Tag: Japan

August 10, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Masakazu Ishiguro’s manga Heavenly Delusion begins with super double-bluff opening chapter, in which a bunch of gormless school-children, tutored by a robot, complain about an unexpected maths test. It’s only when one of them tries to come up with a word for it, unaware that the term “pop quiz” even exists already, […]

August 7, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Festooned with prizes, including the judges’ award at last year’s Scotland Loves Anime and the Japan Academy Award for Excellence in Animation, Ayumu Watanabe’s Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko now reaches British cinemas. As her name inadvertently suggests, Nikuko is a creature of fleshy delights – passionate, enthusiastic, bubbly and obsessed with foods. […]

August 1, 2022 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Megumi Hayashibara is an observant and empathetic narrator, walking the reader through her early years as a nobody struggling to finish nursing school while burning the night-oil on a bunch of freelance recording contracts as an anime voice actor. She is stereotypically Japanese about the need for apprenticeships and a pecking order, […]

July 29, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Dale is on his way home from a grotty mission – purging the forest of frog monsters, which should have been simple, but has left him covered in gunge. And as he scrapes ranine snot off his clothes and body, and bemoans the fate of the low-level adventurer, he realises that someone […]

July 26, 2022 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. Nearly fifty years after he re-emerged from the jungle, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda remains a fascinating and controversial figure. The World War II soldier famously surrendered in 1974, having held out on the small Filipino island of Lubang for the better part of thirty years, convinced that Japan’s conflict with the Allies was […]