Tag: books

April 13, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Jaqueline Berndt, Kazumi Nagaike and Fusami Ogi’s new edited collection, Shojo Across Media: Exploring ‘Girl’ Practices in Contemporary Japan is another welcome addition to the expanding shelf of books specifically about Japanese popular culture aimed at female consumers. Among the high points, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada looks at girls in anime, specifically magical girls, […]

March 28, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Deborah Shamoon’s Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan traces the development of a niche in entertainment that is barely a century old, and yet forms a crucial sector within modern media. She investigates a whole series of tropes and traditions, that themselves form the bedrock of today’s Japanese comics […]

March 7, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In her new book, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, Daisy Yan Du argues against the way that Chinese animation wants to see itself, so often presented as an entirely local, inwardly focussed realm that pays no heed to foreign markets. Particularly in the period under study, you might be […]

February 28, 2019 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. In the midst of a British media panic about “Momo”, a slit-mouthed Japanese woman who supposedly exhorts children to commit crimes, there’s never been a better time to investigate the world of dangerous Japanese ghost-girls. Barbara Creed’s landmark book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) kicked off an entire subgenre of writing about Monstrous Wombs, […]

February 20, 2019 · 1 comment

By Motoko Tamamuro. Hayao Miyazaki was initially unaware of the phenomenon of the “Balse Festival” that broke out on social media. The Balse was the spell of destruction, cast by the protagonists Pazu and Sheeta in Studio Ghibli’s first official production, Laputa: The Castle in the Sky. Over the years, fans in Japan began tweeting […]