“I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil,” he tells me. (We speak through an interpreter, Yuriko Banno.) Japanese pencils are particularly good, he notes: The graphite is delicate and re…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 3 years ago | 0 comments

Tokyo‘s Akihabara district is now reportedly home to the largest Pokémon card store in the world. The Pokémon Card Specialty Shop Hareyua 2 first opened this summer and claims to not only have the bi…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 3 years, 3 months ago | 0 comments

Studio Ghibli will soon release Earwig and the Witch, a new venture into 3D CG animation, that will make its debut on Japanese television. While Miyazaki Hayao works on what is likely to be his last …

posted by  banzaitokyo | 3 years, 11 months ago | 0 comments

Becoming a Pokémon trainer takes on a new meaning in this project for generating new pocket monsters using a machine learning algorithm.

Matthew Rayfield, a programmer who makes mobile and web-based…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 1 month ago | 0 comments

Training GPT-2 with a bunch of text is super easy. The trickiest part was writing code to manage those results into something usable. My "generation" code does this. In this way it's not at all gener…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 1 month ago | 0 comments

Tokiwa-sō is a boarding house where a number of aspiring young manga artists, led by the famed Tezuka Osamu (creator of “Astro Boy”), roomed in the 1960s. Chronicled in their works, Tokiwa-sō lived o…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 2 months ago | 0 comments

It stands just over 18 metres tall and weighs 25 tonnes. And, after years of painstaking work, a life-size Japanese Gundam robot has just proved to its legions of fans that it really can move.

Modell…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 3 months ago | 0 comments

A bigger and more immersive version of a themed facility based on the popular Japanese science fiction anime "Mobile Suit Gundam" has opened in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district.

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 4 months ago | 0 comments

The Gundam Cafe that opened at the Canal City Hakata commercial complex in Fukuoka's Hakata Ward in November (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Gundam fans brace for impact. Japan's very first official cafe …

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 7 months ago | 0 comments

Hatsune Miku’s Nintendo Switch debut is just around the corner! Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix launches exclusively in digital format on Nintendo Switch on May 15, 2020.

Check out a new trailer …

posted by  banzaitokyo | 4 years, 8 months ago | 0 comments