japanamerica

Roughly one month after its multiple New York City launch events, Monkey Business: New Voices from Japan landed in Tokyo for its debut at 'home' in Japan. Tower Books in Shibuya hosted founding editors, translators and scholars Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen for their introduction to the publication, readings, Q&As and photo-ops with the SRO audience. A book-signing followed, as did an intimate and much quieter dinner conversation among the principals. [Goossen and Shibata have a good time] Monkey Business is now available in Japan at Tower Books , Tsutaya , Kinokuniya and other bookstores specializing in literature and global culture. Twenty-five percent of all sales benefit The Nippon Foundation/CANPAN Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund . Our launch events in Canada will take place in Toronto early this fall. Details TBA. Meanwhile, Volume 2 is well underway, and as of this writing, nearly completed. It promises to be longer and thicker, so to ...

Coming Home to London I was looking for a light blue raincoat. The bulbs were dim and the ceilings low. At Heathrow Airport’s Passport Control Center, the line of my fellow arrivals amassed in clumps, passengers slouching and scratching away the hours of cramped flight, fingering their cell phones and sleepily eyeing watches. There were browns, blues and starched whites—sweaters, jerseys, overcoats and t-shirts. But no light blues. Not a raincoat in sight. I had landed in London from New York with a singular mission: to escort my Japanese mother around town for a little over a week. My mother, Kaori Saeki, travels a lot, but as a Spanish-language specialist and linguist, and as a Japanese with relatives in her homeland, most of her recent travel has been to Spanish- or Latin-language speaking countries like Ecuador, Mexico, Italy, and of course, Spain, or to her homeland archipelago in Asia, Japan. She hadn’t been to London in nearly forty years. For me, London is somethi...

Finding Japan in NYC for Japan Day 2011 --with help from May S. Young, Motoyuki Shibata, Stann Nakazono and the sakura in Central Park: (Special thanks to Kyle McKeveny, Elizabeth Van Meter and Michael Wolk from Gorgeous Entertainment .)

My short article for The Christian Science Monitor on Takashi Murakami's 'Google doodle' for summer 2011: Takashi Murakami brings summer solstice to the Google doodle Takashi Murakami has become a global superstar since founding the Hiropon Factory collective of young artists in Japan. Screenshot of Google.com home page on June 21. By Roland Kelts , Correspondent / June 21, 2011 Tokyo Japanese hipster-turned-multimillionaire artist Takashi Murakami ’s trademark psychedelic flower faces, narcotized eyes, and menacing mouth...

SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Japan's pop industries: blind at home, beloved overseas Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri By now it's no secret to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection: The gap between the popularity of contemporary Japanese culture overseas and its anemic industries at home has become a chasm. Anime conventions in the United States continue to proliferate, not only in cosmopolitan coastal cities like New York, Boston and Los Angeles, but also in more rural areas in Ohio and Tennessee. Annual attendance at these conventions is record-breaking. Sakura-Con in Seattle in late April, the convention I most recently attended as a guest, tallied 19,040 individual attendees this year. Elmira Utz of the Asia-Northwest Cultural Education Association, a host of Sakura-Con, notes that their celebration of Japanese pop culture fed roughly 50 million dollars into Seattle's economy from 2006 to 2010. Not sneeze-worthy numbers in post-Lehman shock economies. Yet ...