17 Oscar-nominated movies you can see in Japan tonight

The Academy Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, Feb. 24, in Los Angeles (which means Monday morning here in Japan). As usual, not all of the films have come to Japan yet. But there are 17 that you can see right now, including two that are legitimately available online for free.

I’ve put together a list by cross-referencing the official Oscar site, IMDB, Metropolis magazine, Tsutaya, YouTube and other sources. Click on the titles to see Japanese trailers.

Argo

This film has been nominated for:
Best Picture
Best Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin)
Best Film Editing
Best Original Score
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing
Best Adapted Screenplay

Metropolis magazine lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here. (Also, it’ll be out on disc here in March.)

Brave

This film has been nominated for:
Best Animated Feature

You can rent this one at the video store now. See its Tsutaya listing here.

Frankenweenie

This film has been nominated for:
Best Animated Feature

Metropolis magazine lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here.

Fresh Guacamole

This film has been nominated for:
Best Animated Short.

Watch the whole thing now:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

This film has been nominated for:
Best Makeup and Hair Styling
Best Production Design
Best Visual Effects

Metropolis magazine lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here.

Les Miserables

This film has been nominated for:
Best Picture
Best Actor (Hugh Jackman)
Best Supporting Actress (Anne Hathaway)
Best Costume Design
Best Makeup and Hair Styling
Best Original Song
Best Production Design
Best Sound Mixing

Metropolis magazine lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here.

Life of Pi

This film has been nominated for:
Best Picture
Best Cinematography
Best Director (Ang Lee)
Best Film Editing
Best Original Score
Best Original Song
Best Production Design
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing
Best Visual Effects
Best Adapted Screenplay

Metropolis lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here.

Marvel’s The Avengers

This film has been nominated for:
Best Visual Effects

You can rent this one at the video store now. See its Tsutaya listing here.

Mirror, Mirror

This film has been nominated for:
Best Costume Design

Note: Costume designer Eiko Ishioka appears to be the only Japanese nominee in this year’s Academy Awards. If she wins, it will be a posthumous honor, as she died in January 2012. She previously won an Oscar for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992).

You can rent “Mirror, Mirror” at the video store now. See its Tsutaya listing here.

Moonrise Kingdom

This film has been nominated for:
Best Original Screenplay

The Warner Mycal cinema chain has some showtime and venue information in Japanese, starting here.

Paperman

This film has been nominated for:
Best Animated Short

Watch the whole thing now:

Prometheus

This film has been nominated for:
Best Visual Effects

You can rent this one at the video store now. See its Tsutaya listing here.

Silver Linings Playbook

This film has been nominated for:
Best Picture
Best Actor (Bradley Cooper)
Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence)
Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro)
Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver)
Best Director (David O. Russell)
Best Film Editing
Best Adapted Screenplay

The Warner Mycal cinema chain has some showtime and venue information in Japanese, starting here.

Skyfall

This film has been nominated for:
Best Cinematography
Best Original Score
Best Original Song
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing

Metropolis lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here.

Snow White and the Huntsman

This film has been nominated for:
Best Costume Design
Best Visual Effects

You can rent this one at the video store now. See its Tsutaya listing here.

Ted

This film has been nominated for:
Best Original Song

Metropolis lists Kanto area theaters showing this film here.

Zero Dark Thirty

This film has been nominated for:
Best Picture
Best Actress (Jessica Chastain)
Best Film Editing
Best Sound Editing
Best Original Screenplay

The Warner Mycal cinema chain has some showtime and venue information in Japanese, starting here.

12 zodiac animals in 12 seconds, Kitamura edition

The Year of the Dragon has just ended, and the Year of the Snake has just begun.

To mark the occasion, I have made a very quick video guide to the next 12 years of zodiac animals.

The sculptures shown in this video are by Seibo Kitamura (1884-1987), a native of Nagasaki whose most famous work is the Peace statue in that city. It’s one of the few artworks I’ve ever seen that personifies peace in male form, rather than as a goddess. The blog “Nagasaki Perspectives” has photos, plus critical comments.

