japanamerica

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: