Asia Link Page

 Favorite Artists' Home Pages

• al.ni.co (Show Wesugi and Hiroshi Shibasaki)
• Kuroyume
• L'Arc~en~Ciel / (Sony)
• LUNA SEA
• MALICE MIZER / Gackt

• J-Rock Trading Center
• Yahoo! JAPAN
• Recording Industry Association of Japan

Jeez Park contains CD sales charts of both major and indies albums and singles, as well as store information.

Following WANDS's member change, I've decided to stop my support of all Being artists (including ZARD). Not that I blame Being for what happened, but I do find the music they produce uninteresting.

One of my favorite hobbies is listening to Japanese Pop music. You may take a look at some of the JPOP stuff that I own. I also translate some jpop lyrics as part of my pathetic effort to keep up with my Japanese.

Japan Related Links

• Favorite Getaways in Rural Japan
• Gateway to Japan
• Japanese Information
  
• Japanese Network has good restaurant reviews

• Fuji-TV, broadcasting popular Japanese drama and entertainment programs in Northern California
• Tokyo-TV, San Francisco Japanese Television Program
• John Leo's Japanese TV Drama page
• Asahi National Broadcasting Co., Ltd. (Japanese)
• Fuji Television Network Inc.
• Nippon Television Network Corporation
• Tokyo Broadcasting Systems, Inc.

You can download the latest version of Netscape Navigator, which has Japanese Kanji code support. If you are stuck with a PC running Windows (like me *sniff*) and cannot afford any of the Japanese enabling software but still want to browse Japanese websites, you can download Internet Explorer Multilanguage Support, but be warned that you have to use Internet Explorer with it. I also use Microsoft's Global IME to enter Japanese characters.

One thing you might want to check out is TkJDic, a combined wa-ei-wa and kanji dictionary program. To compile it, you need the Japanization patches for Tcl/Tk.

May I also suggest MULE, a MULtilingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs. It can handle not only ASCII characters (7 bits) and ISO Latin-1 (8 bits), but also Japanese, Chinese, Korean (16 bits) coded in the ISO2022 standard and its variants (e.g. EUC, Compound Text). It is strongly recommended to install Wnn4.108 or later. EGG system bundled with Mule can communicate with jserver of Wnn and provide you a very convenient Japanese inputting method. I downloaded Mule for Win32, maintained by Hisashi Miyashita, but I could not find the other missing components to enable Japanese inputting. Alas, it is better than WordPad.

Lastly, if you have tried everything and still cannot read Japanese web pages, you can use Shodouka, a server-based Internet service that will let you read the kana and kanji on any Japanese document on the WWW without the need for any special software.

 Hong Kong Related Links

• Next Magazine (Big5)
• Hong Kong Movies in the San Francisco Bay Area
• Albums Review

I saw Maggie Cheung at the San Francisco International Film Festival! She appeared with the respective directors following the screenings of her movies, Comrades, Almost a Love Story and Irma Vep. See the San Francisco Bay Guardian for more info.

If you watch HK movies, you would recognize Leslie Cheung, a very talented singer and actor who starred in many great HK movies.

Bryce Yan has created a really cool home page for the awesome singer Jacky Cheung.

Anime / Manga

My favorite artists are Adachi Mitsuru, Miyazaki Hayao, and Takahashi Rumiko. My favorite movie is Omohide Poroporo. My favorite manga series are 3x3 Eyes, Nijiiro Tougarashi, and Urusei Yatsura. Unfortunately, there are very few WWW sites specifically devoted to Japanese manga. You might want to take a look at Shogakukan and Kodansha, two major publishers in Japan. Another good source of information is the Usenet Manga Guide. You can also try Hiroyuki Hironaga's Manga Page.

Check out Miyazaki's latest (and possibly the last) film, Mononoke Hime.

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