japanamerica

I'm honored and chuffed to be returning to the nearly 80 year-old Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, this time in their swanky new Marunouchi digs , to talk about the rising convergence of Anime & Hollywood and my new book, "The Art Blade Runner: Black Lotus," out now from Titan Books and Penguin Random House.  I'll be joined by veteran film and animation producer Joseph Chou ( The Animatrix, Halo Legends, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Appleseed, Ultraman , and the forthcoming Lord of the Rings anime) for a multimedia presentation rife with making-of clips, sketches and insider reveals. Print copies will be on sale for signings, and I've just learned that we will also have copies of Monkey: New Writing from Japan , the annual English-language Japanese literary journal to which I am a humble contributing editor, bowing to my dear friend, author, scholar, translator, renaissance genius, Motoyuki Shibata, who will be on ha...

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...

There is a model 17th century Japanese house squatting in the middle of a park in Philadelphia . It has been there for 63 years, but not many knew why until the city's Japan America Society staged an exhibition called "Shofuso and Modernism: Mid-Century Collaboration Between Japan and Philadelphia." Meant to highlight the JapanPhilly2020 campaign -- an Olympics-related celebration of nearly 150 years of transcultural exchange between Japan and the city -- the exhibition ran from September through November 2020, and will reopen later this year. The story of the Shofuso (Pine Breeze Villa) house and grounds brings together four artists from Europe, the U.S. and Japan: Antonin Raymond, an architect from Prague; his French wife Noemi, an interior decorator; famed prizewinning Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura, designer of International House of Japan in Tokyo and the Japan Society building in New York; and George Nakashima, a Japanese-American wood craftsman and furniture de...

We're honored to be returning to Kansas City,  March 15 - 17 .

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.

Breaking the comic book glass ceiling Four years ago, Chinese-American writer Marjorie Liu had a simple but persistent idea: create an epic fantasy comic book series about a classic Japanese kaijū (strange beast) movie monster that has a connection to a girl. She knew it should take place entirely in Asia, and that Asian women should be the main characters. She also knew that she wanted to work with an Asian artist. The West, and men, would remain peripheral. The artist she wanted to realize her vision was Japanese illustrator Sana Takeda. The two had worked together on the Marvel comic series “X-23” in 2010, and Liu says their chemistry was uncanny. Marjorie Liu “She was one of the finest artists I ever worked with,” she tells me at a cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives and teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Sana is capable of illustrating silence, quiet moments. That’s rare in comics. And I write superheroes as real people wi...

‘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...