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The ad-line reads “甘くて、ほかほか、チイーズ入り!”, translating roughly into “Sweet, Hot, with Cheese!”, which made me want to run right into the shop and scarf down a couple of these An-Burgers. A steamy mix of Anko (red bean paste) on a bed of margerine and topped with a slice of cheese, this burger is the winter offering from a major fast-food joint in Tokyo. It comes as a relief that every person of every nationality I’ve shown this photo to has had the same reaction.

The An-Burger is the latest entry in “Things Which Should Never Be”, where it will hang its head in shame next to pizza with corn on it (which I consider a crime against humanity).

Fuji-san is big. I grew up living on a mountain along the appalachian trail, so I thought I knew what made a mountain. But Fuji is in a whole other class. It is mind-numbingly, inconceivably huge.

The first time I saw Mt. Fuji, my wife pointed it out to me through the train window. I looked out at a group of impressively tall and craggy peaks and picked out the large central one. “That’s tall and impressive, ” I said. She laughed, and told me I was looking at the wrong mountain. Read the rest of this entry »

Staying in touch with the hometown is always a good thing when living on the other side of the world. My hometown* newspaper, the Warwick Valley Dispatch recently asked me to write a short article about Autumn and the Autumn festivals here in Japan. You can find out more about Warwick and the Dispatch at www.warwickinfo.net.

(Tokyo) In a city as massive as Tokyo, a person wouldn’t expect to notice the change in the season all that much. When I taught English in the Imabari countryside the signs of Autumn’s coming were hard to miss; the foliage slowly slid into warm reds and golds and the farmers busied themselves with the harvest. Even without these obvious hints, I woke a few days ago and knew without a doubt that it was Autumn. Read the rest of this entry »

He’s an elephant! He’s a robot! He’s a watering can!

He’s also only ¥100 (about 86¢US as of right now; although I’ve always found the ¥100 = $1.00 rule to be a fairly safe bet. It all balances out over time). We picked him up a few months ago from the 100 Yen shop when we decided that our backyard needing some color (green) in the form of plants. When I say backyard, I refer to the 3 foot by 8 foot rectangle of concrete and hard earth. Just enough room to hang out the laundry, keep a few flowers, and provide a little bit of earth for the local fauna to romp on. We’re luckier than most Tokyoites in that respect.

We were fortunate to get MechaZo-san when we did. He sold out shortly after. That’s because he’s kawaii, you see. Cute. Kawaii is one of the central pillars of modern Japanese civilization. Nearly every box, bag or package you pick up has a cartoon character on it somewhere. Half the time, the products are in the shape of a character themselves. Even my National Health Insurance Instruction booklet is set up as a comic. This is a good thing, because even thought I don’t know the kanji (squiggly alphabet character) for food poisoning or lycanthropy, I can sure follow along with the pictures. Stomach cramping and hairy palms have never seemed so adorable. Nor has watering the plants.

There’s nothing quite like a train to see the country. And, when you travel from Tokyo to a small island off the coast of Shikoku, you can see pretty much the whole country. For a large part of the trip, my wife and I tried to guess where a good place to live would be, if we ever tired of being in one of the biggest cities in the world. We’re both from the country, so it may very well happen. The rest of the trip I spent scribbling away at mythological beasties which I can’t show all y’all just yet.

Above, you can see Toyo, my wife’s cat. Toyo is currently rooming with my in-laws until such time as we move into a pet-friendlier place and I am magically cured of my allergies. Like all cats, Toyo can sense people with severe dander problems, so she spent most of the time crawling into my lap. Or maybe she just likes the sound of sneezing. Good thing I like cats.

Typically I’m not one for the ocean (or inland sea), but I completely enjoyed the island, with its salty air and its jaggy mountains climbing right out of the narrow beaches. After such a nice break, it’s good to get the nose back to the grindstone. And what a grindstone it is. Big and rough. Posts may be scarce for the next few weeks until I get some of these deadlines behind me.

I walk the streets of Tokyo with my keitai always at the ready, my fingers twitching for it like a gunfighter for his side-iron. Keitai, by the by, is the Japanese word for mobile phone. Mine cost ¥1. About a penny. It’s not the snazziest available model, but the built in camera is pretty spiffy.

