I let my Netflix, Crunchyroll, and HIDIVE subscriptions expire at the beginning of the year and spent the next six months mostly watching live-action Jdrama on Rakuten Viki, Tubi, and Jme TV.

The result of this little experiment? Far and away, anime remains my preferred medium for scripted entertainment. So I dropped Jme TV and won't renew Viki. Netflix stays on hiatus until its anime catalog refreshes.

It's not just me.

As Miles Atherton reports on Anime News Network, according to recent data released by Netflix, in terms of total hours viewed, anime not only overperforms in its category overall but makes up almost 80 percent of all Japanese language content viewed.

Starting with deep wells of proven source material, the inherent constraints of anime production sufficiently discipline the process (no anime studio has the resources to crank out a $200 million CGI flop) so that when everything comes together, a watchable work of art is the result on a reasonably regular basis.

Good stories told well.

To start with, this isn't about production values. HD video technology has largely leveled the playing field in that regard. Rather, the underlying problems come down to how the stories are structured, paced, and told.

Many hour-long Jdrama episodes should be thirty minutes shorter. (So should most movies.) I usually skip anime compilation films but doing the opposite works better. Editing Demon Slayer: Mugen Train into seven episodes improved on the movie. When it comes to single arc stories, a runtime longer than that just drags everything out.

The extended Yor arc in the second season of Spy x Family could have been easily compiled into a two-hour movie. But it works better in a five-episode format. And, frankly, I would have rather seen Code White handled the same way, creating a complete second season instead of a single cour.

A half-hour live-action show like Kamen Rider: Zero-One is thirty episodes too long. Past a certain point, filling the available time results in mindless repetition. I made it to the end of Kamen Rider: Kuuga solely on the strength of Joe Odagiri's performance and a fine supporting cast that created a great Scooby Gang.

Incidentally, comparing Kamen Rider: Kuuga (2001) and Kamen Rider: Zero-One (2020) illustrates how extraordinarily far budget CGI has progressed in the past two decades.

Yet despite the superior production values of the latter, the acting and dialogue elevate the former, even with its near-fatal plot holes and running a full two seasons (that's one season too many).

When Hollywood is running on all cylinders, it gets episodic television exactly right, with standalone episodes loosely linked by season-long dramatic arcs running in the background. So Fuyuhiko Takahori has the cause and effect backwards. The common point of failure is stretching a single story over more episodes than are needed to tell it.

There are writers who have mastered the formula. 99.9 Criminal Lawyer and Unnatural both run standalone episodes against background narrative arcs that pay off reasonably well. Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo tells a complete story in six half-hour standalone episodes and completes a satisfying series-long arc.

But more often than not, you feel like you're stuck on a hamster wheel, spinning around and around and going nowhere. Anime is not immune to the problem. Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen spend too long on the hamster wheel (a rut the battle shonen genre easily falls into) while Frieren jumps off before overstaying its welcome.

This is why I prefer the slice-of-life genre. Challenges are taken on episode by episode, with an emphasis on the character arcs. In Komi Can't Communicate, Komi struggling toward her goal and Tadano simply being a genuinely good person (harder to depict than it sounds) make the story compelling.

Likewise, in the plot-heavy My Happy Marriage (Cinderella in early 20th century Japan), I find myself more interested in Miyo's self-actualization (that tired term actually applies here) than the tangled web of political machinations.

Interesting characters create interesting stories, not the other way around. In Jdrama romances especially, the realization too often dawns that, aside from the sturm und drang of the romance itself, these are really boring people. That and a smattering of common sense would fix most of their issues.

Both the abstract nature of anime as an artistic medium and the physical constraints of the production process make it easier to align the story to the viewing time in ways that are both more concrete and rewarding to the viewer.

Related posts

Anime reassessed (pacing matters)
Anime reassessed (culture matters)
Anime reassessed (numbers matter)

Labels: anime, anime lists, japanese culture, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, jdrama, jme, netflix, streaming, tubi, viki

International media distributor Remow teamed up with Nihon Eiga Broadcasting to bring historical dramas to overseas audiences with its Samurai vs Ninja website and YouTube channel. Remow has also gotten into anime licensing and continues to refrain from exclusives, sharing content on Tubi and YouTube.

Tonbo! (2024) is the best title in their anime portfolio so far. The manga by Ken Kawasaki and Yu Furusawa has been serialized in Weekly Golf Digest since 2014 and currently totals 52 volumes. So the viewer would do well to keep in mind that this isn't your usual shonen sports drama. It is written for golfers.
In other words, if you don't find Tonbo's inventive use of a 3 iron inherently fascinating, then the series probably isn't for you.

The plot merges the premises of Barakamon (2014), in which a professional calligrapher with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island and meets a bunch of quirky kids, and Rising Impact (2024), in which an eight-year-old golfing prodigy from the sticks is recruited to the elite Camelot Academy.

For idiosyncratic reasons I never divined, the names of several characters in Rising Impact are derived from the aforementioned Camelot, like Gawain and Lancelot. And speaking of Gawain (Misaki Kuno), a good part of the fun is listening to him (her) speak in a Tohoku accent you could cut with a knife.

In Tonbo! a professional golfer with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island in the Tokara archipelago and there encounters a quirky island girl named Tonbo, who turns out to be a golfing prodigy. He sees in her great potential, potential that will remain dormant and untested if she remains an island girl.

Along with smoothing out her more eccentric golfing habits (while not interfering with her unique approach to the game), he nudges her to leave the island when she graduates from junior high. The island has no high school. Students continuing their education live with relatives or attend boarding schools.

The Tokara archipelago is collectively governed as a village of Kagoshima Prefecture, so the favored destination for transfer students is the port city of Kagoshima and the surrounding areas.

