3:AM Magazine

As quickly as the bubbles went flat on the celebratory champagne toasting the news of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, doubts set in. Many Japanese believe the benefits will be negligent given the country’s recession-hit economy. Others are of the opinion that money invested in the games would be better spent aiding those whose lives were destroyed in the Fukushima disaster. Sadly, it seems like in other cities that have played host to the Olympics, those who will suffer first are those already at the very bottom of society. They are the most disenfranchised social group who would never reap any benefit from the tourism or injections of corporate sponsorship promised. In Tokyo, as everywhere else, this means the homeless.

Chris Low looks at hidden poverty and Tokyo.

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It is a city that had grown from half a million to 18 million in 60 years. The 1960s mayor, Kim Hyeon-ok called it “aggressive construction”: the development of the Metro system; the sequenced opening up of areas to develop as the population grew; how attention was turned to south of the Han river in the 1970s; and the impact of both the 1988 Olympic Games and the 2002 World Cup. It also showed how the late 19th century opening up to being a cosmopolitan city was cut off before it started by the military take-over of the country by Japan during which many of Korea’s own historical buildings were destroyed. This made sense of another of the tangles of ultra-modernity and the past, the need to recreate facsimilies of much of what had been destroyed.

John Barker reports on art, architecture and modernity from the post-dictatorship International Business Zones of Seoul and ‘Dynamic Busan’.

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Not so long ago, I asked a Beijing friend of mine if she thought his portrait might one day be taken down from Tienanmen Square. She smiled wryly and told me that it would be utterly unthinkable. Imagine if Hitler’s portrait still stared down at you from the Brandenburg Gate — that too is unthinkable. It would defy all moral sensibilities and common sense; yet Mao, the demigod, watches over his people, above the gates of the fallen “Emperor’s” Forbidden City. If you wouldn’t know better you’d think there was some kind of a sick inside joke going on.

Tom Bradley interviews Marc Vincenz about Mao’s Mole.

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Akiko, a student juggling money problems, exams, a visiting grandmother and a clinging boyfriend, is reluctantly persuaded by her bar-proprietor boss to go and spend the evening with an elderly man of some importance. She expects him to expect sex… This being a Kiarostami film, however, things aren’t that simple. Consistently engrossing and intriguingly ambiguous […]

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In the production of anime, Japanese women may also be liberated by changes in the creation of the medium. Just as self-publishing models are enabling writers to reach readers without the third-party involvement of publishers, computer software provides artists in anime the means to craft their art outside of studios, which remain largely male-dominated environs.

By Roland Kelts.

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Several years later, the site was almost entirely razed and converted into a suburban ‘commemorative’ park for the citizens of Osaka, with Expo 70’s emblematic ‘Tower of the Sun’ allowed to remain standing at its entrance. Astrorama, too complex and cumbersome for commercial exploitation, also became redundant, and the original celluloid film-cans containing The Birth were stored-away without being documented, and forgotten, until researchers from the Hijikata archive at Tokyo’s Keio University re-discovered them, forty years later, in the Osaka storage-facilities of the Sanwa Midori-kai alliance of corporations whose previous incarnation had sponsored the Midori-kan pavilion.

Stephen Barber writes on the re-discovery of a lost film of the legendary Japanese artist and choreographer, Tatsumi Hijikata.

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J-pop and J-rock’s connection to anime has long been both a burden and an opportunity. In the 1970s and 80s, anime soundtracks were heavily localized to attract American viewers, just as anime scripts were butchered to fit expectations shaped by Hollywood and television.

But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Internet connected global fans to Japanese creators with an immediacy that transcended distance. An edited Pokemon or Naruto episode was no longer acceptable. And original songs, written and sung by Japanese artists, were prized as a sign of authenticity.

Roland Kelts on L’Arc~en~Ciel in New York, London & Paris.

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The appeal of cosplay outside Japan is a perfect example of the transcultural boomerangs that characterize much of contemporary popular culture. As Japanese otaku of an older generation will tell you, cosplay, and the devotional fandom behind it, came from the United States: photos of costumed fans at North American sci-fi conventions, such as those revolving around Star Trek, appeared in magazines imported to Japan in the 1960s and 70s. Japanese readers adopted the practice, using characters from their homegrown anime and manga series. As the popularity of manga and anime spiked outside Japan, fast-evolving Internet access provided overseas fans first with a peephole and then a massive window onto what looked like an enticing made-in-Japan phenomenon.

By Roland Kelts.

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I’ve made three films until now, Karma, You+Me=Love, and Mari-chan. I started getting into filming four years ago, because of Sion Sono, but before that I wasn’t into filmmaking, I wanted to draw manga. I met Takashi ”Bob” Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, and he taught me the basics of Manga. So I was pretty serious about that. I don’t have the patience for comics though, it’s just too time consuming. I wanted Mari-chan to have a manga feel to it, that’s why the characters are so over-the-top and she keeps killing everyone but nothing happens to her.

David F. Hoenigman interviews filmmaker Alex Paille.

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Whoever concocted the world did so under the influence of monsters, incarnations sired from states of self-reflexive revulsion. Reality is horror – it eats people like a carnivorous fog – a construct so diabolical that man has been unwittingly cajoled into adorning the effervescence of his dreams and his fantasies with costumes of malleable terror: ghouls, hybrid creatures, fused entities, seditious organs and limbs, malignant slimes, mythic decapitations, supernatural possession, psychotropic pestilence, brains worm-eaten with paranoia (insanities of truth)… myriad extremities of man’s dull fug.

David F. Hoenigman interviews Gary J. Shipley, Kenji Siratori & Reza Negarestani.

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