It’s always nice to welcome an old friend back into the fold. I’ve been a big fan of Minami-ke since long before I was blogging. It’s hard to believe it’s been five years (the incredible anime year of 2007) since the first and best season aired. I wasn’t as down […] Read more
Sakurasou sits squarely at the intersection of several genres, and stubbornly refuses to fit in any of them. Make no mistake about it, Sakurasou is a pretty interesting series. As far as I know the novelist Kamoshida Hajime has never written anything else, and you have a first-time director working […] Read more
The best thing about the shoujo offerings as a group this season is that each of them is quite distinct from the others. I don’t really have much to say about this week’s episode of Tonari, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was pretty much a build-up […] Read more
Girls are scary. There’s a funny sort of reversal happening with Sukkite Iinayo. Usually you have fans of the source material decrying the shortcomings of the adaptation, and how it never manages to capture the magic of the original. Here, there are seemingly endless “Yeah, the anime seems really good […] Read more
Just a few images from an outing to Yoyogi Koen with friends on Sunday. Meiji Shrine is a special place to the Japanese, but it also has a personal connection for me. On my first trip to Japan it was the place I visited on my last day here. It […] Read more
Well now – I don’t what I could possibly add to that. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when these eps were recorded, because I can only imagine that those sessions must’ve been at least as entertaining as the series itself. The phrase “Give me […] Read more
A quick update: I’ve decided to put SAO on hiatus for the time being. If I were back in the US or if the Fall schedule was a little lighter – or even if it aired during a different time of the week – I’d probably keep covering it, because […] Read more
I’m not sure if this constitutes an attempt to make Iwase likeable, but if so, it didn’t work for me. The struggle for success in the world of manga is so constant that sometimes I get tired just from watching Bakuman. I know that’s a realistic picture and that only […] Read more
Too many shows, too little time… Btooom! – 03 Btooom! is preposterous, but in an entertaining way. It’s one of those shows where a lot of suspension of disbelief is necessary, because the plot is effectively an elaborate 2 AM bar conversation between a bunch of smart geeks with too […] Read more