Christopher Kincaid's Blog, page 3

Only Time Will Tell: Mechanized Time in Old Japan

A day divided into 24 hours of 60 minutes, which are each 60 seconds in length, feels natural. But at one time, daylight didn’t divide so mechanically. Many mistakenly think people didn’t care about timekeeping even just a century-and-a-half ago. The idea: agriculturally based economies didn’t need hourly timekeeping and instead focused on seasonal and monthly timekeeping. However, sundials and other methods of timekeeping were common to time plantings, festivals, and other tasks.

We also consi...

Dan Da Dan’s Sakuga

Sakuga is a term within the anime community used to describe animated scenes with fluid, detailed animations. Sakuga usually highlights important fights or scenes for a story. These scenes have more frames than typical animated scenes. Sakuga scenes require more budget to produce, so the costs are balanced by other tricks. This balance also helps the sakuga stand out. If the entire episode is animated with the same frame lavish, the viewer will stop noticing, and the ability to highlight importa...

Choosing Which Video Games to Play as You Lay Dying

Whether of high rank or low, whether old or young, people die. If enlightened they die; if unenlightened, they die. Indeed everyone must die….Although everyone knows that they will die, they think they themselves will die only after everyone else has died, and they don’t consider the fact the their death may come at any moment. –Yamamoto Tsunetomo

To say life is limited, to say your days are numbered and you don’t know that number, is cliche. But it is true. Whenever you do anything, it consumes...

The Yamato Dynasty by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

The Yamato Dynasty traces the Japanese imperial family from Emperor Meiji and the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate to Akihito. As you can imagine, most of the book centers on Emperor Hirohito. After all, he was Japan’s longest-serving emperor. To the authors’ credit, they spend a nice number of words on more obscure aspects of the imperial family.

For example, there’s a chapter titled “Bismarck’s Mustache” that examines how much influence Prussia and Otto von Bismark had on Japan. Prussia provided...

The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris

In order to understand works like The Tale of Genji, you have to understand the historical context. Ivan Morris’s book The World of the Shining Prince sketches enough of this background for you to understand what Murasaki took for granted. Morris covers every aspect of Heian society from food and superstitions to the relationship practices of the period. The book is a bit older–dating to 1964. However, Morris leans heavily on the few sources we have for the period: namely its literature. The He...

The Maiden of the Screen, An Old Folktale That Parallels Modern Dating Culture

Lafcadio Hearn was an American journalist who, along with Basil Hall Chamberlain, collected and wrote down Japan’s folktales. While many Japanese, in the past, had also recorded various folktales, it wasn’t until Westerners took an interest in Japanese folklore the keepers of this cultural oral tradition began be given a long shift. Hearn and Chamberlain knew Yanagita Kunio, who would become the pioneer of formalized native Japanese folklore studies.

Hearn eventually traveled to Japan and becam...

Redo of Healer: Edge and Reviled Revenge Revel

As I get older, I find myself growing sensitive to violence in stories. Saw never used to trouble me; it does now. Redo of Healer troubled me with its violence and sexual abuse. The version of the anime I watched was censored, but that censorship made the rape and violence even worse. Redo of Healer explores Keyaru’s quest for revenge after he’s exploited, drugged, and sexually abused because of his abilities as the Hero of Recovery. All the destined heroes in the story act as villains, enslavi...

What Do Livestreamers, Politicians, and Waifus have in Common?

To answer the title’s question in two words: parasocial relationships. Okay, you can return to your regularly scheduled livestream!

Parasocial relationships (PSR) are a common part of media consumption for many, so much that few of us stop and think about it. These types of relations extend to celebrities, politicians, livestreamers, and even fictional characters like waifus. Speaking of waifus, the use of the term has been changing since I wrote my article about waifuism. Lately, the term refe...

Beheneko: The Elf-Girl’s Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster!

Beheneko: The Elf-Girl’s Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster! beyond being a mouthful is also an ecchi, uh, handful. For the longest time I’ve avoided ecchi stories. They weren’t my thing, and they remain not my thing. But as an anime writer and armchair academic, this genre has been a blindspot for me. I’ve watched some in the past like High School DxD, but my ability to analyze the genre is limited. But I’ve noticed the genre caters to men–I’m aware Boy’s Love straddles (pun intended) ecchi a...

Texas Senate Bill 20, Obscenity, and Banning Anime and Manga

 

Texas’s state senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 20 which aims at AI-generated child pornography but can also end up banning many anime and manga titles in the process. Texas has joined many other states, such as Ohio and West Virginia, in efforts to crack down on materials deemed obscene. Ohio and West Virginia have bills which establish criminal liability for teachers and librarians if they distribute materials deemed obscene (School Library Journal, 2024). Yes, this can include anime an...