The Season of Horrors It may seem strange at first that summer is the prime time for ghost stories in Japan. We tend to associate summer with pleasant things… but imagine you’re living in early modern Japan. You have no iced drinks, no electric fans, no convenient water taps. There’s basically no way to keep…
Category: Finds and Ramblings
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…
Musings IV: Japanese Idioms, and why it is a good idea to know some.
Perhaps you’ve been so lucky never to have prayed into a horse’s ear (uma no mimi ni nenbutsu), but I bet someone has once looked at you with white eyes (shiroi me de miru) until you felt like your stomach was boiling (hara ga nie-kurikaeru yō). Yes, those are Japanese Idioms. I’ve had a class…
Pots, Cats and Lilies, but Nothing Changes?
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…
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-…