Roland Kelts's Blog, page 35

Another interview for NPR on the evolving hostage crisis in Japan

With WNYC's Brooke Gladstone for "On the Media."

My interview on the Japanese hostage crisis for NPR

Sadly.

With Barbara Bogaev for KCRW's "Press Play with Madeleine Brand":

Anisongs! Anime & J-Pop cross the language barrier in Las Vegas, for The Japan Times

Lantis looks to woo a dedicated fan base with anisong tour


By  Roland Kelts

As soon as the music starts, the language barrier at overseas expos of Japanese pop culture is breached. Legions of non-Japanese fans, most of whose knowledge of the language is limited to basic greetings and exclamations, burst into karaoke-style singalongs, mimicking dance moves and waving glow sticks. Their instant fluency lasts for about three to five minutes. Then the song ends and they retreat to their native tongues.

The Japanese music industry hasn’t had an international chart-topper since Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” (Ue o Muite Arukou) — released in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1963. And while contemporaries Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and virtual idol Hatsune Miku generate millions of YouTube hits, they are lightweights next to South Korean Psy and his one-off wonder, “Gangnam Style,” which is now famous for overloading the file-sharing site’s view counter last month.

The language barrier is what most Japanese industry producers cite as their chief obstacle to global success, especially in Western countries. But it’s also true that some managers seek to avoid associating their acts with established anime and manga fan bases abroad. In two recent cases in New York, I was told that management in Tokyo didn’t want “anime fans” or “otaku types” in the venues, at least not in the front rows, because the concerts were being filmed for Japanese DVD release. They targeted rock fans and club-goers instead, presumably seeking some kind of hipster sex appeal.

Lantis Company, Ltd. is the only major Japanese music producer whose eyes have been fixed on the anime prize from the beginning. Now into its 16th year, Lantis was cofounded in 1999 by president and CEO Shuji Inoue to produce soundtracks and theme songs for anime (known as “anisongs”) and game titles. (Inoue, a keyboardist and former rock musician, produced the soundtrack of the 1998 anime series, “Silent Mobius.”)
Lantis began producing shows outside of Japan in 2006, sending individual artists to appear in Europe, the United States and South America. To celebrate its 15th anniversary last year, the company put together its first package tour in Japan called “The Lantis Festival,” featuring a roster of anisong artists who performed nine shows in Tokyo, Osaka, Mie and Miyagi. Inoue estimates the tour reached 70,000 fans.


“That tour gave us the experience and confidence we needed to take a full package tour overseas,” he tells me at the company’s Ebisu  headquarters.

This year, the “Anisong World Tour — Lantis Festival 2015″ will visit six international cities: Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Seoul, and a yet-to-be-announced final stop. On Jan. 16 and 17, a lineup of seven artists, headlined by JAM (Japan Animationsong Makers), will be joined by Hatsune Miku to kick off the tour at The Joint — Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Vegas.

“We’re specifically targeting American fans” Inoue says with regards to the debut show. “Las Vegas is an entertainment town. We have artists who will perform songs from 1980s and ’90s anime hits as well as contemporary series. You’ll hear music from ‘Dragonball Z,’ ‘One Piece,’ ‘Sailor Moon’ and ‘Macross.’ ”

JAM leader, veteran rock singer Hironobu Kageyama (known to “Dragonball” fans as “Mr. DBZ” for his soundtrack work on the series), believes that animation offers music a unique and far-reaching channel to listeners, especially online.

“Connecting with an audience through animation gives your music a greater opportunity to be recognized on the Internet,” he says. “I do my best to understand the animation I score, reading the script and so on, before I write. In some ways, (composing for) anime is easier because you already know the goal of your music.”

The festival will coincide with Otakon Vegas, an offshoot of the annual Baltimore convention, the largest on the East Coast. Many Lantis artists have appeared individually at Otakon. “Their staff share our purity of affection for Japanese pop culture contents,” says Inoue.


The Vegas premiere is a vast undertaking. A total of 80 Lantis staff members and 25 musicians will fly to the Nevada desert for the two-day event — plus Miku and her backing band and the 20 or so engineers and technicians required to stage the digital diva.

Inoue has no plans to profit from the tour, but he won’t agree to my calling it a long-term investment. The tour is a “service, like a gift” to fans of anisongs, who will return the favor if they’re given first-rate entertainment. He reminds me that last year was the first in which CD sales by domestic musicians in Japan, including several anisong creators, surpassed those of overseas artists.

“I like to think that’s partly the result of the high-quality product we’ve been offering Japanese fans for 15 years. The fans are now supporting us. And I hope to eventually earn that same level of support from overseas fans, too.”

Anisong World Tour — Lantis Festival 2015 kicks off at The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on Jan. 16 (7 p.m. start) and 17 (2 p.m. start). Tickets for each day range between $50-$125. The tour resumes Feb. 7 in Hong Kong, with dates in Singapore, Seoul and Taipei to follow. For more information, visit www.lantis.jp/15th/2015.
Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” He is a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo.

