Japan 604
Dagashi Kashi
by Chris Perkins. Dagashi Kashi starts, as these things so often do, when a mysterious and beautiful stranger walks into our hero’s life. In this case, our hero is Kokonotsu, (affectionately known as Coconut by his friends and family) an aspiring manga creator in a country town. His gregarious father, meanwhile, wants Coconut to take […]
Japan Foundation Film Tour 2020
By Jasper Sharp. In customary fashion for the time of year, the Japan Foundation has just announced the programme for its annual touring film season to give us something to look forward to in these dark and joyless winter months. With 20 titles heading to 22 venues across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland between […]
Divine Gate
By Andrew Osmond. Noriyuki Abe, the long – very long – serving director of Bleach, offers up the new series Divine Gate. Handsomely visualized by Bleach’s studio Pierrot, and based on a smartphone game, Divine Gate is the kind of anime that can look impenetrably complex when you look at some of its synopses online, […]
Books: Otaku & Imagination
By Jonathan Clements. Patrick W. Galbraith’s Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan begins with an advert that depicts a man who is, in the words of Lawrence Eng, a “reluctant insider”, a slave of the rat-race who has an ace up his sleeve. Back in his bachelor pad, he has a virtual girlfriend […]
Plastic Memories
By Andrew Osmond To shed light on Plastic Memories, it’s worth remembering a comment by Yasuhiro Yoshiura, who directed the android anime Time of Eve (and the gravity-defying Patema Inverted). “In the UK and US, robots are robots and they are completely different from human beings. There’s also a kind of Frankenstein complex where they […]