JAXA, or The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, formed in 2003 with the mergers of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, the National Aerospace Laboratory, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan. The new agency began with the launch of several observational satellites and the ambitious Hayabusa mission. Hayabusa’s goal was to study Itokawa,…
Are Fans Entitled?
Steve Shives, a Star Trek YouTuber, released a video titled “Fan Service Leads to Fan Entitlement” where he outlines how catering to fans causes problems. He argues that fan-service, defined as giving fans what they want, can make fans entitled. Entitled fans demand the story, characters, and lore to develop as they want it to…
Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley
History tends to represent the voices of men and those in power. Typically, governmental officials, who are most often men, know how to read and write. And those documents are what survive. The majority of people in the past were illiterate and unable to write. Because of this, their voices disappeared outside of a few…
Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District
Geishas and the Floating World by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet examines the history and development of Tokyo’s red-light district of Yoshiwara. The name of the book misleads a little. Most of the book focuses upon the prostitutes that worked Yoshiwara. The authors note that geisha weren’t sex workers, but geisha did blur the line as…
Parallel World Pharmacy Review
Parallel World Pharmacy takes a different direction from the usual isekai. When medical researcher Kanji Yakutani dies from karoshi, he wakes up to find himself reborn in a medieval fantasy culture with all his medical knowledge intact. Fortunately, he was also reborn to a pharmacist family and, in isekai fashion, born to power. In his…
The Internet’s Spoiler Culture
Every week, some upcoming video game is leaked to the Internet. Either you have an entire ROM (read only memory) drop of the game, or leaks of screenshots and gameplay videos. For old-school gamers like me, it’s nearly impossible to avoid spoilers with how prevalent they are on the Internet. You see, I grew up…