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...

COOL JAPAN | MEDIA ( ACCJ Journal ) Cutters Tokyo CEO, Ryan McGuire The New Mad Men The evolution and transformation of advertising in Tokyo By Roland Kelts Among the fastest ways to check the barometer of a nation’s popular culture—to see who’s cool and what’s in style or comical—is to watch domestic TV commercials. Advertising cuts to the heart of a culture’s DNA. TV ads from Japan, for example, have long been coveted abroad for their apparent outrageousness or sheer oddity. Entire YouTube channels and websites (see the seminal japander.com) upload Japanese commercials featuring American A-list celebrities. On Japanese TV, Leonardo DiCaprio promotes the Orico credit card and hawks Jim Beam; Tommy Lee Jones guzzles Boss canned coffee; and Madonna sports geta (wooden sandals) to tout Takara shochu. Then there's Sofia Coppola’s 2004 film set in Japan, Lost in Translation. It makes cross-cultural advertising a comical plot point, with Bill Murray playing a washed-up...

With Audie Cornish for NPR's "All Things Considered."