Introduction

Belldandy from Ah! My GoddessWhen it comes to culture, for a long time after the end of WW II, the U.S. and Japan were like father and son. In the post WW II era Japanese culture was nurtured on a steady stream of American movies, animation, and comic books.

“All the American movies banned during wartime came back in a flood, both new ones and old ones. It would have been strange for me not to have overdosed on them. I must have been seeing something like 300 films a year.”*1

It was not uncommon for Japanese comic and animation creators to use Hollywood actors as characters in their creations or for them to translate stories from American science fiction magazines and sell them as original work. It was under this shadow of American culture that modern Japanese popular culture developed, and thanks to many creative pioneers Japanese animation has developed into an unique medium exported around the world.

“From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one.”*2
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Ashley and Xander at the 2006 freshman orientation student org fair.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had an update. I’ve been kind of busy moving in to my new place. Anyway, here are the results from the voting and discussion we had at the very last meeting from the previous semester on what shows to show this fall semester.

Live Action Shows:
You’re Under Arrest
Hana Yori Dango

Anime:
Speed Grapher
and either
Yakitate Japan or Honey & Clover

This choice depends on fall semester’s first meeting.
Thanks and we look forward to seeing you next semester!

A futuristic submarine takes on the forces of a mad scientist who is trying to flood the world by melting the polar ice caps.

OK, this is going to take some imagination. First imagine a cool version of Seaquest DSV, then imagine a cool version of Waterworld. Then add them together.

This is a short OVA that plays more like a movie. The two main characters get as much development as can fit in-between action scene, but it is done well. The action scenes them shelf’s are nicely made with a combination of CG and traditional animation.

The sound effects are loud and vivid. The music is fast and jazzy, just wonderful. Great theme song too.
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Roger Smith is a private investigator / giant robot pilot in a world where everyone lost their memories forty years ago.

Big O struck me as a cross between Batman and Evangelion. Imagine Bruce Wanye as a giant robot pilot with Rei Ayanami as a sidekick. The characters in Big O have well rounded and dynamic personalities, which makes them very interesting to watch as the story progresses. Big O is one of the few giant robot series with more than just mecha bashing each other. The plot centers around the jobs that Roger takes and how the assignments he’s set on slowly reveal the secret of what caused the massive destruction and memory loss forty years ago. The first season of Big O is wonderful, but story quality tapers off in the second into a very dissapointing Evangelion-ish ending.

The background music sets a good tone for the dark environment that the show is set in. The opening song is very good but doesn’t seem to match the feeling of the world of Big O.
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A cute android girl becomes a bounty hunter in a post-apocoliptic city.

This movie reminded me of Final Fantasy Seven. People in a dirty city on the ground live off the scraps and garbabe from a paradise city in the sky. Bad androids lurk in dark streets waiting to find people whose brains they will eat, and the bounty hunters go after them. The animation is very smooth and life like.

The story centers around Alta (the battle angel) as she becomes a bounty hunter, falls in love, and then the tragic end. The only really negative thing about the anime is how short it is.

The opening and ending sequences are not very moving, but the music in the show is great and sets the atmosphere up wonderfully.
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Ryu Soma is a double agent working for an organization called Funeral whose job it is to protect the earth against giant aliens. Ryu passes information about Funeral to a man who mysteriously identifies himself as “the Devil.”

Agent Soma is a fairly unique series, it’s hard to compare it to other anime. The craft Soma (and the rest of his team) fly are like a cross between a Evangelion and a Macross jet. However the overall visually style of the show isn’t close enough for me to make any great comparisons.

Ryu Soma himself get most of the character development, the series almost totally revolves around him. But the supporting cast gets enough background to make the show interesting.

The music and sound effects are done well, but not very stirring. The opening song and sequence are very well done and setup the feeling of the show very well. But the ending is some obnoxious jap-pop song that doesn’t go with the show at all.
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A high school girl from modern Japan is mysteriously taken to a magical world, along with two of her friends.

The series is very close to Escaflowne, but with out the mecha. Neither does it have romance as major them. Evangelion fans many also like one of the female characters, who is very Rei-like.

The two female leads get most of the development in this Anime. The supporting cast seems flat by comparison. Also some really good sword fights.

