The traditional police procedural is one genre where live-action Jdrama holds it own. Hollywood could do a lot worse than license a series like Partners just for the premise and the plots.

Much of the credit goes to Ranpo Edogawa (1894–1965), a tireless promoter of the mystery novel in Japan. His pen name is a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe. Edogawa is best remembered for the Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club young adult mystery novels, published between 1936 and 1962.

His efforts are widely acknowledged today. The mystery genre is prominent not only on prime-time television and the best-seller lists, but has long been a staple of young adult manga and anime.

Kindaichi Case Files, based on characters created by mystery writer Seishi Yokomizo, has been published by Kodansha since 1992. The ongoing Case Closed (titled Detective Conan in Japanese) was launched by Shogakukan in 1994, with the accompanying anime totaling more than 1140 episodes.

The main character in Case Closed sports the nom de plume of Conan Edogawa, an additional tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle as well. There is no shortage of detectives surnamed Akechi in contemporary Japanese crime fiction.

Speaking of Conan Doyle, Great Britain and Japan share similar cultural elements that make them ideal settings for the cozy mystery. Namely, generally accepted rules of propriety and a veneer of "polite society" easily disrupted (but not deeply damaged) by an otherwise "ordinary" crime. The world need not end in every episode.

Like a returning tide, we expect the greater cultural forces at work to wash away the disruptive elements and reset the stage for next week. So we shrug off the comically high murder rates in Midsomer and Cabot Cove, and the body counts in Kindaichi Case Files and Case Closed that can exceed that of the entire country on a weekly basis.

To be sure, a gun is rarely the murder weapon. But watch out for knives, rope, stairs, and every kind of blunt object! Reality forces Japanese crime writers to get creative, and they embrace all the plausible possibilities. It follows that the geeky appeal of the CSI subgenre has made it a favorite with audiences.

The CSI guy on Partners played a supporting role for twenty-one seasons. Kasoken no Onna ("Woman of the Science Research Institute") is in its twenty-fourth season. Like Crime Scene Talks (seven seasons), the plotting is pretty much by the numbers. But the reason we follow a recipe is because it works.

Viki has a handful of localized live-action police procedurals. For now, though, your best bet for subs or dubs is anime.

Crunchyroll has a boatload of Case Closed episodes. Sticking strictly to the puzzle-solving cozy mystery formula, five of my anime favorites are Holmes of Kyoto, Hyouka, In/Spectre, Beautiful Bones, and Onihei.

Hyouka and Holmes of Kyoto are classic whodunits that closely follow the classic formula, even though the cases often don't involve any actual crimes.

I love the clever English language title for In/Spectre, a supernatural detective series. It can get overly talky, especially in the first season, but Kotoko takes us through her reasoning process step by step. Though she is an often unreliable narrator, manipulating events to produce the outcome she prefers.

In Beautiful Bones, Sakurako Kujo is an even more eccentric osteologist than Temperance "Bones" Brennan, the series that inspired the English title. The Japanese title translates as "A Corpse is Buried Beneath Sakurako's Feet."

Onihei is an action-heavy Edo period police procedural that doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights for suspects at the time.

And although she only appears in a couple of episodes in a series that can't be classified in the genre, the hard-boiled vampire-hunting private eye in Call of the Night is such a great noir character that I'd like to see her get a show of her own.

Related posts

Scene of the crime writer

Labels: crunchyroll, dlibjapan, edogawa, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, mystery, streaming, tubi, viki

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

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

It's not just me.

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

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

Good stories told well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related videos

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

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

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.

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, crunchyroll, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, remow, sony, streaming, tubi

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

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

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

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

Related posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts

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

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

Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja. As the name makes clear, it focuses on action-oriented Edo period movies and series. I got to wondering who came up with such a great name and dug up the following.

The service launched in 2023 as a joint venture between international distributor Remow and Nihon Eiga Broadcasting, which also runs its own pay TV channel for historical dramas. Samurai vs Ninja is active in forty countries around the world.

The corporate vision statement on the Remow website sums up the underlying problems with Japanese content distribution that have been brought into stark relief by the soaring popularity of Kdrama. Well, somebody finally decided to do something about it.

