Onitsuka Tiger, know to many as Asics has been on the come-up lately, resurging from reletive obscurity to retro cool thanks to it's low-profile silhouettes and snazzy color combinations. While it's US marketing efforts tend towards print campaigns in lifestyle magazines, sponsorships of VH1 "celebreality programming" with contest giveaways and on-air mentions, and national party tie-ins orchestrated by Urban Groove, Tiger's UK counterparts have found a really inventive and original way to add some depth to this iconic Japanese footwear brand.

Entitled Found In Translation, the program seeks to explore "Anglo-Japanese creativity" and the way that Japanese and British identities shift and change when they collide, mix and influence one another. Featuring nine different features, the website offers visitors the chance to remix three tracks by a young woman's band, to check out video pieces including one about a farmer raising tradtional japanese crops on an old English farm, photography, a Japanese baseball team based in England, a fashion designer's sketchbook, and learn the top ten favorite songs beloved by the members of a band called Miso Soup.

It's a pretty eclectic bunch of stuff, but in the end it articulates Tiger's sense of where their brand fits in with England's creative underground in an artful fashion while keeping a foot firmly planted in the brand's heritage in Japan.

EMERGE gives Onitsuka Tiger an emphatic thumbs up for finding a way to stay true to it's DNA while staking it's place in a rapidly changing and internationalizing marketplace.

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