japanamerica

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 ...

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...

‘Blade Runner: Black Lotus’ reinvents neo-noir nods to Japan When the first anime series in the “Blade Runner” franchise premieres on cable TV’s Cartoon Network and online streamer Crunchyroll Nov. 13, it will close the circle on nearly 40 years of cultural cross-pollination. British director Ridley Scott’s 1982 original, 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 startling. In 1982, it must’ve been revolutionary. It didn’t go unn...

Gkids brings anime's best to big screens in the U.S. The Japan Times At the start of a new decade, anime’s two top directors are being delivered to Americans by one company. And, no, it’s neither Disney nor Netflix. The relatively unheralded Gkids, which was spun off 11 years ago from the New York International Children’s Film Festival by founder and CEO Eric Beckman, has now become the chief North American distributor of films by Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai. On Dec. 16 and 18, as part of its ongoing Studio Ghibli Fest, an annual April-December screening series, Gkids will present Miyazaki’s late artistic partner Isao Takahata’s final film, “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” in theaters across North America. On Jan. 15, the company will release Shinkai’s “Weathering With You,” Japan’s highest grossing film of 2019, on 900 screens nationwide. Gkids also has a stake in anime’s less family-friendly material, like the edgier Studio Trigger’s first feature, “Promare,...

U.S. anime market matures in 2019 The Japan Times The third annual Animation Is Film Festival kicked off on Oct. 18 in Los Angeles with the United States premiere of Makoto Shinkai’s latest Japan box-office hit, “Weathering With You,” followed by an onstage Q&A with Shinkai, who flew in from Tokyo for the event. Demand for tickets was so fierce that organizers added a second overflow screening at the city’s historic TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. According to festival founder Eric Beckman, CEO of U.S. distributor GKIDS, tickets to the second screening sold out in “less than three minutes.” WEATHERING WITH YOU, image courtesy of GKIDS /  ©2019 “Weathering With You” Film Partners Six years after the global anime industry was jolted by the retirement of its most loved and bankable artist, Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki, developments in the North American market are transforming 2019 into a banner year. Through consolidation, the flowerin...

The story behind anime localization Les and Mary Claypool For the past 10 years I’ve been guesting at anime conventions across the United States. Each one is unique. On the coasts they tend to be larger and older than cons in middle America, with massive crowds and decades of history. But they’ve each become more diverse. Most today report a near 50-50 gender mix, with attendees spanning racial and ethnic spectra. What’s frustrating, though, is that I hardly ever get to talk with anyone. (I talk to them, of course. That’s my job. But sustained conversations are rare.) Once the crowds show up, cons are dizzying. Your liaison escorts you to the venue, navigating through clumps of cosplayers. The fans pour in, get their book signed, mutter their thanks and maybe share an anecdote about their favorite show, a trip to Tokyo, or a story you wrote that they read. It’s nice, but brief. Unfortunately, the same goes with other guests, many of whom are professionals I’m eag...

Hayao Miyazaki: The never-ending story Last week, an NHK documentary chronicling Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement and un-retirement, “Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki” opened in select theaters across the United States. The same day on the other side of the world, his 1988 classic “My Neighbor Totoro” was released for the first time in theaters across China — 6,000 of them. Next month, Miyazaki will receive the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Career Achievement Award. In 2019, also in LA, the largest-ever exhibition of his work will inaugurate the prestigious Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Meanwhile, in Japan, Tokyo’s Shinbashi Enbujo Theater will stage a kabuki version of “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” Miyazaki’s 1984 sci-fi epic. And 2020 (or soon after) will see the premiere of “How Do You Live?,” his 12th feature film, followed by the opening of a Studio Ghibli theme park near Nagoya. Miyazaki held a press conference to announce his retirement in Septembe...

( 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...

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...

AKB48 turns to an American studio Director Keishi Otomo and AKB48 By Roland Kelts AKB48’s commercial success in Japan is often derided as a sign of the culture’s patriarchal infantilization of women, and the girl group’s inability to appeal to Western audiences a sign of Japan’s increasingly isolated ideas about femininity, sexuality and pop music. Put simply: outside of Japan, AKB48 will never be Psy. But inside Japan, it’s a reliable moneymaker. Its most recent single, “We Won’t Fight” ( Bokutachi wa Tatakawanai ), topped the Oricon charts in June. The idol group is the no. 2 bestselling music act in the entire history of Japanese pop music in terms of singles sold. And Japan is the second-largest pop music market in the world – just behind the United States. Cuteness sells in Japan, especially if it’s well-marketed. Which is why AKB48’s latest music video is puzzling. The ironically titled 12-minute epic, “We Won’t Fight” [ short v. ], was released this summer. In it, th...

COOL JAPAN | MUSIC  ( ACCJ Journal ) First Sound from the Future Hatsune Miku weaves her magic for US audiences this fall By Roland Kelts Not all trends sweeping the domestic market in Japan strike gold with overseas audiences. The exceptions are headliners such as Pokemon, Hello Kitty, and the manga series One Piece, with its record-breaking 345-million print run worldwide. Most Japanese pop culture phenomena are for the home crowd only. Sports manga, such as Slam Dunk, rarely find a mass audience in the United States. Even trendy fashions, like last decade’s yamamba girls with their towering platform soles and bronzed faces, fail to charm most foreign tastemakers. In the 80s, when I was a teenager set free in Tokyo streets by my Japanese mother, I was entranced by quirky Japanese idol groups, fantastical haircuts, and animated television graphics. Still, I didn’t think any of it would register with my peers in America. It was altogether too light, too cute, too w...

Summer gigs, 2014 -- thanks to Nobuyuki, Tsuyoshi, Marlan, Ian, Marc in LA; Peter, Nagame, Lars at Embassy of Sweden, Tokyo; Manabu and Lisa at Meiji University, Tokyo; John, Ted, Eunbi and Haruki at Kinokuniya, New York City. Next up: Ottawa, San Diego, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Berkeley. Project Anime / Anime Expo @ Los Angeles The Embassy of Sweden @ Tokyo Meiji University @ Tokyo Kinokuniya Books @ New York City NHK "Tomorrow" shoot @ Tohoku

My conversation with animation critic/author Charles Solomon on Anime Expo 2014 & Project Anime in Los Angeles, on NPR/KPCC .

Roland Kelts to give Keynote Presentation at Project Anime: Los Angeles 2014  Project Anime is proud to announce Japanamerica author Roland Kelts as a Keynote Speaker for Project Anime: Los Angeles 2014. Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese writer, editor, scholar and cultural expert. He is the author of the bestselling Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S. , and the forthcoming novel, Access . His writing on contemporary Japanese culture, art and literature is published in Japanese and English in publications such as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek Japan, Adbusters, The Japan Times,  the BBC, NPR and CNN . In his Keynote Speech, “Re-Opening Japan,” Kelts assays the specific trans-cultural reasons behind the misunderstandings and sometimes unintended insults that occur when non-Japanese try to work, collaborate and make deals with Japanese creatives.