The sound effects are standard fare and uninteresting. But it’s more than made up for my the stellar music which is a great sounding old world classical mix. The animation quality is also very high, lots of rich vibrant colors.
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A series of short biographies of several Japanese women’s lives. Among them was a women who grew up in America during World War II who later went on to become an English teacher and community leader in her rural home town in Japan. There was a woman who became interested in English from pop music and eventually became a university professor at NC Chapel Hill.

They interviewed an artist who was also a single mother and who had worked as a foreign reporter in Latin America. Also there was a woman who moved to America when she was 26 because of an arranged marriage and later moved back to Japan and now helps run a charitable organization. In addition there was a Korean girl who moved to Japan when she was 18 to become a dancer but she ended up marring a farmer after an extended courtship (of five years) against her family’s wishes.
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Village of Dreams is a film made in 1996 by Yoichi Higashi. It is about two young twins boys named Seizo and Yukiho who grew up in rural Japan just after World War II. The film documents what happened in the boy’s lives over some unknown length of time in the summer. The films more interesting aspects come from supporting roles. I really wanted to see what happened to the boy named Shinji and the girl who’s family was too poor to even buy her shoes.

Instead the films shown long scenes of things like the two boys walking, fishing, swimming, committing acts of vandalism, and other segments designed to show how the same the twins are. I kept saying to myself “Ok, they’re twins, they’re the same, I get it! What’s happening with Shinji?” Gerald Peary, film critic for the Boston Phonex shares my option:
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Bounce Ko Gals is a “day (or night) in the live of” story about a Japanese girl name Lisa who is tiring to get to New York to go to college.

She decides to stop at a shop that sells dirty underwear to sell her panties for a little extra trip money. The shop owner tells Lisa that there is a “video shooting” today as well if she would like some more money.

It turns out that the video shooting is more than what Lisa anticipated and she escapes with a professional KoGal named Joko. Although Lisa was able to save her plane ticket and passport she lost all the money she had ($2300).

Joko feels sorry for her and decides to help her so she takes Lisa on some paid dates with her to earn money singing karaoke. But after a while there were no more clients available and Joko calls an old KoGal friend named Raku to see if she can help too.
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Aiko Sweet 16 is about a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Aiko and her experiences at school over the summer. Aiko, the main character, is a very energetic and a bit of a delinquent. The other main character is Beniko, she is a brown-nosier and Aiko dislikes her in the beginning but later they become friends. The story (as best as I could follow) starts of a comedy about Akio and her antics.
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Learning to Bow is a journal written by Bruce S. Feiler during the year he worked as a exchange English teacher in the middle schools of Sano, a rural town north of Tokyo. Mr. Bruce, as he’s called by his students, learns first hand about the Japanese educational system and Japanese culture. However there wasn’t much material that was new to me so I really had to stretch to find something I could say I learned from it and that’s why this paper is so short.

The most interesting insight into Japanese culture for me was the decreased emphasis on self reliance and instead focus on the group thinking. This was well shown in the scene where Mr. Bruce is at the hospital and in traction for a sprained ankle he got during a tennis match. Mr. Bruce is lying in a hospital bed begging to go home to his apartment. But the descion isn’t left to him, his co-workers from the school have to hold a meeting right in the room to decide if Mr. Bruce will be able to survive by himself given his horrible injury.
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Waseda University graduate Haruki Murakami wrote A Wild Sheep Chase in 1981. The book won the Noma Literary Award for new writers, and latter on Mr. Murakami also won a Tanizaki prize for one of his newer novels.1 Sheep Chase is a Fantasy / Detective novel set in early eighties Japan. An interesting thing about this book is that none of the characters have names. They are all referred to by their relationship the main character (my girlfriend, my ex-wife, my business partner), or by they’re profession (the chauffeur, the hotel owner). The two pivotal characters in the book are ‘the boss’ and the narrator.

‘The boss’ was a solider in the Japanese army during WWII who participated in the invasion of China. After the defeat of Japan a US lead war commission brought ‘the boss’ to trial for war crimes, but the charges were dropped when US doctors discovered the he had developed a massive brain tumor and probably only had a few weeks left to live. However after ‘the boss’ was freed he didn’t become ill at all. In fact ‘the boss’, who had only been a barely literate grunt was completely changed:
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