Segata Sanshiro (せがた三四郎 )is a freaking legend, and I don’t know how I’ve managed to live in this country for 4 years without hearing about him and his devotion to gaming. Being a gamer myself, I bow down to his dedication and enforcement of good gaming practices. Wait - Enforcement? Yes, you read correctly.

Segata was created by Sega to advertise its Sega Saturn gaming console. Although the console ultimately flopped, the legend of Segata Sanshiro lives on. He is a judo master and his name is a play on “Sega Saturn, shiro!” - or “Play Sega Saturn!”.

His videos can be found on YouTube, but this user has most of them. Also, click here for an English explanation of the history, origins and a lot more Segata commercials.

Louis Vitton, those scurrilous purveyors of overpriced, baby-s**t brown hand bags, wallets, and whatnot, put together a really neat video. Perhaps a bit cutesy, but what the hey?

if it was like this -

via Gusto In Japan which will take you to Nya Nya(?), a Japanese blog with two more sumo videos in a similar vein.

So you’ve come up with a camera, named it Kiss for reasons best known to yourself and/or your marketing department, and you need a cool commercial to show the world how rocking it is.

The logical step would be to get four kids to get made up just like Kiss, have them sing a song to the tune of “I Was Made For Loving You” while touring stereotypical and invented Japanese scenes. And you have to conclude with the kids learning to breathe atomic death rays like Godzilla.

Wow.

It’s not often TV entertains me this much -

A lot of people have heard of Yellow Magic Orchestra, a lot of people haven’t. Me, I heard about them for the first time when in a secondhand book and CD shop, I came across Junior Vasquez’s Junior’s Magic Orchestra for 200 yen. Had no idea what the hell this might be - some weird concept album? Turned out to be his remixes of 6 Yellow Magic Orchestra tracks, pretty tasty stuff.

Yellow Magic Orchestra are kind of like the Japanese Kraftwerk, in that they made music with electronics and made it popular. They’re different from Kraftwerk in my mind because they have more of a sense of fun. They formed in 1978 , hung around until 1983, and haven’t really done much together since.

There is, however, a whole heap of videos at YouTube. Here’s my favourite, Cosmic Surfin’ :

That’s my favourite track, but the best video award goes to Computer Game - link.
There’re also videos of Rydeen, Technopolis and probably heaps more I never came across.

Oh, and if you’re interested, I found a copy of that Junior Vasquez CD. At about 15 times the price I paid. Oh, tis a sick sad world…
(link.)

Anyone who’s ever spent even a minute in a classroom with a Japanese high school kid will probably know about the mad pen spinning skillz they all seem to have.

I’ve never seen anyone this good before -