While thoroughly entertaining, Birdie Wing (2022) and Rising Impact are so over the top that they more resemble superhero franchises that have to constantly invent new comically overpowered villains (and golf courses designed by M.C. Escher) to challenge the skills of the comically overpowered protagonists.

Tonbo! is far more realistic and treats the subject with the most technical accuracy. The main characters have actual character arcs, so there's no need for vaudevillian villains to create dramatic conflict. Instead, we focus our attention on how Tonbo evolves as an already gifted golfer and grows as a human being.

It's been an entertaining journey so far and I hope we can follow her all the way to a professional career.

The second cour is a continuation of season 1 starting with episode 14.

Related videos

Tonbo! (Tubi YouTube Prime)
Barakamon
Birdie Wing
Rising Impact

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, manga, remow, samurai vs ninja, sports, tubi

Over the span of a decade or so, I'd been putting together a collection of Yokohama Shopping Log from Honto. I got to volume seven before it went out of print and Honto exited the physical books business.

Happily, a few years later, the English translation has been published and the Japanese edition is available as an ebook.

Imagine that life as we know it came to a screeching halt. When the apocalypse was over and the dust settled, what remained looked like northern Maine in the summer and Yokohama was reduced to the size of Bangor. The world as we know it is over and human civilization has entered its twilight years. But otherwise we all feel fine.

Alpha Hatsuseno is an android (indistinguishable from a human being). No, she and her robot allies are not hunting down the few stragglers left. When she's not exploring the Hudson River School landscapes on her scooter or during one of her walkabouts, she runs an off-the-beaten-track coffee shop on the coast.

Until the coffee shop gets wiped out by a typhoon. But, hey, that's life. A good excuse for another walkabout.

In some places amidst the crumbling infrastructure, the street lights still come on at night. In others, the street lights have evolved into trees that glow in the dark where the streets used to be. The planet finds a way forward, simultaneously disintegrating and remaking itself as it takes a leisurely stroll into oblivion.

I like to imagine Yokohama Shopping Log as the sequel to Girl's Last Tour, as if Chito and Yuuri and their halftrack fell through a wormhole and ended up in the bucolic countryside of Non Non Biyori or Super Cub or Laid-Back Camp.

In the English language, the ending of the world has been most famously memorialized by Robert Frost.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

But contrary to Dylan Thomas, there's something to be said for going "gentle into that good night." Yokohama Shopping Log exemplifies the iyashikei genre that portrays "characters living out peaceful lives in calming environments." As it turns out, the world will not end with fire or ice but with a long wistful sigh.

Written and illustrated by Hitoshi Ashinano, whose show-don't-tell pen and ink artwork is often devoid of text. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Seven Seas in the United States.

Related links

BookWalker (English emanga)
BookWalker (Japanese emanga)
Amazon (Kindle and paperback)

Labels: anime, anime lists, apocalyptic fiction, bookwalker, ebooks, japanese culture, manga, manga reviews, technology

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for Japan and Japanese.

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Kamen Rider: Kuuga (2001) A young Joe Odagiri sets this entry in the long-running franchise apart from the rest. Alas, it suffers from the monster-of-the-week formula and is further hurt by the bad guys having no clear-cut motivation, which turns it into serial-killer-of-the-week. The body count is astronomical. But you can watch it to enjoy Joe Odagiri and a talented supporting cast.
• By contrast, Kamen Rider: Zero-One (2020) follows the George of the Jungle (1997) rule: "Nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos." Zero-One also illustrates how far budget CGI has evolved in twenty years. Alas, good CGI can't compensate for bad scripts. The series might have worked as a smarter Terminator prequel than the usual but instead gets painfully repetitious.
• Liz and the Blue Bird (2018) is a side story from Kyoto Animation's Sound Euphonium franchise. The movie revisits the first season from the perspective of two members of the high school brass band (supporting characters in the main series) as they rehearse a duet to be featured in the prefectural band competition.
• Onihei (2017) is based on the crime novels by Shotaro Ikenami. Heizo Hasegawa is police superintendent with an intimidating reputation (oni means devil). He and his men specifically investigate crimes of theft, armed robbery, and arson. This action-heavy Edo period police procedural doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights afforded to suspects at the time.
• Priest of Darkness (1975) shares a similar premise with Zankuro (2001). Like Ken Watanabe's Zankuro, Shintaro Katsu (of Zatoichi fame) plays a tea master with a high social rank but a meager stipend. Constantly hustling to pay the rent, he and his little gang settle disputes, investigate crimes, and dispense unofficial justice around the neighborhood.
• Sonny Chiba again plays the historical figure Yagyu Jubei in Shogun's Mission. Jubei's brother is an inspector on the famed Tokai Highway. Yagyu Jubei and his band of ninjas tag along as his bodyguards. This is classic road movie material with at least one big fight scene per episode. The Japanese title translates as "Yagyu's Unruly Journey."
• Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan (2017) is a live-action spin-off from Hirohiko Araki's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series. I never got into the latter but quite like the former. Kishibe Rohan is a mangaka who investigates paranormal mysteries for inspiration when he gets writer's block. Basically he and his editor are Mulder and Scully. Issei Takahashi does well in the lead role.
• Speaking of road movies, from 1962 to 1989, Shintaro Katsu made twenty-six Zatoichi films, along with four seasons of the Zatoichi television series. Each episode has the itinerant blind masseur running into a bunch of bad guys who will get sliced and diced in his inimitable style by the time the end credits roll.

Related posts

Tubi in Japanese (1)
Tubi in Japanese (2)
Tubi in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, kyoani, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television reviews, tubi

Back in 2020, the weekly Japanese women's lifestyle magazine Anan featured Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on the cover of its July 8 issue, with feature articles about directors Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki and voice actress Atsuko Tanaka.

