The hiring season is going on right now in Japan. If you want the best chance to get a job working overseas then dust off/fill out your resume and get to applying. We talk about the process of applying, interviewing, and what to expect to get yourself working in the land of the rising sun.
Impressions: Koufuku Grafitti, Sengoku Musou, IdolM@aster: Cinderella Girls, Durarara!! x2, Saenai Heronie no Sodate-kata
We answer the questions in mailbags, on special shows, and in person, but they keep coming up. Well, back by popular demand is a Japan Questionnaire. With 2 Asian Studies Minors and over 5 cumulative years living in Japan between the hosts we answer your questions about the land of the rising sun.
Questions Include:
Chris – facebook- What is the home video market like in Japan compared to the states? Why are their blu-rays and DVDs so expensive compared to the states.
Leanne- Facebook – How common are pets in Japan? Do people often have pets like hamsters, rabbits, snakes?
Alan – facebook – I was at my local bike shop loitering around and over heard one of the employees helping a young lady pick out a road bike because she was going to the glorious nippon. So my question is, how is cycling in japan? Are there bike lanes? And is it reasonable to use a bike as the main mode of transportation?
Tony Spiffy Piggy Pankey – Facebook – How often have you encountered people following Shinto and, on average, how enthusiastic would you say they are about it?
Cortney – Facebook – The commercials in Japan are so different than North America. Are all commercials like that in Japan?
Ivonne – Facebook – is it true that the people will walk around foreigners to avoid being rude to them.
Ferdinand – Facebook – What’s the difference between the special education in Japan and the U.S.?
Stephen – Facebook – A lot of people have asked about the anime fan-scene in Japan, and how prevalent anime is. But how common are other properties, like Star Trek and Star Wars, to name two? Is there a lot of publicity, merchandise, etc. for things like Marvel movies and similar things, or are they similarly relegated to otaku-dom? Do ‘regular’ people talk about popular TV and movies at all, or are they only reserved for the geeks.
Nathan – facebook – Do you think living in Japan has changed you? And if it did, was it noticeable by your friends and family?
Kazuo: How do you get to live and work in Japan?
Kazuo: Is it true that everyone lives in itty-bitty living spaces?
Kazuo: How does crime compare? Are you afraid to walk alone at night in certain areas?
Kazuo: What’s a brotha gotta do to pick up some honeys in Japan? What is dating like?
Kazuo: Since men and women are viewed so differently in Japan, does this reflect on foreign women? Are they treated the same as Japanese women?
Kazuo: Can you survive in Japan without speaking the language? What would some challenges be?
Kazuo: What is it like to drive in Japan? Some horror stories? Or is everyone on point?
Kazuo: I heard that going to see a movie in japan can be more expensive than the states. Are there any other things that surprised you by the difference in cost?
Kazuo: Top 5 pros and cons about living in Japan.
Review: Captain Earth
Chiaki gives the dish on Japan as she experiences it first hand. Followed by a discussion on art in anime with regards to CG versus traditional art.
Reviews: Eve no Jikan, Princess Tutu, One Outs, School Days, and Demon City Shinjuku
Hey everybody! I hope everyone is having a good Christmas season out there in the AAA community. What I’m going to talk about today is the first year of the PS Vita with all the ups and downs (mostly downs), and what the future might hold for the pretty little handheld.
So the Vita launched a year and a day ago as in Japan as I’m writing this, and it had a pretty auspicious start in the lands of the rising sun selling 325,000 units in the first few days, a good launch compared to other systems like the 3DS. However, in the next weeks the sells cratered dropping to as low 12,309 units in the week of February 13th, and being outsold by the PSP. Now the sells have recovered somewhat in the following weeks averaging about 40,000 a week worldwide. This pattern followed with the North American and European launches, initial sales was great and then sinking down to low levels. The black Friday and holiday sales good, but this is likely a temporary bump as with all holiday’s seasons sales always rise dramatically over normal sales figures.
