A block away from the Iranian Embassy in Tokyo and surrounded by almost as many police, 30 or so people were gathered with signs to protest the recent presidential election.

In this issue HESO Magazine shines the strobe light onto all things Otaku.
What is Otaku? A thing? A person? An idea? All three? Without so much as giving you, the intelligent reader, an easy answer nor giving into the obvious stereotypes, we try to provide you a feel for what we think people obsess over, collect, peruse and secretly adore.
What are your secret indulgences? Weaknesses? Fantasies? Extroverted nerdisms?
Focusing on what we do best (photography) we eulogize the Cult of the Polaroid with a fitting Requiem.
We delve deep into everyday people’s musical passions with our Interview of Peter Barakan (NHK DJ & Cohost of Japan’s 60 Minutes) and our featured live musicians: Derek Trucks of Allman Brothers’ fame and SugarFootStomp - the Japanese Bagpipe Collective.
We’ve got amazing photographs from Tetsuya Blues, Keico, Tommy Oshima and Clarice
Plus, just what is Love Earth and how are they helping you help the world?
Finally we’ve got the lowdown on Flickr from the inside: Find out why Flickr matters and if you are a Flickr whore (does that even make sense…)?
And introducing our new Subscription service, offering the most recent five issues of HESO magazine, sent directly to wherever you are in the world!
Subscribe now!
GLOSS - I speak american…the language of 3am french fries and photoshoots with hottees and homeless men in McDonalds…
The last lines that Vonnegut wrote, in his last book, go thus: When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
From the Requiem for Polaroid article in the upcoming HESO Issue on Obsessions

Et Pour Moi…Tokyo’s crazy, but good. Though after a while of prowling the backalleys and neon-lit boulevards, the tiny 5-seat bars and the swanky Roppongi clubs, the Ginza haute couture, the Harajuku freak show cosplay and the Kabukicho sexshops you slowly start to realize there is a disease most people have that they live with in silent submission - the look-busy-while-not-actually-doing-all-that-much-disease. Though I do realize this sickness could be an epidemic in the making in every major metropolis, I find the Japanese have particularly bad strain of the virus. The disease is spreadable by coming in contact with too many hungover salarymen, commuting via the wide network of sardine-can packed commuter trains everyone hypnotized by their supercharged mobile phones (keitai) and/or the latest ipod, knowing perverts (chikan) feel up Louis Vuitton ensconced women on said trains and not doing anything about it, working 3 parttime jobs (freetah), milling about in coffee shops between jobs, snapping photos of people who I think I’ll never see again, yet constantly do, tumbling around Shibuya with the rich teenagers and buying beers and Chinese Tangerines (mikan) for the bums laid up against Gap and Banana Republic, seeing the multitudes of unmarried men pouring out of sexshops open for business right behind Police stations (koban), probably where the police go as well, turning down whale sashimi (kujira) for the nth time but giving in on the horse sashimi (basashi) because it’s too good what with the garlic and ginger, Suntory whiskey and egg breakfasts at 6 in the morning at people’s shoebox apartments you barely know, yet somehow share a camaraderie with, slowly watching the price of tuna (maguro) rise above the price of gas and ordering some anyway, eating it with disposable chopsticks (waribashi) made from yet another clearcut forest in Southeast Asia which adds to the flooding of 1/3rd of Bangladesh, and overall getting blinded by the neon so all this blurs together into a kind of silent beautiful despair. Rife with the gooey, sexy, glossy stuff, Tokyo is an addiction. I’m mainlining.