Atsuko Tanaka was the voice and soul of Motoko Kusanagi. Alas, the past tense is necessary here, as Atsuko Tanaka died on Tuesday at the age of 61. Her list of credits on ANN includes over four hundred video game and anime roles, including Harumi Kiyama in A Certain Scientific Railgun and Flamme in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But she will be forever remembered as the Major, one of my favorite characters of all time in any medium and the one that truly ignited my interest in anime.

A fascinating cultural conundrum revealed by the advent of manga and anime in America is that traditional Japan is so much better at creating believable female action characters than progressive Hollywood. Motoko Kusanagi is a girl boss you never doubt deserves to be in charge.

Nor is there any mystery about why Aramaki has her back or why her mostly male team is so willing to follow her lead.

Although the movie directed by Mamoru Oshii made Motoko and Ghost in the Shell famous, it was Kenji Kamiyama's Stand Alone Complex series and Solid State Society that defined the canon, into which Kamiyama and Aramaki have done a good job retrofitting their latest installment.

The opening arc of the new series takes place in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Yeah, a bit on the been-there-done-that Mad Max side. But the series returns to form and Kamayama's classic Stand Alone Complex cyberpolice procedural roots once we get the Scooby Gang together again and back in Japan.

I like Purin taking over from Batou as the Tachikoma wrangler. The only real mark against SAC_2045 is that the Post Human storyline falls too far down the AI-as-antagonist rabbit hole. Granted, this AI is more interesting than most and Purin is the driving force during the concluding arc.

I wouldn't mind an episodic spin-off series that focused on Purin and the Tachikoma solving odd problems and investigating street-level cases.

At its best, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a cyberpunk Blue Bloods, and I consider that high praise. I can easily imagine Section Chief Aramaki and Commissioner Reagan trading places or teams and soldiering on with barely a hitch.

The origins story Ghost in the Shell: Arise is on Crunchyroll (with a younger Motoko voiced by Maaya Sakamoto). Netflix has Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Unfortunately, the rest of the installments in the Ghost in the Shell franchise are scattered all over the map.

Tubi has a dubbed version of the original movie. Many of the titles are on YouTube and Amazon Prime, though it might be more affordable to track down the DVD and Blu-ray editions. Anime News Network has an encyclopedic media review for the entire franchise.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, ghost in the shell, japanese culture, streaming, technology, thinking about writing, tubi

The human species has been going places ever since our ancestors learned to walk upright. With our restless feet taking us to every corner of the planet, it was only a matter of time before we started telling stories about how we got there, who we met, what we saw, and the interesting stuff that happened along the way.

And thus was born the road trip genre.

Convergent literary evolution consequently produced epic road trips as far-flung as The Odyssey from the western tradition and Journey to the West from the eastern tradition. The theme established here and elsewhere is that getting there isn't so much half the fun as it is pretty much the entire point.

So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of the story, there is no there there, no end of the line, no actual destination in mind. Just the journey. Consider the rootless gunman from classic American westerns, epitomized by Shane and Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

They're going someplace. We don't know where and they don't either. They'll know where they're going when they get there.

The Man with No Name was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a ronin wandering across Edo period Japan. He had plenty of company. In fact, at one point in the Zatoichi series, he crosses swords with the blind masseur, who is also always on the road in search of a good dice game and a righteous cause.

In the world of narrative fiction, the eternal road trip is a neat device to keep the writer from telling the same story in the same place.

Written in the 16th century, Journey to the West follows the legendary pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled from China to Central Asia and India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts. The story and characters have inspired countless adaptations, Dragon Ball perhaps being the most famous.

More recent examples of the road trip include Kino's Journey and Spice and Wolf. The road trip can show up as an arc in a longer series, as when Yuuta bikes off to the northern tip of Hokkaido in Honey and Clover. And often turns into a heroic journey, as in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But Girls' Last Tour may present us with the road trip in its purest form.

The story begins in medias res with no explanations, no backstory. Chito and Yuuri are driving a halftrack through a huge and desolate industrial complex, looking for a way out. They finally emerge into a gray winter day. The whole world is gray. All around them are the remains of an apocalyptic military conflict.

They are apparently the only survivors of an unnamed military organization that fell apart through sheer entropy. Their uniforms and helmets place them in the first half of the 20th century.

Chito's halftrack is based on the Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 101. Yuuri carries a bolt-action rifle and has what appears to be a Balkenkreuz on her helmet. Early on, they stumble across a graveyard of military equipment, including the wreckage of a Cold War era Tupolev Tu-95.

The remnants of every war ever fought everywhere. From there they venture into a ruined and depopulated megalopolis built by a highly advanced civilization. They are wandering through the decline and fall of a 22nd century Roman Empire that has so far regressed to the early 20th century and will certainly fall further.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. Rather than with a bang or a whimper (T.S. Eliot), or with fire or ice (Robert Frost), this is a world destined to simply fade away. Hopefully to be reborn again another day.

