JabrWoky - Following the white rabbit since...

Robotic Obsession

[Source: Monocle magazine, Issue 1, Feb 2007]

Japanese utilitarian street art

In Japan, elements of Kawaii culture permeates everywhere. It has found it's niche in Japan's rich commercial graphic arts too. These three pictures shot by Johnny Vulcan (via Flickr) captures the Kawainess in basic utilitarian artifacts in Tokyo.

The metallic hardness and grit of an otherwise drab and grey fire hydrant is made more comic and amusing and bearable with these firefighter characters.

And on seeing this colorful, funny warning at a park, you feel why warnings can't be this light-hearted and quirky in other countries.

The Tokyo Messenger Service has this lad on it's trucks to let you know that your parcels are in good hands.

the art of kawaii sex

In Japan, 'kawaii' (it's the Japanese word for cute) is an essential of every aspect of their culture. Here in this brilliant Flickr photolog we get to see some of those kawaii influence on sex. Or rather the very commercial aspect of picking condoms. Wonder what prompts them to pick one condom over the other based on the cute characters on the packaging.

Gashapon

Gashapon is the craze that originated among the toy and anime crazy communities of Japan (and then trickled down the rest of South East Asia) where little plastic figurines of Japanese anime characters such as Naruto and Dragonball reside in tiny capsules, sold in a vending machine as commonly found as phone booths.

Its name is interestingly derived from Japanese onomatopoeia, from two sounds - gacha (the sound of the turning of the crank on the vending machine) and pon (the sound of the capsule falling into the receptible of the vending machine). It is also referred to as "trading toy".