japanamerica

[Double-click below for full-size readability.] Imagine this: You’re flying into Canada, bastion of peace and tolerance, and you’re traveling light—a carry-on bag, a few magazines, a gift for your Canadian hosts; and your iPad, iPhone and laptop. Upon arrival, Canadian border officials suddenly seize and search the last of these. What they discover is not an explosive device or a cache of Al Qaeda contacts, but rather an item they deem incendiary nonetheless: a stash of digital manga images, some featuring doujinshi (fan-made) illustrations, others that might be labeled lolicon (lolita complex) manga, showing eroticized renderings of what might be underage characters. Whatever the designation, they are all digital images saved on your personal laptop, and they are all imaginary. An American computer programmer in his mid-20s went through this humiliation last year while visiting a friend in Canada. He has since been charged with possession and importation of c...

All's well, but it certainly didn't feel well. I've felt far worse in Tokyo, but something about being in NYC, where no one knew what was going on (everyone scattering into the street below, shouting into their cell phones--by far the worst thing you can do during a quake), and there are no established alert or emergency systems, and so many of the buildings, down here, especially, are already old and crumbling and made of stiff brick that will collapse instead of 'sway'...no, it didn't feel well at all. When I first realized it wasn't another 18-wheeler grinding cobblestones in Soho, that the movement was both harder and more sustained, my little mind ticker registered 'earthquake,' and I was actually annoyed. I think I spoke to myself, muttering like a geezer, saying something like, "What? Oh, come on! Here?" By the time I had risen from my desk, glanced at the table vase to confirm that, yes, the liquid was indeed sloshing from side ...

Thanks to Colectivo Bunka . Full vid link here .

The first 100% legitimate publisher- and industry-backed English-language portal for digital manga is now up and open ( JManga.com ), developed in collaboration with the folks at Crunchyroll.com --the former fansite that went legal in 2008. I wrote about such industry-fandom tie-ups in one of my recent columns for the Yomiuri.

Special thanks to Ken Rodgers, founder of Kyoto Journal , who picked Japanamerica as one of the top 5 English-language books introducing Japan for Samurai.JP . (Click pics below twice for higher resolution readability.)

Feature in the latest issue of Norwegian literary magazine, Vagant , focused on Tokyo . (Thanks to Bar Stenvik.) Japananorway? (Click pics twice for higher resolution and readability--especially if you read Nynorsk .)

The March 11 tsunami is unnervingly foreshadowed in this scene from Ponyo , Studio Ghibli's last Hayao Miyazaki-directed film, released in 2008. However, the film screened in this CNN video for the children of Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, is Kokuriko-zaka Kara , Ghibli's latest release (May 2011), directed by Miyazaki's son, Goro. Hayao Miyazaki visited Iwate with Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki last month. Also on hand was Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno--though CNN apparently felt no need to mention him. "I thought he was a foreigner," says one girl of Hayao Miyazaki. "His skin was white, he had a long nose and a big beard. I was so surprised seeing him for the first time." Santa Claus sans paunch? [Behold the Ponyo watch]

Yet CNN mispronounces "Ghibli." Oi. Video here . [Kelts in conversation w/Miyazaki and translator Beth Cary @ UC Berkeley, 2009]

Why did the US government suppress this story and film, made by US soldiers, for 65 years? Because it shows, in color, what happened to the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not just the cloud, the buildings, the landscape. What might be happening to the people of Fukushima now--not just the landscape, the barns, the rice fields.

Roland Kelts: Tokyo after the quake -- what matters now? Tokyo has 'had its cells rearranged,' but is it still the same city or something new? By Roland Kelts 8 August, 2011 Select rating Give it 1/5 Give it 2/5 Give it 3/5 Give it 4/5 Give it 5/5 Give it 1/5 Give it 2/5 Give it 3/5 Give it 4/5 Give it 5/5 I was commissioned late last year to contribute a chapter on Tokyo to a book called " City Branding: Theory and Cases ." I have lived in Tokyo for a number of years and often find myself writing about the city, or at least my version of it. As an expat who travels frequently and spends roughly half of each year living in New York, I am particularly sensitive to how Tokyo is perceived beyond its metropolitan and national borders. The opportunity to write about Tokyo as a “brand,” an image, idea and product, was both disturbing and enticing. What did it mean? The Tokyo I wrote about was a global city of superlatives -- moneyed, busy, exhausting and eerily childlike, ...

