Master Cleanse Round 2 
by Roy on May 9, 2008 18:57

Some of you may remember that I did the Master Cleanse aka Lemonade Diet 2 years ago. Well, I’m doing it again and am currently on day 6. I would actually be on day 7 today if I hadn’t eaten half a pizza on day 1. So I had to start over. Anyways, it’s a lot easier this time around and I am planning to go 14 days. Unless I break down and decide to go to Brozer’s to get a burger! I’ve heard they are the best hamburgers in Tokyo. The girl sitting beside me at work keeps telling me how pale I look so if it gets any worse I may have to stop before 14 days. But that means I’ll be able to eat that burger sooner!! Yay! In November, I will do it again and target 21 days which is the ideal length for the cleanse, so they say.

You may also have noticed that I’ve not updated this blog for some time. I’ve realized that I have too many things I want to do but never seem to complete any of them. Then I read somewhere, I think on Lifehack.org, that the most effective way to get something done is to do nothing else but that one thing. This is common sense, but I’ve always been a multitasker so I thought I would try focusing all my energy into one thing at a time. The unfortunate consequence is that I haven’t been spending time wandering the streets looking for blog fodder, hence the lack of updates. Hopefully, this will change soon.

New Office View of Tokyo
by Roy on March 5, 2008 19:42

New Office View
This week my company moved to a brand new office building in central Tokyo which is why I’ve been a bit busier than usually. Our new office has a fantastic view of Tokyo and even Mt. Fuji on a good day. This afternoon between meetings I took a few photos. They’re not that good so I’ll have to take my SLR to work some day and get better shots. The one above is looking towards Roppongi. At the right, you can see Tokyo Midtown and Roppongi Hills just behind it. At the far left is Izumi Gardens.

New Office View
The view east from one of the meeting rooms. That cluster of buildings on the other side of the park is Otemachi. You can also see the Diet which is that pyramid shaped building near the centre.

New Office View
And this shot is facing north-west. That’s Shinjuku in the background.

Hello Kitty Brush Shop
by Roy on March 1, 2008 06:15

Hello Kitty lights ups a brush store window in Tokyo
While walking around in Jimbocho the other night I spotted a dim light in a shop window. It turned out to be this retro Hello Kitty night light. I don’t know which I found more interesting, the Hello Kitty lamp or the fact that the shop was a brush shop. I mean, when was the last time you went to a brush shop?
Close up of retro Hello Kitty night light 
I was tempted to go in and ask if I could by the lamp.

Ear Drops
by Roy on February 29, 2008 08:11

Earbuds shaped like M&Ms 
Throw those crappy white iPod earbuds into the trash and get yourself a pair these cute Ear Drops. Well, if you’re a girl that is. Audio gear has been pretty much unisex, but now there’s a market for headphones designed for women. Recently, while riding the train I’ve been noticing some girls’ ears sparkling thinking it must be an earring, but upon closer inspection I notice it’s a diamond on their headphone.
Earbuds shaped like M&Ms Pink Pink Pink
There are many different styles, diamond heart shaped, rose shaped, candy shaped and of course PINK PINK PINK.
Heart Shaped Earbuds Earbuds for women
The packaging was designed to look like a box for cosmetics and made by different companies, but actually they’re all made by Elecom. These photos taken with my cellphone at Biccamera in Shinjuku

Corporate PC Commonsense
by Roy on February 26, 2008 20:52

Let me take this opportunity to remind everyone never to websurf or save any kind of personal data on your corporate PC or on a PC you use to make presentations. At work, like many of you I sit through many meetings and most of the time someone has their laptop connected to the projector with everyone watching. Often, when they type a URL in the browser the auto complete displays their browsing history and you can see what websites they’ve been visiting. There’s always some surprises hidden in that browser history and while I don’t surf any kind of non work related sites on my corporate PC at work, I still set it to never save history.

Also I never keep any kind of personal image file on the hard drive no matter how benign. You know how in windows if you open up an image attached to a mail and then hit the next button in the image viewer, you get to see what images are in that temporary folder with contains all those mysterious attachments people forget about until they appear on screen for everyone to see. I’ve heard stories about people giving presentations and accidentally pulling up their sex photos and videos and what not. Be careful, else you may end up knowing how Edison Chen feels. Poor Guy..

Unrelated, I’m still looking for an alternative way of displaying images on the blog. I don’t think that Flickr is going to work cause I just don’t like the sizes that I’m limited too. If anyone knows of a good wordpress plugin that will let me batch upload a bunch of photos and specify the thumbnail size differently every time, please let me know what it is.

Nissan GT-R
by Roy on February 22, 2008 21:33

GT-R
I made a turn out of Roppongi Hills parking lot this evening and found myself behind a brand new Nissan GT-R. It’s my first time to see this supercar in person. I missed seeing it at the Tokyo Motor Show last year cause I was sick with the flu and recovering from lasik. The GT-R is not the kind of car that I would buy but boy is it sweet. And sooo shiny too. I couldn’t get any decent photos of it except for this one before he turned onto Aoyama-dori and sped away from me. Now I gotta go to the dealer and see it up close.

Jumper
by Roy on February 20, 2008 22:33

Went to see Jumper at a special premiere today. That’s the film where Anakin teleports around the world. It doesn’t start until March in Japan but a guy at work gave me the tickets cause he couldn’t go. I have to buy him lunch or something in exchange. But I told him that would depend on whether the movie was crap or not. Usually, these special premieres, or 試写会 shishakai as they call them, are held in auditoriums where the sound is really bad and the seats are falling apart, rather than in the regular theatres. Today’s viewing was at Kudanshita kaidan (the sound was bad and the seats were falling apart) which is not far from work but near one of those “not at all convenient to get to stations” where you have to change trains 3 or 4 times. Tickets to shishakai are often raffled off on the Internet and the people who come usually couldn’t care about the film, they just get to see something for free. The theatre was packed 100% with people who appeared to be more low brow and more obnoxious than the usual crowd. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood and everyone got on my nerves. But as an example there was this young dufus who had one of those open-mouthed clued out expressions on his face. He was wearing a big fuzzy hat which he took off, but then put it on again right before the film began. Like, duh? The guy behind him politely asked him to take it off and he was like “Ooooh I didn’t know!! Sorry” Some people are just amazing. And then there was a couple who came in early and started playing Tetris on their mobile phones as soon as they sat down. Not talking to each other, just completely focused on Tetris. For 30 minutes that’s all they did. I was watching them to see if they would continue their game after the movie began but they put them away once the lights went down. I wonder if they play their keitai games during sex too?

Anyways, the movie. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. I’m not going to go into any details and spoil the film for you, but there is one part where Hayden Christensen and the other guy, the kid who played Billy Elliot who’s all grown up now, are walking around in Tokyo talking to each other. They are in Shibuya and Hayden Christensen says something, cut to the other guy who’s suddenly in Ginza and then back to Hayden in Shibuya and so on. They’re literally jumping all over Tokyo even though they aren’t teleporting in the movie. I guess filmmakers think that all Tokyo streets look the same and it doesn’t make a difference but don’t they realize that this film is going to be seen by millions of Japanese people who are gonna know exactly where each shot was taken? This is so typical of hollywood. There’s another scene where they steal a Mercedes from the dealer in Shinbashi and then suddenly they’re driving thru Shinjuku, Akiba and over the Rainbow Bridge. Go figure. Well, it is a film about teleporting so I guess they can get away with it. The film is short, around 78 minutes, probably because they went overbudget filming all over the world. See it on DVD.

Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower
by Roy on February 8, 2008 23:02

Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower and Biccamera
I’m sure everyone has seen that new building they’re building on the west side of Shinjuku. In case you didn’t know, that’s the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower. Mode Gakuen モード学園 is a school for design. What kind of design I’m not sure exactly but from the looks of it they must have a lot of money to be able to build such a building in the middle of Shinjuku. No doubt they’re probably like other trade schools in Japan (called 専門学校 senmon gakko) where the school acts like a quasi-sweatshop, work gets outsourced to the schools which the students do for little to zero pay. The school reaps the profits from the work the students are doing AND also collects tuition from them which is usually some ridiculous amount on par with private universities. The students gain experience working on “real work” which can help them get started professional once they graduate. So it’s kind of a win-win situation. As for the building, well I think on paper these kinds of designs seem kind of cool but design tastes change quickly and this building already looks dated to me.