Related links

Girls' Last Tour
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Honey and Clover
Kino's Journey (2017)
Spice and Wolf (2024)

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, geography, history, japanese culture, manga, politics, thinking about writing

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Bakuman (2013) presents an unflinching account about what it takes to become a manga artist. The process has largely gone digital in the last decade and emanga outsell paperbacks but the merciless challenges of the creative process haven't changed. Check out Sleeper Hit (2016) on Viki for a more modern take from the publisher's perspective. Also see my longer review.
• Daughter of Lupin (2019) is a live-action spin-off of the popular anime action comedy. Like Marilyn Munster on The Munsters, Hana is the only normal person in her odd family. She's a librarian engaged to a police officer from a family of police officers, which causes no end of comedic problems when her crime family gets framed for a series of crimes they didn't actually commit.
• Lupin the Third (1971–2023) Along with six television series, there are at least fifty Lupin the Third movies at the latest count. Tubi has about three dozen of them.
• Pinwheel Hamakichi's Spell (1992) A disgraced Edo period police officer, banished from the capital for accepting a bribe, returns five years later to search for his daughter. Still respected as a detective, he is prevailed upon to solve crimes in an unofficial capacity, and makes ends meet by selling pinwheel toys from a roadside stand.
• Shadow Warriors (1980) Sonny Chiba reassembled the cast and crew from Shogun's Samurai (1978) to play ninja leader Hattori Hanzo (like Yagyu Jubei, a documented historical figure). By day, he's the layabout owner of an Edo bathhouse (if you're looking for gratuitous nudity, look no further). By night, he and his ninjas fix the nasty problems the shogunate wants swept under the rug.
• Steamboy (2004) is about a boy named Edward Steam. Yes, the whole thing is that obvious. This steampunk adventure takes place in Victorian England and includes a big nod to George Stephenson, the "Father of the British Steam Railways." If nothing else, the constant whirring, hissing, clanking, and grinding of gears will be a visual delight for any gearhead. Also see my longer review.
• Summer Days With Coo (2007) Coo is a kappa, a mythological water-dwelling reptile with a penchant for cucumbers and sumo wrestling. The story asks what happens when a fairy tale character ends up in modern suburban Japan and meets a boy named Koichi. Based on the novels by Masao Kogure.
• Toradora (2008) As both a plot device and a well-used anime trope, perhaps no anime series exemplifies the tsundere character type better than Ryuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka in Toradora. This high school romantic comedy works on every level and ends on exactly the right note. Tubi has English dubbed and Spanish subtitled versions as well. Also see my longer review.
• Uzumasa Limelight (2014) looks at the samurai action genre through the eyes of an aging stuntman who has difficulty getting cast in new productions after spending his entire career on a weekly historical drama like Abarenbo Shogun, that was on air from 1978 to 2008.

Related posts

Tubi in Japanese (1)
Tubi in Japanese (2)
Tubi in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, streaming, television reviews, tubi

In a previous post, I discussed what has become a perennial problem in the entertainment business: spending too much time on too little plot.

One example I offered for efficient scriptwriting is Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo, that tells a satisfying tale in six half-hour largely standalone episodes.

Gamera Rebirth also does a good job in six forty-five minute episodes, integrating a backstory with the complexity of The X-Files without dragging the audience through all the nitty gritty details.

It then queues up a sequel (a single scene following the credit scroll) without resorting to a cliffhanger ending.

But perhaps the epitome of a tightly written teledrama is Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation. In all of twenty-five minutes, we get a beginning, middle, and end, a (somewhat predictable) twist halfway through, and a conclusion that provides the promised payoff with another clever (and foreshadowed) twist.

Followed by a brief coda that ties it back to the One Piece universe.

This may be a bit of a spoiler, but Monsters takes a cue from the "management by walking around" governing style on display in samurai action classics such as Abarenbo Shogun and Mito Komon, that has a high government official mingling among the common folk into order to ferret out the bad guys.

It's an approach favored as well by Emperor Shouryuu in the Twelve Kingdoms.

This little gem was penned by One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda. Granted, if you're not familiar with One Piece, you may wonder what a French swordsman, a samurai, and a dragon are doing in a town straight out of the American West. But you quickly stop wondering because the narrative can carry that weight.

I don't follow One Piece closely and wasn't aware of the connection before watching the show. And yet despite the odd anachronisms, it was still one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in quite a while.

Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, netflix, thinking about writing, viki

Why do western audiences like anime? One reason is precisely because anime doesn't pander to western audiences. Or rather, anime in general does not make a concerted effort to appeal to modern audiences outside Japan.

The Critical Drinker deserves the credit for turning that expression into a pejorative. To be sure, any trending social and political movement will inevitably show up in Japanese popular culture (often using the same English terminology). But in almost every case, it is an ephemeral surf that leaves the deeper societal currents undisturbed.

Dating back at least 2500 years, Confucianism is the common cultural cornerstone of the Sinosphere. In particular, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share a worldview with deep roots in Confucianism. Especially in South Korea, that worldview "shapes the moral system, the way of life, social relations between old and young, high culture, and much of the legal system."

It's easy to spot an almost identical postmodern veneer around the developed world and assume that all such societies are essentially the same. But no matter how contemporary a society may appear on the surface, the bedrock culture remains. If only for the sake of verisimilitude, it must constitute an inextricable part of any story being told in that context.

The payoff is that understanding and respecting the immutable nature of the culture makes for a reliable source of tension and conflict and narrative depth.

Challenging traditional values is one thing. Eliminating them entirely is quite another. That's what China did during the Cultural Revolution. The result was the wholesale destruction of an entire generation. It comes as no surprise that those very same communists are now hawking the ancient cultural heritage and Confucian teachings they once vilified.

China learned the hard way the value of Chesterton's Fence.

Granted, aside from a handful of trending topics and popular political slogans, most people would have a hard time identifying what those cultural values are. But they do recognize their absence. Like a living organism deprived of a necessary nutrient, though its absence may go unnoticed at first, its loss will inevitably exact a toll.

Regardless of the genre, anime is deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Even when seemingly lost in translation, it shores up the story being told. From the hierarchal language to the education system, to food, fashion, architecture, and a myriad of other customs that are centuries old and very much alive.

