NEWSWORTHY
Social media weighs in on design and purpose of Japan's new bank notes
Social media has been awash with posts following the public unveiling of Japan’s new era name, Reiwa, at the beginning of April. The announcement was almost the complete opposite of an April Fools’ Day joke and yet every detail has been picked apart online, ...
Robot rights: From Asimov to Tezuka
Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" are fictional rules, so why do we keep looking to them for guidance? The closest thing to real-world robot law we could have more seems likely to develop around the question of when autonomous military drones can make "kill" ...
Frederik Schodt recalls the 'different world' of manga translation in the 1970s
"I loved manga but there was no way to make a living (with it)," recalls manga translation pioneer Frederik Schodt.
Japanese pop icons and traditional paintings mingle in a mash-up exhibition
A unique exhibition opened Wednesday in Kyoto featuring famous anime and manga characters, as well as other icons of Japanese pop culture, drawn in the style of traditional Japanese paintings. The exhibition, titled "Bokura-ga Nihon-wo Tsuideiku" ("We Will Inherit Japan"), shows a collection of 35 ...
Leiji Matsumoto surfs the floating world
The work of manga artist Leiji Matsumoto mixes historical periods, themes and technologies, often in a science-fiction setting: His signature comics involve steam locomotives and reborn World War II battleships sailing among the stars. These grand flights of fancy, which have found fans around ...
Tokyo ward to resurrect dwelling famed for housing manga artists
Tokyo's Toshima Ward plans to restore Tokiwa-so, a wooden apartment building known for housing many manga artists, including Osamu Tezuka, to promote the nation's anime culture. The ward will create the building at a park near the place where Tokiwa-so originally stood, ward officials said ...
Drawing on the past of Osamu Tezuka
In 1977, American author and translator Frederik L. Schodt and three friends formed a manga-translation group in Tokyo, with the then-quixotic dream of introducing Japanese comics to a global readership. Schodt had arrived in Japan in 1965, courtesy of a father in the United ...
'Phoenix': Osamu Tezuka's epoch-spanning manga masterpiece
"Hi no Tori" ("Phoenix" ) is a 12-part masterpiece by manga legend Osamu Tezuka. Started in 1954, Tezuka worked on the manga until his death in 1989. Acclaimed for both its story and style, "Phoenix" rises above the greatness of Tezuka's "Astro Boy" or ...
Down and out with Tokyo's manga artists
That Japanese movies are often adapted from Japanese manga is no secret. Less well known is the subgenre of films about the lives of some Japanese mangaka (manga artists), which is informally known as mangakamono. Many of these fictional biopics have gone on to ...
Although he is best known internationally for creating "Astro Boy," Osamu Tezuka's most popular work for adults in Japan is "Black Jack," a series of short stand-alone stories from the 1970s, documenting the renegade antics of the unconventional title doctor whose mercenary facade masks ...
Star Belgian choreographer celebrates manga and more
"Tokyo, my brother, my protector" was the tweet posted by Belgian-born Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui — often dubbed "the busiest choreographer in the world" — straight after he arrived here two months ago. Explaining in a recent interview with this writer what had prompted so fulsome ...
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet have lots in common. Both are 38 and grew up in Belgium with a foreign parent — one from Morocco in Cherkaoui's case and one from France in Jalet's. Both are also globetrotting choreographers and dancers who share a ...
