Clannad is best examined in reference to Kanon (reviewed here). It's pretty much the same, only different. Which is to say it's very much worth watching. Good, not great, though there are many moments of greatness. The better the idea, the more it should be ripped off. The world hasn't run out of worthy homages to Pride and Prejudice.

As with Kanon and Air, the story and character design were created by software developer Key Visual Arts. The anime version was produced by Kyoto Animation, directed by Tatsuya Ishihara and written by Fumihiko Shimo. This team has a good thing going. I hope they keep at it.

Clannad, like Kanon, is on the surface a high school harem melodrama with a wise-guy male lead (Tomoya Okazaki, voiced by Yuichi Nakamura), surrounded by a bunch of eccentric, troubled girls. But while Kanon starts out with a story derived from traditional folklore, Clannad begins as a theater of the absurd.

Tomoya sets out help Nagisa join the drama club. The drama club was shut down for lack of interest. They can start it up again if they can attract a quorum of members. But they can't officially recruit because it's not a club. And nobody wants to join because nobody's interested in joining what's-not-a-club. That sort of thing.

The comic relief is broader. The repartee between Tomoya and Fuko is fall-down funny (though the patter can be tough to follow even with subtitles).

We also find out about everybody's "after school special" problems much earlier. This makes Clannad more by-the-numbers, less dramatically complex than Kanon. Rather than weaving several stories together, the narratives follow one after the other in an episodic fashion, almost independent of each other.

The story arcs thus tend to hang separately than together, and never quite surmount the first featuring Fuko (or address the implicit magical realism). The writer seems to have realized this and has Fuko popping up randomly throughout the series doing a "magical girl" parody that though funny, only serves to remind how much she is missed.

Anybody who's seen Cipher in the Snow will recognize the same theme in the Fuko arc. Both Clannad and Kanon deal seriously with the weight of memory and loss and the burden of guilt--and about disparate people uniting in a common cause largely despite themselves.

The concluding arc featuring Nagisa tries to tie up the lose ends, but raises more questions than it settles--about Nagisa's parents, about the relationship between Tomoya and his father, about the metaphorical significance of the poignant "lonely robot" vignettes--and doesn't quite deliver on the original promise.

If anything, Clannad is cursed by an abundance of good ideas and the inability to choose the right ones to follow through on.

Which is perhaps why, far and away, the best-written episode is a stand-alone short story tagged onto the very end (it expands upon a secondary character and conflict raised during the series). Rather than focusing on group dynamics, it's about two individuals coming to terms with each other and their place in the world.

Essentially, a high school senior slacking his way through life realizes he's not half the man his girlfriend thinks he is and finally grows the heck up. In only twenty minutes, the story comes to a well-crafted conclusion and a satisfying moral point but without a hint of moralizing. It is a superbly directed and edited short animated film.

Although Clannad takes a more meandering and uneven path than Kanon, and the whole doesn't always exceed the sum of the parts, it does begin and end on two very high notes.

Labels: anime reviews

My father only listens to all-classical radio (my parents have never owned a TV). He once told me that the brief news summary at the top of the hour told him everything he really needed to know about the "news" (solid-state physicists do tend to be eccentric like that).

The local Fox affiliate runs its late-night news an hour earlier than the competition, and does a recap at the top of the hour to keep viewers from switching to the other stations. As I've grown older, I've found that on most days that recap tell me everything I need to know.

Hand-wringing aside, much "professional" news content is being devalued because it's useless. The Internet makes that obvious. For example, Daniel Gross (a fine person, I'm sure) traveled to Japan and in 750 words manages to say nothing. As one commenter noted:

Wow, Mr. Gross flew all the way to Japan, went straight to the Roppongi district in Tokyo, and saw a lot of American chain restaurants there. Ergo, the Japanese love American fast food.

It's rather like analyzing "America" by hanging out in Times Square and eating at the Hard Rock Cafe. As travel writer Rolf Potts observes (read his far more insightful analysis of the international McDonald's experience here),

I'd wager that the contempt sophisticated travelers hold for McDonald's has less to do with ethical principle than the fact that fast-food franchises ruin the fantasies of "otherness" that are an inherent part of travel.

As a result, Gross completely missed the bigger story, namely that

McDonald's and other fast food establishments, rather than providing a symbol of the exotic foreign or non-Japanese other, have become ubiquitous establishments that serve important needs and tastes of the Japanese within their own culture.

