By Jonathan Clements. Scottish-born Iain Maloney writes of the way that he always needs a body of water somewhere nearby to feel grounded, to know which way is up. Living and working in Japan’s landlocked Gifu prefecture, he becomes aware that many of Japan’s early modern coastal defences, including a ring of vital lighthouses, were […]
Nov 16, 2023 • Subscribe
More like this
Books: Japan at War
by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. A country opens up to the West and goes through a flowering of political and social liberalism before reactionaries force a backlash, democracy flounders, and…
5 Books Lovers of Japan Need to Read
The following list of books are must reads for those who are interested in Japanese culture, anime, and manga. This list focuses on important events and sections of…
The Best Books
Buying books, especially old books, is a fascination and my biggest weakness. I love the old wear and tear on antiques, and sitting and pondering where the scraped…
Episode 129 - Lights Follow
After nine years, we are still around. On this episode of the podcast, we are covering some more stuff from Netflix. We start by over the be...
86 – 14 – Northern Lights
We rejoin Shin as he’s in the midst of officer training where he’s paired with Eugene. Two of their comrades almost crash into him, so he jumps and backflips…
Gibiate – 02 – Lights Out
Remember my comment about being able to feel the enthusiasm of the assembled talent emanating from the first episode? Yeah, that wasn’t the case this week, as Gibiate joins…
Pick of the Week: Overture, Curtain, Lights!
SEAN: Seven Seas has most of my attention this week, as I’m torn between the relaxing yuri feel of Days of Love at Seagull Villa and the less…
Books: The Deer King
By Motoko Tamamuro. A salt mine controlled by the Empire of Zol is attacked by a pack of dogs. The workers and slaves are all bitten, and within…
Books: The Apothecary Diaries
By Jonathan Clements. It is the ultimate in blood-sports – hundreds of the most beautiful women in the world, locked away in a palace where their sole chance…
Books: The Incredible Tide
By Jonathan Clements. The novelist Alexander Key (1904-79) is best known outside anime fandom for Escape to Witch Mountain, the sci-fi story that has thrice been adapted for…
Books: The Reincarnated Prince
By Jeannette Ng. Some portal fantasies are all about the wish fulfilment: being reborn beautiful, beloved and with all the “cheat skills” at your fingertips. The Reincarnated Prince…
One Piece lights up London!
One Piece Lights up London with a magic projection on the County Hall and 15 other projections around the city on November 26th, 2022 Paris – November 24,…
Books: Ghibliotheque
By Andrew Osmond. The Ghibliotheque podcast started in 2018, and soon became an institution. It offered a journey through the films of Studio Ghibli, presented by Michael Leader…
Books: Orienting
By Jonathan Clements. “My stay here has been so short,” said Rabindranath Tagore to Japanese students in 1916, “that one may think I have not earned my right…
Books: Sexiled
By Shelley Pallis. Tanya is twenty-five years old. She’s got half a decade of adventuring behind her, looting treasure from dungeons, spell-casting to protect her friends from goblins…
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Japanese Book Guide : 27 Books You Ought to Read about Japan
Here’s a collection of books to help expand your knowledge about Japan. I’ve referred to these books for my various writing projects. This list skews toward history because…
Japanese Book Guide : 27 Books You Ought to Read about Japan
Here’s a collection of books to help expand your knowledge about Japan. I’ve referred to these books for my various writing projects. This list skews toward history because…
Books: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer
By Shelley Pallis. The trouble with Rentt Faina is that he isn’t very good at his job. He’s spent ten years wandering the ruins of a haunted dungeon,…
Books: Batman – The Animated Series
By Raz Greenberg. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Joe Sutliff Sanders new book, Batman: The Animated Series, which analyzes the superhero show as part of Wayne State…
Books: The Impact of Akira
By Andrew Osmond. If you were asked which singer comes to mind in connection with Akira, most readers would think of Kanye West cosplaying Tetsuo in his pants…
The Books of Monster Hunter
Want to see ALL videos early? Support me on patreon for exclusive access! https://www.patreon.com/oceaniz TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Intro 01:44 - Artbooks 07:30 - Lorebooks 15:21 - Guidebooks Books shown/discussed in this video: Monster Hunter World Editors…
Books: Grave of the Fireflies
By Jonathan Clements. Long overdue for inclusion in the BFI’s Film Classics series, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies finally gets the critical treatment, courtesy of Alex Dudok…
Books: The Ethics of Affect
