Queen’s Blade Second Season Commercial streamed!
July 31, 2009 by Toonleap
Filed under News, Queen’s Blade
Comments Off
Queen’s Blade still months away, but marketing for the second season has just begun, with the launch of Volume 0 of Queen’s Blade: Gyokuza no Tsugumono!
The 132-second commercial for the “Volume 0 DVD” of the Queen’s Blade: Gyokuza no Tsugumono (literally, “Queen’s Blade: Inheritor of the Throne,” or Queen’s Blade and the evil eye) television anime series has begun streaming on the YouTube website and on the anime’s official website. Media Factory will sell the DVD at next month’s Comic Market 76 event in Tokyo.
Source: Saishin Anime Jōhō via ANN
Queen’s Blade and the Evil Eye can’t get here fast enough and fans are eagerly waiting for it…including Me!
Japan’s Strangest Toys!
Oddee has compiled a list for the 10 strangest toys made in Japan and I must second that…They are very strange indeed. I will not post all of them because I consider that some of the toys maybe disturbing, and also because I want our readers to visit Oddee and read the rest. I picked up some of them and you are invited to make out your own conclusions. Here are some of Japan’s strangest toys and some remarks from the author of Oddee!
Tuttuki Bako Poking Box
This new interactive toy from Japan involves sticking your finger in a hole on the side of the box to interact with a virtual environment.
Found at Geek Stuff 4 U for a little bit over $48.(Source)
H-Bouya Erotic USB Toy
Here’s the weirdest toy, designed by Cube in Japan: the H-Bouya! The ‘H’ used in the name may also mean ‘erotic’ in Japanese (‘H’ is pronounced “eechi” = erotic). So you can say this is the Erotic Boy! H-bouya is plugged into a USB port, and each time the keyboard’s ‘H’ key is hit, it turns red and its eyes blink!
(Source)
Sega Robot Cat
This is “Yume-Neko Venus,” or “Dream Cat Venus.” This Japanese toy is equipped with touch sensors that let it engage in such real-life feline behavior as purring, moving its legs when you rub its belly, and sleeping a lot. It could be cute if it weren’t so damn creepy.
(Source)
Obama Action Toy
Barack Obama supporters can buy action man figures of the new US President, wielding a samurai sword and a Star Wars lightsaber, thanks to Japanese firm Gamu-Toys. The dolls, which are 1/6 in scale and stand roughly 12in in height, come with interchangeable heads and hands. The weapons are not included as part of the package, leaving the way clear for fans of Barack Obama to accessorise the President as they see fit.
(Source)
Bandai Floating Micro Toys
Here’s another toy straight from Japan that’s a little baffling. The toy is meant to just hang out in bottled water and float around. No, there really isn’t a point to it. It comes in various colors in the shapes of jellyfish, squids and octopuses. The Bandai micro toys are available in Japan for $6. Of course those outside Japan will have issues getting them, which I’m sure is heartbreaking news for many of you.
(Source)
The Kaba Kick
Kaba Kick is a Russian Roulette for kids, well in this case a Japanese Roulette. The player points the gun at his or her own head and pulls the trigger. Instead of bullets, a pair of feet kick out from the barrel (which is shaped like a pink hippo). If the gun doesn’t fire, the player earns points. I would surely like my kids playing this healthy game.
(Source)
For more of Japan’s Strangest Toys, visit Oddee. There are some other toys that can disturb some of our readers in there.
Japanese Astronaut tests his Undies endurance?!
Astronauts are doing all kind of tests to explore the possibility of space exploration…Tests that includes the endurance…of underwear!
In what might embarrass less adventurous souls, astronaut Koichi Wakata is returning to Earth with the underwear he kept on for a solid month during his space station stay and scientists will check them out.
They’re experimental high-tech undies, designed in Japan to be odor free.
The Japanese spaceman described his underwear test Thursday as shuttle Endeavour and its crew aimed for a touchdown the next morning. The astronauts released some mini satellites, their final job before Friday’s re-entry, and said it was time to come home after more than two weeks aloft.
Wakata has been off the planet for 4 1/2 months.
“I haven’t talked about this underwear to my crew members,” Wakata said in an interview with The Associated Press, drawing a big laugh from his six shuttle colleagues. “But I wore them for about a month, and my station crew members never complained for about a month, so I think the experiment went fine.”
The Japanese underwear, called J-Wear, is a new type of anti-bacterial, water-absorbent, odor-eliminating clothing designed for space travel. The line includes shirts, pants and socks as well. Wakata tested all of them during his mission; he had four pairs of the silver-coated underwear, a cross between briefs and boxers.
“We’ll see the results after landing,” Wakata said.
J-Wear is billed as being antistatic and flame retardant, which is especially important for spaceship wear. The cotton and polyester clothes are also seamless, making them lighter and more comfortable, according to the Japanese Space Agency. The goal is “comfortable everyday clothes for life in a spaceship.”
