After the great success of the latest blog entry (Japanese Mini-Z girls, you know!) I think, the european boys need to get informed, what is going on in Asia! Or to be correct, in Japan. To get the best impression of the people's lifestyle of other countries, you only have to take a look in their RC-Car magazines! Yuji from Tresrey, the japanese distributor of the company I am working for, has send me some issues from the most popular RC-Car magazines in Japan. RC World, RC Sports and RC Magazine.
The first thing, you need to know is, that you have the read the Magazines from what we know as the last page to the first page. This is no joke! The magazines starts from the opposite site as this is the common reading direction in Japan. If you do it the first time to read it, it hurts a little in the hands and in the brain, because it´s not usual for us to handle this. The other problem is, that it seems, that there is no systematical order of editorial content and advertising. It's a motley mixed buildup of reports, features, advertising, ad panels, news and manga-comics …
But the graphical overkill starts with the stamp sized pictures of crazy people, cars, or whatever! On the other hand, there are some fantastic reports about the japanese RC mega starts, like Shin Adashi or Masami Hirosaka with great photos. By the way, the japanese magazines are loaded with Manga drawings of real people. This is very funny to see and separates them (the magazines!) from the average 'Western' publication. I wish, I had a Manga drawing from my person. There are some very technical reports about learning RC-car driving with loads of cool photos and graphics of jumping cars, cornering cars and masses of racing line graphics that less talented drives like literally soak up!
Interesting to see is the fact that there are so many people shown in Japanese magazines. One could think that these are 'people' magazines instead of RC-car ones! Pick the average Europpean mag and the only thing you will find are boring and virtually aseptic pictures of boring RC Cars, transmitters, or whatever have to do with toy cars, but not Joe (or Josephine) Average.
The japanese RC-car Mags also have a lot more girls inside, what makes me really, really happy. Generally those mags shows much more lifestyle, fun, crazy faces and all, what makes life feel better! With a German RC-car mag you can only start a camp fire. And this is what I do now ...
So long, Michael
