October 01, 2023

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

The Kindle edition is on sale at Amazon for $1.99. I reviewed the book here.

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September 30, 2023

Anime(tion) domination

Fuji TV is home to three of the top five anime series in Japan. Even most anime fans outside Japan would be hard-pressed to name the top two.

The only surprise about One Piece, Sunday mornings at nine-thirty, is that it doesn't rank higher than fourth or fifth place. In second or third is Chibi Maruko-chan, Sunday evenings at six o'clock.

And finally in first place (by a wide margin), Sazae-san follows Chibi Maruko-chan at six-thirty. That is some serious animation domination for you.

At over 2,250 episodes, Sazae-san is officially the longest running animated television series on the planet. The manga by Machiko Hasegawa debuted in 1946 and ran until 1974. The anime has been on the air since 1969.

Though once considered quite liberal in its depiction of the role of women in society, the show avoids topical references and skirts the kind of changes brought on by technologies like smartphones. As the producers of Sazae-san have explained,

The appeal of this anime is that it depicts scenes of everyday life and universal relationships that can be found in any family. We have no plans in the future to incorporate events or items that would change them.

As a result, even episodes from 2023 will give you a good idea what suburban culture and architecture in Japan looked like fifty years ago.

During her lifetime, beyond short-lived radio and television dramas, Hasegawa refused to merchandize the show in any form, including home video. Amazon Prime Video alone has streaming rights to a select number of older episodes and only in Japan.

The manga Chibi Maruko-san by Momoko Sakura has been published since 1986. The anime first ran from 1990 to 1992, relaunched in 1995, and has been on the air ever since.

Chibi Maruko-san is similarly a Showa drama that revolves around a traditional nuclear family and a grandparent or two. It is also set vaguely in the 1970s, though like Sazae-san, makes no attempt to pin down a specific time period.

Again, in-show references are to the general culture and not to the zeitgeist then or now. In other words, both shows appeal to modern audiences by making no attempt to appeal to modern audiences. Well, make that modern Japanese audiences.

To date, the Sazae-san anime has not been licensed outside Japan and Chibi Maruko-chan in only a few countries, most notably Germany and India. As Brian Hanson explains this apparent failure of supply and demand,

[Sazae-san and Chibi Maruko-chan] don't look much like traditional anime and their stories couldn't be any further from the typical anime fare that sells well over here. Sazae-san is basically a distinctly Japanese family cartoon show, like a warmer, less-satirical version of The Simpsons. And Chibi Maruko-chan is sort of the same thing, except told from the point of view of a precocious little girl.

This creates a big mismatch in the marketing demographics outside Japan. These IPs are already so valuable in their home market that the rights holders have little to gain by shopping them to reluctant buyers for pennies on the dollar.

Unlike Machiko Hasegawa, Momoko Sakura was on board with marketing her creation in Japan, so Chibi Maruko-chan has its own website and merch. But only in Japanese.

Nippon Animation also decided that a big backlist has no promotional value just sitting there and made Chibi Maruko-chan available on YouTube. The official Chibi Maruko channel is home to a huge repository of promos and past episodes.

dLibrary Japan had one season of Chibi Maruko-chan, though there's no guarantee those shows will still be on the service when it returns next year after a planned hiatus.

As mentioned above, the only licensed distributor of Sazae-san in Japan is Amazon Prime Video. Of course, you can find bootleg episodes on YouTube.

Again, none of this content has been localized. Still, I think it's well worth familiarizing yourself with these touchstones of Japanese popular culture.

Related links

Chibi Maruko channel
Sazae-san (YouTube search)
The Showa drama
Popular anime you never heard of (probably)

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September 27, 2023

The Bronze Devil

A thief is on the loose in Tokyo, a smash and grab artist that targets high-end jewelry stores and steals only rare and valuable watches and timepieces. The identity of the burglar is no mystery. It's a metal robot, dubbed the "Bronze Devil" by the press.

Now it has set its sights on the estate of Ryunosuke Tezuka and the "Royal Luminous Watch." The police know the Bronze Devil's next victim because the robot brazenly told them the time and the place.

Except with its magical ability to appear and disappear out of nowhere, the police are powerless to stop one theft after the other. That can only mean it's time to put master sleuth Kogoro Akechi and the Boy Detectives Club on the case.

