Based on the manga created by Toshinao Aoki and Studio Bones, the animation in Dragon Pilot brings to mind the comic strip art of Bill Watterson. The premise of Dragon Pilot as well is the crazy kind of gross but hilarious and yet clever idea that Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would come up with.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world (and most Japanese), a select few of Japan's military aircraft, including an F-15J and an F-2 (Mitsubishi's made-in-Japan version of the F-16), are dragons disguised to look like fighter jets.

Hisone Amakasu is a rookie airman at the Japan Air Self-Defense Force Gifu Air Base. One day out of the blue she learns she has passed a "qualification" (she wasn't aware of) and is summarily transferred to a huge hanger way off in the corner of the base that no one seems to know about—except for an odd old woman who pushes a food cart around the base.

When Hisone finally finds the hanger, she walks in and is confronted by a huge dragon (she later names "Masotan") that promptly eats her.

The ground crew is delighted. It's been a while since a pilot passed muster with this particular OTF (an "Organic Transformed Flyer," as the military labels them). You see, the pilot doesn't ride atop the dragon like a horse. The dragon swallows the pilot, who "flies" the dragon from its guts. And when the flight is over, regurgitates her back out.

And, yes, the pilots have to wear special flight suits to keep from getting digested.

Needless to say, the dragon has a lot of discretion about who gets swallowed, and some, like Masotan, can get picky. The dragons are perceptive about the personalities of their pilots. They can even pick up mechanical issues with the real F-15Js they fly with (via the heads-up display in the helmets the pilots wear). But they don't talk.

It's eat or don't eat. Once they've formed an attachment, the one thing that really gives a dragon an upset stomach is his pilot forming a romantic relationship with another human being (which reminds me a similar plot device in My Zhime). No surprise, then, that the girls who make the best "D-Pilots" are not very socially adept.

For all its inherent silliness, Dragon Pilot raises fascinating questions about choice and free will. Hisone got something she didn't know she wanted. Nao wants something she can't get. Elle got what she didn't want instead of what she did. Moriyama gave up what she wanted and walked away to happily make another life for herself.

As Hisone tells Okonogi, a member of her ground crew and also, by family lineage (not something he had a lot of choice about either), a Shinto priest, "It's always best when the things you like and the things decided for you are in agreement."

That religious angle is no small matter. One of the old gods of Japan is a whale-sized monster, literally the size of a small island. It briefly comes out of hibernation every seventy-four years. The job of the dragon pilots is to escort it to a new resting place before it goes all Godzilla on Japan, and put it to bed with an ancient Shinto ritual.

The old school ritual required one of the miko attendants to stay behind in the "belly of the whale," so to speak. As far as Hisone is concerned, that is very much not okay. As it turns out, the food cart lady is the last living member of her squadron from the last time, when her reaction was the same as Hisone's.

In Calvin and Hobbes style, Hisone figures out an unlikely solution. It's a credit to the writing that the series manages to take these serious turns—and turn back again—without spoiling the comedic mood created earlier or making light of the dramatic decisions that Hisone faces (but be sure to stick through the final closing credits).

Masotan ultimately gets a character arc too, which suggests that perhaps the dragons will figure out how to compromise on the whole personal boundaries thing, and not force their pilots into the kind of all-or-nothing choice that Moriyama was left with. We have every reason to hope that the dragons will mature alongside their pilots.

Dragon Pilot is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime reviews, japanese culture, netflix, religion, shinto

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

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

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

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

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

Sums up the Financial Times,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ranpo Edogawa
Boy Detectives Club
Scene of the crime writer

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

Seven Seas Entertainment has licensed the Twelve Kingdoms novels by Fuyumi Ono. (Just for the record, I am not involved in any way.) Shadow of the Moon, Shadow of the Sea (part 1) will be released in July 2025 in paperback format. The ebooks will also be made available on digital platforms. (Fuyumi Ono has resisted releasing the novels in electronic format. The Japanese editions are still not available from BookWalker or the Kindle store.)

TokyoPop published the English translations back in 2007. The license was not renewed and the books have gone out of print. When it comes to localizing manga and light novels, Seven Seas has a much bigger presence in the market. It makes sense that they would be handed the baton this time around.

Let's hope they make the most of the opportunity. Though it's not encouraging that only part 1 of Shadow of the Moon is being released first, rather than an omnibus edition. At that pace, publishing the entire series could take a long time.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, business, publishing, shadow, translations

I usually sign up for a full year when I enroll at Crunchyroll. Unlike Netflix and Hidive, Crunchyroll acquires new anime titles at a prodigious enough rate to keep me engaged, especially after taking a short break to watch everything worth watching on Hidive and Netflix.

