“Japanese Science Fiction of the 1930s”
Jess Nevins writes about Sato Minoru’s The Foreign Farm (1931), Japanese science fiction in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries and “the White Peril.”
RIP, Koji Wakamatsu
Director and producer Koji Wakamatsu has died. Wakamatsu had just been named filmmaker of the year at the 2012 Busan Film Festival. Wildgrounds has an interview, which Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats helped translate, Keyframe has an obituary and Subway Cinema had a brief overview of Wakamatsu’s career paralleling a […]
“Battle Royale and Japanese Nationalism”
This Japanese Life provides some historical context for Kinji Fukasaku’s film, Battle Royale–including an incident from Fukasaku‘s own life as a student drafted into a munitions factory, writer Yukio Mishima and the Hagakure: “Since the film deliberately omits much of the novel’s WW2-inspired alternative reality, I look at Kitano […]
“Flip a Switch, a Fairy Dies”
Pornokitsch writer (and Kitschies judge) Jared Shurin writes about fairies as fuel and the vast potential of Steampunk as a resource for discussing industrialization.
The Cat and the Coup
In The Cat and the Coup you are a cat, specifically Mohammed Mossadegh’s cat. Who was he? The first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran who was overthrown in a CIA-funded coup . The game looks like Persian miniatures. It has music by Nine Inch Nails. And it’s […]
Fear of a Black Panther: Part One
“Fear of a Black Panther: Part One” is the excellent first part of an examination of Panther’s Rage: “a classic 13 part super-hero story that predated the ‘adult’ stylings of Watchmen & the Dark Knight Returns by over a decade. [It} was a dark, dense American super-hero comic […]
The Cultural Gutter 