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Read an excerpt

The Boy Detectives Club

The Phantom Doctor
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien


Ranpo Edogawa's first Boy Detectives Club novel since 1939 features the debut of the "Street Gang Irregulars," a motley crew of war orphans inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street Irregulars. Against such a formidable foe, these clever kids will have their work cut out for them.

But let there be no doubt that Edogawa's new and improved crime-fighting crew will come through in the end.

Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.

Check out Kate's interview with me about the translation process (also here, here, and here). Please visit the website for more information.

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September 23, 2023

Kazuya Kosaka

One of the rewards of listening to the Gold(en oldies) on J1 Radio is hearing covers of songs you never expected. Flash back to the late 1950s and early 1960s when Japan's television stations were first going on the air. They licensed Hollywood productions to fill in the program schedules.

Westerns were a staple on American television at the time, and so the genre naturally became a staple on Japanese television. Rawhide was a big hit. During a February 1962 publicity tour, Clint Eastwood, Paul Brinegar, and Eric Fleming met the Japanese press at the Palace Hotel in Tokyo.


It was only a matter of time before Japanese musicians began performing Western music and rockabilly. Kazuya Kosaka & The Wagon Masters not only covered the hits but reinterpreted them as well.

Here's Kosaku's version of "Rawhide."


And his cover of "Jailhouse Rock."


Kazuya Kosaka (1935–1997) is better remembered today in Japan for his long career in movies and television.


There are also J1 Radio apps for Roku, Android, and iPhone.

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September 20, 2023

Lord Simon: The Dispossession of Hannah

To save a young woman from a band of marauding students, Lord Simon bespelled her into the walls of his house, powerful magic he later discovers he cannot undo.

Determined to free her from this prison of wood and stone, Lord Simon consorts with grave robbers and physicians, politicians and priests, twisting the arms of the powerful and the profane in every profession. As his reputation and his house crumble around him, his obsession to save a woman long thought dead threatens to drive him mad.

The third installment in the Roesia series, Lord Simon: The Dispossession of Hannah encompasses the events in Richard: The Ethics of Affection and Aubrey: Remnants of Transformation.

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The Roesia Series

Tales of the Quest
Lord Simon: The Dispossession of Hannah
Richard: The Ethics of Affection
Aubrey: Remnants of Transformation

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September 16, 2023

Classic Toei samurai shows

Abarenbo Shogun ("The Unfettered Shogun") ran for 831 episodes between 1978 and 2008, placing it third behind Zenigata Heiji and Mito Komon. Over a four-decade long run, Mito Komon reached a staggering 1,227 episodes, the record for a Japanese period drama.

Abarenbo Shogun and Mito Komon share the same premise: a high Tokugawa official dons a disguise and mingles among the commoners to deliver rough justice to the bad guys. As the title makes clear, in Abarenbo Shogun, the official is the shogun himself.

Ken Matsudaira played Tokugawa Yoshimune for the entire series while five actors took on the lead role as Tokugawa Mitsukuni on Mito Komon.

As governor of Mito, the maverick Mitsukuni laid the groundwork that eventually led to the domain playing a key role in the Meiji Restoration a hundred and fifty years later. The equally impressive Yoshimune is ranked among the best of the Tokugawa shoguns.

The first episode of Abarenbo Shogun introduces another historical character, the respected Ooka Tadasuke, who was appointed by Yoshimune. As an Edo period magistrate, he functioned as both the chief of police and the presiding judge.

The series has Yoshimune using the residence of an old firefighter friend as his base of operations. It's a perfect setup for an action-oriented police procedural. With decent scripts, acting, and directing, it's easy to see why it lasted so long.

The Toei Jidaigeki channel has the first two subtitled episodes of Abarenbo Shogun. The channel includes sample shows from other classic samurai series, including Sonny Chiba's Yagyu Abaretabi and Shadow Warriors.

In Shadow Warriors, Chiba is the laid-back owner of a bathhouse in Edo. But that's a cover for his real job as a secret agent for the shogunate. In each of the five seasons, he returns as a different descendent of the Iga ninja Hattori Hanzo, a role he reprised for Kill Bill.

