A couple more entries in the shiritori word game.
First up, Uda-san posts a vignette of figure-skater Mao Asada receiving a bag full of LEGO goodies from a fan:
Nigou continues the game, from Uda-san’s Mao Asada to her sweet-potato vendor’s cart (manned by Hagrid). These vendors sell sweet-potatoes baked on a bed of red-hot stones. Today, they most often drive around in little trucks, with their oven on the back, so these traditional carts are a rare sight:
Earlier this week, Bruce (of VignetteBricks) posted on Classic-Castle.com about a LEGO exhibit in Japan. I’d seen links to this on Japanese LEGO blogs, but that was before I started Pan-Pacific Bricks (and then I forgot).
The “Piece of Peace” exhibit, sponsored by McDonald’s and Yahoo! Kids, was a charity event in which the proceeds from ticket and souvenir sales benefited UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. With the motto “It takes a lot of pieces to build peace,” the exhibit showcased UNESCO World Heritage Sites in LEGO, built with the assistance of Japanese LEGO Master Builder Kazuyoshi Naoe.
Here’s Mont St. Michelle in France:
And Machu Picchu in Peru:
This page lists each of the sites recreated in LEGO for the exhibit. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese. LUGNET user M. Moolhuysen assembled a site-by-site list in English (with links), so I’ll link to his list instead of duplicating it here.
For even better pictures, watch the wonderful 20-minute video (in Windows Media Format) available at three bit rates toward the bottom of this page. The video shows close-up shots of each LEGO creation, from many different angles. A Japanese explanation appears on-screen, but each site is also identified in English. The end of the video also shows several interesting non-UNESCO LEGO creations by contemporary artists and graphic designers. Well worth watching.
The bad news is that the exhibit now appears to be over; the last listed date is October through November of 2005.
In Japanese, the word for “part-time job” is arubaito, which comes from the German word for “work,” arbeit. Arubaito is often shortened to baito. There’s a Japanese PSP game called “Beit Heller 2000,” which apparently includes a minigame called “Ballpoint Factory.”
This guy has figured out an ingenious method of getting the high score:
Click the image to view the full series of hilarious pictures. Thanks to mumu for finding this!
(Yes, this is LEGO-related!)
Ask and ye shall receive! In my recent post on the alternate Exo-Force design by anime director and mecha designer Shoji Kawamori, I asked if any Japanese LEGO fans knew of any better pictures of a completed Van Force mecha.
Azumu (of LEGO-BINGO, who it seems is much more consistent about checking Brickshelf than I am) responded:
Regarding instructions for Kawamura-sensei’s “Van Force,” gabriel-san customized the model a bit and uploaded them:
http://brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=161353
There were a few places in the magazine that were hard to figure out, so it’s not a complete recreation, but I think it’s pretty much complete.
Thanks Azumu-san! So without further ado, here’s a bigger picture of Van Force:
Click the image (or the link Azumu-san provided) for the full gallery, complete with step-by-step building instructions! Awesome.
Oh, and those aren’t custom decals. Japanese LEGO specialty store Click-Brick handed out Van Force sticker sheets with the purchase of any Exo-Force set. Since The LEGO Company worked with Mr. Kawamori to design Van Force, I believe the sticker sheet is “official.”
The name Nelson Yrizarry should be familar to regular readers of VignetteBricks and LUGNET (as well as The Brothers Brick). He and his brother Patrick are well-respected members of the LEGO community, and their creations are admired by LEGO fans everywhere. One of Nelson’s latest vignettes features a distinctly Japanese theme — the Hina Matsuri or Girls’ Day Festival.
Here’s what Nelson has to say:
In this MOC, a family gathers to celebrate the day with the pounding of mochi (rice cakes) in the traditional style – hammering it inside a large stone bowl. For those who have never seen this before, one person wets their hands and reaches into the bowl between hammer blows to fold the mochi over – timing is crucial! Everyone else helps to roll the mochi into smaller pieces.
A hina-ningyo doll is on display inside the house, along with something else… Don’t forget to enjoy the cherry blossoms!
Click the image to see the full gallery.
Today we’ll wrap up translations of Izzo’s series of Japanese proverb vignettes. I’ve said before that he’s presenting them in hiragana order, which means he created a LEGO vignette for each kana character in the Japanese syllabic alphabet. Some of you may be expecting 50 vignettes, but there are only 44. Let’s have one last Japanese lesson to explain why.
The Japanese alphabet, or Gojuon, is represented in two scripts (or kana), hiragana and katakana. Goju means “fifty,” and on means sound, implying that there are fifty kana in the Gojuon. Children memorize the Gojuon in tables. There are ten columns of five kana each. The first column contains the vowels; the next nine contain consonants combined with those vowels (plus an N sound in its own eleventh column that nobody counts). However, the “Ya” column includes two duplicate vowels, and the “Wa” column includes another duplicate vowel, two archaic kana (unused in modern writing), and the vowel “Wo” that never begins a word. Thus 44 instead of 50.
(Now combine hiragana with their corresponding katakana forms, Latin letters and numbers, and nearly 2,000 Kanji characters derived from Chinese — each with multiple possible readings depending on context, and you get an idea of how complex the Japanese written language is.)
