A friend over at Tokyopia.com pointed out this soon to be released movie called Lost In Translation about a couple of foreigners in Tokyo.

Advance word is that it's very good and I guess we are all hopeful since many of us at Tokyopia.com have gone through the isolation issue of being a foreigner here and plus I'm sure there are many interesting things in the movie. Maybe you can get a taste of what Tokyo is like. Bill Murray is awesome so I have high hopes.

I was trying to find some random movie that I remember from my childhood. I don't think it was a good movie. It takes place in space, some astronauts land on another planet, I think it's Uranus, and as they are walking around they find this large sphere, if I remember correctly it looks like it's made of crumpled foil, and it eats them. I don't remember what happens while they are inside of the sphere but I remember seeing this on TV, probably in the early 70s. Anybody have any idea what it is?

Someone recently pointed out this site called Brovision.com which a mostly video based site about Japan. There's also a related site, brobe.com which is directed at Japanese speaking people but it's also all video.

For you Kitano "Beat" Takeshi fans, his newest movie, Zatoichi, is about to come out. You can find the trailers here.

Nothing major but I noticed all the TV channels are off. Every single one of them. Fortunately every station says it's because they are doing some kind of earth based digital broadcast test. (vs satellite based). Still, it's kind of freaky to have every single channel be off.

I just noticed yesterday from an ad on the train that the Toshiba J-Phone T-10 cell phone has a built in Japanese -> English and English -> Japanese dictionary. How cool is that! It's also bilingual meaning it has English menus so if you are coming to Japan that might be the phone you should get. 😊

A few more things a 505 cell phone can do.

1) All of them have infrared communications. That's not that new. Many phones have had that before. It's used to beam info from one phone to another like your phone number, address, e−mail etc. The new thing about the 505s is that using their net connection you can view an online TV guide, pick the programs you want to record, point your cellphone at your VCR and it will program it for you.

2) You can take pictures with all 505s. All 505s have memory sticks or sd cards to get the pictures off easy. But, they can also beam the images through their infrared beam directly to photo printing machines.

The lastest 505 to come out, the Fujitsu F505i has a thumbprint sensor. They advertise it as a security device. Once you've registered your thumbprint than you can press your finger to it to unlock your phone. Of course in the fine print it says "This function doesn't always work. When it doesn't work you'll have to unlock it the normal way and use your secret code" 😖

Checking out Japaneze I found this fun site, Geisha Asobi Blog which links to the most random stuff. For example this site with Fake Japanese Products. Actually most of them are not done that well but a few made me laugh. Of course it was done better in the book 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions which is also a bunch of fake inventions most of which actually seem almost believable.

On the train the other day I saw an ad for Sony's new Wireless LCD TVs. It comes with a box you plug your VCR and DVD player into. That box beams the signal to the TV so that you can carry the TV around anywhere you want. Making dinner? Carry it to the kitchen. Washing clothes, put it in the laundry room. Etc.