Sony has been on an anime buying binge of late, having purchased streaming services Funimation and Crunchyroll, along with retailer Right Stuf, which were rolled into Funimation under the Crunchyroll brand. To top that off, Sony then set its sights on Kadokawa, a much bigger prize.

Kadokawa is one of the top three publishers in Japan, ranked slightly behind Shueisha and Kodansha.

In late 2024, Kadokawa and Sony confirmed reports that Sony was in talks to acquire Kadokawa. A buyout is not off the table, but effective as of January 7, Sony will instead take a 10 percent stake in Kadokawa (in newly issued shares) as part of a "strategic capital and business alliance."

Sony does not have a traditional publishing arm. As Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki explained earlier this year,

Whether it's for games, films or anime, we don't have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning. We're lacking the early phase (of IP) and that's an issue for us.

Sums up the Financial Times,

Sony is betting on a multibillion dollar push into producing more original content, as part of a creation shift the Japanese tech giant hopes will win it a greater share of the three trillion dollar entertainment industry.

The alliance will give Sony first dibs on Kadokawa's enormous catalog of manga and light novels. In exchange, Kadokawa ends up with much deeper pockets that it will use for "creating, developing, and acquiring new IP." Collaborative projects being discussed include initiatives to adapt

Kadokawa's IP into live-action films and TV dramas globally, co-produce anime works, expand global distribution of Kadokawa's anime works through the Sony Group, further expand publishing of Kadokawa's games, and develop human resources to promote and expand virtual production.

Crunchyroll obviously stands to benefit from the deal too. The acquisition of Crunchroll made Sony the dominant anime distributor in North America, though with Hidive, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Tubi actively acquiring content, it can't be technically said to hold a monopoly position.

In publishing specifically, Kadokawa still has a huge competitor in the Hitotsubashi Group.

The Hitotsubashi conglomerate includes Shogakukan, Shueisha, Hakusensha and related subsidiaries, such as Viz Media in the United States. Given that Shueisha alone is bigger than Kadokawa (and together with Shogakukan is twice its size), the Kadokawa deal likely won't trigger any antitrust issues.

The bigger risk with these sorts of mashups is that the customer, responsible for the success of the enterprise in the first place, gets lost in all the bigness.

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, kadokawa, manga, netflix, publishing, sony

Back in 2016, Jason Thompson opined on Gizmodo that "Manga publishing is dying." Unable to adapt to New Media, "most Japanese publishers have no coherent digital strategy and the extra step of licensing [manga] in America makes them even slower to react to change."

Yeah, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but that bit of prognostication aged rather badly. In less than a decade, Japan's manga market practically turned itself upside down and is currently the most profitable it has been in thirty years.
The shift has been reflected in the content itself, from the traditional pen and ink approach depicted in Bakuman (2013) to digital drawing tablets in Sleeper Hit (2016) and Eromanga Sensei (2017). By 2022, the digital manga market in Japan was twice the size of the print market.

I once bought Japanese manga from Honto. To take advantage of Honto's more affordable shipping rates (compared to Amazon-Japan), the entire process took about a month. Now Honto no longer stocks and ships paper books and I can get Japanese manga from BookWalker instantly.

Customer convenience is only half of the equation. Industry observer Haruyuki Nakano notes that

For some years now, publishers have been switching emphasis from traditional publishing to the rights and IP business. Shueisha had income of ¥51.1 billion for nondigital publishing in the period from June 2023 to May 2024, compared with ¥72.0 billion for digital publishing and ¥75.3 billion for business including publishing rights and sale of goods.

Hence Sony's interest in acquiring Kadokawa. Having Kadokawa under the same corporate umbrella would let Sony tap into the licensing income streams while eliminating the need to shop for content on behalf of its studios and streaming services. Because Sony would already own the IP.

Successful businesses adapt to new technology and the evolving marketplace. Traditional publishers like Kadokawa and the much bigger Hitotsubashi Group remain powerhouses in the industry. Japan's keiretsu can't turn on a dime. But once they get their bearings, it's full steam ahead.

Publishing is publishing, regardless of how the content gets distributed.

To paraphrase Seth Godin, they figured out they were in the storytelling and information business, not the newsprint business. Compared to magazines, higher quality tankoubon (print digest) sales have remained fairly robust.