Even more surprising, "many Japanese, and especially younger Japanese, are unaware that McDonald's is not a Japanese company."

In any case, Mr. Potts notes that "McDonald's (and other fast food) is easy to avoid." Anyway, it's hard imagining a Japan-based blogger being this boring on purpose. Basically, Mr. Gross was being glib and lazy and his editors let it slide. Those tough journalistic standards at work.

Read, for contrast, Japan newbie Orson Scott Card describing (among other things) dining in Tokyo. He gets off the beaten track. He tries different stuff. He observes. Card is a professional writer, but his blog is exactly the kind of "free" that Chris Anderson is talking about.

The Wall Street Journal can charge for content because it provides valuable information (that is at least perceived as such) that can't be found elsewhere. And like Fox News, its conservative perspective makes it "unique" compared to the rest of the MSM.

As Mark Cuban puts its succinctly, "When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free." There's no "more for less" when you start at zero, and you can't charge more--in money or attention--for more of the same when the "same" wasn't worth anything to start with.

Labels: business, japan, publishing, technology

Malcolm Gladwell begins his review of Chris Anderson's Free with a misconstrued anecdote and buries the lead to boot. Apparently James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, is peeved about the royalties offered by Amazon to post the paper's content on the Kindle.

Newspapers, Gladwell incredulously reports Anderson concluding, "need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business."

I wasn't aware that this conclusion was being debated by anybody. In any case, I'm not interested Gladwell's opinion of Anderson's book, except to say that I think Anderson is making an obvious point (and, yes, perhaps too glibly), and Gladwell is doing his level best to miss it.

To start with (as Anderson himself can't help quipping), Gladwell's review is free too.

But a long paragraph later, Gladwell marries that first anecdote with his thesis by concocting a straw man. Moroney was originally protesting Amazon's 70 percent cut on Kindle subscriptions. Then Gladwell tells us that "Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free."

As Clint Eastwood's Will Munny would put it, "Want's got nothing to do with it." I want to get paid the same rates that Gladwell gets paid, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.

The more important question Gladwell completely misses--despite it staring him and James Moroney in the face--is why Amazon can charge those usurious rates. The answer is easy: because Amazon has a monopoly (or when it comes to buying Kindle content, a monopsony).

And why does Amazon have a de facto Kindle monopsony? Because what we learn from history is that nobody learns from history. Especially, these days, publishers.

The RIAA spent the better part of the past twenty years insisting that CDs are king! And if they aren't, then any content produced by RIAA members is worth a gazillion dollars! And so must be locked up and DRM'ed like Fort Knox lest it fall into too many prole hands.

Of course, the cruel fact is that most musicians and writers make minimum wage at best. The RIAA exists to protect an aristocracy. Yet I believe in copyright protection (though reasonably limited to the life of the artist) and believe that ISPs can and should block file sharing ports.

But most content is not worth what the content producers wish it was. It sure isn't worth what I wish it was. And the actions of publishers to defend that fantasy are only making the situation worse.

It was Steven Jobs--not the RIAA--who married the MP3 player to a storefront and started making lots of money. Jeff Bezos added a twist: Amazon would do the same thing but use a non-proprietary format. So now it's the retailers--not the RIAA--running the show.

With the Kindle, I wouldn't be surprised if Bezos got the idea from Jobs: mash up a storefront and proprietary hardware and make the content creators come to him. Ironically enough, he can count on the Luddite publishing industry to enforce his marketing monopoly.

He dangles DRM before their eyes and they bite down hard. Hook, rod and reel. But at the end of the day, Bezos is the one holding onto the end of the pole.

If James Moroney doesn't like Amazon's terms, why haven't he and his fellow publishers deployed their own push technology? There are plenty of e-readers out there and a non-proprietary standard (ePub). I believe it again comes down to delusions about content value.

As a running-dog capitalist, I'm mostly fine with charging what the market will bear. The flipside of that equation, though, is that when the market can't bear so much, the price must go down. As with a housing bubble, that painful realization takes time to sink in.

By the time it does, though, book and newspaper publishers may find themselves again in the unenviable position of having the more technologically adventurous distributors and retailers dictate the terms to them.

Labels: books, business, publishing, technology

In chapter 17 of Angel Falling Softly, Milada and Kamilla walk into a bar. It is kind of a joke.

