Mainichi Anime Yume
I recently came across a post about a book called “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” by Prof. Hiroki Azuma. Although I’ve never read the book myself, Mike over at Anime Diet had some very interesting comments about how Prof. Azuma describes the mentality of Japanese otaku…
The title of this post is a question that I’m confronted with fairly often. Why do hardcore fans spend so much money buying anime collectibles, such as figures, plushies, and trading cards, when such things are relatively expensive, take up space, and all they do is “sit around and collect dust?”…
Famous manga artist Koge-Donbo is best known for her “cute” character designs, especially in her popular series Di Gi Charat, Kamichama Karin, Pita Ten, and others. It’s also well known that she’s a Harry Potter fan. About nine years ago I came across some of her Harry Potter illustrations and saved them to my computer. And now, since I recently saw the new HP movie and am currently reading the final book, I decided to look back at these old, but still pretty, drawings of Koge-Donbo’s…
For the past ten years or so, a little quirk of mine has been to cover every inch of my room with anime pictures and products. On a previous post, I shared photos of how my room looked last year. Since then, I’ve hung up new pictures, rearranged old pictures, and displayed new goodies. So I decided to once again share photos of my anime immersed room, the “2009 edition” XD
The skill, ingenuity, and often times bizarreness of fan-made anime MADs never cease to amaze me (and Hetalia ones are no exception)…
During my trip to Japan a few weeks ago, I spent most of my time with Japanese college students (between the ages of 18 and 23) who I stayed with at the dorms and who took us out during our sightseeing. I was curious how Japanese people my age would feel about an American female anime fan like me…
Ever since all anime switched from cel animation to digital animation back in the early 2000s, there has been some debate among fans about whether story/character quality has decreased even though animation techniques have increased…
This is a recent Ask John post that caught my attention. John points out that there is indeed a difference between what Japanese fans like about anime and what American fans like about it…
The results of the Anime Preference Survey (2008 version) are now posted! I opened this survey a little over 3 weeks ago (I had one in ’06 and ’07 too) and it was basically a quick survey recording general preferences, interests, and tastes among anime fans such as how they watch anime, what anime products they buy, favorite series, etc,. The survey received about 160 participants…not as many as I would have liked, but still enough to make some sort of statistical inferences about the interests of anime fans nowadays ^^
Click here to see the survey results. I’ve also commented on the results and compared some of them to last year’s survey.
For some time I’ve been puzzled about the difference between “fandom” in America and “fandom” in Japan, not just anime fandom but fandom in general. It seems to me that the Japanese place more emphasis on having people become totally immersed and supporting fans of anime and other entertainment, while America doesn’t really offer the same kind of hard-core immersion in its shows and movies. I’ll illustrate my points further in this post, and I’d also like to hear your opinion as well…