Huffy Flounce

Oh, you!

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FYI: They are wearing traditional Japanese men's underwear, fundoshi.

Follow-up to the above FYI: Japanese women did not regularly start wearing underwear (or feeling shame about things down there) until the mid-1950s.

Is that the song from Frozen?

Yes, it's "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?"

Those crazy Japanese!

W. T. F.

That was awesome.

FUNdoshi, indeed.

I got reserve subscriptions for a couple of Japanese manga magazines (one marketed for boys, one marketed for girls). I received my first issue of Monthly Dragon Age this week. These manga magazines are often compared to phone books, and with good reason. This issue is just a few pages shy of 900.

I've finished the first selection in it, which is the first part of a manga version of the upcoming anime movie The Empire of Corpses. It's one of those things where lots of famous literary characters inhabit the same narrative. In this case, John Watson (the main hero, pre-Sherlock encounter) finds himself joining British Secret Service (after two of its members - M and Van Helsing - catch him illegally conducting experiments on corpses and give him the ol' "you can either join us in our mission as our expert and get your sentence waived or you can go to prison, you nasty felon" treatment). He and Captain Frederick Barnaby have to infiltrate war-torn Afghanistan in order to stop Alexei Karamazov from building his "Empire of Corpses" - an army of reanimated dead created using the supposedly lost technology of Victor Frankenstein. Watson has his own reanimated corpse, Friday, who acts as his personal secretary (it was the reanimation of Friday that Helsing and M walked in on when recruiting Watson).

This is essentially how far the 50-page first chapter of the manga gets. The movie is getting a big push in Japan, since it is based on a novel by a popular Japanese science fiction writer, Project Itoh.



What I really wanted to share, though, was this: Barnaby is basically the "Brock Samson" of the heroes. Here he punches a reanimated corpse through the head of a different reanimated corpse:

I guess Watson is a Robinson Crusoe fan.

I love when the Japanese interpret and remix Western culture.

The English wikipedia page for the novel has a character list on it - It's Burnaby and not Barnaby as I had guessed guessed from the Japanese-version of the name (ba-nabi-), and "M" is Mycroft Holmes.

Funimation has licensed the movie, so it will be getting an English release of some sort in 2016.

Alan Moore made Mycroft the second M in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He stepped into the role after SPOILER: the death of Moriarty.

The show I just watched sent a group of Japanese (including two girls in school sailor uniforms) into a Costco, where they were each given a cart and given instructions to bring something interesting back so that the audience could marvel at the "America Size" things. One of the girls in school uniform was nearly in hysterics over Fruit by the Foot, and there were many impressed gasps as they realized that they roll-out to 9 car lengths.

What the hell is Fruit By The Foot?

It's Betty Crocker's attempt to stick it to General Mills and their Fruit Roll-Ups.

In case you can't guess from the end credits, everything was done by 谷口崇 (Takashi Taniguchi).

The Japanese version of "Lickity-lickity-lickity-lickity" sounds like "Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Pedo!"

ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ　ペロペロ

This post is now covered in saliva (pero pero).

You're both being weird. I don't like it.

From one of my test prep books

They're probably just trying to cheer up someone who's depressed by pointing out their strengths.