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Before heading over to Tokyo last year I'd say I was moderately interested in Japanese animation and mildly obsessed with the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Since returning, I've been hoovering up other anime films and television series, attempting to find the gems amongst all the truly godawful rubbish. In particular, I've found myself looking for anime set in a realistic present day setting, whether it's ostensibly a work of comedy (Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers), science fiction (Hosada's The Girl who Leapt through Time) or, in this case, romance.

I stumbled across 5 Centimeters Per Second on the web at the end of 2009, and it sounded interesting – a film in three distinct parts from Makoto Shinkai, who famously created the sci-fi short Voices of a Distant Star single-handedly on his computer. Getting a copy wasn't easy – details later – but a month or two later I finally got to watch it. As there are relatively few reviews available, I thought I'd put one online. I'll avoid spoilers as far as is possible.

The plot

The sequence of films follows two characters, Takaki and Akari. The first film, Cherry Blossom Story, is set as Takaki makes the (complicated, lengthy) train journey north from Tokyo to see Akari; as he does so a sequence of flashbacks explain how they met and became friends in elementary school before Akari's family moved out of the city. Since her departure a year previously the two have corresponded by post, but with his own family now moving far afield the two have one final – at least for the conceivable future – chance to meet.

The second segment, Cosmonaut, is set  years after Takaki's move to the island of Tanegashima – home of the Japanese space agency, NASDA. This section is narrated largely by Kanae, a female classmate of Takaki who has suffered unrequited love for him since his arrival, and who goes out of her way to arrange 'chance' meetings. The two, soon to graduate from high school, discuss their plans for the future, but Takake is somewhat distant and is constantly seen writing emails on his mobile phone. At several points we see Takaki and Akari together, but these appear to be dream sequences.

The final segment, 5 Centimeters Per Second, is set back in Tokyo. Takaki, now 26, is a computer programmer, and significantly depressed. One day, while walking across a level crossing, he spots Akari. The finale, which makes up the majority of this segment, takes the form of a montage of rapidly cut visuals shown as a song is played.

The look

It's worth noting immediately that 5 Centimeters Per Second looks beautiful. The animation slides between a slightly painted style and the more realistic look that you'd expect from computer animation but throughout the shots, and in particular the use of colour, are remarkable – many of the scenes are set in twilight or night, with an amazing luminous appearance and glowing pink washes that link the narrative back to the cherry blossom tree of the title.

The effect is a world that's immediate and real – Takaki's journey through and out of Tokyo is almost photo-realistic – and yet somewhat otherworldly, and in the second film this is taken even further as the setting introduces another glorious light source to both dream sequences and the segment's climax.

Swirling cherry blossoms are something of a specialism of Japanese animation – there's probably a firm somewhere in Tokyo that specialises in computer-rendering them – but here the blossom and snow swirl and dance beautifully as the camera moves through them, while light sources flare and glint off the surroundings. Even the rapid shots of the final segment, each on screen only momentarily, are beautifully put together.

The effect

Of course pretty animation is all for nothing in a drama if the viewer doesn't feel emotionally involved. Here, though, the Japanese voice cast does a wonderful job of conveying real-sounding emotion without recourse to the squeaky, shouty clichés that plague many teenage anime characters, and the plot is paced cleverly enough to suck the viewer in enough to build a sense of unease from that most mundane occurrance: a delayed train. Although ultimately a simple tale of young love it left me with enough emotion invested as to care what happened to both parties at the end, which is surely a success on the writer's part. And it's always a good sign when you watch a film through to the credits, then immediately pick up the remote control to flick back into the story again. Overall it's a simple but elegantly crafted tale that avoids saccharine sweetness in favour of the affectingly recognisable, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

Where to get it

Picking up a copy of this film (legally) is a pain. There's a Blu-ray, but you'll need to import it from Japan, play it on a Japanese or American Blu-ray player and, not least of the obstacles, understand the Japanese-only audio. A DVD with English subtitles was available in the US, but it's Region 1, out of print and currently selling for $150 or so. In the end I imported a Region 3 DVD from Hong Kong via Ebay – this has the Japanese audio track and English subtitles.

There are few foods as versatile as japanese curry. In Tokyo we saw it served on or with just about everything, but katsu-curry (breaded pork fillet with cury) and curry rice (yes, that's just curry with rice) are staples of good-but-cheap food. If you want to make your own here in the UK, there are three options.

Of course, you can make it from scratch. This would provide both curry and an air of smug satisfaction, but it requires both a recipe and some skill. I have neither. If you're in the same situation you can buy it ready-made in a packet that must then be boiled or microwaved. I've tried these, and they're OK, but there's a definite air of Vesta about the whole business, plus they're very expensive.