We hear more and more about Japanese productions being viewed around the world. However, the number of platforms on which Japanese titles can be viewed is limited. The truth is that many users all around the world are viewing pirated copies rather than using legitimate platforms. Japanese entertainment is an expression of our culture and our identity, and we want to deliver this entertainment culture to the people of the world along with the identity of our thoughts and feelings.

Remow has identified a chronically underserved market (while NHK Cosmomedia invests in a vanishing niche with Jme TV). Samurai vs Ninja is a work in progress though I have to wonder if its appeal might prove too narrow. Maybe add "Cops vs Yakuza" to the mix next. And lean harder into licensing.

I expect that Sony will end up being taught as a case study in business schools for wisely resisting the siren song to launch its own branded streaming channel. It already owned Aniplex, an anime production and distribution company, and then purchased two established anime streaming services.

Sony subsequently merged Funimation and Crunchyroll into a worldwide operation under the Crunchyroll brand. It didn't have to spend the time and resources building the whole thing from scratch with untested original content.

Owning a bunch of content doesn't matter much if nobody knows about it and can't access it. To its credit, the Samurai vs Ninja YouTube channel is jam-packed with sample episodes and promotional material. Although for now, aside from the website, the only streaming apps are for Android and Apple.

Related links

Samurai vs Ninja (official website)
Samurai vs Ninja (YouTube channel)

Labels: business, crunchyroll, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, jme, nhk cosmomedia, remow, samurai vs ninja, sony, streaming, technology, tubi

I gave up on Jme TV, NHK Cosmomedia's streaming replacement for TV Japan. They're charging the same $25/month they did for the cable channel, an amount completely out of whack with comparable streaming services. Jme offered to grandfather the VOD service for $15/month, which is no less absurd, especially given the size of its catalog.

In many cases, push the price point low enough and you can stop thinking about the sunk costs. Kocowa, for example, South Korea's equivalent of TV Japan, offers its basic plan for $7/month. But the Jme TV website and app are so poorly designed that I'd be unlikely to stick around at any price greater than zero.

Speaking of which, NHK really ought to host a version of the Jme Select channel on NHK World Japan, along with the Asadora. If nothing else, it'd be a great publicity move. TV Japan used to be the only game in town for live-action Japanese content. Used to be. That built-in audience is long gone by now.

NHK World Japan, TV Japan's public service sibling, has something worthwhile to offer most days (especially during the sumo tournaments). NHK posts its flagship domestic newscasts online. Japan's commercial news networks stream their television feeds on YouTube. NHK's hourly radio broadcasts are also online.

And it's all free.

Back in February (the offer has since expired), I couldn't resist Rakuten Viki's 30 percent off sale and got the annual basic plan for $3.50/month. Even with its emphasis on romance and Kdrama, Viki has a decent enough collection of contemporary Jdrama that there simply isn't a downside.

Though given the glacial pace at which Viki acquires new Japanese content, I'll probably subscribe every other year. That's one reason why I think Viki should do a deal with NHK to license more of their material. (It is very telling that Rakuten Viki, a Japanese company, is dominated by Korean and Chinese content.)

Tubi is probably the best FAST (free advertising supported streaming television) streaming service currently available.

As Jordan Minor puts it, "Tubi fearlessly gets down and dirty by adding whatever cheap, old, and just plain weird stuff it can find to make sure you can always look forward to a novel viewing experience." In other words, Tubi's Japanese content consists of everything from art house to grindhouse to anime, along with quirky travelogues and documentaries.

Tubi has few contemporary Jdramas series, such as Daughter of Lupin and Special Security Squad and romances like A Girl and Three Sweethearts. Plus many more older period dramas and Sonny Chiba actioners. At least two dozen subbed or dubbed Godzilla and kaiju films, four Kamen Rider series, and a sizable selection from the Ultraman franchise.

My only big gripe with Tubi is the absence of language and country filters that would make it easier to find live-action Japanese content. Tubi has three anime channels and two Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama.

Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja, which has an impressive collection of action-oriented television movies and series from the 1970s up to the present. Content can be viewed online and there are apps for Android and Apple (but not Roku). The cost of a streaming subscription is $7.99/month.

Netflix's affordable ad-supported tier provides access to an eclectic collection of anime-inspired adaptations (One Piece and City Hunter being two of the latest), live-action dramas, and reality TV. Netflix licenses and produces new Japanese content on a regular basis.