My eyeballs turned into macaroni salad
by Roy on February 6, 2008 20:04

As some of you may know I got intra-lasik done on my eyeballs about 3 months ago and I’m one of the unfortunate 0.1% of the people who have some kind of post operative complication. It’s not really that big a deal so I won’t go into it here. I’ll save all the gory details for another post. Anyways, my right eye still has some induced stigmatism which fluctuates by the hour. It’s more of a nuisance than handicap and I still see better now than before without glasses but I wish it would hurry up and get better already!

So last night I had this dream where I took my eyeballs out of my head and held them in my hand. I watched Minority Report again on Sunday so maybe that scene where Tom Cruise is chasing his rolling eyeballs down the corridor was lingering in my subsconscious. Even though I took my eyes out of my head I could still see perfectly. I looked at my eyes as they were leaking liquid and quickly becoming deflated like squashed grapes. Then when they finally dried out they looked like a pile of macaroni salad. Go figure. I couldn’t put them into my head anymore. Since I could still see perfectly I thought I didn’t need them but when I looked into the mirror I could see that without eyes I would not look attractive to the opposite sex. This was my first thought in the dream and probably what I would think if this happened in real life ;-)

Finally I found some small light bulbs and stuck them into my eye sockets. They fit perfectly but I didn’t have any pupils so it was very spooky. Thank god I woke up at that moment to find that I still had eyes and not a handful of macaroni salad. I will never be able to enjoy macaroni salad again.

Poo Smell
by Roy on January 28, 2008 19:24

Recently, I’ve been smelling the smell of poo while sitting at my computer at home. It comes suddenly in an intense burst that is quite noticeable. And then disappears. The smell is that of poo, not flatulates, the solid stuff. But sometimes there will be a variant like stinky feet smell or body odor. It’s not a good smell like the smell of coconuts or apple pie or tatami mats. When it comes, I check my hands, armpits, feet, clothes, keyboard, keitai, under my desk etc in a effort to isolate the smell but there’s nothing. The doors and windows are closed so it can’t be coming from outside. It appears to be coming from directly in front of me, like from my keyboard or computer monitor.

This has been happening once or twice a day for the past 2 weeks and is driving me absolutely crazy. I’ve been trying to figure out this mystery but haven’t been able to come to any conclusions, however I do have some theories. Here they are:

  1. Someone hid some poo in my computer case. An ex-girlfriend of mine once hid a really strong airfreshener behind a bookshelf in my apartment. It smelled like citrus constantly and it took me a while before I discovered I was sabotaged. I think she was giving me a subtle hint that she didn’t like the smell of my place. Anyways, citrus is better than poo.
  2. There’s some kind of animal living and pooing in my office. Like a rat or beaver.
  3. There’s some kind of sewage leak that’s seeping into the walls of my house near where my computer is located.
  4. The smell is coming from some other-worldly source. You know how the devil is supposed to smell like fire and brimstone, like that except a poo demon, or something.
  5. My brain is short-circuiting and sending me sensations from past experiences. Perhaps they are my first smell experiences as a baby? If so, why couldn’t they be more pleasant smells like a new car smell or first kiss smell?

I have reason to believe that it could very well be number 5 since today at work I experienced another wave of poo smell while sitting in front of my PC at the office. Very strange this is. At any rate, I’m sorry for throwing around the “p” word so liberally in this post. Hope I didn’t ruin your lunch or dinner.

GR Digital 2
by Roy on November 1, 2007 06:49

ricoh_gr2.jpg
I’ve come briefly out of hiding to tell you about the Ricoh GR Digital 2 which was announced the other day. Yes, it looks almost exactly like the GR Digital 1 and has the same basic body and lens, most of the improvements are under the hood. It’s been exactly 2 years since the GR Digital 1 came out. Unlike other camera companies (Sony, Canon, Fujifilm), Ricoh doesn’t arbitrarily change the design, add a feature and release a new model every 3 months, which is something I can respect. It goes on sale 11/22 in Japan and I’ve already ordered mine online from biccamera.com. Read more about it here.

Tokyo Intersection #2
by Roy on September 1, 2007 06:07

tokyo-intersection2-01.jpg
Having to climb stairs to cross the street via an overhead bridge is very common in Tokyo although a big pain in the butt if you are lazy. But it’s fun to watch people overhead when you’re in a car. Can you guess this intersection?


