That’s about the only explanation I have for no posts in April (until now). Even now I shouldn’t be fiddling on the web while I have several chapters to read for my next class session. We’re reading Ian Condry’s book Hip-Hop Japan this week; had fun with it in class today as we talked about […]

I’m excited. Students from my anime class (grads from my first-year writing seminar in the fall — oh heck, let’s just give their names: Levy and Kevin) informed me today of the upcoming U.S. release this summer of the latest animated film by Kon Satoshi (Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent). It’s called […]

I saw Letters from Iwo Jima a few weeks ago on the invitation of a colleague and I guess I proved that I’m not a typical American by not overwhlemingly liking it as many others have. It’s a very good film — I especially liked the muted palette — and there was a certain (but […]

There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. government doesn’t join China and Korea in condemning Japanese officials’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese war atrocities, and the general whitewashing of Japanese war history that has been pushed by some Japanese conservatives, but the latest declassified documents from the CIA sums a lot of it […]

Japan’s new prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is living up to his reputation, advocating revision of Japan’s Constitution to eliminate Article 9 (the no-war clause) and the fostering of “patriotic education” that will instill a sense of pride in Japan’s youth. That’s just great. Let’s combine rearmament with the kind of nationalistic education that was used […]

You know you’ve made it as an (academic) author when your work is cited in a Yahoo Discussion Group dealing with Japan-related role-playing games (RPG):

I actually find this citation to be the most gratifying of them all.

Japanese television has always had, IMHO, the best commercials. This web site has collected some very good ones from YouTube. I especially like numbers 18 (samurai cockroach), 10 (great concept well executed), 9 (too cute for words), 6 (too close to home), 5 and 1 (for their take on a stereotype of Japanese), and 2 […]

Japanese robotic researchers are just plain cool … and crazy. It takes a bit of wild-eyed thinking to come up with anything interesting and cutting edge and Japanese technuts are real good at that. They often come up with stupidly wacky things, but out of all that wackiness breakthroughs arise. Now, I don’t know if […]