Afro Samurai

From left to right:-

• Fuminori Kizaki (Director of Afro Samurai, Animation Director of Blue Gender, Character Designer of Galaxy Railways, Key Animation for Macross Pluss OAV)
• Danny Choo CEO Mirai Inc/Key pigeon cage cleaner
• Takashi Okazaki (Original creator art/manga of Afro Samurai)
• Andrew Lee (Writer and Art Director (Kodansha International))
• Hiroya Iijima (BLASSREITER Art Director, Kurogane no Line Barrel Art Director, Afro Samurai Character Design/Animation Director, Black Cat Animation Director, Gantz Key Animation, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society movie Key Animation)
• CM Willy (Doujin Artist, Silkworm Smeller)

After being invited to have din dins with some of the creators of Afro Samurai at Takashi Okazaki sensei's place, we thought we'd do a bash at my house just after the new year.

The office is on the 1st floor where the entrance is so we start off my going through bits n pieces around the desks.

A few hours of dinner to talk about a load of stuff including much anime industry talk. Hmmmmmmmm...

Me like wifey's cooking. The only thing I can "cook" is boiled water.

Time for mega Star Wars otaku Okazaki sensei to try out the Vader gear. The leather suit and inner cloak look great without the Vader hard parts. Me went out for lunch dressed like this one day ^^;

Vader gets dolphin slice salad.

Turned out to be a cosplay photo session ^^;

"Join me or the teddy gets it up the bottom through the skull."

Then its everybody's turn to have pics with the dark lord.

Couldn't be bothered to put on the trooper armor though ^^;

Okazaki sensei relieved from the heavy helmet for a while.

Checking out Kizaki sensei's pics.

Time flies when you're having fun eh? Before we new it it was 12AM - last trains in Japan are between 12:15 and 12:45AM-ish.
This was one of the things I found surprising when I first came to Japan - no night time public transport. Back in London, we had night buses. But then again, drivers of night buses would only stop if they felt like it. Is there 24 hour public transportation services in your neck of the woods?

Vader giving somebody a bollocking in the corner.

One interesting thing I noticed about many (not all) folks over here is that they hardly invite each other to their houses. I spoke to a few Japanese folks about this and they said one of the reasons they don't invite colleagues round to their abode is because others get to see their private life which they prefer not to show.

Another reason given was that they were busy and didn't have time to invite anybody.

This was very different to when we was living in Seattle for a few months - there were always colleagues at Amazon inviting others over for dinner.
How often do you have friends over at your gaff?

Was thinking that a black trooper helmet actually doesn't look too bad on Vader's body and was wondering that perhaps this could have been the original design for Vader's helmet.

The Vader armor is still for sale if you want it - 300,000 yen or swap for Boba Fett armor.
Discovered that I had an ahoge.

Iijima sensei is a Kamen Rider otaku and occasionally wears this Rider belt which lights up and makes henshin noises.

Hes also got a load of cool accessories bouncing off his person.

Some of the cake that Iijima bought round. Probably the same in most cultures but Japanese folks usually bring some food stuff when they visit other peoples houses.

A few days later, Kizaki sensei sent over a CD with some of the photos that he took - he also drew this Vader for us.

Illustration prezzie from Iijima sensei. Can you name this character?
And for folks who don't know why the title of this article is Afro Samurai - most of these folks are involved in the production of the anime.

All the lads were very interested in the girls around my desk and requested cast offs ^^;
Desk ends up being berry messy.

Just thought I'd throw in some pics of the office of late.

Dug up the old PowerBook and installed Leopard on it. We now have two optic fiber Internet connections into the house - one is a private network and one is the used for the server. The PowerBook is used to control stuff on the external network. Will talk more about this in a separate article next week.

Office is a bit more spacious now that the sewing machine is gone.

Diagram of bits of Mirai Gaia.

Cant get enough of the Dollfies. I noticed that since I got them that quite a few of you have been getting them too ^^; Anymore planning on adopting one?