There is, fortunately, a third option – and here it is:

This is ready-made curry roux. and you can buy it from just about anywhere that stocks Japanese food. It's cheaper than ready-made, plus you get to choose exactly what goes in the curry, and there's a certain degree of smug satisfaction to gain from doing some of the work yourself. So, what's the downside? Well, er:

Yes, that's the recipe. If you don't speak Japanese, or like me you speak a bit but know hardly any kanji, you're in for a world of translation-related fun. What you need, in fact, is a curry dictionary – and so, courtesy of the ten minutes I spent wrangling with my pocket kenkyusha, here's one I made earlier:

I've pasted this in as an image so it should show on any computer rather than relying on Japanese display fonts. Note that this may not be perfectly correct – I'm guessing that "sarada oil" is vegetable oil, but it seemed to work for me. Any corrections gratefully accepted. And so, on to the recipe.

Armed with that vocabulary and a packet of roux it should be easy to make out the necessary ingredients. For five servings, using Golden Curry roux, the recipe asks for the following:

• 200g meat
• 300g onion
• 100g carrot
• 200g potato
• 1 spoon vegetable oil
• 700ml water
• one packet of roux

Double these for the full ten servings. I had no meat, so I just added more carrots and potato – it's not an exact science. Chop the whole lot, add the oil to a pan, and cook the meat followed by the vegetables (or just chuck the veg in for a bit, in my case):

I cooked it until the onions were softening up nicely, which took a few minutes over a low heat. Next, add the water. The packet calls for 700ml, or 1300 for 10 servings:

The packet, if I'm reading it correctly, says to simmer for 10 minutes, or 20 if making ten servings. I found that about 15 minutes were needed to cook the potato chunks. Anyhow, after ten to fifteen minutes, it's time to break out the curry. Here's what's in the box:

If making ten servings we'd use both, but for five only one is needed. Open it up and chuck the incredibly attractive contents into the pan:

Obviously it's less than a feast for the eyes at this stage. Stir gently for a few minutes, though, and as if by magic:

Curry! Stir it for a few mintues more (be warned, it'll stick and burn given the chance), then serve on rice, katsu, or just about anything else:

Brown, glutinous, chunky, probably packed with MSG and yet strangely delicious. Enjoy.

Early warning: expect some mild spoilers here.

Earlier this year Helen and I paid a visit – or perhaps a pilgrimage - to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo. One of the main exhibits was filled with information about a film I hadn't at that point seen: Gake no ue no Ponyo. The exhibit was fascinating, with a special focus on the design and animation of the numerous wave and sea scenes in the film, and I made a note to search out a copy on my return to England. On getting back, however, we found out that for reasons unclear it won't be released here until sometime next year.

Last night, however, I finally got to see it. Ponyo, which seems to have picked up the rather unwieldly English title "Ponyo on the cliff by the sea", was being presented in Japanese as part of the Barbican's Japanimation season with an introduction by Helen McCarthy, and six of us managed to pick up tickets. Actually, on the subject of the title, if anyone with a better grasp of Japanese than I knows where the sea comes from, I'd love to know – it looks like "cliff (no) above (no) Ponyo", or "Ponyo on the cliff", to me.

The story is pretty simple: a young boy, Sosuke, meets a goldfish, Ponyo, and they fall in love. Obstacles are presented and – it's a children's film, so this shouldn't count as a huge spoiler – overcome. As with many of Hayao Miyazaki's films, though, this takes place in an environment where everyday Japan meets the supernatural, and with a subtle theme of environmental concern (the drag nets, the idea of nature being pulled out of whack, the moon, etc).

It's colourful, beautiful and beguiling, with a gorgeous look that mixes realism (the dry dock of the working port, the retirement home where Sosuke's mother works) with childlike drawings (the house on the hill, the simple boats bobbing out to see). And of course the waves – at times magically  transformed into giant fish and in one scene racing the camera as it tracks horizontally – are magnificently animated and almost worth the price of a ticket alone.

The film is funny, too – Ponyo's first encounter with a sheet of glass and her enquiries as to the profession of Sosuke's father, in particular, drew big laughs from the (almost entirely adult) audience, while the slightly crazed driving of Sosuke's mother Lisa raised gasps and smiles. The problems faced by Sosuke, Lisa and Ponyo don't ever seem *that* dangerous or frightening, and the conclusion isn't as uplifting as, say, the girls from Tonari no Totoro travelling by Catbus to check on their mother – but they build up and wrap up the plot neatly.

So, predictably, I'd entirely recommend Ponyo when she eventually swims up to these shores sometime in mid 2010. The English version is being distributed by Disney, is produced by John Lasseter and has a cast packed with well known actors – so I'm sure it will at least get a big release, and I suppose subtitles don't make too much sense for an audience of small children. See it in English, then rent the DVD or Blu-ray for the film as it was intended.

