“Maybe what she was feeling now was what her civics program had called culture shock. She felt like everything, every little detail of Tokyo, was just different enough to create a kind of pressure, something that built up against her eyes, as though they’d grown tired of having to notice all the differences: the little sidewalk tree that was dressed up in a sort of woven basket, the neon-avocado color of a payphone, a serious looking girl with round glasses and a gray sweatshirt that said *free vagina*. She’d been …

This past Sunday saw six time champion yokozuna Asashoryu from Mongolia beat the Bulgarian sekiwake Kotooshu in a playoff bout to win the Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament. The number of foreigners in this traditional Japanese sport has been increasing rapidly over the years with 12 of the current 42 wrestlers in the top makuuchi division being non-Japanese. There is even talk of making it an Olympic sport. Interestingly, when you speak to the locals about sumo they respond with a look of indifference, telling you it is an old man`s …

We are in the final hours before our flight to Beijing. Plans to blog while on the trip are foggy at best. I may try to fire off a few quick impressions of the digital skylines and cybernetic crowds but I will have to see how it all plays out. As a last blog entry, I leave you with photographer Michael Wolf’s website, a series of photographs and collected posters that best represent the contents of my dreams over these last days before my imminent departure. Mata ne.

If anyone has any recommendations for restaurants that we should be checking out while in Shanghai, it would be great to hear from you. At the moment, the plan is to check out Cloud Nine for the view at the very least. The other restaurant that caught my eye is Tou Ming Si Kao which looks like something straight out of a Wong Kar Wai movie. As for Beijing, we will probably take most of our meals at the night market. Mmmm…deep fried scorpion.

Jane and I are heading to Asia this Friday so we have been busy doing a ton of reading and research not mention brushing up on our etiquette skills. This site, how-to-bow.com is quirky and bizarre and deadly accurate when it comes to Japanese do’s and don’ts. (via Coudal)

Climbing into the back of the pickup truck on the dusty street, a trio of tribes women surround us wearing clothes of bright yellows, magentas and cyans, and black hats decorated with jingling tokens and coins. Their smiles are stained red with bettlenut juice and they thrust toward me their handfuls of bracelets and scarves all the while whispering under their breath the mantra on their true intent: “Opium….o..p..i..u..m..”
We were leaving Muang Xing in the north of Laos, thirteen miles south of the Chinese border. This was one of the …

Sony Classics has posted a new website for Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 designed by Klimate out of New York City. I love the kaleidoscopic transitions between the pages.
I rented 2046 the other night and found it to be exquisite, which is not a word that I generally throw out there to describe anything, but in this case it seems appropriate. It is the third in a trilogy that pays homage to Wong Kar Wai’s fascination with Hong Kong in the 1960′s. I am inadvertently watching these films in reverse order …

A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon a photoblog website out of Japan called fotologue.jp. Its clean and dynamic interface far surpassed anything that we had seen in the North American market. It seemed like an excellent B-side for the Industrial Brand Creative website at the very least; a third cornerstone (along with the blog) for our online community at best. So after a number of false starts and emails lost in translation, we were finally invited to register for our own page.
The idea was to create a …