A common criticism of Hollywood is that it cares more about what sells in China than what sells in middle America. That Hollywood can sell its wares in China at all is a testament to the universality of storytelling and the structured approach to the craft that Hollywood has polished to a shine.

At the same time, what makes universality equally interesting are the exceptions that are not so universal. Here I'm thinking about a unique interplay between subject matter and genre, quite apart from cultural specificity, that has no real equivalent in Hollywood when it comes to narrative fiction.

Call this one the "how-to" genre.

In the non-fiction space, there is no lack of DIY and "how-to" programming in the North American market. PBS Create does nothing else 24/7. But while there is often an element of DIY in scripted television shows coming out of Hollywood, it's hard to think of an example where it is the single defining element.

The setting of any series will dictates a certain amount of expository material, as will the occupations of the characters. At the very least, in the name of verisimilitude, a show that, for example, takes place in a radio station (NewsRadio, WKRP in Cincinnati, Frasier) must necessary provide some insights into broadcasting.

In Home Improvement and Last Man Standing, Tim Allen comes close, epitomizing a "how-to" man working in "how-to" businesses.

On Japanese television, and specifically anime, "how to" is not only a defining element but often the entire point. The hugely popular "gourmet drama" pays the kind of attention to the nuts and bolts of cooking otherwise only found in reality shows and the occasional feature-length Hollywood production.

It is certainly a defining element in the ever-popular sports genre, appealing to its audience with a focus how to play the game better.

Thus the protagonist in a mainstream sports drama commonly starts off with a great deal of promise but an Achilles heel that must be overcome. Tsurune begins with our protagonist suffering from a bad case of the yips in the form of target panic. Big Windup features a pitcher with incredible control but no speed.

Especially in baseball series, multiple episodes can be devoted to a single game, with the granularity of the narrative resolving to a pitch-by-pitch analysis.

Then there is the "oddball sports" category, which features sports or games the audience may be familiar with but probably doesn't know a lot about. Again, an excuse to work a great deal of exposition into the narrative.

Examples include Chihayafuru (karuta), Saki (mahjong ), Hikaru no Go (go), Tsurune (archery), and March Comes in like a Lion (shogi). The latter gained particular resonance when real-life Sota Fujii turned professional at the age of 14 (youngest ever). These sports-related series do also generate a great deal of melodrama.

And finally we come to the "how-to" genre distilled down to its essence.

The Japanese fascination with "how-to" is fully on display in what I call the "Cute girls doing interesting things in a cute way" genre. The typical approach is to have the protagonist get interested in a somewhat obscure activity, discover that her friends are interested in it too (or recruits them), and plunges in.

The result are slice-of-life stories, often with little actual drama and only the rudimentary scaffolding of a plot, but with great attention given to the specific details of the activity. Recent examples include Encouragement of Climb (hiking), Laid-Back Camp (camping), and Long Riders (bicycle touring).

Even the shamelessly silly and purposely low-brow Bakuon!! explores the world of motorcycling in considerable technical detail.

The result is part how-to guide and part promotional video in a surprisingly entertaining format. And who knows? Maybe viewers here and there will be convinced to put down their phones and venture into the great outdoors. (Along with a great many DIY aficionados, I'll settle for watching the great outdoors on television.)

Related links

Bakuon!! (CR HD)
Big Windup (CR Fun)
Chihayafuru (CR HD)
Encouragement of Climb
Laid-Back Camp
Long Riders (CR HD)
March Comes in like a Lion
Saki
Tsurune (CR HD)

Food fiction
Cute girls doing interesting things

Labels: anime, anime lists, chihayafuru, economics, food, japanese culture, television, thinking about writing

As Family Gekijyo slowly fills in its new schedule, let's talk about books.

I'm alternating between the Chihayafuru manga series and Edogawa Ranpo's young adult mystery novels. Inspired by Chihayafuru, I'm also working my way through the Manga Hyakunin Isshu Daijiten. It's an encyclopedic guide to the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu written at a 6th grade level, about my speed in this subject.

Chihayafuru wins that rare trifecta as a great manga series, a great anime series, and a great live action film series. A third season of the anime and a third live-action movie should be coming out this year (though they will take longer to make it eastward across the Pacific).

Norihiro Koizumi wrote and directed the live-action films, and did a fine job condensing two seasons of the anime down to four hours of film without compromising the characters or the plot. He also introduced some incidental changes that work well, such as making Harada a Shinto priest.