Physical media is seeing a decline in video as well. Panasonic and Sony haven't updated their Blu-ray player lines since 2018. Samsung stopped making new players in 2019. LG stopped manufacturing Blu-ray players altogether. When the current inventory runs out, LG will not restock.

But just as vinyl LPs are still being pressed, there will be an ongoing demand for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. And I am also sure that print books will outlast them all.

Labels: anime, bookwalker, business, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese tv, kadokawa, manga, publishing, sony, viki

In Japanese, the terms honne (本音) and tatemae (建て前) refer to a person's true self versus their public image. It is a compelling subject in the field of social anthropology. The distinction is equally useful in fiction.

In my review of Spy x Family, I argue that in the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—ultimately determines the direction of the narrative.

As Kate points out, Lloyd and Yor in Spy x Family are "decent, family people who just happen to be a spy and assassin rather than a spy and assassin pretending to be decent people."

Spy x Family puts Yor in the same moral position as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker in True Lies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." The Yor-centered stories make clear that her targets are, by and large, reprehensible human beings.

Lloyd is more conflicted than Yor, but he is not an enemy of Ostania. He often ends up working tangentially toward the same goals as Yor and her brother, and does his level best to inflict as little collateral damage as possible.

The climactic ending of Code White being a case in point. Lloyd, Yor, and Anya end up saving the day for Ostania.

After all, his overall mission is to establish a diplomatic backchannel with Donovan Desmond. Killing him, he admits, would be easy, but would also not be in any of their interests (and certainly not Desmond's).

If the intelligence services in Westalis suspect that the Berlint Wall is about to collapse, then it would be in the self-interests of both sides for a moderate government to survive and steer the ship of state between the political extremes.

This is a far more politically and intellectually challenging task than saving the world on a weekly basis. Lloyd and Yor spend much of their undercover time picking off extremists on both sides.

The old James Bond was a spy who happened to be a suave English gentleman. Efforts to infuse the character with moral depth, especially during the Daniel Craig era, were never going to work. That's simply not who James Bond is.

When your job is preventing a world apocalypse on a regular basis, those kinds of qualms are bound to fall by the wayside. To start with, you're not going to have the time.

Lloyd's more real-world missions require that he keep his honne and tatemae in close alignment, even though they may seem as far apart as night and day. His ultimate struggle is to accept that he is a family man at heart.

Since the start of the series, his success as a spy and his success as a father have become inextricably intertwined.

The Forgers are a pair of eccentric but otherwise ordinary suburban parents (like Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mike and Vanessa Baxter from Last Man Standing) who happen to be a spy and an assassin.

The order matters. If you get the happens to be rule wrong, you may end up with the wrong audience tuning in. Nothing will doom a series faster than the feeling a bait and switch is going on.

The premise of Moonlight is right up my alley. But halfway through the first season, it turned into a melodrama about a vampire who happened to be a private detective rather than a police procedural about a private detective who happened to be a vampire.

I believe that is why Moonlight lasted only one season (despite everything else about the series being pretty spot on). The audience tuned in for a mystery show and got a contemporary gothic soap opera about vampires instead.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But in a ratings-based world, the core values of the viewers (as expressed by tuning in to watch) must largely overlap with the values of the characters (as expressed by the writer and director).

The same things goes for message-based entertainment. If a show runner wants to preach a message, it had better be one the audience wants to hear or at least is able to ignore because everything else about the show is so good.

One of the great advantages of anime and especially manga is that quantity has a quality all of its own. You are all the more likely to find titles that match up the honne and tatemae of the characters in an order that matters to you.

Labels: anime, criticism, japanese, language, movies, thinking about writing

In the realm of contemporary fantasy, I see dead people is always a useful addition to the resume of the main character.

Donna Howard investigates the provenance of relics and antiques with the help of people from the past who are only visible to her.

For Natsume, his second sight (inherited from his grandmother) often results in the supernatural Shinto world intruding on his otherwise ordinary day-to-day life.

Mieruko can see dead people too. Her name is a pun on the verb meaning "I can see." That makes her privy to an extensive and weirdly thriving ecosystem of the living dead invisible to all but a select few.

Unfortunately for Mieruko, she has a hard time telling the good dead people from the bad dead people.

