AltJapan

Yurei Attack! The Japanese Ghost Survival Guide

 

BE AFRAID. Lock the doors and hide the kids. The yurei are coming.

But don't worry, because Hiroko and I just wrote Yurei Attack! The Japanese Ghost Survival Guide. It's the sequel to Yokai Attack! and Ninja Attack! It's coming out in just a few months from Tuttle Publishing. And it's available for pre-order on Amazon right now!

Yurei Attack! is the world's first English-language survival manual for Japanese ghosts. It gets you through encounters with Japan's angriest ghosts and sexy spectres. Guides you to haunted places in Tokyo and beyond. Teaches you traditional games of the occult and how to play them. It even gives you a guided tour of what awaits in the world of the dead.

Yurei is the Japanese word for "ghost." They are the souls of the dead unable - or unwilling - to shuffle off this mortal coil. They are driven by emotions so uncontrollably powerful that they have taken on a life of their own: rage. Sadness. Devotion. Revenge. Or even the simple belief that they are still alive. Many are considered dangerous even today.

Scary stuff to be sure. Equally terrifying are the illustrations by lovely lady manga artist Shinkichi, with layouts by the equally lovely Andrew Lee.

So how's this different from Yokai Attack? Glad you asked. Although they're often conflated, yurei and yokai are very different beasts. Yokai are a "something." Yurei are a "someone." Someone with an axe to grind... Usually right against your neck.

Hiroko and I spent years conducting field research in some of Japan's spookiest places, and we've compiled detailed illustrated dossiers on 39 of the most frightening spirits in Japan, along with real-life haunted spots, occult games like Kokkuri-san and Hyakumonogatari, and even an illustrated tour of the underworld itself. It is your complete guide to the Japanese occult and afterlife.

Trust us: it's the last guidebook to Japan you'll ever need. Just don't blame us if you have to sleep with the lights on for a while.

More good news! Tuttle is also releasing new revised editions of Yokai Attack! and Ninja Attack! with all-color pages and additional new profiles. Stay tuned for more info!

I Can't Live Without my Radio

All tucked in? Heeeeere we go.

Once upon a time, not long ago, Japanese electronics ruled the worldwide marketplace.

It's true! Seriously! They were so renowned for their quality and sense of design that a little-known entrepreneur by the name of Steve Jobs visited Japanese factories in an attempt to figure out how to make his own company's computers more stylish.

They were so renowned for their sense of design, in fact, that a short-lived fad for plastic model kits of boomboxes and stereos actually swept the land. In a country with as much pocket money as Bubble-era Japan, it might seem odd that people would pay money for non-functional versions of things that they could actually purchase on store shelves.

But the yen was weak. Stereos were expensive -- the equivalent of hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars. Not to mention the small floorspace of many urban Japanese homes, which limited the amount of equipment even wealthy gear-heads could own. Aoshima included every tiny detail of the originals -- even little records to put on the turntables. 

So plenty of audiophiles suffered with cheap systems for actually playing music, while gazing at the tiny plastic scale representation of what they actually wanted to own. If you ever wanted a clear picture of how a bubble-era otaku spent his days, that is probably it.

Eventually, Aoshima ran out of consumer gear to portray and expanded into entire studio setups. "Hello FM-kun" replicated an actual radio DJ's setup -- perfect for those long afternoons spent listening to FEN. This one actually featured a light up "on air" lamp.

The Otocon series replicated a then-cutting edge karaoke setup -- so unrelentingly old-school it used tapes instead of laser discs. Otocon upped the ante with little working speakers that could be plugged into the headset jack of a "real" system and even included little cut-outs of hearthtrob Emi Kagami.

Of course, this being the Eighties and this being Japan, there was only one logical conclusion to all of this stereo madness: a stereo that transformed into a robot. Meet Popy's Compoboy. ("Compo" being the Japanese term for a compact stereo system.)

Conclusion: if Japan still produced things like this today, we'd all be listening to music on iCompoboys instead of iPods. 

Science dropped. Class adjourned.

(And thanks to machinesoldier for the Compoboy images!)

Bullseye

Illustration by Yutaka Kondo, from "Ninja Attack!"

Reports of a "flaming-horned bull" goring a man in Spain yesterday remind me of a historical incident involving flaming bulls that you may not be aware of: The Battle of Kurikara Pass, in June of 1183.

It starred a certain ninja-to-be named Nishina Daisuke, who would later go on to develop the Togakure-ryu school of ninjutsu, one of the few that is still actually taught in Japan today (by the illustrious Masaaki Hatsumi).

According to the legends of Togakushi, the Nagano village from which Daisuke hails, he led a special forces team called the Nishina-to ("Team Nishina") during the Battle of Kurikara Pass. Part of a major alpine throughway, the pass represented prime strategic ground in a battle playing out between the Heike and Yoshinaka clans for dominance in the region.

Late one evening, as the Heike forces bivouacked in preparation for another day of battle, Team Nishina launched a surprise nighttime assault. Raising a din loud enough to wake the dead, they startled the Heike soldiers into an immediate retreat— and then Daisuke cowed them into submission. Literally.

He had hit upon the novel tactic of strapping flaming torches to the horns of a herd of cattle, which he stampeded directly into the terrified mass of Heike soldiers. In their haste to escape the flaming beasts, some ten thousand men tumbled from the narrow confines of the Kurihara Pass to their deaths. Some speculate that he may have based the idea on a Chinese story, in which cattle with daggers tied to their horns were sent careening across a battlefield.

History is silent as to whether Team Nishina celebrated their victory with hamburgers afterwards.

Kampai

 

 

Most Disturbing Macross Valkyrie Art That Wasn't Explicitly Drawn for the "All Porn" Day of Comiket

1) Cross-dressing transforming robots:

2) Hastily drawn robot tailgating parties:

3) Fumbling robot menage-a-tois:

4) Peeping tom transforming robots on lovers' lane (why do I suspect I accidentally hit on this site's top new keyword combo search?) Bonus points for the "black velvet" style.

The Seventy Samurai

Live from Budokan! I turned a corner and ran into this crew on Monday morning. (One of the great things about living in Tokyo, things like that.) This was part of a kickoff ceremony for a new year of martial arts. Love the "samurai" with the eyeglasses, second from upper back left.

I Scream

You scream, we all scream for...

It's true: life-sized Godzilla hands represent the state of the art in inflatable advertising, circa 1998. 

What ARE Godzilla Chips, anyway? I can only imagine something like a car-sized cow patty.

Year of the Dragon

Not even 10 AM and I've already caught my first dragon of the year. Happy 2012!