japanamerica

I’ve been doing a series of JAPANAMERICA-themed talks in Tokyo via the generous and uber-competent WorldStrides agency for US universities including The University of Wisconsin , Vanderbilt University and DePaul University . The discussions have been wide-ranging and fascinating (I'm learning a lot myself!) and I am grateful for the enthusiastic student-professor audiences and the sterling support from the team at WorldStrides. Highly recommended.      

I returned to NHK for an interview on the explosive growth of Japanese arcade games in the US--specifically the "UFO Catcher/Crane Games" as they're known in Japan, and more aggressively in the US: "Claw Machines." Round One and Genda are investing heavily in the US market, opening bricks-and-mortar venues in targeted US regions (like Vegas). The driver? Character goods based on manga and anime characters, of course.  Got a little vociferous on this one. More of my interview at NHK .     

Movie animates Murakami's portraits of empty lives     American writer Nathaniel Rich once claimed that Haruki Murakami, lauded internationally and regularly short-listed for the Nobel Prize in literature, actually writes "genre fiction," the commercial label for stories that repeat formulas, conventions, plots and sometimes whole casts of characters to satisfy reader expectations (think "Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter"). Genre works are distinguished from the less predictable and less marketable aims of literary fiction -- and have a much better shot at the bestseller list. The kicker, according to Rich, is that Murakami created his own genre, absorbing literary conceits into a blend of other recognizable storytelling tropes from the realms of noir, fantasy, horror and sci-fi. The most salient hallmark of the Murakami genre is its fluid shifts between a ruthlessly humdrum reality and poetic, often borderline erotic and prophetic dreamworlds. These

 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman' is an immersive journey into Murakami's world The first time I met Haruki Murakami, on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1999, he greeted my question about film adaptations of his fiction with a shrug. I knew the author had studied film as an undergraduate at Waseda University and was something of a Jean-Luc Godard aficionado, but the only two directors he said he would green-light immediately were David Lynch and Woody Allen — the latter of whom had apparently tried to contact Murakami’s office years earlier when the author was out of the country. Murakami was hard to find back then, especially in Japan. Notoriously camera-shy after he shot to fame domestically with his hugely popular third novel, “Norwegian Wood,” Murakami refused to appear on television or magazine covers, and had given only one public reading to support victims of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in his native hometown of Kobe. As Murakami’s fame and readership grew, film

‘Tokyo Cowboy’ strikes balance between cross-cultural comedy and fish-out-of-water tale Thirty-six years ago, American director Marc Marriott lived in Japan as a missionary and worked as a filmmaking apprentice to Yoji Yamada, the legendary director of the “Tora-san” film series. When Mariott returned to the U.S., he came across an article in an American magazine that stirred his imagination. During the late 1980s, the height of Japan’s bubble-era economy, a Japanese beef company purchased a cattle ranch in Montana to expand its operations and better serve a meat-mad Japanese consumer base. To educate its staff in the ways of American cattle farming and teach Americans about the Japanese palate, the company sent a handful of salarymen to live and work on the ranch. “That idea of this clash of cultures, Japanese cowboys on an American ranch,” Marriott tells me. “I just thought: There’s a movie in there, a great story.” At a company meeting, Hideki proposes his plan to revive the fortune

Andy Summers captures life on and off stage in moody monochrome   With Police guitarist Andy Summers in Ginza   In 1980, one of the first music videos for then up-and-coming British rock trio The Police was filmed on the Tokyo subway. In the footage , three blond musicians — bass player/singer Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and American drummer Stewart Copeland — mug for the camera against a backdrop of anonymous Japanese commuters, lip-syncing into walkie-talkies to their aptly chosen hit single, “So Lonely.” But Summers would soon find himself on the other side of the lens, pursuing a passion for photography that he had nurtured since his adolescence in Bournemouth, England, where he fell in love with black-and-white art films from around the world shown at a local cinema, including early masterworks by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. When The Police was hitting peak popularity in 1983, Summers tracked down American photographer Ralph Gibson in New York, who helped him publish his