Japanese Lesbian/Transgender Identities in Contemporary Media. The anime and manga community will probably be familiar with the term okama (literally, kettle), variously translated as ‘transvestite’ or ‘Drag Queen’, which is commonly applied to (effeminately) gay characters, especially in a cross-dressing context. Bentham/Bon Curry from Oda Eiichiro’s One Piece may turn being okama into a martial…
Category: Finds and Ramblings
Musings II: Magical Girls, or, Empowerment VS Sexism
Magical Girls puzzle me; they make me feel intrigued and desperate at the same time. That is not just because of my, admittedly, relatively limited experience with shōjo (‘[for] girls’) anime genres – until recently, I preferred adventure fantasy, which is sadly, but undoubtedly, shōnen (‘[for] boys’) material of the most popular order. No, Magical…
Musings On Nameless Old Women in Edo-Period Popular Literature
About a year ago, I was looking at Edo-period book illustrations and reading name cartuoches – until I stumbled upon two which did not actually contain a name! I was working behind the scenes of an exhibition at my former university (Goethe-University Frankfurt Main, Germany[1]), which owns a small but very well-preserved collection of mid-…
Another Revolution around the Sun
Our little blue rock has revolved around the sun successfully yet again. It’s been an eventful year for me personally and for JP. On a personal note, I managed to finish my first masters degree in Library and Information Science. Now I just need to find a professional level library job. JP has come a…
How do you make Animated Anime Images?
They are everywhere online. The humble animated gif from the 90’s Internet has returned with a vengeance. So how do you make them anyway? Well it is actually really easy. First, you need images and an image editor. I like to use Photoshop, but it is an expensive program. Luckily, the excellent open source GIMP…
Kinki University, Fukuppy?
After reading the title, many of you are snickering. I know I was! Sometimes Japanese names just don’t translate well into English. Osaka’s Kinki University realized this (college officials politely calling their university’s name distracting) and decided to change it’s name to Kindai University. I don’t know, law school and fishery research might be kinky….