Meanwhile, to see my “12 zodiac animals in 12 seconds” from a year ago, go here.

Cephalopod surprise

Having arrived in Kyoto today for this weekend’s Japan Writers Conference, I spent an the afternoon wandering around town, with a particular focus on the always enjoyable Nishiki Market. I treated myself to various goodies, including this boiled octopus on a stick. If you think this looks good simply as an octopus, wait till you see what happens when you bite into its head…

There’s a boiled quail egg inside!

This is every bit as delicious as it looks.

2012 Japan Writers Conference animation

Did you know that Tom Baker is stylish British animator?

It’s true – but I’m not that Tom Baker. (His website is here. )

The Tom Baker whose blog you are reading now is neither stylish nor British, but I can lay claim to a half-evening-long career as an animator. The following video contains all 65 seconds of my entire body of work:

The point of this video is to promote the 6th annual Japan Writers Conference. I’ve been to the past three JWCs, and I highly recommend them to anyone in Japan who is interested in writing in English.

This year’s event will be held Nov. 10-11 at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto.

For all the details, visit http://www.japanwritersconference.org

A new caffeine delivery system

If you’re an office drone in need of a mid-afternoon pick-me-up, you might decide to sip some espresso. Or you might decide to guzzle some soda. Now, thanks to the Suntory company, you don’t need to decide at all. Its new “Espressoda” product appears to combine both experiences in one handy bottle.

The concept is clever, the name is clever, and the marketing is clever, too. Its website includes a video game in which a tiny stick figure carrying a briefcase runs across a gigantic spreadsheet, leaping from pie chart to bar graph as you control him with your mouse. (Click on the “game” tab at the bottom of the screen here to play.)

Caffeine junkie that I am, I was quite excited when I saw this beverage in a vending machine in the building where I work.

When the bottle came out of the machine and I was able to read the ingredient list on the back label, I was disappointed to see that sugar was the first ingredient. (Coffee was second.) I’ve been trying to cut needless sugar out of my diet, so I knew I probably wouldn’t be buying this product again.

On the other hand, I have enjoyed coffee ice cream and coffee-flavored candies in the past, so I still expected to enjoy drinking Espressoda.

Alas, the beverage didn’t strike my palate as sweet at all, but harsh and stale, like coffee that had been left out overnight. I wound up pouring most of it out in the sink. I love coffee, but this was not my cup of tea.

(P.S. You know what Japanese vending machine concoction I do love? Pancake milkshake in a can.)

Tatsunoko’s anime shows

Tatsunoko Productions is a major producer of Japanese anime. If you ever enjoyed watching “Gatchaman” (“Battle of the Planets”) or “Mach Go Go Go” (“Speed Racer”), you have Tatsunoko to thank.

Right now in Tokyo, and coming soon to Osaka, there is an exhibit filled with cels, videos and original drawings from dozens of Tatsunoko TV series.

I recently paid a quick visit to the Tokyo show on my lunch break, and realized there was more material there than I could absorb in my limited time. However, I did enjoy playing a short game of “spot the reference,” beginning when I noticed that the company’s earliest character – the hero of a 1965 black-and-white show called “Uchu Ace” (Space ace) – had an asymmetrical crescent crest on his space helmet just like the one Date Masamune (1567-1635) had worn on his battle helmet four centuries earlier. Looking through time in the other direction, a rocket launch facility in “Space Ace” strongly resembled Syndrome’s lair in “The Incredibles” (2004).

Despite his costume, Ace didn’t have a buff superhero physique. He looked more like one of the original Campbell’s Soup Kids, probably because he was created by people who grew up in straitened times when chubbiness was something to aspire to.

That changed pretty fast, however, with the full-color characters of “Gatchaman” in the early 1970s looking like slim disco denizens – especially when they hung up their superhero capes and got into their civvies, which included thick-soled boots, bell-bottom pants, superwide belts and cataracts of shaggy hair.