Chihayafuru
   Amazon (JP)
   Honto
   YesAsia
   Kindle (US)
   Crunchyroll

Manga Hyakunin Isshu Daijiten
   Amazon-JP
   Honto
   YesAsia

Edogawa Ranpo is the pen name (derived from Edgar Allan Poe) of Taro Hirai (1894-1965), a tireless promoter of the mystery genre in Japan. His efforts were well-rewarded. "Cozy" mystery fiction is a staple on Japanese television and the best-seller lists.

Ranpo wrote the "Boy Detectives Club" series for a young adult audience. It reminds me of the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books I read as a kid. Early versions of the "light novel," the Japanese is fairly simple, with an emphasis on action and short but vivid descriptive passages.

As in old radio dramas, the narrator often breaks the fourth wall to address the reader.

Now out of copyright, HTML files of Ranpo's novels can be downloaded from the Aozora public domain library. The files display as plain Unicode text in most browsers. For a more aesthetically-pleasing reading experience, cut and paste the online link into the Air Zoshi reading app.

From the "Boy Detectives Club" series, here's The Witch Doctor using the Air Zoshi app.

Labels: anime, books, chihayafuru, ebooks, japanese culture, manga

Hollywood rose to world domination by finding the common dramatic denominator amongst most of the movie-going population on the planet, epitomized by the Disney animated feature and the action movie (whether shoot 'em ups or CGI-heavy fantasy epics and space operas).

Hollywood films once dominated the box office in Japan too. Lately, Japanese filmmakers have started paying less attention to high-brow film critics abroad and learned how to appeal to those common denominators too. In other words, they stopped trying to be the next Kurosawa and started trying to be the next J.J. Abrams.

As a result, the home-grown share of the Japanese movie market has grown from under 30 percent to over 60 percent in under two decades.

Combined with digital technology, cinematographers have proved themselves capable of producing the Hollywood action-flick "look" for a fraction of the cost. Over the span of a single decade, the technological improvements in the Appleseed films (3D animation using motion capture) have been nothing short of staggering.


A Harry Potter or Frozen will still zoom to the top of the charts, but made-in-Japan movies now hold most of the top-twenty spots. Except that, more often than not, they do so by fitting into Japanese culture in ways that Hollywood films can't, by exploiting culture, currents, and trends that are literally foreign outside Japan.

The evolutionary spiral that results has been termed "Galapagos syndrome," referring to products so customized to Japan's "island culture" that they are incompatible with the rest of the world.

In the Japan Times, Stephen Stapczynski and Shoko Oda point out that two of Japan's biggest grossing films of 2016, Your Name and Shin Godzilla, couldn't be less alike, and yet "the two movies share one thing in common—they're relentlessly, unapologetically Japanese."

Your Name is at times a love letter to Tokyo's cityscapes, with key plot points revolving around regional Japanese traditions. Shin Godzilla has more fast-talking scenes riffing on Japan's post-Fukushima politics than it does building-stomping monsters.

Another good example is the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy. It follow the Hollywood action movie playbook, with slick production values and lots of action paired with a dumbed-down script stocked with cardboard characters (played by actors better than their parts).

Part 1 is worth watching for the dazzling swordplay. Part 3 is worth watching because Masaharu Fukuyama dominates the first third doing a combination of Yoda and Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid. Plus Yosuke Eguchi shines as Saito Hajime, a cynical ex-Shinsengumi lieutenant who switched sides.

The seeming simplicity of the story aside, the Rurouni Kenshin series assumes a cursory understanding of the Bakumatsu era (during which the various sides negotiated by day and assassinated each other by night), the Boshin War, and the early Meiji period leading up to the Satsuma Rebellion.

Even a Japanese kid who slept through every history class in school will have absorbed the rough details along the way. Western audiences will have a much harder time figuring out what the heck is going on.

This is one of the many reasons made-in-Japan family films and copies of the Hollywood action flick formula can't compete with the Hollywood behemoths outside the Asian market, such that most never even get a DVD release in the U.S. (Getting American audiences to read subtitles is another reason.)

The live-action version of Chihayafuru is a fine adaptation and a great teen movie with a compelling female lead. But I can understand why U.S. distributors would pass on a story that centers around a competition involving medieval Japanese poetry. And only the hint of a romantic sub-plot.


