japanamerica

(photo courtesy of Lisa Kato) Haruki Murakami: Japan's 21st-century cultural ambassador Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri Two sharply contrasting portraits of a global Japan flashed simultaneously around the world this month, like one of those live, split-screen broadcasts of two different TV reporters stationed in distant countries. On one screen, viewers watched in morbid fascination as a narcotized and nearly comatose Japanese finance minister named Shoichi Nakagawa slurred his way through a press conference at the meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank governors in Rome. Two days later, when news broke that Japan's economy had just suffered its worst contraction in 35 years, and that Nakagawa's boss, Prime Minister Taro Aso, himself suffering severe contractions in popularity, had yet to demand Nakagawa's resignation, the emerging picture of a dangerously dysfunctional government overseeing the world's second-largest ec...

This is the text of Haruki Murakami's acceptance speech in Israel to accept the Jerusalem Literary Prize earlier this month. My latest profile of Haruki is due out in this Friday's Daily Yomiuri : I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies. Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be? My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies -- which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true -- the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location a...

(photo courtesy of Christine and Ashley) Drinks on me. Mar 1st , Pasadena, CA, The Pacific Asia Museum (*RSVP required) Mar 3-5th , Geneva, NY, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Mar 10th , New York, NY, The Consulate General of Japan in New York Mar 12th , New York, NY, The Japan Society Mar 22nd , New York, NY, JETaaNY Author Showcase (*RSVP required)

No messiah, no. But the number of Japanese friends and colleagues who have said to me 'We need an Obama' with nary a whiff of irony or sarcasm is not small. (photo courtesy of jetwit.com)

From my latest column in today's Daily Yomiuri : SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / On the front lines of Japanese pop culture Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri Near the end of last month, I took two groups of graduate students to Akihabara, the eastern Tokyo neighborhood that remains the mecca of Japanese pop cultural artifacts and trends, and ground zero for the domestic marketing machine. I was skeptical at first. While not all of the students are Japanese, they all live in and around Tokyo, so a short train ride to Akihabara wouldn't really qualify as an exotic excursion, let alone academic "fieldwork." But both trips turned out to be revelatory, largely owing to the characters who hosted them. The first visit involved an exhaustive, three-hour tour of the neighborhood's honeycomb of nooks and crannies, its iconic otaku landmarks and legendary vending machines. It was hosted by Patrick Galbraith, an Alaskan transplant currently researching the impact...

(John Dower, Fred Schodt and me [in hiking shoes--thanks, Ash] before an overflow audience at the Anime Masterpieces program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 11, 2009 [and thanks, Scott, for the pic]. )

We're putting Japanamerica back on the road this week, starting in Boston. This Wednesday, February 11, join us at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for an Anime Masterpieces screening of Grave of the Fireflies ( Hotaru no Haka ), the 1988 postwar masterwork by Isao Takahata, produced by the venerable Studio Ghibli. The discussion panel will include Pulitzer-prize winning historian and author John W. Dower, manga authority, translator and author Frederik L. Schodt and me. Tickets are required, but admission is free. For more info, click here . *** And on Friday through Sunday, Feb. 13-15, join us at the Washington, DC area's 15th annual anime/manga celebration known as Katsucon . This year's event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, VA, and I will be on hand for a couple of panels on Friday afternoon and evening, plus several events throughout . Do swing by if you're in the region. (And, yes, that's an actual American cosplayer at a p...

Click on the play button above to hear my radio segment on Japan's pop culture, Hayao Miyazaki, Ryu Murakami, youth pathologies--and a singing clown, not to mention a crooning poet. I won't lie: this was a lot of hard work. I am deeply grateful to my uber-producer, the brilliant Pejk Malinovski (pictured above at the mixing boards in the NYC studios), David Krasnow (for critical script edits), David d'Heilly, Lisa Kato, Motoyuki Shibata and Mario Tauchi, plus all of my subjects, who graciously granted me their time and insights. The entire program is at the Studio 360 web site , and will air on NPR stations across the US tomorrow. But you can hear it right here. Hope you dig it.