culture

Two years ago, light novel publisher Kadokawa added Thailand to its list of foreign publishing investments, which already includes Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and the United States. Now there are signs that English-language readers are catching on.

You know when you go on YouTube — or Spotify, or Netflix — and you’re faced with so many options for entertainment that you don’t know where to start? It can feel like that with Japanese summer festivals, too. In addition to the abundance of ...

Though rampant piracy is damaging global sales of manga, some print publishers in Europe and North America are experiencing an optimistic revival.

Those looking for an immersive introduction to Japan's contemporary art, need to look no further than Roppongi Art Night. Rather than taking classes or visiting the myriad galleries across Tokyo, for one night art fans can explore this world of art by visiting Roppongi. Tokyo's ...

Anime, manga and Haruki Murakami may form an unlikely trinity, but outside of Japan they're responsible for filling Japanese Studies departments and sprawling convention halls with generations of the devoted.

Netflix's director of anime, Taito Okiura, tells me he feels like a local baseball player who got drafted into the U.S. Major Leagues. Except, he doesn't play the sport. A producer and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in the industry, Okiura was offered ...

Although Alexis Sanborn was a self-professed Japanese-culture geek as a teenager, she never had much of an appetite for washoku (Japanese cuisine). As she grew up reading anime in a California suburb in the early 1990s, before the Japanese restaurant boom in U.S. urban cities, ...

Prognosticating something as unpredictable as the domestic music industry might appear to be a fool's errand. But what's the fun in playing it safe? Here are some predictions for 2018. YouTubers will wield more power: TV and movie theme songs remain the best way for ...

In an interview with Buzzfeed two years ago, American animator Henry Thurlow, who had moved to Tokyo from New York six years earlier, summed up his dilemma. "When I was working as an animator in New York, I could afford an apartment, buy stuff ...

The planets have aligned and the Force is even stronger for the "Star Wars" community. On Thursday evening, hundreds of fans filled Toho Cinemas Roppongi for one of the first global premieres of "The Last Jedi," the latest film in the well-loved series, with ...

It takes only two words to sum up why 2016 was always going to be a hard act to follow: "Your Name." To call Makoto Shinkai's body-switching romance a hit is a little like calling Tokyo Skytree "pretty tall." The film made up nearly half ...

The world of anime in 2017 didn't give us any obvious breakout hits like last year's "Your Name.," but the past 12 months still had its share of winners: 'Night is Short, Walk on Girl' ('Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome') Director: Masaaki Yuasa One of two films ...