japanamerica

We're honored to be with Haruki Murakami, Hayao Miyazaki, Frederik L. Schodt & Susan J. Napier.  Happy holidays.

tix

Netflix anime welcomes the dark side Go Nagai is the original bad boy of manga. His series “Shameless School” (“Harenchi Gakuen”) cemented his status as the inventor of the hentai (erotic) genre. “Shameless School” debuted in the first issue of Shueisha Inc.’s Weekly Shonen Jump , Japan’s best-selling manga magazine, in August 1968. The adult shenanigans and sexualized students Nagai depicted rendered him the target of national media, Parent Teacher Associations and women’s groups — and an infamous artistic pioneer. Over the past year, both Nagai and Shonen Jump have been celebrated for their 50th anniversary milestones. But one of Nagai’s later manga has gained immediate relevance. The animated adaptation of his 1972 “Devilman” series, “Devilman Crybaby,” directed by Masaaki Yuasa and released on Netflix back in January, has become one of 2018’s most talked-about anime and biggest international hits, despite its source being 46 years old. Now 73, Nagai looks like a profess...

رولاند كيلتس يتحدث إلينا خلال مشاركته في معرض الشارقة الدولي للكتاب Roland Kelts, well-known speaker and author chats with us. Here's what he said about #SIBF18 and about his participation. #الشارقة #الإمارات #معرض_الشارقة_الدولي_للكتاب #Shj #UAE #SBA pic.twitter.com/xpmg3QSUik — Sharjah Book Authority (@SharjahBookAuth) November 9, 2018

Honored to be in Dubai this week for appearances at The Sharjah International Book Fair.

Defining the Heisei Era: When anime and manga went global The Heisei Era commenced after two gods fell in rapid succession. The first, Emperor Hirohito, was no longer officially a god, having repudiated his quasi-divine status under the terms of Japan’s surrender in World War II, but he remained god-like in stature. His January death in 1989 at age 87 signaled the end of a Showa past both turbulent and glorious. It drew global attention from the world’s leaders and media, but had been widely anticipated in Japan. The other fell just one month later, in February, and his death shocked the nation. Osamu Tezuka, the beloved “god of manga,” died of stomach cancer at the age of 60. News of his declining health had been kept secret, as was then customary in Japan. Tezuka was a prolific workaholic and omnipresent television personality. He was also a licensed physician. Almost no one expected his sudden passing. The two deaths would augur a new life for Japan’s twin pop cultu...

It was a privilege earlier this month to join my fellow Nieman fellows, dear friends and colleagues in Cambridge, Mass. for the 80th Anniversary of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard . Kampai! Gala Dinner at Boston Public Library Brunch at Lippmann House

Honored to be ensconced in the Tower at the Catwalk Institute .

( PROJECT ANIME 2018 , Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, CA. photo: Kumo Takeda) ( ANIMEFEST 2018 , Sheraton Dallas, Dallas, TX.)

Motherhood in modern anime © PROJECT MAQUIA Screenwriter, author and newly minted anime director Mari Okada shrugs and smiles as she and her entourage burst through a door behind me 15 minutes late for our meeting. We’re in a conference room on the ground floor of The Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites in downtown Los Angeles, a building famous for its cameos in hit films and TV series (“True Lies,” “CSI”) and for its bewildering interior layout. “We didn’t know there was another entrance to this room,” explains one of her handlers. Okada, sporting a floral print dress, puts a hand to her lips and emits a giggle. It’s not what I’d expected. In her autobiography, “From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: My Path to ‘Anohana’ and ‘The Anthem of the Heart,'” recently published in English by J-Novel Club, the 42-year-old Okada tells her coming-of-age story as a rural hikikomori (shut-in) in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture. She was awkward and unhygienic, endured sporadic bullying...

MAQUIA US trailer

(Go Nagai, creator of Mazinger Z, Devilman, Cutie Honey)

Can Japanese ‘light novels’ remain publishing heavyweights? Sam Pinansky (photo: Roland Kelts) The palm-sized, lavishly illustrated paperbacks known in Japan as “light novels” can have some heavy titles. “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime” is one. Another, “Is it Wrong to Try to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon?” is a bestseller, but so is “I Want to Eat Your Pancreas.” And that’s a love story. Of course. They can also have some heavy political repercussions. Earlier this month, a light novel called “(New Life +) Young Again in Another World” had its big-budget anime adaptation and future publications in all languages abruptly canceled after its author, pen name Mine, was found to have posted racist tweets denigrating Chinese and Koreans . The offensive posts, first issued four years ago, were deleted, and Mine publicly apologized. But the tweets and the novel’s storyline, in which a Japanese swordsman who murdered 3,000 in China is reborn in a land of monsters, were not taken...

