Today we enter the world of a YouTube celebrity. If you?re an avid user of the popular video sharing site, chances are you?ve encountered the videos of Magibon ? those big eyes and tiny face looking up at the camera, sometimes with a message, often with none. Surprising even her, the videos garnered millions of views, most of them from Japan, which lead this American 22-year-old to start learning ? and using ? Japanese, without leaving her bedroom in the state of Pennsylvania. PingMag catches up with Magibon during a recent visit to Tokyo, to find out what it takes to make it big on YouTube.
Una entrevista muy interesante con esta chica. Básicamente se ha hecho famosa mirando fijamente a la cámara. Pero ni siquiera para eso vale cualquiera. Ella sí.
Y queda la cuestión más curiosa: ¿por qué se forran los libros? Podría pensarse que es para protección de las cubiertas. Pero visto con los ojos de mis informantes japoneses la cuestión es aún más sutil: se cubre la cubierta del libro para no emitir públicamente ningún juicio. Muchos libros están revelando al exterior las opiniones de sus portadores y esto, en una sociedad como la japonesa, sencillamente no se hace.
El libro me ha encantado. Cuenta un poco de la vida del ilustrador japonés Hiroshige, del mundo en el que vivía, de la tecnología que se usaba para sus ilustraciones y de la sociedad que disfrutaba de ellas. Pero lo que más me ha gustado, con diferencia, es que te el texto va contándote todo lo que se ve en cada una de las ilustraciones. En algunas ocasiones, la lectura es de lo más simple. Pero por lo general hay una miríada de detalles que se han saltado, pequeñas muestras de la vida social que pasan desapercibidas, detalles de color que tiene su explicación, o elementos de la naturaleza que sirven a tal o cual fin. Para mí ha sido una lectura muy estimulante porque me ha demostrado lo mal que leo las imágenes. Taschen tiene también un libro grande de ilustraciones que voy a intentar conseguir.
(In one famously controversial show, an aspiring comedian named Nasubi was locked naked in an empty apartment and forced to live on winnings from magazine sweepstakes until he earned $10,000. When he finally reached his goal 14 months later, the show’s producers gave him some clothes, blindfolded him, and took him on a surprise vacation to South Korea, where he was locked in yet another apartment until he won enough money to buy a plane ticket home. While some vehemently opposed the show, most watched it religiously with delightful horror and amusement. Nasubi wrote a best-selling book about his experience and later became a successful stage actor.)
The Ooishi Hyoroku Monogatari, a largely fictional story featured in picture scrolls in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, tells of a young warrior and his encounters with trickster foxes posing as yokai. According to the National Museum of Japanese History, the story takes place in 1624 in Kagoshima, where a group of notorious young warriors have assembled. When a rumor circulates about shape-shifting foxes that have hoodwinked some people in the area and shaved their heads, the men decide to test the courage of one of the young warriors, Ooishi Hyoroku, by sending him on a mission to capture the mischievous creatures.
Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions.
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