Well, this is very sweet: Japanese kids are collecting trading cards with local seniors on them:
On the surface, this Ojisan TCG looks like any other collectible card game. As of March 18, there are 47 different cards in the collection, including 28 featuring local men with stats and special abilities.
-- From Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japanese Town, via Metafilter.
Absolutely gorgeous library built into the earth in Chiba, Japan.
The cleft looks like a water drop when viewed from above. As you wonder into the approach and pass through the plowed ground, a corridor of bookshelves appears. Architectural elements such as beams and columns have been eliminated, while the concrete void slabs cantilever out from the outer retaining walls and wing walls. The floor, walls, and ceiling all have an earthen finish and connect smoothly, and the lawn that has been planted up to the vertical edge of the slab hangs down lushly and gives the space a sense of dampness. This detail allows for the balance of irrigation and water retention to be adjusted according to the season.
Designer is Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP and there are more images on their site.
Found via Yatzer.
I've been reading Craig Mod's wonderful books about walking Japan and I realized how infrequently I see photos of the country that are not Tokyo, or at least not bustling. A bit of searching led me to these lovely b&w photos from Seiki Hayashi.
Many more on his Hayashi's Behance page.
Cody Ellington's extraordinary nighttime photography of Japan thrills me, probably because I suck at nighttime pictures.
More pictures are on Ellington's Webflow site and a list of his other projects is here.
He's also a collaborator on Wander the Night.
If you saw Wim Wenders' most recent film, and are not someone who has visited Japan, I'm guessing you were impressed with the public bathrooms of Tokyo.
These photos were gathered by EastEast for their piece, In Praise of Shadows, Ruminations on the aesthetics of a Japanese toilet.
The Public Domain Review has a nice page on Japanese Fireman's Coats of the 19th Century.
Check them all out on their site:
The Japanese have a word for severe social withdrawal: hikikomori.
It refers to people, usually men aged 18 to 35, who refuse to leave their homes, and often won't even leave their bedrooms. They do not socialize and they do not work or attend school. For an "official" diagnosis, the Hikikomori must do this consecutively for at least six months. However, many spend decades alone in their bedrooms, some even dying there, having isolated themselves until they're without friend or family.
One researcher compared its growing prevalence in Japan to homelessness in the US — Americans have millions of homeless, whereas Japan only has about ten thousand homeless. Yet, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Japanese Hikikomori exist — and those are 2010 numbers.
France 24 English did a segment on it:
The phenomena has given birth to an industry of women for hire, known as Rent-a-Sisters. They are not social workers, nor are they professionally trained. They're paid (usually by the victim's parents) to visit the Hikikomori and talk with them. At the start, it's usually through the bedroom door, and over months or years becomes a face-to-face relationship. Eventually, it can lead to outdoor accompaniment, and, hopefully, cause the afflicted to move out on their own and start a normal life.
I found the topic rather interesting and it checked my Unorthodox Work box.
Amelia Hemphill has a BBC short on the Hikikomori and the Rent-A-Sisters program:
There is more info on the Hikikomori Wikipedia page: and an entry on Psychology Today. Some former Hikikomori even have a magazine, HikiPos.
For an even deeper dive, there's Saito Tamaki's book, Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End, which was the publication to first bring the phenomena to a wider audience within Japan.
