japanamerica

So long, 2022. You've been quite the year for anime... Anime continued its dominance in 2022 I used to get asked if anime would ever go mainstream. In 2022, the reverse happened: The mainstream came to anime. At the end of 2020, I wrote about the anime industry’s surprising resilience in the throes of the pandemic. Two years later, anime is being called the world’s most COVID-resistant entertainment medium: bankable content in disruptive and chaotic times. While Hollywood struggles to lure audiences back to theaters for anything that’s not a superhero epic or “Top Gun” sequel, anime is thriving everywhere you can find it: on cinema and TV screens, video and Blu-ray discs and streaming platforms. The industry saw record-breaking revenues in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available, growing 13.3% after contracting a meager 3.5% in peak-pandemic 2020, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. Today the market overseas is almost as large as the one in J...

Okay, here goes the new book , out now worldwide from Penguin Random House and Titan Books. I'm no good at this launch stuff but I can assure you the book is beautiful. Just got big boxes of it here in Tokyo: So what's it about? I wrote a preview of it in one of my monthly columns for The Japan Times . "British director Ridley Scott’s 1982 original 'Blade Runner,' a Hollywood live-action movie set in a futuristic Los Angeles, features several neo-noirish nods to a dystopian urban Japan. Signs in Japanese flash above neon-lit alleyways lined with cramped standing food stalls. Snatches of Japanese dialogue are heard on the streets and from the radio in Los Angeles police officer Gaff’s hovercraft (the brilliantly designed “spinner”), and in the voiceover accompanying an indelible image of a geisha, popping a pill on a gigantic skyscraper video projection. Even today, seeing Japanese culture embedded so deeply in the mise-en-scene of a mainstream Hollywood film is st...

Letters from Tokyo November 2022: Visiting Chestnutville in Nagano The latest in my "Letters from Tokyo" series for the Japan Society of Boston recounts a recent tour of Nagano to meet the 21st Century descendants of Nakahama (John) Manjiro, Commodore Matthew Perry and Captain William Whitfield, key 19th Century figures in the origins of Japan-US relations. To join the families as they reunited over 180 years later in Japan was an astonishment; learning more about their intertwined histories remains fascinating. Scott Whitfield, Aya Nakahama, Matt Perry We met in the storybook village of Obuse, famed for delicious chestnuts, miso, sake and heaps of locally grown fruit and veggies. We also toured the Hokusai Museum, housing rare works by Japan's most famous woodblock print ( ukiyo-e ) artist, Katsushika Hokusai. I wrote about all of that, too. Kamameshi w/chestnut At the start of November we found ourselves on a bus bound for Obuse, a tiny village spanning seven square m...

The Lingering Tragedy of Japan’s Lost Generation Mark Wang I met Hiroshi S. a few years ago at a support group in Tokyo for socially isolated Japanese. A chain-smoking 43-year-old in a puffy down vest, he was one of an estimated one million or more Japanese known as hikikomori, which roughly translates as “extreme recluses.” Typically male, between the ages of 30 and 50, jobless or underemployed, they have largely withdrawn from society after Japan’s extended economic malaise since the 1990s prevented them from getting their working lives in order. Hiroshi, who asked that his full name not be used, crashed out of Japan’s corporate job market roughly 20 years earlier and was living off his aging, unsympathetic parents in their home, where he racked up credit card debt on pop culture merchandise. He even contemplated suicide. “Japan has changed,” he told me, referring to the shrinking opportunities and hope available to his generation. He never once looked me in the eye. That was in 2017...

Letters from Tokyo, September-October 2022: Autumn is for Eating   Autumn in New York was romanticized long ago by the eponymous 1934 jazz standard, and the phrase remains classic. Everyone knows the season is romantic in climate and hue, especially in Central Park and along the Hudson, where you can actually see the leaves change color against the backdrop of the buildings. But autumn in Tokyo can be equally inviting, if not more so. For one thing, its drop in dew points can be a lifesaver for the heatstroke prone. Plus, it lasts longer. I first learned about dew points in high school from my friend Jim. The higher the dew point, the stickier you feel. Your sweat has nowhere to go so it stays on your skin and your pores can't breathe. Jim was the goalie of our soccer team but dreamed of becoming a meteorologist. Today he works for the US National Weather Service in the mountains of upstate New York. And I live in Tokyo, where I keep a close eye on dew points every time autumn roll...

