japanamerica

Listen HERE This Year Another year's gone Here comes a new one What's gonna happen? This year We're gonna make it Not gonna take it Make no mistake it's This year Last year was a fiasco A real disaster So full of sorrow This year will be a great year I just can't wait, dear Until tomorrow Forget the old pain Sing a new refrain Uncork the champagne This year No, it's not too late We've got a clean slate The future's our fate This year Last year was a fiasco A real disaster So full of sorrow This year will be a great year I just can't wait, dear Until tomorrow It's after midnight I'm just a bit tight Hey, but I'll be all right This year The year is brand new The old one's all through And it's time to kiss you This year --Loudon Wainwright III

My latest contribution for Adbusters magazine is Confucius , a riff on the shifting winds of influence in the 21st Century, with special mention given to the now-iconic Sony Walkman. Yoi otoshi o -- Happy New Year. Confucius East-West, good-evil, right-wrong? "What I only dimly knew then, of course, was that the Walkman was produced by a nation low on national resources, limited in space and keen on reinvention. A nation much like the world we are all living in now." [Complete story HERE ]

My "Year in Reading 2009" for the eds at The Millions : "As a half-Japanese kid growing up in the Northeast, I masqueraded quite successfully as another disenfranchised suburban Caucasian dude, angry more at being nowhere special than for any definable reason. But two historical phrases instilled unease: 'Pearl Harbor' and 'The Bataan Death March.' The former’s nasty ethnic stereotypes of the Japanese character—sneaky, cowardly, backstabbing—made me wary of my mother and half of my family, all of whom seemed otherwise sane and trustworthy to me. And the latter left me cold: How could such mindless barbarity even happen? One of these days, I used to think, I’ll be unmasked—as one of them ..." [more HERE ]

Pats vs. Jags @ Gillette w/sis on Sunday

...with humble thanks from 'home' in New England, courtesy Remy Martin.

Here's my latest and last 2009 column for the Yomiuri in Tokyo: SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / Our hybrid future is here Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri Diana Yukawa, 24, is a violinist whose story is film worthy, melodramatically so. In 1985, her Japanese father died in the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, the deadliest single-aircraft accident in history. Born a month later, Yukawa was moved to her mother's home country of Britain, where she was raised. But she performed in her early years in Japan at a memorial service for the victims of the JAL crash--and was promptly hailed as a child prodigy. I first met Yukawa about five years ago, when she stopped by my Tokyo office. I found her remarkably level-headed and sincere, and I was impressed by her reviews and credentials. So I paid attention when her latest CD, The Butterfly Effect, landed in my mailbox this autumn. Pop and classical music are uneasy bedfellows, as most attempts to meld the two demonstrate. But Yuka...

Here's a smart, thoughtful and genuinely balanced review of Japanamerica , penned by Steven Savage of FAN TO PRO : "Japanamerica is a journey - in some cases literally - through the world of Japanese Pop Culture in Japan and America, the fused world of "Japanamerica". Mixing visiting historical places and persons, talking to individuals, and speculation, author Roland Kelts asks just why and how Japanese Culture is big in America, and what it may mean. This is a phenomenally difficult task quite frankly, and he does a good job of it. Kelts approaches his subject in several ways, mixing them together throughout the book: The development of and traits of Japanese media companies. The history of the U.S. interests and how those intersected with Japanese products. The changing relations and technologies that made this possible. The author handles these by using a mix of history, interviews, statistics, and speculation. Much as it's hard to break out one factor from...

Bits and pieces--online HERE and HERE : Britain’s Rough Guide series has been helping itinerant travelers navigate foreign destinations for nearly 30 years. As globetrotting becomes more casual, and print guides feel more extraneous with the internet’s immediate and wider scope, the presence of the Rough Guides and their counterpart, Lonely Planet , provides security amid the angst of 21st-century travel. We still like to carry paper in our bags—and the Rough Guides’ latest introductions to anime and manga are easy-to-read and suitably compact. I have been asked too many times the same question about Japanese pop culture: “Where should I start?” These books are your answer. The Rough Guide to Anime takes you deep into the art form’s best stuff—without speaking down to you. You’ll learn about the major films, with author Simon Richmond’s easygoing guidance, and broaden your horizons via his questing voice. You will finally realize why Japanese animation “supersedes the American model...

Here's my new column in the just-published, refurbished edition of Paper Sky magazine --to which I am honored to be a contributor. The column is focused on travel to hybrid locales (like Sydney, Tokyo and NYC) by hybrid travelers (like most of us).

Replete with big-nosed, manga-like Perry portrait.

I wrote this story about Japan's unique generation gap for Psychology Today . Things keep changing, but the fundamentals remain the same. Japanese youth are enacting a kind of Bartelby Rebellion--checking out, passively, to check in. The story can be read online here .

