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...