japanamerica

Online HERE Cosplay for a Cause 2012 Cosplay Calendar is a must have for any fan of cosplay. Rarely has something been done before with such a wide assortment of cosplayers, and who knows when you will see all these beautiful cosplayers together again. This calendar is full of high quality, never before seen photos, specifically done for this project. Each month will also come with a small illustration done by one of the 4 professional comic book artists involved in the project. At full size the calendar will open to 11x22, allowing each beautiful image to be displayed at 11x17. The staples in the middle can be easily removed when the year is done so you can save your favorite photo! So, here is your chance to help raise money and awareness for disaster relief in Japan while supporting your love of Cosplay! Do your part and help get the word out! And get your calendar while supplies last. Thank you to everyone who has donated their time and energy to aiding the country tha...

The Urbanist’s Tokyo A city that has turned itself back on again. Add Comment By Daniel Krieger  Published Nov 20, 2011 Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.  (Photo: Iwan Baan) T his spring, the Tokyo Sky Tree, the world’s tallest broadcast tower (with restaurant, of course; this is Tokyo), is set to open: an apt symbol of the capital getting back on its feet after the gravity-altering March earthquake. But following two decades of economic malaise and a revolving door of prime ministers—six in the past five years—it’ll take a lot more than a 2,000-foot tower to set things right. Still, economic growth is up for the first time since the quake (alas, for visiting Americans, the yen is high too; at press time it was at 77 to the dollar), and there is a sense that things are finally starting to get back to normal—even as, notes one salaryman, TV network “NHK has been broadcasting a radiation map of Tokyo every day.” (There are, according to monitors, no da...

Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters , a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M . and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/201...

SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Overseas anime market online only Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri The paradox at the heart of the North American anime market is common knowledge to industry insiders: Plummeting DVD sales and shrinking TV exposure coincide with record-breaking attendance figures at anime events across the continent and surging activity online. At least the knowledge is common to insiders who are actually in North America. Here in Japan, it's still being treated like news--often unwelcome news. Anime fans outside of Japan turned to the Internet long ago to feed and fuel their habit, and the prospect of them returning to overpriced, hard-to-find and long-delayed DVD releases is not in anyone's rational vision of anime's future. But try telling that to the folks who make the content. "Our biggest challenge has always been educating Japanese companies," concedes Kun Gao, cofounder and chief executive officer of Crunchyro...

Pal Patrick Galbraith, author of The Otaku Encyclopedia , tells me of this upcoming Todai conference on 'idoru' culture and its relationship to celebrity: Idols are first among equals in the Japanese entertainment industry. They organize the market into fan communities that allow for predictable patterns of viewership and consumption. The purpose of focusing on idols specifically, and celebrity more generally, is to understand the Japanese mass media by focusing on its most prominent characteristic. By situating the study of idols within the framework of media and cultural studies, this conference aims to bring the Japanese mass media into productive dialogue with scholarship and theoretical debates beyond Japan. Each presenter will illuminate a different dimension of the phenomenon of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture.

Photo shoot for the Halfu project.  (Lifestyle not recommended.) 

Will TPP copyright kill dounjin and cosplay culture in Japan? Doujin Cosplay

The Asahi Shimbun reports on the latest attempt to forge into foreign markets here -- and translator, author and writer Dan Kanemitsu critiques it here . 'Uphill' is an understatement.

The fine folks at Crunchyroll.com   are offering freshly pubbed copies of Japanamerica , the book, as their "Daily Deal" for November 8, 2011.  Drop by and pick it up for pennies, yen or euro, while supplies and hours last. Violence-free looting op here .

Live @ Akasaka Crawfish.  Photo courtesy of Eriko Takano.

SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / American anime fans show that cosplay is the sincerest form of flattery   Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri An estimated 105,000 fans attended last month's combined New York Anime Festival and Comic Con --and you couldn't walk a meter on the convention floor without seeing or literally bumping into someone in costume. The larger North American anime conventions feature artists and voice actors from Japan and the United States as celebrity guests, screenings, panels and live performances alongside booths offering merchandise and promotional paraphernalia. But cosplay, an import from Japan that involves wearing, and often posing provocatively in, a homemade costume of your favorite character, may be the biggest draw. "It's like total escape," a teenager from Philadelphia said as he adjusted the collar of his costume, based on a character from Hetalia: Axis Powers , a notably popular title this year. ...