Even the guardian deities (inari) at the Shinto shrine are fierce and intimidating. Most of the dead people and creepy crawlies look like mutating corpses. Which is bad enough, except when they realize she can see them. Mieruko has gotten good at maintaining a look of deadpan indifference.

The rules governing Mieruko's abilities mirror those in Natsume's Book of Friends (which just debuted a new season). Creatures from the spirit world can only physically interact with you if they catch you looking at them first. Maintaining an attitude of stoic indifference can be the best recourse.

Which brings me to a new word I learned reading the manga: suruu sukiru (スルースキル), a transliteration of "through skill." Weblio defines it as the "ability to ignore bad things happening to you." In other words, the skill to work through a problem by tuning out and not getting upset about it.

But like Natsume, a girl's got her limits. There are times when Mieruko has no choice but to lend the ghouls an ear. Occasionally she discovers their intentions are benign. At other times, not so much. It's easier when the monsters behave like monsters, but even there she can jump to the wrong conclusions.

The occasional Sixth Sense twist will also fool the reader. And there's a touch of Dexter in the cat killer arc as well (which is featured in the anime).

Her best friend Hana is a ghost magnet ("Like moths to a flame," an old soothsayer ally observes), though not having second sight herself, she's clueless about their presence. One of their classmates also has second sight, though not being as powerful as Mieruko, she misjudges their respective abilities.

These moral dilemmas lend Mieruko-chan depth without being depressing or nihilistic. Some of the stories are genuinely heartwarming. If you're a fan of Edward Gorey or Charles Addams, Mieruko-chan is right in your wheelhouse.

Written and illustrated by Tomoki Izumi. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Yen Press in the United States. The anime is based on the first three volumes of the manga. A live-action film adaptation is scheduled for release in 2025.

Related links

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

Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese culture, kindle, manga, manga reviews, movies, religion, shinto

GKids has agreed to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toho International.

Founded in 1932, Toho is one of the biggest film producers and distributors in Japan, most famous for the Godzilla franchise (including the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One) and the films of Akira Kurosawa and Studio Ghibli. Toho Animation has done much of its work behind the scenes, regularly showing up on the production committees of top-tier anime series such as Spy x Family, Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and The Apothecary Diaries.

But then earlier this year, Toho purchased animation studio Science Saru, known for The Heike Story, Scott Pigrim Takes Off, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! as well as an upcoming addition to the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

Toho also bought a minority stake in CoMix Wave Films, the production home of Makoto Shinkai.

The GKids catalog already includes the films of Studio Ghibli, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, Hideaki Anno, and a wide selection of animated productions from across Europe. So it looks like a good fit in the content department too.

Labels: anime, business, japanese tv, movies about japan

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

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

The two major pure-play anime streamers in the North America market are Crunchyroll and Hidive. Netflix is active enough in anime to place third, but a distant third to Hidive, while Hidive places a distant second to Crunchyroll.

That's how dominate Crunchyroll has become in the anime world.

Some of my all-time favorite titles, such as Insomniacs After School, Made in Abyss, Girls und Panzer, Patlabor, Beyond the Boundary, Beautiful Bones, Tsurune, Clannad, and The Demon Girl Next Door debuted on Hidive. More recently, though, Hidive has been abandoning licenses as fast as it is acquiring new content.

Patlabor, for example. One of the best mecha series of all time. A true Mamoru Oshii classic. Gone without a trace.

As a result, the second seasons of Call of the Night and The Dangers in My Heart are the only recent titles on Hidive that have caught my interest. Separately, Netflix and Hidive don't have big enough anime catalogs to justify staying subscribed for more than a few months at a time.

With Crunchyroll, by contrast, the ongoing challenge is combing through the next season's lineup every quarter and deciding what not to watch (because I simply don't have the time).

Since entering the anime licensing arena, international distributor Remow has embraced a go wide philosophy that includes sharing content on Tubi. Remow partnering with Hidive is the stuff MBA theses are made of, but I'm not sure how plausible it would be from a bottom-line business perspective.

My solution to this problem is for Netflix to buy Hidive and combine their anime catalogs under the Hidive brand (using Netflix's streaming architecture). Netflix would preserve Hidive as a standalone pure play for subscribers like me who aren't that interested in anything else on Netflix besides anime.