And happy to be in Tokyo. Except my eye hurts, my back aches, and my knee is killing me. Otherwise, I feel great.

My latest column in the Daily Yomiur i in Japan--on Pres. Obama, Commodore Perry, and the new Asia: SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / Soft power evolution from Perry's day to Obama's Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri Less than a week before U.S. President Barack Obama touched down in Tokyo last Friday, I took the train to Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture, the tiny port city at the tip of the Izu Peninsula famous today for its beaches, seafood and hot springs. But 156 years ago, Shimoda earned fame for another reason: It was the landing site of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships, a squadron of four military vessels equipped with threatening cannons and aiming to open Japan to international trade. At the time, Japan's Tokugawa shogunate had successfully shut the nation's shores to the world for nearly 300 years. Perry, with his technologically advanced hardware and a letter of peaceful intentions from U.S. President Millard Fillmore, succeeded in his mission...

... courtesy of Studio Ghibli.

Big thanks to Mr. M. Douglas for the latest enthusiastic review of Japanameric a , recently posted by the kind folks at iSugoi.com : Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded The U.S. Author: M. Douglas Published: 10/19/09 Roland Kelts is a fiction and nonfiction writer, an editor of the literary journal A Public Space , and a lecturer at the University of Tokyo. His 2007 book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S . explores the conceptual history regarding the use of Japanese pop culture and its influence within the Western world. Serving as both an insightful and personal take on the infatuation of Japanese pop culture within the realm of Western consumers, author Roland Kelts’s book Japanamerica gives a broad overview of the what, how, and why of the American experience regarding the Japanese pop culture phenomenon. While not attempting to answer every question concerning the matter, Kelts selectively chooses various key areas to address and fundament...

Had a blast this weekend chatting on the radio with Tyler Brule, founder and editor of Monocle magazine , based in the UK, about manga in Japan and Japanamerica--and my forthcoming novel, Access. You can hear it here, with the intro @ 1:00 and the entire conversation @ 22:00: MONOCLE interview w/Tyler Brule

Koike and Ishii in Locarno, Switzerland Ribbon-cutting for debut of "Redline" Heart Like a Wheel -- ANIMATION MAGAZINE Print Email Sunday, October 25, 2009 By: Roland Kelts Redline, Takeshi Koike’s heady new anime feature, embraces the car culture of the West. Two years ago the staff at Madhouse, one of Japan’s most adventurous animation studios, sat me down in a screening room in west Tokyo. A sequence of spasmodic images blazed across the screen: long sleek race cars burning past elaborate robots and rubber-faced aliens; mechanical ships soaring, bursting into flames and smashing into skyscrapers—and, most memorably, contorting humanoid faces with bulging eyes and curdled lips, grimacing and shrieking. The action ended as abruptly as it began: with a slashing crimson silhouette of a drag racer and a thin red band bearing the title, Redline . The five-minute trailer soon appeared on the Internet and at successive Tokyo International Anime Festivals. Buzz and curiosity swe...

“There’s no doubt that cuteness has been a part of the Japanese aesthetic since the postwar years,” says Roland Kelts, the author of the 2006 book J apanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. “One theory, which has been proposed by a lot of Japanese artists and academics, is that, after the humiliation and emasculation of Japan in the postwar years, Japan developed this quasi-queer position of ‘little brother’ or ‘little boy.’ If you become ‘little brother’ or ‘little boy,’ the only way you can get big brother’s or fat man’s attention is by being so cute or puppy-like that he has to take care of you.” [more HERE ]

My latest column for the Daily Yomiuri , and co-published by 3:AM magazine in the UK, features interviews with Miho Hatori , formerly of Cibo Matto, and Reni-chan , a 'maid cafe' performer, both of whom have been transplanted from Tokyo to New York to make it in America. It's a little riff on the status of Japanese music performers in the US, via AKB48 , of course. SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / Japan's music-makers in America Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri When Japanese pop idol group AKB48, a heavily produced amateur team of late-teen and twenty-something dancers and singers, took to the stage in Manhattan's aging Webster Hall club last month, we all clapped. These were cute young Japanese girls making their debut in the heart of the West's media maw. Why not welcome them? But the truth was, as always, more complicated. AKB48 flew to New York to make a splash in the world's biggest media pond. They had already sung and danced to devoted American...

Private Worlds Lives spent lurking too long in the shadows of the virtual. (out now in the current issue of ADBUSTERS magazine) Roland Kelts | 19 Oct 2009 | 1 comment japan L ate last year when Japan’s master animation artist Hayao Miyazaki ( Spirited Away, Totoro ) addressed a room of mostly Western journalists in Tokyo, many of us were expecting him to talk about his latest fantastical feature film, Ponyo , which was just about to open worldwide. Instead, the 68-year-old director spent 15 minutes issuing a stern warning about the dangers and delusions of living through virtual media. “All of our young people today derive their pleasure, entertainment, communication and information from virtual worlds,” he declared. “And all of those worlds have one thing in common: They’re making young Japanese weak.” Miyazaki ticked off the usual suspects – cell phones, emails, video games, television – and he also included two more categories: manga and anime. “These things take away [young pe...