 [Finally resuming my monthly "Culture Clash" column for The Japan Times.] Indie studio Tonko House's coming-of-age story portrays a multiethnic Japan Fairy tales usually move from humdrum reality to fantasy and back again, with the protagonist and the rest of the audience transformed along the way. Think Alice and the rabbit hole, Chihiro and the tunnel in “Spirited Away.” But the CG-animated limited series “Oni: Thunder God’s Tale” opens in a Japanese dream world before crossing the threshold into an urban Japan that is darker and far more dangerous. “Oni” is the latest work from indie animation studio Tonko House, with a script by veteran anime writer Mari Okada (“Macquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms”). The series uses digital techniques to mimic the tactile, slightly jerky movements of stop-motion animation, making its visuals feel intimate despite the story’s dizzying array of characters and Hollywood action-adventure scope: a four-episode, 154-minute epic that b...

[Running a little late with the updates owing to travel and, well, life.] Japan struggles to give up floppy disks and fax machines for the digital age KYODO When Kono Taro was tapped in August to lead the government’s one-year-old Digital Agency, dedicated to digitizing Japan’s bureaucracy, headlines lit up with his opening salvos. No more fax machines! Out with floppy disks! His proclamations, delivered via Twitter, elicited cheers overseas. Inside Japan, they were met with muted bemusement.  Fluent in English and dubbed a “maverick” by the global media, the former foreign affairs and defense minister Kono is Japan’s most visible and Twitter-friendly politician ever, in a country more typically known for faceless bureaucrats. (When Yoshitaka Sakurada, the 72-year-old cybersecurity minister for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games shamelessly said that he had never once used a computer, his confession was greeted by shock and embarrassment. Though he was promptly forced to resign, no one r...

I was thrilled by the feedback on my first post so I hope you enjoy my second entry. Here, I talk about how my Mom and Dad have different reactions to the anime we watch together. I’ve re-watched a decent amount of anime with my parents. Together we’ve watched Attack on Titan (3x), Jujutsu Kaisen (4x), Hunter x Hunter (3x), Death Note (2x) and The Promised Neverland (2x). For my dad, the jokes don’t land. He has strong opinions about jokes because he himself is a comedian. He thinks anime can be overwritten: Too much internal dialogue during fights (“if I do this, then that will happen”); too much internal analysis of the opponent. He gets taken aback when there are inappropriate moments. In HxH, Hisoka is always looking for a fight to entertain himself. His desire for a worthy opponent is so strong that he gets aroused when he comes across someone of similar strength.  Dad’s enjoyed Attack on Titan the most so far, interestingly enough. He’s a huge Star Wars fan, and AoT and Star ...

This August, we've resumed my monthly series, "Letters from Tokyo," with the Japan Society of Boston after a 6-month personal hiatus. Tokyo August 2022 saw record-breaking heat and Covid numbers and almost zero tourists. The city feels muted and a bit fatigued. But it's also calming and a lot less expensive than the US cities I've recently been in, and Tokyo's food, design and infrastructure remain unparalleled. Also, as you can hear for yourself in my closing video shot at the lovely Kumano Shrine in Jiyugaoka, the semi/cicadas are sizzling at full tilt. Roland Kelts' Letters from Tokyo, August 2022: Hot and Tired Town In recent years I’ve spent late-July and August elsewhere, usually at US retreats in New York and New England, abandoning Japan to escape the heat. But this year everything is different. I broke my shoulder in the spring and got sidelined for a while, albeit in a friend’s beautiful house in storybook Carmel, a town in north central Califor...

