FT Wastes Time, Money in Tokyo.

[Captain Japan]

[Samurai_Jerk]

I want a pair of the rose tinted glasses he's wearing, because that ain't the Tokyo I see. I like this city. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. But Jee-zus.

[Mulboyne]

Momus has just had a bit of a Tyler Brule moment on returning to Japan.

...It's something to do, too, with the feeling that you live here in the present -- no old buildings -- yet the past (ritual, ancient costume) and the future (the talking police sirens! the new mega-complexes!) too. And it's something to do with no longer finding consumer capitalism toxic here...Midtown is a shrine -- a shrine to bubble-style boom...Japan is booming again, just as it was in the 80s...The buzz of this city feeds me. It's constant stimulation. Daikanyama feels like family, somehow...

At least his reaction is an honest one. There always seems something fake about Brule's enthusiasm for Tokyo although I don't doubt he enjoys the place.

[Doctor Stop]

I'm getting the feeling that Mr. Brule has in fact never visited Tokyo or Japan. Somewhere in the world, most probably in Jack's parents' basement, is a mini-Japan theme park containing all the major sites and shops, all constructed at HO scale, and that's where Mr. Brule does his research.

[Taro Toporific]

This goes from bad to delusional to just plain silly...

Baka Brûlé liked going to a 'Pyongyang" concert in "eerily still and sparkling" Shin-Yokohama, a failed Brasília-style ghost town.
[INDENT]Tyler Brûlé: Verbal plays a concert in Japan and pop redeems itself
International Herald Tribune ---July 27, 2007
....a visit to a Verbal concert in Tokyo was a precision exercise that could only be pulled off in Japan...
....Beyond the stage, the audience was just as alluring as acts like Chara and Ryohei. At times, the spontaneous choreography of 15,000 people brought to mind a Pyongyang youth rally rather than an evening of pure pop...more..[/INDENT]

[Charles]

[Taro Toporific]

[Greji]

[Charles]

[Taro Toporific]

[Takechanpoo]

[Doctor Stop]

IT'S ALL about the club sandwich. That's how you recognise a decent hotel, according to Tyler Brule writing in the Financial Times at the weekend. Mr Brule wisely dismisses the pernickety details that govern so many star-rating programmes and says that the quality of the club sandwich (apparently invented in New York in the 19th century) is the simplest way to asses the standards of a hotel.

Focusing on the very basics, it [the sandwich standard] starts by sampling the quality of 10 everyday ingredients (bread, lettuce, tomato, egg, bacon, chicken, mayonnaise, butter, potatoes and cooking oil) and how well (or not) all of these can be worked up into a club sandwich.

As with many things in life, if you can nail the simpler, smaller things, then the rest tends to fall into place. This is particularly true of hotels and how they deal with toasting bread, frying eggs, arranging lettuce, crisping bacon and cooking French fries."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2008/12/the_club_sandwich_debate.cfm

[Typhoon]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2008/12/the_club_sandwich_debate.cfm

Tyler Brule's character would greatly benefit from losing his job and having to survive on the leftovers the restaurant hotel tosses in the bin.

[Taro Toporific]

[SIZE="6"]Tyler Brûlé -- Toilet Tout[/SIZE]

Via CONTRIBUTING EDITOR magazine

[Taro Toporific]

[Mulboyne]

In Japan, where Toto controls 60-70% of the market, society is apparently subject to a kind of lavatorial apartheid. The journalist and publisher Tyler Brûlé, who hosted a symposium on clean technology as part of today's launch, explained there were two kinds of people in Japan: the Washlet haves and the Washlet have nots. "It's at the point where if you know someone who doesn't have a Washlet, or you go to a restaurant that doesn't have one, it seems odd," he said. "[It's] like the rest of the world is unwashed."

Here

[Coligny]

That guy is the horn of abundance of stupidity...

[TennoChinko]

This guy is the expert on Japanese toilets!

[Taro Toporific]

[SIZE="6"]Tyler Brûlé -- Toilet Tout[/SIZE]
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR magazine

Toto - we're not on normal toilets any more
The Guardian | 2010 May 25.... journalist and publisher Tyler Brûlé, who hosted a symposium on clean technology as part of today's launch [in the UK of hi-tech Toto squirters], explained there were two kinds of people in Japan: the Washlet haves and the Washlet have nots. "It's at the point where if you know someone who doesn't have a Washlet, or you go to a restaurant that doesn't have one, it seems odd," he said. "[It's] like the rest of the world is unwashed."

