We Love Japan, for The Happy Reader

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


Location: Tokyo, Japan

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On the newly legal 'hentai' erotic, pornographic manga/anime site, FAKKU, for The Japan Times

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Finding opportunities overseas with the ‘art of hentai’ By ROLAND KELTS When Jacob Grady began pirating anime and manga online eight years ago, he was still in college. He took out student loans to pay the server bills, and figured that if he ever made enough money from the site to purchase a round-trip flight to Japan, the effort and expense would be worth it. Like many Americans, he got hooked on Japanese pop culture as a kid through the Cartoon Network’s action-oriented programming block called “Toonami” (“cartoon tsunami”). He would race home from school to catch the latest episodes of “Dragonball Z” and “Gundam Wing.” But Grady was not pirating anime adventure series or kids’ shows like “Pokemon.” The content on his site was what most non-Japanese call “ hentai ” (abnormal, perverted), and in Japan is still largely known as ero-manga, ero-anime, or just porno. “At some point, going through puberty and exploring the Internet for the first time, I came across hentai,...
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Haruki Murakami tells me about American literature

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>an excerpt from my interview w/Haruki for A Public Space . Haruki Murakami’s translations include: Raymond Carver’s short stories, Truman Capote’s short stories; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart, John Irving’s Setting Free the Bears, Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; and Mark Strand’s Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories. ROLAND KELTS You and I once discussed how difficult it is to be an individual in Japan, how lonely. HARUKI MURAKAMI It’s still very difficult, but things have changed drastically in Japan over the last ten years. You know, when I was young, we were supposed to join a company, join the office or the academy. It was a very tight society. You had to belong to someplace. I didn’t want to do that, so I became independent as soon as I left college. And it was lonely. But not these days. People graduate and immediately become freelan...
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