Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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Japanese games company Angel has joined forces with Disney to produce a novelty Hanafuda card deck featuring Disney characters on the cards.

Hanafua card decks were developed in Japan over 350 years ago in response to the introduction of Western-style playing cards.

A hanafuda card deck consists of 48 cards divided into 12 suits of four cards each. Each “suit” is named after a month of the year and allocated a flower from that month. The word “Hanafuda” can be literally translated as “flower cards”.

For more details about hanafuda decks in general and the Disney/Angel hanafuda deck in particular, check out Japanese-Games-Shop.com.

David Hurley
http://Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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At this time of year in Hiroshima it is stiflingly hot and humid.

People slow down. They feel lethargic. The feeling is called “Natsubate” (na-tsu-ba-te).

Happily, I recently had quite a lot of editing work to do for the regional newspaper, so I was able to sit at home all day under the air conditioner!

However, I have noticed that I have been very lethargic. My Internet business activities came to a “virtual” halt. Given a choice between writing an article or lying down and watching a DVD or snoozing, I began to choose the latter option…

Work on my business site has ground to a halt.

Question: How do you respond to lethargy?

Do you fight it?

Or do you let it take its course?

My response is the latter. I shut down and lie down and dream about what I’ll do when I can be bothered to do anything, and wait for my mood to change and for the return of energy and zest…

I savour the languid feeling and enjoy it while it lasts.

Yesterday I watched 2 x ROME DVDS - IN THE AFTERNOON!! It was a delicious feeling to lie there thinking of all the work I was NOT doing while Mark Anthony gave himself over to a much more deadly Egyptian form of the virus!

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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Quite often, when I pick up my five year old daughter from nursery school, I take her to a local Japanese “sento“, or bath-house.

Bathing is a recreation in Japan. Bath-houses used to be as common as muck, and very good for removing it in the days when Japanese houses resembled shacks and lacked bathing facilities. Sadly, many of these old bath-houses have shut down as the upwardly mobile Japanese began to be able to build and live in modern apartments with all the amenities supplied and now prefer to bathe in private!

However, you can still find quite a few bath-houses dotted around Hiroshima, where I live, and most other towns and cities, and if you want to experience “the real Japan”, popping into one of these places is a good way to do it!

The baths at these places include a piping hot main bath, a jacuzzi bath, maybe some baths with water jets for massaging your tired muscles. Most bath-houses also have a sauna, and cold plunge pool. Some even feature “electric baths” - i.e. hot baths that have a low voltage electric charge running through them to give you a shock as you climb in!

Anyway, last week, when I took my daughter along for a bath, she discovered that she could climb into one of the clothes lockers and once in, she didn’t want to get out again.

In short, my daughter had found her niche!

Next, she wanted me to shut the door and lock it, but I declined that particular request. After all, while it is good to find your own niche, it is not good to be stuck inside it. Some freedom of movement is always advisable because there are plenty of other niches out there that are just waiting for someone to occupy!

Also, had I locked her in and gone and enjoyed my bath in peace, my daughter would have been deprived of her chief delight, namely pouring bowls of freezing cold water of the benighted noddle of her long-suffering father!

If you would like to find out more about finding your niche on the Internet, click here.

David Hurley

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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One of my niche markets is Japanese manga comics. At the outset I did not know much about Japanese manga, but I was interested in the genre and in the social phenomenon of manga in Japan.

However, I gradually received requests from people living outside of Japan for various manga titles, and so with the help of my customers, I gradually built up a knowledge of manga. One of the most popular manga series that I offer is called Silver Fang Legend Gin.I recently wrote an article about the manga series, and reproduce it here:

In 1984, Japanese comic magazine Shonen Jump began publishing a new manga series by manga artist Yoshihiro Takahashi.The series ran for two years and was called “Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin“, or “Silver Fang Legend Gin” in English.

What was especially notable about the series was that the “hero” of the story was a Japanese akita dog called “Gin” (which is the Japanese word for “silver”). The akita dog, from Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu, Japan, is a versatile hunting dog that is ideal for hunting deer, bear and game. It is also the national dog of Japan.