Coming of Age in today's Japan, for Utne Reader

The Satori Generation

A new breed of young people have outdone the tricksters of advertising.
By Roland Kelts

[Photo by Flickr/Kathleen Zarubin]Young Americans and Europeans are increasingly living at home, saving money, and living prudently. Technology, as it did in Japan, abets their shrinking circles. If you have internet access, you can accomplish a lot in a little room. And revolution in the 21st century, as most young people know, is not about consumption—it’s about sustainability.

They don’t want cars or brand name handbags or luxury boots. To many of them, travel beyond the known and local is expensive and potentially dangerous. They work part-time jobs—because that is what they’ve been offered—and live at home long after they graduate. They’re not getting married or having kids. They’re not even sure if they want to be in romantic relationships. Why? Too much hassle. Oh, and too expensive.

In Japan, they’ve come to be known as satori sedai—the “enlightened generation.” In Buddhist terms: free from material desires, focused on self-awareness, finding essential truths. But another translation is grimmer: “generation resignation,” or those without ideals, ambition or hope.

They were born in the late 1980s on up, when their nation’s economic juggernaut, with its promises of lifetime employment and conspicuous celebrations of consumption, was already a spent historical force. They don’t believe the future will get better—so they make do with what they have. In one respect, they’re arch-realists. And they’re freaking their elders out.
“Don’t you want to get a nice German car one day?”—asked one flustered fiftysomething guest of his twentysomething counterpart on a nationally broadcasted talk show. The show aired on the eve of Coming of Age Day, a national holiday in Japan that celebrates the latest crop of youth turning 20, the threshold of adulthood. An animated graphic of a smiling man wearing sunglasses driving a blonde around in a convertible flashed across the screen, the man’s scarf fluttering in the wind. “Don’t you want a pretty young woman to take on a Sunday drive?”

There was some polite giggling from the guests. After a pause, the younger man said, “I’m really not interested, no.”

Critics of the satori youths level the kinds of intergenerational accusations time-honored worldwide: They’re lazy, lacking in willpower, potency and drive.

Having lectured to a number of them at several universities in Tokyo, I was able to query students directly. “We’re risk-averse,” was the most common response. We were raised in relative comfort. We’re just trying to keep it that way.

Is this enlightened, or resigned? Or both?

Novelist Genichiro Takahashi, 63, addressed the matter in an essay 10 years ago. He called the new wave of youth a “generation of loss,” but he defined them as “the world’s most advanced phenomenon”—in his view, a generation whose only desires are those that are actually achievable.

The satori generation are known for keeping things small, preferring an evening at home with a small gathering of friends, for example, to an upscale restaurant. They create ensemble outfits from so-called “fast fashion” discount stores like Uniqlo or H&M, instead of purchasing top-shelf at Louis Vuitton or Prada. They don’t even booze.

“They drink much less alcohol than the kids of my generation, for sure,” says social critic and researcher Mariko Fujiwara of Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living. “And even when they go to places where they are free to drink, drinking too much was never ‘cool’ for them the way it was for us.”

Coming of Age Day, 2015
Fujiwara’s research leads her to define a global trend—youth who have the technological tools to avoid being duped by phony needs. There is a new breed of young people, she says, who have outdone the tricksters of advertising.

“They are prudent and careful about what they buy. They have been informed about the expensive top brands of all sorts of consumer goods but were never so impressed by them like those from the bubble generation. We have identified them as those who are far more levelheaded than the generations preceding them as a result of the new reality they came to face.”

The new reality is affecting a new generation around the world. Young Americans and Europeans are increasingly living at home, saving money, and living prudently.

Technology, as it did in Japan, abets their shrinking circles.  If you have internet access, you can accomplish a lot in a little room. And revolution in the 21st century, as most young people know, is not about consumption—it’s about sustainability.

Waseda University professor Norihiro Kato points to broader global phenomena that have radically transformed younger generations’ sense of possibility, calling it a shift from “the infinite to the finite.” Kato cites the Chernobyl meltdown and the fall of communism in the late ’80s and early ’90s; the September 11 terrorist attacks in the early 2000s; and closer to home, the triple earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear disasters in Japan.

These events reshaped our sense of wisdom and self-worth. The satori generation, he says, marks the emergence of a new “‘qualified power,’ the power to do and the power to undo, and the ability to enjoy doing and not doing equally.  Imagine a robot with the sophistication and strength to clutch an egg without crushing it. The key concept is outgrowing growth toward de-growth. That’s the wisdom of this new generation.”

In America and Europe, the new generation is teaching us how to live with less—but also how to live with one another. Mainstream media decry the number of young people living at home—a record 21.6 million in the United States, according to recent statistics—yet living at home and caring for one’s elders has long been a mainstay of Japanese culture.

In the context of shrinking resources and global crises, satori “enlightenment” might mean what the young everywhere are telling us: Shrink your goals to the realistic, help your family and community, and resign yourself to peace.

What Takahashi called “the world’s most advanced phenomenon” may well be coming our way from Japan. But this time it’s not automotive or robotic or electronic. It’s human enlightenment.

Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese writer based in Tokyo and New York. He is the author of the best-selling

On Haruki Murakami's "The Strange Library," illustrated by Chip Kidd, for The New Yorker

Illustrating Murakami


By  ROLAND KELTS

Haruki Murakami’s illustrated novella, “The Strange Library,” arrived in the mail last month looking like a Christmas card from a bipolar ex. Two cheery and colorful cartoon eyes adorn the card’s top half; beastly sepia-toned fangs snap down below. When I slid open the envelope-like front cover, its button seal bearing the numerals “107,” I expected to find menace, and I did. One dark-rimmed emerald green eye glared at me from the broad interior fold, embedded in hair and encircling a black pupil. On the smaller bottom flap was the upside-down half-moon mouth of a smiling child, skin pink and over-bright, canines pristine.

Two realities trading places, the threat of violence in an uneasy state of play: classic Murakami, of course. But also vintage Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf who has been designing U.S. first editions of Murakami books since the author’s 1993 short-story collection, “The Elephant Vanishes.”

Kidd’s designs contain eyes and other facial features, circular motifs that seem to swirl through kinetic colors, and bold, arresting closeups. In a display case in his Upper East Side apartment, Kidd devotes a shelf to his “Murakami face trilogy”—the covers of the author’s three longest novels, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Kafka on the Shore,” and “1Q84,” boasting, in order, a painted mechanical bird’s eye, a head that looks like an inflated golf ball, and a photograph of a young woman’s face, parts of which are strategically concealed behind the book’s title and dust jacket.
Kidd designs books by James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy, Oliver Sacks, and many other top-tier contemporary authors. He has also written and published two prose novels of his own, one graphic novel, and a book on the history of Batman in Japan. But his collaboration on “The Strange Library”— a fairy tale that reads at times like a grim blend of Kafka and Lewis Carroll, with a touch of whimsical erudition in the vein of “The Phantom Tollbooth” (the subtitle of the illustrated Japanese edition, published in 2005, is “a fantasy for adults”)—marks the first time he’s illustrated an entire book front-to-back.

“It was a book designer’s dream,” Kidd told me. “I was given totally free rein.” The instructions from Knopf’s editor-and-chief, Sonny Mehta, Kidd said, “was to just illustrate this thing, or figure out how it can be done.”

Kidd is no stranger to Japan’s vast library of graphic commercial and popular art. Raised in suburban Philadelphia in the late sixties and early seventies, he got hooked on now iconic Japanese animated and special-effects TV series like “Astro Boy,” “Ultraman,” and “Gigantor.”

It was an education in what he describes as the aesthetics of modern Japanese pop. “The compartmentalization: one large image living on the picture plane, with lots of other images scattered around,” he said. “You look at the big one first, then the little ones, and it forms a whole new idea.”

Kidd has visited Tokyo five times since 2001, drawn to the city’s multiple paradoxes—too many things, not enough space, elegant minimalism, and order in the world’s most populous metropolis. In Tokyo, he spends his free hours trawling the shops and stalls of the city’s antique book district, Jinbōchō, collecting scrapbooks, magazines, and other ephemera from the forties, fifties, and sixties, including advertisement flyers and matchbooks.


“I’ve got albums of vintage Japanese matchbooks which are just amazing,” he said. “I love the design sense. But also, the fact that I can’t read the language makes me appreciate the design formally in a different way, for how it looks rather than what it says.”

The result of Kidd’s obsessions is the retro psychedelia of “The Strange Library.” Every other page contains an illustration, often so arresting that you can’t stop staring (and there are many eyes staring right back at you). Some graphics sprawl across two-page spreads. The typeface is called Typewriter; the pages of text look like they’ve been scrolled through an Olivetti and bound to images from a shared past. In the young narrator’s opening description, his new leather shoes “clacked against the gray linoleum” as he enters the library; it is followed by a primitive, two-toned advertisement for patent-leather shoes—a luxury for many in postwar Japan.

The story is simple and wildly unpredictable: the unnamed boy seeks to check out some books at his local library. He is told to descend to the basement and knock on the door of room 107. There he meets a little old man who grows increasingly big and sinister—a brother of the sadistic schoolmaster in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” The boy is imprisoned with three massive tomes, all about the Ottoman Empire, and told that he must memorize their contents in a month—or else the old man will devour his brains. He is stuck in the cell with a sheep-man (far more sheepish than the one in Murakami’s “The Wild Sheep Chase”), a beautiful, wispy young girl who may be a bird, and several spreads of gourmet food, fresh donuts, and honeyed tea that makes him feel quite warm inside. Around the corner of every frightening turn is something delightful. (The food, served punctually by the girl, “looks scrumptious. Grilled Spanish mackerel with sour cream, white asparagus with sesame-seed dressing.”)

Kidd told me that he is drawn to the “hypnotic quality” of Murakami’s writing. “When you start reading it, it doesn’t seem all that complicated,” he said. “But the further you get into it, the more complex it becomes in this stealth kind of way, and you become really invested. I find this minimalist maximalist quality very engaging.”