Yagyu Abaretabi, by contrast, is a road movie. Chiba again plays a historical figure, Yagyu Jubei. His brother is an inspector on the famed Tokai Highway. Chiba and his band of ninjas tag along as his bodyguards. It's another great premise for an ongoing series.

The Toei Jidaigeki channel includes the 1972 remake of the acclaimed Kutsukake Tokijiro, an Edo period yakuza redemption drama. But also in the mix are several martial arts and tokusatsu series that put the low in low budget. Production quality is all over the place.

The first season of Shadow Warriors is on Tubi. The movie Uzumasa Limelight looks at the genre from the perspective of a sword stuntman who has difficulty finding work after spending his entire career on a period drama like Mito Komon.

Samurai dramas were once as dominate on Japanese television as Westerns were on American television. Incidentally, Rawhide (1959–1965), the series that made Clint Eastwood a star, was a big hit in Japan at the time.

Especially with Shadow Warriors, be forewarned that broadcast standards during the 1970s and 1980s in Japan were not as stringent as those in North America. On the other hand, "golden time" shows like Abarenbo Shogun and Mito Komon remained more family friendly.

Related links

Toei Jidaigeki channel
Uzumasa Limelight
Shadow Warriors

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September 13, 2023

Coin

It's 1995 and Donna Howard is living an ordinary life in Portland, Maine. She works as a hairdresser, has a boring boyfriend, two opinionated brothers, and two exhaustively energetic parents. As far as she's concerned, she's an ordinary person and proud of it.

Except she can see the past. Walk down any street in the old part of the city and four centuries of its inhabitants walk right along with her. She can observe them, hear them, smell them. And she'd rather not. She'd prefer to leave the past in the past.

Until a customer "accidentally" leaves an ancient Roman coin at the hair salon. A coin worth an awful lot of money. Then the woman appraising the coin for the Portland Museum of Art "accidentally" ends up dead. And now the past won't leave her alone.

Not even the man who's visage was molded into the metal 2000 years ago, a man who wreaked mayhem then and may have witnessed murder now. Quite unwittingly, Donna uncovers family secrets, confronts historical controversies, and closes in on a very contemporary crime.

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Donna Howard Mysteries

Coin
Silver Spoon
Apron
Clasp

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September 09, 2023

The Dial Comes to Town

The best technical support video ever. I'm so ancient that I grew up with a dial telephone. And those massive telephone books. This was an era when AT&T owned the entire system from end to end, including the telephone. Touch-Tone (a registered trademark) debuted in November 1963.

The AT&T monopoly (also known as "Ma Bell," after Bell Telephone founded by Alexander Graham Bell) was broken up in 1984 into seven regional "Baby Bells." I was in college at the time, and one of the first manifestations of the break-up was the proliferation of cheap Touch-Tone phones.

Those wall-sized racks of electromechanical switches make the geek in me smile. Today, the equipment that filled entire buildings would fit into a small closet. But this was the cutting edge of computing in 1940. And why the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 changed everything.


Not only has the dial telephone gone the way of the dinosaurs, but the landline (also known affectionately as "POTS" or "plain old telephone service") is fast on their heels. Today, only two percent of households in the United States rely solely on a hardwired connection to place a phone call.

The question going forward is how fast fiber will replace the now "traditional" coaxial cable connection. And when and if wireless will replace everything else.

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September 06, 2023

The Space Alien

The year is 1953. The Korean War is winding down. The Cold War is heating up. In 1952, the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb. Godzilla stomped onto the world stage two years later. UFOs are appearing all over the world. In Ranpo Edogawa's latest young adult novel, five flying saucers zoom across the skies of Tokyo.

A day after that alarming incident, a woodsman stumbles out of the forest to report the landing of an alien spacecraft in the mountains southwest of Tokyo. A month later, Ichiro Hirano's neighbor goes missing. And then reappears as abruptly as he vanished, claiming he was kidnapped by a mysterious winged lizard creature.

That same lizard creature is now stalking the pretty and talented sister of Ichiro's best friend. What in the world is going on? What do the aliens want? And where did they come from? These are the kind of questions only master sleuth Kogoro Akechi and the Boy Detectives Club can hope to answer.