So now let’s look the games released for the system so far. There are currently 158 games as of writing for the Vita. Of these 25 were the launch titles, including Little Deviants, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Rayman Origins, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend etc. The best selling game is Uncharted with 850,000 units sold and will likely also be the first 1 million seller on the system. Not of the other games come close to Uncharted; however three games have about half the sales. Some of the games have been released to critical acclaim such as Persona 4: The Golden which is the highest rated handheld game in 2012 on Metacrtic. Gravity Rush has won handheld game of the year from some publications. So the Vita does have some games to answer that question people like to ask all the time about Sony systems haha. There are a couple games that came out this year that were suppose to turn the fortunes of the Vita around, the so-called “Killer App” that people are always talking about that sells systems, but neither Call of Duty: Declassified or Resistance: Burning Skies became the killer app as both suffered from bad controls and were a little short on content. One of the key selling points people were touting was the ability of Vita to play FPS on the go with the dual analog sticks. Now that two high profile FPS have come out and both have been utter disappointments and in my mind this has damaged the Vita brand.
There is isn’t much to say about what Sony has done to turn around the lackluster sales of the PS Vita because there hasn’t been a permanent price cut, the marketing has largely remain the same, and the Playstation Plus is now on Vita and that should help with sales, how much it will help remained to be seen.
Now I’m going to discuss some things that I think Sony can do to turn Vita around and get it selling good. Here’s the strategy I have conceived that Sony can follow to make sell well and make a profit. They cannot drop the price until the handheld can be redesigned into a form that makes a profit off each unit, otherwise Sony will be losing even more money then they already are on each unit sold. This could take a year or so, but in the end be worth it if they include the features I’m about to list. Include a drive to play all the PSP games; all of the people on the fence about buying a Vita that have a big PSP game library would have a huge reason to buy the system. Add an SD card slot; having only Sony memory cards as the only storage media on Vita has hurt the system even if its not the main reason people often point too. The Vita memory cards are expensive and are an unnecessary extra expense for buyers when they probably have a few SD cards they could be using to store games and data. Extend the battery life of the system; this is probably the easiest one to implement as it has been done many times for other handhelds. The most recent example being the 3DS XL, which added an extra 1.5 hours to the 3DS’s battery life, so it is not that hard. This could also be done through third party batteries such as the ones by Nyko, and that’s what I did with my 3DS and its battery life is actually better than the XL’s. Make games that are an unique experience to the Vita; I think the major problem with Sony’s ideology towards Vita is that they are trying to create scaled down versions of PS3 games for Vita instead of developing games from ground up specifically for Vita. In order to attract people to spent the money on a new hardware you need to have exclusive software that is found no where else. Marketing the Sega Genesis style; it would be extremely funny to watch Sony do some commercials along the lines of the ones done by Sega against Nintendo in the early 1990’s, and seeing how those worked well for Sega it could work for Sony as well.
Well until next time,
Devil_Survivor
As seen in the Globe and Mail Video, a fashion show in Japan has taken a very experimental design to the public. With cross-dressing males models walking down the catwalk and zombified female models sitting on old TV’s with blank stares, is this the direction that the fashion industry is heading? Will we be seeing more anime-esque outfits or even full on cosplay lines in the near future? You be the judge; leave a comment on the bottom with your thoughts!
~~Z-ComiX
Links:
The Globe and Mail Article
Hey all you crazy anime addicts out there, its me coming at you once again, the most interesting man on the AAA network, Devil Survivor. I have an extremely interesting, yet disturbing, and maybe humorous topic for you today. Recently, a survey was commissioned by the Japanese government on the attitudes of Japanese men and women aged 16-49 towards sex. So let’s take a look at the results of this study. Starting with the men 16-19, 36.1 percent said that have little interest in sex or even despised it altogether. Wow, I’m shocked that a teenage boy would ever say he hates sex, its like a Republican politician saying he hates cheating on his wife then claiming he is a family values candidate. That figure is almost double the figure reported in a 2008 survey. This survey, which was conducted in September of 2010, also found that 83.7 percent of Japanese men that are turning 20 this year are not dating anyone, and a further 49.3 percent said they have never had a girlfriend. The findings for girls in the same age group unfortunately are no better; 59 percent of them felt similarly like the young men about sex, which was up 12 percent from 2008.