Plus an annual subscription saves around sixteen bucks over the monthly rate.

Though then I recalled that my last annual subscription ran out a few days earlier than I expected it to. A little research confirmed that, according to Crunchyroll itself,

Our subscription services are billed on a 30-day cycle (or 90 days, or 360 days), not a fixed rate. Since all months do not have exactly 30 days, the billing date can fluctuate, which can result in these changes.

Ah, now it makes sense. With the more typical month-to-month payment systems, we don't mind getting screwed over in February because the seven 31-day months will make up for it. The whole system is still more irrational than it needs to be.

If I ruled the world, I'd create a calendar of twelve 30-day months with four one-day festival days for the equinoxes and solstices, plus an extra day for the New Year. Then I'd shift the year forward ten days so that the Winter Solstice fell on New Year's Eve.

In ancient times, kings and emperors issued debt relief decrees on special occasions to win the loyalty of the masses. Given the complexities of modern economies, that wouldn't work today without creating all sorts of moral hazards.

I would stipulate that no rents or interest could be charged during those five festival days. This rule would not apply to all the common per diem expenses, only to rolling monthly and yearly accrued charges.

I'm sure it would take no time at all for retailers to come up with all sorts of "Interest free!" sales.

Oh, and I would get rid of Daylight Saving Time too.

Related posts

The relative time of day
Daylight Saving (waste of) Time

Labels: business, crunchyroll, geography, hidive, netflix, politics, science, streaming, technology

In his essay on Aeon, Matt Alt tackles the subject of Japanese minimalism (and the lack thereof), most recently epitomized and poularized in the bestselling books by Marie Kondo.

To begin with, ascetic practices attributed to Zen Buddhism are not the same as the disciplined use of space due to the fact that there isn't that much of it.

Ongoing population decline notwithstanding, Japan is still home to 126 million people who live in a country the size of California. Only 11 percent of the total land area is arable and less than a third of that is actually usable for housing.

That certainly sounds like a good argument for a less-is-more lifestyle. Except what space is available is nowadays bound to be crammed to the gills with stuff (as George Carlin delightfully put it).

After all, Kondo wrote originally for a Japanese audience, that had apparently forgotten they were supposed to be minimalists living in the land of minimalism.

Though to give Kondo the benefit of the doubt, I believe this is largely a postwar phenomenon brought about by both a booming economy and the additional confidence that all your stuff will still be here tomorrow.

As I discussed in a post about how Edo-period cities handled the constant plague of massive urban fires, perhaps Japanese minimalism simply evolved as a way to cope with that pretty grim reality.

Starting with the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, fire was such ever-present fact of life that the average Edokko could expect his house to burn down at least once during his lifetime.

This expectation didn't end with the Meiji. As Edward Seidensticker writes in Low City, High City, "From early into middle Meiji, parts of Nihonbashi were three times destroyed by fire. There were Yoshiwara fires in 1871, 1873, 1891, 1911, and of course in 1923."

To be sure, the effervescence of life notwithstanding, the denizens of Edo weren't nonchalant about losing their stuff. Row house residents dug root cellars to stash their valuables during a fire. Wealthy landowners built fireproof storehouses away from the main house.

As late as 1995, the widespread damage from fires throughout Kobe following the Great Hanshin earthquake was a big wakeup call. Fire is no longer the threat it once was in Japan's urban centers, which has allowed clutter to proliferate.

When one of those old Edo period storehouses shows up in a modern mystery series, it will be crammed floor to ceiling with a haberdashery of clutter, that the detectives will have to comb through to find the critical clue.

As Kyoichi Tsuzuki points out, "Simplicity isn’t about poverty at all. It’s about wealth." It's about being able to buy all that stuff and then being able to afford to store it someplace else. Or replace it on a whim.

It's also a good way to have your minimalist cake and eat it too. Before the fussy relatives come over, cart all that materialistic excess to the storehouse and show off your splendidly simple life.

Or I guess you could hire Marie Kondo to eliminate the need in the first place.

Labels: economics, geography, history, japan, japanese culture, religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not just me.

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

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

Good stories told well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts

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

In this largely autobiographical account of the author's two-year proselyting mission to Japan during the late 1970s, a Mormon missionary is confronted by an overzealous religious bureaucracy and faces his own growing doubts as the work of preaching the gospel gets turned into a cynical and self-serving game of numbers and spiritual one-upmanship.

The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the innagural story of my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I liked using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than programming.

Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I doubt the story would be so well received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s at Brigham Young University under President Jeffrey Holland its glasnost era.)

Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the the Tokyo North and South missions being reunited in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.

If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.

Tokyo South will be made available at a later date.

Related posts

The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
Tokyo South is dead
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Labels: books, BYU, ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south