Despite winning a "best picture" award in Japan, the live action film of The Great Passage (about a team of etymologists compiling a Japanese dictionary) also remains unlicensed, while the anime version was picked up by Amazon. The Chihayafuru anime series is available on Crunchyroll

So while the Fast and the Furious franchise has raked in $1.5 billion worldwide by stripping away the cultural baggage and concentrating on a handful of universal story elements, anime and manga have thrived by being not-Disney, by creating a unique media niche not easily duplicated. Which, ironically, makes it all the more niche.

Your Name set records around Asia for a Japanese-produced film. But it's still a niche product that, like all those highly praised Studio Ghibli movies, barely made a dent at the U.S. box office.

Thankfully, audiences are growing large enough to make "borderless" media worth the bother. Increasingly, studios in Japan (same Blu-ray region as the Americas) distribute discs with English subtitles. Maybe someday in the not-too-distant future, any movie made anywhere will be available everywhere at a reasonable price.

Labels: anime, business, chihayafuru, japan, japanese culture, movies, movies about japan, your name

"All the world's a stage," wrote Shakespeare. And in anime, that stage is, more often than not, a high school

The simplest reason why is the target audience. Except most otaku have long left high school. And I suspect that a lot of them, like me, have no desire to go back. So the better reason is that Japan is just one big high school all of the time.

No need for nostalgia when you are still living the life.

Granted, there's a lot of overlap among those in Japan and the U.S. who are always looking forward to the next class reunion. But the nostalgia Japanese feel about high school is of a different sort. It defines the institutional waters in which they will swim for the rest of their lives.

They put the uniform on in junior high and never take it off. News reports involving teenagers often refer to them not by age but by year in school, using the shorthand: 中 (1/2/3) for junior high and 高 (1/2/3) for high school.

For example, I found this question on an education forum: 「15才だと中３、高１どっち？」 "If you are 15 years old, are you a junior high senior or a high school freshman?"

The answer is that if you are 「早生まれ」 (haya'umare, lit. "early birth," meaning born between 1/1 and 4/1) then you're a 「高1」. The school year in Japan begins in April.

Your school becomes your identity, even taking over responsibilities that in the U.S. would fall to law enforcement or social service. As Justin Sevakis explains,

Say, for example, a kid gets in trouble for shoplifting. In Japan, the police might get called, but after that the next call would be to the kid's school. The homeroom teacher would come to apologize on the kid's behalf. And then the school would call in the kid's parents for a conference.

The paternalistic expectations established in high school never end. For Japanese, to paraphrase Faulkner, "Your high school past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past."

All secondary schools, public and private, are essentially open enrollment and most require entrance exams. The fiscal year is the same as the school year. Corporations large and small hold recruiting drives and "matriculation" ceremonies that mirror those of high school.

The nostalgia Japanese feel for high school (reflected in anime) is directed at the first two or so years, before students start sweating blood preparing for their college entrance exams (it's expected that seniors will quit the sports teams after the summer tournaments to cram for the exams).

Up until the last half of the senior year, it's a "maximum structure, (relatively) minimum pressure" environment. And within that structure, Japanese kids often enjoy far more freedom than their American counterparts, for example, in planning their own activities and commuting to school.

This sense of "structure" in the U.S. has come to mean parents running every aspect of their children's lives. In Japan it means, "Here's the framework. You can't change the framework. But you can create whatever you want using it, and you have maximum freedom inside it."

College athletic scholarships do exist, but in far fewer numbers than the U.S. The equivalent of "March Madness" is the high school baseball tournament. As in Ace of the Diamond, high schools offer athletic scholarships too.

In Yawara, Yawara rejects a judo scholarship to a prestigious university because she's sick of judo and wants to be a "normal" teenager. But in Chihayafuru, Chihaya is delighted to learn that some schools offer karuta scholarships because she has little passion for schoolwork.

Interestingly, this nostalgia for high school is not nearly so intense about college, even though once having made it though the entrance exams gauntlet, university life in Japan is "minimum structure, minimum pressure." Until the senior year, that is, when the job hunt begins.

Maybe that 's because "real life" is looming there over the horizon. (Some high schools even ban their students from having part-time jobs.)

Labels: chihayafuru, education, japan, japanese culture, social studies

As I discussed last week, Popular Mechanics recently explained "Why You Can't Remember What Modern Movies Sound Like." My first reaction to the implicit challenge in that question was that I can sure remember what Chihayafuru sounds like.

