Japan has a long history of literary and artistic women. If you look at the education of women, Japan’s history would resemble a sine curve. Some periods have widespread female education among the nobility and even among some peasant groups. Other periods neglected or limited female education. The most literary women cluster around the Heian…
What the Historical Silence of Japanese Women Says
By the title you may be expecting me to write about the patriarchy in history. You’re right to a degree. After all, the patriarchy has hurt women, but it has also hurt men too. What we have of history comes from those who worked within and often benefited from historically male-dominated power systems. However, little…
Animation is Hard: What You Should Know About the Anime Industry
Have you thought about how the anime you watch works? Animation results from the stickiness of our minds and vision. We take this stickiness for granted, but without it animation wouldn’t work. Animation happens when a series of images are shown to us fast enough to invoke this stickiness. If you flash these still images…
The Not-So-Future Problems of Cloud Content
Despite Google pulling the plug on Stadia, cloud gaming or gaming as a service continues to be the direction the gaming, movies, and anime (and manga for that matter) will move. There’s too much profit to be had and convenience for video gaming not to move this way. Video games as a service would allow…
Sitting Down to Tea with Sakuraco
Tea has a long history of being a part of high-culture in England and in Japan. Sakuraco offers tea-for-two subscription boxes that combine elements of Western tea tradition with Japan’s. Sakuraco was kind enough to send me another box to review–this box themed around cherry blossoms. After all, we are in cherry-blossom season. Although Sakuraco…
Collecting Ukiyo-e, Several Things to Consider
Ukiyo-e translates to “images of the floating world.” The Floating World refers to the pleasure districts of the Edo period. This was the world of actors, prostitutes, geisha, bath girls, and other entertainers. The districts were set aside for those purposes by the Shogun. Prostitution was banned outside these districts. Yoshiwara and Gion numbered among…