japanamerica

Manga becomes a major draw at Toronto Comic Arts Festival BY ROLAND KELTS The 11th annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) kicked off May 10. As its title suggests, it’s less a fan-focused pop convention than a platform for comics and graphic novels as art, and for the artists who create them. It has also emerged over the past few years as a great friend to manga. Toronto is often cited as one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, and one of the safest, with crime rates far lower than in neighboring U.S. metropolises. Half of Toronto’s population were born outside of Canada, a good portion of them in Asia. When I visited the city a few months ago to take part in a week of readings and presentations at the behest of The Japan Foundation, I was surrounded by Asian cuisine and culture on nearly every block. My audiences were large, deeply engaged and multi-ethnic, looking less like a hockey team than a Benetton commercial. “Toronto has become a great place for fa...

The Unmasking of “Japan’s Beethoven”   By Roland Kelts   The strange saga of the man once dubbed “Japan’s Beethoven,” Mamoru Samuragochi, was first made public this winter, amid the Sochi Olympics and Tokyo’s worst snowstorm in forty-five years. That was when Japanese television networks interrupted daytime programming for a press conference held by a slim, horse-faced man blinking morosely against the flashbulbs. His name was Takashi Niigaki, and he was a forty-three-year-old adjunct music professor at a Tokyo college. Samuragochi, Niigaki announced, was neither deaf nor a composer. Over the past eighteen years, it was he who had composed Samuragochi’s music. Moreover, Samuragochi was not a musician and could not even write musical notation or scores. The Olympic figure skater Daisuke Takahashi was about to perform his short program in Sochi to Samuragochi’s “Sonatina for Violin” in front of a global audience. Niigaki was there before the cameras...

Monkey Business authors are coming to NY!  To celebrate the the 4th issue launch, the magazine’s contributing authors Toh EnJoe, Hideo Furukawa, Laird Hunt, Matthew Sharpe, founding editors Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, contributing editor, Roland Kelts will be coming to New York and have discussion events in various locations. Please come meet us! Saturday, May 3, 2pm- PEN World Voices Festival Monkey Business — Japan/America: Writer’s Dialogue Dialogues between Hideo Furukawa and Laird Hunt, and between Toh EnJoe and Matthew Sharpe at Asia Society 725 Park Ave. New York, NY 10021 212-288-6400 asiasociety.org $10 Asia Society & PEN members, $12 Students & Seniors, $15 non-members (Ticket includes a copy of Monkey Business Issue 4.) Tickets are available at worldvoices.pen.org Sunday, May 4, 2pm- Reading at Kinokuniya Bookstore by EnJoe, Furukawa, Hunt, Roland Kelts, and Sharpe at Kinokuniya Bookstore 1073 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY...

Out now here .

Anime industry reunified at expo, satellite events BY ROLAND KELTS AnimeJapan 2014, the rebranded and reunified annual industry trade show, exceeded organizers’ expectations last month, hosting 110,000 producers, publishers, journalists, cosplayers and public visitors. What a relief. Since 2010, the anime industry’s political divisions meant two separate shows: one in Chiba called the Anime Contents Expo (ACE), the other in Odaiba, the original Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF). Dashing between the two had become an annual headache. AnimeJapan brought domestic and overseas players together again under one cavernous roof at Tokyo Big Sight on March 22 and 23. It wasn’t perfect. “AnimeJapan was a huge success as a B2C (business to consumer) event,” says Yuji Nunokawa, chairman of the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA). “From B2B (business to business) aspects, however, there were some unsatisfactory elements, such as meeting-space shortage and lack of preparation.”

Toronto Japanamerica tour interview, via Torja magazine. 『Japanamerica』著者、Roland Kelts氏に訊く日本と北米のマンガ・アニメ産業 Roland Keltsさん Roland Kelts 日本のポップ・カルチャーがアメリカに及ぼした影響、そして互いに切磋琢磨しながら変革するマンガ・アニメ業界を鋭い視線で分析した『Japanamerica』の著者。他にもThe New YorkerやThe Wall Street Journalをはじめとする数多くの新聞・雑誌に記事、エッセイなどを寄稿。 東京大学や上智大学などの客員講師を務め、東京とニューヨークを行き来する生活を送る。スタジオジブリの宮崎駿監督や、作家の村上春樹など、日本の作家へのインタビューも多く行っている。 日本マンガとの出会い 私が初めて日本に行ったのは幼稚園の時。母方の祖父母が住んでいる盛岡を初めて訪れた時でした。テレビを点けるとウルトラマンや仮面ライダーなど、いわゆる特撮ものがやっていて、それを夢中で観ていました。さらに祖父母の家にはマンガもあって、少しだけですけど、パラパラとめくって読んでいました。それが初めてのマンガとの出会いです。中学・高校生の時も、夏休みなどで日本に行くと、電車の中によく置き去りにされている読み終わったマンガ雑誌を集めては読んでいて、友人に見せようとアメリカの自宅にも持って帰ったりしていました（笑）アメコミのスパイダーマンなどと比べても、日本のマンガは格段におもしろいと感じ、友人に見せては、みんなで「すごい！」と興奮したものです。日本のマンガにはアクションシーンもたくさんあるし、セクシーな女の人も出てきて。それらの描写方法やデザインが、とても興味深かったのです。アメコミはどちらかというと絵柄が大きくて、ダイナミックなのに対し、日本のマンガは細かい絵が多く、フレーム使いも面白い。マンガに本格的に興味を持ち始めたのは、この頃だと思います。さらに今度は、川端康成に谷崎潤一郎、そして大学の時には村上春樹といった日本文学も読むようになりました。日本文学は私にとってとても新鮮なものでした。そうして、日本の物語というものにも興味を持ち始めたのです。後に、（映画監督の）フランシス・フォード...

>an excerpt from my interview w/Haruki for A Public Space . Haruki Murakami’s translations include: Raymond Carver’s short stories, Truman Capote’s short stories; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart, John Irving’s Setting Free the Bears, Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; and Mark Strand’s Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories. ROLAND KELTS You and I once discussed how difficult it is to be an individual in Japan, how lonely. HARUKI MURAKAMI It’s still very difficult, but things have changed drastically in Japan over the last ten years. You know, when I was young, we were supposed to join a company, join the office or the academy. It was a very tight society. You had to belong to someplace. I didn’t want to do that, so I became independent as soon as I left college. And it was lonely. But not these days. People graduate and immediately become freelan...