Great Mazinga Self Portrait

Great Mazinga has been my friend since I was 4 years old. He often watches me draw, and he makes silent suggestions.

I guess a lot of my drawings are influenced by his opinions. He is a pretty artistic robot.

Yesterday I gave him some pens and paints before I went to the zoo. When I came home, I found this picture he drew of himself.

I was going to get him a blow up giraffe balloon as a souvenir at the zoo (he loves giraffes), but they were sold out. Instead, I got him some animal crayons with colors named after animals, like Lemur brown, and hook worm yellow.

I'm hoping that he does a lot more drawing.




Here is a photo of Great Mazinga watching me type this blog.






Big Robot Casts Big Shadow.

Letters from a Super Hero. Atomic Atom Episode 1

(For some reason the above video player cuts off 1/3 of the screen...double click the video to see it on youtube in full.)

Atomic Atom is based on this drawing I did called "Letters From a Super Hero".

He is real, but I didn't know he was real until after I made the drawing. He is a very good neighborhood hero. This morning I saw him refilling a hummingbird feeder.

If you have a problem, contact Atomic Atom. He might be able to help, but I think he has a bad back.

He can't do heavy lifting, or anything that requires him to bend in a funny position.



Letters From a Super Hero- Acrylic Ink and collage over canvas

Flowers Everywhere

It's April and that means it's flower season. Back home, we spend Spring doing Hanami (flower viewing), where we sit in a park under the plum or cherry blossoms and have picnics and sake all night long. In Los Angeles I haven't met anyone who goes flower viewing, but it rained a lot this year and there are flowers all over.



This weekend, I went to Hondo Canyon Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica mountains to meet some of them. I met about 30 species of flower and also some friendly bees. It made me think of Judge, who is always thinking about flowers.



This was my favorite flower. He is soft and fuzzy and looks like he is from a Dr. Zeuss book. When I grow up, I'd like to be a flower like this one.


While I was hiking, I almost walked into a giant rattle snake (Jacob) who was sunbathing on the trail. I stopped and waited a while for Jacob to disappear into the grasses. I was afraid he would mistake me for a delicious field mouse, I've been told I look like one. Luckily Jacob didn't bite me, he probably just wasn't hungry.

I also saw a small, friendly ringneck snake (Jacob). Jacob moved so fast that I couldn't really get a look at him. He was tiny and shy.




I'm hoping to go to the poppy reserve soon, where they have hills covered in beautiful poppies and other purple and yellow flowers. I went a while ago and you can see the video here.

Song Improvisation and Evolution

I got a few emails yesterday asking about how we improvised the song "No Job" that I posted yesterday. So today, I uploaded the original raw video of the improvisation that led to this song.

The video is on my Kentanakajapan channel.
It is just a webcam video of me and Takeo-Kun making up the song as we go...
Then we did a few more recordings like this and finally I wrote some extra lyrics and Takeo made some guitar licks to go with the song.

Hopefully this video can answer your questions :)

Thanks everybody for your nice comments about the song. We had a very good time making it, and will make some more soon. Actually, Takeo-kun is on the way over right now to play music with me. そう言えばおそいなたけお君。

New Japanese Song - Yamato Natadecoco

I made a new Japanese song with my Friend Takeo, who you might know from some of my other videos. Takeo is a white man, but was born and raised in Chiba, Japan. He comes from a family of musicians.

Takeo plays guitar in the song and I sing. We made this song through improvisation.



He played, and I sang to it a few times. Afterwards, we changed the lyrics from the improvisation and arranged it a little bit.

Improvising music is one of the funnest things in the whole world.

We will be making more songs soon. I hope you can enjoy this one :)