This is the second in a three part series on Cyberpunk by Mike Dillon. Part One is here. Cyberpunk literature is written by and written for a generation that occupies “a truly science-fictional world” (Sterling 1986, xi), producing work that...
Probably because many of my US-based friends are academics and technologists, many of them visit Tokyo as part of their professional circuit. I often get requests for recommendations for places to stay and visit while in Tokyo. Usually these requests...
This is the first in a three part series on Cyberpunk by Mike Dillon The last decade has seen a startling growth in the demand for Japanese consumer culture. A weariness of recycled material, paired with wartime anti-Americanism in general...
Here is another installment from my student essays from my Japanese popular culture class last year. This one is from Brendan Callum. From time to time there are motifs and symbols that come to represent or signify a certain genre....
Here is another installment from my student essays from my Japanese popular culture class last year. This one is from Ainsley Breault. According to an article about MTV, Music Television, the station is "Undeniably an institution… viewed in over 342...
Here is another installment from my student essays from my Japanese popular culture class. This one is from Jennilee Tuazon. Her blank eyes gaze at you from her white face, her button nose a sunshine yellow. A dainty bow...
In her master's thesis submitted to the East Asian Studies Center at USC, Annie Manion argues that among college students in the US, anime has become one of the most important drivers of interest in Japan and Japanese language study....
Is Disney trying to intentionally sabotage the release of Miyazaki Hayao's films in the USA? Deborah Shamoon pays a visit to Howl's Moving Castle, and finds her stay lacking......
For the final essays for my Japanese Popular Culture class this spring at USC, my students wrote on the theme of transnationalism. Here is an essay by Annie Manion which takes up how the image of the samurai has become...
Last year, when I organized an event on Animation and the Contemporary Japanese Imagination, I got a call from Rafu Shimpo, the oldest Japanese language daily newspaper in the US. They wanted to send a reporter out to the...
Mike Dillon examines .hack//SIGN, an anime miniseries that aired in Japan between 2002-03, directed by Mashimo Koichi and written by Ito Kazunori and Omoda Akemi. What follows is an analysis of the cyberpunk themes explored within its story, and a...
Japan may lead the world in animation, but it's not generally known for live action sci fi films, or at least serious ones for adults (Godzilla notwithstanding). Budgetary restraints are probably one reason, but advances in computer animation could change...
When I first heard that my uncle, who lives in Chiba-ken, was working in the wine business I was a bit dubious. Hmmm.... Wine? In Japan?...
Iku Mohamed, President of Japan Digital Entertainment, Inc., talks about the worldwide appeal of his successful animation BuBu ChaCha....
With her chestnut colored hair and perfect English delivered in a booming voice, Jane Aiko Yamano, at first glance, seems an unlikely candidate for promoting a traditional Japanese robe as the kimono....
First in a series on "Chanpon LA" A Profile of Michiyo Masabuchi: model, mother, alternative educator....
Juergen Specht is a photographer who is mixing Germany Ireland and Japan to make Nooper - a nimble mobile software developer and mobile culture exporter from Tokyo....
In this three-part interview, former CNN/NHK anchorwoman Karuna Shinsho speaks about her childhood in Japan and Hawai'i, as the child of a Buddhist minister, now an avid spam-eater and mother of a possibly tri-lingual child....
Violet: how one American marked herself Chanpon....
Cornelius, the Boredoms, Melt Banana, Guitar Wolf: four bands from Japan that season with western fixin's whilst still keeping the entree nihongo-styled and original in some way:...
A whimzikaru rooku atua Japanese adaptation of English words....
Art and Crafts Instructor at the American School In Japan (ASIJ)...
I was given a more ethnic name to seem more Asian. Rather than blur diversity, my name shouts it....
A recent spring dinner party saw Chanpon dishes mixing East and West....
Mixing it up in Komazawa Olympic Park....
The Search for Madame Butterfly, and the Evolution of Early Mixed-Culture Myths...
Can you tell a Japanese face apart from a Chinese and Korean face? I certainly cannot....
Managing Director, Tokyo, Standard & Poor's Credit Market Services...
Kenji Rikitake writes on Haruomi 'Harry' Hosono, YMO, and the beginning of Chanpon Music...
Caroline Pover: Being a Broad in Japan...
Coffee is coffee is coffee, of course, and yet it is not. Here lies the complexity and delight of cross-cultural encounters....
Chairman, JC Foodsnet Co., Ltd....
A Chanpon Member writes from ground-zero for the Terrorist Attacks on New York City on 11 September 2001....
Founder and CEO, Neoteny Corp....
