Word: teche
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...pacifism that settled over the nation after the devastation of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japanese cities. Japan calls its army the Self-Defense Force. Its soldiers don't wear uniforms on their commute to offices in Japan. Despite an annual defense budget of $40 billion - and such high-tech arms as F2 fighters and guided missile destroyers - newspapers were enraged last year when Tokyo's governor, the nationalist Shintaro Ishihara, referred to the Self-Defense Force as a "military." Years ago, children of Japan's 240,000 servicemen and women were bullied by schoolteachers: teachers' unions in Japan...
There are, in this world, some rather loopy people. Not dangerously loopy. Just pleasantly idiosyncratic folks, whose enthusiasm for something high-tech occupies a little more brain space than the normal person would dedicate to, say, a metal-plated canine robot. Because Japan is the source for so much of this addictive technology, it's not surprising that these fetishists view the country as the mecca of techno-cool. Fittingly, Japan is also the birthplace of the word otaku, an almost untranslatable phrase that describes a person whose fascination with something has reached, well, loopy proportions. Below, meet five American...
...more than a decade before cutting three albums with his band SadSadFun. Which is why when the 29-year-old Chulada deejays at Mecca, a velvet-draped club in San Francisco, he only uses Technics SL-1200 direct-drive turntables to spin his favorite vinyls. "When I used the Tech 12s, I feel like I'm playing a real musical instrument," he says, his fingers, with blue-varnished nails, keeping time to the lush, melodic Frisco beat. "With other turntables, I'm just using a record player...
When Panasonic's Tech 12 was unveiled two decades ago, it revolutionized the dance-club scene from Tokyo to Toronto. Deejays rejoiced at the smooth, almost buttery, pitch control, which allowed them to match beats and seamlessly shift from one song to another. In today's San Francisco, young dotcommers are deserting the city's once-booming live concert venues for dance clubs where they can groove to trance or house tracks, and the Tech 12 is helping a whole new generation of professional deejays spin to success...
...pair of decks a year-and-a-half ago, they were a musical revelation. "I spent two months learning how to spin on inferior turn-tables," he says, outfitted for maximum hipness in a plum-colored oxford, tight black trousers and two-day stubble. "Then when I tried the Tech 12s, I suddenly felt like a real deejay." Today, the former hippie haven of Haight-Ashbury, where the laid-back Chulada bunks with his brother, teems with hundreds of makeshift Mobys scratching out their living. Some, including Chulada, have made it to the coolest clubs, like Mecca where a weekly...