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September 21, 2007

three great grown-up manga

Koi no Mon - Jun Hanyunyuu

Bizarre story about a cosplay girl and freteer who makes manga out of rocks.

Osaka Hamlet - Hiromi Morishita

Teenage tearaways, cross-dressing, love, life, death and divorce. Everyday life in Osaka. Winner of this year's Tezuka Osamu Prize

Lyric Pieces for Whistle - Naoto Yamakawa

Understated and hauntingly beautiful stories with not much of a middle or an end. Real manga maniac territory here. Some of the pieces were rescued from self-published manga books.

Do I qualify as an otaku now?

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September 19, 2007

shinjujku cafe

Spotted an exciting new Tokyo eatery last night. Just opposite Shinjuku East exit: "cafe de Bore"

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September 09, 2007

Commuterland

A couple of months ago I wrote an article on Tokyo Commuting for the Credit Suisse in-house magazine (a publication that has been going for 150 years, no less).

Here's the link. I spent a few rather uncomfortable train journeys taking the photos to accompany this article!

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September 05, 2007

Am I an Otaku?

A question I attempted to answer in this article for Japan Spotlight:

Answers on a postcard please.

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September 01, 2007

Giving up on Asian languages

The BBC had an interesting article today on how Australians are giving up on learning foreign languages.

That's a shame. Some of the best Japanese speakers I've met here (other than Japanese people of course!) have been from Australia and New Zealand. I'm always jealous of people who learned Japanese at school and did homestays here.

Given the economic reality in the world, I could understand Australians passing over Japanese for Chinese, but that doesn't seem to be the case. According to the article Japanese is still one of the more popular languages (albeit for reading manga rather than doing business, I suspect).

But one student in the article complains about hard Japanese it."Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) are very difficult and it's impossible to conquer."

Can agree with that. About the only way is to cram kanji every day for several years like Japanese schoolchildren.

Makes you wonder what happened to globalization though. Or maybe it's the predominance of business English that's the problem?

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