With its worldwide reach, Netflix is emerging as one of the best sources of modern Japanese movies and television outside Japan. Netflix also provides subtitles in English and Japanese for many of its Japanese and non-Japanese titles.

The focus here is on live-action television, but you could spend a good portion of your life working through the free anime catalogs at Tubi and Retrocrush alone. Then for under $20/month total, you could add to that Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, and Netflix, and you'd need another lifetime.

Related posts

Jme TV (NHK World Premium)
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)
Tubi in Japanese
News from Japan (in Japanese)
Japanese language links

Labels: anime, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, netflix, nhk, samurai vs ninja, streaming, tubi, viki

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

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

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

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

Related posts

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

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

The great thing about streaming is that you can sign up for a month, watch what you want to watch, and then sign off (my Netflix approach).

Even if you're not interested in the rest of the Viki catalog, I recommend subscribing for a month (or two) to watch Isekai Izakaya Nobu, Sleeper Hit, and 99.9 Criminal Lawyer.

The first is a cute live-action drama that is better than the anime (and I usually steer clear of isekai).

What makes the isekai part of Isekai Izakaya Nobu work is that it ultimately doesn't matter that much. The show posits that the back door of the restaurant exits onto an alleyway in Kyoto. The front door opens onto a sort of alternate universe Geneva during the Habsburg Dynasty.

Nobody wastes much effort asking why (or wonders how the electric lights work) and nobody really needs to.

This is ultimately a food-focused show and the setting is an excuse to introduce Japanese cuisine to people who have never heard of it before. There are melodramatic arcs that tie the episodes together but they never overwhelm the rest of the story. The meals are ultimately the main characters.

Viki has two seasons of the live action series. Crunchyroll has one season of the anime.

Sleeper Hit follows the triumphs and travails of the editorial staff at a second tier manga imprint. They are one small division in a big publishing house with healthy enough sales to keep it alive but not in the same stratosphere as Young Jump (and thus have to worry about their best talent getting poached).

The Japanese title translates as "Print the Second Edition!" That is the turning point in the life of a manga. Manga magazines do well to break even and most mangaka lose money during serialization. They only end up in the black when a series has enough chapters to justify the release of a tankoubon edition.

The show starts out like a sitcom but soon turns into a serious drama about commerce and creativity. The story arcs make no bones about the punishing deadlines, the inextricable link between business and art, and the primacy of story, with the fickle reader exercising the final vote on success or failure.

We are taken through the life and death of a manga, from acquisition to serialization to cancelation, including a poignant scene in which the company president takes two of the new hires on a pilgrimage to the warehouse where the returns (all of the unsold books and magazines) are getting shredded.

The outstanding cast includes Yutaka Matsushige (Solitary Gourmet) as the managing editor, Joe Odagiri (Midnight Diner) as a senior editor given to bouts of philosophizing, and stars Haru Kuroki as an energetic newbie hired right out of college after the CEO challenges her to a wrestling match.

That last sentence will make more sense once you watch the first episode.

Sleeper Hit should be watched along with Bakuman. The anime covers the manga industry from the perspective of a pair of budding mangaka working hard to create a break-out hit.

I'm a fan of the traditional police procedural (following the one mystery per episode formula) and 99.9 Criminal Lawyer qualifies on all counts.

Ittoku Kishibe (best known as the Machiavellian government minister on Aibou) plays the managing partner at a big law firm. He recruits the eccentric Hiroto Miyama (Jun Matsumoto of the boy band Arashi) for a newly formed criminal defense division.

Character actor and Kabuki veteran Teruyuki Kagawa is Miyama's ornery boss. The "99.9" refers to the conviction rate in Japan's criminal courts, so his skepticism is understandable. Even in modern Japan, the accused is pretty much presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Related links

Isekai Izakaya Nobu (Viki)
Isekai Izakaya Nobu (Crunchyroll)
99.9 Criminal Lawyer
Sleeper Hit!

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, crunchyroll, fantasy, japanese, japanese tv, manga, publishing, streaming, tubi, viki

With dLibrary Japan offline until April 2024 (at the latest), it's once again time to reshuffle my Japanese language streaming choices. Tubi and NHK World Japan are free, so no decisions to make there.