Kidd’s visual accompaniment is a sheaf of blowups—insect motifs collide with origami paper and the face of a geisha; a spectral half-moon is completed by one half of a donut (the only graphic that didn’t come from his collection of Japanese ephemera; he purchased it from a food cart in front of the Knopf offices and “stuck it into a scanner.”) Kidd wasn’t trying to graphically tell the story. Instead, he said, his goal was to “graphically play around with form and content so it surprises you.”

The stealth complexity and the mechanics of Murakami’s storytelling are laid bare in “The Strange Library” ’s novella form, partly because its sentences are so spare and its plot so fast. The boy’s real fears have little to do with the phantasmagoric librarian, the walls of his library cell, or mnemonic torture. When he was younger, we learn, he was bitten by a big black dog on his way home from school. Since then, his mother has become a worrywart, and he fears causing her anxiety by getting home late. He also suspects—correctly, we discover—that she may be unwell.

Kidd and others believe the story may be an allegory for Murakami’s days as a college student at Waseda University, whose library features several basements and a rather Byzantine system for checking out books. (“I can’t say,” Murakami told me, “because I never went to the library at Waseda University.”)

There are now four illustrated editions of “The Strange Library.” In the original Japanese version, the Japanese artist Maki Sasaki’s illustrations are simple and bulbous, like children’s manga, faithfully representing each plot point’s actions and characters. The German edition, published last year, is rendered in heavy dark ink, neo-gothic and humorless. Harvill’s British edition, also published this month, is a scrapbook of charming stock images, culled from the Library of London, that echo fragments of the story.

Kidd’s bright, bold, Americanized mashup of Japanese ephemera takes some getting used to, especially for those familiar with the Japanese original. (A few friends who work in Japanese publishing shook their heads in dismay when I showed them Kidd’s edition.) But Murakami said that he appreciates Kidd’s tendency to take his designs in unexpected directions. “I’ve been working with Chip for twenty years already, but he continues to always surprise me with his designs,” the author told me before leaving Tokyo for Christmas in Hawaii. “Being surprised by his designs is one of the things that makes writing the books that much more fun.”

Roland Kelts is the author of

Sanrio's kawaii 3D anime J-Pop "Nutcracker", for The Japan Times

Sanrio’s ‘Nutcracker’ offers visual experience in 3-D


By Roland Kelts

For anyone raised in the West, the year-end holidays in Japan can be a jarring experience, at least for the uninitiated. Decorated trees, illuminated boulevards and carols in convenience stores coincide with Colonel Sanders statuettes remade into Santa Claus and mini-skirted chorus girls in reindeer costumes on TV. If you live in Japan for more than a few years, however, you might come to embrace this topsy-turvy, roller-coaster version of the holiday season. Just close your eyes and enjoy the ride.

This year, that ride took on a psychedelic technicolor glow in cinemas nationwide, courtesy of Sanrio’s “The Nutcracker” (“Kurumiwari Ningyo”), which was released on Nov. 29. The stop-motion animated film, loosely based on ETA Hoffman’s original story and the Tchaikovsky ballet, is credited to Sanrio founder Tsuji Shintaro, with additional writings and song lyrics by the late avant-garde author, poet, dramatist and director Shuji Terayama. It was originally released in 1974, and remains the only feature-length film ever produced by Sanrio.

The 2014 version underwent a radical makeover at the hands of director Sebastian Masuda, founder of seminal Harajuku clothing boutique 6% Dokidoki, art director for pop sensation Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and now a conceptual artist who has exhibited in New York and Miami. Many consider Masuda the father of the kawaii fashion movement. Veteran producer Masayuki Tanishima assembled a crack team to “re-create” the movie into something he considers completely new. This included digitally transforming a now-primitive and painstaking 2-D animation technique, stop-motion, into a more fluid and interactive visual experience in 3-D.


In October 2013, Shintaro proposed the idea of updating the 1974 film to Tanishima as a part of the company’s 40th anniversary celebration of Hello Kitty.

“The original took five years to film and cost ¥700 million,” Tanishima says. “What we decided to do was re-create the entire project with modern technologies. Everyone knows and loves “The Nutcracker,” but not many know the details of the story.”

For Masuda, who saw the original as a child, the film was a more personal project that made him question his own memories. He recalled it being “so colorful, full of light and wonder,” but when he reviewed the original 40-year-old print, he was shocked. “What I saw was dark and dull and full of dust and distraction,” he says.

The team, including 3-D director Kunihiko Mita, scanned the entire film and re-created it one frame at a time. A restoration crew cleaned off the dust and particles; colorist Makoto Imazauki worked with Masuda to add splashes of kawaii-like pink, yellow and green.

Masuda also reviewed the script and restructured it, highlighting key points of emphasis, cutting entire scenes (the original, viewable on YouTube, is sometimes densely convoluted) and adding others to enhance the sense of charm and child-like fantasy. For example: The original contained a darkly filmed segment showing human dancers performing a passage from the ballet; Masuda replaced it entirely with a colorfully animated 2-D sequence of butterflies flirtatiously dancing through sun-bathed air.


