japanamerica

My short subjective and selective history of the West's infatuation with "Japan." For Penguin UK's The Happy Reader .

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one." Don DeLillo, White Noise .

AnimeJapan 2015 sees the big picture by Roland Kelts For most in Japan, April marks the beginning of the new working year. But for the anime and manga biz, it all starts in March. Last weekend, the second annual AnimeJapan trade fair overtook Tokyo Big Sight, with more than 120,000 total attendees (a spike of 10,000 over last year’s tally), 2,500 of whom were business representatives from Japan and overseas. This weekend, March 28 and 29, will see the first-ever “Otaku Summit,” a special edition of the biannual Comics Market (Comiket), featuring manga-fan artists from 18 countries and held at Chiba’s Makuhari Messe. AnimeJapan is the union of two events, the former Tokyo Anime Festival (TAF) and The Anime Contents Expo (ACE), whose initial split was caused by a rift over ex-Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara’s controversial censorship drive in 2010. The first TAF I attended in 2005 targeted industry insiders — domestic studios, networks and media. But AnimeJapan has evolved

Turning Japanese Coping with stasis: how the supposed 'sick man of Asia' might be a model for us all By Roland Kelts I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable. I steel myself before landing, my mind tallying variables and unknowns: will my luggage land with me and emerge on the dingy carousel? Will the taxi service I booked online arrive on time, at the right terminal, or at all? Will traffic be an impediment to my destination? And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of Los Angeles highway off-ramps from LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit. Landing in Tokyo,

Japan's Ministry of Cool Ahead of hosting the 2020 Summer Olympics, the country is ramping up government-sponsored efforts to promote its culture abroad. PATRICK ST. MICHEL Japan wants the world to know just how cool it is. Over the past six months, the country’s government has announced plans to pump millions of dollars into companies eager to expand internationally, such as the online lifestyle retailer Tokyo Otaku Mode and the ramen chain Ippudo. And that’s just the start. There are plans for a Japan-centric TV station and many more projects aimed at promoting the nation’s culture to the rest of the world while generating money and interest in the 2020 Olympic Games, hosted by Tokyo. The effort isn't new: For over a decade, the country has embraced “Cool Japan,” a government-supported movement focused on selling what many have described as its “gross national cool.” This has involved touting cornerstones of pop culture such as cartoons, comics, music, and food oversea

from BoingBoing by Colin Marshall When he tried to quit smoking, the writer David Sedaris distracted himself from his lingering cravings by changing his surroundings: specifically, he moved to Japan for a few months. Not only did it help him kick the habit, it gave him a great deal of material for his hilarious and observant stories. In his book When You Are Englufed in Flames, Sedaris tells of his and a French Japanese-language classmate's astonishment at Tokyo's abundance of vending machines: “Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.” “I know it,” I said. Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was. “In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him. The Indonesian raised his eyebrows. “He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”

On Fukushima's anniversary: A Japan of 'great gifts' With the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and on the fourth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a Japanese-American writer talks about Japan, the West, responsibility, history, and fun.  By ROLAND KELTS Employees of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, take part in a moment of silence at 2:46 p.m. local time at TEPCO's headquarters in Tokyo March 11, 2015, to mark the fourth anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands. (Yuya Shino/Reuters) Marie Mutsuki Mockett is a Japanese-American writer who was born and raised in California but spent considerable time with her mother in Japan. She feels that her upbringing gives her a “dual vision” into West and East. When Ms. Mockett first heard of the March 11, 2011 tsunami that flooded the Fukushima nuclear reactor four years ago today, she panicke

‘The Anime Encyclopedia’ goes full digital By Roland Kelts “The Anime Encyclopedia, 3rd Revised Edition: A Century of Japanese Animation” was released on March 3. Editions 1 and 2, published in 2001 and 2006 respectively, have long proved invaluable to English-speaking scholars, fans and writers, serving as reliably exhaustive and often highly entertaining guides to a world that can seem as massive as it does impenetrable. As author Neil Gaiman gushed, the book is “an astonishing work." In the era before the Internet was awash in anime trivia, it was also an imperative one. But the Encyclopedia’s publishers, California-based Stone Bridge Press, were not only aware of the flood of anime sites online since the last edition, they dove straight into it. The e-book version of the third edition is peppered with hyperlinks to Internet sites relating to the films, series, directors, authors, studios, genres and terminology highlighted in the text, enabling readers to leap sea