Avatars from the Poupee Girl Website.

Poupee Girl, a fashion social networking site operated by Tokyo-based web firm CyberAgent, has won a devoted and quickly growing base of users since launching in March 2008.

After registering on the site for free, users can create avatars named poupee (“doll” in French) by mixing and matching hairstyles, facial features and body shapes that resemble themselves. Users can then dress their avatars with thousands of available garments and accessories, and take a snapshot to post on their personal page on the site.

Users create avatars and dress them virtually.

Poupee Girl has a virtual currency, known as “ribbons,” can be purchased by credit card, or earned by posting new snapshots or commenting on other users’ snapshots. Ribbons can be used to buy virtual fashion item for their avatars. Users can also auction off virtual items they no longer want to other users. Many of the virtual items are based on actual garments, so users can coordinate a look on the site and go out and by the actual outfit.

Users post to the message board every few seconds.

However, Poupee Girl is much more than a virtual fitting room. It is also a social networking site with a rapidly growing base of users. In the “Poupee Cafe,” users can post one-line micro blogs on how they are feeling at the moment, which appear with their latest snapshot. New comments are posted every few seconds, attesting to the popularity of the site. Users can post photos of fashion items bought in the real world from their mobile phone cameras and receive comments and advice from other users.

Users can also post photos of items they actually buy.

The site has collaborated with brands to bring popular Louis Vuitton and Hello Kitty items into the virtual space, helping traffic to double every month since the site’s launch.

Learn more:
Poupee Girl site
News on Louis Vuitton
News on Hello Kitty

New credit cards from Mitsubishi UFJ feature Seasame Street characters.

Nicos, the credit card division of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan’s largest financial services company, has begun issuing Visa cards with Sesame Street themes. The cards are available in four designs, including Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and the whole gang from the long-running children’s educational show.

The colorful cards, like all Nicos products, are only available to applicants 18 years and older. However, cuddly characters originally design for children appearing on products for adults is not at all surprising in Japan, where super-cute Hello Kitty graces mobile phones and high-storage computer memory sticks.

The new credit card designs are advertised on Sesame Street Japan’s official website, as well as through brochures in Mitsubishi UFJ bank locations.

Approved applicants receive a pop-up greeting card featuring Sesame Street characters, free “My Sesame” membership, which allows discounts on goods from official Sesame Street shops, and a discount for their children to “Sesame English,” language classes for young learners taught by Berlitz English Schools and involving Sesame Street character dolls.

Sugamo is known as a haven for the elderly in Tokyo.

Here is the true face of modern Japan, the most aged society in the world. In Sugamo, far from the streets of futuristic Shibuya is Jizo Dori, a shopping area popular with the elderly and in its own way, a glimpse of Japan’s future. People under the age of 50 stand out in a sea of grey heads, many in wheelchairs, who visit the area to buy health food and cheap clothes, and pray at the neighbourhood temple for a healthy life. Signs for AED defibrillators are a common sight and that bastion of youth, Hello Kitty, is even featured with her bespectacled grand parents.