“Kunoichi” γγδΈ is the Japanese word for female ninja. In the following pictures you can see several Kunoichi in the latest advertising campaign of Toshiba. With this advertising campaign Toshiba tries to highlight the flexibility of its new Dynabook Kira L93, which can be used as a laptop or as a tablet, thus resembling the flexibility of the Kunoichi.
More photos at Livedoor
Last Tuesday I had the chance to meet Pepper, the robot designed and built by Softbank that is planned to be released to the market next year for 200,000 yen (around 1,400 EUR or 2,000 USD). There are two prototypes at the Softbank shop in Harajuku and you can interact with them. I tried to have a conversation with one of them but I couldn’t get anything more than “Good morning”, “I don’t understand you, could you repeat what you just said?” and “See you next time. Thanks for visiting our shop!”. He detected that it was a week day (I should be working instead of visiting the Softbank shop) and he asked me “Don’t you have to work today? I see that you are taking a day off”.
One of the tips that I usually give people that come to Japan for the first time is to “not to worry” too much and wander around without a clear destination in mind. One of the things that I enjoy the most about living in Tokyo is to get lost with my camera in residential areas. The residential areas don’t have anything special like tourist attractions do, but that’s why I find them so cool and charming.
These are some of the photos that I took around Setagaya in Tokyo. I’m not saying that you should go to Setagaya, any residential neighborhood in any Japanese city has a similar spirit: small houses that look like they have been taken out of a Doraemon or Shinchan episode, low-rise buildings, narrow streets where almost no cars pass, a lot of green areas, stressed out people going to the supermarket riding a bicycle…
Explore and get lost in any neighborhood near your hotel when you come to Japan! π
Trivia: Setagaya-ku is the second largest district in Tokyo after Ota-ku and was the neighbourhood chosen by Akira Kurosawa to “retire”.
More photos of my walks around Tokyo in my Flickr and in my Instagram