Kon Satoshi
I am stunned to learn of the death of anime director Kon Satoshi. He was only 46; the cause of death was pancreatic cancer. Kon was for my money easily the best director in Japanese anime. Each of his...
View ArticleThe Current Reading List
A few things I’ve been reading as of late: Jim Harrison, True North (Grove Press, 2004). I’m a belated convert to Harrison’s fiction: I’ve known about him since a girlfriend in high school recommended...
View ArticleDetroit Metal City
This 2008 film came up in a discussion yesterday following a workshop I led at DePaul University for K-12 teachers on using Japanese popular music in the classroom. I did a little web surfing after...
View ArticleMarch 11: One Year Later
Next week marks the first anniversary of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan. In recent days, we’ve been learning that the situation was in fact far more dire than the...
View ArticleThis and That: Two Weeks in the Life
Apologies for the radio silence around these parts in recent days. It’s been a busy, fun couple of weeks since last I posted here. I was in Tokyo for six days last week, meeting with other scholars and...
View ArticleBang! Bang! Bang!: The Evolution of a J-Rock Classic
(Recycling something originally posted here in 2009) In 1967, Group Sounds superstars The Spiders recorded a song composed by their rhythm guitarist, Kamayatsu Hiroshi. Not much was expected of “Ban...
View ArticleUpcoming Japan-related Events at the University of Chicago
Apologies for the dearth of posts recently: it’s been a busy couple of months. The coming weeks and months promise to be just as busy, with many exciting Japan-related events on the horizon here at the...
View ArticleWakamatsu Koji’s “United Red Army”
Recently I’ve been thinking about film director Wakamatsu Kōji （若松孝二）. In part, this was because of his role as an early advocate for the music of Hayakawa Yoshio and JACKS; he hired them to provide...
View ArticleGodzilla vs. Hegel
Yesterday afternoon, we attended a nearly sold-out screening of Shin-Gojira (Godzilla Rusurgence), the new reboot of the Godzilla movie franchise directed by Anno Hideaki (of Neon Genesis Evangelion...
View ArticlePointillism and Limited Animation
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit “Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh: Ways of Pointillism,” a remarkable exhibit at the Albertina Museum in Vienna (open through 8 January 2017). It was an...
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