Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends is a raunchy, fluffy anime. The story follows a collection of weird misanthropes who form a high school club to help them learn how to make friends. Kodaka Hasegawa is a half-English exchange student who people avoid because of appearance and delinquent reputation. Together with the equally abrasive Yozora…
Category: Anime
The Three Measures: Contrasting Disney Princess Body Types with Anime Girls
Anime girls get sharp criticism for being unrealistic. Few women can naturally achieve the enormous breasts and narrow waists many anime girls sport. Breasts are fat deposits (sexy thought eh?) so big boobs naturally come with bigger ladies. Silicon and flukes of nature (blessed or cursed depends on perspective) make for exceptions to this rule….
Musings V – Adaptation in Japanese (Pop) Culture
One among many orientalist[i] stereotypes of Asians is that they are masters of imitation (or adaptation) but lack original creativity (or invention); an assumption which looks ridiculous when one spends just a little time studying any given Asian culture, I would say. Rather, I spot the tendency to imitate (instead of inventing) in modern popular…
Anime as a Storytelling Medium
Anime and manga are storytelling mediums equal to movies and books. Anime has more flexibility and one unique strength that movies cannot have. Anime and manga are a style of their own, just like Cubism or Pointillism. Some people lump anime into the “Superflat” art movement because of the flat nature of anime art. But…
Mayo Chiki!
Every once in awhile I like to watch a fluffy, silly anime. Mayo Chiki! is certainly one of those…on the surface. Underneath the light-harem antics and relationship tangle waited a surprising theme. First, my usual summary. Kinjiro – nicknamed Jiro – is a nice high-school guy with a problem. He is terrified of girls, and…
Doing Justice to Transgender Characters on TV
It’s always a good sign when something ‘weird’ stops being funny, and is taken seriously. As it seems, that is happening – in some cases – with transgender characters in Japanese TV. A Queer Family in Last Friends First off, I have a correction to make. In my post on lesbians in Japan I was…