So what does this all mean, you might ask. Well according to Kunio Kitamura head of the clinic of the Japanese Family Planning Association says it seems to confirm the notion that Japanese younger men are becoming ” herbivores” meaning men who do not actively seek out women or sex. What we are seeing here I think is the collision of two social phenomena at play in Japanese society creating a tsunami of sexual apathy. Women in Japan have been gaining empowerment in society in the past couple decades making more money and getting higher on the professional ladder, and this has caused Japanese women to raise their expectations of what their potential husband should make at his job. This has in turn caused Japanese men to believe that the expectations of women are too unrealistic and they cannot possible make enough money in their jobs. So more and more men are turning other means of romantic engagement such as dating sims, anime character figures, sex dolls, and other such things. Add to this the already extremely low birth rate in Japan and the high average age of the population, which is 44.8 years old, and things are not looking good for the future of Japan.
Some other findings from the survey that are of note; 40.8 percent of married couples answered that they had not had sex in the last month, up from 36.5 percent in 2008. Almost 50 percent married couples older than 40 also reported that they had not had sex in the last month. Thus confirming the widely held belief that getting married kills an otherwise healthy sexual desire haha.
This is a major social problem for Japan in a number of ways. In terms of the workforce and having a ready a supply of new young workers it would be disastrous as the birth rate is well below replacement. National defense would also be compromised as its hard to maintain an armed forces without young people to fill out the ranks. The population is projected to shrink to about 95 million by 2050 and this would cause the Japanese economy to suffer worse than anything before. Correcting this isn’t easy will probably take a generation or so to see signs of change.
Here’s the original article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/japanese-men-losing-sex-d_n_809271.html
Cheers,
Devil
Recently I was looking for news topics on anime for my next post when something caught my eye. A post by Shubhajit Roy over at India Express, although unassuming in nature, caught my eyes and my heart when I read the title. The post was entitled “Japan Pushes Anime for Indian Kids”[1] and being half Indian and an anime addict I was quick to jump on the post… 9 days after it was posted.
In his article, Roy speaks about how both the Japanese and Indian Prime Ministers were in talks to “strengthening of cooperation in creative industries… animation and manga.” Roy also writes that when addressing the good people of Delhi(no not a meat shop, the capital of India folks), Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Nado stated this:
“Adults may be unaware of it, but I understand that Japanese Anime is quite popular here.”
To me this was a surprise, as I have never actually met any Middle Eastern people who like manga or anime, except for the occasional Deviant Art artist. In fact, Roy cites that India is actually a growing market of anime and Japanese products, having 40 to 70 Japanese animations exported fromJapantoIndiaevery year! vice secretary general of the Association of Japanese Animation, Eiji Takahashi, has been working on relations with India as is working with companies such as Toei Animation to bring anime to India. Older readers may remember Toei Animation as the guys who brought us Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z, two shows that helped pave the way for many anime fans inAmerica. That said, having done this before, Toei Animation is the best choice if we want to see anime take root in India. Takahashi has also gone on record, saying that anime exported toIndiawill have good dubbing, a problem that turns off many viewers to this day. It is also should be noted that even though India has not put any restrictions up, Japanese companies will be exporting cleaned up versions of shows such as the removal of guns and sexual scenes. Being Indian myself I can see that this was a smart move for Japan as those things can and would be very offensive and cause many problems for anime in India.
Now, one of my complaints about anime is the representation of, or the lack thereof, races and religions that are not the standard set withinJapan. Of course, in my teenage mind this only pertains to Indians or really anyone from theMiddle East. I’ve seen “stereotypes” from the man with a grey beard, white clothes and a turban to a little girl with an accent, red don’t on her forehead and makes weird robotics or some sort of, what I guess is “Hindi voodoo.” I am however able to forgive these caricatures of people of my race since Japan isn’t Indi aand therefore really has no reason to insert individuals whom they do not necessarily understand into their media. Even so, I still yearn for good Indian characters in anime. That is why when I heard in a recent article thatJapanis working on a cricket anime for India based off of hit manga Koyjin no Hoshi I was ecstatic.