One of the great oddities here in Tokyo are the wildly inappropriate shop signs. Not “inappropriate” as in “naughty”, but rather “why does such a tiny shop have such a huge sculpture, and what does an octopus have to do with bicycles anyway?”.

I snapped this one in Asakusa a while back. It was out front of a shoe store - so there is some connection. A run-of-the-mill, everyday, nothing fancy shoe store on a back street. You may not be able to see it in this shot, but there is a wicked barb on the back of this flying boot. The ultra-modern sci-fi chrome stand in front of an old wooden shop only adds to the mystique.

Hellboy Rocks. Mike Mignola Rocks. A comedy/action cartoon based on Mignola’s comic “The Amazing Screw-On Head” just had to Rock. And it does. Hard. After all, it has a mechanical secret agent working for Abraham Lincoln.

You can see the entire pilot online at SciFi.com. Then take the survey to know that you want to see more. I sure do.

This is the cut-paper studio.

One of the quirks of living in Japan is that furniture is just a touch smaller than I’m used to. This table is 2 or 3 cm shorter in all dimensions than the student drafting table I was using back in the States. Until I really get used to it, I expect I’ll keep knocking things off it. I learned quickly to be careful with anything liquid or sticky. Or sharp. On the plus side, it’s built like a rock. I also hope to be able to add a lamp to the mix one day.

Space is pretty vital over here, which is why everything is piled on top of one another. Rooms are measured in tatami mats (about 34 x 70 in). An average room like this is 6 mats. I began using one of the tables to flip through my piles and piles of paper, but that didn’t work out. The paper has a tendency to spread and fill any semi-available space. I’ve tried to control this entropy, but it’s pretty futile.
Here’s the business nook. I try to keep my business and promotion work separate from where I do my art. The idea is to prevent distractions. Occasionally it works.

The computer is one of those newfangled intel-powered iMacs. Love it. It’s great to watch movies on. At night. After work. It does keep the music playing all day - something I find essential to doing any kind of art.

Inoshishi is Japanese for boar. Like TakoButa-san, this picture was inspired by a competition, albeit with somewhat more stringent rules. For one thing, the subject was a boar - kind of a pig with anger-management problems. The image had to be one-color and fit inside a 15cm circle. I had been wanting to do a single color image for a while (and I plan on doing more in the near future), so I turned this into an experiment with positive and negative space. I also wanted to play around a bit with the decorative elements, the spirals and swirls shoved up against some perpendicular and parallel lines.

All in all, I like the image. It provides an interesting challenge for the viewer. Maybe more interesting to me than the piece itself is how the elements I was playing with here have found their way into my subsequent work. And who knows, this might make a cool t-shirt someday.

I love Japanese food. Pretty much all Japanese food. Okonomiyaki, yakitori, kushiage, sushi, sashimi, soba, udon, takoyaki (which, by the by, suffers from what may be the worst case of mis-translation in history, burdened with the unfortunate moniker “octopus balls”. They aren’t. I’m almost positive). Raw or cooked, grilled, breaded or fried, served in a broth or on a stick; no other cuisine can hope to match the sheer variety of subtle shades of flavor. There’s even a sake served with a grilled fish fin in it-and lit afire before drinking (note: please do not drink flame). Doesn’t sound all that special? It’s brain melting.

But there are some foods I just can’t get behind. Most of my friends think I’m talking about natto- I’m not. Nothing lurking in a damp, dark hole for a year or more still gets to call itself food. Not in my world, not while I’m still in charge.

Spam sushi. I’m pretty open-minded. I’ve gulped down some pretty questionable plants and critters in my time. Gone back for seconds too. But…spam. sushi. sushi with spam. It’s bizarre. It’s inconceivable. It’s available in Shinjuku at Tokyo Punch Kitchen. Advertising itself as a 「スパムむすびの店」- Tokyo Punch Kitchen is an entire shop dedicated to the idea that traditional sushi was neat, but sadly behind the times and missing that special something that only spam can provide. What blew my mind hardest was the menu. By which I mean the fact that there is a menu.

I almost regret not going in. True confession: I’ve never even tried spam. I know that it has a long and storied history in world culture. For now though, I think I’ll have my food on sticks.