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR magazine

[Mulboyne]

Tyler's magazine Monocle has once again published a list of the world's top 25 cities based on quality of life. Tokyo has dropped to 4th place from 3rd last year while Munich moves from 4th to 1st. Fukuoka moves up from 16th to 14th and Kyoto slips from 22nd to 23rd. He talks about his criteria here and you can see his regular FT column here.

Tyler doesn't appear to mention anything new about Japan but that might have something to do with the fact that his rankings barely change so there's nothing really to add.

[Taro Toporific]

Who should succeed Gaddafi? Step forward Marty McFly
The Guardian | 2011/mar/23
...Until this weekend, western journalism was winning this prize collectively with its frequent descriptions of the Japanese – all of them – as "stoical", which appears to be the 21st-century word for "inscrutable" or maybe just: "I can't actually understand Japanese, so I'll just assume they're all being silent and brave." But journalist Tyler Brûlé -- a man who...is a Bret Easton Ellis character without a denouement, soared ahead this weekend with his breathtaking column in the Financial Times, "Tokyo with the dimmer switch on".
First, our hero, for "moral and professional" reasons, decides to fly to Japan. "On board," he writes, "there were just two other passengers in the business section." Not even a major natural and nuclear disaster can stop brave Brûlé from emphasising that he only turns left when he boards a plane.
Once there, he details his stroll through a be-dimmed Tokyo, like the man in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. One can only imagine how Brûlé would have captured, say, hurricane Katrina: "As I stood in my penthouse corner suite of the Mandarin Oriental New Orleans, I looked out at the the non-bottled Fiji water lapping at the Richard Rogers-inflected houses and felt enormous gratitude that my hand-lasted Brioni suede shoes had remained in Mayfair, safe from water damage." But Brûlé is not just about brands. He is also about clothes and he ends his column on this terrible, nay, apocalyptic note: "There were many talented, small craft-based firms in the [affected] region," he writes, one of which makes "the most wonderful suits with the most perfect shoulder shape"
My colleague Aditya Chakrabortty wrote last week about the difficulty people have in grasping the tragedy of Japan. He was wrong. The tale of the disappearing shoulder shapes has truly expanded our comprehension of the horror experienced by the Japanese people and, most of all, the disaster it has wrought on Brûlé's wardrobe.

[Iraira]

But Br&#251] region," he writes, one of which makes "the most wonderful suits with the most perfect shoulder shape"

Is it wrong do have the burning desire to murder these type of idiots? And do it so they really suffer?

[dimwit]

Is it wrong do have the burning desire to murder these type of idiots? And do it so they really suffer?

Only if you murder the anyone having to do with the AC commercials first. Personally, in the past couple of days I've developed the burning desire to push old people down the stairs of the local temple.

[Taro Toporific]

[Samurai_Jerk]

How long did it take the young man in Italian hiking boots and trim military trousers to get his Jack Russell dog dressed in clashing plaids and Gore-Tex booties? How did the Jack Russell feel about footwear? And what about the pack of young boys and their haircuts? How many products from brands like Shiseido and Mandom were involved? Five? Nine? 15? What would happen in a downpour? Would there be a petroleum slick left in their wake?

This guy's so gay he makes gay people uncomfortable.

[Taro Toporific]

[Greji]

Is it wrong do have the burning desire to murder these type of idiots? And do it so they really suffer?

On come on Iraira. I get a stiffy reading his stuff. You're just jealous 'cause you know I could do him and it wouldn't be a close shoulder fit....

[Samurai_Jerk]

[Mulboyne]

I also agree that service in Japan is polite but can be a bit inflexible a times. This guy, however, seems to have an over-inflated sense of entitlement. He doesn't want the service he paid for, he expects automatic upgrades and special treatment.

[Catoneinutica]

His essay in Reimagining Japan was certainly among the weakest of the bunch. He wrote that the Japanese have, in essence, moved beyond vulgar brand goods, and now are demanding handcrafted, custom-made fashion, furniture, and objets, true signifiers of status, a la Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class, or whatever the fuck he called it, in 1899. Would that it were true! The fact is that, except for the privileged few, brand goods beyond bags bearing the "Afternoon Tea" logo, or maybe a vinyl Harrod's shopping bag, are pretty much unattainable anymore here.