Apparently, as seen in Catherine Makino’s article “Anime Baseball Hero Transforms into Cricket Champion”[2] on Majirox News, Japan plans to release a 26 to 52 episode anime based on the hit manga in the form of cricket in the Fall season of this year. The following is an excerpt that explains the premise of the anime:
“The Indian version will be called Rising Star. The hero, who has tentatively been given the name of Salaji, is a young, left-handed southpaw cricketer who wants to follow in the footsteps of his cricket player father and make it in the big leagues.”
The success of this show, Makino points out, will be on how well they can reskin the manga’s ideas around cricket. Cricket is a very complex sport and is difficult to learn, let alone play. A game of cricket can take days to complete, as opposed to baseball where it is for 9 innings. Also, India has grown up on mostly American animation and comics, and not the newer kind. We’re talking Golden Age, CaptainAmericavs Nazis, Superman leaping over buildings in a single bound, Smiling Batman comics. The idea of a non-super-powered protagonist may not appeal to the Indian audience even if cricket does. It’s going to be tough to hook people, but I’m hopeful that his will be a gateway for more!
The export of anime toIndiais great for both sides as it opens a new frontier forJapanto make money and gives India new form of media that may be better than anythingAmericaputs out inIndia. I personally am looking forward to all this and will watch the first episode of Rising Star when it airs, although not in Hindi since I only know Urdu. Keep your eyes open because if What happened in America and in Japan when Anime was brought over happens to India we may see some awesome new animes that may even feature an Indian protagonist too!
Until next time!
~~Z-ComiX
[1] http://www.indianexpress.com/news/japan-pushes-anime-for-indian-kids/894690/2
[2] http://www.majiroxnews.com/2012/01/10/anime-baseball-hero-transforms-into-cricket-champion/
Is he a creeper? Is he a perv? Perhaps he is just looking for sausage?
Good day everyone and please forgive my delay in starting. Perhaps in the forums I will list the cause of my strife but I must not dwell on such triviality as it could distract me.
My name is Noshgard but please call me Nosh. As my title suggests – I am one of the senior members here but I love anime. On top of this, I love AAA Podcast which is why I chose to throw my thoughts onto the screen and see where they land. My goal, and yours should you choose to accept it, is to help build a burning desire for you to give all Anime a chance regardless of its age. Ok – maybe not ALL Anime but you get what I mean.
There will be a common theme for the Anime I tend to watch I’ll leave it to you to determine what that is.
I love all things Japan and have since, well, the 60’s. Anime in the 60’s was very one dimensional in my mind but it was still unique compared to the C-R-A-P I could watch in the U.S.
Oops – a side note – I have focusing issues, I tend to ramble sometimes as there is a lot of information fighting to come out first so please stick with me when I drift. The important thing is that all of my thoughts are interrelated so you can find where I am headed – I hope. Where was I – oh yeah. So Trixie’s chest! No, not Chistina’s chest which has been great since like 1998 but the original Trixie. It was normal. I can honestly say that I didn’t pay it much of a mind. Now, compare this to say Canaan which is physically about the same size and yet she is much more accentuated. Is it a sign of the times? Is it a dialogue on how Anime has changed?
But Nosh, Trixie was a ditz and Cannan kicked serious butt! Yes, I agree – Cannan kicked serious butt yet Trixie was no slouch. She drove the Mach 5 many times when Speed petered out. She was a serious Helicopter Pilot and, not unlike the lovely Canaan, she was actually quite good with a handgun. Granted she didn’t have Alphard after her but she was quite handy with Assassin’s who were.
So if you are looking for thrills – give Canaan a try. And if you are looking for retrospective – give Trixie the respect she deserves!
Nosh
PS – What the heck is up with Yunyun’s chest?