Weebs

From the anus of TikTok comes a version of slop so wacky, so delightfully dumb, so… Italian (???), that its managed to win the hearts of every iPad kid around the world. Introducing: Italian Brainrot, the latest AI craze of anthropomorphic hybrid creatures with Italo-gibberish na ...  Show more

Born from a Japanese tech arms race and immortalized in Fred Benenson’s 2009 masterwork “Emoji Dick,” the emoji has become a staple of the way we communicate. Such that the Oxford dictionary named the cry-laugh emoji its word of the year in 2015. Whether you’d like to convey comp ...  Show more

A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how ...  Show more

Alisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired ...  Show more

Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the pas ...  Show more

The anime series Cowboy Bebop is currently being turned into a live-action series for Netflix, but Cowboy Bebop doesn’t need to be Americanized. The original series was already an homage to Western films and movies. Authors Roland Kelts and Matt Alt talk about how Cowboy Bebop fi ...  Show more