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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…

You know that new camera from Takara Tomy that features a little Zink printer that pops 2x3in photos out one end?

After ten years of litigation, the Japan supreme court ruled in favor of a man who challenged an allegation that he fondled a woman on a Tokyo train. The man fought the police charges in 1999…

Reader Matt asked what anime the still featured here comes from and - whaddya know - it just happens to be on YouTube.

One of the pleasures of film festivals, whether you’re watching them or organizing them, is in discovering unintended themes in the films.

Heck - it’s nothing to do with either Japan or technology (at least, not directly), but it is an absolutely stunning piece of animation work by a bona-fide genius.

It’s kinda late notice (understatement and a half, eh?), but our pals at Orbital Manga in London have an in-store event today to mark the launch of Demon Prince: Children of Gaia from Dimensional Manga.

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.

“It all started with Osamu Tezuka” or “It all started with Astro Boy” have been common ways to start describing the history of anime for years, even though a moment’s sober reflection would reveal the fallacies in those statements. Somewhat surprisingly, the increased popularity of anime outside of Japan has largely served to reinforce, rather than disabuse, these and other notions about the country’s rich animation history.

La Cinémathèque Québecoise in Montreal is hosting the largest retrospective of early Japanese animation to ever take place outside of Japan.

Regular readers will have noticed a fair sprinkling of the odd term ‘1-seg’ in news items over the last year or so, with all referring to Japanese products in some way. From Sony’s PSP and video Walkman to car sat-nav systems and mobile phones, this strangely named digital TV standard is popping up everywhere in the Far East, but what exactly is it?

Emily at Orbital Manga in London dropped us a line with word of a cool-sounding event there next month.

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.

Japan’s state broadcaster, NHK, has teamed up with Mitsubishi Electric to create an anti-piracy system that it hopes will put a stop to movie copying from cinemas.

Although it beats the pants of the competition on the sales front, Nintendo’s DS Lite has never been anything more than a games machine, leading anyone interested in mobile media to opt for the PSP. Come March, however, that’s set to change with the launch of an official movie download service for the DS.

To pimp the Japanese HD DVD release of all 1,450 minutes of the original Star Trek in 1080p glory, the HD DVD promo body has decked out its booth attendants in appropriate regalia at CEATEC this week.

In one of the most innovative and open-minded approaches to intellectual property we’ve seen in a long time, Toshiba is helping Japanese comic-book artists bring their work to the rest of the world through some pretty clever technology.

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

If there’s a product as bizarre as the Segnity pocket television from E-Revolution then we’ve yet to see it.

The Astro Boy Essays traces the evolution and rise of manga and anime through the lens of Osamu Tezuka’s iconic robot.

Ever since I first discovered CG-Arts and the Japan Media Arts Festival, I’ve been delighted to find that every year the festival features at least one short that looks and feels unlike any film I’ve ever seen—my criterion for an excellent film fest.

One of SIGGRAPH’s (many) hidden gems is the collection of digitally animated shorts from the previous Japan Media Arts Festival.

As a juror for the Sketches & Posters committee at this year’s SIGGRAPH, I chaired one of the Sketches sessions on the last day of the conference—a session called “Looking Good,” which featured two presentations related to anime.

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.

Office co-creator and Herculean foulmouth Ricky Gervais is many things, but I never knew he was such a wranker.