I first interviewed Hayao Miyazaki for Japanamerica in the early aughts. I was very fortunate. It was the usual story--a friend of a friend of a friend, and so on. He was a bit tight-lipped at first but relaxed and opened up when he realized that I was no otaku.  Later I was invited to interview him live onstage at UC Berkeley in California (video here), and we've had a few informal chats since.  When he was awarded a second Oscar this year (third if you count his 2014 honorary statuette), I gave interviews to the BBC, CNN and The Guardian, in addition to a couple of online Japanese ..read more

I used to run like hell from Godzilla movies, not out of fear but embarrassment. As a Japanese-American teenager in diversity-poor rural New England, I winced at the sight of a dude in a rubber suit stomping on cardboard cities. It looked silly and cheap, two Asian stereotypes I was trying hard to live down, so I ran even faster from the Americans I knew who actually liked Godzilla to avoid being cast as yet another Asian American nerd.   Godzilla outran me. Japan’s nuclear lizard is now the face of the world’s longest-running film franchise, according to Guinness World Records, turning ..read more

Two Japanese-made films premiered within a week of each other in US cinemas last December, "Godzilla Minus One" and "The Boy and the Heron," with very little publicity. Both are now huge commercial successes: "Heron" is the highest grossing non-franchise anime feature ever in the US; "G-1" the highest grossing Japanese live action film. Both are also critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated.  For Miyazaki, a win would be his second after 2003's "Spirited Away." For the "G-1" VFX team, led by writer-director Takashi Yamazaki, a win would be a first for any film in the 70 year-old Godzill ..read more

Sleeper hit anime 'Blue Giant' gets an encore In 2023, releasing a big-budget anime feature about three Gen Z boys in a post-bop jazz band sounds like commercial suicide. Jazz is boomer music; anime is for kids weaned on Pokemon. But the sleeper hit of the year was by far director Yuzuru Tachikawa’s “Blue Giant,” an adaptation of Shinichi Ishizuka’s jazz-centric manga series. The film was so popular with audiences in Japan and overseas after its first run this spring that it warranted an even bigger budget for a re-edited second release, which premiered last month at this year's Tokyo Intern ..read more

One of my favorite recent English-language books on Japan is AMETORA ("American Traditional"), the enthralling, novelistic story of postwar Japan told through its brilliant refashioners of Western fashions (Take Ivy! Selvedge Denim! BAPE!). I will host a talk w/author W. David Marx at The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan on Wednesday, Dec 13th, 6pm JST, both live and via Zoom. If you're in Tokyo (or not), please join us by registering here:  https://www.fccj.or.jp/event/book-break-w-david-marx-author-ametora-how-japan-saved-american-style-presentation  "Tokyo-based author W. D ..read more

  Kaori Drome Of all the projects I've worked on over the years, this one is the dearest and most rewarding. So I'm thrilled to announce our first LIVE streaming event to launch the latest edition of MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, the world's only annual English-language literary magazine of Japanese stories, poetry, art and essays. I will be joining co-founding editor Motoyuki Shibata and author-artist Satoshi Kitamura to introduce our new issue for the Japan Society of Boston on Tuesday, December 5th at 6pm EST / Wednesday, December 6th 8am JST. Please join us to learn how Japanese sto ..read more

Portraits by Satoshi Kitamura I am both humbled and honored to be featured in the brand new Fall/Winter 2023 issue of the original Japanese MONKEY, the nation's leading literary magazine, in conversation with founding editor/scholar/author/translator Motoyuki Shibata on what makes a good sentence and the more granular mysteries of translating literature between Japanese and English. Among the authors we discuss are Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, Denis Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, Kyohei Sakaguchi, Don DeLillo, Rebecca Brown, Tim O'Brien, Amy Hempel and Ehud Havazelet. The ..read more

  photo Joe DeMarie (LA) I was interviewed for the Japan episode of the new Netflix doc series "Encounters," about cultural perceptions of UFOs and alien beings, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. The episode features a highly sensitive take on Japan's spiritual imagination. It's called "Lights Over Fukushima" and is now watchable here. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81573975 I was a tad leery of this gig at first. But the director and crew were great and genuinely keen to tell a true story. And the opportunity to talk about Astro Boy, Ultraman and Totoro in one fell sw ..read more

The Johnny's fiasco in Japan is but one reminder that tight corporate/big business control over creative industries can result in corruption and stymie creativity (leaving aside the charges of sexual abuse). When I was tasked to write about contemporary Korean vs. Japanese films in my latest column for The Japan Times, one of the starkest differences I found was between the processes of movie and series production in the two countries. In Japan, delivering a product on or under-budget and on-schedule is prioritized, and creatives are treated by corporate owners like disposable gig-economy work ..read more

   2023 My latest interview for HISTORY Channel airing this month pursues my work on a story I started researching and writing about 20 years ago: the fate of billions of dollars (at least) worth of treasure plundered from Asia by the Japanese military in World War II, much of it buried in an underground network of tunnels and caves in the Philippines.  The loot was discovered forcibly by the Americans (i.e., GHQ), kept off the books, and deposited in bank accounts across the world--known primarily as the "M-Fund" (M-Shikin in Japanese). How was that money used? You can probabl ..read more