I shot this a little while ago and thought it might interest anyone wanting to see the area around Takeshita-dori, JR Harajuku Station as well as Jingu Bridge where you’ll find the cosplay girls (and boys) every weekend.

Unfortunately it was an average day weather-wise so there wasn’t a lot to see on Jingu Bridge but you still get a sense of the area and there will be some surprises left for you if you ever get to Tokyo ^_^

The Route

View HD Video: A Walk Through Harajuku in a larger map

• Japan Images: Keitai Harajuku Girl
• Japan Images: Takeshita Maid
• Japan Images: Harajuku Girl Gothic-Style
• Japan Images: Harajuku Maid
• Japan Images: Saturday on Takeshita

If you like your J-Rock hard and played by guys who can actually play (the bassist is amazing), make sure you check out – Nothing’s Carved In Stone.

Find out more at myspace, last.fm and at their own website plus a short background at Wikipedia.

Nothing’s Carved In Stone – Isolation

Nothing’s Carved In Stone – November 15th

• J-Music: Capsule
• Today is Culture Day in Japan
• Don’t Be Deaf To Japanese
• Japan Images: Serenity in Kichijoji
• J-Music: Maximum The Hormone

I use YouTube to improve my Japanese in 3 simple ways: Listen and Learn, Watch and Read and finally – Watch, Listen and Learn.

A great way to improve your comprehension is by listening to native Japanese speakers rather than the dumbed down recordings you may get in a CD at the back of your textbook.

A lot of those audio files are spoken by non-natives and more often than not riddled with phrases that you would never hear anyone say in a real Japanese conversation.

Just ten years ago, you really had very little choice of learning materials. You either used what resources they had at the local bookstore and library or flew to Japan, the latter being an expensive way to master the language. ^_^

Fast forward to 2010 and one of the many resources brought to us via the rise of the interwebs is YouTube, which recently announced that they serve up a staggering 1 billion videos a day. Making up part of that incomprehensible figure is a huge array of Japanese videos covering everything from learning the language to anime, cooking, sports and news.

So to get started with learning Japanese on YouTube, I’ve listed several Japanese TV stations below that have a regularly updated YouTube channel. The quality isn’t perfect on some of these and none are streamed in high definition but the content is 100% genuine Japanese and served up (almost) daily for free.

• TVAsahi
• ANN News
• NHK Online

The great thing about Japanese TV is that almost everything they broadcast has a boatload of onscreen graphics across it. This gives us an ideal opportunity to watch YouTube videos and study the language at the same time – win-win!

I use YouTube videos to learn Japanese in three simple ways.

Listen and Learn

Play the video online but don’t look at the actual visuals. Listen to just the audio and try to write down any of the words you recognise.

Of course, this can be either rewarding or somewhat demoralising depending on your level of Japanese but it gives you a good idea as to what you know and what you need to work on.

Even if you only recognise one word, it’s a start and after another week or two you may be able to pick out another few words. Stick with it and your listening comprehension will vastly improve.

Make sure you bookmark the video and then come back to it every month or two and see if you have improved.

Watch and Read

Watch the video without the audio and concentrate solely on reading the onscreen graphics.

Just as you did in the “Listen and Learn” section above, write down as many kanji, hiragana or katakana that you recognise. You’ll notice fairly quickly that most Japanese news videos look like CNN on steroids with graphics all over the screen.

I would suggest if you’re at the JLPT4/N5 level, then make liberal use of the pause and play buttons otherwise everything is going to be a blur.

If you know how to use the screenshot system on your OS or you are okay with using a program like Skitch or Jing then feel free to take screenshots of certain frames of the video and save them for later.

Here’s a screenshot below as an example.

View the video on YouTube

In the top right hand corner you might recognise the kanji for Tokyo (東京) or 見, which means “see”.

At the bottom of the screen is a ton of hiragana mixed in with two kanji – 外 (outside) and 囲 (surround). There’s plenty of Japanese to learn even in a short video.

Watch, Listen and Learn

And of course the final step is to watch the video as you normally would and see what you can absorb in real-time.

My suggestion is to work on just one video at a time and use steps 1 and 2 over the course of a week or month and then come back to it again for step 3.

In one month, you may not make huge leaps in you listening comprehension but you will most certainly recognise more kanji onscreen and hopefully without the need to constantly pause.

If you’re stuck with any words or kanji, make sure you visit www.tangorin.com and use their excellent online dictionary and multi-radical kanji search.

There are literally tens of thousands of Japanese videos available on YouTube so there’s plenty of opportunity to increase your listening comprehension.

