Hasta La Gadget!

With the Tokyo Marathon just round the corner and the climbing season about to begin, retailers are still hoping to capitalize on the growing boom in all things outdoors and the so-called yamagaaru mountain-loving young females trend.

This is best represented by the North Face, who next month is opening its first store aimed at women. Located bang on prime Meijidori, the store is set to be designed in a chic white and black wooden decor, a blend of the cool and the natural. Clearly these kinds of yamagaaru like to remain stylish when they are outdoors.

The American brand is not alone. Sankei reports that in the spring Asics is reviving its outdoors range Mescalito, which it had originally suspended in 2006, only this time switching the focus to women consumers. Descente is also adding outdoors goods to its sports products and Marmot is planning to raise sales of outdoors gear from 65 billion yen last March to 80 billion by 2013.

There are implications for tourism as well. Chichibu City in Saitama hopes to regenerate its fortunes through girls-only mountain tours in collaboration with travel agency JTB. The area has suffered, like many parts of Japan’s regions, from depopulation and the aging populace, and an injection of fully costumed, fashionable mountaineering urban girls might be just the trick for boosting the local economy.

And just because you apparently love the outdoors does not mean you even need to leave the house to indulge your hobby. Yamagaaru now have their own niche digital community site called, perhaps not surprisingly, YamaGirl.net, which recommends products and shares fashion snaps of women in snazzy outdoors wear.

This is just a small example of the funny products we see everyday. Yeah, engrish isn’t exactly new or surprising to us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

From a convenience store collaboration with girls magazine Happie Nuts, now the ladies can have nuts as an accessory!

(Trying to formulate Jewish American Princess joke without offending EVERYONE)

I have no idea what to say about this. These photos were taken in two different stores, albeit of the same brand. Kicking myself for not buying one for my niece.

Finally, someone has created an extract of everyone’s favorite natural aroma!

A new web service, Tada Yasai (”free vegetables”), as the name suggests, is offering people veggies completely without charge.

You do have to pay the delivery costs but essentially there is no catch. The vegetables and fruit are simply left-overs from local farmers in Saitama and Gunma, including produce that is not necessarily fit for the supermarkets (e.g. because the potato is an odd shape). Rather than waste the food they will send it to people who don’t mind eating “imperfect” vegetables. Since it comes straight from the fields the taste or freshness won’t be any different to what you buy from the shelves.

Much like the Noka no Daikoku restaurants, the focus of the site is on the participating farmers themselves, who are all mentioned by name and get their own detailed profile pages like minor celebrities.

Obviously the volume of vegetables on offer is limited (often to around 30 or 40 portions) and you do have to become a member of Tada Yasai to apply for the food, but it still seems a great deal to me! Certain produce is also for sale through the site, so the project is also kind of a promotion for that service. They have obviously gone to a lot of effort with the website and it will be interesting to see if they develop a full retail model beyond just the mottainai ethos of not wasting food.

Japan’s eco consciousness is strongly tied to issues surrounding its own dismal food self-sufficiency levels. As we covered in detail in our Eco Japan Report in 2010, this has led to a number of innovations, including restaurant ranking systems based on proportions of local produce used. More and more veggie-themed restaurants have been popping up recently as well.

Farmers apparently have a lot of glamor in Japan at the moment. Echoing the nogyaru trend from a couple of years ago, a former member of pop group Morning Musume also recently announced she was stopping her modeling and entertainment work to go green-fingered professionally.

[Via Mono Watch]

One of the much-noted trends last year was the ascendancy of the “power spot” frenzy. These centers of spiritual energy are apparently the answers to all our problems. Although the term itself (パワースポット) was coined in the Nineties, going to the places deigned to have this “extra” potency became a big activity last year, especially among women.

While a majority of Japanese people do not claim to follow a faith — other than perhaps a vague affiliation with Buddhism — there is no shortage of people eager to buy talismans, rub their hands on lucky stones, and visit power spots everywhere from Mount Fuji to, um, Iidabashi.

[Meiji Shrine well “power spot” image via Kyodo.]

Now Tokyo Metro is offering one-day train passes for girls looking for romance and the power spots to help them on their quest.

Limited to just 5,000 passes, the 710-yen ($8.60) tickets will be on sale for only six months at major stations. With it in hand love-sick ladies can proceed on their task to channel energy from the seventy power spots inside Tokyo. These include ones at Meiji Shrine, Asakusa and Tokyo Daijingu, famously a shrine visited by girls keen to get married.

Superheadz have produced a special installation using its Digital Harinezumi cameras and content created by over thirty international artists, including filmmaker Patrice Leconte, actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, Harmony Korine and more.

Harinezumi no Mori was first shown in Tokyo and abroad last year and this updated version is on exhibition at Shower Room Factory in Shibuya from tomorrow.

This is how Superheadz describe the concept:

In a world where remixes and loops, samplings and downloads, Google, Amazon, and Youtube became our necessity, people have stopped watching television, and going to record shops and book stores. However, to experience Harinezumi no Mori, you just have to get out; and come experience the moment.

The thirty-minute installation is viewable several times a day and each showing is supposed to be different.

We wanted to create something that you can witness only here – something inconvenient, over the top, painful, not portable, anti-mobile, anti-internet. The result was Harinezumi no Mori.

The “forest” (mori) is composed of multiple Digital Harinezumi films, collected from around the world, broken down and reconstructed. Showing on two hundred monitors the installation is promised to be a “spiritual musical”, the footage becoming “like uncontrollable creatures in the woods”.