A great example of this is Dragon Pilot, that starts at a modern JSDF air force base, and then tosses dragons, miko (Shinto shrine maidens), and ancient religious rites into the mix. Dragon Pilot introduces the shrine maidens in the last third of the story, while Otaku Elf takes place entirely in the shrine maiden genre.

The Japanese title for the latter is Edomae Elf and Elda has been hanging around Takamimi Shrine since the dawn of the Edo period. More recently in the early twentieth century, the Taisho period has become the go-to setting for Japan's fantasy steam punk era, as in My Happy Marriage and Demon Slayer.
In an interview posted on Anime News Network, My Happy Marriage director Takehiro Kubota was asked if he was concerned about how viewers outside Japan would enjoy and interpret the anime.

"Not really," was his reassuring answer.

In fact, I never imagined that it would be seen so widely in so many different countries, so I was grateful when I heard that it had been watched by so many people overseas and had such a positive response. Perhaps due to Miyo's uniquely Japanese character? It's somewhat hard to express the nuance, but Miyo is a quite modest person who clearly doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. I found it very interesting that her character was accepted in other cultures where being able to assert one's own opinion is a highly valued character trait.

A big part of what draws western audiences to anime is precisely because it is not made for western audiences. The aesthetics of anime create an additional level of remove that paradoxically makes reality all the more real. So as it turns out, then, I do like the isekai genre very much, because watching anime takes me on a voyage to another world.

Related posts

Anime reassessed (pacing matters)
Anime reassessed (culture matters)
Anime reassessed (numbers matter)

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, culture, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, politics, streaming, thinking about writing

Thinking about slice-of-life anime, I believe the genre often has an clear-cut narrative structure, what I call the outsider-to-insider learning curve.

In Super Cub, Koguma starts out as a novice. Learning the ropes first from her mechanic and then from Reiko, a Super Cub aficionado, Koguma goes from outsider to insider over the first half of the series. But neither of them have ridden their motorcycles in the winter, so a whole arc is devoted them learning how to adapt their Super Cubs (and themselves) to the cold, again going from outsiders to insiders.

In the last episode, their friend Shii buys a Super Cub and so she as well is on her journey from outsider to insider.

Non Non Biyori begins with Hotaru moving from Tokyo and attending her first day of school. The quintessential outsider. Laid-Back Camp has Nadeshiko biking to a scenic overlook for a view of Mt. Fuji. There she meets Rin and gets interested in camping. As in Super Cub, the first season follows Nadeshiko as she learns about camping from Rin and the school's camping club. As the POV character, what she learns, the audience learns.

In the food genre, Solitary Gourmet features Yutaka Matsushige eating at a different (real) restaurant every episode (being the proprietor of a one-man import-export business is the pretext for him traveling all over the place). Every episode begins with him as an outsider at that particular restaurant and ends with him an insider, having observed the cooks and clientele and eaten practically everything on the menu.

Samurai Gourmet and Wakako Zake follow a similar formula. The latter even includes details about the restaurants visited at the end of each episode.

What makes Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform more of a Mary Sue (though an entertaining one) is that she goes from outsider to insider in one episode. By contrast, in Snow White with the Red Hair, earning her insider status takes Shirayuki most of the first cour.

As a general rule, the romance genre always benefits from a learning curve unrelated to the romantic relationship, such as Sawako in Kimi ni Todoke using her nickname as an impetus to study up on Japanese folklore, which pays off brilliantly at the end of the second season.

And in Insomniacs After School, given the task of revitalizing the astronomy club, Ganta takes up the hobby of astrophotography and finally learns how to use the expensive digital camera his father gave him.

In the last third of the season, Ganta and Isaki travel around the Noto Peninsula searching for shooting locations, a narrative arc now made all the more poignant in the aftermath of the 2024 Noto earthquake. A realistic learning curve can't help but touch upon the real world.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese culture, thinking about writing

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from using third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Blue Thermal (2022) follows Tamaki Tsuru as she learns to fly gliders in the college soaring club. The movie makes the common mistake of cramming in too many plot points from the manga, and relies on angst as an excuse for doing really dumb stuff, but the unique subject matter kept me interested.
• Cats of Japan (2020) is a cute travel documentary about cats lounging around and being cool. The kind of show to watch when you just want to kick back and relax.
• Detective Dobu (1991) is an Edo period Columbo, whose slovenly and bumbling ways disguise his keen mind and relentless drive to catch the criminal (although Columbo never drank as much as Dobu does, if at all). The series covers the same material as the earlier made-for-television movies, also on Tubi.
• Crisis: Special Security Squad (2017) Shun Oguri heads a secret team of specialists tackling threats the regular cops can't handle. In both good and bad ways, it's pretty much by-the-numbers for the genre.
• The Great War of Archimedes (2019) The first six minutes documents the sinking of the battleship Yamato. The rest of the movie is a political drama (that feels like a stage play) about how Admiral Yamamoto tried to scuttle the project in favor of building more carriers. Also see my longer review.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One (2020) This comedy action series in the long-running Kamen Rider franchise could be a Terminator prequel. Enjoyable in small doses as practically every episode is the same and not all that different. It gets old fast if you don't pace yourself.
• The Life of Bangaku (2002) is an Edo period action comedy starring acclaimed actor Koji Yakusho as an expert swordsman who is simply too honest and principled for his own good. Directed by Kon Ichikawa.
• Shogun's Samurai (1978) was broadcast in Japan as The Yagyuu Conspiracy. Sonny Chiba stars as the historical figure Yagyuu Jubei. Together with his brother and father, Yagyuu carries out a palace coup in order to install Iemitsu as the third Tokugawa shogun, and then has to deal with the violent blowback.
• Zankuro (2001) Ken Watanabe is a retainer of the shogun during the Edo period. Despite his position in the low aristocracy, his bad habits and his mother's spendthrift ways constantly outstrip his stipend, leaving him to moonlight as a bodyguard or executioner or detective, whatever it takes to make ends meet.