I'm not just referring to an anime's opening (OP) and ending (ED) themes, though they are integral to the anime soundscape. The job of the OP and ED isn't just to keep your attention during the credit roll. They are key elements in marketing and promoting both the artist and the anime.

And perhaps most importantly, the OP establishes a mood and ambience that can fine-tune the genre before the story even starts. Think of how the Law & Order theme, together with the famous "doink-doink/thunk-thunk" sound effect, ties the whole franchise together.

In the Non Non Biyori OP, "Nanairo Biyori," Nano Ripe sounds just like Kotori Koiwai, the voice actor who plays Renge. Renge is a kind of Calvin & Hobbes character whose off-the-wall approach to life establishes the goofy yet endearing tone of the series.


At the other end of the emotional spectrum is Kalafina's dark and gothic "Magia" for Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The message is clear: this is not going to be just another cute magical girl anime.

And as far as ending themes go, Katsu Hoshi's arrangement of "The Rose" that closes out Only Yesterday revisits Bette Midler's Grammy-winning song (performed by Harumi Miyako) with a heartfelt interpretation quite apart from its original use in the 1979 Hollywood movie.

It's a perfect ending with the perfect musical accompaniment.

Chihayafuru does have a memorable OP ("Youthful" by 99RadioService), and an OP you like listening to is a nice reward when you're binge-watching a series. But when I say I remember what Chihayafuru sounds like, I mean the actual soundtrack.

First of all, though I'm sure the whole thing is rendered digitally, composer Kousuke Yamashita goes for a traditional classical orchestral sound (it's getting hard to tell the difference). Second, he develops a simple theme that comes to represent the entire emotional spectrum of the series.

Now, themes can go wrong. "The same only different" is the goal, not endless repetition.

Hikaru no Go suffers a bit from this. The "competition" theme is played on an electric guitar fed through a harmonizer with some backing percussion. That's not the problem. The problem is that the exact same riff is simply repeated in every big scene with no variation.

I suspect this was a budget thing, as it's a fairly low budget production (still a great story!). But it gets samey after a while, not evocative. (The matches of veteran players get more classical-sounding tracks, which are more effective.)

However, when done right, that "same only different" can really bury itself inside your brain. In a good way! The classic James Bond theme is a good example of a musical theme fully integrated into the cinematic narrative and all the more effective because of its familiarity.

Consider the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th symphony. Or the five notes from Close Encounters that John Williams builds into the soundtrack. For Chihayafuru, Yamashita starts with five notes too. By the time he was done, I was feeling like one of Pavlov's rats.

In a good way!

These five notes, revisited in hints, whispers, and variations, with different arrangements and instrumentation, trigger our brains to automatically recall the emotional cues we've already associated with them and prepare the brain for more of the same.

The soundtrack is available from Yes Asia.

Yes, this is "cheating," as Patrick Doyle's score to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V was described by one critic.

Except movies are all about manipulating the senses. The question is whether we enjoy being fooled or end up feeling conned. Every time we hit the play button, we are giving the director the same challenge Penn & Teller make every week to their magical contestants: Fool Us!

A good movie soundtrack is a magic wand that makes the fooling all the more enjoyable.

Related posts

Hearing what you see
Chihayafuru
Kalafina
Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Labels: anime, chihayafuru, movies, music, social studies, technology

According to Buddhism, suffering arises from attachments to transient emotional states and the impermanent material nature of this corruptible, world. In other words, believing you can take it with you. Undisciplined, our insatiable desires doom us to samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth.

Enlightenment can only be achieved by breaking the chains of these cravings.

The Japanese being enthusiastic syncretists, home-grown Shinto evolved similar doctrines with a difference. The Buddhist concept of the "hungry ghost"—corrupt souls possessed by earthly failings such as greed, anger and ignorance—merged with the Shinto concept of impurities accumulated through sin or pollution.

Japan's outcast social class (burakumin) is said to have arisen from Buddhism strictures attached to death-related occupations such as executioners, undertakers, butchers and tanners. Such trades have long since been religiously accommodated, though the hereditary burakumin class persists.

Similarly, people who die harboring unresolved grudges and possessive attachments can turn into evil kami and ghosts and haunt the world they departed from until they are exorcised.

The epitome of this downward spiral is perhaps best illustrated in Madoka Magica, in which the very process of fighting evil inevitably corrupts the good magical girls. It's gone on for so long that now all the magical girls do is battle other magical girls who've gone bad.

