Cosplay and photography are the clown fish and anemone of fandom. Cosplay is a swift, adaptable creature that can survive quite well on its own, but it needs the soft, protective tendrils of photography to truly flourish and preserve itself. Awkward metaphors aside, the fact …Read more »
It always sucks to be second banana. Tokyo’s immediate neighbor, Saitama, hardly ever gets a break in the Japanese psyche, seemingly condemned to be a punchline – sometimes literally, as in the case of One Punch Man ’s comically bland protagonist. Some of our more …Read more »
Photo: @usaaaaaaaaaaagi Being an anime fan means high school is never over. Whether 13 or 30, it’s an absolute given that you’ve watched and are probably currently watching one show or another prominently featuring at least one character in a pleated blue skirt or impeccably …Read more »
There has been a specter haunting Vietnam. It is the specter of cosplay. Out in the humid tropics of Ho Chi Minh City, cosplay events, once a niche within a niche in the nominally communist nation, have been becoming a common sight and a place …Read more »
While a relatively niche spectator sport in the US, Japan takes its ponies more seriously. Called Keiba, It’s home to over 21,000 annuals races which are watched and observed by numerous salaryman as much as passionately as any Hanshin Tigers vs. Yomiuri Giants match. The …Read more »
The Vietnamese can do it too, y’all. That’s what we discovered in our last issue of Otaku USA e-News with Fernando’s report from the Ho Chi Minh City Manga Festival, where anime fans in Vietnam assembled en masse to celebrate their love of Japanese cartoons …Read more »
Anaheim’s AX. Atlanta’s AWA. Baltimore’s Otakon. Tokyo’s Comiket. Ho Chi Minh City’s Manga Festival. Wait, what? Vietnam is an unlikely (but not altogether surprising) hotbed of anime fandom and even production. Despite the Vietnamese economy’s rapid growth of the past decade leveling off compared to …Read more »
In the toyetic, merchandise-run world of tokusatsu, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s all just crass commercialism designed to sucker kids, big and small, into wanting some gimmicky piece of plastic. Enter Keita Amemiya. A visionary in a genre dominated by toy sales, …Read more »
Dear reader, before we venture into today's review, a movie with this many conjunctions and colons (which we will refer to as simply Ultimatum here) demands a more detailed introduction. Kamen Rider is one of the longest-running and beloved tokusatsu superhero franchises in Japanese history. …Read more »
Super Potato is one of Akihabara’s most famous retro gaming shops. Stocked to the brim with the video games of consoles past, the oddly-named Super Potato is a must for gamers less interested in Xbox 360 and more in 8-bit. We sent agent Ramos to …Read more »
Vietnam. The name inspires many things to the uninitiated, mostly, for cinema fans, revolving around helicopters and music by The Doors. However, the country has gone through major changes in past decades. The economy is one of the fastest growing in Southeast Asia, encouraging overseas …Read more »
At this point, director Kenji Kamiyama has pretty much become the filmmaking equivalent to a cover band for Mamoru Oshii. Between constantly hiring Oshii mainstay Kenji Kawai to do his musical scores and a penchant for inserting complex real world politics and, lately, religious allusions, …Read more »
Tokusatsu is, if anything, a genre of extremes. At its best, it's basically live-action anime as the 12-year-old boy in us remembers it, full of cool vehicles, explosions, and gratuitously convoluted storylines full of cool-sounding buzzwords that boil down to a simple framework. At its …Read more »
Ah, Don Quijote. When I first arrived to Japan, I was impressed that so many people knew of Don Quixote, the famed Spanish work of literature, thinking that it was sign of how cosmopolitan the island nation could be. Alas, the reason people knew of …Read more »
Dark, brooding and brutally violent, Kentaro Miura's Berserk would at first glance seem like the poster child for all of what made anime and manga infamous in the late 80s and 90s. However, that would be to neglect the genuinely complex storyline and layered characters …Read more »
Fernando Ramos
![[Review] Berserk Golden Age Arc I: Egg of the Supreme Ruler](https://otakuusamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/sfp-berserkposter.jpg)