Another Japanese astronaut wore some J-Wear items during a shuttle flight last year, but had only 16 days in orbit to try them out.
NASA’s space station program manager, Mike Suffredini, stressed the importance of testing new products, especially those aimed at improving astronauts’ quality of life. There’s no way to wash clothes in space. Station residents simply ditch dirty outfits, along with other garbage, in no longer needed cargo ships that are sent plunging in flames through the atmosphere.
“Eventually, we’re going to do exploration. We’re going to go to the moon. We’re going to go beyond the moon someday, and little things like this will seem like really, really big things when you’re far away from Mother Earth,” Suffredini told reporters.
Good weather was forecast for Friday’s late morning landing attempt, with the rain expected to hold off until afternoon at NASA’s spaceport.
On Thursday afternoon, NASA cleared Endeavour to come home, after analyzing wing and nose images beamed down by the crew Wednesday in one final sweep for micrometeorite damage.
“I’m ready to get back … I think I have a landing in me, so don’t want to get anybody on the ground worried about that,” commander Mark Polansky told the AP.
In one of NASA’s longer shuttle flights, Polansky and his crew put a new addition onto the international space station — a porch for Japan’s massive $1 billion lab — and freshened up the place with batteries, experiments and spare parts. They rocketed into space July 15.
Thursday marked Day 15 in space for Polansky and all but one of his crew. For Wakata, Thursday marked Day 137. He flew to the space station back in March, becoming the first person from Japan to live at the orbiting outpost.
Wakata said he’s longing for sushi.
“That’s the first thing that I’d like to have and also a hot spring in Japan sometime in the near future,” Wakata told the AP.
Earlier in the day, the shuttle astronauts released a small canister containing a navigation and rendezvous experiment. Five hours later, the crew launched an atmospheric density experiment so scientists can better understand how orbiting objects move and eventually come down.
Over at the space station, meanwhile, the major air-purifying system on the U.S. side failed again, and the crew spent the day trying to fix the equipment. Engineers suspect a heating element is causing a short.
A carbon dioxide-removal system on the Russian side is still operating properly, and the six astronauts have backup methods for cleansing the cabin atmosphere. But the American system is critical for long-term space station operations. It overheated over the weekend and shut down, but flight controllers managed to work around the problem, at least for a few days.
As for NASA’s next station visit, officials are targeting an Aug. 25 launch of Discovery, provided that a few remaining tests of the fuel tank shows the insulating foam is attached properly.
An unusually large amount of foam broke off Endeavour’s fuel tank during liftoff. Deputy shuttle program manager LeRoy Cain said dust or other debris may have gotten on the tank and not been cleaned off prior to the foam application. Some of the workers may not have been familiar enough with the job, he noted.
Source: Associated Press via Google / Discovery
Odorless underwear, now thats good product…not only for astronauts!…. 
Getting ready for the REAL Tokyo Magnitude!
Right now on Japan TV, one can watch an anime called Tokyo Magnitude 8.0! The anime is based on situations dealing with a Big Earthquake with a 8.0 magnitude…but what about real life? Japanese are preparing themselves for the BIG one.
Many believe a massive earthquake is due any time in Tokai, an area south of Tokyo that sits atop a precarious confluence of tectonic plates. One worried mom has taken preparations into her own hands.
Come hell or high water — she’s actually expecting both — Nobue Kunizaki will be ready when the dreaded Tokai earthquake finally hits central Japan, whether in the next month or years from now.
She’s anticipating a temblor that’s already got a name as well as estimates on when and where and how mightily it might strike, a guessing game that has rattled even this earthquake-prone nation.
But no one, perhaps, is shakier than the petite 39-year-old. She’s built a new “Ninja house” with high-tech gadgets and design improvements that she hopes will withstand the force of the next earthquake for at least long enough for her family to escape.
Go ahead and call her Japan’s Chicken Little, the Earthquake Lady or Calamity Queen; others here in this suburban community just outside Tokyo already do.
But Kunizaki is bettering her chances on an archipelago perched upon a precarious confluence of shifting continental plates that each day causes 1,000 quakes strong enough to be felt and scores of temblors annually that are magnitude 5.5 or greater.
Her $600,000 home is connected to Japan’s vaunted earthquake early-warning system, which senses the first shaking of a temblor and can give up to half a minute or more of notice before a major earth movement reaches a particular location. There are also secret fall-away doors, emergency lights, indoor sprinklers and other sensors.
“I don’t think I’m paranoid,” she says. “Tokai is imminent. The earth is going to move in a big way. Now that I’m prepared, I feel I can try to live a normal life.”
Kunizaki is illustrative of what experts call Japan’s evolving approach to earthquake preparedness. For decades, scientists here focused on technology that could accurately predict an earthquake — its size, location and time.
Now the government has shifted its approach, acknowledging criticism — both at home and abroad — that such formidable natural occurrences cannot be predicted with such certainty.