Hachikō: A Dog’s Story
by Roy on March 6, 2008 06:08

Richard Gere is going to be in a movie about Hachikō. I happened to be mindlessly surfing around imdb.com and found the entry. From looking at the cast list, it seems like it won’t be filmed in Shibuya. The wikipedia entry on Hachikō says the American adaptation will take place in Rhode Island. And I wonder what kind of dog they will choose? Beagle maybe? How are they going to explain the name of the dog? Not sure if this is an original story based on the “true story” or an adaptation of “Hachikō Monogatari”, the Japanese movie that came out in 1984.

N.Y. Cupcakery in Tokyo
by Roy on March 4, 2008 07:11

N.Y. Cupcakes in Tokyo
I’ve been getting fat on cupcakes recently. Near Meidaimae station, along the train tracks there’s a small cupcake shop that makes some of the best cupcakes I’ve ever had. The shop is called N.Y. Cupcakes because the owners actually went to the U.S. and learned how to bake cupcakes from some cupcake guru, apparently. There’s a whole story about it on the website how they quit they’re jobs just to make cupcakes. On some podcast, I remember hearing about some rich investment bankers in the U.S. who also quit their day jobs to open up a cupcake shop in Beverly Hills, “Sprinkles” was the name I think? Anyways, these cupcakes are good. Not as moist and sweet as your typical american one, but altered to be more palatable for the Japanese. They’re small and cost about ¥200-250 each. I like the chocolate cream filled ones, 2nd and 4th on the bottom row.

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Shimokitazawa Station
by Roy on March 1, 2008 02:15

They’re tearing down our beloved Shimokitazawa station and a new one will be completed sometime in the next decade. Shops along the fringe are slowly disappearing and walls to hide the destruction have been erected without notice. Along these walls they’ve posted several black and white photos of Shimokitazawa station taken 30, maybe 40 years ago. As I was examining them, and trying unsuccessfully to determine what part of the station it was now, I wondered if people back then also protested the destruction and construction of what was to become the current station. And if in 50 or so years people will protest the destruction of the station that they’re building now. At any rate, let me try to explain what these photos are of. Apologies to all of you who’ve never been Japan, let alone to this extremely local part of Tokyo. You can ignore this post and click on one of the random photos to look at something else.

Shimokitazawa Station Shimokitazawa Station
These 2 photos appear to be the main entrance to the platform of the Keio Inokashira line. That would be where the west exit is now. The ticket gate is in the spot which is now the Hanko shop and Step runner shoe shop.

Shimokitazawa Station Shimokitazawa Station
The photo on the left is of the platform as you are crossing the Inokashira line tracks at the west exit. The entrance to the station, shown in the first 2 photos can be seen here at the right edge. The second photo was taken from the platform looking at what’s now the north exit. You can see the covered staircase which goes up, over and probably down to the Odakyu line which is half underground. Not sure if the Odakyu line was even built at that time but it definitely looks like there’s something there.

Shimokitazawa Station Shimokitazawa Station
This photo was taken from the complete opposite side looking at the elevated platform of the Inokashira line. If you look closely you can see the phone booth and signs which are in both photos. This is about where AM/PM and Mizuho Bank are except the photo was taken at a high angle. I took a present day photo from roughly the same spot so you could compare.

Did you find this interesting? If so, maybe you want to check out my post about Shibuya in 1985.

Akiba Morning
by Roy on February 28, 2008 21:04

Akihabara on a Saturday morning Yodobashi Akiba
My thumbnails are now the size I want them to be!! Hooray!! Many thanks to Patrick for cooking up a super php script which creates thumbnails of any size I specify and caches them on my server. Now I can host all my images on Flickr and not be limited to their image sizes! As a test case for the script, I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos I took around Akihabara last Saturday.

With the Format war over and Blu-ray the clear winner (Yay! I’m in the Blu camp obviously) Brad and I decided it was the right time to sell all our DVDs. This was my 3rd time to purge my DVD collection. I sold 85 DVDs and Brad had 66. For those 85 I got about ¥67,000 which basically paid for the 32GB iPod Touch I got when it came out. If you’re wondering why we sold all our DVDs, it’s because we are going to rebuy them when they come out on Blu-ray. While the good people at Trader were assessing our DVDs we walked around Akiba trying not to get tempted to buy anything. Some photos after the jump.