I've been avoiding the Tate Modern lately. None of the exhibits have been that interesting – I was surprised by how effective Rothko's famous paintings were when I finally saw them a few years back, but I couldn't be bothered to queue for hours and face the tourist crowds packing his recent Tate exhibition – and even the installations in the turbine hall have seemed a little half-hearted since Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth.

Now, though, there's a new and fantastic exhibition on. And, because it's of Russian contructivists rather than ikea-poster-friendly-material, there are no queues and you can actually get close enough to the art to see it.

I'm an art ignoramus and had only previously heard of Aleksandr Rodchenko because of his famous poster for Battleship Potemkin (the symmetrical one with the guns, not the one with the stairs). Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism begins earlier in his career with something rather different. The first few rooms are full of abstract, geometric paintings made before he abandoned traditional artistic techniques (abandoning artistic strokes in favour of drawing lines with ruler and compass) and then painting itself – his farewell to the medium, three panels of solid colour in which he "reduced painting to its logical conclusion", is remarkable when you consider when it was created. There's then a small collection of sculpture, a few pieces of which are striking.

This is all quite good, but then things become brilliant. Having given up on painting and sculpture ("as useless as a church") both artists turned their attentions to advertising and graphic design, and plenty of space is given to both. I read at least one review sniffing at this as inferior to the earlier art and deserving of less space, but if you like typography, propaganda art or commercial design you'll find it fascinating. There's also space given to one area where Popova found a genuinely popular use for her art: textile designs that were then mass produced by a state-run mill.

The exhibition ends with some film extracts, which are interesting but rather hard to watch – I attempted the 25 minutes of nonlinear socialist montage while standing up, but after about ten minutes it was beginning to resemble the visual equivalent of white noise – and, more effectively, a reconstruction of the "Worker's Club" that Rodchenko designed, which is rather like the set of a 1970s 70mm sci-fi film. Of course, things don't end happily for the artists. Popova died in 1924, aged 35, while Rodchenko fell out of favour as Soviet Realism became the only acceptable form of art in Stalin's USSR. The exhibition effectively ends with his 1925 work, including none of his return to painting or later photography.

I came away convinced that Defining Constructivism is one of the best things I've see at the Tate Modern since it opened, and it also reminded me that the museum has on display in another room a small selection of David King's collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It's great that the museum devoted so much space to Rodchenko and Popova, but I'd love it, in future, to make available so much room for King's huge archive of art and photos from the same period. For the moment, King has compiled many pieces in this book, which I'd also recommend.

Photo: Oak Ridge, taken by Ed Clark for Life Magazine in 1945. Details here.

Since visiting the Cold War Modern exhibit I've been looking for more information on the American National Exhibition held in Moscow in 1959. So far I've turned up depressingly little that I didn't already know, but I did stumble back into Google's Life Magazine archive.

When it was launched a few months back I vaguely noted that this project sounded interesting. Now I'm convinced that it's one of the best things on the internet. Search for anything from 1860 to 1979 (the Nixon/Kruschev kitchen debate, for example) and it turns up photo after photo after brilliant photo. If you have a few hours to lose, do go take a look.

On an entirely unrelated note, I've made some changes to the design here: out go the red leaves, in comes something more blue (this is a decision entirely unrelated to politics). If you spot any oddnesses, please let me know.

Thursday was one of the good London days: it started with the view above, was followed by a great bit of publicity for the magazine and ended with dutch beer and discovering soup-filled dumplings at a great Taiwanese restaurant. Fantastic.

On the minus side, karma dictates that Monday will be a bad London day:I will almost certainly be rained on, stressed at work and assaulted by a drunken tramp. Ho hum.

When I get a cold, I get a hankering for wasabi peas. When I get a hankering for wasabi peas, it's time to pop round to Arigato on Brewer Street. And when I go to Arigato, I always end up buying so much stuff, not all of which I know how to actually cook. Oops. I blame the packaging.

Today's case in point: the MokoMoko cake-in-a-mug:

The instructions are entirely in Japanese, but I reckon they come down to mixing the powder with an egg, putting that in a mug then bunging that in the microwave. And then, apparently, the cake will start to sing (inept translation: "it's a chiffron cake, egg and something, something something, mokomoko, mokomoko, also available in chocolate"*)

Watch this space for more egg-mug-cake action. Possibly with high-def video, who knows.

* Yes, I know. I paid for a year's tuition, and I'm still clearly unable to translate cake adverts.

You're welcome.

What can you do when you get a rare few days off work – climb a mountain? Hike through the wilderness? Travel to far flung and exotic lands and immerse yourself in an alien culture? All wonderful choices, of course, but with one common problem: none of them necessarily involves a random visit to the Lego Store.