In Noragami and Kekkaishi, participating in the brutal battles of the medieval Warring States period tainted even the souls of the gods. And at times turned ordinary animals into evil kami.

Kami loosely translates as "god," though more in the Greco-Roman sense than the Judaeo-Christian. "Kami" can span the behavioral spectrum, from the benign and even playful youkai (which includes the the various species of shikigami) to expressly evil youma and  shinigami ("god of death").

In Shinto, every imaginable aspect of the natural world has a parallel spiritual dimension, with new kami evolving all the time. Toss in all the Buddhist crossovers and this raises the ghostly population an order of magnitude. Justin Sevakis details a small slice of Japan's transcendental taxonomy:

Onryo are vengeful ghosts, ubume are the spirits of mothers who died either in childbirth or with young children who return to look after their kids. Goryo are vengeful aristocratic ghosts, funayurei are ghosts who died at sea, zashiki-warashi are playful child ghosts, and ibakurei are ghosts that haunt a certain location.

Out of this theological amalgam developed a popular fantasy genre about the spirit world warriors charged with combating the evil fruit of both human and divine depravity.

The first pop-culture spirit world warrior was the real-life Heian court diviner Abe no Seimei. He literally became a legend in his own lifetime (played here in the 2001 film Onmyoji by Mansai Nomura).

Spirit world warriors can be recruited from the Shinto pantheon, which includes deities imported from Buddhism and Taoism.

More commonly they are human (or teamed up with humans), maybe with some supernatural powers (but not super-duper). Their job is to corral out-of-control youma and youkai and put them through the purification rites. Or send them onto the next world. Or blast them to kingdom come.

The job will always be there. Anybody can go bad: gods, people, and things go bad all the time, without moral dualism necessarily being at play.

Because "badness" can be disassociated from "evil," the same way polluted water can be filtered and distilled, there's no way to separate the sides by simply counting the black and white hats.

Almost nobody and almost nothing is condemned to a particular place in heaven or hell for eternity. But don't count on deathbed repentance scooting you to the head of the line in a post-mortal Disney World. The severity of the Buddhist hell would give Dante pause.

Considering the stakes, Pascal's Wager is one worth making. Despite most Japanese not being devout or theists in the common Christian sense, most Japanese make it.


So when visiting a Shinto shrine, if there is one, be sure to step through the purification ring. The one at Omi Jingu is depicted in Chihayafuru; the ritual is explained at length in Ginkitsune. And while there, perform the temizu hand-washing ritual.

Harae (cleansing) ceremonies springing from Shinto that have been a practical part of everyday hygienic practices in Japan for centuries.


Sumo wrestlers cast salt before a bout. They don't flick a pinch over their shoulders, but throw it high into the air; if you've got a ringside seat, it'll be raining salt.

Courtesy Princeton Wong.

In police procedurals, cops do the Buddhist equivalent of crossing themselves when they encounter a dead body. Omamori charms can be bought at any Shinto shrine. And somebody dying in an apartment is considered a curse that will drive down the rent.


Even if your house isn't cursed, a priest will stop by on Setsubun and drive out the bad spirits, just to be sure. What with all this supply and demand going on between the material and spiritual realms, there are plenty of business opportunities.

In Beyond the Boundary, exorcized youma can be turned in for bounties. In Noragami, the god Yato hires himself out as handyman to save up for his own shrine. And in In Ghost Talker's Daydream, Saiki is a professional exorcist who cleans up apartments where suicides and gristly crimes took place.

In a slightly different genre, the devil in The Devil is a Part-Timer has to get a job at McDonald's to make ends meet.

Thus in keeping with the original Ghostbusters, ghostbusting in Japan is often a business, or at least an avocation, both in real life and in fiction. Well, that's the modern world for you. Even the gods have to work for a living. Eastern spiritualism meets Adam Smith.

Related posts

Ghostbusting in Japan (2)
Pop culture Buddhism
Pop culture Shinto
Pop culture Catholicism
Angel Beats!
The Passion of the Magical Girl

Labels: anime, buddhism, chihayafuru, history, japan, japanese culture, religion, shinto

Chihayafuru is based on the award-winning manga by Yuki Suetsugu. It begins with Chihaya Ayase (her name is coincidentally the same as the first line of an Ogura Hyakunin Isshu poem) hanging recruiting posters for the high school karuta club. (See my previous post on the subject.)

Since there isn't a high school karuta club, she needs five members to form an official one (an official club gets an advisor, a budget, and a room).