Netflix could feature popular Hidive titles on its own service and Hidive would benefit from access to Netflix's licensing and production teams.

Too many players in a niche streaming market works as much to the detriment of the consumer as too few. But I doubt the FTC would condone Sony buying yet another anime distributor on top of what has become the Crunchyroll colossus.

Netflix acquiring Hidive would bring some competition back into the anime market without forcing anime fans to sign up for yet another streaming service. Netflix's platforms are much better and Netflix could inject some fresh blood into Hidive's dwindling catalog with content from its own backlist.

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Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, remow, sony, streaming, 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

A scene in episode five of Spy x Family makes use of a reel-to-reel video tape recorder sitting under the television in the living room. At first, I was sure it was an anachronism. But a little research revealed that the technology existed in the 1960s when the series takes place.

Sony introduced the CV-2000 video tape recorder (VTR) in 1965 as part of its home electronics line. At the time, the CV-2000 retailed for $695. Adjusted for inflation, that'd be $7000 today. I'm sure Lloyd put it on his expense account (which his handler complains about).

In Japan, the initialism VTR is still used to refer to prerecorded video content on broadcast television (even though it's all digital by now).

Labels: anime, business, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, sony, tech history, technology, television

If you needed a reason to get a Crunchyroll premium subscription, Spy x Family is it.

If nothing else, Spy x Family is a great homage to classic spy series from the Cold War era like Get Smart, It Takes a Thief, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, and The Saint (in which Roger Moore plays a better James Bond than when he was cast as James Bond).

You know, back in the good old days when we could safely assume that democracies were superior to autocracies and the good guys acted on behalf of the greater good.

In Spy x Family, the European setting is roughly based on East and West Germany during the 1960s, though this East Germany is economically freer and more politically turbulent than that East Germany. A better comparison might be Taiwan and post-1997 Hong Kong.

Operating under the code name Twilight, super spy Lloyd Forger has been tasked with establishing a diplomatic back channel with reclusive party leader Donovan Desmond. Desmond's sons attend Eden Academy, so Forger's handlers conclude that the best cover story is for Forger to enroll his child at the academy.

To do that he will need a child. And a wife. And a dog. A family, in other words.

He rescues Anya from a shady orphanage and arranges a paper marriage with Yor Briar, who has reasons of her own to shed her single status. What Forger doesn't know is that Anya is a telepath and Yor is a professional assassin. And the dog can see the future, except only Anya can communicate with him.

Because of her psychic powers, Anya is privy to the secret lives of her pretend parents, though this knowledge is filtered through the eyes of a precocious six-year-old child (who is probably five but said she was six because she knew that's what Lloyd wanted and was desperate to get out of the orphanage).

As far as Anya is concerned, her top priority is keeping the family together, as fake as it may be, while helping Lloyd complete his mission. And while Lloyd and Yor are always telling themselves they'll go their separate ways, they find themselves growing increasing comfortable with their artificial family life.

There are additional sitcom complications, such as Yor's younger brother being a member of the State Security Service (the equivalent of the Stasi). While Yuri is aware that a foreign agent named Twilight is in the country, he is is too flustered by Lloyd's marriage to his sister to realize that he's right under his nose.

Yuri is equally unaware of his sister's sinister side job. Undoubtedly one of those siloed need-to-know things.

Directors Kazuhiro Furuhashi and Takahiro Harada deftly walk a thin line, keeping the tone of the story simultaneously smart and silly without being stupid. Lloyd's side missions are quite thrilling in their own right too.

If we could go back in time, the perfect cast for a live-action version would be Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I'd love to seem them play against type and switch on a dime from normal (if somewhat goofy) middle-class parents to steely-eyed operatives.

The difference between the two leads is that Yor naturally defaults to Laura Petrie mode. For her, assassin really is just a side gig. Switching out of full-time spy mode is more difficult for Lloyd.

The second half of the second season reverses the roles. Yor is sent on a mission that constantly throws her into precarious situations that call on her talents as a cool and competent cutthroat killer. In her absence, Lloyd has to figure out how to be a full-time father figure.

In the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—will ultimately determine the direction of the narrative. For Bruce Banner and the Hulk, the conflict arises out of the irradicable nature of the struggle.

