gadgets or toys, fashion or sushi, amigurumi or Hello Kitty, each time I see how 'hot' and 'cool' something Japanese is it throws me for a loop. The funny thing is that all of this interest seems to have come after the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in the late '80s to early '90s.

I find this story in USA Today about more American men taking their wives' last names (via kottke) rather interesting as a snapshot of gender attitudes. My impression of the American Male is that a lot of them are awfully defensive about their masculinity, much more so than men elsewhere, which explains the "sissy juice" comments received by Sam Van Hallgren (who, incidentally, is co-host of the one podcast besides This American Life that I listen to religiously, Filmspotting.)

In Japan, men have been taking their wives' last names for a long time. This may seem surprising in light of the view of Japanese society as being very male dominant. In fact, it's done for practical, usually business, purposes. If the woman's family has a well known business which is run as a family concern, and the man marrying the woman is going to enter, and eventually take over, that business, he is legally adopted by the woman's family and thus takes her surname along with it. This is called becoming a yo-shi. The word and concept is the same as for a child being adopted.

Last time I griped about the numerous ways in which the popular U.S. TV series Heroes got Japanese things so totally wrong. Over the weekend we finally got to see Babel. The merits of the movie as a movie aside (I liked it, sort of, though it left me a bit cold), as far as the Tokyo scenes were concerned I thought that they felt absolutely right. There might be some minor quibbles with some details of how Chieko (played by Oscar-nominated Rinko Kikuchi) and her friends act (though, not having been a Japanese teenager for some time, I really don't know how a typical 16-17 year old acts) but the atmosphere, the sets, and the way people generally behaved felt very natural.