A handful of photos from the Otakon 2011 weekend, Baltimore, MD. Pre-talk prepping with impeccable 'handler,' Mike Williams. [photo courtesy of Bryan P Johns] Onstage and between the screens. [photo courtesy of Bryan P Johns] View from the hotel. Inner harbor in the heat.

Click on pics to enlarge and read, or find it in print now here :

SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Cultivating the habit of fandom Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri The scene beneath my floor-to-ceiling hotel windows was epic: A parade of multicolored costumed revelers coursed across an elevated walkway in the midmorning sun, some arm-in-arm, others wielding makeshift swords and other fake weaponry, most with an obvious skip in their step. The temperature was above 38 C, the humidity numbing, and I watched with awe and a little trepidation. They were American otaku, cosplayers, anime fans and gamers, and they were headed to the Promised Land--in this case, the cavernous Baltimore Convention Center, host of the East Coast's largest anime convention, Otakon --and they were about 31,000 strong. Soon I would be joining them. As a guest speaker, I have now attended several anime conventions on the East and West coasts of the United States, but each time I am taken aback by the number and variety of the attendees. They are primarily young, to be sure...

If you're in Tokyo, check out Junot Diaz's ( Oscar Wao, Drown ) reading tonight. Info: Event: Junot Diaz talk with Koji Toko and Ono Masatsugu Date/Time: Aug. 4 (Thurs.), 2011 19:00~ Place: Second Floor Conference Hall, The Nippon Foundation (Minato-ku Akasaka 1-2-2, Tokyo) Speakers: Junot Diaz, Masatsugu Ono (author), Koji Toko (translator) Free-of-charge. Capacity = 100 people. *Please sign up in advance! To sign up, please contact: Shinchosha Publishing Division email: diaz@shinchosha.co.jp TEL：03-3266-5411（13:00～17:00） FAX：03-3266-5852 And here's Junot rhapsodizing about Tokyo .

My thanks to Dana Goodyear and Lindsay Van Thoen of Figment for inviting me to prattle on about Issue 1 of Monkey Business: New Voices from Japan , which is still available at some bookstores and via the A Public Space website . We will be hosting Canadian launch events for Issue 1 in Toronto next month (details TBA), and Issue 2 is well under way, with a targeted pub date in Feb/March 2012, and a second round of NYC launch events to follow in Spring 2012. Monkey Business with Roland Kelts Roughly two years ago, my dear friends Motoyuki Shibata—a Japanese writer, scholar and translator of American literature—and Japanese literature translator and scholar Ted Goossen, the editor of the Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, approached me with a singular mandate: please help us publish an annual English-language journal of contemporary Japanese stories, poems, and art for a western audience. In 2008, Shibata founded a new literary magazine in Tokyo called Monkey Business , modeled in pa...

With anime auteur Makoto Shinkai ( 5CM per Second; Voices from a Distant Star; Children who Chase Lost Voices ... ) @ Otakon 2011 , Baltimore, MD. *Update: A video introduction to and interview with Shinkai-san by NHK World (w/English titles) is here .

The oddities of Otakon Baltimore's ever-growing celebration of Japanese pop has everything from kiddie cartoons to apocalyptic fantasies By Michael Sragow , The Baltimore Sun 3:25 PM EDT, July 29, 2011 A man in black wields an enormous hollow cross packed with phony handguns while checking out Barnes & Noble's graphic-novel racks. A futuristic Marie Antoinette, in a regal gown with bared cleavage and midriff, balances a huge rectangular headpiece with impeccable hauteur while navigating the steaming crowds on Pratt Street. An urban-cowboy assassin in fringed Daisy Dukes, with hippie-like straight hair hitting the small of her back and bandoleros crisscrossing her chest, eyes a burger at Five Guys. These are the kinds of sights that have filled Baltimore's downtown and Inner Harbor since Thursday night, when Otakon 2011 opened with a block party. Every summer, Otakon, a celebration of Asian popular culture, turns Baltimore into the double-take capital of the world. At le...