“I thought, ‘Well, maybe I just saw more colors when I was a child,’ ” Masuda says.  “‘Maybe I saw colors that weren’t really there.’ So I tried to re-create more color in the new film, adding it everywhere I could, where it seemed natural and wondrous. In a way, I wasn’t just restoring the film. I was restoring my own childhood.”

Masuda was also concerned about the film’s running time. The original is a full 93 minutes — too long, he thought, for today’s children to sit still in a stuffy theater. Straight away he trimmed 30 minutes. With the newly added scenes, the final clocks in at 80 minutes.

At the capacity screening I attended just prior to the film’s opening last month, only one child among many families and legions of teens squealed uncomfortably midway through. Most of the film-goers were rapt; older attendees, in particular, seemed pleased to hear the strains of Tchaikovsky surfacing throughout the soundtrack.

For the younger crowd, Tanishima called upon Kyary, whose lilting, slightly melancholic music-box melody, “Oyasumi,” is the new film’s theme song.

“I didn’t choose (Kyary’s) song just for promotional purposes, which is common in our film industry,” says Tanishima. “I was looking for a song with a strong connection to the protagonist’s feelings. ‘Oyasumi’ is Kyary’s only ballad. It was released five years ago, so we remixed it and ‘re-created’ it as the closing song, using the same approach we took to the original film.”

The result is a Lewis Caroll-like Christmas fantasy, with a rabbit hole grandfather clock and multiple echoes of the original story and its choreographed battle scenes, romantic longing and fairy tale denouement, embedded in a Japanese pop mise-en-scene. And Western viewers of a certain generation may find it as nostalgic as Masuda does, though for a slightly different reason.


The stop-motion animation team and doll makers behind the 1974 original were also the creators of a series of Christmas specials aired on television in the United States in the ’60s and ’70s, and produced by Americans Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass (Rankin/Bass Productions). One of those specials, “Rudoph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, 10 years’ Kitty’s senior. To those raised on the Rankin/Bass specials, some of the dolls in “The Nutcracker” will look very familiar.

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” He is a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo.

Sanrio's kawaii 3D anime J-Pop "Nutcracker" for The Japan Times

Sanrio’s ‘Nutcracker’ offers visual experience in 3-D


By Roland Kelts

For anyone raised in the West, the year-end holidays in Japan can be a jarring experience, at least for the uninitiated. Decorated trees, illuminated boulevards and carols in convenience stores coincide with Colonel Sanders statuettes remade into Santa Claus and mini-skirted chorus girls in reindeer costumes on TV. If you live in Japan for more than a few years, however, you might come to embrace this topsy-turvy, roller-coaster version of the holiday season. Just close your eyes and enjoy the ride.

This year, that ride took on a psychedelic technicolor glow in cinemas nationwide, courtesy of Sanrio’s “The Nutcracker” (“Kurumiwari Ningyo”), which was released on Nov. 29. The stop-motion animated film, loosely based on ETA Hoffman’s original story and the Tchaikovsky ballet, is credited to Sanrio founder Tsuji Shintaro, with additional writings and song lyrics by the late avant-garde author, poet, dramatist and director Shuji Terayama. It was originally released in 1974, and remains the only feature-length film ever produced by Sanrio.

The 2014 version underwent a radical makeover at the hands of director Sebastian Masuda, founder of seminal Harajuku clothing boutique 6% Dokidoki, art director for pop sensation Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and now a conceptual artist who has exhibited in New York and Miami. Many consider Masuda the father of the kawaii fashion movement. Veteran producer Masayuki Tanishima assembled a crack team to “re-create” the movie into something he considers completely new. This included digitally transforming a now-primitive and painstaking 2-D animation technique, stop-motion, into a more fluid and interactive visual experience in 3-D.


In October 2013, Shintaro proposed the idea of updating the 1974 film to Tanishima as a part of the company’s 40th anniversary celebration of Hello Kitty.

“The original took five years to film and cost ¥700 million,” Tanishima says. “What we decided to do was re-create the entire project with modern technologies. Everyone knows and loves “The Nutcracker,” but not many know the details of the story.”

For Masuda, who saw the original as a child, the film was a more personal project that made him question his own memories. He recalled it being “so colorful, full of light and wonder,” but when he reviewed the original 40-year-old print, he was shocked. “What I saw was dark and dull and full of dust and distraction,” he says.

The team, including 3-D director Kunihiko Mita, scanned the entire film and re-created it one frame at a time. A restoration crew cleaned off the dust and particles; colorist Makoto Imazauki worked with Masuda to add splashes of kawaii-like pink, yellow and green.

Masuda also reviewed the script and restructured it, highlighting key points of emphasis, cutting entire scenes (the original, viewable on YouTube, is sometimes densely convoluted) and adding others to enhance the sense of charm and child-like fantasy. For example: The original contained a darkly filmed segment showing human dancers performing a passage from the ballet; Masuda replaced it entirely with a colorfully animated 2-D sequence of butterflies flirtatiously dancing through sun-bathed air.


“I thought, ‘Well, maybe I just saw more colors when I was a child,’ ” Masuda says.  “‘Maybe I saw colors that weren’t really there.’ So I tried to re-create more color in the new film, adding it everywhere I could, where it seemed natural and wondrous. In a way, I wasn’t just restoring the film. I was restoring my own childhood.”

