Category — Culture

On July 8th, 2008, Jackie Chan attended a ceremony held to inaugurate the construction of the Jackie Chan Film Art Museum in Shanghai.

Jackie Chan’s legendary career will be archived in the new museum with Chan handpicking the location for it. The museum, which will be named after him, will be in the Changfeng Ecology Commercial District in Shanghai’s Putuo District and will largely be renovated from old factory buildings. When completed on October 1 next year, it will take up about 3,100 square meters.

Visitors will be able to retrace Chan’s footsteps from Hong Kong to Hollywood, and navigate through detailed showpieces of Chan from being a Chinese icon, a kung-fu megastar to a charity devotee.

Also on display will be some of Chan’s film awards, as well as costumes and props he has used.

From ChinaDaily

Technorati Tags: China, culture, film, Jackie Chan, Jackie Chan Film Art Museum, martial arts, Shanghai

Cult notebook makes Moleskine have expanded their City Notebook range with the release of the Hong Kong and the Beijing versions - the first of many Asian City Notebooks to come.

Patrick of Scription has more…

Technorati Tags: Beijing, City Notebook, Hong Kong, Moleskine, travel guides

Slim enough to fit into a Dior Homme suit but can’t quite afford one yet? It might be time to brush up on your Japanese.

The country’s newly empowered female execs have been hiring so-called “geisha guys,” who earn up to 50 grand a night for “entertaining” the ladies.

A growing number of professional women in Japan are forking out $1,000 to $50,000 a night for male companionship.

They meet their “hosts” in hundreds of clubs that have sprung up around Tokyo - the industry says only compliments are exchanged. The women pay for a man to lavish them with undivided attention.

“There’s nothing wrong with a woman paying to be entertained by a man” one female client says. “It’s just another step in equality.”

“I give women things that men normally don’t do, like complimenting their appearance” says one host, 24-year-old Yunosuke, who only goes by his single host name. “I make women happy.”

And they make him happy: Yunosuke says he earned more than $200,000 last year, enough to let him visit a salon once a day to have his hair dyed and blow-dried.

“Women see us as one of their accessories” he says. “They like to wear nice things, so I try to look prettier for them all the time.”

What drives the business boom is an increase in the earning power of Japanese women, according to Air Group, a company that owns a chain of “host” clubs.

“Japanese women are now working hard and making more money” says Yuko Takeyama, a woman in her early 30s who manages Air Group. “They see this as a way to de-stress.”

Women love being treated well without the pressures that come with dating, she says.

Quoted from CNN and Men.Style.com

Technorati Tags: culture, Geisha guys, Geisha men, Japan

Packages of cocaine are lined up before they are loaded onto an airplane in San Andre, Guatemala, on April 13, 2008.

Guatemalan anti-narcotics police seized 1.2 tons of the drug on its way to Mexico.

Via Activate.us

Technorati Tags: culture, Hello Kitty, Japan

Waiters Ritsuki Sunomiya, Yuta Asami, and Makoto Aoba (left to right), dressed as schoolboys and schoolteacher, pose at the Edelstein cafe in Tokyo, Japan.

The café is designed as a boarding school and is part of the growing trend in role-playing eateries where customers and employees play characters from manga comics.

Here, as part of the theme, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.

Via Activate.us

Technorati Tags: Japan, Tokyo, Edelstein cafe, cafe, culture, role-playing

PingMag’s latest contains an interview with photographer Masaru Tatsuki who spent ten years with the truckers of Japan’s highways.

Not just a dreary existence, the truckers of Japan colour their vehicles with beautifully painted landscapes and details, whilst at night, their fluorescent handiwork shines through with bold and colourful light displays.

Labeled Decotora, short for decorated trucks, see some examples below.

Read more on PingMag

Technorati Tags: culture, Decotora, Japan, Masaru Tatsuki, photography

Five month old Fu Long the giant panda, was finally unveiled to the Austrian public on 30th January, at Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Zoo.

The 16lb bundle of black-and-white fluff emerged gingerly from the nesting box where he was born - to the delight of crowds who had been anticipating this moment since August.

Currently there are only seven at European zoos - five in Vienna and two in the Spanish capital.

Historically, giant pandas were handed over by China as gifts to heads of state around the world.

Read more on the Daily Mail

Technorati Tags: Fu Long, giant panda, Schoenbrunn Zoo, Vienna

Syamsulariff has just blogged an interesting post on the world’s most unique holiday festivals.

The variety and strangeness of some of these festivals, some resulting in century old traditions, will make for interesting reading! There’s a cross section of countries from around the world, but here are a couple of the East-Asian ones…

Inazawa, Japan: Hadaka Matsuri, The Naked Festival

Hidden somewhere in the midst of all these men in loincloths is one fully naked man. Touching him is believed to bring good luck and happiness.

Lopburi province, Thailand: The Monkey Buffet

Every year, all of the province’s approximately 600 monkeys are invited to eat fruits and vegetables during an annual feast held in honor of Rama, a hero of the Ramayana, who, it is said, rewarded his friend and ally, Hanuman the Monkey King, with the fiefdom of what is now Lopburi.

Organisers of the annual monkey buffet use more than 3,000 kg of fruits and vegetables for the festival.

See more of The World’s most unique holidays

(Thanks for linking to OneInchPunch in the first place Syamsulariff!)

Technorati Tags: cultural festival, culture, The Monkey Buffet, The Naked Festival, world’s most unique holiday festivals