japanamerica

COOL JAPAN | MEDIA ( ACCJ Journal ) Cutters Tokyo CEO, Ryan McGuire The New Mad Men The evolution and transformation of advertising in Tokyo By Roland Kelts Among the fastest ways to check the barometer of a nation’s popular culture—to see who’s cool and what’s in style or comical—is to watch domestic TV commercials. Advertising cuts to the heart of a culture’s DNA. TV ads from Japan, for example, have long been coveted abroad for their apparent outrageousness or sheer oddity. Entire YouTube channels and websites (see the seminal japander.com) upload Japanese commercials featuring American A-list celebrities. On Japanese TV, Leonardo DiCaprio promotes the Orico credit card and hawks Jim Beam; Tommy Lee Jones guzzles Boss canned coffee; and Madonna sports geta (wooden sandals) to tout Takara shochu. Then there's Sofia Coppola’s 2004 film set in Japan, Lost in Translation. It makes cross-cultural advertising a comical plot point, with Bill Murray playing a washed-up...

Japan at a Crossroads By ROLAND KELTS After the death last week of Kenji Goto, the second Japanese citizen to be executed by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the conversation in Japan has turned from obsessive analysis of the hostage crisis to a drone of regret and dread. The government had repeatedly claimed that it would “do whatever we can” to free Goto, a forty-seven-year-old journalist who had appeared in three videos posted online by ISIS issuing his captors’ demands and claiming that his time was running out. Japan has no diplomatic presence in Syria and, since the end of the Second World War, no standing military. As many Japanese became painfully aware, there was very little their government could do. The first video showed two hostages, Goto and his forty-two-year-old friend, Haruna Yukawa. Both men were kneeling, in orange jumpsuits, beside the black-clad, knife-wielding man who has been filmed beheading other hostages. The demand at the time was ...

With Audie Cornish for NPR's "All Things Considered."

In less than a year, Tonko House earns an Oscar nomination By Roland Kelts They had plum roles at one of the best companies in the world and their successes were the envy of their peers. But last summer, two peak-career professionals quit their lucrative day jobs to found a start-up. With no income or investment, they built their own studio, mostly by hand, and started working long odd hours, seven days a week, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California. Typical Silicon Valley fairy tale? Hardly. These two make animation. “I just felt like I had a lifelong dream to make art,” Tokyo-born, 40-year-old director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi told me at a café in Berkeley. “And that if I was going to do it, I better do it now.” Tsutsumi and his Tonko House Studio cofounder, Japanese-American 34-year-old Robert Kondo, both left positions at American industry giant Pixar Animation Studios last July — Kondo after 14 years, Tsutsumi after seven. Their resumes include gl...