Paperback
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Read an excerpt

The Boy Detectives Club

The Phantom Doctor
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien


The Space Alien takes place in the year following the end of the Occupation (1945–1952). Stark reminders of the war remained, such as a concrete storehouse standing alone in a city block that was once home to a neighborhood of wood-frame houses.

Rice paddies could still be found throughout Setagaya Ward, located in the southwest corner of Tokyo proper. No longer "sparsely populated," this mostly residential ward has since grown to a population of nine-hundred thousand, the largest in the city.

Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.

Check out Kate's interview with me about the translation process (also here, here, and here). Please visit the website for more information.

Related posts

The magic mirror
Last storehouse standing

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September 02, 2023

dLibrary Japan (big upgrade in the works)

A couple of months ago, I earned an Amazon gift card for participating in a lengthy survey from NHK Cosmomedia about the kind of content I would expect from a streaming service that resembled TV Japan. And how much I'd be willing to pay.

By next April, we should find out the results from that survey.

Changes are afoot at NHK Cosmomedia, which owns and operates dLibrary Japan, NHK World, and TV Japan (also known as NHK World Premium).

I've speculated about the possibilities before. Cable cutting is surely eating into TV Japan's subscriber base. The (free) NHK World streaming service already carries a considerable amount of localized NHK edutainment material, including the all-important sumo tournaments.

dLibrary Japan recently started streaming series after their first run on TV Japan and shows after they debuted in Japan. With sumo bouts covered by NHK World, the only programming on TV Japan I really miss are the Taiga and Asadora dramas, and live news from Japan (in Japanese).

NHK World streams news on the hour from its own bureaus, half of the day from New York, and all in English. But, frankly, a lot of the time, I get the feeling that the NHK World anchors think they're on CNN. News from North America often gets more airtime than anything to do with Japan.

dLibrary Japan could become the VOD library for TV Japan, including real-time news and commentary.

It's never had a backlist and only held onto content for a year or two. While services like Retrocrush specialize in classic anime, long-running series like Abarenbo Shogun remain unknown outside Japan. (You can watch Shadow Warriors and a couple of tokusatsu series on Tubi.)

NHK World is available via streaming, OTA, and VOD, so NHK Cosmomedia doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Ideally, they'd integrate the services in a single app with paid and unpaid tiers. But easier said than done, which is why dLibrary Japan is going on hiatus for several months.

Though I suspect that NHK Cosmomedia's more immediate goal is to rebuild dLibrary Japan with the capacity for future expansion, which will take place at a later date. A Roku app that actually works would be a big step forward.

In any case, for now, dLibrary Japan stopped enrolling new customers on 9/1/2023 and won't post new content after 9/30/2023. The service will go offline on 10/31/2023.

Don't panic! The official press release (which has been updated several times since the original announcement) promises they will be back!

We are thrilled to announce the upcoming introduction of an upgraded streaming distribution service. This renewed service will bring you an even richer selection of Japanese content and improved performance, including the addition of NHK news viewing. To make way for these enhancements, the current dLibrary Japan service will be suspended.

Well, I do like that bit about the news. All we know at this juncture is that the new service will launch "within fiscal year 2023." In Japan, that means before the end of March 2024. They won't need five months to update the apps and servers, so other stuff must be going on behind the scenes too.

I am very curious find out what sort of "upgraded streaming distribution service" NHK Cosmomedia has in store.

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August 30, 2023

Silver Spoon

Since her adventures in Coin, Donna Howard has become an established investigator of relics and antiques, with the help of deceased historical people only she can see. This time around, her investigation takes her to Salem, Massachusetts, where she delves into the town's haunted history and the modern world of antique hunting.

Her research into the provenance of a silver spoon leads Donna to a stash of unexpectedly valuable junk in an old man's basement, an old man whose death Donna begins to suspect was less than "accidental." Along with opportunistic antiquers, she must also contend with a possible murder, a possible possession, and a possible boyfriend.

Because nothing can make the dead past and the living present more precarious than the unpredictable complexities of human relationships.

