American fighting game players very widely use the term “anime game”. It's all but official terminology! When we do so, we're talking about a very particular sort of game in the genre: games descended from Darkstalkers (Vampire),
Let's talk about one more event that leads to lines around the convention center. There's the rave, there's the concert,
I noticed Felipe Smith's Peepo Choo on the front page of animeanime back when I started with this column, and I was curious what a Japanese audience would think of a comic that takes so much
A friend of mine doesn't like to talk about it, but he singlehandedly put the word “weeaboo” into regular usage among American anime fans.
A friend of mine-- I'll withhold his name to protect his identity-- has an otaku secret that he doesn't want his buddies to know about.
The earliest American anime fans were people at science fiction conventions watching tapes untranslated: if they were lucky there was a translated script in their hands, or
Years ago I briefly dated a Japanese-American otaku girl who very sincerely asked me, “Dave, am I Japanese enough for you?” The question was
And so it was that at two in the morning during a round of Dodonpachi with a friend, I found out that Anime Boston had been shut down by the police.
Shinichiro Watanabe's new anime Kids on the Slope just premiered, and it made me think about American online fan reaction to the show even
there are many cases of censorship in older American broadcasts of anime/manga. A brushed-out splash of blood here, bare breasts painted over with a “swimsuit” there.
I have mentioned in passing that nearly every anime that aired on American television was somehow altered for US audiences.
I thought right away of Gundam in America. It's a very strange story, and Gundam fans in Japan might be a little mortified to hear it.
At midnight on April Fool's Day this year, Cartoon Network changed its usual late-night programming to “Toonami”, the fondly remembered programming block from the late 90s.
I won't exactly call it a trend-- it's much too small for that-- but in the last few years a lot of English-speakers have suddenly been taking up Japanese-style mahjong.
If you give American anime fans a few square feet of free space, they'll do one of two things: pull out a stereo and start a dance circle
Speaking of moe outside Japan, here's one you might not have heard. Years ago, the Japanese artist Raita drew some pictures in a doujinshi
"Letters from the New York Otaku"
The US anime market is a funny thing. Just a few weeks ago, Discotek-- a small distributor that specializes in old titles with
I talked about how there's no Akiba in the States, but that doesn't mean that there isn't anywhere to go. A big city like ours will inevitably have small pockets of otaku interest.
If you ever find yourself making jokes about stereotypical American anime otaku for some reason, and you really want your joke to be authentic, say
I want to take a minute from the convention talk while this interview with Takashi Murakami is still recent.
You know what otaku like to do, anywhere in the world? They like to share information. Think of the 20,000 brains walking around in those big conventions,