Viewing items with Tag: "anime"

Released on July 4th as straight to DVD and Bluray, Ghibli's latest movie is a partnership with the artist Inoue, who also worked on the arty sequences in "Whisper of the Heart". Details about the plot of Iblard are sketchy, and the best I could find was:

A project about Inoue’s imaginary world Iblard. Fragments of forgotten memories... Nostalgic days that are sure to come again... Iblard is made of such elements.

You can check out the trailer and try to decipher more youself, over at the official website @ iblardjikan.jp

June 30th saw armies of otaku (Japanese dorks, geeks, etc.) marching through Akihabara in protest of discrimination against their culture, reclaiming Akihabara as their rightful holy-land and home. The rally was organised by 3 Otaku Alliances, the Otakuism Alliance オタク先鋭派 革命的オタク主義者同盟, Revolutionary Moeism Alliance 革命的萌え主義者同盟 and the Revolutionary Rejects Alliance 革命的非モテ同盟.


The Otoki donned a range of clothing (as you would expect...) from standard protest costumes to darth vader and coke machine lookalikes, and walked 1.5km through the city, holding their banners high with pride. I say fair play to them. We see gay pride and womens rights rallies all of the time, so why not Otaku, stands to reason in my opinion.



My guess is at the end of the walk they all jumped on the train and went home... I would not like to have been an unsuspecting school girl on that chikan train to hell!

Lots of coverage of this event at various online vendors, Kotaku, Japan Probe, etc. but this vid was my favourite for its randomness (despite becoming a little repetetive). Anyway, without further ado, here is Danny Choo in Tokyo, in a storm trooper outfit, dancing.

Flicking through Kotaku I found this cool image of the Street Fighter crew and others chowing down in an Udon store run by none other than Edmund Honda. Class. I love street fighter, I love anime, and I have come to love udon, so 3 out of 3!

The image is from a soon to be published 300+ page book featuring loads of Capcom characters, by publisher Udon Entertainment. This teaser image and the name of the artists gives me the impression that they will all be eating udon, but I could be wrong... anyway, looks pretty cool to me.

This is pure genius, but I bet you can't name all the animes featured...
(answers in the comments please! ps; no cheating by looking at the linked site)



[via japansugoi]

Not Even Death is a Barrier to Censorship

It’s a classic moral question that you pose to your friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon; “A stranger hands you a black box with a red button. She says that every time you press the button someone you don’t know without any connection to you, or your friends or family will die and you will receive $1000. How many times do you press the button?” A popular Japanese comic “Death Note”, by Tsugumi Ohba, put an updated spin on this conundrum. It tells the tale of a bored high school student, Light Yagami, who finds the note book of a Death God which allows him to kill anyone Light wants simply by writing his or her name in the book and picturing the victim’s face. Light quickly gains an addiction to “pushing the button” and the story of corruption through power lasts for 12 volumes, not to mention an anime and two live action movies.

Today, numerous sources, including the Daily Yomiuri report that China has developed a sever aversion to this manga and has placed a ban on its publication. The controversy followed from a school in Shenyang, China which began confiscating school “Death Notes” that the students used to write down names of teachers they didn’t like. The note books the students had were commercially available versions of the manga Death Note, although it is unclear to me if the ban is on pirated Death Note materials, which I suspect is all that is available in China, or anything to do with the manga. According to Comi Press Hualing Publishing reports that it has legal permission to print “Death Note” in China, but the Japanese publisher, Shueisha, says they never gave permission and they have nothing to do with this incident.

Whatever the legal ramifications, as a teacher I would be more than a little alarmed if my name appeared on a student’s death list, even one modeled after a manga. At the same time I have read Death Note and found it very intelligently written and felt no personal inclination to go anonymously murder a bunch of people who had ticked me off that day. I feel that this is no more than juvenile experimentation that has given China yet another excuse to censor foreign content within its borders. The newspaper Shenyang Night Report called Death Note "poison, creating wicked hearts”, but have we not all, at least in our minds, made a list now and again of people we feel the world would be better off without? Have you ever been tempted to push the red button? I know the Chinese government has.

Via Secret Japan:

The technical term for these is Ita-Sha. Ita is derived from the kanji for pain, while Sha simply means car. It may also be a little play on words of “Italian car”, but who knows.

Any readers around Tokyo ever actually seen some of these? I was thinking of gimping out my bike with a decal or something... (JOKE! Seriously, that was a joke...)

Theres quite a bit of discussion going on at the moment on this guys Flickr concerning those people that just lurk in the aisles of combinis and book stores leeching manga without paying a cent for the privilege. The discussion is regarding a fitting name for these folk, with the current winner being "hobotaku".

Got something better? Post in the comments here for my personal entertainment, and then try and beat hobotaku off the top spot over at Flickr.