Day: March 16, 2011

Japan Prime Minister’s Office Begins English Twitter, To Inform Disaster Information

Prime Minister’s Office of Japan has just annouced that they opened an official Twitter account @JPN_PMO in English.

This is the official English twitter account of Prime Minister’s Office of Japan. Most of the information provided here will be translation of @ Kantei_Saigai.
http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/index-e.html

The first tweet was “The Prime Minister’s Office of Japan has launched an English twitter account from now on” at 21:16, Japan Standard Time.

As the second tweet says, the tweets are going to be about Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake and related disasters translated from @Kantei_Saigai. (Kantei = Prime Minister’s Office, Saigai = disaster)

via @HYamaguchi

Japanese Artists Draw Catfish To Encourage The Earthquake Sufferers

http://i0.wp.com/p.twipple.jp/data/J/6/z/u/6.jpg?w=660
Drawn by shigeokahide.

Many Japanese artists drew Namazu-e(鯰絵) to encourage earthquake sufferers on Twitter.

What is Namazu-e? Namazu-e is a motif drawn in ukiyoe (Wikipedia) during Edo period (Wikipedia). “Namazu” means a catfish in Japanese. In old days, Japanese believed that the earthquake occurs because of a catfish behaves violently in underground. In 1855, earthquake of magnitude 6.9 attacked Kanto region(known as Ansei big earthquake – Wikipedia). In those days, many ukiyoe artists prayed for revive from a disaster and drew the ukiyoe of the heroes exterminate a catfish. Variations of full many Namazu-e increased one after another. For example, god of Shinto exterminates a catfish, catfish apologizes to the people etc…

The Namazu-e project rose from this earthquake is a modern version of ukiyoe of Namazu-e. Please search hashtag #namazue on Twitter. You can find various kind of hot artworks. 

* This project is not meant to harm or kill any real catfish.