IKEA Japan Storage Problems campaign: Dance to the beat!

In 2009, IKEA Japan ran a marketing campaign called Shunoumondai (Storage Problems). “Storage Solution Experts” from IKEA would go to the homes of people with major storage problems, install a bunch of IKEA stuff, and solve it. The theme of the campaign was this catchy song with calypso beat, and the accompanying dance. (Katazuke means ‘to put [stuff] away’).

Catchy, isn’t it? I have to restrain myself from breaking out in song and dance at our local IKEA in Avignon.

IKEA held in-house auditions for the campaign, where their employees had to demonstrate their…dance abilities? Well here are some of the auditions.

Some of the employees are suspiciously good. This guy here must be an ex-ballet dancer or something…

And finally, here are a couple of the Storage Problem Solving visits. They do the dance as warm-up and cool-down exercises, reminiscent of Rajio Taiso (radio exercises and the morning assembly exercised performed at some Japanese companies.

It’s even funnier when a platinum blond Swede does it!

You can see the rest of the series here.

I just love this Apple Japan New Years 2012 image.

RRcherrypie’s Advent calendar

RRcherrypie is a Japanese person who uploads videos to YouTube that show off various food related toys and such. She’s put a variety of shokugan, or toy prizes that come in food packages, in her advent calendar box. Some are from Re-ment, such as the little box of chocolates. Adorable!

I used to be a big Re-ment fan, before the company changed its lineup to emphasize licensed character items over realistic miniatures. You can see some of my Re-ment related postings on JustHungry and JustBento here.

Jazz piano Silent Night →

Jazz Piano Small Pieces is the musical podcast (RSS link) of a Japanese guy (changee) who is a ‘fan of Bill Evans’. His latest upload is Silent Night. I like his style - he is very good, but not totally polished like a seasoned pro, so you get the feeling you’re sitting near a piano while it’s being played by a good friend on a quiet evening. Enjoy.

The Advent calendar got rudely interrupted because on the day I posted my last Christmassy link, I got thrown back in hospital due to my surgery wound getting badly infected. Boo. So, no more advent calendar this year. ;_; But I’ll post some Xmassy stuff anyway. Here’s my real advent calendar, that I made a couple of years ago.

Maki’s Advent Calendar Day 2:

Take 6 is a gospel a cappella group. They’ve been around since 1980, and despite some member changes their sound has remained consistent - rich, layered yet quite laid back. I love good a cappella, but no group is as soul-satisfying to listen to as Take 6. Here they are singing I’ll Be Home For Christmas. Keep in mind that rich sound comes just from six voices, no instruments. Amazing.

You can find a lot of their other Christmas and other songs on YouTube, Spotify, etc.

Maki’s Advent Calendar Day 1:

This is a short film called Tanghi Argentini. It was nominated for an Oscar in 2008. The payoff is wonderful. Enjoy.

A bit of Christmas cheer every day.

What with the operation and my father dying and all, I know I’ve been depressed and making people around me depressed too these days. So, to compensate a bit I’m going to be bringing a bit of Christmas cheer every day until the big day. Sort of like an advent calendar.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Things you can do with a paper book that you can’t with an ebook.

• Lend or borrow it easily to/from someone else (Damn DRM)
• Read it in the tub
• Quickly riffle through it to find something you want (for me at least, looking for something in an ebook takes much longer, unless I know the exact word/phrase to search for)
• Turn back/forward to/from specific pages easily
• Use it to prop up your wonky table leg
• Put flower petals within its pages, to surprise you years later when you’ve forgotten about them and they gently flutter into your lap
• Cut random letters/phrases out of to form a ransom note
• Cut out the middle to conceal a revolver
• Line up on your shelves to give your room a a bookish air, as well as provide some sound and heat insulation
• Provide an excuse for having a bookcase that hides a secret door leading to…your hidden lair, your secret dungeon, your stash of gold, an escape route for your heretic priest friend, or a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis
• Use the pages as emergency toilet paper

The boring stuff: why I made this list

I am very glad that Amazon has decided to update the Stanza reading app for iOS5, even though the update doesn’t work on older iOSes and is probably the last update ever to the app, as Amazon forces encourages people to switch to the Kindle. They want you to buy a physical Kindle, but they’ll settle for you using the app.

Anyway, I have been reading books on ereaders since…well, since the days of the Newton. (Yep I’m the one who bought a Newton.) I read them on my computer screen, and I read them on my Palm Pilot device. I remember getting through a boring couple of days of jury duty by reading Star Trek novels on my Palm. Ebooks are great, especially for someone like me who likes to read English or Japanese books, but lives elsewhere. Shipping costs for books internationally are either super-duper-slow (you’ve forgotten you’ve even ordered the book by the time you get it) or ridiculously high. I don’t have to pay shipment for ebooks.

Still, I’ve been getting quite grumpy about the ebook world lately. For one thing, why do I have to pay extra for an ebook if the reader app/program it was on, or the online bookstore that sold it, is no longer? That’s the situation people that relied on Stanza thought they were facing for a month. Stanza is now back, but now I’m wary about the status of the eReader app. It used to be the Palm eReader (before that the store itself was called Peanut Press) but Barnes and Noble bought it, and the app hasn’t been updated in zonkers, and the store itself seems to be slowly bled to death. If/when the eReader app stops working on my iPad/iPhone, what then? I have about 80 books I purchased there. I’m supposed to re-purchase them in another format? Not quite fair. (There’s a workaround, but still.)

So, I still continue to buy books, especially Japanese books (the ebook market in Japan has not taken off yet, mainly because publishers are dragging their feet). I suppose the ebook market will continue to expand, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.

It’s not even perpetual.

This is a solid gold 2012 calendar made to commemorate Walt Disney’s 110th birthday. It was unveiled by a jewelry maker in Ginza, Tokyo called Ginza Tanaka.

The calendar measures 41.66 cm x 66.6 cm (about 16.3” x 26.2”) and comes in a frame. The total weight of the gold is 6 kg (about 13.2 lbs). The description doesn’t specify, but since 18K is the standard for gold jewelry in Japan (14K is not really considered to be solid gold) I’m assuming the calendar is at least 18K.

The calendar costs 60 million yen, or about US $768,250.

Also available: a small 5 gram gold calendar for 45,000 yen, a 1 gram version for 11,000 yen, and a larger gold leaf calendar for 35,000 yen. (Japanese page)

Now, I have been pondering who the heck is the intended customer for this line of gold calendars. It is sort of hard to imagine a lot of Japanese customers buying these, even if Disney fandom runs deep in Japan, since they are so ostentatious. Especially not this year, the year of repeated natural disasters (besides the earthquake and tsunami, there has been record breaking flooding too) and continuing economic woes. Besides, rich Japanese people these days do not like to flaunt their wealth anymore, unlike in the show-off 1980s.

I suspect that the primary target for these calendars are wealthy Chinese customers. Ginza is apparently a mecca for Chinese tourists with money to burn - so much so that the venerable department store Mitsukoshi remade their store to appeal more to them (a move which drew a lot of criticism and ire from their Japanese customer base).

Maybe that’s the role Japan is going to play in the near future: a shiny little playground and shopping mall for rich dilettantes from other Asian countries.