Behind The Nihon Review

It’s very rare for the collective response to an anime as widely viewed as Guilty Crown to be so unified and even rarer when that response skews so strongly to the negative, but that’s where we are after 15 episodes. Right from its debut the show was compared incessantly with Code Geass, propelled by a [...]

The AnimeSuki Choice Awards frustrate the hell out of me. I definitely think it’s a worthwhile idea, which is why I cover it each and every year, as it is a good exercise to see which anime a community of its size rate highly, and Haak does a good job organizing nomination and voting stages, [...]

Ahhh the New Year. A time of beginnings, resolutions, and rebirths. A chance for everyone, everywhere, to start over with a fresh beginning. A chance to wash away the bumps, bruises, smudges, and stains of the last three-hundred and sixty-five days so that we may try again for the better. While the Winter season is [...]

I recently had the pleasure of meeting translator and writer Naoki Matsuyama (Twitter) from Contectures, a Japanese publishing company started by literary critic Azuma Hiroki. We sat down at a large café in Shinjuku, the heart of Tokyo, along with freelance translator Ko Ransom (Twitter), who had graciously set up the meeting for me by [...]

Following a brief discussion of C81 in our Three Way Action podcast from New Years, I wanted to do little bit of looking into a relatively interesting phenomenon: consignment sales of doujinshi. Sales of doujinshi via consignment involve circles producing doujinshi for comic markets in Japan contracting the sales of their goods to a store [...]