They had to buy a four-dollar membership to get in the door--the product of some strange nexus between state liquor laws and the teetotaling Mormon population.

This remnant of 19th century "blue laws" has long irked the tourism industry here in Utah, so much so that the Mormon governor (Huntsman, who recently resigned to become ambassador to China) pushed hard for repeal. On 1 July 2009, it was finally put out of its misery.

Also gone is an actual physical barrier. A provision in the old law forbade bartenders from directly serving customers, and running down the middle of the bar in every bar was a partition fondly known as the "Zion Curtain." In the novel I pretended it wasn't there because even in a story about vampires, reality can be stranger than fiction.

The distinctions between a "social club" (a bar), a "dining club" (50 percent of receipts from food) and a restaurant (70 percent of receipts from food) remain, along with restrictions on when alcohol can be served, (10:00 AM or noon to midnight or 1:00 AM) and whether minors can be admitted unaccompanied by an adult.

But the more things change, the more other things remain the same. In chapter 22 of Angel Falling Softly, Milada "savored a respectable 1993 Merlot and watched the quiet neighborhood dramas play out in the driveways and front lawns," and muses to herself that "obtaining the Merlot had approximated a visit to a twenties-era speakeasy."

In fact, "packaged liquor, wine, and heavy beer [over 3.2 percent]" will continue to be sold only in duly licensed state liquor stores. Utah's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control boasts that Salt Lake City "offers a world class wine selection at four specialty wine stores."

Count 'em, four! (There are 37 "full service" liquor stores state-wide.) But the legislature did agree that wine bottles no longer needed to carry the official Utah tax stamp (which had to be tediously pasted on every single bottle sold), as the smuggling of bottled wine into Utah was pretty much determined to be a nonexistent crime.

Labels: angel falling softly, angel notes, politics, utah

Lenore Skenazy　(she who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone) writes about raising "Free-Range Kids":

We all want to raise children who are self-confident and independent. And we all want them to be safe. What's happened in the past generation is that our fear for their safety has overwhelmed any old-fashioned notion of the benefits of letting them knock around and make their own fun. Even make their own mistakes.

When I was growing up, my parents' two unbreakable rules were: "Go outside and play!" and "Be home in time for dinner!" What we did in the meantime was pretty much up to us. Perish that thought nowadays! Skenazy goes on to point out that

since its peak in the early '90s, the crime level has plummeted by about 50 percent. Crimes against kids and adults are back to the levels of 1970. Here in New York, they're back to the levels of about 1963. So if you were growing up and playing outside in the '70s or '80s, your children are actually safer than you were.

To be honest, I am a little surprised that none of my adventures sent me to the ER (like some weird, medieval curse, my younger brother seemed to be the designated injuree, though he's still alive and kicking). Except that the general public hasn't processed these facts because

when you go to CNN, there's another wide-eyed child staring out at you--a cold case they'll plaster on the screen if it's a slow news day (i.e., a day when no white girls were abducted). Leave CNN and you're back to CSI or Law & Order SVU, where it's the same story, served up with a bow of duct tape.

This isn't only a U.S. phenomenon. NHK recently ran a time-filling news story about two teenage girls who stole a scooter and snatched a purse. It included a CSI-type photo of the neatly-arranged evidence (the scooter, the purse, some junk they bought with the money in the purse).

This being a national news broadcast, I waited for the other shoe to drop. Something like: "Teenage girl admits killing dad with ax." But no. That was it. The crime spree lasted all of an afternoon. As it turned out, the police didn't even bother pressing charges.

This kind of paranoia gets Japanese in as big a tizzy as it does Americans. Scowling juvenile delinquents currently populate Japanese TV dramas like castoffs from a West Side Story revival. As Peter Payne puts it, "Once the Japanese people decide they're going to freak out about something, everyone gets on board."

Except that Koichi Hamai, professor of law at Ryukoku University, found that "rates for crimes by juveniles are not increasing as a percentage of overall crimes; nor do they show any tendency to occur from an earlier age." Moreover, there's "no evidence that Japan's law and order situation is deteriorating."

Of course, we don't really believe the world is ending in our own back yard. It's always the fault of those bums in Shelbyville.

According to Hamai's research, fifty percent of his respondents believed that "crime has increased nationwide over the previous two years." But only four percent thought it had increased in their own neighborhood. Americans say the same thing about the politicians they elect (well, maybe not if they're from Illinois).