Her first recruit is Taichi Mashima, one of the kids she learned karuta with in elementary school. The story then flashes back to their childhoods. Arata Wataya, the new kid in their elementary school homeroom class, is a karuta wizard, having been taught by his grandfather, a grand champion.

Chihaya, Taichi and Arata venture to the community center to join the local karuta club. The club president, Dr. Harada, is overjoyed to find three new members on his doorstep. Taichi is better than Chihaya. Arata is in a league of his own. But Chihaya is undaunted in her quest to be the best.

After elementary school, the three of them go their separate ways. In Japan, kids in the same neighborhood will usually attend the same elementary school; starting with junior high, the school they attend depends more on their academic goals and abilities.

Taichi is accepted into a prestigious junior high. Arata returns with his family to far-flung Fukui when his grandfather falls ill and grows out of touch. When we next meet him as an older teen, he speaks with a strong Hokuriku accent.

Arata has also grown out of touch with karuta. The most poignant dramatic arc in the first season involves Chihaya's efforts to re-inspire the person who first inspired her.

Now in high school, Chihaya has reached A-level, the highest rank in competitive karuta. But she's far from the top. Taichi hasn't played since elementary school but gets dragged along by Chihaya's enthusiasm. With another classmate they once competed with and two rookies, the club is on.

Chihayafuru follows the basic structure of the high school anime sports series. A big difference is that karuta isn't exactly a spectator sport. At first, there's no way to replay an entire karuta game in real time and hold our interest.

As the players get better and we become more familiar with the game, the competitions get longer, and begin to approximate real time. Similar to The Big Windup, commentary comes in the form of inner monologues that reveal the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of each player and team.

Character profiles of the players and their opponents—examining what drew them to such an obscure and difficult sport in the first place—are depicted in often surprisingly intense melodramatic vignettes (accompanied by lush orchestration).


Now, stories about melodramatic teens usually appeal to me as much as fingernails scraping across a blackboard. A big problem with otherwise compelling teen romances like Kimi ni Todoke is that, as Kate puts it, the characters have too much time to "sit and around and get angsty."

A job, a sport, a serious hobby helps to mitigate that. The nascent love triangle (usually another annoying dramatic device) in Chihayafuru stays mostly nascent, largely because Arata is on the other side of Japan. And Chihaya's monomaniacal focus on karuta precludes such distractions.

Neither is it resolved (I'll have to start reading the manga). But there is a pay-off in the penultimate episode of season two when Kanade (the club medievalist) realizes the implications of a poem Chihaya wrote for a homework assignment and lectures Taichi to pick up his game (a cute scene).

So there's a lot more involved than the protagonist going from success to success. Common to anime sports series,the struggle, the hard work and effort, the growth and the team effort are what matter the most.

Kanade insists they wear traditional hakama and learn what the poems mean (think of how well the average educated person understands Chaucer). The club nerd calculates "batting averages" based on card placement. Taichi and Nikuman-kun rise quickly to match Chihaya's abilities.

For Chihaya, being the biggest fish in her own small pond doesn't mean there is nothing more for her to learn right where she is. She's still got a long way to go to become the "queen" of karuta. But her unrelenting passion for a game based on medieval poetry will surely take her there.

The videos below are from the 2016 Queen (women) and Meijin (men) matches. (I mentioned hakama above, which the competitors are wearing.)



Granted, at first it'll make about as much sense as, well, Cricket (though it should be obvious when a "dead" card is read). But once you've watched a season of Chihayafuru, you'll know exactly what is going on, even if you don't understand a word of Japanese.

Crunchyroll and HIDIVE have the three seasons of the series to date.

Related posts

Play ball!
Poetry in motion
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: anime, anime reviews, chihayafuru, japanese culture, personal favs, sports

As discussed previously, there's a manga or anime for practically every sport, an entire subgenre for baseball alone. Competition makes for conflict and great story material, and that includes a fascinating series about a literary card game that quickly became one of my all-time favorites.

The game is kyougi (competitive) karuta, the latter word borrowed from the Portuguese carta during the Edo period and applied to Japanese playing cards in general. Here it refers specifically to the game of "singing karuta" or uta-garuta.

To be sure, even in Japan, more people know about karuta than can play with it with any competence. The Tokyo high school baseball regionals involve hundreds of teams. Only a dozen or so can muster enough members to compete in the Tokyo karuta regionals.

