japanamerica

<<1:54 AI can help maintain the anime boom, says Roland Kelts, Professor and 1:58 Japanese culture expert. 1:59 He has written a book about anime. 2:02 "They call it 'in-betweener work,' when you draw frames in 2:07 between the keyframes. 2:09 And that kind of work can be done by AI very effectively and save the 2:13 studios money and time. 2:16 A lot of people think of anime as these big hits, etc. 2:20 But there are thousands of anime produced every year. 2:23 And many of them are just for late-night TV. 2:25 They are pretty cheap, so those can probably easily be produced by AI." 2:33 Technology isn’t seen as a threat in Japan, says Kelts. 2:37 This openness is rooted in the country’s indigenous 2:40 religion, Shinto. 2:41 Shinto is centered on worshipping kami, or spiritual entities. 2:45 They inhabit all kinds of objects, manmade or not, and everything is 2:49 accepted to be part of nature. 2:52 "Japanese creativity is quite fluid. 2:54 The very first a...

I kept a stack of well-thumbed issues of The Nation Magazine in my New York apartment so it was an honor to host their first-ever Japan Tour these pasts two weeks along with Pico Iyer and other accomplished Japan-based authors, journalists and scholars.   We addressed a wide range of topics, from the aging society and shrinking population to the state of Japan's economy, politics (in the middle of LDP elections, no less), environmental policy, LGBTQ legislation, burakumin culture, spirituality and folklore (yokai and yurei included) and, of course, manga and anime. The tour hit Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Koyasan, Nara and Hiroshima. It was a proverbial tour de force for a great American magazine.    

I’ve been doing a series of JAPANAMERICA-themed talks in Tokyo via the generous and uber-competent WorldStrides agency for US universities including The University of Wisconsin , Vanderbilt University and DePaul University . The discussions have been wide-ranging and fascinating (I'm learning a lot myself!) and I am grateful for the enthusiastic student-professor audiences and the sterling support from the team at WorldStrides. Highly recommended.      

Movie animates Murakami's portraits of empty lives     American writer Nathaniel Rich once claimed that Haruki Murakami, lauded internationally and regularly short-listed for the Nobel Prize in literature, actually writes "genre fiction," the commercial label for stories that repeat formulas, conventions, plots and sometimes whole casts of characters to satisfy reader expectations (think "Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter"). Genre works are distinguished from the less predictable and less marketable aims of literary fiction -- and have a much better shot at the bestseller list. The kicker, according to Rich, is that Murakami created his own genre, absorbing literary conceits into a blend of other recognizable storytelling tropes from the realms of noir, fantasy, horror and sci-fi. The most salient hallmark of the Murakami genre is its fluid shifts between a ruthlessly humdrum reality and poetic, often borderline erotic and prophetic dreamworlds. These ...

I first interviewed Hayao Miyazaki for Japanamerica in the early aughts. I was very fortunate. It was the usual story--a friend of a friend of a friend, and so on. He was a bit tight-lipped at first but relaxed and opened up when he realized that I was no otaku .  Later I was invited to interview him live onstage at UC Berkeley in California ( video here ), and we've had a few informal chats since.  When he was awarded a second Oscar this year (third if you count his 2014 honorary statuette), I gave interviews to the BBC, CNN and The Guardian , in addition to a couple of online Japanese media.    The business has undergone a revolution since our first meeting for Japanamerica . File-sharing and streaming media have made Japanese pop culture in general and anime in particular a content goldmine. The reputation of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli has grown in prominence over the past 20 years, partly owing to its rich and unparalleled catalog of quality content, but also...

I used to run like hell from Godzilla movies, not out of fear but embarrassment. As a Japanese-American teenager in diversity-poor rural New England, I winced at the sight of a dude in a rubber suit stomping on cardboard cities. It looked silly and cheap, two Asian stereotypes I was trying hard to live down, so I ran even faster from the Americans I knew who actually liked Godzilla to avoid being cast as yet another Asian American nerd.   Evidently, Godzilla outran me. Japan’s nuclear lizard is now the face of the world’s longest-running film franchise, according to Guinness World Records, turning 70 this year on the heels of its most successful iteration yet. Released into U.S. theaters with scant publicity, “Godzilla Minus One” is North America’s highest-grossing Japanese-language movie ever and has surpassed the $100 million mark globall y on a production budget of under $15 million. A box office blockbuster with a price tag minus one of Hollywood’s lavish digits. It’s also ...

Sleeper hit anime 'Blue Giant' gets an encore In 2023, releasing a big-budget anime feature about three Gen Z boys in a post-bop jazz band sounds like commercial suicide. Jazz is boomer music; anime is for kids weaned on Pokemon. But the sleeper hit of the year was by far director Yuzuru Tachikawa’s “Blue Giant,” an adaptation of Shinichi Ishizuka’s jazz-centric manga series. The film was so popular with audiences in Japan and overseas after its first run this spring that it warranted an even bigger budget for a re-edited second release, which premiered last month at this year's Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) before opening in cinemas across Japan. Jazz has been featured in popular anime soundtracks since the 1970s, when Yuji Ohno’s funky fusion scores for the “Lupin III” series were broadcast on network TV and incorporated into Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature film, “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.” Jazz and sci-fi anime cemented their synergy with Yoko Kanno’...

