The "BUILD THE SHGTE" Contest ended Friday night, and in the course of a week 68 new hotspots were added to our community map. THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!! I'm extremely stoked to have had this great response, and I really appreciate your help in building out this map.
The Same Hat Guide to Everything continues to be a work in progress, and when I finalllllly launch samehat.com, it will be a key part of the site. I will keep adding cool stuff that I hear about or visit, and hope you'll do the same.
Now for the results: there were a lot of great additions to the map. I wrote down names for everyone who added items, but it got confusing to remember who added 1 or 2, etc. I've decided to give everyone who added items a Junko Mizuno sticker and a copy of my zine (plus some mail from me!). Please send your email and mailing address to SAMEHAT[at]GMAIL[dot]COM.
For the winners, four contributors stood out for adding the most numerous and interesting additions to the map. These 4 people will get the stickers/zine and a Shintaro Kago postcard, purchased in Tokyo from Kago-san himself. These are the Google Nicknames that showed up on the maps, send me your name/address to claim your prizes: Connor kittenmeats karl gyyguy
Many, many thanks again to everyone who helped improve the map. Keep up the great work!
On Friday I re-posted details about the slowly-growing Same Hat Guide to Everything. The idea is that anybody and everybody in the Same Hat community can share their favorites shops, museums, and spots in one consolidated place.
I've been updating it today with a few favorite Tokyo bookstores, and thought a contest would be a fun idea in order to grow this sucker quickly!
Announcing the BUILD THE SHGTE contest! The idea is that I want to encourage folks to add stuff to the map this week. Adding an entry takes about 2 minutes, and step-by-step details on doing so are here. It can be anything that other Same Hat readers would be interested in, in any part of the world. Some examples: + A custom doll gallery in Akihabara that displays Suehiro Maruo's paintings. + Your local manga shop where you buy new books each week. + The Kyoto Manga Museum (and the train route to get there from Kyoto Station). + A club with a monthly gothic lolita cosplay night in Seoul. + The restaurant in Kichijoji where you spotted Demerin out eating soba and playing Gameboy.
The deadline to add entries is 11:59pm PST on Friday (August 14, 2009). How about these for "prizes"? THE "PARTICIPATION" PRIZE: Everyone who submits at least one new entry to the SGHTE will get a Junko Mizuno / Last Gasp sticker and some mail from me:
THE "SILVER MEDAL" PRIZE Everyone who submits two (or more) new entries to the SGHTE will be mailed the Junko sticker and a copy of my zine of Japanese self-introductions from when I lived in Saitama. Check it out here:
(Don't you want one??)
GRAND PRIZE The three people that made the most/best additions to the map (left up to my discretion!) will win all the stuff mentioned above (Junko Mizuno sticker, My Seat is Your Behind zine) plus... A LARGE HANAKUMA / LAST GASP STICKER! and... A SHINTARO KAGO POSTCARD!
After you've made additions to the Same Hat Guide to Everything, please leave your name and a quick list of what you added in the comments. Can't wait to see what everyone posts up on the map! If you have any questions, let me know!
Every couple weeks, I get a nice email from a reader or friend of friend heading to Japan looking for recommendations. I have a go-to list of cool places to see in Tokyo and Kansai, but those are just the picks of one dude. It's better to ask a big group of like-minded folks and post the information somewhere easily accessible.
Good news, this wisdom is captured in our collaborative Google Map, The Same Hat Guide to Everything. I hadn't updated it in a while and wasn't sure if newer readers were aware of it. Sounds like good timing for a post!
I'm summarizing a lot of the stuff I said when it was first launched, so you long-time readers please bear with me for a minute. Generally speaking, the SHGTE is an open and editable map, detailing any and all spots of interest to rabid Same Hat geeks around the world. It includes a lot of spots for folks heading to Japan for the first time, along with your local shops, museums, etc.
