Posts Tagged “News”

NOTE: image not from the upcoming game.

According to ANN, Ideafactory is making a Ouran Host Club romantic adventure game targeted at women for the PS2, due to come out in spring 2007 in Japan. I guess this isn’t exactly a case of life imitating art but more like games imitating anime and manga since Renge, the host club’s self-imposed manager, went to Japan because she was a fan of a relationship game (a parody of Tokimeki Memorial) featuring lookalikes of the host club’s members. I hope the characters have the same voices and I wonder if Haruhi would be available as a love interest…

[via kottke]
The Washington Post has an article about how the old method of making kimonos from scratch is dying in Japan, particularly in Kyoto’s Nishijin district. Many are being made in China and those kimonos are made in Japan are woven with cheaper imported silk rather than Kyoto silk.

Here is the main problem:

Fewer Japanese are marrying today than ever, and those who do largely shun traditional white wedding kimonos in favor of Western-style dresses. A declining birthrate, meanwhile, has meant fewer babies, which in turn has meant fewer sales of kimonos for children’s coming-of-age rites. Nationwide, kimono sales have more than halved in the past decade.

The reporter uses 102-year-old Yasujiro Yamaguchi, one of the last master weavers in Nishijin, as a narrative focal point through the article. He is one of only three left who can create a kimono from scratch, which means planning and weaving it with his own hands to “infuse the intended wearer’s personality”. All three are over 70 and none have any apprentices.

The kimono is one of the few things that I can think of as distinctly Japanese alongside Shintoism and samurai. If one looks at the kanji for the word (??), kimono literally means ’something worn’. It’s a symbol of traditional Japan and subtle beauty. I think this quote from Yamaguchi says it best:

“The kimono is not just about our country,” [Yamaguchi] added. “It is about the Japanese race — our daily rituals, our history, our religion, about who we are as a people. We have to do anything we can to protect the kimono, even if that means making them overseas.”

Right now, I am trying to create rough member card mockups for Anime Club as well as a tentative schedule for the remainder of the year. After the jump: two DVD collections get delayed, hack//ROOTS premiere details, and ADV incentivizes its digital distribution service.
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[via ANN]
Brian Ruh, the editor of Anime Research and author of “Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii”, is putting together a collection of essays tenatively called “Terminal Dogma: Essays on Neon Genesis Evangelion”. That’s a pretty good title right there but there’s another interesting thing about this project: Ruh is soliciting submissions from not only academics, but also anime fans who haven’t done graduate work and such. The article lists a list of fifteen likely topics to covered although there may be a couple more if there are some good essays from off the list. Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, I’m still subscribed to ADV’s email newsletter. Most times I don’t bother to read it but yesterday, I found something interesting. This particular edition was promoting the company’s presence at Anime Weekend Atlanta, which apparently is taking place next weekend (Sept. 22-24). Near the bottom were dates of Anime Network premieres.

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Mark Beall over at Cinematical reports that producer Gerald R. Molen (Jurassic Park, Minority Report) recently got onto two major projects: one is a sports drama about baseball players in WWII and the other is Lupin the 3rd. The sports flick is scheduled to begin filming in Feburary while no date has been set for Lupin. This news made me think of previous and ongoing anime-to-live-action attempts. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m back in the library again. This afternoon, I asked the landlady when the internet was going to be set up. It turns out sometime “by the end of the week”. So before 11:59pm Saturday night, I should have Internet access in my apartment. I hope. Lack of bandwidth to waste has allowed me to get some good reading time into my day, so maybe it’s a good thing to be unplugged for a while. But only for a while, not two weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Bandai USA has pre-emptively told subbing groups not to distribute copies of the upcoming “Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society” or they would risk litigation. The movie will premiere on a Japanese satellite pay-per-view channel on September 1 and released on Region 2 DVD on November 24. The company holds the North American license and, according to their press release, will release the title sometime in 2007. Way to be generic, guys! Read the rest of this entry »

Former Livedoor executive Daisuke “Dice-K” Enomoto (34), who had planned to wear a Char Aznable costume into space, was “deemed not ready to fly for exclusive medical reasons” and bumped from a next month’s mission to the International Space Station. Enomoto was going to accompany the next space station crew on their September 14 flight, hang out on the ISS, and return to Earth with the astronauts up there now. The expected replacement for the third shuttle seat is Iranian-American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari. Read the rest of this entry »

Yomiuri TV has launched a website for a live-action adaptation of Meitantei Conan scheduled to air this fall as the anime concludes its 10th anniversary celebration. It will take place before Shinichi’s transformation into Conan Edogawa so there will be some high school moments in it between Shinichi and Ran. But one thing that I feel will make or break the series is the role of Kogoro. He must have at least one drunk scene; otherwise, the adaptation will have failed in my book.

Cast:

Kudo Shinichi - Oguri Shun (???)

Mouri Ran - Kurokawa Tomoka (????)

Suzuki Sonoko - Iwasa Mayuko (?????)

Mouri Kogoro - Jinnai Takanori (????)