This is the question that Lloyd will ultimately have to answer. The decision would end the show in its current form, but given such wonderful characters, I would very much like to see how our family of spies adapts after the Berlin Wall falls.

Spy x Family is a well-crafted series where the long arc of the show can be stretched out without frustrating the audience, allowing the writer and director to get creative with one-and-done episodic plots. Exactly what former network executive Paul Chato identifies as the recipe for a successful television series.

Crunchyroll has both seasons of Spy x Family and Spy x Family: Code White. Tubi has five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show and six seasons of The Saint.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, crunchyroll, geography, politics, streaming, television reviews

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.

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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

Earlier this year, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about the international rise of Japan's domestic entertainment industry.

Aside from anime, which continues to see dramatic increases in supply and demand, I remain skeptical that we are "on the precipice of a [live-action] content boom" from Japanese production houses. Rakuten Viki is a good yardstick and it continues to rely heavily on South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia for content.

Not Japan (despite Viki being a Japanese company). However, I do agree that despite the plodding evolution of the market,

the live-action series space is the area of Japanese entertainment where the surging investment from big foreign streamers is changing production standards most and where insiders say there is the biggest potential for a reinvigorating shake-up.

"Big foreign streamers" pretty much means Netflix. And maybe Jme TV, if it ever gets its act together.

Netflix has a strong presence in Japan and has been increasing the number of licensed and in-house productions it is sending east across the Pacific. Among subscription services, Netflix has the third biggest anime catalog in the North American market after Crunchyroll and Hidive and is getting competitive in live-action as well.

Although the live-action Japanese language catalogs at Netflix and Viki are about the same (adding in anime doubles the size for Netflix), Netflix has a wider range of curated content and an equally affordable entry point. And for now, Netflix is acquiring Japanese content for its North American catalog at a decidedly faster pace than Viki.

So little new Japanese content is showing up on Viki that I wonder if it decided to focus on Kdrama rather than compete with Netflix and NHK Cosmomedia. NHK Cosmomedia dumped all its premium streaming eggs into the Jme TV basket and is very likely staking a claim on every live-action series produced domestically.

I'm not convinced that effort is going to pay off. To start with, unlike Viki and Netflix, NHK Cosmomedia localizes very little of its catalog. Which brings us back to Netflix and Samurai vs Ninja and Tubi (that licenses Samurai vs Ninja content) as the only sure bets for localized live-action Japanese television going forward.

Though as I have pointed out previously, I can't pretend this is a great loss, as live-action Japanese television melodrama is a genre that has slowly but surely lost much of my interest.

Related posts

Japan's phantom content boom
Netflix in Japanese (1)
Netflix in Japanese (2)
Netflix in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime, business, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, netflix, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television, tubi, viki

Perhaps the best known poems in anime are the tanka (or waka) recited during the Uta-garuta competitions in Chihayafuru. These poems are taken from the Hyakunin Isshu, an anthology of one hundred tanka compiled during the late Heian and early Kamakura periods by the scholar Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241).

Tanka are also featured in the Utakai Hajime ("First poetry recital") held annually at the Imperial Palace on New Year's Day. Tanka are distinguishable by a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern while haiku follow the more familiar 5-7-5 format.

Haiku are built upon a poetic framework that goes far deeper than just the syllable count. A well-formed haiku should demonstrate the appropriate use of kireji, words comparable to sounded-out punctuation marks that shape the pacing and prosody of the poem. And kigo, words that refer metaphorically to the specific season of the year.

In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, haiku enthusiast Kouichi carries a saijiki (a kigo dictionary) around with him should the inspiration strike. Haiku is a serious enough literary subject to have its own dictionaries. And periodicals and associations and recitals and awards and, of course, school clubs.

What people outside Japan generally think of as haiku are often senryuu. The prosody of senryuu is the same as haiku but the use of kireji and kigo are not required. Moreover, senryuu takes human nature as its primary subject matter, with an emphasis on clever juxtapositions and comical turns of phrase that can resemble puns or aphorisms.

That makes senryuu popular in improvisational comedy shows like the long-running Shouten.

Along with Kouichi in In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (and Komi in Komi Can't Communicate), Nanako in Senryu Girl would rather write than talk (this has become something of a trope of late). Senryuu is her preferred medium. Nanoko is a member of the high school literature club and attends the senryuu association at the local community center.

