I watched My Next Life as a Villainess on a whim. I had been deep in my revisiting of various past anime series and needed something new. The new anime season has been thin with COVID-19 related closures and other events hampering production schedules. My Next Life offered a different look on the isekai genre….
Author: Chris Kincaid
The Three Legends of Lake Biwa
These three stories combine to create a single legend. I kept the original 1918 spellings and grammar. I find them charming and interesting examples of how language can change. Language changes quite a bit over the course of a century. In any case, I hope you enjoy these stories. While up fishing on Lake Biwa,…
Book Addiction Has a Word: Tsundoku
I love books and suffer from a mild case of tsundoku. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the tendency to buy books and not read them. My books clump together in great piles that mock me for not reading them fast enough. Of course, I come home from the library with books that I have…
Akita: Japan’s Bear-Hunting Dog
Most cultures have their own breeds of dogs. Dogs have provided us with companionship, protection, and help for thousands of years. Dogs were brought to the islands of Japan from China around 660 BC. But the Akita breed didn’t appear in documents until the early 17th century. A nobleman exiled to Akita Prefecture encouraged people…
Weekend Afternoons with NHK Japan
I grew up on a steady diet of PBS. I’m sad to say that Sesame Street wasn’t a part of my childhood. My PBS time consisted of shows like Sewing with Nancy, This Old House, Antique Roadshow, and The Joy of Painting and whatever watercolor series followed it. My parents watched the former shows. Bob…
This is Your Brain on Anime. Any Questions?
Teen brains sit on an important stage of brain development. Adolescence isn’t just a cultural construct; it’s a period of drastic rewiring. I will be using Robert Sapolsky’s book Behave (2017) for the following facts. Remember too that research focuses on averages. At the start of adolescence, teens have more gray matter than adults. Gray…