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Tubi in Japanese (2)
Tubi in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, streaming, technology, television reviews, tubi

As I mention in my review of Little Witch Academia, the philosophical and legal dilemmas at the center of Captain America: Civil War and the Incredibles are more often than not settled issues in manga and anime. The existence of superpowered individuals is widely known and they work within a regulatory framework.

One-Punch Man is another recent example. When it comes to consistent world building across an entire franchise, I've taken a particular liking to the three anime series based on the light novels by Kazuma Kamachi.

Sharing many of the same characters and storylines, A Certain Magical Index, A Certain Scientific Railgun, and A Certain Scientific Accelerator take place in Academy City. Imagine if every major high school, university, research institute, and corporate lab in the country had extension campuses within the same prefectural boundaries.

This being Japan, students are tested and ranked from zero (no superpowers) to six (out of this world). Following a normal distribution, there are a lot of zeroes and ones, and only seven Fives. Even the Fives are ranked, with Accelerator at the top. The ranks are logarithmic, so similarly ranked espers can still be orders of magnitude apart in their powers.

Espers are seen as "scientific," as distinguished from skills derived from magic. When Index Librorum Prohibitorum (her name derived from the 103,000 forbidden magical books she's memorized) shows up in Academy City with a bunch of sorcerers and miniskirted Catholic nuns in her wake, her presence throws Toma Kamijo's life into turmoil.

Incidentally, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was an actual list of publications deemed "heretical or contrary to morality." It was revised and updated until 1966, though it contained thousands of volumes, not hundreds of thousands.

As the title makes clear, more than the rest of the franchise, A Certain Magical Index switches back and forth between magical and religious forces or scientific and superpower forces as main drivers of the conflicts. The result is an interesting mix of fantasy and hard science fiction.

Railgun and Accelerator belong almost entirely to the latter genre while half or more of Index could share the same world as The Ancient Magus Bride.

In the second and third seasons of Index, it's the English Reformation redux as the Anglicans and Puritans go to war with the Catholic Church. I get a real kick out of the tossed salad of Western and Eastern religious tropes that show up so often in manga and anime, like Jesus and Buddha sharing a Tokyo apartment in Saint Young Men.

Toma Kamijo, the protagonist in A Certain Magical Index, is actually a negative infinity in the esper superpower rankings. With his right hand, he can negate both magic and esper skills. He seems to be the only one who can do this, which means that all the espers milling about in Academy City create a unique law enforcement problem.

Working alongside the regular police are two additional organizations. "Judgment" is run by the students, who basically form patrol units of glorified hall monitors. Though when the hall monitors have superpowers, they tend to stray outside their jurisdictional boundaries. "Anti-Skill" is comprised of heavily-armed SWAT teams.

But when high-level espers go off the rails, even Anti-Skill can find themselves out of their depth. Then only another Five (or Toma Kamijo) can hope to match them. Kuroko Shirai (a level Four teleporter) is a member of Judgment. She's also roommates with Mikoto Misaka, a level Five, so Mikoto often ends up getting drawn into the fray.

Mikoto has a skill set similar to Magneto in X-Men. Her preferred technique is to propel a coin through a self-generated electric field to hypersonic speeds, hence her "Railgun" moniker.

Despite the proliferation of so many superpowered individuals in Academy City, there is, refreshingly, no one ring to rule them all, no big bad, no supervillain. Accelerator certainly has the potential to step into the role, though his reasoning is that if he really could become the biggest big bad in the world, everybody would leave him alone.

There are, to be sure, a whole bunch of little bads, espers renting out their skills to government and private sector and black market organizations. But they usually play supporting roles to the actual villains. If there is a consistently distinct and identifiable antagonist, it is the academic establishment itself and the accompanying state bureaucracy.

The underlying motivations for these actors come down to ordinary human failings like arrogance, envy, and greed, though A Certain Scientific Accelerator starts out as Magnum Force and turns into the sixth season opening arc of Buffy, where the Scooby Gang resurrects Buffy (with near apocalyptic results in this case).

The crazies aside, they don't perceive themselves as bad people doing bad things. They're too busy filling out grant proposals and delivering papers at conferences to worry about the moral implications of their experiments. Surrounded by so many fascinating labs rats, who can blame them for the odd ethical lapse? Scientific progress justifies all!

Tying the three series together is the kind of underground experiment that the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files would love. It involves the manufacture of 20,000 Railgun clones that have been specifically designed to raise Accelerator's powers to the mythical Level Six through the brute-force use of real-time Darwinian selection.

The fate of the clones draws Mikoto into a no-win conflict with Accelerator, the most powerful level Five in Academy City. When we first meet him, Accelerator is a bona fide sociopath. But not beyond salvation. The terrible things we see him doing were not his idea. But he is the reason the Railgun clones were created.

Mikoto's low point comes when she realizes that fighting the establishment using the "Hulk smash!" approach simply results in one Pyrrhic victory after the next. Wreck a laboratory and they'll build another. The only way to stop these Doctor Frankensteins to make them question the validity of the experiments themselves.

This is when Toma steps in to settle things with a good old-fashioned fist fight, he being the only person who can literally reduce every superhero to his level.

Toma takes so much damage getting close enough to deliver the beat-downs that he's got his own hospital room reserved for him. Luckily for him, he can count the Frog-Faced Doctor as an ally. Also known as Heaven Canceller, the Frog-Faced Doctor can reattach limbs and bring practically anybody back to life as long as they're not stone-cold dead.