Now, on to the final batch of Izzo’s vignettes:
Japanese: The seed of pleasure is pain; the seed of pain is pleasure.
English: No pain, no gain.
Japanese: A flower in each hand.
English: Have one’s bread buttered on both sides.
Japanese/English: Like attracts like.
Japanese/English: There’s an exception to every rule.
Japanese: Evidence instead of discourse.
English: The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Japanese/English: Fortune enters by a merry gate.
Izzo has finished his sequence of Japanese proverb vignettes. Now Bruce and I just need to catch up!
So let’s get cracking!
Japanese/Japanese: Fine feathers make fine birds.
Japanese: The mummy thief becomes a mummy.
English: Go for wool and come home shorn.
Japanese: The pestle handle I took hold of in the past.
English: Skills you learn as a young man don’t wane as you grow older.
Japanese/English: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Japanese: A sword returns to its sheath.
English: To kiss and make up.
Japanese/English: Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Japanese: Carelessness is the greatest enemy.
English: Danger comes when you least expect it.
Japanese/English: The biggest trees give the most shelter.
Although Japan officially celebrates New Year’s Day on January 1st, until 1873 Japan followed the lunar calendar used by China, Korea, Vietnam, and many other Asian countries. The Japanese calendar is still full of many holidays that mark various important dates in the traditional lunar calendar.
One such holiday, Setsubun, is celebrated each year on February 3. In the past, Setsubun represented the last day of the winter months and the beginning of spring. Celebrating Setsubun involves the usual Shinto shrine visits, but you also toss toasted beans out your door and yell “Out with demons [oni]! In with happiness!” Pretty fun when everybody on your street is doing it!
To honor Setsubun, a couple of Japanese builders have posted really cool creations.
First up, mumu chases an oni away with handfuls of round 1×1 tan plates (I’m really diggin’ the giant oni head):
And PPB hero Izzo offers his take on the same scene:
(These builders’ awesome oni make my own no-face oni look pretty silly.)
Japanese LEGO blogger Sumi-Handy posts his own LEGO creations, along with those of his kids. He recently posted a kago (which means “box”), an enclosed sedan chair in which important people were carried around during the Edo period (1603-1867):
The sedan chair is by Sumi-Handy’s son, but what struck me about this creation is the fantastic cedar tree Sumi-Handy himself added in the background. Very, very nice!
I was honestly a bit disappointed that the New Year’s LEGO creations by Japanese builders didn’t include any mochi-pounding scenes. A really fun New Year’s tradition I remember is to make hand-made mochi (rice cakes). You put a special type of sticky rice in a wooden pestle and literally pound it with a giant wooden mallet. It’s pretty awesome.
Thankfully, mumu’s wife has built a cute little mochi-pounding scene, complete with the mochi-pounding rabbit from the Moon*:
*Where westerners see a face in the Moon, Japanese people see a rabbit pounding mochi.
As regular readers of Pan-Pacific Bricks and VignetteBricks already know, Izzo has been posting LEGO vignettes based on Japanese proverbs. So far, Izzo has posted 30 vignettes on his Web site and in two Brickshelf galleries. I’ve translated the first twenty, and am genuinely looking forward to the next thirty. How do I know there are going to be thirty more? Izzo is posting the proverb vignettes in hiragana order, and there are approximately fifty hiragana characters.
So let’s get started with the next ten, shall we? :-)
Japanese: A bee to a crying face.
English: Misfortunes never come alone. / When it rains, it pours.
Japanese/English: He who runs after two hares will catch neither.
Japanese: Millet with wet hands.
English:Like taking candy from a baby. / Easy money.
Japanese: Wearing a cat.
English: A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Japanese/English: There’s luck in leftovers. (“Luck” sounds the same as “clothing,” so there’s a pun in this one as well.)
Japanese: Dumplings rather than flowers.
English: Function before form. / Better fill a man’s belly than his eye.
Japanese: Beauty and luck seldom go together.
English: The fairest flowers soonest fade.
Japanese/English: Candle in the wind. (To have one’s life hang by a thread.)
Japanese/English: He that shoots oft, at last shall hit the mark.
Japanese: If you’re in love, travelling a thousand miles seems like only one mile.
English: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Bruce has posted again that Izzo has posted another batch of Japanese proverb vignettes in his gallery.
Here we go…
Japanese: Strategem 36: If all else fails, run away.
English: He that fights and runs away lives to see another day.
Japanese/English: Dead men tell no tales.
Japanese: When one god deserts you, another one picks you up.
English: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Japanese/English: Good and quickly seldom meet.
(It’s a fast-food noodle stand. Not exactly gourmet cooking.)
Japanese: Providing is preventing.
English: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
(In other words, always be prepared. Thus the Swiss Army robot.)
Japanese: A bird taking flight does not pollute the place it left.
English: It is an ill bird that fouls its own nest.
Japanese: Even dust piled up will make a mountain.
English: Many a little makes a mickle.
Japanese: The moon and a soft-shell turtle.
English: As different as night and day.
Japanese/English: The nail which sticks out gets hammered down.
Japanese/English: A near neighbour is better than a far-dwelling kinsman.
As before, check out Izzo’s if you want to see Flash versions that include the original Japanese text.