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Anyone with even a passing interest in modern Japan will have heard of Tokyo’s Akihabara district, most likely through squealing newspaper or blog stories detailing just how weird and depraved the one-time electronics Mecca is…

This week’s Digital Content Expo at Miraikan is one of the less corporate tech shows on the Tokyo calendar, so it’s no surprise to see some pretty kooky engineering like the Funbrella from a grad-student team at Osaka University.

Of the many huge Japanese electronics purveyors that we’ve long been familiar with, one name that rarely stands out from the pack is that of Sanyo.

Last month, one look at the work Japanese company Eitarosoft is doing with Android made it pretty obvious a closer inspection was in order before the fledgling big player hits the inaccessible heights of some of its current customers.

Japan’s legions of small northwest coastal towns are famed for their patchworks of rice paddies and garlands of snow-capped mountains that offer some of the region’s best skiing, but only one is home to a research lab devoted to understanding how we interact with our mobile phones.

Everybody knows the 3G iPhone will hit Japan later this year on the crap-tastic Softbank network, but I don’t believe anyone else was able to get NTT DoCoMo to admit it had been in the race too.

The To the Source of Anime retrospective ends its run today at the Cinémathèque Québécoise with a tribute to Noburo Ofuji. The “Wartime Japanese Animation” programs included propaganda cartoons that feature strikingly American character designs.

One of the marketing bigwigs behind Blu-ray has gone public with an astonishing claim that Toshiba has only itself to blame for the flop that was HD DVD.

At this year’s Ottawa International Animation Festival, I sat down with I.Toon’s Yuichi Ito and his manager Hiroko Kamata to talk about his series of short stop-motion films, Norabbit’s Minutes.

After Monday’s announcement by Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) of their Linux-based Android platform for mobile phones there are more questions than answers about exactly what it means for the end user.

The Tekkonkinkreet anime made its North American home video debut earlier this week, and we decided to celebrate with three bits of Tekkon goodness.

Digital Meme’s recent Japanese Anime Classic Collection isn’t just a boxed set, it’s a godsend: it goes a long way toward clarifying things about anime’s origins, or fleshing out what we already knew.

DWT friend and all-round good-egg Roland Kelts has a new book out about the bizarre and intriguing bonds between the cultures of Japan and the US. Japanamerica touches on everything from manga to maniacs, so get your click on and hear what Roland has to say for himself after the jump. PS If you’re in Tokyo, don’t miss the chance to get it straight from the horse’s mouth tomorrow night - details at the end.