One of my favorite recent English-language books on Japan is AMETORA ("American Traditional"), the enthralling, novelistic story of postwar Japan told through its brilliant refashioners of Western fashions (Take Ivy! Selvedge Denim! BAPE!). I will host a talk w/author W. David Marx at The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan on Wednesday, Dec 13th , 6pm JST, both live and via Zoom. If you're in Tokyo (or not), please join us by registering here :  https://www.fccj.or.jp/event/book-break-w-david-marx-author-ametora-how-japan-saved-american-style-presentation  "Tokyo-based author W. David Marx will speak about his 2015 cultural history of American fashion in Japan — AMETORA: How Japan Saved American Style — which has recently been re-released by Basic Books with a new afterword after surprising global success. Marx will give a presentation in conversation with JAPANAMERICA author and moderator Roland Kelts on this fascinating micro-history of how Amer...

    photo Aki Mizutani (editor, JP)   I was interviewed for the Japan episode of the new Netflix doc series "Encounters," about cultural perceptions of UFOs and alien beings, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. The episode features a highly sensitive take on Japan's spiritual imagination. It's called "Lights Over Fukushima" and is now watchable here . I was a tad leery of this gig at first. But the director and crew were great and genuinely keen to tell a true story. And the opportunity to talk about Astro Boy, Ultraman and Totoro in one fell swoop was too good to pass up.      photo Joe DeMarie (LA)     photo Chris Yap Wooi-Hoe (SG)     This Japan story is beautifully shot and brilliantly pieced together by director Yon Motskin and consulting producer/novelist Marie Mutsuki Mockett, without whom I wouldn't be involved. I am typecast in my usual role--resident alien--which I hope to one day play to perfection. ...

Letters from Tokyo by Roland Kelts, February - May : What a Long Strange Spring It’s Been  We swallowed an entire season in the latest of my "Letters from Tokyo" series for The Japan Society of Boston, partly because I was away from Tokyo for huge chunks of it. This spring Japan opened its borders and the tourists rushed into Tokyo and Kyoto, PM Kishida survived an attempted assault via pipe (smoke?) bomb--and while Covid eased its grip, roller-coaster climate changes have swung many of us (i.e, me) in and out of summer colds. Let's look back before we fast-forward too far.  The February night I returned to Tokyo from New York felt like spring had landed ahead of me. I shed my jacket in the unusually long taxi line outside Haneda, watched two teenage boys order an Uber and promptly copied them, stepped over the ropes, skipped the line, and settled after five minutes into the backseat of my driver’s minivan, rolling down the windows on both sides.  The weather during my ...

A couple of weeks after I wrote this story for Rest of World , the Tokyo Stock Exchange hit a 33-year high. Credit my editor. Japan’s sleepy tech scene is ready for a comeback After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum. Sho Hayashi might be a walking cliche in San Francisco or Austin. The 33-year-old founder, with two successful startups and a string of degrees to his name, met me in a light-filled coworking space before flying overseas for a weekend of meetings.  But here in Japan, Hayashi is a new breed of revolutionary. A graduate of the elite University of Tokyo, his standard path would have been to settle into a lifetime job — perhaps as an international diplomat, or at a time-tested corporate empire like Mitsubishi. When he attended a massive startup conference in Singapore in 2010 and realized Japan didn’t have a single representative, he asked to become one and found a new calling: entrepreneurship. “I realize...

Anime may be booming, but Japanese manga (comic book) sales are astronomical. I was interviewed about the explosive overseas sales of manga during the pandemic and the recent proposal by Keidanren, Japan's biggest business federation, to quadruple overseas manga sales over the next 10 years. You can read Julian Ryall's full story  here . Excerpt: "'I was stunned when I saw the figures for 2020 and 2021, which showed that year-on-year manga sales in the US were up by 171%,'  Kelts told DW. 'That's just an astonishing number, and the figures made it clear that the overall graphic novel market grew much faster than the standard market for books.' There are key differences between the Japanese and US markets, however, with sales of print manga in North America driven in recent years by anime that consumers will have seen on television, including such famous titles as 'One Piece,' 'Attack on Titan,' and 'Spy Family,' Kelts highlighted...

Belated thanks to Yuri Kageyama of the Associated Press for her story about Hollywood anime adaptations that grew out of my  FCCJ  event for the new  Blade Runner: Black Lotus book. This article was published well before the live-action  Saint Seiya movie   (called  Knights of the Zodiac , btw) dropped and disappeared, and word from the One Piece  set ain't so great either. (Original mangaka Eichiro Oda apparently has a lot of notes.) You can read Yuri's full article here . It was a particular honor for me to be featured alongside one of my former students, Nina Oiki, for whom I was happy to sign a book at the press club.  Excerpt: "The cross-pollination of Hollywood and Japan goes back for decades. References to Japan, such as the image of a geisha on a screen, are plentiful in the 1982 sci-fi movie “Blade Runner,” directed by Ridley Scott. The film, in turn, influenced anime, including the “Blade Runner: Black Lotus” anime that first aired in...

I was honored to be invited back to The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan to talk about the explosive ties between Anime and Hollywood and launch my new book, "The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus." We had a great live audience of authors, journalists, club members and readers, and a wonderful clued-in Zoom crowd. For those of you who might be keen but couldn't attend or Zoom in, here's a video of the event, courtesy of the FCCJ:  

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.  With "Chainsaw Man" having recently been adapted into its own anime, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about what makes it stand out from other shonen series. I often see people comparing "Chainsaw Man" to "Jujutsu Kaisen," as both are the most recently produced projects from MAPPA. "Chainsaw Man" has its fair share of classic shonen tropes: the main character being half human, half devil, a timid and “emo” best friend, and a sort of training arc at the beginning of the ...