Masuda was also concerned about the film’s running time. The original is a full 93 minutes — too long, he thought, for today’s children to sit still in a stuffy theater. Straight away he trimmed 30 minutes. With the newly added scenes, the final clocks in at 80 minutes.

At the capacity screening I attended just prior to the film’s opening last month, only one child among many families and legions of teens squealed uncomfortably midway through. Most of the film-goers were rapt; older attendees, in particular, seemed pleased to hear the strains of Tchaikovsky surfacing throughout the soundtrack.

For the younger crowd, Tanishima called upon Kyary, whose lilting, slightly melancholic music-box melody, “Oyasumi,” is the new film’s theme song.

“I didn’t choose (Kyary’s) song just for promotional purposes, which is common in our film industry,” says Tanishima. “I was looking for a song with a strong connection to the protagonist’s feelings. ‘Oyasumi’ is Kyary’s only ballad. It was released five years ago, so we remixed it and ‘re-created’ it as the closing song, using the same approach we took to the original film.”

The result is a Lewis Caroll-like Christmas fantasy, with a rabbit hole grandfather clock and multiple echoes of the original story and its choreographed battle scenes, romantic longing and fairy tale denouement, embedded in a Japanese pop mise-en-scene. And Western viewers of a certain generation may find it as nostalgic as Masuda does, though for a slightly different reason.


The stop-motion animation team and doll makers behind the 1974 original were also the creators of a series of Christmas specials aired on television in the United States in the ’60s and ’70s, and produced by Americans Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass (Rankin/Bass Productions). One of those specials, “Rudoph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, 10 years’ Kitty’s senior. To those raised on the Rankin/Bass specials, some of the dolls in “The Nutcracker” will look very familiar.

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” He is a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo.

Disney's Japanamerica, for The New Yorker

Japan and America Meet in “Big Hero 6”


By Roland Kelts

I first heard about Disney’s “Big Hero 6” and its unprecedented hybrid setting—an urban mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo called San Fransokyo—at this summer’s Anime Expo, North America’s largest annual convention devoted entirely to Japanese pop culture. Amid the throngs of cosplay (costume play), anime, and manga revellers and garishly lit promotional booths, the news of “Big Hero 6,” delivered by a bright-eyed and green-wigged young companion, didn’t sound promising. I pictured a crudely expanded version of San Francisco’s existing Chinatown, with maybe a few additional sushi counters and one or two Pikachu or Totoro dolls cluttering the background.

Instead, the movie’s metropolitan portmanteau is a marvel of architectural alchemy. Shibuya skyscrapers with pulsing video screens hug San Francisco’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid. Victorian Mission duplexes line hilly San Fransokyo neighborhoods, aglow from the pink-white light of Japanese cherry blossoms in full bloom below. Trains from the Yamanote and Chuo lines, two of Tokyo’s central and most popular railways, stream by on elevated tracks. The sprawling Yokohama Bay Bridge connects the financial district to San Francisco’s East Bay, which may well be home to Oaksaka and Berkyoto in this Japanamerican universe.

Since the end of the Second World War, American and Japanese popular culture has been cross-pollinating, sharing and sometimes stealing ideas. It hasn’t always been honorable. Disney’s “Bambi” was beloved by Osamu Tezuka, the seminal Japanese cartoonist, known as “the god of manga,” who drew, published, and sold his own illustrated version of the story in the nineteen-fifties. But Disney was later accused of plagiarizing Tezuka’s “Kimba the White Lion” for its multi-media franchise hit “The Lion King.” (Tezuka Productions never sued, and Disney never formally admitted wrongdoing.)

More recently, the Pixar honcho and animation auteur John Lasseter has been a longtime champion and friend of Japan’s Hayao Miyazaki, the Oscar-award winning director of 2003’s “Spirited Away” and the now-consecrated children’s classic “My Neighbor Totoro.” Last weekend in Los Angeles, Lasseter bestowed upon Miyazaki an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, proclaiming that only Miyazaki and Disney could be called the greatest animators in world history.

A stuffed Totoro makes a cameo in Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” and there have been a few forgettable Hollywood remakes of popular anime titles like Tezuka’s “Astro Boy” and “Dragonball Z.” Live-action directors such as Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky have borrowed concepts and entire scenes from the works of the late anime auteur Satoshi Kon. But the open embrace of Japan and its cultural iconography, both pop and traditional, distinguishes “Big Hero 6” from any other major Hollywood release.

Ryan Potter, the actor who provides the voice of the film’s protagonist, told me that “there are so many Easter eggs of Japanese culture tucked into the world” of “Big Hero 6.” Potter, who is half-Japanese and half-Caucasian, was born and raised in Tokyo by his American mother, who moved him to California when he was seven. Now nineteen, he recalls being immersed in the animated films of Miyazaki and Kon, and counts manga and anime series such as “One Piece,” “Akira,” and “Inuyasha” among his favorites. In the movie, Potter plays Hiro Hamada, a fourteen-year-old boy who, like Potter, is Japanese-American. (As am I, and I was startled to see my ethnic mix so specifically rendered in a main character.)