With the global popularity of manga, there are also people in all corners of the globe who want to learn how to draw in the manga style. I have a background in manga – after starting out as a fan, I made it part of my career – covering it as a journalist, adapting it into English and working in the editing process. Two years after the release of my first book on manga, Manga Art for Beginners , I’m back with its sequel, Manga Art for Intermediates . 

 For this book I worked with Rena Saiya, a professional Japanese mangaka who is making her American debut. This book mirrors the design of the first book, which aimed to show more steps for character-drawing than your average how-to-draw book, and to also make sure that the art is in the manga style. (I find most how-to-draw manga books in America look like a combination of manga and American comics.) But the book also discusses how professional Japanese mangaka work, including what pens they use, what happens if they make a mist...

The Times Literary Supplement: Japanese questions of the soul At public readings, either in Japanese or English, the novelist Hideo Furukawa performs like a banshee. He voices his characters’ personae, tenor shifting from stentorian to hushed, growling, trilling, book held aloft in his quivering left hand. His compact frame rocks to and fro, slowly enlarging before your eyes as he rises on his toes and raises his arm into a broad arc, snug hipster beanie barely holding his cranium in place. I have watched Furukawa read several times, in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and each time I have been unable to look away. At first I worried that his histrionics might be overkill. But then I re-read his prose. He writes like a banshee, too, forcing words into action, squeezing them for meaning, studding his lines with coinages such as “scootscootscoot” and “creekeek” when the words just can’t take it anymore. At fifty-one, Furukawa is among the generation of Japanese writers ...

Specs: AnimeFest 2018

via GLLI Editor’s note: Forget the old saw that English language readers won’t read literature in translation. For the last seven years, Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan has been publishing an annual journal of what it calls “the best of contemporary Japanese literature” in English. The paperback editions of the first three issues were completely sold out. This year, though, for reasons the editors call “both professional and personal,” it will not be releasing a new edition. Monkey Business will return with issue no. 8 in 2019 but the digital and most paperback editions of issues 1-7 are available for purchase at its online store . I asked Roland Kelts, who has been involved with the journal since its founding, to tell us about Monkey Business and his connection to Japanese literature in translation.   Eight years ago I had the good fortune of being asked to do a favor. Professors Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, esteemed literary translators, invited me to di...

Will digital piracy ruin the future of manga? Chigusa Ogino (photo: Toru Takeda) Author and manga translator Frederik L. Schodt once pointed out to me that many of Japan’s cultural products are embraced abroad just as they are declining at home. Ukiyo-e prints became the rage in Europe in the late 19th century, nearly 100 years after they’d peaked in Edo and Kyoto. Sake sales have been climbing steadily in overseas markets, with the value of exports doubling over the past five years and hitting a record in 2017, as they continue a decades-long slide in Japan. And now: manga? According to a survey by the Research Institute for Publications, domestic manga sales were flat last year, but the big reveal in the numbers was that digital outsold physical for the first time, rising 17.2 percent while print slipped 14.4 percent. Weekly manga magazines saw the steepest drop in sales, to below a third of what they were in 1995. A lot of digital manga content is cheap or costs nothing at ...

Writer, scholar, editor and cultural critic Roland Kelts  is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling book, JAPANAMERICA: HOW JAPANESE POP CULTURE HAS INVADED THE U.S. His writing is published in the US, Europe and Japan in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Japan Times and many others. He contributes commentary on Japan to CNN, the BBC, NPR and Japan’s NHK, and gives talks at venues worldwide, including The World Economic Forum, TED Talks, Harvard University, the University of California, the University of Tokyo, the Singapore Writers Festival and several anime conventions across the United States. He has interviewed several notable Japanese artists, including Hayao Miyazaki and Haruki Murakami, and is considered an authority on Japanese culture and media. Kelts has won a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Award in Writing at Columbia University and a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at...

Honored to be visiting Akita, my grandmother Ebata's furusato (hometown), to speak at Akita International University .

Japan’s pop culture and literature drive soft power Anime, manga and Haruki Murakami may form an unlikely trinity, but outside of Japan they’re responsible for filling Japanese Studies departments and sprawling convention halls with generations of the devoted. They’re at the core of Japan’s global allure, the center of its soft power, and last month I was immersed in all three in the span of two weeks in two countries: the United Kingdom and the United States. In Japan they’ve been around for decades, yet they continue to draw younger audiences abroad. It was 40 years ago that Murakami decided he could write a novel after watching an American baseball player hit a double for the Yakult Swallows, his favorite Japanese team. That novel, 1979’s “Hear the Wind Sing,” won Japan’s Gunzo Prize for New Writers and launched the literary career of a rarity: a bona-fide international best-selling writer who is now short-listed annually for the Nobel Prize in literature. Twenty years...

