For some really cool pictures of cosplay at the Anime Expo 2007 (held in Long Beach, California) check out these two links:

Anime Expo 2007 Part 05: Cosplay (Part 1)
Anime Expo 2007 Part 05: Cosplay (Part 2)

This just in …

Japanese violinist Kamio wins Int’l Tchaikovsky Competition

A 21-year-old Japanese, Mayuko Kamio, from Osaka Prefecture, won the violin section of the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition on Friday.

Kamio became the second Japanese to win the violin section, following Akiko Suwanai, who won the ninth competition in 1990 at age 18.

Congratulations!

[Update: This is not really an update so much as a reminder. Tonight on TV Asahi at 7:00, Johnny Depp will be lending his voice to play a pirate character on the popular kids anime, Doraemon! ]

This just in from Anime News Network:

Johnny Depp, the international star of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, will voice a guest role on the Doraemon children’s animated television series this month. He will appear as the “Pirate Captain Johnny” character on “Doraemon One-Hour! Pirates Special!! The Great Decisive Battle of the Pirates: A South Seas Love Story,” which will air on TV Asahi on Friday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m.

Sounds cool!

• Wikipedia: Doreamon
• Wikipedia: Johnny Depp

 

 According to an article in the Daily Yomiuri:

Being the captain of the baseball team at Shimonoseki Chuo Kogyo High School in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture–a semifinalist in the summer 2005 prefectural tournament–doesn’t protect Sunao Iwakawa, 18, from being benched during official games. She has to sit out games for one very important reason–she is female.

Aw, come on … Let her play! :-(This is a great story, follow the above link and read the rest of it! Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Salzberg at Global Voices Online says:

An interview with Montreal-born Japan-based video producer Michael Goldberg has been posted at gyaku. In the interview, Goldberg discusses his experience with media art movements in the 60s and 70s, as well as his recent documentary entitled “A ZEN LIFE” about Japanese author/translator D.T. Suzuki, widely credited as having introduced Zen to the West.

I’ve heard of D.T. Suzuki before, but was not aware his wife had been from a western country. The interview is pretty neat, check it out!

According a report in the Mainichi Shimbun:

Flopping again! Japanese trail the world in sex once more
-
Results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey have come out and once again the Japanese have come dead last when it comes to sex among over 26,000 people from 26 countries across the world.

I don’t trust reports like this at all, so I tried to look around on the internet to get some information on this study, and I couldn’t find anything.

The last study listed on the Durex homepage is the 2005 survey.

Also there are no other news story similar to this one.

Could this report be bogus?

I’ll look around a bit more and hopefully add an update to this page after I’ve discovered something.

Update 1:

Okay, I think I found the survey. They changed the name from sex survey to sexual well-being survey.

Here is the link. I will comment on the methodology as soon as I have a chance.

日本語で:
セクシャルウェルビーング グローバルサーベイ

There was a totally weird article about self-esteem that got published in the Yomiuri recently. It was titled, New test shows Japanese don’t lack self-esteem.

The article really bugged me, so I want to look at three quotes here and explain why the article bothered me.

First quote:

Psychological tests of American, Chinese and Japanese university students have shown for the first time that Japanese have as much self-esteem as students from the other nations, it has been learned.

My first reaction is who cares? Self-esteem is such a vague and ambiguous concept to begin with that there simply can’t be any tests that would be sufficient to measure it.

However, there is a hidden irony here. Clearly there are some people who are very insecure about Japan’s place in the self-esteem world rating. So insecure, in fact, that they need some kind of study to validate their psychological well-being as Japanese.

How’s that for some low self-esteem?

Second quote:

Research teams from Tokyo University, Harvard University and East China Normal University conducted the new test on 505 students from the three countries to try to gauge their subconscious view of themselves.

A completely meaningless sample size and sample group.

Third quote:

Under the old method, self-esteem was tied to self-assertiveness, and Americans came out with the highest scores, followed by Chinese and Japanese students. However, with the new method there was no difference between students from the three countries.

The above might be hard for some people to parse, so let me rephrase it:

Using a previous definition of self-esteem Japanese were shown lacking, so we re-defined the term at our convenience and then found that Japanese were equal.

This reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story where where everyone is finally made equal:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. …

Click here if you want to read the rest of the Vonnegut story.

 

 Don’t they look cute?You can find these at take-g toy’s, on this page.I don’t think they actually have any functionality, you sort of just look at them. They’re probably too expensive to use as toys. There’s no price listed, but as they say, “if you have to ask …”

It would seem that Manga is doing so well in America that publishers now want to start publishing some homegrown manga, especially in the case of teenage females.

Here’s a neat video on the subject from the WSJ:

According to a related WSJ article:

Trade publication ICv2 puts the total comics and graphic novel market at about $640 million last year in the U.S. and Canada, with manga accounting for about $200 million of that figure. The manga category is expanding quickly. Total sales of manga books jumped 22% to 9.5 million units in 2006 from 7.8 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen BookScan, which collects point-of-sale information from 6,500 retail locations across the country, including those operated by Borders Group Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. The manga category in 2006 accounted for about two-thirds (68.5%) of all graphic novels sold in U.S. bookstores, up from slightly more than half (53.8%) in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan. (The figures don’t include comic-book stores.)

All very cool. To read a little more about this I recommend you check out the Kokoro Media blog entry, where I found this information.

Here’s a funny video:

As you can see, kids are growing up faster than ever in Japan.