Good luck with your YouTube Japanese study and please leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

• Minitube: Immerse Yourself in Japanese
• Video: Japan – The Strange Country
• Don’t Be Deaf To Japanese
• Japan: Earthquakes and Tsunamis
• Book Review: Japanese Graded Readers

This week Google introduced a new look and feel for it’s online translation service, Google Translate.

Previously the system allowed the user to input the foreign word or phrase and then hit the “Translate” button to view the answer. This, of course, wasn’t that much of a chore but the instant translation sure feels a whole lot better – even if the results aren’t.

I did a quick test with a recent twitter from dannychoo.

Input: アーマー部品日本に置いてきちゃった！

Entering this tweet with the exclamation mark resulted in “Armor Parts I left it in Japan!” but removing the exclamation mark gave me a whole different answer – “I left it in Japanese Armor Parts”. I tested with several other Japanese phrases and received similar quality results.

For a free service, it is great and will certainly give you a good idea of what is being said but let’s just say that I wouldn’t use it to do up a resume for that job at Microsoft in Tokyo you really wanted to nail. (^_^)

Other improvements are the ability to view a romanisation of phrases written in the likes of Japanese or Chinese and for non-English speaking users the new text-to-speech service will provide an audio snippet for the translated word or phrase. Hopefully this is extended to other languages, like Japanese, in the future.

See the video below for a full overview of the new features.

• Google Japan animates Street View concerns
• Use Twitter To Improve Your Japanese
• Japan Signs: Soup Nazi Barber
• Mnemonics: Learn Japanese Faster
• Canon debuts ground-breaking EOS 7D

Yes I know I’m a bit late on this one but I couldn’t resist these posting these awesome videos.

When Google Japan debuted its new Street View service in August 2008, there was such an uproar that by May 2009, Google announced that it would re-shoot all of Street View data it had captured in Japan and also lower the height of the Street View car’s camera pole.

The concerns centred on the fact that the height of the Street View camera allowed a clear view over the fence of residential homes and for the intensely private Japanese, this was just not acceptable. Also raised at the time were the views of car license plates, people’s faces and private information on letterboxes.

So if you’re Google Japan what do you do when things get tough? That’s right – you wheel out a cute animated video to smooth things over. The video shows the steps Google Japan have taken to protect everyone’s privacy from blurring of private data plus how you can raise any concerns you have with Google’s Street View.

I have to admit this style of video is one of the things I love about Japan – their design aesthetic.

ストリートビューのプライバシーについて

ストリートビュー 公開に適さない画像の報告について

• Google debuts instant translation service
• Historic Japan: The World of Albert Kahn
• Japan Images: Kichijoji Painter
• Japan Images: Underneath Tokyo Tower
• Eat & Learn: Yummy Meiji Chocolate

I missed the news over the weekend but it seems Tokyo has lost out to Brazil’s Rio De Janeiro in it’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.

It’s a shame as Tokyo, who last hosted the Olympics in 1964, would have done a great job (okay I’m biased) but after hearing that Rio is the first ever South American city to hold the Olympic Games it is probably a fair call. The other cities in the finals race were Chicago and Madrid.

Tokyo 2006 Olympics Bid Video

Not sure it’s the most exciting video I’ve ever seen. What did you think about it?

Here the Rio De Janeiro video for a comparison:

• Honda introduces Segway-like U3-X
• Hotel Claska, Tokyo: Room 502
• Google Japan animates Street View concerns
• Romaji Is Evil
• Japan ravaged by Typhoon Melor

In the leadup to the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show, Honda has introduced the U3-X, its own sit-down take on Dean Kamen’s famous two-wheeled Segway.

The one-wheeled U3-X, dubbed by Honda as the “world’s smallest existing transport device”, can move in any direction by the rider simply shifting their weight in the direction they wish to go. The seamless, almost levitational, movement is made possible via a ring of small perpendicular wheels lining the outer edge of the main wheel.

The U3-X looks like an exciting development but only time will tell if mass adoption is a possibility.

Judge for yourself in the video below. What do you think?

Honda U3-X

• Japan: Earthquakes and Tsunamis
• Japan Images: Beluga White Whale
• Japan Images: Underneath Tokyo Tower
• Review: Kodansha Kanji Dictionary
• Tokyo loses Olympics bid to Rio

• Japan Images: Homeless in Shibuya
• 3 Ways to Learn Japanese With YouTube
• Japan Images: Home On A Stroller
• Learn Japanese: Dates of the Month
• Japan Images: Asakusa Bag Lady