My latest contribution to Adbusters magazine is "Japan's Private Worlds," just released in the new November/December issue-- the Virtual World/the Natural World . I set out to explore the nature of privacy in Japan amid questions of digital displacement and engagement, especially at a time when the nation's so-called 'digital natives,' those born and raised with intimate access to mobile and stationary digital media, are behaving very differently than their elders did and do. My latest story for Animation magazine is "Heart Like a Wheel," also just out in their current October issue. Madhouse's forthcoming boffo anime release, "Redline," debuted at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland this summer and will be released in Japanese cinemas in April 2010, with a US release soon after. I speak with whiz-kid animator Takeshi Koike ("World Record" from The Animatrix ) and screenwriter Katsuhito Ishii ("A ...

Pal and intrepid reporter Jake Adelstein's first book, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan , has just been published in the U.S., and Jake has embarked on a brief book tour ahead of an upcoming 60 Minutes/CBS report on related topics in early November. In our era of cheap armchair journalism and errant blog chatter (like this), Jake's book is something of an anomaly: an account of a singular story researched and written by a writer on the scene--or, more literally, on the beat, whose knowledge of his subject is unassailable, and whose intimacy is so stark it nearly got him and his family killed. What's more, the research, interviews, encounters and writing were initially done in Jake's second language. If you haven't deduced from his name, Jake is not Japanese, but he is very fluent, both linguistically and culturally. Like most good books, Tokyo Vice is many narratives--a coming-of-age story about a boy from the American Midwest who foll...

Mid-afternoon Japanamerica talk (courtesy Fred Schodt) Christopher Born, me, Fred, Jeni Plough and Patrick Danzen, at the end of a long but not lonely day in Saint Louis.

ANIME in St. Louis:

My NYAF official sched is as follows: NYAF Japanamerica sched: 9/25, 5:15-6:15, Yoshiyuki Tomino (GUNDAM) 9/26, 12:15-1:15, AKB48 9/27, 11:15-12:15, Yui Makino (Tsubasa Chronicle)

My new column for the Daily Yomiuri (co-hosted by 3:AM Magazine ) covers Gundam's creator, Yoshiyuki Tomino , and girl-power via AKB48 --both of whom are in town right now to prep for appearances at this weekend's New York Anime Festival at the Javits Center in Manhattan. I'll be hosting panels with Tomino-san, AKB48 and voice actress Yui Makino . (Full schedule forthcoming.) Special thanks to NYAF Director Peter Tatara for his time and insights. SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / Mecha auteur and mega girl group hit New York Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri This evening in New York, I will have the privilege of introducing and conversing with Yoshiyuki Tomino, veteran anime creator, director, screenwriter and novelist. Tomino is most famous for his now 30-year-old seminal mecha anime masterpiece, Mobile Suit Gundam. He has been making the rounds of late, granting public appearances and interviews both in Japan and overseas, and speaking out on topics as diverse as v...

from Medium At Large Roland Kelts Comes To NYAF! "I have the great honor of announcing that Roland Nozomu Kelts will be attending this year's NYAF! Roland is a half-Japanese American writer who divides his time between New York and Tokyo and publishes in both English and Japanese. He is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US . He is also a lecturer at the University of Tokyo, a contributing editor and writer for "Adbusters" magazine and "A Public Space" literary journal, and a columnist for "The Daily Yomiuri" in Japan. His essays and stories can be found in the books "A Wild Haruki Chase," "Gamers," "Kuhaku," "Playboy's College Fiction," "Art Space Tokyo," "Zoetrope" and others. He is the Editor in Chief of the "Anime Masterpieces" screening and discussion series. His forthcoming novel is called "Access," and when he is not writ...

I've just reviewed Tears in the Darkness , a capacious, brilliantly narrated account of the Bataan Death March in World War II, featuring interviews with Japanese, American and Filipino veteran and civilian survivors. Former NYT correspondent Michael Norman and his wife, author and NYU professor Elizabeth M. Norman, spent ten years researching events surrounding and involving the largest ever US military surrender and one of the most brutal and sadistic POW horrors in recorded history. The result is a riveting book that is as artfully structured and well written as it is excruciating. John Dower ( Embracing Defeat ) and Herbert Bix ( Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan ), in particular, arguably raised the bar for English-language books on the Pacific War by conducting extensive research and interviews in Japan and with the Japanese. The Normans rise to the challenge admirably. Tears conveys our capacity for stark inhumanity with novelistic i ntimacy. My review is out in thi...