Jon Siegel // 米岡 ジョン

I love Kirin, and I love beer. Memories of my first year in Japan are peppered with great dinners paired with a cold Super Dry. I saw this new campaign on the train today and my immediate thought was, “Free beer?”. This is an example of a campaign that only works in Japan. The terms, “Free”, “Calorie Off”, and simply, “Off” are all common English terms adopted by Japanese corporations to market their diet and alcohol-free products. I appreciate the simplicity of it, but had a hard time stifling a laugh at the sight of “Free” beer.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pacman, Namco and the convenience store chain Sunkus tie up with a release of a Pacman shaped steamed bun. The bun itself is filled with cookie and custard cream. The custard cream is a typical Japanese dessert filling, but the inclusion of the cookie element is a new thing. The bun is about $1.25USD~(120 yen) and is available for a limited time only. Beneath the bun is a custom designed wrapper with information about Pacman’s 30th anniversary.

Tie-ups like this are not uncommon in Japan, but this product is very unique and an intelligent pairing of concepts. I can’t vouch for the flavor of the product though, even for the Japanese market, the flavor was a little exotic.

Gamers gather to play co-op in the new Dragon Quest game for the Nintendo DS. The game is wildly popular in Japan with groups like this all over Tokyo. This group was in front of the mega electronics store Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara.

15,000 yen will get you a tiny CMOS sensor with some tweaked settings that give a sort of washed out “Lomo” look to it’s little 640 x 480 videos. It can handle microSDHC up to 16GB and it’s pretty much set on auto pilot the whole way. You can see some of the monochrome videos it can shoot here.

Not sure if this is really worth 15,000 yen when you can buy a used digital pocket cam for about half the price and get the same shoddy results tweaking it in FCP.

The elusive Tokyo sake vending machine. I love the old fonts used on these machines, all custom lettered.