By Jonathan Clements. Those silly do-gooders in Akihabara, making a computer game company take down a mere advertising billboard on the grounds it might offend, shock or otherwise…
The Cat Who Saved Books
Japanese Title: 本を守ろうとする猫の話 (Hon o mamorō to suru neko no hanashi)Author: Sosuke Natsukawa (夏川 草介)Translator: Louise Heal KawaiPublication Year: 2017 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Press: HarperColli…
Books: The White Cat’s Revenge
By Jeannette Ng. The ever-lengthening ever more direct yet elaborate light novel title is a commonly observed phenomenon and The White Cat’s Revenge as Plotted from the Dragon…
Books: Eavesdropping on the Emperor
By Jonathan Clements. In 1939, Japanese embassy personnel in London were ordered to destroy stacks of compromising documents, and made the mistake of hiring a local company called…
Books: The Garden of Words
By Andrew Osmond. This August, Makoto Shinkai’s film The Garden of Words – soon to have a new Blu-ray/CD Steelbook – will be adapted as a London stage…
Books: Behind the Kaiju Curtain
By Jonathan Clements. Despite the title, which immediately and perhaps unjustly evokes Jasper Sharp’s magisterial Behind the Pink Curtain, Norman England’s Behind the Kaiju Curtain: A Journey onto…
Books: The History of Sushi
By Jonathan Clements. Eric C. Rath observes that in the anime series Sushi Police, fish are portrayed weeping at the injustices done to them by culinary criminals. Luckily,…
Sailor Moon Store: Three Lights Series
Product Details The Sailor Moon Store is coming out with a Three Lights Series. This...
Sailor Moon Store: Three Lights Goods
✦ Product Details ✦ Four new items featuring the Three Lights, will be coming to...
Three Lights New Song in Production
On September 19th, at 6 PM in Japan, Sailor Moon Official’s YouTube channel had a...
Lapis Re:Lights – Episode 12 (END) – Return of the Lights
Episode impressions of Lapis Re:Lights Episode 12 as four four groups perform their own orchestras to protect the city from magical monsters, Tiara finally makes it back. Will…
The Journal, Page 103, Doctor Who’s Books and Audio Books, and the Unwelcome Epilogue
Doctor Who, a lengthy and marvelous series that I discovered almost a year ago thanks to EmeraldDM8 and his struggle against my stubbornness, and one that I’d never,…
Books: By the Grace of the Gods
By Shelley Pallis. And then he died. In his sleep, because of a particularly powerful sneeze. Ryoma Takebayashi wakes up at tea party in heaven with several gods,…
Books: The Works of Hayao Miyazaki
By Shelley Pallis. In an already crowded field of critical appraisals of Ghibli films, the Toulouse-based Third Editions offer their latest English-language publication, Gael Berton’s The Works of…
Books: The Characters Taught Me Everything
By Jonathan Clements. Megumi Hayashibara is an observant and empathetic narrator, walking the reader through her early years as a nobody struggling to finish nursing school while burning…
Books: The Story of British Animation
By Andrew Osmond. Most people looking at this review will be anime fans. But what does “British animation” bring to your mind? Probably Wallace and Gromit and Aardman.…
Books: Miyazaki and the Hero’s Journey
By Helen McCarthy. A book can be a ground-breaking work of scholarship and still accessible to any intelligent reader. Language capable of being understood by the average well-read…
Books: Leiji Matsumoto
By Jonathan Clements. For all the passion and excitement that the contributors bring to the new collection Leiji Matsumoto: Essays on the Anime and Manga Legend, their subject…
Japanese “Cat Books”
Anyone who reads Japanese literature has surely noticed the overwhelming number of books about cats. It’s not just a phenomenon of fiction in translation—there are a lot of…
Books: Infinite Dendrogram
By Shelley Pallis. Infinite Dendrogram is the best game ever invented, a “virtual reality massively multiplayer online game” but not a crap one like all the ones that…
Books: Terminal Boredom
By Jonathan Clements. “There is something wrong with our present society,” Izumi Suzuki once wrote, “and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that… Even…
Books: Reading Murakami
By Jonathan Clements. Almost everything that is written about fiction is either reception (what the reader thought of the book) or production (an occasional making-of about the author…
Books: Rebuild World
By Jonathan Clements. When we first see Akira, he is gripped in the jaws of a mutant dog. Nafuse’s Rebuild World ditches the tiresome induction scene of many…
Books: Combat Baker…
By Jeannette Ng. The light novel series The Combat Baker and the Automaton Waitress follows Lud “Silver Wolf” Langart, a former captain and mech-operator who retires after a…
Books: Japanese Drinking
By Shelley Pallis. Masaaki Watanabe’s anime series Bartender is part of a long tradition of TV shows about smart loners who help others in secret. Its leading man…
Books: Spirit Chronicles
By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even…