Each of the “Gatchaman” characters’ superhero identities is based on a bird. One of them, Ryu Nakanishi, dresses up in an owl costume uncannily resembling that of the Nite Owl character who would appear in the English-language graphic novel “Watchmen” in the 1980s. And in a possible case of influence going the other way, the colorful characters and kooky vehicles of Tatsunoko’s late 1970s “Yatterman” series had a look that reminded me of Hanna Barbera’s earlier “Wacky Races.”

Admission to the Tokyo show, which runs through Aug. 20 at the Matsuya department store in Ginza, is 1,000 yen. Admission to the Aug. 22-28 Osaka show, at the Hanshin department store in Umeda, is only 500 yen. For details, see the promotional posters at the top and bottom of this post.

Ginza lunch: Vegetarian curry buffet

At first glance, the above photo taken in a Tokyo restaurant might appear to show a fairly routine assortment of curries with some rice and naan bread. But do you notice that the two pieces of naan are different colors? That’s because the paler one in the background is ordinary naan, while the one in the center of the photo is vegan naan.

I took this picture at the Ginza branch of Nataraj, a vegetarian Indian restaurant whose 1,100 yen lunch buffet I partake of about once a month.

And if you zoom in on the curry near the rear of the photo, you’ll notice something amazing: It’s made with black-eyed peas. These are so rare in Tokyo that all the Japanese people I’ve asked for the name of these lovely legumes—including the wait staff at the only other place I know of that serves them—have been stumped. But thanks to the signage at Nataraj’s lunchtime buffet, I now know black-eyed peas are called “robia mame.” Googling this term led me to the anticlimactic discovery that they are also known as “kurome mame.”

The Nataraj buffet consists of rice, four different kinds of vegetarian curry, the two kinds of nan, a token salad, coffee and tea, and kheer rice pudding for dessert.

The four curries have been different on each of my visits, and I’ve always enjoyed at least three of them. Usually all four. There always seems to be a soupy lentil curry, and on one recent visit it was intensely garlicky – which I mean as a compliment. There’s often one dish spicy enough to make me sweat, while the rest are milder. Sometimes there’s a sweet curry, such as creamy korma made with nuts and fruit. Other featured ingredients include peas, beans, mushrooms, onions, potato, cauliflower and chewy vegetarian “meat.”

As tends to happen at all-you-can-eat buffets, I often eat more than I intended to. But since it’s all veggie, it’s easier for me to tell myself that this is OK.

Nataraj info
Address: 7th floor, 6-9-4 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061
Phone/Fax: (03) 5537-1515
Website: http://www.nataraj.co.jp/

Tokyo Snow-asis

On Monday night of this week, it began to snow in Tokyo. By Tuesday morning (Jan. 24), it was four centimeters deep on the ground, and the TV news was describing it as the biggest accumulation Japan’s capital had seen in four years. Hoping to get a few nice nice photos while the snow was fresh, I made a beeline for the Koishikawa Korakuen garden, which as you can see from the above photo is right next to the Tokyo Dome baseball stadium.

The 70,847-square-meter garden (originally much larger) was built by a branch of the Tokugawa family nearly 400 years ago, so Tokyo Dome wasn’t always part of the view. (Click on the picture of the sign at right to read a brief official history.) The buildings below are probably closer to what you would have seen when the Korakuen was new:

There are parts of the garden where modern Tokyo cannot be ignored:

And there are parts where you might forget that you are in a city at all:

Now, nearly a week later, there are still a few scattered patches of dirty ice here and there in Tokyo’s more shaded nooks, but it was melting rapidly even on the morning I took these pictures. In fact, in this video you can actually hear the melting snow dropping from the trees:

A word of warning about that video, by the way: There’s no plot, and nothing happens. It’s just a view.