There Nanako meets classmate Eiji, a punk who got tired of being a punk and is reforming himself (another popular trope). He developed a love of senryuu along the way and hasn't shed his habit of reciting poems like a punk cruising for a bruising.

The Heike Story is a recent adaptation of the classic Heike Monogatari, about the decline and fall of the Taira clan. It is a historical drama and not about poetry per se. But the story is told from the perspective of Biwa. Traveling bards like Biwa are believed to have preserved the story until it was put down on paper.

Related anime

Chihayafuru
Komi Can't Communicate
Senryu Girl
The Heike Story
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop

Labels: anime, anime reviews, japan, japanese, japanese culture, literature, thinking about writing

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

Honda will stop selling motorcycles with 50cc and smaller internal combustion engines in the next fiscal year. That means drawing the curtains on the Super Cub, once the most popular motorcycle in the world. With a four-speed clutchless transmission geared for utility, the Super Cub sold 100 million units since going into production in 1958.

Alas, in recent years, the popularity of the 50cc motorcycle class has waned due to the

proliferation of electric bicycles and the rise of electric scooters. Around 1.98 million motorcycles in the category were shipped in 1980 but the number plunged to around 90,000 by 2023.

Stricter emissions regulations factored into the equation as well.

I had a 400cc CB400T Honda Hawk in college. When I first lived in Japan almost half a century ago, Super Cubs equipped with delivery rigs were ubiquitous on the backstreets of Tokyo.

My rekindled affection for Honda motorcycles this time around is thanks to one of my very favorite anime. Super Cub is based on the light novels and manga by Tone Koken and was made into a 2021 series by Studio Kai.

Koguma is a high school student living a lonely life in the exurbs of Yamanashi Prefecture. Her life undergoes a major change when she buys a vintage Super Cub to commute to school. Her Super Cub catches the attention of classmate Reiko, a Super Cub fanatic, and Shii, whose eccentric parents run a German-style bakery and coffee shop that Reiko frequents.

What follows is textbook slice-of-life storytelling. The only episode with a traditional narrative arc has Reiko attempting to conquer Mt. Fuji on a Super Cub (which actually has been done). The rest might better be called "Zen and the Art of Super Cub Maintenance." Of course, one of those classic Super Cub delivery rigs makes a cameo appearance.

The series concludes with a Super Cub road trip chasing the cherry blossom season down to the southernmost tip of Kyushu. Yeah, it's basically a six hour commercial for Honda, but what a great commercial it is!

The Super Cub C125 is available in North American. Its 125cc engine makes it a full-fledged motorcycle and not a scooter. (The original Super Cub had a 49cc engine to avoid being legally designated a motorcycle in Japan.) If the day comes that I find myself with a couple of grand burning a hole in my pocket, I have to hope it will still be on the market.

Super Cub is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, japanese culture, personal favs

Starting perhaps with the Sakura Wars franchise, the two decades from the end of the Russo-Japanese War through the Taisho era (1905–1926) have come to encompass Japan's steampunk period.

Also known as the Taisho Democracy, a flowering of democratic ideals leading to a short-lived parliamentary system, it is the setting for My Happy Marriage, Otome Youkai Zakuro, Demon Slayer, Golden Kamuy, Taisho Otome Fairy Tale, Taisho Baseball Girls, and many others.

My Happy Marriage and Otome Youkai Zakuro also share a similar premise. Though the modern age is upon them, they still live in a demon-haunted world and those demons have to be dealt with.

In My Happy Marriage, Kiyoka Kudou is the stoic leader of the Special Anti-Grotesquerie Unit, while in Otome Youkai Zakuro, Kei Agemaki is the stoic second lieutenant in the Ministry of Spirits.

Kudou's team pacifies rampaging youkai while Agemaki (aided by two fellow officers and three youkai allies) is tasked with dispatching the worst of the lot while reaching negotiated settlements with the rest.

Though as the title suggests, My Happy Marriage primarily concerns itself with the relationship between Kudou and Miyo Saimori and the complications that ensue. As a result, he ends up spending more of his time fighting other human magic wielders than actual youkai.

Miyo Saimori is the Japanese Cinderella in this story and Kudou is her prince charming, except he is not at all charming when they first meet. He's more like Fitzwilliam Darcy on a bad day and his reputation precedes him.