At his first audition for the film, Potter told me, Don Hall, the co-director, “almost gave me a Japanese pop-culture test.” Potter continued: “Did I know about the comic books? How many anime shows had I seen? What action figures did I collect? I was able to unload all my Japanese pop-culture knowledge on him. And finally they were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is our kid.’ I never thought my knowledge of ‘Dragonball Z’ and ‘Yugioh’ would be a factor in an audition.”

Daniel Henney, a Korean-American actor, plays Hiro’s brother, Tadashi. The Venezuelen-Cuban-American actress Genesis Rodriquez provides the voice of Latina Honey Lemon, and the Asian-American actress Jamie Chung is the voice of Go Go Tamago. The earnest, broad-shouldered African-American character, nicknamed Wasabi, is played by Damon Wayans, Jr., the son of the comedian Damon Wayans. “But what’s great is that they don’t make a big deal of it in the film,” Potter said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, here’s the Asian-American character, and here’s the Latina.’ It’s just part of the story, part of the world.”

This blend of ethnicities has become a hallmark of recent Disney and Pixar releases, from “Pocahontas” and “Mulan” to “Lilo and Stitch.” Cynics will cite Hollywood’s need to conquer more diverse domestic and global markets. But as the animation critic and historian Charles Solomon points out, portraying explicitly non-white characters can be risky for animators. “Designing ‘ethnic’ characters poses special challenges,” he told me. “How do you suggest Asian or African-American facial features without sliding into the stereotypes that have been used in unflattering portrayals in the past?”

Perhaps that’s why the character that gives “Big Hero 6” its elegiac heart belongs to no ethnic group: a roly-poly health-care-companion robot named Baymax. (That’s also the film’s title in Japan, where it will be released next month). Baymax is a big, squeaky balloon, given to gaseous leaks, rubbery fart-like noises, and perpetual awkwardness and befuddlement. He has a flat-line mouth and stares blankly through two black, expressionless orbs. His sole goal is to help his charge—the spastic, pre-pubescent Hiro—which makes his helplessness all the more piercing. He’s a wonder of medical technology, but lacks the agility to pick up a soccer ball or navigate a bedroom without disrupting a stack of books.


In the United States and Japan, two countries facing fast-graying populations, the pillow-soft Baymax feels like the right robot for the times. His most common refrain is a query that can be found on the walls of health-care facilities worldwide: “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?” Baymax’s question is accompanied by a display on his chest of the pain scale showing smiley faces deteriorating into tearful ones. But his own minimalist, Hello Kitty-like features were inspired by an ancient Japanese bell that Don Hall saw during a visit to a Shinto shrine.

In “Big Hero 6,” such authentic details add up to a portrait of two onscreen cultures sharing the same world, undiluted by their affinities, tethered by mutual respect. While the script contains many of Disney’s boilerplate action-adventure pyrotechnics (including a villain of unconvincing motives in a Kabuki-inspired mask), and viewers will likely wince at some of the throwaway jokes, the movie’s characters and mise-en-scene mark a genuine break from the past. The American entertainment industry is honoring one of its chief transcultural roots and trusting that its audience has come a long way, too.

(Photographs courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Everett)

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the United States.” He divides his time between New York and Tokyo.

Disney's Japanamerica for The New Yorker

Japan and America Meet in “Big Hero 6”


By Roland Kelts

I first heard about Disney’s “Big Hero 6” and its unprecedented hybrid setting—an urban mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo called San Fransokyo—at this summer’s Anime Expo, North America’s largest annual convention devoted entirely to Japanese pop culture. Amid the throngs of cosplay (costume play), anime, and manga revellers and garishly lit promotional booths, the news of “Big Hero 6,” delivered by a bright-eyed and green-wigged young companion, didn’t sound promising. I pictured a crudely expanded version of San Francisco’s existing Chinatown, with maybe a few additional sushi counters and one or two Pikachu or Totoro dolls cluttering the background.

Instead, the movie’s metropolitan portmanteau is a marvel of architectural alchemy. Shibuya skyscrapers with pulsing video screens hug San Francisco’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid. Victorian Mission duplexes line hilly San Fransokyo neighborhoods, aglow from the pink-white light of Japanese cherry blossoms in full bloom below. Trains from the Yamanote and Chuo lines, two of Tokyo’s central and most popular railways, stream by on elevated tracks. The sprawling Yokohama Bay Bridge connects the financial district to San Francisco’s East Bay, which may well be home to Oaksaka and Berkyoto in this Japanamerican universe.

Since the end of the Second World War, American and Japanese popular culture has been cross-pollinating, sharing and sometimes stealing ideas. It hasn’t always been honorable. Disney’s “Bambi” was beloved by Osamu Tezuka, the seminal Japanese cartoonist, known as “the god of manga,” who drew, published, and sold his own illustrated version of the story in the nineteen-fifties. But Disney was later accused of plagiarizing Tezuka’s “Kimba the White Lion” for its multi-media franchise hit “The Lion King.” (Tezuka Productions never sued, and Disney never formally admitted wrongdoing.)

