Hello, my name’s Fiona, and I’m an otaku – or at least, I used to be. My obsession of choice? Comics. I loved them. I was an equal opportunities lover too. At one time my huge collection included Spiderman and Garfield and The Far Side, as well as Doraemon and Dragonball (translated, of course). These [...]
Japan loves their mascots and all of us at Tofugu love writing about how much Japan loves their mascots. It’s a love-love relationship, really. Anyway, what could be better than a Japanese mascot? How about a Japanese mascot dancing? Yeah, now that’s more like it. There couldn’t possibly be anything more disgustingly adorable than that, [...]
There are lots of different types of video games: first person shooters, real time strategy games, role playing games; but one genre that’s never really taken off (at least in America) has been the dating sim. A dating sim is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you spend the game wooing your would-be mates [...]
It’s hard to overstate instant ramen’s importance in Japan. There are multiple instant ramen museums in the country, and at the beginning of the millenium, the Japanese voted instant ramen Japan’s most important invention of the 20th century. Of course, no product in Japan is without goofy advertising campaigns. Some of my favorite commercials (CMs) [...]
In Japan, there’s a huge and vibrant community of people who love to make things, whether they’re pre-made models, crafts, gadgets or anything in between. You can see what I’m talking about in our post last week about the Tokyo Maker Fair. One of the coolest DIY projects that’s come out of Japan recently has [...]
For some reason, imitating other languages really intrigues me. There’s just something about being able to mimic a language you don’t actually know while still getting enough right to make other people understand what they’re going for that’s incredibly cool to me. Whether it’s a bunch of Italians singing a gibberish song meant to sound [...]
In the early 2000s, 4chan became the site of increasingly heated exchanges between those who were anime and manga fans, and those who, er, weren’t. Or perhaps they were just trolls. Well, trolls or not, their slur of choice was “Wapanese” – short for “Wannabe Japanese.” But why am I telling you all this? By [...]