Yoshihiro Takahashi, who was born in Akita Prefecture, is said to have been inspired to create a manga series with an akita dog as the hero after reading a news article about stray dogs that turned wild, formed dog packs and lived in the mountains.

“Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin” is set in the Ohu mountains in the remote north eastern region of Honshu, an area populated by Japanese black bears. The story gradually shifts its focus from a hunting community, with man and dog responding to the menace of giant bears, to the animal world and the visceral conflict between bears and dogs.

Each group, humans, dogs and bears, consists of various characters, breeds or types, which adds variety and deepens the interest and complexity of the story.

The story opens with an account of how an akita puppy, Gin, loses his father, Riki, when Riki is thrown over a cliff during a fight with a gigantic bear called Akakabuto.

Thinking that Riki is dead, his master, Gohe, abandons him. Gin, and his young master, Daisuke, head off to hunt down and kill the giant bear. But the bear they succeed in killing turns out not to be Akakabuto.

Worse still, Akakabuto has gathered a whole gang of bears. Eventually, Gin leaves Daisuke and joins a dog pack that has formed to fight the bears.It transpires that the dogs are able to talk to each other, just as humans are, although the humans think the dogs are simply barking and yelping. The leader of the dog pack is Riki, Gin’s father, a charismatic leader. Unfortunately, however, he has lost his memory as a result of his fall during his fight with Akakabuto, so he does not recognize his son when Gin joins the dog pack…

The story involves a lot of violence but it proved to be popular enough for it to be turned into a ten volume manga book series. In 1987, Yoshihiro Takahashi’s achievement was recognized and “Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin” received a Shogakukan Manga Award.

In 1999, Yoshihiro Takahashi brought out a sequel called “Ginga Densetsu Weed“. He also wrote a prequel series, which was combined in a single six-chapter volume called “Ginga Densetsu Riki“.

The manga was turned into a television animation by Toei Animation and broadcast in Japan in 1986. It was released in the West as a video series dubbed into English and other languages, but because of the brutality of the fighting scenes it was considered too violent for children in its uncensored form and quite severely cut in several places.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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Waseda University in Tokyo has opened a “virtual campus” in Second Life, a virtual reality game you can play (and make money playing) on the Internet. Waseda University plans to use their virtual campus to “meet” students from Princeton University, USA, which also has a campus set up in Second Life.

Second Life, created by Linden Studios, is set in a virtual world where players interact using avatars. You can go shopping, play games and buy gear that has been designed by others.

You can also offer your own virtual goods and services and offer them for sale in Second Life.

This is where it gets interesting for the Internet marketer.

Since goods and services can be bought and sold, Second Life has a virtual currency called Linden Dollars, which can be exchanged for real dollars, so it is perfectly feasible for people to get paid to play Second Life online!

In fact, in November 2006 the first real-dollar Second Life millionaire was reported in Business Week. Check this link and scroll down.

It certainly beats commuting to work every day!

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com 

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In my nocturnal meanderings around cyberspace I recently came across a fine recommendation for a healthy snack that would go just great with “space beer” (see previous post)…

All the way, and only, from Japan, green horseradish flavoured dried peas! Japanese horseradish is called “wasabi” and is green in hue and all hues excels in heat. Typically, you will find a splodge of it on a plate of sashimi (raw fish) or sushi.

You are supposed to plop it into your little bowl of shoyu (soy sauce) and dip your raw fish or bit of sushi into it before you wolf it down.

If you are a masochist as I am, you will take great delight in loading your slab of raw fish with lashings of the stuff, fully aware that it will be a fast train to Brain Pain City, all the way up the line via your adenoids, just ten seconds from now.

But the wasabi is not limited to raw fish. You can enjoy it as part of an otsumame drinks snack, in the form of “wasabi beenzu” aka dried peas coated in dried horseradish!

They are great with beer, and not really so hot as compared to wasabi fresh and in the raw.

Anyway, here’s that great tip I picked up recently and have just tested and not found wanting…

Want a great beer snack that is also pretty healthy? Try mixing wasabi peas with salted almonds! Fantastic!

Get 12 x mini packs of Wasabi Peas Shipped Directly To You From Japan For Just $5 Plus Postage!

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

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