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Algorithm Taiso
by Roy on February 22, 2008 23:12


Recently, I’ve been exposed to Japanese children’s television subculture which up until a few months ago I paid no attention to. See, one of my best friends who lives 5 minutes from my house had a baby and I go visit them at least once a week to play with the kid and brainwash him to become a bad boy by whispering evil ideas into his ear when his mother is looking the other way. Well, it doesn’t seem to be working cause he’s absolutely a great kid. On the other hand, when I’m over there I’m constantly being bombarded with children’s tv shows for hours. As a result, I find myself humming some of these songs while I’m in the shower or on the train. I’ve even looked them up on youtube while at work!! Help me! One of them is Algorithm Taiso (Algorithm Exercise) which is a regular segment from NHK’s 15 minute children’s show Pitagora Switch (Pythagora Switch), a show mixing animation, contraptions and music to stimulate children’s minds. You might have seen this before doing the rounds on the Japan blogs. Two guys do the same exercise routine and every time they have different guests doing it with them. Policemen, firemen, construction workers, various people in society that are easily recognizable by children. The one above though is with the Sony QRIO robots. And they’re really good!!


Even better is with Tokyo Bus Guides. Can’t wait for the Akiba Maids one. I’m guessing there must be an adult version out there somewhere, you know, for the dads. ;-)


There’s also a different version which is the Algorithm March. Here they are doing it with a bunch of Ninjas. For some reason I can’t stop watching this video. Japanese people grow up watching these kinds of complex dance routines, that’s why they’re good at the Haruhi Dance.

Many more versions on youtube.

Q-TARO.COM Version 4.0
by Roy on February 22, 2008 08:22

Things at work and outside work have kept me quite busy for the last several weeks. But there was one weekend in January when I just sat down and decided to redesign this site. I had no real image of how I wanted to design the layout, it just kind of evolved over the course of 72 sleepless hours. The result is what you are looking at now, unless you’re using an RSS reader in which case please visit the site. There are still quite a bit of outstanding items to be added and changed but I couldn’t wait any longer so cut it over to production the other night.

This time, I rebuilt the site with WordPress and have abandoned MovableType (Sorry SixApart). I’ve been a loyal MT user and the only reason I switched to WP was because I couldn’t get MT4.0 initialized when I tried to upgrade it, and after searching for hours to find a solution I gave up in frustration. In case you don’t know, documentation for MovableType is absolutely crap considering the fact that they charge money for it. On the other hand, documentation for WP is plentiful and easy to find. I’ve tried WP in the past only to be less than impressed, however after spending more time with it I’ve realized that it’s so much easier to use and manage. As an example, my database when ported over from MT to WP shrunk in size from 128MB to 7MB. That’s because MT stores everything in the database, templates, stylesheets etc. while WP only contains blog content and configurations. When you customize templates you have to FTP them to your server. I suppose there is convenience to be able to administer everything from the MT admin pages but for me this is not a big deal. The only other beef is that WP uses dynamically created pages which may cause bottlenecks at the server but I don’t anticipate 5000pv per day for a while.

Most of the cosmetic changes I made to the template I did for my own satisfaction. All the images along the top and right hand side of the page change randomly when the pages is refreshed. I took all the toy images I had from the old site and display them randomly along the header. At the top right are photos of my retro robot toys. The search box area randomly displays images from classic Japanese films. I especially like the photos of Kaga Mariko. There are about 100 or so photos and I will be adding more all the time. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to support the old layout because it was done on MT and personally I’m kind of sick of it after 4 years, so apologies to those who prefer the old design. You can still see the old site here for comparison (the links are all messed up though). Maybe the new one will grow on you. Still to be added are RSS for comments, featured feeds, photo gallery, preview for comments and a bunch of other little stuff. If you have any suggestions or ideas please let me know in the comments.

Finally, I’m very happy to see that several people have kept my feed in their RSS Reader. To be honest, I didn’t expect anyone would be interested in my relaunch. It’s always nice to receive such kind comments.

