After playing Chromehounds, a friend and I both expressed our sense that it was an "accidentally American" game– a Japanese title with a lot of appeal to the semi-nerd "western" gamer. The more we discussed the issue, the more we charted the murky dichotomy of "western games" versus Japanese games.

It’s easy to think about the kind of games that are unlikely to come out of the Japanese games industry:

• A highly realistic flight simulator,

...

(a repost from my personal blog)

In the past decade, with the emergence of digitally distributed, fan-translated "digisubs" (now just "fansubs") and dual-language DVDs, the anime fandom in the US experienced rapid expansion. Distributors like (most famously) ADV / A.D. Vision also experienced growth, but then a sudden leveling off and eventual contraction, despite the continuing rise of interest in Japanese animation. ADV’s troubles are representitive of the declining...

(CONT'D FROM) (Original version)



Disclaimer: the rest of this article may contain heavy amounts of gaijin speculation.

One only needs to look as far back as the Empire of Japan that existed up to WWII. During that time, the forces of military propaganda and mass media created a feedback loop of nationalism, twisting societal aspects like giri into a military machine that...

one of my (lol) Greatest Hits reposted from my personal blog.



The prevalence of atomic bomb-inspired imagery (Akira) and atomic horrors (Godzilla) in Japanese pop culture is pretty well recognized. However there is a more subtle yet profound apocalyptic theme that runs through modern Japanese pop culture. It is the idea that human civilization is an arbitrary, unstoppable, and sometimes...