Christopher Kincaid's Blog, page 43

How Not to Summon a Demon Lord – Anime Review

When it comes to ecchi anime, the characters all need to be having fun. Although I dislike ecchi, even I know this. Too often the genre falls into exploitation, and female characters yelling “no” all the time. How Not to Summon a Demon Lord avoids this for the most part, but it goes too far in […]

The Lovers Miura-ya Komurasaki and Shirai Gonpachi.

A Brief Look at the History of the Yakuza

The yakuza need no introduction. The organized crime groups appear throughout Japanese and American films. Next to the Italian mafia, they are the most famous crime group. The name yakuza comes from a losing hand in a traditional Japanese card game. Ya ku sa — eight, nine, three. The group began in the Tokugawa period, […]

Western Clothing from the series An Array of Auspicious Customs of Eastern Japan

What an Academic Hoax Warns Us About Research

According to The Atlantic, three scholars wrote 20 fake papers using trendy language and tried to get them placed into high-end academic journals in fields that include gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Seven of the articles were accepted, and seven more were in various points of the review process. In academic journals, articles […]

Mt. Fuji from the series Famous Mounts in Japan

Sadako and her One-Thousand Cranes

The first nuclear weapon used in war fell on Hiroshima more than 70 years ago. Most of us have heard the statistics in history class: 80,000 people killed instantly and thousands more died from the after effects of radiation. But the numbers hide the personal stories of lives lost and family members lost. As time […]

Evening Chime of the Clock from the series Eight Parlor Views

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

Along with Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Senpai, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime surprised me.  I expected another run-of-the-mill isekai. Instead, I found a slow-paced, even thoughtful story with heart. Satoku Mikami dies and finds himself reincarnated as a slime (the title says it all, right?) Well, he wakes up in a cave full of rare […]

Courtesans Imitating a Court Procession