japanamerica

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...

Honored to participate on the BBC's "World Questions: Tokyo" panel with the politicians Rui Matsukawa (LDP) and Hiroe Makiyama (CDP), and economist/professor Sayuri Shirai (Keio University). We discussed Japan's future — including the nation's low birth rate, women in politics and the labor force, the immigration dilemma, the constitution's 'pacifist' Article 9, and the 2019 Rugby World Cup and 2020 Olympic Games. You can hear the entire program online  here .

Live event info & tix here . Broadcast, Oct. 5 . BBC

In a Renewed Hotel Okura, Japanese Historians Still See a Loss The New York Times TOKYO — The outcry over the demolition of the 53-year-old Hotel Okura in Tokyo surprised no one more than some Japanese historians and architectural specialists. Monocle, the global lifestyle magazine, had circulated a petition, savetheokura.com, to register the “outrage from admirers of its unique design.” Tomas Maier, the creative director of Bottega Veneta, an Italian luxury brand, filmed a video memorial and started a social media campaign, #MyMomentAtOkura. The hotel’s modernist postwar lobby artfully balanced elements of traditional Japan, like lacquered plum-blossom-shaped tables and chairs, with visions of what was then futuristic, like a lighted world map displaying global time zones. It was frequented by United States presidents including President Obama, and other heads of state, celebrities, artists and designers. It played a central role in the 1960s James Bond novel “You O...

‘Seen from Japan, Britain is no longer recognizably British’ The Guardian A nation of islands shaped by limited space and imperial ambitions, garden aesthetics and ceremonial teas -- and stoic, stiff-lipped reserve in the face of adversity: Great Britain, or Japan? For many Japanese, Britain has long been something of a western mirror and model nation, a land whose geographical and cultural character were recognisable and achievements often admirable: a doppelganger off the coast of another continent and equally rich with tradition, history and parochial pride. At least, until Brexit. Only three months after the June 2016 EU referendum, the Japanese government voiced its displeasure over Britain’s choice in unusually un-Japanese language. A 15-page memorandum issued in September 2016 by the otherwise soft-spoken ministry of foreign affairs “strongly requests” that the UK consider the facts: Japan invests a lot of money and employs a lot of workers in the UK, but Japanese b...

'Cannon Busters': Bending anime rules in all the right ways The Japan Times South Bronx, New York native LeSean Thomas is making anime in Tokyo partly owing to a mistake.  In the early ’90s he bought a video cassette of what he thought was “Akira” but turned out to be a behind-the-scenes “production report”  documenting the film’s creation. Instead of returning it, Thomas watched it every day. When he saw director Katsuhiro Otomo and his team working through the night at their cramped desks, he thought: That’s what I want to do. More than 20 years later, Thomas, now 43, has become an anime showrunner with “Cannon Busters,” a 12-episode series based on his 2005 comic book of the same name and rendered by Tokyo animation studio Satelight Inc. The multinational project was created by an American, co-financed by Britain’s Manga Entertainment Ltd. and Taiwan’s Nada Holdings Inc., produced by a Japanese studio and released on major U.S. and Chinese streaming portal...

Big Little Lions: Disney's New 'Lion King' Dodges the 'Kimba' Similarity Issue The Hollywood Reporter Over the years, however, many anime fans have speculated that there were, perhaps, other reasons that Tezuka Productions declined to take legal action against Disney, with some even suggesting that the company might have paid them off in secret.  However, in the 2006 book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. by Roland Kelts, Tezuka Productions' Yoshihiro Shimizu insists they never received any compensation.   "Of course, we were urged to sue Disney by some in our industry. But we're a small, weak company. It wouldn't be worth it anyway. … Disney's lawyers are among the top 20 in the world." Read >>