Isekai has developed a shojo villainess subgenre where the protagonist is reincarnated or otherwise become the villain in an otome, or female-targeted romance video game. Most often, the protagonist aims to avoid the villainess’s fate in the game, such as My Next Life as a Villainess. In the process, they shift the game’s love interests…
Author: Chris
Only Time Will Tell: Mechanized Time in Old Japan
A day divided into 24 hours of 60 minutes, which are each 60 seconds in length, feels natural. But at one time, daylight didn’t divide so mechanically. Many mistakenly think people didn’t care about timekeeping even just a century-and-a-half ago. The idea: agriculturally based economies didn’t need hourly timekeeping and instead focused on seasonal and…
Dan Da Dan’s Sakuga
Sakuga is a term within the anime community used to describe animated scenes with fluid, detailed animations. Sakuga usually highlights important fights or scenes for a story. These scenes have more frames than typical animated scenes. Sakuga scenes require more budget to produce, so the costs are balanced by other tricks. This balance also helps…
Choosing Which Video Games to Play as You Lay Dying
Whether of high rank or low, whether old or young, people die. If enlightened they die; if unenlightened, they die. Indeed everyone must die….Although everyone knows that they will die, they think they themselves will die only after everyone else has died, and they don’t consider the fact the their death may come at any…
The Yamato Dynasty by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave
The Yamato Dynasty traces the Japanese imperial family from Emperor Meiji and the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate to Akihito. As you can imagine, most of the book centers on Emperor Hirohito. After all, he was Japan’s longest-serving emperor. To the authors’ credit, they spend a nice number of words on more obscure aspects of…
The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris
In order to understand works like The Tale of Genji, you have to understand the historical context. Ivan Morris’s book The World of the Shining Prince sketches enough of this background for you to understand what Murasaki took for granted. Morris covers every aspect of Heian society from food and superstitions to the relationship practices…