Along the way, Toma likely sets some sort of cinematic record for getting into brawls with women. As Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker says in True Lies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." Academy City is an equal opportunity employer on both sides of the equation and thus home to some of the more interesting female villains in the genre.

Though as they all eventually discover, defeating someone in physical or supernatural combat doesn't change them unless what gets them up in the morning changes as well. It doesn't help that when you're the top dog, somebody is always trying to take you down a notch.

Accelerator's attempts to resolve his own moral quandaries eventually restores a portion of his humanity when choses to defend the final Misaka clone (known as "Last Order") from yet another mad scientist. Though doing so doesn't make him nice. He's like Spike in Buffy after he gets his soul back.

The substance of the conflict is told from the POV of Toma Kamijo in Index, Mikoto Misaka in Railgun, and then with Accelerator as the main character. The result is often great superhero storytelling without any spandex or the world ending every other week.

One ongoing flaw in Railgun is an odd scripting quirk that frontloads each of the narrative arcs with all the comic relief at once. Granted, this approach quickly dispenses with most of the dumb stuff, after which the narratives turn increasingly dark, at times descending from science fiction into outright horror.

The fan service in Index that gets tossed in at random intervals is no less juvenile, though pretty typical of shonen-oriented content. Accelerator is mostly free of slapstick. I guess Accelerator getting stuck with the chirpy Last Order and her third-person self-references was considered punishment enough.

All of the Misaka clones do this, something to do with their programming. It does help to tell who is a clone and who isn't.

The first five series follow a fairly cohesive narrative, interspersed with standalone arcs. Index begins with Toma meeting Index and explains her relationship to the Church of England. Starting with episode ten, we get an abridged version of the Mikoto Misaka clone arc that is significantly expanded upon in the first season of Railgun.

The first season of Index concludes with a segue to the Accelerator series and then adds a short arc that brings the Anglicans back into the story. Season two returns to the religious wars heating up between Academy City and the Catholic Church and the renegade Amakusa sect.

The Index story arcs at this point can get pretty scattershot and confusingly complex. In season two, the best Index episodes are those that feature Accelerator. I think Railgun has better overall consistency in terms of the plotting and writing.

1. A Certain Magical Index (1)
2. A Certain Scientific Railgun (1)
3. A Certain Scientific Railgun (2)
4. A Certain Scientific Accelerator (1 season)
5. A Certain Magical Index (2)
6. The Miracle Of Endymion
7. A Certain Magical Index (3)
8. A Certain Scientific Railgun (3)

The timeline plays out in approximately the above order. Except for Accelerator, the series have two-cour seasons so we're talking about a ton of content. The core of the franchise can be condensed to series 1 – 4. Crunchyroll places The Miracle Of Endymion between seasons two and three in the Index series.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese culture, japanese tv, religion, streaming

Being less constrained by the budgetary boundaries of Hollywood productions, and often based on material originally created by a production team of one or two, anime ends up throwing a lot more ideas against the wall to see what sticks.

As depicted in Bakuman, manga artists constantly compete to come up with a unique cast on the same-old same-old. The survival of the fictional fittest yields new tropes and formulas that are refined, exploited, and exhausted. Then the whole process starts all over again.

This Darwinistic struggle can also yield bursts of surprising creativity. Genres from opposite ends of the story spectrum intersect in ways that can only be described using multidimensional Venn diagrams.

A recent break-out genre is commonly referred to as "Cute girls doing cute things." It arose out of the primordial soup of moe, which can be defined as "the ideal of youthful and innocent femininity." In narrative terms, it means using cuteness both as a theme and a character trait.

Writers were soon populating their stories with casts of cute girls. This resulted in slice-of-life comedies about cute girls attending school, having fun, and hanging out together, less concerned with plot than the warm fuzzies. It's a life-affirming approach that defines the iyashikei or "healing" genre.

Representative series include Non-Non Biyori, Azumanga Daioh, and Strawberry Marshmallow.

Also drawing on the noteworthy insight that a sure way to create an interesting character is to give her a job or hobby, the focus was further refined to highlight cute girls engaged in specific activities. This evolved in a genre best described as "cute girls doing interesting things in a cute way."


The genre-making hit in this regard was probably the K-On! franchise, about five high school girls who form a rock band. But to illustrate how heterodox such a simple concept can become, an earlier hallmark series was Aria, about cute girls working as gondoliers on Mars.


And then there is Girls und Panzer, in which a group of cute girls operate a platoon of vintage tanks in unrealistically realistic high school war games. On a less exotic note, cute girls form a mountain hiking club in Encouragement of Climb and a camping club in Laid-Back Camp.

Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater plunges into the activities of an all-girl high school fishing club, with each episode focusing on a different species of fish and the techniques used to catch it. Super Cub celebrates Honda's hugely popular (throughout Asia) line of utility scooters.

Sakura Quest tackles the intractable problems of rural depopulation. Five cute girls (they're mostly adults this time around) are recruited by the tourist board to help revitalize a small town. The comic premise notwithstanding, they come up with real-world, practical solutions.

Seriously, you could use Sakura Quest as the text in a college course on the subject.


The Japanese obsession with technical precision is on full display. Actual equipment and techniques are depicted in Encouragement of Climb and Laid-Back Camp. The tanks in Girls und Panzer are operated according to the historical specs. Honda consulted on Super Cub.

As with the ever-popular cooking shows, the goal is to geek out on a subject while keeping it interesting. And one sure way to make it interesting (to boys in particular) is to keep it cute!