I spoke to the BBC about the Japanese government's new campaign contest to get young people to drink more alcohol (!)—and the death of pioneering fashion designer Hanae Mori. I did not try to connect the two. Audio's online here .  "Japan's young adults are a sober bunch - something authorities are hoping to change with a new campaign. The younger generation drinks less alcohol than their parents - a move that has hit taxes from beverages like sake (rice wine). So the national tax agency has stepped in with a national competition to come up with ideas to reverse the trend. The 'Sake Viva!' campaign hopes to come up with a plan to make drinking more attractive - and boost the industry. The contest asks 20 to 39-year-olds to share their business ideas to kick-start demand among their peers - whether it's for Japanese sake, shochu, whiskey, beer or wine. The group running the competition for the tax authority says new habits - partly formed during the Covid pa...

Hello everyone, I’m Fintan. I’m a high schooler in NYC and Roland was nice enough to let me make a contribution to the blog! This is a big topic and will take more than one posting, so I look forward to sharing more of my thoughts in future posts. Anime and Manga have become increasingly popular in recent years, predominantly outside of Japan. From the perspective of an American teenager, I want to write about what I think it is that makes the medium so widely consumed.  To me, the vast majority of American media feels generic and lacks depth. The movies we see in theaters follow the same plot, as our standards for cinema hardly change. These movies seem to always lack the confidence to go outside of the invisible box they’re all made in.  It’s been a while since a movie came out that I genuinely considered a 10/10, and the most recent one I can think of is Parasite, which originates from Korea, from filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. It addressed the social pyramid in an entirely new wa...

Er, this one gets personal. Apologies in advance if I said something I shouldn't have said. Guy's very good at what he does: The Guy Perryman Show Roland Kelts and Guy Perryman in Tokyo, 2022

Here's my latest JAPANAMERICA podcast interview with NYC-based comedian and writer, David White, who is blessed with a very soothing voice: No Future NYC Episode 6C  (or click on pic). David got me talking about the economics of anime—how much has changed (budgets), and how much hasn't changed enough (wages). We also talked about the Pokemon scam of the late 90s/early aughts, the strategy behind the success of Kimetsu no Yaiba /Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, released mid-pandemic and now Japan's highest grossing film ever, and why The Who's Pete Townshend blurbed JAPANAMERICA . A little bit of MONKEY and my new art book in here, too. This was a lot of fun. (Or, kinda fun, at least.)

 

 JAPANAMERICA & TEZUKA, 2022

[I broke my shoulder a couple of months ago and that slowed output considerably. Am on the mend now.] Japan once led global tech innovation. How did it fall so behind? When I first moved to Japan in the late 1990s, Japan’s technological achievements were envied. In 2001, at a book launch in New York, I recorded a video of fellow revelers on my Japanese cell phone. The model had just been released: a squared-off clamshell of sparkly maroon plastic, with an impressive color screen and emoji-like graphics. I emailed the video instantly to publishing friends in Tokyo, which was then home to the world’s second-fastest internet speeds. They responded just a few minutes later, flashing victory signs. My friends in New York cooed as if we’d just watched a new moon landing. But almost exactly twenty years later, vast regions of Japan’s digital universe are stuck in the early aughts. Online banking, airline booking, major newspapers, you name it: Services that have been streamlined by the digita...

Letters from Tokyo, February 2022: Throw Those Beans! T.S. Eliot famously called April the cruelest month, but for me and many I know, the cruelest month is the shortest, February, especially if you live in chillier parts of the northern hemisphere. In Tokyo, New Year’s greetings and shinnenkai drinking parties start to go stale while the dark, cold, snow-dusty winter keeps hanging around like a guest who won't leave. Fortunately, February in Tokyo has some strategically placed distractions to help us forget that it’s February. On the third, we had our Setsubun rituals, heralding the arrival of spring and giving winter the memo to move on. We tossed roasted soybeans out our front door to cast away demons and welcome good fortune, shouting Oni wa soto ! and Fuku wa uchi ! Then we tossed some beans around the house, where they crackled softly underfoot until they were vacuumed.  You're supposed to eat one soybean for each year of your life, but that's become several beans to...