BOWDOIN , April 13: INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, TOKYO , April 24:

Off Assignment When Roland Kelts was commissioned by a travel magazine to write about Vietnam, he was drawn to the vestiges of its war with the United States. But he was seduced by a man on a motorbike. James Salter wrote that there were people we were born to talk to, and like so many of them in my memory, Hie was just there, short, squat and round-faced, a smooth-skinned twenty-something slowing down next to me as I walked. I answered his questions tersely, hoping he'd leave, but he stayed with me, turning the engine off and pushing his bike alongside: You live in Japan, ah. Oh, you're from New York. I want to go there. How can I go there? At the hotel I asked about Hie. Mr. Lai squinted through the lobby window. "He's okay," he said. For the next 13 days, Hie took me everywhere he thought I should go. He showed me how to slouch into the sunken nook of his vinyl bike seat and drape my arms across his belly and squeeze hard enough not to fall off, bu...

After Disaster: Embracing a Living Past through “Ghosts of the Tsunami”  (Words Without Borders) I flew out of Tokyo two days before March 11. There was a mild tremor as I packed, causing the overhead lamp in my kitchen to sway. I crouched over my suitcase, arms extended in my usual high-alert stance, but the earth soon resettled and I went back to folding my socks. Mild side-to-side rocking and the occasional vertical jolt are standard stuff in Japan, the most earthquake prone country in the world. During the days of the disaster and its immediate aftermath, I was in Oregon and California, giving university lectures and an NPR interview about, of all things, Japan’s obsession with apocalypse in its art and popular culture. I would not have remembered that tremor on the ninth had it not been for what happened on the eleventh. Read More >>

Netflix is animated about anime Roland Kelts Taito Okiura Netflix’s director of anime, Taito Okiura, tells me he feels like a local baseball player who got drafted into the U.S. Major Leagues. Except, he doesn’t play the sport. A producer and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in the industry, Okiura was offered the job twice by Netflix before joining last October. He was unavailable three years ago when first tapped by the company to help open its Japan branch. In 2016, he took a conference call with the talent acquisitions department from corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. “I told them I wasn’t sure how serious Netflix really is about anime. Then I hung up the phone,” he says. (© BONES / PROJECT A.I.C.O.; © KAZUTO NAKAZAWA / PRODUCTION I.G) But Netflix knew how passionate Okiura was about anime. In 2007, he was a key producer on the then-groundbreaking transcultural project, “Afro Samurai,” written and illustrated by Takashi Okazaki, a...

Honored to be joining friends and colleagues in Newcastle, UK for "Eyes on Murakami," a symposium on the 40th anniversary of Haruki Murakami's life in fiction.

Honored to be returning to Tokyo for my second talk at International House of Japan, April 24. Register here  for tix.

My generous thanks to Hajime Kosai, my fellow Japan alum from Columbia University, and a brilliant audience at Aux Bacchanales in Tokyo. Hope to see you in the UK & US next month. (photos: Hajime Kosasi)

Back on the road.

I'm honored to be joining fellow Columbia grads in Tokyo for a talk & Happy Hour on Thursday, February 8th, 7 - 9 p.m., at Aux Bacchanales, Kioicho,  Shin Kioicho Bldg. 1F, 4-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo  (at Hotel New Otani ). Info & rsvp here .

Foreign anime artists still face a long haul (The Japan Times) Roland Kelts Arthell Isom and Henry Thurlow of D'Art Shtajio (Ben Gonzales) In an interview with Buzzfeed two years ago, American animator Henry Thurlow, who had moved to Tokyo from New York six years earlier, summed up his dilemma. “When I was working as an animator in New York, I could afford an apartment, buy stuff and had time to ‘live a life,'” he said. “Now (in Japan) everything about my life is utterly horrible, (but) the artist in me is completely satisfied.” Indigo Ignited (D'Art Shtajio) He’s still here. I tracked Thurlow down in a quiet corner of Nishi-Shinjuku, where he is now in what he calls “the inevitable next iteration” of his journey through the anime industry: his own studio. Read More >>

'Ghosts of the Tsunami' humanizes the survivors of Japan's 2011 catastrophe (The Christian Science Monitor, January, 2018) Roland Kelts Author Richard Lloyd Parry I started reading Ghosts of the Tsunami half-expecting to be bored. Not because of its author, Richard Lloyd Parry, the Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, who over the course of three books has proven himself an excellent reporter and writer. But as a fellow expat and journalist in Japan, I have already seen so many stories and documentaries about its subject – Japan’s 2011 tsunami. I have visited the devastated region, interviewing survivors and public officials for media in the US and Japan. Aside from some updated statistics and reportage, I couldn’t imagine the book would tell me anything I didn’t already know. Japanese translation from Hayakawa I was wrong from page one. “Ghosts” is less an analytical or journalistic account than it is a character-driven, novelist...