They'd all fit in a single gymnasium with room to spare.

The centuries-old game is based on a Heian period poetry collection known as the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ("One hundred poems by one hundred poets"), compiled by the court noble Fujiwara no Teika in the 13th century. Not the kind of game that makes the average teenager sit up and take note.

In competitive karuta, given the first three lines of a waka, players pick the card with the last two lines. Skilled players can identify cards by the first one or two syllables of the poem. The game involves lots of memorization, short-term spatial memory, sharp hearing, and good reflexes.

The reader card is on the right. The player card on the left is written in kana, a purely phonetic syllabary. (Courtesy Tofugu.)

The best players become experts in assimilation and coarticulation,  the phonological processes by which the articulation of one phoneme influences the pronunciation of the next. That way, two poems that begin with identical syllables can be differentiated before the second syllable is spoken.

Fifty cards of the one hundred are randomly selected, each player receiving twenty-five, which they arrange in front of them. They have fifteen minutes to memorize the cards before the game begins. So players line up their cards to maximize ease of location and speed of identification.

A reader proceeds through a full, randomized deck (there are CDs to practice with: set the player to shuffle play), meaning that fifty cards will not be in play. Mistakenly choosing a "dead" card will cost one of your own.

A live card can be—is often—selected from the group with a sweep of the arm. With well-matched players, quick reactions matter, so this sweeping motion may be executed with considerable force, sending the cards flying. Multiple cards can be selected if the target card is included.

Towards the end of a match, a player can group his remaining cards together and hit them all at the same time; though if none of those cards are the right card, a penalty is exacted.

A player can also reach over and grab a card from his opponent's side (which requires being able to read the cards upside down), and then give his opponent one of his own (again, a strategic move). The first person to empty out his side wins.

The result is a formal poetry reading combined with a fast-moving athletic performance that gives competitive karuta a "chess boxing" vibe. It really is "poetry in motion." Oh, and that anime series? It's Chihayafuru. More about it next time.

Related posts

Play ball!
Chihayafuru
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: anime, baseball, chihayafuru, history, japan, japanese culture, literature, nhk, personal favs, sports

Hollywood cranks out a big sports movie every year or two, Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid starring in about half of them. But sports is less commonly the primary focus of U.S. television series, Friday Night Lights being an exception that proves the rule.

In Japan, though, the sports drama is a hugely popular manga and anime genre (often adapted to live action). And no athletic endeavor or game gets left out.

From Captain Tsubasa (soccer) to Yawara! (judo) to Hikaru no Go (go) to Kuroko's Basketball to Free! (swimming) to Ashita no Joe (boxing) to Haikyu!! (volleyball) to Prince of Tennis to Princess Nine (baseball) to Over Drive (bicycling) and Initial D (street racing), and even Chihayafuru (the poetry-based card game of karuta).

We're barely grazing the surface. The My Anime List website dug up over 500 titles in anime alone. These series are certainly products of their times, both reflecting and arousing interest in their area of interest. As a case in point, each broadcast episode of Yawara! included a countdown to the Barcelona Olympics

Ashita no Joe debuted in 1968 and defined the boxing drama in the public imagination eight years before Rocky. In 1981, Captain Tsubasa presaged the huge popularity of soccer today. Basketball is interesting, in that Japan remains noncompetitive at the professional level outside Japan. But Kuroko's Basketball (2008) is a massive hit.

"Even if it's just for a moment, I'm gonna burn so bright it'll dazzle everyone. And all that'll be left is pure white ash."

If real sports don't strike your fancy, there's always Angelic Layer, a futuristic version of Rock'em Sock'em Robots. And Eureka 7, in which jet-powered hoverboarders save the planet. Bizarrely enough, Girls und Panzer somehow manages to turn armored war games into a high school extracurricular activity.

And yet no sport can match the enduring popularity of baseball. The roots of baseball's appeal in Japan go deeper than the simple cinematic appeal. Even more than home-grown sports like judo and sumo, baseball is woven into the fabric of modern Japanese society. The reason is high school. More about this next week.

Related links

Chihayafuru (CR)
Free! (Yahoo CR)
Girls und Panzer (Yahoo CR)
Hikaru no Go (Yahoo)
Haikyu!! (Yahoo CR)
Kuroko's Basketball (CR)
Princess Nine (CR)

Labels: anime, anime lists, baseball, chihayafuru, japanese culture, manga, movies, pop culture, sports