If you haven't used the Google Maps My Maps feature, it's basically a way to create custom maps by pinpointing specific spots (think: The Kazuo Umezu Makoto-chan house), insertings overlays (think: A scanned floorplan to the Nakano Broadway mall's shops) or drawing custom routes and shapes. You can choose the icon associated with each entry you add, and Google provides pre-made icons to denote shops, train stations, and shopping. Evan and I also whipped up a few Same Hat icons for Sentai toy shops and Umezu, Maruo and other hot spots.
With the SHGTE, the focus isn't on duplicating the work of others, but thinking about what your fellow readers would have in common with you and wanna know about; Basically what is the shit you'd send in an email to a friend going to that/your city for the first time?
I'm gonna spend some time adding things to the map; I just put the Gundam statue in Odaiba, and the NEW PEOPLE Japantown center in San Francisco on there. Here are some instructions for you to add things as well:
STEP 1: When you're viewing the Same Hat Guide to Everything, click on the [Edit] button on the left side to start adding stuff or making changes to other people's stuff on the map.
STEP 2: When you click [Edit], new little tools will show up at the top of the map frame, including a icon marker thingy, a line tool for drawing routes, and a blobby-looking tool for drawing areas and shapes. In this case, I know where Otafuku is on the block, and clicked the icon marker thingy there on the block in the East Village. STEP 3: Now that the placeholder is there, it's time to start the magic. I'm sharing as much detail as I have, which in this case is my experience there and a picture from Yelp. If I know the hours they were open or had specific recommendations on times to go or what to order, I should add them too.
Lots of news coming in from the interwebs regarding Kazuo Umezu's wonderful and incredible Makoto-chan House, located west of Tokyo in Kichijoji.
The first and most exciting order of business? Nate (Same Hat's man in Japan) biked over to Kichijoji on Saturday, and visited Umezu's house! The location he noted on the Same Hat Guide to Everything is accurate, and here are his photos to prove it:
(RSS folks, you'll have to click through to see them! Sorry!)
On another note, more stories about the housewarming and interior decorations of Umezz's house are making the rounds. I've gathered together photos from both Takekuma-san's blog and Variety magazine for your please, here:
(RSS folks, same deal here, sorry!)
Takekuma-san noted on his blog that his traffic spiked after he posted the first of his photos from inside the Makoto-chan house, and posted the above follow up for those new readers (like us!). If more photos make their way out, I'll continue to post and link them from here.
One more huge thanks to Nate for tracking down the house and biking over to document it for us! Dude, I will buy you some luxurious ramen and Japanese whiskey when I'm in Tokyo next time!
Linked from Umezz.com, I just read an article detailing the ins & outs of Kazuo Umezu's famous Makoto-chan house in Kichijoji. In summary, it is a dandy horror nerd Valhalla.
The article is written by mangaka and author Kentaro Takekuma, who has written and lectured on manga and co-wrote Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga! with another favorite of mine, Koji Aihara. Not surprising that Takekuma and Umezu are buddies, huh?
Takekuma explains in his post that these pics were taken in February at a housewarming party hosted by Kazuo Umezu. He notes that Umezz decorated the entire house (surprise!) and not pictured here are an amazing library curated by Demerin, including every published work by Umezz. Also worth noting, apparently the woman who filed the original lawsuit against the home lives... next door to the Makoto-chan house!
Okay, so here are the pics from inside the house. PREPARE TO BE AMAZED:
Sorry for the lull in posting, friends. I have a list on the wall by my kitchen of posts to write (nine and counting...) but keep getting distracted. Now that we're past Thanksgiving here in the states, I wanted to share a holiday shopping guide for folks heading to Tokyo in the near future.
As mentioned previously with the launch of the Same Hat Guide To Everything (SHGTE!), Nakano Broadway Mall in west-central Tokyo is my favorite shopping area in the world. In addition to stores selling beetles, maid cafes, replica weapon stores, forgotten item shops, and TACO che (the greatest indie/weirdo manga shop in the world), Nakano Broadway is home to a complex of Mandarake shops - 22 individual stores spanning 3 floors! Each shop varies in size, and is dedicated to a different subgenre of manga/anime/toys/fandom. From my trip earlier this year, here is a map of Mandarake, in English:
(click for a giant version of the map - 450k)
You can take a look above and plan your shopping route, specific to your own interests. For me, the greatest shop in Mandarake was the 4th floor shop, Mandarake Maniac Store. There I found a treasure trove of old and rare manga, weird collectibles, an insanely knowledgeable (and rather fashionable) counter staff, and their own in-house manga zine, TRASH. If you're a Same Hat reader, this is the shop for you:
Here are a few shots from my trip earlier this year, of the magical Mandarake Maniacs Store...
