Friday Link-a-palooza

I read a rather large number of blogs which cover the news, commentary, and insanity from Korea and Japan and not a day goes by that I do not find a couple of things worth sharing with my loyal readers. I keep marking these entries as unread in my feed-reader with the intent of sharing them with you at some point. Now that there are over 100 in there to share, I think the time has come to unveil my new semi-weekly feature in which I do a linkblogging entry to keep you all abreast of the the wackiness from across the Pacific. I do not have any good ideas for a name for this, so if anyone can suggest one you'll get a nifty tip o' the bowler.


Linguistic Hilarity

• First up, words to live by from Matt Alt over at AltJapan. (He is also the co-author of freind of the Opiate Tim Brikso's book Super #1 Robot.)
• JP over at Japundit is confused by this shirt. Perhaps it is 100% real artificial?
• I have nothing funny to say here, nothing at all.
• If I had seen this shirt while I was in Tokyo I totally would have bought one for my roommate Annie.
• Again I offer this up without any additional comment.
• Overoften at Japundit has solved the age old mystery of DWA.
• Ummm, yeah.
• Tease!
• Usually I can hack my way through the language and figure out the meaning. This one has me stumped.
• Awwww....isn't he kawaii!
  

Wacky Products from the Orient

• Lee over at TokyoTimes seems to think a Hello Kitty banana case is just what the doctor ordered!
• I am not sure if Keepon is actually going to be available in the retail world in the future, however it is pretty damn cool. Shake a tail feather lil' dude! (On second thought this thing might give me nightmares about the legions of Peeps I have consumed. Thanks for the loss of sleep, James.)
  

Asian Advertising is A-OKAY!

• Care to sign up for the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force? If not these two ads will certainly change your mind! Seaman Ship for Love, indeed!
• For those of you with a more academic bent, you can buy this piece of software which will help you learn kanji on your Nintendo DS.
• Mozilla Firefox is my browser of choice and with this ad it is certain to blow up in Japan. They have fox-ears on and everything.
• The McFlurry invasion of Japan has begun and it is led by some seriously bling'd out penguins. One might, if one had a predeliction for HORRIBLE jokes, say they were McPimpin', but really we are way above that here.
• While here in the States, Glen Beck tries to convince us that the jury is out on global warming, in Japan the girl-group Hello Project tells us to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle in this ad. (If that doesn't convince you to do it then you might have to deal with the ire of Kotooshu, the Bulgarian-born sumo wrestler who delivers the same message in this ad.)
• So this next ad is for diet water, a concept that I am more than just a little hazy on. How can one make water lite? Probably best not to think too much about these things, besides, it seems to get this sloth pretty pumped.
• Everything in Japan gets the cute, or kawaii, treatment, even band-aids. (For more information about this sort of anthropomorphism in Japanese advertising you may want to check out the forthcoming book Hello, Please! Very Helpful Super Kawaii Characters from Japan by Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda. Or you can just check out this pic from AltJapan.)
• In this clip, from Japundit, I don't really care what is being advertised as much as the manner in which the advertising is being done.
  

Drinking with a Kung-Fu Grip

Given my love of the drink it is probably a good thing I do not live in Japan. Prepackaged sake Jello shots? Buckets of sochu just waiting to be consumed? One cups? How in the hell is a man expected to stay sober? Oh, well the image on the vending machine at the bottom of this post might slow me down a bit.