-Shop cute Japanese products and cool products from Japan. This cute blog is about Japanese kawaii, kawaii Japan, kawaii fashion, Japanese pop culture and more. It's a kawaii blog from Japan, Japan blog in English by a Japanese girl.

★Tokyo Kawaii Perfect Map★
4/APR/2009 on air

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There’s no need to explain this time, because the show just looks like picking several old episodes up and presenting you the impression of what’s Japanese kawaii. Each episode is introduced at this page in this blog for your further interests and better understandings with my English summary.

Disclaimer: The map is originally from Tokyo Kanko Ryoko and red letters are marked by me for your better understandings.

If you have a chance to shop or browse in Harajuku area, I think most of you do not even step inside backstreets, because main streets are already full of shops, restaurants and cafes. But backstreets can be more unique, more interesting, and anyway they are sometimes something more than main streets.

Here are some related links for you to check out to imagine how the Urahara world would be.

-Harajuku Cat street website
-Tokyo Kanko Ryoko
-Harajuku Urahara Mitegoran Guide
-Urahara jp
-Urahara org

These sites are in Japanese, but I believe you can at least enjoy pictures there.

Have you been to Harajuku before? If yes, how did you like that? Which shop did you go and find what? When I was a teenager, my mom didn’t allow me to hang around Harajuku, because she said it’s a dangerous place for kids. Time has passed, and I’ve never had any dangerous happenings out there since my first Harajuku shopping in high school age. Now it’s a place too young for me to hang out but I still like to see people out there.

I’ve set up another blog in Japan last weekend. At a moment I run 4 blogs.

No.1- Japanese Cuisine Daily Recipes and Something Kawaii From Harajuku
(Free Blogger blog that I started Feb.2008 in English and I still keep it while I update a new post only once in a while.)

No.2- Tokyo Kawaii, etc.
(This blog that I work hardest, and love most! I pay for domain and hosting server, from which you’ll see how special this blog is to me.)

No.3- Pi-chan (my dog) blog
(Free FC2 blog that I run in Japan in Japanese.)

No.4- My daily stock exchange market trading blog
(Free Seesaa blog that I run in Japan in Japanese.)

*I no longer run other 3 blogs, because I decided to focus more on this blog, “Tokyo Kawaii, etc.”.

Wow! No wonder I’m busy! But I’m spending most of the time for Tokyo Kawaii, etc. (this blog). I know I should stick to 1 blog, meaning Tokyo Kawaii, etc. only, but the first blog is still good to be kept. The third dog blog is important in order to record how my dog spends her life with us. The fourth one also is important to record what I am learning and how I’m acting in my daily trading habits.

Some of the readers from my first blog (Japanese cuisine…) might be confused to hear that I’m trading at stock exchange market because I used to work as an importer, house renovation planner, and writer. But now I’m working from home. Online stock exchange market trader from home, writer and blogger. Why such a big career change? It’s a long story so let me avoid explaining that here. :p

Instead, today I’ll introduce blogspot in Japan, as some of you are already good at Japanese and may want to browse Japanese blogs to read or to write a blog in Japanese by yourselves.

Blogsphere in Japan is totally different from the U.S or most of English spoken countries. First of all, WordPress is minor, which I think is because there are many attractive free blogs available in Japan and how to manage dashboard or how to write a post is far easier and more convenient compared with WordPress or blogger.

This is a dashboard from Seesaa blog and I was surprised to find this difference. In English blogsphere, we basically add things we want. We may join Google Analytics to track stats, and paste the code or do something to activate it if we want it, for example. To the contrary, Seesaa had everything there including stats. (not from Google, but original one) We are then deleting things we don’t need. That’s it!

Japanese people are used to this style; say everything being given in a package, and so, customizing blogs with plugins by themselves like what we do with WordPress is not accepted.

Here are major Japanese free blogs for your reference.
-FC2 (Do you know FC2 ranks in No.2 in Alexa in Japan!?)
-Seesaa
-Ameba
-Livedoor
and there are actually hundreds of more but above 4 blogs are I guess most popular ones. There are many blogs that do not allow affiliate promotion. (Above 4 blogs are OK)

If you prefer Ezine, rather than blog, there is a free Ezine stand called “Magu Magu” and this is the most popular and the largest scale in Japan. Of course you can start yourself both blog and Ezine (in Japanese it’s called “melumaga” meaning mail magazine) for free, if you want to. But I know how hard it’d be to write constantly in foreign language, so you can at least browse Japanese blogs and Ezines of your interests just as you like to improve your Japanese with fun!

Basically I’m not good at crafting but since my first experience of making DECOTTI, I kinda find it fun to craft something by myself. Yet, I cannot make something from scratch. I have to rely on kits or easy tool to make something cute by myself.

So what’s new this time? It’s my first experience of decoden! As I filmed myself making decoden, you’ll see this is not mori style as well-known as what decoden is like. I use my cell phone as a camera, too, and so too much overloaded decorations just unable it to be used as a camera. That’s why I chose this water-proof sticker type of decoration with Japanese Makie art pattern, combination of rhinestones so that my decoden won’t look too simple.

Please watch the video, see how I made it, and let me know what you think.

I’m quite satisfied with the outcome, nevertheless I’m kinda clumsy at things like this requring skills to pick up small pieces… Also, as a result, simple deco was OK to me. I really liked it.

Have you ever tried decoden yet? If yes, tell me your experience and share it with others who like kawaii, cute stuff here!