Japanese music icon Utada Hikaru (Hikki) has announced on her homepage that she and her husband Kazuaki Kiriya have divorced. Watchers of the Japanese TV show Music Station also noted that on the March 2nd episode Hikki was no longer wearing her ring.

Lack of communication between the pair, because of their busy international schedules, is stated as the main reason for the split. Differences over the direction of their marriage have also been stated as a factor.

Utada and Kiriya were married in 2002, at which time Utada was only 19 years of age - while Kiriya was 34.

Source: Mainichi

Since its release, there have been an abundance of fan videos relating to the series ‘The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’. In this article I am going to post about some of my favourites.

1) Murder Mystery Computer Game

The creator of this video has done a fantastic job at re-creating the feel of a visual novel style video game using bits of video from the ‘Remote Island Syndrome’ episodes. Throughout the video there are a series of text/selection dialog boxes and some very fitting music.

2) Suzumiya Haruhi no ASCII

Whoever created this video either had way too much free time or simply used a plug-in to their favourite video editor.. either way, it is still pretty cool. The content of this video is the entire ending video of the series with each frame converted to ASCII.

3) Suzumiya Haruhi - God knows

Not so much a fan video, rather a clip of one of the best bits of the series. In this video you can watch Haruhi and Yuki playing Hirano Aya’s song ‘God Knows’.

Which are your favourite videos?

Welcome, Welcome. If you are wondering what this site is all about, fear not, I shall reveal.

The Otaku Times is a new blog which aims to render for you the finest that geek culture has to offer. The word ‘Otaku’ is Japanese slang (Why Japanese slang? Because Japan pwnz0rz of course) which is used to refer to geeks, usually of the variety obsessed with Anime and/or Computers, our niches. ‘Times’ is used to demonstrate the fact that the site will be generating news related to important world issues (haha), as seen in for example ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Sunday Times‘, etc.

What you can expect to see:

Anime/Manga:

Everyone loves space bounty hunters, high school girls who are actually aliens, and big mechas (if you don’t you should be ashamed of yourself). Here at The Otaku Times we will do our utmost to bring you up-to-date news regarding the latest goings-on in the anime/manga world, and from time-to-time we will post reviews of series we have recently finished watching.

Computers/Tech:

Computers and technology are becoming a greater part of our lives at a rapid rate, with this growth there are naturally lots of new and exciting developments going on all the time. The Otaku Times will attempt to chronicle the developments which we believe are particularly interesting, there should also appear at some point a number of tutorials related to programming in languages such as ‘Ruby’, ‘PHP’, ‘Java’, etc.

Misc Fun:

As mentioned previously, here at The Otaku Times we love everything Japanese (well, pretty much) so expect to see some of the following:

Battle Angels (Japanese Idol battles) - ‘Who is hotter, Mihiro, or Miyabi?’
JRock/JPop related postings
Japanese Lessons

Blog posts will also often include links to external media files, these might be accessible via a .torrent file or as direct downloads on sites such as RapidShare or MegaUpload.

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If you have any interesting ideas regarding the content/direction of the site please feel free to post a comment. Also, if you share our interests, have an excellent mastery of the English (Japanese?) language (with some examples at hand), and would like to help out with posts, then please email us at applications [at] otakutimes.com .