Behold the wonder of their stacks! It's a small shop but full to the brim with amazing stuff.
On one wall, there is a glass case for rare stuff and 1st editions.
Lovely and unique books, including a $200 copy of Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi
Incredible! An early, $175 edition of Kage by Kazuo Umezu
Sexy ladies and blue tales.
What wonders are hidden in these shelves? This is where I picked up an old copy of Toiretto Hakase for Johnny!
Oh, I'm sorry... were you interested in every issue of Garo ever published?
Or were you looking for the COM back catalog?
Also in effect, nice & cheap paperbacks of Hideshi Hino classics.
Okay, I can't even keep track of this shit anymore.
There are too many freakin' branches here-- Give yourself at least 5 hours at Nakano Broadway to hunt. SERIOUSLY.
And don't forget to check out the UFO Store, Gacha-Paradise, and the Deep Store (Check the map above for details!)
Have you been to Nakano Broadway or the Mandarake shop in Akihabara? Share your stories or recommendations in the comments on this post. Next up: Pics from TACO che, finally!
Thanks to everyone who has already started adding shops and hot spots to the SAME HAT GUIDE TO EVERYTHING. I realize that I could have provided better details in yesterday's post on how to actually add places to the map. Here is a quick step-by-step on using the map, with the New York takoyaki stand Otafuku as an example.
STEP 1: When you're viewing the Same Hat Guide to Everything, click on the [Edit] button on the left side to start adding stuff or making changes to other people's stuff on the map.
STEP 2: When you click [Edit], new little tools will show up at the top of the map frame, including a icon marker thingy, a line tool for drawing routes, and a blobby-looking tool for drawing areas and shapes. In this case, I know where Otafuku is on the block, and clicked the icon marker thingy there on the block in the East Village.
STEP 3: Now that the placeholder is there, it's time to start the magic. I'm sharing as much detail as I have, which in this case is my experience there and a picture from Yelp. If I know the hours they were open or had specific recommendations on times to go or what to order, I should add them too.
I also clicked the upper right icon to bring up a menu to choose other icons. This is a "restaurant" so I'm using the food icon that's already there. You can also use the Same Hat-specific icons Evan and I made, or upload your own. Once I'm all done, I clicked Save (I actually saved a few times along the way so I wouldn't lose my progress). Then click Done to stop editing the map, and view it as everyone else will see it. Booyah, you are now officially an altruistic, contributing member of the Same Hat community!
ALSO: If you are using Google Maps for something unrelated, but look up a place that'd be good for SHGTE, you can simply click "Save to My Maps". This will automatically create a placeholder in that spot in SHGTE (with the address and details if available pre-loaded) and you can simply customize and save the entry from there.
Writing this on a plane returning home to San Francisco from a weekend back in my hometown, I'm feeling contemplative about where I "exist" and how I connect with people I care about. Like probably everyone, I have my own rituals, reminders and rules for trying to keep up-- on family, on friends, on my projects, on information (Damn you, Google Reader! You are both a boon and a CURSE). Hand-in-hand with all that jazz, I've been thinking about Same Hat and what role "community" should play in our site.
At this point, I've been writing Same Hat for more than 2.5 years and our traffic is beefier than I ever imagined it'd get. But, we're not a huge site by any measure. Through the blog, I've been able to make some awesome IRL friends and exchanged emails and passed on reading recommendations with similar-minded weirdos. We've also gotten hooked up with a wild bunch of cartoonists, writers and artists from around the world, and in some cases introduced these people to eachother; The latest and best example being the badass T-shirt collaboration between master shirtmaker David (SEIBEI) and comix demigoddess Hellen Jo, which debuted recently at Renegade SF and will be on sale online as soon as David is back from Europe.