Paperback
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Smashwords
Apple Books
Google Play
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Donna Howard Mysteries

Coin
Silver Spoon
Apron
Clasp

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August 26, 2023

Carnivorous vegetarians

The Japanese may be the most pragmatic people on the planet. Going all-in on half-of-the-world domination and then losing everything knocked the stuffing out of that sort of zealotry. And unlike the Germans, they decided not to dwell on it.

Well, except when silly westerners try to ratchet up their own virtue signaling by apologizing for beating them.

And unlike the Germans, the ultra-nationalists and their rhetoric aren't banned. Some even get elected to high office. Then there's that whole Yasukuni Shrine business, which prime ministers pretend to be "sensitive" about.

Until the cameras are turned off, that is.

All the paeans to pacifism are pragmatic as well. In a neighborhood full of angry bulls, it's a good idea not run around waving a red flag. But at home, disturb the social order and the kid gloves come off. Japan has the death penalty and uses it.

And they don't pay much real attention to foreigners who complain about such things. Frankly, I think the Japanese government sticks to that whole whale hunting thing (it's for "research," don't you know) because foreigners complain about it.

It's a passive-aggressive way of asserting Japan's sovereignty and national prerogatives.

Japan's eating habits are doing a lot worse to the unagi, but when's the last time you heard anybody campaigning to "Save the eels!"


As Homer Simpson would put it: "Mmmm . . . eels."

Which brings us to the subject of another bunch of virtue-signaling westerners that amuse the Japanese when they're not bemusing them: vegetarians. Long story short: the best way to be a vegetarian in Japan is to not ask about the ingredients.

Eryk points out in his This Japanese Life blog that the

long life expectancy of Japanese people isn't from a vegetarian diet, because none of them are vegetarians. Okinawans are usually singled out—longest life expectancy in the world—but Okinawans actually eat taco rice and chicken.

The same goes for cancer rates. Japan's cancer rates aren't low because they avoid meat. Japan's diet is heavy on meat and soy—tofu, in particular—and soy can lower the risk of certain cancers. But tofu in Japan is usually served alongside meat, not in place of it.

Far from utopian, Japan is one of the least vegetarian-friendly places on Earth.

A vegetarian lifestyle is tough enough. But a vegan diet is almost impossible to strictly adhere to in Japan. Even in vegetable dishes, the dashi (broth) that is a ubiquitous component of Japanese cuisine almost certainly contains pork or fish.

The ingredients that go into dashi.

Laments Anne Lauenroth at GaijinPot, dashi is commonly made from bonito (related to tuna), and it is everywhere,

from sauces, salad dressings and miso soup to udon and soba noodles being boiled in it. Better restaurants pride themselves on making their own dashi, and they will be inclined to cook even their vegetables in this special broth instead of lovely, ordinary water.

But as far as Japanese cooks are concerned, dashi doesn't count as "meat," regardless of what it's made from. If you can't see the meat, there isn't any meat. Warns a site called the Vegetarian Resource Group,

It may be difficult to explain to Japanese people what you cannot have, because the concept of vegetarianism is not widely understood. For example, if you say you are vegetarian, they may offer you beef or chicken soup without meat itself.

Agrees Peter Payne,

One special challenge is being a vegetarian in Japan, since the country generally doesn't understand the lifestyle. One restaurant even advertised "vegetarian" bacon-wrapped asparagus, as if the presence of a vegetable was enough to make it vegetarian.

He advises sticking to shoujin ryouri, the food traditionally eaten by Buddhist priests. Which could be tough for the typical tourist to arrange alone. So the Inside Japan Tours website "will advise all your accommodation of your dietary needs in advance."

 Why? Because it is

decidedly more difficult to be a full vegetarian or vegan in Japan due to the ubiquity of fish in the diet. In fact, it is so rare that many restaurants do not offer any vegetarian dishes at all.

Protecting tourists from vegetarian dishes that aren't really is a great example of what Tyler Cowen calls "Markets in Everything."

Granted, I find actual "travel" utterly unappealing as a hobby, let alone a necessity. (Fun to watch on television, though.) But this strikes me as an odd tourism mentality. It's a kind of reverse cultural appropriation: "Don't do as the Roman do."

Then why go to Rome in the first place?