Labels: deep thoughts, japan, politics, social studies

I've previously heaped praised on My Otome Hime, and having reached the end of the dystopian second season and the series, I can confirm that it only gets better (though the extras include some silly pandering just to make sure we don't all take it too seriously).

In episode 18 ("Whiteout"), the insufferable Princess Mashiro is shown to have been the pawn of the Schwartz and the equally insufferable Grand Duke Nagi. What follows is a close approximation of the Shoukei chapters at the beginning of A Thousand Leagues of Wind. The back and forth between lowbrow comedy and stark drama can give you a whiplash though.

And in the wickedly comedic "By the Red Sky" bonus episode, Akane and Kazuya, having run off in the Harlequin conclusion to "In the Crimson Sky," are about to bed down in what (hilariously) looks for all the world like a seedy Motel 6 when they are tracked down by the Secret Service so Kazuya can become king after his father dies.

This also means they can't consummate the relationship. The moral of the story: primogeniture sucks and sometimes love conquers nothing and just creates problems instead. I appreciate a Y/A series with 100 percent comic book values, but sporting the message that while utopian ideals have their place, trying to run the world by them is ruinous.

Labels: anime reviews

Jonathan McIntosh puts everything in its proper context here.

Labels: buffy, twilight

My sister's analysis of Darcy from Pride and Prejudice reminds me of the current NHK historical drama, Tenchijin, about a minor daimyo, Kagekatsu, who governed Echigo Province from 1578 to 1623. He is depicted as a classic introvert, handsome and accomplished, but who loathed "socializing."

There is apparently solid historical evidence for him being a man of very few words (the court historians kept detailed records), and the actor Kazuki Kitamura does a good job of depicting him just dying inside when trapped in situations he has to schmooze his way out of.

Like the great warlord Uesugi Kenshin, whom he succeeded, when faced with a battle or political dilemma, Kagekatsu was wont to retreat to a literal cave to think things through. If he'd been lord of Pemberley instead of Echigo, he would have spent most of his time in the study.

When dealing with the hyper-extroverted warlord Hideyoshi, he dragged along his gregarious adopted brother, Kanetsugu (Satoshi Tsumabuki), to do the talking, a la Aaron and Moses. Kanetsugu had to work hard to convince Hideyoshi that his brother was being quiet, not contemptuous.

As Jonathan Rauch explains,

Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion.

Kitamura's Kagekatsu would make a good Darcy. Not surprisingly, the NHK series is told from the point of view of Kanetsugu, not Kagekatsu. Introverts really are boring, but they prefer it that way.

Labels: books, criticism, history, japan

Set Apart (Exploring the Christian Faith through Japanese Animation) by Daniel Cronquist (ISBN 978-1414112565).

This isn't a book review because I haven't read the book. I'm making note of it because I find it such an intriguing subject. I found out about the book from the Okazu blog.

Here's an excerpt from the Amazon listing:

Outside of our memory, in a forgotten dream, lies a world surrounded by walls. In an abandoned dormitory far from town live the Haibane. Not quite human, they hatch from cocoons and grow gray wings. They are "set apart."

While not directly a Christian story, the characters and themes found within [Haibane Renmei] reflect much of God's truth. This book is a journey for the reader showing God's truth can be found even in the most unlikely of places.

Erica Friedman comments:

[Cronquist] interprets the characters as representations of the Seven Deadly Sins. I don't think this is as crazy as it sounds--I saw Haibane Renmei as taking place in a kind of purgatory, and I'm coming from a decidedly non-Christian point of view.

The purgatory theme occurred to me as well. As I wrote in my review:

Couched as a modern fable--never digressing to explain itself--Haibane Renmei slowly evolves through the exacting study of character into a thoughtful and moving exegesis on the Catholic concept of purgatory (or "spirit prison") and the inextinguishable possibilities of salvation.

The kanji on the book cover mean "Salvation from sin."

Netflix has the DVDs. The U.S. distributor, Geneon, shut down in 2007. Funimation acquired its catalog but hasn't reissued Haibane Renmei. The Right Stuf has the first two of the remaindered volumes at a deep discount (they're out of the other two). Used editions are available at Amazon.

Incidentally, the publisher of Set Apart, WinePress, touts itself as a kind of Christian POD and vanity press, the primary difference being that it lists titles with Christian book distributors and bookstores as well as Ingram and Baker & Taylor.

