AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
When asked to describe his latest film in one word, director Shunichiro Miki repeated what most cinema critics worldwide had said after their own somewhat botched attempts to describe it: "Indescribable."
An anime with a sad-eyed waif as the hero must surely be something for the kiddies, no? Well no, if the waif carries a blood-stained axe and greedily devours human flesh like a starved wolf. Keiichi Sato’s feature animation “Ashura (Asura),” whose eponymous hero ...
Residents of Kyoto Prefecture may be used to the local bursts of festivity that come around this time of year. What’s new, though, may be the sudden influx of excited anime enthusiasts. This year will mark the city’s fourth time hosting a three-month-long exposition ...
Mamoru Hosoda is a leading contender to succeed Hayao Miyazaki for the title of anime master of masters — the one everyone in the industry, Japanese or foreign, looks up to and steals from. The Miyazaki influence on Hosoda’s own work seems obvious, from ...
OTAKU SPACES, by Patrick W. Galbraith. Chin Music Press, 2012, 240 pp., $20.00 (paperback) T he word otaku and the complex mass of ideas, people and trends variously connected to its constantly evolving meaning have been discussed and analyzed ad nauseam since this term ...
PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIP: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan, by Deborah Shamoon. Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2012, 181 pp., $27.00 (paperback) The subject of this book is one that is baffling to outsiders, but visible on the streets of Tokyo, especially the more fashionable ...
By the time I entered college, my family had moved house seven times. The process of adjusting to a new place grew harder as I became a teenager, though by the time of our last move I was more accepting — or indifferent, take ...
Among the newest additions to Japan’s anime menagerie is the eponymous star of “Gon” (TV Tokyo; Mon., 6 p.m.), a cute dinosaurlike critter who is totally instinctual, which, in the world he inhabits, makes him (her?) even more of a troublemaker than your average ...
Tokyo’s otaku (geek) hub of Akihabara might be empty for the next two weekends as two major anime events hit the capital. The Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) will be first. Popular companies such as Studio Ghibli, Toei and Bandai are among those with ...
Eshi are illustrators who work within various fields of Japan’s pop culture, such as manga, anime and games, all of which have become increasingly popular around the world. This exhibition is an extended version of the “Eshi 100″ show that was held in Tokyo’s ...
For anime-aficionados across the nation, a little weekend getaway to Okinawa may be the perfect way to spend this coming Sunday. The Okinawa International Animation Contents Summit allows visitors to participate in a series of anime-related events, including a museum that features the works ...
Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is nutty about anime and manga. Speaking to him at a cafe in his native Antwerp, Cherkaoui drops all the right names into his conversation and gets as giddy as an otaku (obsessive) discussing Japanese pop culture. However, this 35-year-old ...
