2,890,000 students worldwide

In October 2007 the Japan Foundation announced a 26.4% increase over the past 4 years in the number of people studying Japanese around the world.

The Foundation cited the dissemination of Japanese pop-culture, including anime, movies, and video games, as a major reason for the increase. Countries with the highest number of students were: Korea, China, and Australia. The most common reasons for learning Japanese were “to gain more knowledge of Japanese culture” and “to become able to communicate in Japanese.”

Source: Daily Sun New York No.1212, 11/01/2007

My hero: Yumi Tamura, a.k.a. TAMU-SENSEI

Now that I’ve finally established Animator, I’m going to embark on a project that will span many posts and many months: extolling the virtues of BASARA, a manga title that seemed to flop when it turned into an anime, but which has such literary and artistic value that I really feel it deserves a good critical treatment. (Usually manga titles that do really well in sales and build a strong fan base tend to be turned into anime. Most producers won’t take on a project unless it first proves its worth as a manga. Unless of course, it’s a project of Hayao Miyazaki. But even he had to prove his debut project’s merit by creating a manga fanbase for it first, before anime producers would consider making a movie out of it.)

So, what is BASARA? (click on the link above for a wikipedia article)
BASARA is epic. BASARA is Shakespearean. And yes, BASARA is a manga.

There is too much to say. For now, I will just put up tantalizing images and write some prose inspired by them. 

*Sarasa meets the descendant of a failed revolutionary in an underground cave. She claims the name “Tatara” for the first time. from vol 2, p87.*

 

Blogging rocks my socks.

Wow I just learned so much by compiling this blog from old stuff I had written. So fun!

I so nerdy.

Manifesto

I am Sei Kino and I humbly re-present what you see and don’t understand. Read this blog about my escapades in the escapism and hyper-realism of the worlds of manga. Learn, Teach, and Enjoy the show!