The song is precious, sung by MEG, music by 中田ヤスタカ (Nakata Yasutaka), the DJ behind capsule and perfume. The video is directed by the late 野田さん.

Her works feel like Michel Gondry, utilizing amazing tricks that are totally mundane in nature. Another video to check out is Yuki’s Sentimental Journey for more of 野田さん’s work.

In the MEG video, we have the people in black doing the magic. It blows my mind, because the first time I saw this effect was in 文楽 (bunraku), which is a Japanese puppet theatre where one pupper is operated by 3 people. When I first saw it, I thought it was a real person… and then the camera zoomed in on the puppet.

So this video has it all. Music by 中田ヤスタカ, PV directed by 野田凪, and MEG, of course. Bravo, simple amazing.

Technorati Tags: bunraku, meg, music, nagi noda, pop culture, traditional culture, video, ystk

There is this odd phenomenon where when you don’t live in Japan, but are interested in it, it takes a while before something reaches critical mass and starts to leak out to other country’s Japanese-speaking populations. perfume archived this a few weeks ago.

perfume (generally not capitalized [like right after I said this, I suddenly saw it in regular caps everywhere...]) is a three girl group from Hiroshima. The members are あ～ちゃん (A~chan), かしゆか (Kashiyuka, sometimes ksyk in ローマ字), and のっち (Nocchi). They struggled for many years, apparently since elementary school, to make hit songs, but until Yasutaka Nakata, a fairly popular DJ, picked them up, they didn’t really succeed.

My personal history with perfume started when I saw the IKZOLOGIC video a while back. From that video, I started to get into capsule. Yasutaka Nakata is the DJ for capsule, so when I went looking for more music by him, I ended up hearing a lot of perfume.

But I didn’t think much of them. And then they took off and started showing up on TV and now I am on-board… they are a girl group… they don’t make their own music, but Yasutaka-san is awesome, so at least it is good music. They are just there to look pretty and dance. All their live performances are lip-synced to allow them to dance in their very unique way.

Funny thing is most people have a favorite. They are made to all look different, mainly with wardrobe and hair styles differing. I must admit that のっち is my favorite. She’s the short haired one… (-.-;)

Their blog is here. Sorry, it’s in Japanese… for now…

I leave you with their music video/commercial for Pino brand bonbons. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: blogs, electropop, girls, Japanese girls, music, perfume, pop culture, video, ystk

The first thing that make ニコニコ動画 stand out is its unique comment system. Rather than putting comments at the bottom of the video, what you write is immediately put over the video anonymously at whatever timestamp you happen to be watching at the moment.

What this leads to is every video being covered up in everyone’s comments. Popular videos end up with so many comments, it is sometimes hard to see what is going on in the video! I have to admit that at first, it was really distracting. But once you start getting into it, it’s almost like watching a video with friends who are commenting in real time. What you get is an amazing feeling of community.

And that’s the other thing that makes ニコニコ動画 so amazing. The community, which is pretty much all anonymous in nature, is much akin to the sort of people you might find on fark or YTMND. Culture is happening en mass. It’s brilliant.

The reason I even mention the site is that I watch it pretty maniacally. I’ve even been called a ニコ厨 (nicochu) at work. If you are going to read this blog, you are going to get a lot of links to ニコ動画. Thus, you need an account!

If you speak Japanese, just hop on over. If not, Tokyotronic walks you through the registration process.

If you are having second thoughts, let me assure you… someday, you will thank me for it. XD

Technorati Tags: nicovideo, obligatory, otaku, pop culture, video