3D TV
by Roy on February 9, 2008 23:05

3D TV glasses 3D TV
Did I tell you I love 3D? Yes, I actually paid to see Polar Express in 3D IMAX 3 times. I would have paid to see Beowulf in 3D IMAX too, but unfortunately there weren’t showing it in Japan. BS11, one of those BS channels that I never watch, is broadcasting many of their shows in 3D. When I saw this promotion I thought “How Cool!” but then I found out that you have to buy that crappy looking Hyundai TV to watch it. Even if Sharp puts out an Aquos that will do the 3D I doubt if I would be willing to buy a new TV just to watch 3D.

Giant Garbage Whirlpool off the coast of Japan
by Roy on February 7, 2008 16:42

Great Pacific Garbage Patch
That’s not plankton or seaweed forming that whirlpool off the eastern coast of northern Japan. That’s a huge “soup” of floating garbage. If that junk is in the ocean and the fish are eating that junk and we eat the fish, then we are eating that junk too!! It’s sickening, isn’t it? This post on Japan Probe got me to google it out and I found the above image here.

Redesign in progress
by Roy on January 29, 2008 08:02

Q-TARO.COM renewal
Some photos of my beautiful dual 24″ dell displays which I procured last fall at an incredibly low price. It’s nice to have all that screen real estate for doing web work. Here I’m working on the icons for the top banner using the toy images from my previous design. It’s already changed quite a bit since I took these photos. You can see that the previous header looked awful compared to the darker tiled version I have now. I’m almost finished the design template, except now I’m thinking of creating another one with the main content in 2 columns like I had before. First I have to fix that darn IE6 CSS bug though.

Mt.Fuji from Izu
by Roy on January 25, 2008 12:16

With the renewal of this site, I’ve decided to host all my images on Flickr from now on. I’m not going to bother moving all my older posts’ images to Flickr cause there are too many. I’m starting with this photo of Mt. Fuji taken from a small town on the west side of Izu last fall.
Fuji-san from Izu

Hiatus
by Roy on September 4, 2007 22:46

Was chatting with Sean over Skype this afternoon about how reading blogs was getting boring and the content on most of them repetitive. It’s such a daily habit with me that reading blogs and RSS feeds has become somewhat like flipping channels on cable TV trying to find something interesting in all that noise. At least with TV there are times when there is nothing to watch. But with the web it just never ends. There’s always something leading to something else. It’s a bottomless pit. It’s gotten to the point where it’s actually affecting my health. I suppose I have a mild addiction to the Internet (don’t we all?) 8 hours at work and another 6 hours at home per day is a bit much, isn’t it?

This feeling is part of the reason that I have not been very enthusiastic about updating this blog for the past few weeks. Not that I don’t enjoy doing it but I try not to post about something unless I feel excited and genuinely passionate about it. Otherwise it’s just a chore, you know. There have been quite a lot of interesting things lately for which I have many unpublished posts, but just haven’t been able to motivate myself to finish. Another reason is simply that there are other things going on in my life that have become more of a priority than getting a blog post published. Nothing bad, in case you were wondering, just some different interests I’m pursuing.

Many good blogs I read often die out after a year or two and I’ve always wondered what happened to those people. Not a word about why their blog disappeared or anything. Did they die? Or did they have a nervous breakdown? Like Justin Hall did online in Jan 2005. In case you don’t know who he is, he’s like the Internet’s first true blogger. Probably most people just lose interest or move on with their lives or whatever. Well, I’m not planning to shut this site down completely, but I will be taking a self imposed hiatus of a couple months to focus on other things and just recharge.

I’ll be back so don’t unsubscribe my blog feed from your RSS reader just yet.

Peace.

Gap Posters with Japanese Stars
by Roy on August 30, 2007 20:41

gap-posters-01.jpg gap-posters-02.jpg
The Gap is using Puffy and Ken Watanabe in their posters. This is the first time I know of that they’re using Japanese celebs in their ads. Since they are 2 (or 3) of the few Japanese faces that are well-known in North America I’m guessing that either 1) the marketing department is located overseas or 2) run by foreigners who don’t know any other locally famous Japanese celebrities or 3) It’s an International Ad campaign. Probably it’s 3. Which might explain why most of the other foreigner celebs that appear in these ads are practically unknown to the average Japanese shopping for jeans. E.G. Selma Blair, Forest Whitaker, Sarah Silverman etc. Photos are by Annie Leibovitz