More recently, the Pixar honcho and animation auteur John Lasseter has been a longtime champion and friend of Japan’s Hayao Miyazaki, the Oscar-award winning director of 2003’s “Spirited Away” and the now-consecrated children’s classic “My Neighbor Totoro.” Last weekend in Los Angeles, Lasseter bestowed upon Miyazaki an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, proclaiming that only Miyazaki and Disney could be called the greatest animators in world history.

A stuffed Totoro makes a cameo in Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” and there have been a few forgettable Hollywood remakes of popular anime titles like Tezuka’s “Astro Boy” and “Dragonball Z.” Live-action directors such as Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky have borrowed concepts and entire scenes from the works of the late anime auteur Satoshi Kon. But the open embrace of Japan and its cultural iconography, both pop and traditional, distinguishes “Big Hero 6” from any other major Hollywood release.

Ryan Potter, the actor who provides the voice of the film’s protagonist, told me that “there are so many Easter eggs of Japanese culture tucked into the world” of “Big Hero 6.” Potter, who is half-Japanese and half-Caucasian, was born and raised in Tokyo by his American mother, who moved him to California when he was seven. Now nineteen, he recalls being immersed in the animated films of Miyazaki and Kon, and counts manga and anime series such as “One Piece,” “Akira,” and “Inuyasha” among his favorites. In the movie, Potter plays Hiro Hamada, a fourteen-year-old boy who, like Potter, is Japanese-American. (As am I, and I was startled to see my ethnic mix so specifically rendered in a main character.)


At his first audition for the film, Potter told me, Don Hall, the co-director, “almost gave me a Japanese pop-culture test.” Potter continued: “Did I know about the comic books? How many anime shows had I seen? What action figures did I collect? I was able to unload all my Japanese pop-culture knowledge on him. And finally they were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is our kid.’ I never thought my knowledge of ‘Dragonball Z’ and ‘Yugioh’ would be a factor in an audition.”

Daniel Henney, a Korean-American actor, plays Hiro’s brother, Tadashi. The Venezuelen-Cuban-American actress Genesis Rodriquez provides the voice of Latina Honey Lemon, and the Asian-American actress Jamie Chung is the voice of Go Go Tamago. The earnest, broad-shouldered African-American character, nicknamed Wasabi, is played by Damon Wayans, Jr., the son of the comedian Damon Wayans. “But what’s great is that they don’t make a big deal of it in the film,” Potter said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, here’s the Asian-American character, and here’s the Latina.’ It’s just part of the story, part of the world.”

This blend of ethnicities has become a hallmark of recent Disney and Pixar releases, from “Pocahontas” and “Mulan” to “Lilo and Stitch.” Cynics will cite Hollywood’s need to conquer more diverse domestic and global markets. But as the animation critic and historian Charles Solomon points out, portraying explicitly non-white characters can be risky for animators. “Designing ‘ethnic’ characters poses special challenges,” he told me. “How do you suggest Asian or African-American facial features without sliding into the stereotypes that have been used in unflattering portrayals in the past?”

Perhaps that’s why the character that gives “Big Hero 6” its elegiac heart belongs to no ethnic group: a roly-poly health-care-companion robot named Baymax. (That’s also the film’s title in Japan, where it will be released next month). Baymax is a big, squeaky balloon, given to gaseous leaks, rubbery fart-like noises, and perpetual awkwardness and befuddlement. He has a flat-line mouth and stares blankly through two black, expressionless orbs. His sole goal is to help his charge—the spastic, pre-pubescent Hiro—which makes his helplessness all the more piercing. He’s a wonder of medical technology, but lacks the agility to pick up a soccer ball or navigate a bedroom without disrupting a stack of books.


In the United States and Japan, two countries facing fast-graying populations, the pillow-soft Baymax feels like the right robot for the times. His most common refrain is a query that can be found on the walls of health-care facilities worldwide: “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?” Baymax’s question is accompanied by a display on his chest of the pain scale showing smiley faces deteriorating into tearful ones. But his own minimalist, Hello Kitty-like features were inspired by an ancient Japanese bell that Don Hall saw during a visit to a Shinto shrine.

In “Big Hero 6,” such authentic details add up to a portrait of two onscreen cultures sharing the same world, undiluted by their affinities, tethered by mutual respect. While the script contains many of Disney’s boilerplate action-adventure pyrotechnics (including a villain of unconvincing motives in a Kabuki-inspired mask), and viewers will likely wince at some of the throwaway jokes, the movie’s characters and mise-en-scene mark a genuine break from the past. The American entertainment industry is honoring one of its chief transcultural roots and trusting that its audience has come a long way, too.

(Photographs courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Everett)

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the United States.” He divides his time between New York and Tokyo.

Hosting "Tomorrow" in Tohoku, for NHK

I host the documentary, "Tomorrow," on ongoing post-quake/tsunami volunteer & recovery efforts in Tohoku, northern Japan, for NHK television. The film was shot not far from where I once lived with my grandparents in Iwate Prefecture. Summary here.