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Character Hunter collects photos of cartoon mascots, kawaii art, and other character designs seen on the streets of Tokyo.

From School Library Journal

Daughter Seren and I are back in the chilly UK now after 3 wonderful weeks in Tokyo. My exhibition Kingdoms Curious at Pinpoint Gallery was a great success, with over 200 attendees over the two weeks. Following the show I gave a presentation to SCBWI Tokyo on creating "Power Portfolios", if I get some event snapshots I'll post them here, but in the meantime here's a few snippets from the exhibition.




Seren made herself very useful setting up the show.










A few panoramas of the gallery. Pinpoint is a relatively small space, but ideally located right in the middle of the fashionable Aoyama district and highly focused on children's books. For a book illustrator it's the perfect size for a solo show. There were 32 pictures on display altogether, mainly from my published picture books like The Boat in the Tree and The House of the World, but with a number of graphic works created especially for the show too.



The majority of images represented a selection of work from the last three years.




I was in the gallery for around 4 hours every day. Seren was occupied by a growing number of activities, games and gifts and was an angel... for the first week at least!




A few of my more recent books released in Japan were on sale, like the Japanese edition of Jenny Nimmo's Charlie Bone series (Tokuma Shoten), and Zipper-kun to Chaku no Maho (Rironsha).

This is the last part of Jeffrey Lockwood’s blog on the development of nerve gases from insecticide. The previous installments can be read here and here. Today he looks at nerve gases then and now.

His book, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects and Weapons of War, is out now.

While the nerve gases did not realize their lethal potential in World War II (probably because the Nazis, who had a monopoly on these weapons, mistakenly believed that the Allies could reply in-kind), these chemicals had too much promise to disappear from the military scene. In the closing weeks of the war, the invading Soviet army stole the secret formula of soman and captured the massive production plant for tabun. Ecstatic with these spoils of war, the Russians dismantled, transported, and reassembled the German plant on the banks of the Volga. The machinery was back in operation a year later and by the late 1950s, the Soviets had stockpiled no less than 50,000 tons of nerve gas. While the Red Army was pumping out organophosphates as weapons, the chemists of the West were busy upping the ante.

In 1952, a British chemist synthesized an odorless toxin capable of penetrating the skin. Not only did this organophosphate have a toxicity ten times that of soman, but it was viscous enough to form poisonous puddles that would persist and produce deadly vapors for weeks (the earlier, G-agents were volatile and short-lived on the battlefield). The pinnacle of the new V-agents was VX, which became the golden child of the American chemical warfare community and tens of thousands of tons were produced and loaded into bombs and shells over the next 20 years.

All the while, agrichemical companies searched for organophosphates that were substantially more toxic to pests than they were to humans. And they finally struck insecticidal gold. Today, farmers and homeowners are intimately familiar with the chemical legacy of the nerve gases. An incredible 70 percent of all insecticides applied in the United States are organophosphates—about 73 million pounds per year. Diazinon and malathion of two of the three most commonly used home-and-garden insecticides. Worldwide sales of organophosphate insecticides approaches $3 billion, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the entire market. Malathion, the most widely used of these chemicals, has a human toxicity 15,000-times lower than its nerve gas ancestors, while still being remarkably lethal to insects. However, even the relatively safe forms of these insecticides have been used as murderous weapons.

During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, organophospate insecticides became the weapon of choice for assassins operating within extremist factions of P.W. Botha’s violent apartheid government. Parathion—a chemical cousin of malathion—was an ideal poison, being readily available and generating a set of indistinct symptoms such as nausea, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, disorientation, confusion, and respiratory arrest. The killers quickly discovered a bizarre but wickedly effective method for delivering the poison to a political enemy: breaking into the victim’s house or hotel room and smearing the odorless, colorless insecticide onto the person’s underwear. The optimal penetration of the chemical was through the body’s largest hair follicles, conveniently located under the arms and in the crotch. If the targets of these insecticidal weapons were limited to victims of demented murderers (and the occasional, incautious farm worker) we might be somewhat relieved, but there is a much darker potential.

In 1975, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute provided a disturbing analysis of the potential for unholy alliances between agrichemical industries and modern militaries: The possibility that chemical plants, especially those producing organophosphorus insecticides, could be converted to the production of nerve agents or other CW [chemical warfare] agents cannot be excluded…So far as plant safety measures are concerned, if a plant were producing very toxic insecticides, the safety measures would possibly differ very little from a plant producing nerve agents.

Indeed, in 1995 we learned just how easy it is to produce the evil progenitors of today’s insecticides. On March 20th, just before the height of rush hour, an apocalyptic cult called “Aleph” released sarin into the Tokyo subway system. The chemical was carried along by five high-speed trains which spread the nerve gas through the teeming subterranean tunnels. The attack was poorly conceived and executed but still managed to kill a dozen people and injure 5,000. Had the mastermind, Shoko Asahara, not been half-blind and entirely crazy, his followers might have murdered thousands.

Tom is adjusting well to Tokyo. He started classes, and bought a bicycle for commuting. He is finding food to eat.

He's already been to the hospital, when his roomie got sick and needed antibiotics. (They had to sign up for Japanese national health insurance. It cost about $30. Bargain!!)

A few of Tom's photos:


conveyor belt sushi


sake barrels; offerings to the gods


A 7-story arcade


A salon. Interesting name. Below "Balls" it
says "hair and make."

An American turns his noodle obsession into a career.

From Reuters:

“‘Ramen is the uber-comfort food. It’s meatloaf and mashed potatoes in a bowl. It’s a Jewish chicken noodle soup. It’s all those kinds of things that I think make you feel warm and safe.’

Ivan Ramen may be one of an estimated 80,000 ramen shops across the country, but one Tokyo food magazine ranked it among the top ten best noodle shops in the city this year.

Kaoru Nakamura, a regular at Ivan Ramen, says its Orkin’s skill that makes his shop stand out from the rest.

‘Ivan’s skill as a former French chef really shines since his ramen is presented in a beautiful way,’ he said.”

Awesome. Now I want a big bowl of (vegetable) ramen…

by Sam Enthoven Razor Bill / Penguin 2008 Let's play a game of Mental Picture and see how things go. First, imagine two giant monsters throwing down like a couple of WWF wrestlers in a large metropolitan city. Sort of like in a Godzilla movie, with both of these monsters a couple hundred feet tall, tossing each other into famous landmarks and obliterating the skyline. One of them is a