Viki goes into watch and drop rotation. No complaints about the service itself. To start with, it's eminently affordable. It's a content mismatch. The Japanese content focuses on BL and romance. Frankly, when it comes to romance, Jdrama simply doesn't measure up to manga and anime.

I prefer police procedurals, low-stakes slice of life dramas, and documentaries, which Japanese television writers are much better at pulling off.

Viki has a few in that category, just not that many. But speaking of which, I see that Viki has licensed 99.9 Criminal Lawyer. It's a well done execution of the reliable formula that pits an eccentric defense lawyer against his uptight boss (a corporate lawyer because it pays much better).

And while I'm at it, I'll again point out that Viki has Sleeper Hit, a fun, insightful, and even philosophical examination of the manga publishing world and the hard-nosed business of selling art.

In any case, as with pretty much every streaming service that doesn't focus specifically on Japan, Viki's Jdrama offerings take a back seat to its Kdrama series (true of Tubi and Netflix too). But if that is what you're looking for, Viki is one of the better overall sources for Asian content.

Unfortunately, take away dLibrary Japan and Viki and there aren't that many viable Jdrama alternatives left. When TV Japan was alive on traditional cable, it added up to eighty (!) bucks a month for a single channel on Xfinity. Not an option when I cap my monthly streaming budget at twenty dollars.

Tubi has a few Jdrama series and (subbed) Japanese movies worth watching. It sure doesn't make them easy to find. But a little effort will occasionally turn up genuine classics, campy tokusatsu series (featuring primitive CG effects and guys in rubber suits), and recent releases like Blue Thermal.

At least for now, that leaves Netflix as far and away the best of the remaining Hobson's choices.

Anime, by comparison, offers an embarrassment of riches. Thanks to Sony's acquisition of Funimation and Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll rules the anime streaming world. You could watch Crunchyroll all day long and not make a dent in the huge backlist before getting swamped by dozens of new titles.

The annual subscription option makes Crunchyroll an even better deal. On price alone, HIDIVE is the most affordable anime streaming service but is so much smaller that it's hard to justify an annual subscription anymore.

I've been following Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer on HIDIVE. Both franchises have moved to the theatrical model. This wouldn't be a problem if they were releasing standalone movies but they're actually serials. What we end up with are regular series produced at a glacial pace.

I'll wait until a season is over before watching it. I'm very much on board with the old Netflix approach of releasing a whole series at once. Even on Crunchyroll, I watch a season behind the current schedule. The added benefit is that makes it easier to figure out which series are worth the time.

While waiting for titles to accumulate, HIDIVE joins Viki in the watch and drop category. Once I run out of live-action content on Tubi, I'll shift to Viki and then to Netflix. Netflix uniquely provides Japanese subtitles for much of its Japanese content, a very valuable language learning resource.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
Crunchyroll
HIDIVE
Netflix
Rakuten Viki
Tubi

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, dlibjapan, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, manga, netflix, nhk, nhk world, sony, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan

The ebook files for the titles discussed below are available at the downloads page. All publication rights remain with the copyright holders.

The Twelve Kingdoms novels have been licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment. Bookstore links will appear when they are published.

For additional commentary about the Twelve Kingdoms and the translation process, see Kate's Interview with a Translator series.

Youko/Keiki
1. Tsuki no Kage, Kage no Umi. My translation: Shadow of the Moon, a Sea of Shadows.

2. Kaze no Banri, Reimei no Sora. My translation: A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.

Youko, Suzu, and Shoukei join forces to defeat corrupt government leaders in Wa Province.

3. Tasogare no Kishi, Akatsuki no Sora. My translation: The Shore in Twilight, the Sky at Daybreak.

Risai escapes to Kei and asks Youko for help rescuing Taiki. Taiki and Youko are contemporaries.

Gyousou/Taiki

Fuyumi Ono wrote The Demon Child before she started the Twelve Kingdoms series. See link below. She covers some of this material in The Shore in Twilight, The Sky at Daybreak. In Kaze no Umi, Meikyu no Kishi ("A Sea of Wind, Shores of the Labyrinth"), Taiki choose Gyousou as Emperor of Tai. See links below. 

1. Tasogare no Kishi, Akatsuki no Sora. My translation: The Shore in Twilight, the Sky at Daybreak.

Risai escapes to Kei and asks Youko for help rescuing Taiki. Taiki and Youko are contemporaries.

