National
John Hofilena on May 13 2013
The Tokyo Red Cross is seeing a downward trend in blood donors not just in the city, but across the whole of Japan as well. To attract blood donors and to keep them coming back, the
Tokyo health organization has opted to turn to very creative strategies to entice them, including providing the latest manga for people to read when they are resting and recovering from their blood donation.
As part of its anime hero and heroine stamp series, Japan Post Co will be issuing a postal stamp set featuring characters from the massively popular
Doraemon manga and anime series. The project is a collaboration with the Association of Japanese Animations and will be released starting June 4.
With Asian players not very big in the international basketball scene, it's actually a wonder why basketball is a hugely popular sport in the region. While some countries can attribute it to their former colonizers (the Philippines, where the United States has made it the most popular sport in the country) or to the one big player who made it to the NBA (China and Yao Ming of course), Japan can trace its love of basketball to a
manga: Takehiko Inoue's
Slam Dunk.
It must be fun being young and having no sense of responsibility whatsoever – only, we old people know that this is a lie (we don’t know why young people are stupid enough to fall for it, really). A clear evidence of this is the recent vandalizing of the Sakawa Municipal Junior High School by two 13-year-old girls, who said that they got the idea from a
manga series.
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is working with US cable TV network HBO to bring to life a TV series adaptation of the hit
manga series
Monster, by Naoki Urasawa. Along with being the executive producer, Del Toro is also planning to direct the pilot episode, to be written by British screenwriter Steve Thompson. Shogakukan Inc., the publisher of the manga will serve as consulting producer.
A group of parents from the central Russian area of Ural wrote an open letter to
Russian President Vladimir Putin requesting a ban on the popular Japanese manga series
Death Note. The parents are claiming that the
manga series itself is harmful to children, and they claim as evidence a girl who committed suicide early this year – leaving four of the comic books at the scene of the incident.
While it may not threaten the future of
Google Glass directly, Japanese entrepreneur Takahito Iguchi and his lean team of 8 people are in the process of developing
Telepathy One, a wearable image-streaming device. What's more, one of the first apps they used is one that will make you see the world through "manga eyes".
It’s not just another book café – while we love those too – but Tachikawa City’s Manga Park in western
Tokyo is probably heaven here on earth for any self-respecting lover of Japan’s renowned comic medium. It’s an honest-to-goodness manga library on steroids, with almost 30,000 volumes on shelves waiting for
manga fans of all ages to come and spend some wonderful reading time within its comfortable premises.
Hadashi no Gen ("
Barefoot Gen") is probably one of the most well-known pieces of Japanese
manga stories to ever come out of Japan's classic comic medium. The story is a semi-autobiographic play on the late author and artist Keiji Nakazawa’s experiences after surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the series ran in several magazines from 1973 to 1985. After his death
in December 2012, the wife of the artist recently donated never before seen storyboard images of what is possibly a second part of the famous story.
Tech & Science
Ida Torres on Apr 10 2013
Line, the messaging app used by 45 million people in Japan right now, is looking to further expand its market by launching Line Manga, an Android and iOS app that serves as an online comic store. The initial line will have 30,000 manga titles, making it one of the largest online retailers, even beating online retail juggernaut Amazon, which only has 15,000 titles available.
