japanamerica

   2023 My latest interview for HISTORY Channel airing this month pursues my work on a story I started researching and writing about 20 years ago: the fate of billions of dollars (at least) worth of treasure plundered from Asia by the Japanese military in World War II, much of it buried in an underground network of tunnels and caves in the Philippines.  The loot was discovered forcibly by the Americans (i.e., GHQ), kept off the books, and deposited in bank accounts across the world--known primarily as the "M-Fund" ( M-Shikin in Japanese). How was that money used? You can probably count the ways, but don't overlook the Marcos regime.   Last time the producers cast me as a cafe-haunting journo. This time I'm playing an author/prof in a gulag.   Here's the first story I ever wrote on the conspiracy, published in The Japan Times and based on my work with the late authors Sterling and Peggy Seagraves and their book GOLD WARRIORS: "Believe it ... or not"  

Letters from Tokyo by Roland Kelts, February - May : What a Long Strange Spring It’s Been  We swallowed an entire season in the latest of my "Letters from Tokyo" series for The Japan Society of Boston, partly because I was away from Tokyo for huge chunks of it. This spring Japan opened its borders and the tourists rushed into Tokyo and Kyoto, PM Kishida survived an attempted assault via pipe (smoke?) bomb--and while Covid eased its grip, roller-coaster climate changes have swung many of us (i.e, me) in and out of summer colds. Let's look back before we fast-forward too far.  The February night I returned to Tokyo from New York felt like spring had landed ahead of me. I shed my jacket in the unusually long taxi line outside Haneda, watched two teenage boys order an Uber and promptly copied them, stepped over the ropes, skipped the line, and settled after five minutes into the backseat of my driver’s minivan, rolling down the windows on both sides.  The weather during my

A couple of weeks after I wrote this story for Rest of World , the Tokyo Stock Exchange hit a 33-year high. Credit my editor. Japan’s sleepy tech scene is ready for a comeback After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum. Sho Hayashi might be a walking cliche in San Francisco or Austin. The 33-year-old founder, with two successful startups and a string of degrees to his name, met me in a light-filled coworking space before flying overseas for a weekend of meetings.  But here in Japan, Hayashi is a new breed of revolutionary. A graduate of the elite University of Tokyo, his standard path would have been to settle into a lifetime job — perhaps as an international diplomat, or at a time-tested corporate empire like Mitsubishi. When he attended a massive startup conference in Singapore in 2010 and realized Japan didn’t have a single representative, he asked to become one and found a new calling: entrepreneurship. “I realized th

Anime may be booming, but Japanese manga (comic book) sales are astronomical. I was interviewed about the explosive overseas sales of manga during the pandemic and the recent proposal by Keidanren, Japan's biggest business federation, to quadruple overseas manga sales over the next 10 years. You can read Julian Ryall's full story  here . Excerpt: "'I was stunned when I saw the figures for 2020 and 2021, which showed that year-on-year manga sales in the US were up by 171%,'  Kelts told DW. 'That's just an astonishing number, and the figures made it clear that the overall graphic novel market grew much faster than the standard market for books.' There are key differences between the Japanese and US markets, however, with sales of print manga in North America driven in recent years by anime that consumers will have seen on television, including such famous titles as 'One Piece,' 'Attack on Titan,' and 'Spy Family,' Kelts highlighted

Belated thanks to Yuri Kageyama of the Associated Press for her story about Hollywood anime adaptations that grew out of my  FCCJ  event for the new  Blade Runner: Black Lotus book. This article was published well before the live-action  Saint Seiya movie   (called  Knights of the Zodiac , btw) dropped and disappeared, and word from the One Piece  set ain't so great either. (Original mangaka Eichiro Oda apparently has a lot of notes.) You can read Yuri's full article here . It was a particular honor for me to be featured alongside one of my former students, Nina Oiki, for whom I was happy to sign a book at the press club.  Excerpt: "The cross-pollination of Hollywood and Japan goes back for decades. References to Japan, such as the image of a geisha on a screen, are plentiful in the 1982 sci-fi movie “Blade Runner,” directed by Ridley Scott. The film, in turn, influenced anime, including the “Blade Runner: Black Lotus” anime that first aired in 2021. Japanese pop cultur

When Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop) show up in the same small venue in the same small city on the Sea of Japan--magic happenstances. I was invited to attend the first annual Niigata International Animation Festival and I'm glad I went. My take below. New Niigata film festival brings out the big names in anime Roland Kelts JAPAN TIMES column CULTURE SMASH It’s no secret that Japan loves animation. Despite being a marginalized medium elsewhere, animation in Japan regularly tops the domestic box office, earning billions of yen for films made without movie stars and on relatively low budgets. Of Japan’s 10 highest-grossing movies ever, seven are animated. But there’s a hitch: six of those top seven titles are homegrown. Animation produced elsewhere, aside from the occasional old-school Disney blockbuster like “Frozen,” rarely gets seen in Japan, let alone embraced by moviegoers. Like short-grain white rice and unagi (fr