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Azumanga Daioh
Aria
Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater
Encouragement of Climb
Girls und Panzer
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Laid-Back Camp
Non-Non Biyori
Sakura Quest
Strawberry Marshmallow
Super Cub

Labels: anime, anime lists, japanese culture, social studies, thinking about writing, tubi

Tubi is an ad-supported streaming site with one of the best (least annoying) ad engines in the business. It has a sizable anime catalog and the keyword search feature is fast. The Roku app works without a hitch.

Except when it doesn't. On a rather random basis, when I queue up a video and press play, the app crashes hard.

I picture a guy scurrying down to a dark vault, switching on a dim incandescent bulb, and pulling out a VHS tape with the title scribbled on the label with a Magic Marker.

He brushes off the cobwebs and loads it into the machine, powers the VCR on and off a couple of times, and gives it a good hard whack. After that, everything works fine. Weird. Maybe it's just a Roku thing.

The content is all over the place. Subbed and dubbed, old and new, real gems, timeless classics, and junk they got on the cheap. Nothing is sorted. Simply identifying new titles turns into a scavenger hunt.

The subtitled version of Penguin Highway, for example, is tagged "Western, Comedy, Romance (1934)." The thumbnail graphic for Black Jack says "English subbed" but it's a dub. That kind of thing.

At least anime has its own category. Live-action Japanese titles on Tubi are lumped under "Foreign Language," most of which aren't Japanese. A handful are worth finding (though it'll take patience finding them).

Recently acquired live-action titles include Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (his first film featuring Toshiro Mifune), a half-dozen Gamera flicks (Daiei Film's same-only-different answer to Toho's Godzilla), along with a wide selection from the Ultraman and Super Sentai franchises.

And, hey, it's free. And having Fox as the parent company has paid off with licensing agreements with distributor Shout! Factory and anime giant Toei Animation. There are needles in the haystack and gold in them there hills.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, streaming, technology, tubi

Sports is the most enduring genre in manga and anime. With the conflict built into the narrative, athletic competition is an always reliable source of story material. Baseball has long been the king of this particular hill, but the genre has tackled everything from mahjong (Saki) to archery (Tsurune) to bicycle touring (Long Riders).


And just when you think maybe all of those permutations have been exhausted, competitive karuta makes a brilliant contribution with Chihayafuru. And shogi becomes the center of the masterful melodrama, March Comes in like a Lion.

With both mainstream team and individual sports, significant parts of the story are often fashioned out of the play-by-play. Even Yowamuchi Pedal (bicycle racing) and Chihayafuru spend multiple episodes on a single competition, at each step along the way diving into the winning strategies of the players.

But with archery, there's not a whole lot to make of an arrow striking a target. Either it does or it doesn't (though roster order apparently matters). So Tsurune focuses more on the mental than the muscle, starting out by giving the protagonist a bad case of target panic as a source of the conflict (along with a bunch of teenage angst and a family tragedy to boot).

Even archery is more action-oriented than firearm "bullseye" or "range" shooting, where the "objective is to score points by hitting a round shooting target as close to the center as possible with slow precision fire." When the shooter is doing everything right, the only thing that moves is the trigger finger, and imperceptively.


Rifle is Beautiful (distributed in North America as Chidori RSC) is about a high school shooting team, so it could go down the melodrama route (like Tsurune) or slice of life. It takes the latter approach, what I call the "cute girls doing interesting things" genre, though more competitive aspects do emerge in the concluding arc at the national high school championships.

Now, given that Japan has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the universe, the obvious question is what kind of rifles they are shooting.

Two of the girls in the series participate in air gun competitions. Doing so, we are told, is expensive. In order to purchase an air rifle (as opposed to less regulated airsoft and paintball weapons), you have to present a certificate obtained by attending a gun safety lecture and pass a test at a local police station. Thereafter, the certificate has to be renewed every three years.

So the emphasis of Rifle is Beautiful is on "beam."

Not a laser beam. The light source used in a beam rifle is the same kind of xenon lamp used in electronic camera flash units. The result is a weapon that literally couldn't hurt a fly (unless you smacked the fly with the butt of the rifle). A well-hit line drive, by contrast, is seriously dangerous. Not to mention a bow and arrow.

The target of a beam rifle is a photoelectric grid that feeds the "hits" to an electronic display that generates the sound and calculates the score. From a gadget point of view, this is totally cool technology. As an extracurricular activity, it means a shooting range can be set up in a high school gym. Of course, it helps if the high school has already purchased the equipment.

Not many have, so the entire Tokyo regionals can be held in a high school gym.

Hikari Kokura chose to attend Chidori High School because it did have the equipment. According to the well-established formula, she has to scrape together enough members to form a club. That turns out not be much of a challenge either. There isn't a whole lot of drama in Rifle is Beautiful. It's more about the how, what, and why of the sport.

Hikari gets a bit of a character arc at the end, but as with series like Laid Back Camp and Long Riders, your entertainment value will depend on how much you enjoy the subject matter and the characters and the comic relief (supplied by the club's scatterbrained faculty advisor), and less the threadbare plot. As a low-stress entry in the slice of life genre, it worked for me.

Here's footage from the 2019 high school championships at the Tsutsuga Shooting Range in Hiroshima Prefecture. It's been held there ever year since 2006 so you will recognize the setting from the series. If you wonder why the girls are walking rather stiffly in their uniforms, the series explains that as well.


Treat Rifle is Beautiful as a promotional video and you should have a good time. It's been officially endorsed by the National Rifle Association of Japan (first and foremost a sports organization). All the power to them if the series can excite more interest in what is, at heart, a very Zen activity.

Related links

Chihayafuru (CR HD)
Laid Back Camp
Long Riders
March Comes in like a Lion (CR NF)
Rifle is Beautiful
Saki
Tsurune (CR HD)
Yowamuchi Pedal
A title by any other name

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, sports