Instead, Japan has shifted much of its emphasis to instructing people on how to react once a temblor hits.
A nationwide education campaign features drills conducted at centers with quake simulators. Seminars on emergency medical treatment, fire extinguishing and finding one’s way out of a smoke-filled building have attracted hundreds of thousands of people each year.
Recently, two Tokyo schoolteachers clutched the legs of a fastened-down table as a simulator stage shook for nearly a minute with the force of a 6.9 temblor, jolting the test room like a malevolent thrill ride.
“Everyone here is surprised at the violence of the movement and how long it lasts,” said Toshio Seki, a former firefighter and instructor at Life Safety Learning Center in Tokyo. “They say, ‘I didn’t know the earth moved so vigorously.’ And I tell them that this is just a test. The real one is much worse, much more emotionally terrible.”
The Tokai region, centered 100 miles south of Tokyo, is the anticipated ground zero for Japan’s next Big One, which researchers say could reach a colossal magnitude 8.0. Southern California’s most powerful modern earthquake was the magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon temblor in 1857.
At Tokai, experts explain, the Philippine Plate is sliding under the Eurasia Plate. In a process known as “crustal deformation,” a sharp-edged peninsula that juts into the sea is being pushed down several millimeters a year. The quake would release the pressure, causing the land to leap up several yards and send deadly shock waves across Japan.
The Tokai region was last hit by such an earthquake 154 years ago. With an estimated frequency of 150 years, that means another ground-shaking event here may be just around the corner, Seki said.
“If the quake hits at 6 p.m. rush hour,” he told one tour group, “more than 60,000 people could die.”
Over the decades, Japanese scientists have spent billions of dollars conducting studies with sensitive equipment they hoped would offer clues to when the Tokai temblor might occur. Then the 1995 Kobe quake hit — a magnitude 6.9 monster that killed 6,400 people and caused $90 billion in damage.
“Kobe changed everything,” said Teruyuki Kato, a professor at the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo. “People complained that no one had predicted a quake in that region. They said researchers had failed.”
The government responded with an education campaign that included multimillion-dollar earthquake simulators and other efforts to prepare the public for the aftermath of a quake. Although researchers still use seismic probes and other instruments to monitor movement in Earth’s crust, Kato said, the aim no longer is to predict the hour or day or week of the next quake.
“We tell people not to expect researchers to predict earthquakes with any exactness because we’ve discovered that it’s nearly impossible to do,” Kato said, adding that his opinion is now the expert consensus in Japan and elsewhere. “We’ve started talking in a more holistic way, about how to react when one hits.”
The Kobe quake changed life for Nobue Kunizaki.
She was living in a rented home near Tokyo and saw the images of destruction on TV along with the rest of the nation.
She began reading up on disaster preparedness and found most books written from a male view.
“Men think it’s enough to escape a second floor with a ladder or rope,” said Kunizaki, who has children ages 13, 10 and 3. “But if you’re a woman with kids, you can’t climb down a rope with a baby.”
With what the homemaker learned about earthquakes, she began a private “disaster management advisor” business, offering safety seminars.
She’s also written two books, “Save Your Child From the Earthquake,” and “The Earthquake Came to My Town,” offering pointers such as preparing an emergency backpack for each child that includes not only disaster essentials but soft, comforting items like stuffed animals to help ease the emotional stress.
Then Kunizaki got the idea to construct her own house to illustrate her safety ideas. She bought land in suburban Tokyo and had the home built.
Without architectural training, she designed a modern structure in which each room has two doors, balconies for easier escape and lights that are covered in case the bulbs explode.
She argued with her builders, who repeatedly told her that what she wanted couldn’t be built. She also quarreled with her husband, Manubu, an engineer who helped foot the bill. “Her idea became an obsession,” he said. “She’s a bit more worried about earthquakes than the normal person.”
Each bathroom has a push-out wall or door in case someone is trapped.
But the escape hatch in the upstairs bathroom is too small for Manubu to fit through, Kunizaki said. “So we’ve supplied the bathroom with a whistle to call for help and a radio to listen to until it comes.”
She also conducts regular drills with her two oldest boys.
“My mom is kind of paranoid, but I’m not afraid of earthquakes,” says 10-year-old Yutaka.
“Liar!” his brother Junnichi yells from the next room.
Kunizaki’s house was completed last year. Now she waits for the ground to shake. Manubu teases her about her next project. She laughs and says no, she’s not going to build an asteroid-proof house.
“I’m ready for the worst,” she said of the Tokai quake. “But even though I’ve prepared this much, I’m still scared.”
Source: Los Angeles Times / Article by John M. Glionna
It is interesting how people are preparing for the big one. If you are still not familiar with the situation, perhaps, you should watch Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. Producers tried their best to portray what could happen in a big earthquake and also delivers a good story. Probably many in Japan are paying attention.
Loading ...