Even during the Taisho era, the aristocracy used marriage to conduct business and politics. Kudou, for one, is tired of the gold diggers and opportunists showing up on his doorstep and assumes the worst of Miyo as well. Once he realizes that all she wants is to be nowhere near her stepmother and stepsister, he begins to warm to her presence.

I was wary at first about My Happy Marriage for fear of being drenched in Miyo's misery. But the worst of it is over by the end of episode one, with the evil step-people making a return visit in episode five.

Convinced that Miyo had no supernatural powers, Miyo's father was eager at first to get rid of her and was surprised when Kudou accepted. A little genealogical research later, it becomes apparent that Miyo is a descendant of the powerful Usuba bloodline on her mother's side. Even if she has no powers now, they are likely to manifest later.

So now they want her back. But in the meantime, Kudou has grown quite fond of her. He is not about to give up this diamond in the rough without a fight. You really don't want to get Kudou mad and have him go all Hulk Smash! on you.

A big difference with Otome Youkai Zakuro is that we don't actually see Kudou doing his job until the second half. In the first half of the series, he's got his hands full dealing with his in-laws. In the second half, Miyo's connection to the Usuba clan has caught the attention of the powers that be, who fear she will upset the status quo.

My Happy Marriage concludes with the Taisho emperor (Yoshihito in our world) going off the rails (which he did in our world too) and Takaihito (Hirohito) stepping in as regent. Miyo is safe and the situation has stabilized for the time being. But hardly permanently. So a second season is in the works.

My Happy Marriage is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, fantasy, history, japanese culture, netflix, politics

In my previous post on the subject, as an explanation for why Jdrama trails so far behind anime in the international marketplace, I theorized that Jdrama has difficulty syncing the amount of story available with the amount of time available over the typical run of a television series.

I will now try applying Occam's razor to the question, which broadly holds that the simplest theory is usually the best.

Sturgeon's law states that 90 percent of everything is crap. Statisticians call this phenomenon the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. In this case, 20 percent of the entertainment produced represents the 80 percent of the entertainment that's worth watching. The obvious solution, it would seem, is to just produce that 20 percent to start with.

The problem, as screenwriter William Goldman famously described Hollywood, is that "Nobody knows anything." The smartest people in the room can rarely predict what that 20 percent will be ahead of time.

Even when the majority of consumers of a product agree about what is objectively good, that consensus is not necessarily synonymous with what they all like or what they are all willing to pay for. Once you start dividing the entertainment pie into mediums, audiences, and genres, the slices that appeal to any one person are going to end up being pretty thin.

When it comes to anime, I generally avoid isekai and anything that involves people getting trapped inside video games. Battle shonen like Jujutsu Kaisen test my patience too. In other words, I steer clear of many of the most popular genres (though I did enjoy Reborn as a Vending Machine and Chainsaw Man, that flipped a bunch of worn out formulas on their heads).

And yet, even taking those genres off the table, there are enough titles left over every season that I still have to whittle down the list of new shows I want to watch. With distributors like Crunchyroll and Netflix buying everything that the anime industry puts out, the pie keeps growing and growing and those thin genre slices start getting pretty big all on their own.

As Miles Atherton points out, the anime pie is now so large that, with the exception of children's television, more anime series are produced every year than all of the animated television programs in the rest of the world combined.

The expanding audience encourages distributors to buy more content, and anime producers in Japan to make more content, and more talent to enter the field, which increases the odds that the audience will find something to keep them watching. It's the virtuous circle of art and commerce that rewards more with more. Also known as the Matthew effect.

Kdrama is now in the same place.

At this rate, unless a major player like Netflix begins buying content like crazy, I don't see Jdrama expanding outside a few streaming niches.

If Edo period dramas are your thing, Samurai vs Ninja has a whole website just for you. Rakuten Viki focuses on romance, but even Viki (a Japanese company) acquires ten times as much Kdrama as Jdrama. Jme TV is the only active player licensing content across the board. But it localizes almost nothing in its catalog, which places a hard cap on future growth.

In the meantime, anime keeps going from strength to strength if only on the strength of numbers alone.

Related posts

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

Labels: anime, business, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, jdrama, jme, kdrama, samurai vs ninja, technology, viki