New essay on NJ

I have my first essay up at Neojaponisme. It's about the J-drama CHANGE starring SMAP icon Takuya Kimura.

Note: You can download this drama fansubbed in English from the torrent site D-Addicts.

Westerner's fear of the neon sign -- offline!

What a tragic waste of classic essays:

"The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available."

Anyone have any idea why this happened?

Welcome to Adamu's stand-alone blog

Welcome to my new blog!

This post is for those who know me from my posts on Mutant Frog Travelogue.

For almost four years, MFT has been the forum for my translations and commentary. But considerable reorganization of my life over the past year (moving to Tokyo, marriage, a full-time office job) has made it tough to keep up with regular posts there.

This blog will serve as a dump for my random thoughts, pictures, etc., but I'll still try and post more fleshed-out pieces to MFT.

I make no promises as to how much I'll be posting in terms of actual blog posts, but you can check my public Google Notebook in the sidebar to keep up with whatever news stories I am following (right now there's one on Burma signing the ASEAN charter, the coming shortage of "mocha" blend coffee at Japanese supermarkets, and the Nikkei index, among others).

Anyway, please make yourselves at home and enjoy the new site!

Matisyahu - Pretty decent music

A couple of years ago I came across this review of Matisyahu, perhaps the only Hasidic Jewish reggae singer, in the New York Times. At the time I wasn't all that interested in listening (or a regular user of Youtube to search for music) so I kind of let it pass.

But now Matisyahu has found his way back into my consciousness with a new song especially for the "Burma - It can't wait" campaign, a 30-day series of videos by mostly US celebrities aimed at raising awareness of the situation in Burma. Here's his contribution:



And he's not bad! His music is a smooth ride down an open road. It reminds me of overnight drives home when I would flip through the radio dial until I found could listen to some genre of music I don't usually come across. Here's another video.