Remember Gunkanjima? The little rock in the ocean, off the coast of Nagasaki, that once saw duty as a coal mining town? No? Well, you can review the original post from way back when here, and perhaps you might want to take a look at the wikipedia entry here. It’s a beautiful, haunting place, a testament to how we interact with our environment and what happens when we just stop.

It would look really, really good filled with zombies.

Something more grounded in reality, and a lot more moving than that suggestion can be found below - a video taken when someone who grew up on the island in its heyday goes back to see the ruins. Stunning, moving and fascinating.

via videosift.com

This video from YouTube goes pretty far in explaining why.

The Japan Ad Council was set up 36 years ago to make everyone safer and happier via public information announcements. They have a lot of cool information ads, which can be seen over at their site.

Some of them are very well made - I like this one about manners. And some of them cover things that are probably only relevant to Japan - like this one about not putting too much pressure on your kids.

If you can’t read Japanese, the best way to find your way about the site is to go to either one of those links above and from there just click about in the left column, which will take you around their various campaigns, and pages of videos for each of those campaigns.

Now if I could only get that AC jingle out of my head.

This year saw the Japanese police really starting to clamp down on drink driving, following an incident where a drunk driver rear ended an SUV, forcing it into Kyushu Bay - and killed 3 of the 4 kids onboard. The mother and father, I believe, survived. The kids were all under 5, as I recall. (I can’t find any news source still available about this incident, so forgive me if I’ve made a mistake.)

There’s even an advertising campaign on TV, something I’ve never seen before. The commercial I saw featured a small child sobbing his heart out, and berating his father for drink driving because all the kids at school were picking on him and his sister - a little different from this one, the only example I could find in digital form:

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Now, if we could pause for a second, as I warn you not to watch the next video if you are easily upset. The fact that I have to do this illuminates the point behind the post - a big difference in the nature of these ads in my home country, and the one I find myself in now.

I still remember being traumatized by the adverts in Northern Ireland, adverts that increased in volume in the run-up to Christmas. This one is the one I remember as being particularly harrowing -

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I’m not sure on the reasons behind the cultural difference here. I had a few ideas but the more I thought about them, the less they made sense. Anyone know why Japanese commercials are not aimed at giving you nightmares ?