« Okinawan Beer | Main | Election Reaction »
November 16, 2004
Astro Boy, Indian-Hi, and Godzilla
Yesterday I received my first order from CDJapan and I must say that I was pleased with how smoothly everything went. The shipping was a tad pricy, but I got my stuff much more quickly than I thought I was going to.
So what did I order? First of all, I bought a DVD of Tetsuwan Atomu, better known in the US as Astro Boy. It was the first half-hour Japanese animated program and debuted on both sides of the Pacific in 1963. I'm currently writing a paper on Astro Boy and the process of localizing he show for the American market, so I wanted to get a copy of the original Japanese version of the first episode. (Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I still don't have a region-free DVD player so I'll have to use the facilities in my department's film studies office to watch the program.)
Since I was placing an order from Japan anyway, I decided to throw in a CD of one of my favorite Japanese punk bands, IN-HI. (They used to be known as Indian-Hi, but changed their name as they began to get big.) I was actually first introduced to IN-HI in a grad class at Texas on Japanese popular culture, and when I went to Japan for the Japan America Student Conference in the summer of 2001 I picked up everything I could find by them. IN-HI makes good punk, but what's interesting about them is the way the throw traditional Okinawan instrumentation into the mix, along with the occasional touch of hip-hop.
So the CD that I bought is called "7 Colors Mind" and came out earlier this year and is their second album on a major-label. (Although it looks like they have a new full-length that just came out last month.) So how does it compare to their earlier work? I must say that I'm a tad disappointed -- the album is good, but it's almost all fairly straightforward rock, with very little of the unique "Okinawan-ness" that I have come to expect from them. It's still good, just not what I was expecting.
In other news, the NYT has a brief write-up on that Godzilla conference at Kansas that I had written about a couple of months ago.
Posted by brianruh at November 16, 2004 06:40 AM