Giant Gundam statue ready to stand guard on its own Tokyo theme park

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  • February 6, 2012 at 11:26 am

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Giant RX-87 Gundam statue in Odaiba Tokyo

Ah Japan, the country where giant robots roam free. Well not exactly, at least not yet, but you can’t deny the Far Eastern nation’s affinity to all things robotic.

A giant RX-78 mobile suite Gundam statue made its first appearance in the Tokyo skyline in the summer of 2009, measuring 60 foot tall and weighing 35 tonnes. The statue was erected by Bandai, a Japanese toy maker and video game company, in Tokyo’s Odaiba island. Odaiba is an artificial island in the Tokyo bay hosting a number of leisure parks, exhibitions and shopping malls. Since then, the statue has been dismantled, re-erected and moved around.
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Olympus claims title of best-selling mirrorless camera manufacturer for 2011 in Japan

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  • January 26, 2012 at 6:17 am

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Olympus new PEN cameras: E-P3, E-PL3 and E-PM1

Embattled Olympus didn’t have such a bad year after all. The Japanese camera manufacturer has just claimed top position for the mirrorless camera category in the 2012 BCN Award.

The BCN Ranking pulls in point-of-sale data from a number of major Japanese electronic stores, including online stores like Amazon Japan, and once a year hands-out awards based on the number of actual sales. Olympus has moved ahead of both Sony and Panasonic, capturing more than a third of the market with sales numbering 36.6% of total. Panasonic has the number two spot with 29.3% of sales.
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Fujitsu planning to enter the US smartphone market with ‘special’ devices

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  • January 16, 2012 at 8:02 am

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Fujitsu Arrows F-07D views

It was about time for major Japanese phone manufacturers to start looking outside their home market. As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, except from Sony, all other Japanese giants have been absent from the world market for some time. In the past, the big stumbling block was software — it was very hard for Japanese companies to design and market handsets specifically for overseas markets, as their existing line of phones catered to the idiosyncrasies of their local market. With the advent of Android however, there was no longer any excuse, as they could finally focus on hardware, something they can do very well, and simply use stock Android on top.

Thing is, Japanese companies are now being more or less forced to expand. While in the past Japan had been a very closed market, other international players are now coming in dynamically and eroding the hold that local companies had. The iPhone specifically has been killing on sales with the Samsung Galaxy S II trailing far behind.
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“Laputa: Castle in the Sky” TV screening breaks tweets per second record

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  • December 14, 2011 at 1:39 pm

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Ghibli museum - Laputa: Castle in the Sky robot

It’s become a yearly tradition in Japan for Hayao Miyazaki’s and Studio Ghibli’s 1986 anime film Laputa: Castle in the Sky to air around this time of year on TV. On December 9, the amazing anime film was broadcasted for the thirteenth time since first airing in 1988.

Another tradition is for viewers to join the two main characters, Pazu and Sheeta, in shouting “Balse!” (the spell of destruction), at the climax of the movie over social networking sites. Well, this year viewers had taken to Twitter in droves and broke the social networking site’s all time record with 25,088 for tweets per second while the movie was broadcasted from NTV. Even rival broadcaster NHK joined the action with a tweet from its official PR account.
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