Despite all this, I'm not sure that Same Hat or its readership is quite hefty enough to sustain a forum just yet. I'd love to have a place to dish with everyone, but nothing is more depressing and hideous as running a ghost town forum with no posts (except by the moderator, sometimes under fake names desperately attempting to seed threads). The best stand-in for a forum in the meantime is the comments, and I'm sure I can speak for all the regular readers when I say thanks to the hardcore folks leaving updates, questions and links for us all to check out. The comments seriously make my day and often lead me off on crazy hyperlink goose chases for even more stuff to read up on. You guys are awesome.
So what should come next? I've been talking to Evan about a project to tackle after Electric Ant #1 is final-fucking-ly finished, and before we start work on the next book (oh shit!)... The plan is to finally migrate over to samehat.com, which I've been squatting for over a year while being too lazy to build a proper site. In the meantime, I wanna get started with what is the first Same Hat community project, something I plan to turn into its own section of the new site. Without further ado, let me invite you to take part in...
THE SAME HAT GUIDE TO EVERYTHING! The Guide (or um...SHGTE) is an open and editable Google Map, detailing any and all spots of interest to rabid Same Hat geeks.
Anyone can participate and edit any entry, and anywhere in the world is fair game for inclusion. The only requirement is that you sign in with a Google Account (your gmail or blogger username, etc) so that it knows to attribute your entry to you.
If you haven't used the Google Maps My Maps feature, it's basically a way to create custom maps by pinpointing specific spots (think: The Kazuo Umezu Makoto-chan house), insertings overlays (think: A scanned floorplan to the Nakano Broadway mall's shops) or drawing custom routes and shapes (think: A walking tour of Brooklyn or Berlin, hitting the best comic and used-book stores in a neighborhood).
You can choose the icon associated with each entry you add, and Google provides pre-made icons to denote shops, train stations, and shopping. Evan and I also whipped up a few Same Hat icons for Sentai toy shops and Umezu, Maruo and Kago-related hot spots. You are also totally and completely welcome to add your own custom icons as well!
So, what should you add to the map? I envision this map to be in partially a guide to Japan for visitors heading over, and partially a repository of local tips from where you like to hang out. I've started adding things to San Francisco, Tokyo and Kansai to seed some ideas on formatting. If you need some tips on writing entries, I strongly recommend Schutlz's Tokyo Damage Report Guide to Tokyo, which is some of the funniest and smartest guide writing online.
With the SHGTE, the focus isn't on duplicating the work of others, but thinking about what your fellow readers would have in common with you and wanna know about; Basically what is the shit you'd send in an email to a friend going to that/your city for the first time? Some ideas include: + The best manga shops in Sao Paolo + A custom doll shop and gallery in Akihabara that displays Suehiro Maruo's paintings + The Osamu Tezuka museum (and the train route to get there from Kyoto) + A club with a monthly gothic lolita cosplay night in Athens + The restaurant in Kichijoji where you spotted Demerin out eating soba and playing gameboy
I won't be moderating the map per se, but might remove wildly off-topic or spam entries or fix formatting on confusing text. Otherwise,I leave it to you guys to play with and fill up. There is now a link on the sidebar ,and I plan on adding a few spots a day as we build the site. This is OUR resource, and I'm geeked to benefit from you sharing the wealth.
If you have any questions about how to use the map or suggestions on how to improve it, leave them here! After SDCC I'm planning to roll out Same Hat community feature #2.
[UPDATE]: I've posted a brief "How-To" on adding stuff to the map here.
Updated: SAME HAT stopped updating in 2013! For all new projects, please see Youth in Decline's sit and Instagram.
All fan translations of manga that you'll see in the archives are previously untranslated into English and range from comedy to horror to avant-absurd weirdness.
Same Hat is written & edited by Ryan. If you would like to contact me, please email: samehat @ gmail.com. Also, you can Ask me anything on the Same Hat Tumblr!