Today we went to Bluewater. Or was it Lakeside? Not sure – either way it was a shopping centre somewhere on the outskirts of London, roughly the size of Luxembourg and alarmingly sterile in that way that big shopping centres tend to be. We wandered around a bit, conspicuously failing to buy anything of much value, but then we found the Lego store. Now, Lego and I go some way back – we had lots of it as kids and, when building little houses lost some of its technical challenge, I spent what must have been entire years constructing things out of Lego Technic – the fancy Lego with cogs and gears and electric motors and pneumatic doodads and all that good stuff. In fact, I got surprisingly good at creating completely tiny, and pointless, things like miniature Lego gearboxes for slightly larger Lego cars – looking back, I suppose my progression onto adult geekhood wasn't a huge shock to anyone. [Even geekier sidenote - turns out that today's Technic bricks don't have lumps on - they've gone all odd and rounded. I'm not sure if this is progress or heresy.]

Anyhow, in a fit of nostalgia I spent a tenner on a big box of bricks: not fancy Technic ones, just the classic primary-colours-with-lumps-on type. And they're great: having got home I spent a good hour mashing them together, all the while grinning like an ourang-outang who has just discovered not one banana but a whole Chiquita shipment all to himself. And, in honour of the Olympics (it's hard to craft a model of Georgia using perma-happy minifigs right now), I created the masterpiece you'll see above: a Lego diving contest. I thought it was quite good, until I looked on Flickr and found this:

So, that'd be the Olympic Stadium in Lego, then. Bloody hell. And they didn't stop at the one building, either – behold the entire Olympic Village, crafted in plastic bricks. Watch this space to see if I go slightly crazy, sell the car, fill the bedroom full of tiny plastic bricks and attempt to recreate the entirety of Western Europe in full, glorious, detail, before I have to return to work.

When BT rang up and invited me to come along to Cowes Week – it's rather involved in sailing sponsorship, what with the Extreme 40s, sponsoring Ellen MacArthur, and all that – the weather in London was sunny, hot, and with no wind to speak of. So, in all honesty, I expected Sunday to be a rather dull affair, drifting slowly around a racing course watching the sails flap idly in the breeze. It didn't really turn out that way.

Instead, Sunday morning was grey and a bit ominous, and by the time my boat hit the water with an intrepid crew comprising of one skipper, one BT employee and five journalists, the wind was blowing up impressively. Within a minute of getting the mainsail up I was wrestling with the helm, which seemed determined to pull away onto a reach with the sails too far in, and the boat was tipped over at least 45 degrees going close hauled. I've spent enough time sailing to find this interesting rather than alarming, but I'm not sure it'd be so much fun on your first time out and with barely a few minutes' briefing, as it was for some of the crew.

We missed the start of our race spectacularly due to unfortunate scheduling – the ten minute signal went when we were barely off the jetty and half an hour from the start line – but things were kept interesting by a fender flying off over the stern and some increasingly drastic efforts to get it back. After four passes, a couple of breakneck turns and a few very soggy crew members, myself included, we admitted defeat. Short of getting the sails in and resorting to the motor, the plastic balloon's bid for freedom was bound to succeed.

As the afternoon went on the weather got a little rougher, with the wind gusting to around 25 knots and the tide (I assume) creating some deep, choppy waves down by the coast. As we came back, wind behind us, into Cowes alongside the main racing fleet boats were broaching wildly, a few had lost spinnakers, one appeared to have lost his forestay and was hastily re-rigging the mast with the stays pulled forward, and another was completely dismasted, floating just off the course as its crew attempted to pull the rigging up out of the water. We didn't even attempt to fly the spinnaker – with the wind veering a little behind us on a very broad reach I was getting seriously nervous about the possibility of an unplanned gybe that would send the boom hurtling over the cockpit.

Fortunately we made it back entirely in one piece and managed to get the sails down, despite the best efforts of the red line ferry which appeared looming behind us as I attempted to hold the boat head to wind and out of the way of the other yachts. And speaking of other yachts: I've never seen so many. Coming into the town all you could see both ahead and behind was a mess of spinnakers and mainsails, ranging from tiny twenty-something footers hastily attempting to reattach their outboard motors to enormous racing craft built like giant dinghies hurtling along behind asymmetric kites. The whole thing really was amazing to behold.

Despite a few hairy moments the whole thing was incredibly enjoyable, and I'd certainly go back for another shot given the chance. In fact, yesterday served as a reminder of why I used to enjoy sailing in small yachts – you don't quite get the breakneck feeling of speed that comes from hanging out of a dinghy with your head inches from the water, but there's something very satisfying about it. Oh, and you get coffee making facilities on board, too. What more could you want.

Photos here, slideshow here.