Some minutes ago I published an article at japaninfo.at which focuses on japanese asian Smileys. What are your favourite Smileys/Emoticons/Kaomoji and what are they called in your country?
Personally I really like emoticons which feature kanji
Meet my weird friend (`益´) or my cat ミ^・.・^彡 and dog u・ェ・u
Sometimes I feel just so indifferent（　´_ゝ`）
But anyway… who cares? 凸(｀∇´)凸

Today my generous wife surprised me with a really cool gift. She gave me a book with the title “Japanese Graphics Now”. It’s a book full of photographs and with hardly any text in it (very good feature for lazy people like me). It gives a very good overview of the current product and marketing designs in Japan. You see tons of posters, products, logos and much much more which are presented in over 350 pages. This version of the book is brandnew and sold at a special price (€ 9.99). You might want to click on the image to buy it online from amazon directly.

Today a small dream came true. For a short time but still it came true.

It does not happen often that Japanese people come to Linz. And it happens even fewer that I get to know them. Today I was lucky because three men from Japan were visiting our corporation and I was invited to join them , I thought.

Preparations for this event started early and ranged from making Japanese business cards to mental preparations. Our business cards in Japanese proofed that the work was worth it because they easily passed the Japanese-Native-Test. After meeting the guests for the first time and half an hour of campus tour we went for lunch and then visited an external facility. That was when I started making huge plans to show them the city in the afternoon and go for some Omiage shopping and getting prepared for some nice drinking after work. Austrian beer is not that bad. I even would have brought them back to Vienna by car just to be able to exchange some Japanese/German/English phrases.

As you might have noticed I intentionally used “would have” in the last sentence. That is because for me the short meeting ended exactly 2.5 hours after saying “Konnichiwa”. The guests were invited to a short trip to the city and then brought back to the train station (I think) and I had to go back to the office.

Still I am happy that I was able to join at all. And I could experience something important again. The feeling I get when talking to Nihonjin and exchanging some words. It makes me work harder on my Japanese and I am definitely going to look for ways to meet more Japanese natives by myself. Anybody interested in visiting Austria? Let me show you some sights and spots which you will never be able to see with a traditional tourist tour.

Ok. enough of it for now. Looking forward to a nice evening with some friends watching Monthy Python movies…

Some days ago a new Akihabara News service launched: http://www.akihabaranews.com/integration/

It allows you to embed the latest news from the high tech district (and Japan and other Asian countries) in your own website. There is also a utility which lets you configure many parameters (layout, content, language, etc.) within a few clicks and which automatically creates the needed html sourcecode.

Some other nice Akihabara News enhancements are still in the pipe, just waiting to pop up one day…