japanamerica

My short subjective and selective history of the West's infatuation with "Japan." For Penguin UK's The Happy Reader .

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one." Don DeLillo, White Noise .

AnimeJapan 2015 sees the big picture by Roland Kelts For most in Japan, April marks the beginning of the new working year. But for the anime and manga biz, it all starts in March. Last weekend, the second annual AnimeJapan trade fair overtook Tokyo Big Sight, with more than 120,000 total attendees (a spike of 10,000 over last year’s tally), 2,500 of whom were business representatives from Japan and overseas. This weekend, March 28 and 29, will see the first-ever “Otaku Summit,” a special edition of the biannual Comics Market (Comiket), featuring manga-fan artists from 18 countries and held at Chiba’s Makuhari Messe. AnimeJapan is the union of two events, the former Tokyo Anime Festival (TAF) and The Anime Contents Expo (ACE), whose initial split was caused by a rift over ex-Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara’s controversial censorship drive in 2010. The first TAF I attended in 2005 targeted industry insiders — domestic studios, networks and media. But AnimeJapan has evolved ...

Turning Japanese Coping with stasis: how the supposed 'sick man of Asia' might be a model for us all By Roland Kelts I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable. I steel myself before landing, my mind tallying variables and unknowns: will my luggage land with me and emerge on the dingy carousel? Will the taxi service I booked online arrive on time, at the right terminal, or at all? Will traffic be an impediment to my destination? And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of Los Angeles highway off-ramps from LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit. Landing in Tokyo, ...

Japan's Ministry of Cool Ahead of hosting the 2020 Summer Olympics, the country is ramping up government-sponsored efforts to promote its culture abroad. PATRICK ST. MICHEL Japan wants the world to know just how cool it is. Over the past six months, the country’s government has announced plans to pump millions of dollars into companies eager to expand internationally, such as the online lifestyle retailer Tokyo Otaku Mode and the ramen chain Ippudo. And that’s just the start. There are plans for a Japan-centric TV station and many more projects aimed at promoting the nation’s culture to the rest of the world while generating money and interest in the 2020 Olympic Games, hosted by Tokyo. The effort isn't new: For over a decade, the country has embraced “Cool Japan,” a government-supported movement focused on selling what many have described as its “gross national cool.” This has involved touting cornerstones of pop culture such as cartoons, comics, music, and food oversea...

from BoingBoing by Colin Marshall When he tried to quit smoking, the writer David Sedaris distracted himself from his lingering cravings by changing his surroundings: specifically, he moved to Japan for a few months. Not only did it help him kick the habit, it gave him a great deal of material for his hilarious and observant stories. In his book When You Are Englufed in Flames, Sedaris tells of his and a French Japanese-language classmate's astonishment at Tokyo's abundance of vending machines: “Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.” “I know it,” I said. Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was. “In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him. The Indonesian raised his eyebrows. “He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”