geometry / 幾何学
by joostay
Categories: Tokyo Days • Tags: angles, art, blog, geometry, gym, japan, japanese, outdoors, photography, tokyo, working out
Monthly Archives: October 2014
FILL. EVERY. SPACE.
by joostay
How Tokyo’s apparent lack of urban planning can actually be an urban planning model. “First-time visitors to Tokyo may arrive with one of two fantasies dancing in their heads. One is the hyper-modern city of sleek 100-story high-rises and gleaming starchitecture. The other is the darker version: The city that inspired Blade Runner and Akira, a super-dense, technology-saturated metropolis in which Manga faces on towering billboards grin down on shootouts and chase scenes.” – Informal City Dialogues Urban planning is something […]
Categories: Tokyo Days • Tags: accra, asia, bangkok, chennai, community, growth, housing, ikimasho, Informal City Dialogues, japan, japanese, lima, manila, nairobi, Rockefeller Foundation, se asia, tokyo, tokyo. japan, urban planning
The Smallest Drum Major
by joostay
It’s a small world. Marching Performance at a Japanese kindergarten. Earlier in the year I posted about my class of five-year-olds performing the Jurassic Park theme tune for the ongakukai (Music Festival). Those particular kids have long since moved on to Elementary School, having been replaced with this year’s batch of nen-cho students. Not to be outdone by their predecessors, these new kids did a marching performance for our annual undōkai (Sports Day) that once again showed how amazingly talented these little guys and girls are.
Categories: Kindergarten Life • Tags: asia, blog, drums, english, festival, ikimasho, japan, japanese, keyboards, kindergarten, music, sports day, talent, teaching, tefl, tokyo, undokai
Kagurazaka Bakeneko Parade 2014 (Ghost Cat Parade)
by joostay
Nya-nya-ing our way through the cat-strewn streets of Tokyo Working in a Japanese kindergarten not only affords me the luxury of coming into close contact with every single germ known to man, it also provides me with an abundance of information that is essentially useless to anyone over the age of six. For example, did you know that in Japan dogs don’t go woof-woof, they go wan-wan; frogs don’t ribbit, they go kero-kero; cats don’t meow, they go nya-nya. Now I say this information is useless but actually it came in quite handy […]
Categories: Bizarre/Unique, Tokyo Days • Tags: asia, bizarre, blog, cat, cats, festival, ikimasho, japan, japanese, matsuri, neko, parade, se asia, surreal, tokyo
The Grandfather Clock
by joostay
The bus is quiet tonight. A few Chinese workers from the Panasonic plant and a family of three wearing identical scarves and hats. The little girl draws a few random squiggles on the foggy window with her finger and then erases her artwork with the cuff of her sleeve. Rinse. Repeat. Wax on. Wax off. Every time a new passenger climbs on board, he or she goes through the same ritual: shaking their umbrella and making a loud brrrr noise just to make sure everyone on the bus knows […]
Categories: Tokyo Days • Tags: atsugi, blog, CREATIVE, food, hon-atsugi, ikimasho, inaka, japan, japanese, rain, ramen, tokyo
Sticking up for Berastagi, Sumatra.
by joostay
A quiet town with not much going on. But that’s exactly why you should go. The picture above is one of my favourite photos, taken down a quiet street in the town of Berastagi in north Sumatra. There’s nothing spectacular about its content, but I remember the moment very clearly – a group of kids playing just down the road from the house I was staying in. Berastagi is visited by many travellers who use it as a base to […]
Categories: Travel: Outside Japan • Tags: asia, backpacking, berastagi, blog, budget, carts, climbing sibayak, homestay, horses, ikimasho, indonesia, japan, japanese, justin egli, roadtrip, se asia, sibayak, sinabung, street food, sumatra, tokyo, travelling
Android: What is Human? Innovations in Humanoid Robotics.
by joostay
A new exhibition in Tokyo explores what it means to be human. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is quite possibly Philip K. Dick’s most famous work – a science fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic near future, subsequently forming the primary basis for the 1982 film, Blade Runner. The film depicts a dystopian world in 2019 in which genetically engineered replicants, which are visually indistinguishable from adult humans, are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation as well as by other “mega-corporations” around the […]
Categories: Art Music & Culture, Tokyo Days • Tags: androids, blade runner, blog, do androids dream of electric sheep, future, hiroshi ishiguro, ikimasho, japan, japanese, kodomoroid, miraikan, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, otonaroid, telenoid, tokyo