2. Shirogane no Oka, Kuro no Tsuki. My translation: Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon (book I  II  III  IV). 

Risai and Taiki return to Tai. They recruit a small band of allies to search for Gyousou and take back the kingdom.

Shouryuu/Enki
Higashi no Watatsumi, Nishi no Sokai. My translation: Poseidon of the East, Vast Blue Seas of the West.

Shushou/Kyouki

Tonan no Tsubasa. My translation: The Wings of Dreams. 

Kyouki chooses Shushou as Empress of Kyou. (Shoukei encounters Shushou in A Thousand Leagues of Wind.)

Short Story Collections
Kasho no Yume. My translation: Dreaming of Paradise.

• (冬栄) "Winter Splendor" (Touei): takes place in Tai and Ren during The Shore in Twilight, the Sky at Daybreak.
• (乗月) "Jougetsu": takes place in Hou after A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.
• (書簡) "Pen-Pals" (Shokan): takes place in Kei and En after Shadow of the Moon, a Sea of Shadows.
• (華胥) "Dreaming of Paradise" (Kasho): takes place in Sai sometime before A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.
• (帰山) "Kizan": takes place in Ryuu and Sou after A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.

Hisho no Tori. My translation: Hisho's Birds.

• (丕緒の鳥) "Hisho's Birds" (Hisho no Tori): takes place before and shortly after the coronation of Youko as Empress of Kei.
• (落照の獄) "Prison of Dusk" Rakushou no Goku: references to Ryuu and Emperor Chuutatsu suggest the beginning of Youko's reign.
• (青条の蘭) "Blue Orchid" (Seijou no Ran): takes place in En before Rokuta chooses Shouryuu as the next Emperor.
• (風信) "Weather Vane" (Fuushin): takes place during the last days of Empress Yo of Kei, and then following her death. 

 Non-Woodbury Translations
  Translations of Masho no Ko ("The Demon Child") and Kaze no Umi, Meikyu no Kishi ("A Sea of Wind, Shores of the Labyrinth") are available at the Worlds in Translation website.  The TokyoPop translation of Tsuki no Kage, Kage no Umi is available here: The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow. 
The TokyoPop translation of Kaze no Banri, Reimei no Sora is available here: The Twelve Kingdoms: The Skies of Dawn. The TokyoPop translation of Kaze no Umi, Meikyu no Kishi ("A Sea of Wind, Shores of the Labyrinth") is available here: The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Wind.   The TokyoPop translation of Higashi no Watatsumi, Nishi no Sokai is available here: The Vast Spread of the Seas.  Resources & Other Notes
I've created my own abridged glossary. An overview of the Twelve Kingdoms universe can be found at Wikipedia (English Japanese). The Twelve Kingdoms Wiki has scans of the illustrations and additional artwork.

My go-to resource while translating the novels has been Yoshie Omura's Twelve Kingdoms Room (Japanese). Also see the Twelve Kingdoms Database (Japanese).

Fuyumi Ono borrows much of the political terminology from medieval China. Harvard University's "Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China" (PDF) provides useful clues about the English equivalents.

However, we are talking about a fantasy series, so historical translations are not always exact. The organizational charts at Twelve Kingdoms Memo (Japanese) have proved quite helpful.

The NHK anime can be streamed at Tubi and Crunchyroll (regional restrictions may apply). The Blu-ray edition is available from Discotek Media.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, books, crunchyroll, fantasy, japanese, kate, publishing, translations, tubi

So I reactivated my Netflix account using the "Netflix with ads" option. My original queue was still there eight months later, though that caused problems when my old Roku queue picked a fight with my new online queue. I finally let the old queue win, deleted everything, and started over.

In the meantime, Netflix made an important update to its search tools. "Browse by Languages" is now featured in the top menu. Previously, the only way to bring up the language menu was to search for the language content first (you had to search for Japanese content in order to search for Japanese content).

This is one feature that Tubi really needs to implement. Just steal the whole UI from Netflix. Though one oddity is that if you select the A-Z filter, you only get the first half of the alphabet. You have to select Z-A to get the other half. Hey, it's a feature, not a bug! (Don't steal that part.)