Labels: anime reviews, personal favs, religion

Noting that "only 2 percent of Japanese births [are] to unmarried women," Half Sigma wonders if "Christian people see the irony that non-Christian Japan has much better family values than the United States?"

Except that with a birthrate of 1.34, it won't be long before Japan runs out of people to practice those family values on (not to mention the debilitating effects of a declining tax base on municipal budgets--California at a national level).

I predict that the population in Japan will continue to fall until, as Steve Sailer's "affordable family formation" theory stipulates, raising 2.1 children is no longer ruinously expensive. In cost-of-living terms, contemporary Japanese society is not "family friendly."

This is one reason why the crude marriage rate per 1000 population (2006) is 5.8 in Japan and 7.3 in the U.S. (highest in the G8).

The term "parasite single" refers to children who live with their parents well into adulthood in order to preserve what is a fairly modest standard of living compared to the U.S. Thus the threat of getting kicked out of the house becomes a big lever on behavior.

Besides the normal social mechanisms of shaming and conformity, which have Kryptonite strength even in postmodern Japan. But that's only half of it.

Worker productivity in Japan is 71 percent that of the U.S. This is mainly the fault of the white-collar sector. The typical American businessman cranks out as much "work" in seven hours as his Japanese counterpart does in ten. All that time spent at the office is not time spent at home.

That means less emphasis on family life--and less emphasis on quality-of-life family-centered consumables, which makes Japan’s export-driven economy more vulnerable to economic downturns elsewhere (like in the U.S.). And, of course, less time spent making more Japanese.

The same way grumpy old white men rhapsodize about the "good old days" (whenever those were), Japanese rhapsodize about the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868). The population during that period remained fairly constant at 20-30 million (three times that of Great Britain in 1800).

The present population of Japan (127 million, 146,000 square miles, 12 percent arable land) could fall by a full third and still be the same as Germany (82 million, 138,000 square miles, 34 percent arable land).

But the other deeply-rooted problem is the secondary education system. Beginning with high school entrance exams, kids face a series of test-score death matches that make NCLB look like a game of Tiddlywinks, the training for which no parent trusts to public education alone.

So I don't see Japan's birth rate rising until the cost of living falls to affordable levels and it becomes socially acceptable for parents to not impoverish themselves funding the private tutors and cram schools that constitute Japan's vast educational-industrial complex.

Labels: japan, social studies

I turned off the DTV converter to watch it live! KUED (PBS 7 and UEN 9) pulled the plug at 10:00 AM (MDT). No fanfare, straight to snow. Gee whiz, if you haven't figured it out by now, it's time for some reality therapy.

KBYU (BYU 11) ran a crawl until 12:30 PM, and then preceded the cutoff with a retrospective on the station's beginnings, including a tip of the hat to Utah native and pioneering television inventor, Philo Farnsworth.

Then they cut to the control room and the current station manager and the very first KBYU station manager threw the switch together. It was a classy send-off.

By 1:00 PM (MDT) the only remaining signal was from a low-power UHF Spanish-language station. But an hour later, KSL (NBC 5) came back on the air running "Hey, where'd my TV go?" infomercials for the clueless.

Still, it's kinda weird flipping through the channels and seeing nothing but empty-channel static. Like a scene out of one of those end-of-the-world movies.

To be sure, it's not exactly the end of analog. The audiophiles have their vinyl and turntables, and FM and AM are going to be around for a while. FM is slowly drifting towards digital, but AM should stay analog forever.

You know, just in case the aliens and robots invade and the last remaining humans are forced to band together around their shortwave sets.

Labels: DTV, technology, television

A funny, fascinating, and highly entertaining discussion about "The Science of Art" by neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran. His talk begins at the 22 minute mark in the video. The first address by neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux presents a more empirical approach to the theories proposed.


MP3 and MP4 podcast versions can be found at the link above.

Labels: art, criticism, deep thoughts, science

Digital Manga has created a Kindle version of Ai no Kusabi vol. 1. It's wisely priced at half that of the paperback. No other formats yet.

Labels: publishing, translations, yaoi

My Yashakiden website is now up.

The Yasha (夜叉) in Yashakiden (夜叉姫伝) is the same as in Inuyasha (犬夜叉). The former means: "The Demon Princess Files." The literally latter means: "The Dog Demon."

Labels: translations, yashakiden