When it comes joining the culinary globetrotting set, I think Phil Rosenthal has the right idea in I'll Have What Phil's Having and Somebody Feed Phil. He travels the world and eats whatever he is served with great élan and with barely a care about where it came from.

After all, all those other people are eating it and they didn't fall down dead. Yet.

Related posts

Food fiction
Eat, drink, and be merry
Hungry for entertainment
Kitchen Car

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August 23, 2023

The Real Darcy

Besides the badness of the writing, Kate argues that the biggest problem with Pride and Prejudice fan fiction (commercially published or otherwise) is that it inevitably makes Darcy out to be the stereotypical alpha male of Regency romances.

Austen simply wasn't capable of being that simple and obvious, and nothing in the text justifies it. As Kate explains:

I go along with Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer's argument in So Odd a Mixture that Darcy is borderline autistic. Her delineation of Darcy's character is one of the most accurate and delightful on record. She recognizes what few interpretations do, namely that Darcy is accused of pride in Hertfordshire for reasons that have nothing to do with familial or class pride.

Most tributes to Pride and Prejudice fail to acknowledge that all of Darcy's problems in Hertfordshire stem from his behavior, not from his beliefs about himself. He is perceived as proud because he won't dance or talk, not because he boasts about his position or even because he gives anyone the "cut direct." He doesn't even cut poor Mr. Collins.

To correct this problem, she penned A Man of Few Words, an addendum to Pride and Prejudice that relates Darcy's perspective on the important events in the novel.

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The Gentleman and the Rake is the omnibus edition of Mr. B Speaks! and A Man of Few Words.

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August 19, 2023

Two to watch on Viki

The great thing about streaming is that you can sign up for a month, watch what you want to watch, and then sign off (my Netflix approach).

Even if you're not interested in the rest of the Viki catalog, I recommend subscribing for a month to watch Sleeper Hit and Isekai Izakaya Nobu.

The latter is a cute live-action drama that is better than the anime (and I usually steer clear of isekai). The former is an insightful look at the manga publishing business.

What makes the isekai part of Isekai Izakaya Nobu work is that it ultimately doesn't matter that much. The show posits that the back door of the restaurant opens onto an alleyway in Kyoto. The front door opens onto a sort of alternate universe Geneva during the Habsburg Dynasty.

Nobody wastes much effort asking why (or wonders how electric lights work) and nobody really needs to.

This is ultimately a food-focused show and the setting is an excuse to introduce Japanese cuisine to people who have never heard of it before. There are melodramatic arcs that tie the episodes together but they never overwhelm the rest of the story. The meals are ultimately the main characters.

Viki has two seasons of the live action series. Crunchyroll has one season of the anime.

Sleeper Hit follows the triumphs and travails of the editorial staff at a second tier manga imprint. They are one small division in a big publishing house with healthy enough sales to keep it alive but not in the same stratosphere as Young Jump (and thus have to worry about their best talent getting poached).

The Japanese title translates as "Print the Second Edition!" That is the turning point in the life of a manga. Manga magazines do well to break even and most mangaka lose money during serialization. They only end up in the black when a series has enough chapters to justify the release of a tankoubon edition.

The show starts out like a sitcom but soon turns into a serious drama about commerce and creativity. The story arcs make no bones about the punishing deadlines, the inextricable link between business and art, and the primacy of story, with the fickle reader exercizing the final vote on success or failure.

We are taken through the life and death of a manga, from acquisition to serialization to cancelation, including a poignant scene in which the company president takes two of the new hires on a pilgrimage to the warehouse where the returns (all of the unsold books and magazines) are getting shredded.

The outstanding cast includes Yutaka Matsushige (Solitary Gourmet) as the managing editor, Joe Odagiri (Midnight Diner) as a senior editor given to bouts of philosophizing, and stars Haru Kuroki as an energetic newbie hired right out of college after the CEO challenges her to a wrestling match.

That last sentence will make more sense once you watch the first episode.

Sleeper Hit should be watched along with Bakuman. The anime covers the manga industry from the perspective of a pair of budding mangaka working extraordinarily hard to create a break-out hit.

Related links

Isekai Izakaya Nobu (Viki)
Isekai Izakaya Nobu (Crunchyroll)
Bakuman (review)
Bakuman (Tubi)
Sleeper Hit!

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