To view Korakuen in person, exit Korakuen subway station on the Tokyo Dome side, look for this wall to the right of the dome, and follow it a few hundred meters to the entrance

Admission is 300 yen. Official English details here.

Purple potatoes

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post that mentioned a purple potato salad I had found sold as a dessert item in a supermarket just outside of Tokyo. (See it here.) A little over a month ago, a reader posted a comment asking where he could buy the purple potatoes themselves in Japan.

Ever since then, I’ve had my eye peeled for murasaki imo, as the colorful spuds are called, every time I set foot in a grocery store’s produce section. But I had no luck.

Then, a wise person suggested that I try the basement food halls of the Mitsukoshi Department store in Ginza. Sure enough, there was a specialty produce corner on floor B3 where murasaki imo were avaiable. They were labeled as produce of Chiba Prefecture.

At 100 yen for 100 grams, these are probably the most expensive potatoes I have ever purchased. The two smallest ones, shown here, cost me a total of 403 yen (about U.S.$5.25 or four euros).

If I had been feeling ambitious as well as extravagant, I could have used them to make a colorful bisque, but instead I simply baked them to serve as a side dish to meat.

I have to report that the main pleasure this vegetable offered was visual. The flavor wasn’t too different from that of an ordinary sweet potato. (If anything, it was blander.) I had to load it up with butter, honey and a generous dusting of cinnamon to make it satisfactorily interesting.

Still, if you are having guests over, murasaki imo might make an interesting conversation piece, especially if you serve them in their skins so that the purple color isn’t revealed until your guests cut into them.

Finally, just for the record, I should mention that you can also buy murasaki imo powder online in Japan through sites including Amazon and Rakuten.

Architecture alert! Go see Tod’s while you can

A defining characteristic of the Tokyo cityscape is that it is always changing. Stay away from any given neighborhood for a few months, and you may not recognize it when you go back. I was reminded of this for the 9,000th time a few days ago when I walked along the Omotesando shopping street for the first time in quite a while and saw what was happening around the Tod’s building.

Since its completion in 2004, the Tod’s building has been a major landmark of the area, and a darling of architectural critics. It was the designed for the precise spot on which it stands, but that spot is now changing around it.

As the Tokyo flagship store for a luxury Italian shoe brand, this building had a mission to be eye-catching, but the facade had to be squeezed into a narrow sliver of street frontage. Architect Toyo Ito’s design, however, doesn’t look squeezed at all. The building’s exterior is more window than wall, especially near ground level.

The building is criscrossed by seemingly random strips of concrete that, at second glance, turn out not to be random at all. A few thick pieces at ground level branch out and become thinner as they climb skyward, just like the trunk and branches of the zelkova trees that famously line the boulevard out front. (In Tokyo, a tree-lined street is something of a novelty, and Omotesando is by far the most famous one.)

Watch this video I quickly shot the other day and see if you think the design works for you.

When the Tod’s building was new, a video with these views would have been impossible. The building sits on an L-shaped peice of land, with most of its bulk set back from the street. Until recently, an unrelated building standing in the crook of the L (which you can see on the second page of this presentation) prevented Omotesando pedestrians from seeing much of Tod’s sides.

But now that other building has been torn down.

With its neighbor out of the way, you can now see two more of Tod’s walls – each bigger than the front — and thus appreciate an otherwise hard-to-discern aspect of Ito’s design. He took one silhouette of one tree and repeated it at irregular intervals to create a forest motif that wraps all the way around the building in one continous pattern.

But these views won’t last.  According to signs posted on construction barriers, a new 8-story retail building is set to go up in the crook of the L. The planned completion date is April of 2013. And right next door, on an even larger lot that is slightly uphill, work has begun to build a 9-story office and retail building. In a further sign of how quickly Tokyo changes, there is another active construction site right across the street, and even the famous Kiddy Land toy store nearby has been demolished to make way for a new incarnation of itself.

So if you want to see the Tod’s building’s wraparound design with your own eyes, don’t wait too long. This chance may never come again.