Netflix has about as many Japanese live-action series and features as Viki and Tubi, though Netflix covers a wider variety of genres and Tubi features older rerun material. Of course, Crunchyroll and HIDIVE have many more anime titles. Another big difference is that Netflix closely curates its catalog.

That curation does make a difference. Compared to Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, and Tubi, I have seen or am interesting in watching a higher percentage of Netflix anime titles (though there seems to be a polarizing effect too, as the ones I'm not interested in I usually have zero interest in).

At the top of my current list are the latest seasons of Ghost in the Shell, Ultraman, Midnight Diner, and The Way of the Househusband, along with Kotaru Lives Alone, Romantic Killer, I'm Old Enough, and The Makanai, the live-action version of Kiyo in Kyoto.

Though along with its Lupin the Third and Tokusatsu flicks, Tubi's kitchen sink approach occasionally produces some golden oldies.

For example, Tubi has Sonny Chiba's Shadow Warriors ninja series from 1980. Japanese broadcast television was more permissive back then, so along with the slicing and dicing, most episodes feature at least one scene of totally gratuitous nudity. Sonny Chiba's charisma shines through regardless.

As did Hollywood at the time, Japanese television studios back then mastered everything on videotape. It'd be nice if Netflix could grab some old samurai action classics (like the more family friendly Abarenbo Shogun) and run the SD masters through the best upscaling technology available.

On a separate note, I observed last summer that Eleven Arts had pulled its excellent slate of anime movies from Tubi, including Liz and the Blue Bird, Maquia, Penguin Highway, Sound Euphonium, and The Wonderland. They've since all shown up on Crunchyroll.

Related posts

Kiyo in Kyoto
I'm Old Enough
Netflix with ads
Netflix with ads (first impressions)

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, hidive, japanese, netflix, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television, tubi

Marketers refer to the nonlinear (video on demand) streaming business as "connected TV" or CTV. Ads for CTV are packaged in "pods," meaning "multiple ads sequenced together and played back-to-back within a single ad break."

Tubi has the lightest ad load of the ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) services. Another reason to like Tubi.

Ads [on Tubi] take up 4–6 minutes per hour of viewing, occurring every 12–15 minutes at 3–5 ads per pod, giving advertisers increased brand recognition and recall in an environment where the viewer is most receptive.

My experience with Tubi is that every program starts with a single "bumper" ad and then between 2–4 and 3–6 ads per pod.

For the time being, Netflix has delivered a lighter ad load than Tubi with its new ASVOD (ad-supported subscription video-on-demand) service. Though as Jay Peters points out, the ad placement is all over the place. Netflix with ads is a beta product still in the shakeout stage.

The transitions between the content and the ad pod can be so abrupt as to be jarring. Simply getting the timing right, along with a fade out and fade in, would make a big difference.

Netflix should consider the National Geographic approach. I grew up with the magazine, which only placed ads before and after the editorial content. (Even for a middle-class kid, those ads, aimed at an audience with deep pockets, could be as exotic as the articles themselves.)

Another pending problem is that not all content will be available on the ASVOD tier. In most cases, this simply means that the licensing agreements have to be renegotiated in order to divvy up the ad revenue.

"Netflix continues to haggle with several major studios for the right to run ads against their content in the new service" so this list is in flux. Unavailable content is displayed with a little padlock icon beneath the title.

I resubscribed to Netflix in large part to catch up on Komi Can't Communicate, Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045, Ultraman, and I'm Old Enough! (which I first saw on TV Japan many years ago), all of which are available.

The current Apple TV app doesn't support ad insertion at all (they're working on it), one consequence of Netflix wanting to get a jump on the Disney+ ASVOD launch in December. But no problem, I'm a Roku guy.

Then there's the question of whether to use the ASVOD tier at all. When Netflix launched the service, it also increased the video resolution of its Basic tier to 720p. Frankly, it's probably worth the three bucks to get rid of ads altogether.

On the other hand, Netflix was a pioneer in the streaming business, and together with Microsoft (engineering the underlying technology), I'm sure they will be innovating in the ad space as well. So I'm going to stick with the ASVOD tier a while longer to see how it develops.

Related posts

Tubi (update 4)
I'm Old Enough
Netflix with ads
Netflix with ads (content)

Labels: anime, business, japanese tv, netflix, roku, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan