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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Mad scientists. Beautiful women who specialize in amputations. Supercomputers that threaten to starve an entire hospital full of patients. Tumors that take on human form. Sounds like a freakish B-list horror movie, right? Actually, these are all seminal elements of a classic cult favorite manga by Tezuka Osamu. Black Jack is one of his darkest yet most appreciated works, but it hasn't had much exposure in the US market until now. This fall, Vertical Inc has started publishing this entire series, volume by volume, in English. It's some of the best science fiction to ever come out of Japan. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. In Tokyo, teenage girls don't worry about date rape and theft nearly as much as they fret over monsters (and train gropers). I never thought twice about the whereabouts of my wallet as I walked home in the dark after school, but I definitely braved the path from the train station to the house armed with all my monster-combating skills. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. The International Space Station is flying straight at me. "This is a glimpse into the future," a voice says from somewhere above my head. "This is what the ISS will look like when it's completed in 2010." More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Earlier this week, I joined a team of experts from Gizmodo Japan on an expedition to the world's most famous geek mecca. For half a century, people trekked to Akihabara to buy electronics parts. But in the last 10-15 years, the neighborhood has turned into a giant playground for otaku to express their love for anime in any and every way—whether it's dressing up as them, being served by them at restaurants, or collecting fan-made manga and figurines that depict them as porn stars. Today, I'm going to give you a quick guide on figurine shopping in Akiba. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. What if zombies took over Tokyo? How would a slow zombie fare in a cage fight against a martial arts expert? Has a zombie ever offered you a blowjob? These questions and more are answered in a funny, slightly X-rated Japanese comic book and movie called Tokyo Zombie. Created by Japanese cult manga master Yusaku Hanakuma, the tale gives us a glimpse into an unimaginably bizarre apocalypse. You'd think a series with such an off-the-wall plot would be cheesy or campy or both. But actually, Hanakuma is a skilled Gary Panter-meets-George Romero-meets-Ayn Rand social commentator who is about to bring a whole new genre of manga stateside. The English translation of the manga was published earlier this month, and the subtitled movie is slated for release in November. Here's a quick preview (and maybe some spoilers). More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Back in the 1920s and 30s, when Asian immigration to the US and Europe was picking up steam, prominent science fiction writers like Philip Nowlan and H.P. Lovecraft created speculative scenarios starring massive hordes of horrible, slanty-eyed, intelligent Asians who were either taking over or destroying the world. Yellow peril science fiction was never large enough to be a genre in and of itself, but I decided it was worth traveling back in time to revisit the trend in its historical context. To kick off this topic, let me introduce you to a character you may already know. Fu Manchu, the Chinese master criminal with the infamous long sinister mustache, was created by British author Sax Rohmer around 1912. More »
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Click to viewWelcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. I'm a total sports nut. Olympic season makes my bones shiver with excitement. But this year, I took my mind off record-breaking swim relays and super-twisty gymnastics routines for a minute to consider the host country's techno-socio-political future. The opening ceremony confirmed my theory that China is breeding robots. (We already know that the cute girl who performed the patriotic song was lip-syncing and that the fireworks shown on TV were fake. I'm pretty sure that the 2008 drummers who kicked off the five-hour technological spectacularity were androids, too.) But what else is up in the giant nation that many believe will be the next world superpower? I called some experts and came away with a list of five predictions for China's next half-century. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Mac Funamizu is a tech geek, designer, and futurist who has created quite a lot of buzz among design circles for his innovative gadgets from the future. The 38-year old Tokyo native has always loved Apple, Google, and Starbucks, but he always felt inconvenienced by the extra steps involved in using them. (Why mouth off a complex multi-conditional order of coffee when you could just customize your cup of joe online? Why doesn't Google Maps give you more than just a topographic image of what you're looking at?) At first, his ideas were just rough sketches in his Moleskine. But then he started posting his neat, provocative ideas online, and now developers are contacting him to try and make some of them a reality. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. There's a lot of buzz about Japanese contemporary artists these days. Takashi Murakami's super-cute, superflat alien-like characters are on everything from Louis Vuitton bags to the pages of io9. But he isn't the first or only Japanese artist on our radar. This week, I'm going to introduce you to two very cool futurist artists whom I love, Yayoi Kusama and Mariko Mori. One of them has spent her life covering the world with polka dots, and the other traveled the globe in her own alien pod. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. My childhood hero was a purple-haired robot who spends all her free time poking poop with a stick. Like all good Japanese children, my formative years were influenced by manga robot heroes-two-dimensional, two-legged machines that first existed in simple black-and-white on newsprint. These robots quickly evolved from inanimate drawings on paper into animated TV stars, and later spawned franchised products, movies, video games, and major museum exhibits. One even transcended man-machine boundaries to become the first robot, feline, and two-dimensional figure to become an officially recognized global ambassador. Amazing. Here's a quick list of four anime robots that played a huge role in making me into the human I am today. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. While Dr. Wong was putting dental dam in my mouth, I was watching three hot women singing the penis song in a Chinese restaurant downtown. It happened last Thursday, when I discovered a gadget that can warp my brain to a blissful alternate reality. That was the day that I had to visit my own personal dystopia, which happens to involve dentist chairs, root canals, and lots and lots of hellacious oral drilling. Though I took an inevitable trip to this dystopia, I miraculously evaded doomsday by using a device that made me forget the pain without any drugs at all. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. I've been thinking about extraterrestrials a lot this week. Do they exist? How will we know? Who will they call if they decide to make contact with us, and through what medium? First off, nobody knows if extraterrestrials really exist. Organizations like SETI are banking on the high possibility that they do, but to date there is no concrete evidence to prove or disprove this. For the purposes of contemplation, though, let's just assume they do. If aliens decide to make contact with Earthlings, they'll probably want to contact the Japanese using prime numbers and laser pulses. Call me biased (I was born and raised in Japan), but I think there is a really good possibility that this will be the case (and so does the guy who writes alien messages for SETI). And I don't just think this because I spent my childhood watching reenactments of UFO sightings on Japanese TV while eating fried noodles out of a giant UFO-shaped bowl aptly named "UFO Yakisoba." More »
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Welcome to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Fight scenes featuring beautiful Asian women with machine guns are sexy, scary, and fetishistic. If you're in San Francisco in June, you're in luck—you can get a double dose of ass-busting Asian women at the Another Hole in the Head horror movie fest, where two crazy, ruthless Oriental beauties battle evil in a cumulative three hours of gory revenge and fantastical sci-fi crime-fighting. The Gene Generation and The Machine Girl are two completely different kinds of movies—one is American sci-fi, one is a low-budget Japanese gory B-movie. But when stripped of their decor, there are a lot of common themes and subtexts. More »
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Welcome to MangoBot, a column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Way before Speed Racer became fodder for one of the season's most highly anticipated blockbusters, it was a simple 60s-style Japanese cartoon. The original Speed Racer was a TV anime series called Mach GoGoGo, aired on Fuji TV—one of Japan's major television networks—in 1967 and 1968. Like many other sources of entertainment in Japan at the time, Go's determination and the superior technology of Mach 5 were symbolic of the country's rapid post-war recovery and the determination that drove it. While you're waiting to head to your multiplex to watch the Hollywood version tonight, let me take you back in time and show you a glimpse of the original. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. In the spring of 1988, Japanese publisher Kodansha released a revealing English-language book titled Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia. The book predicted a new era when humanoid robots would dominate Japanese society in the same way that industrial robots were then dominating behind-the-scenes manufacturing in the country. It was a topic that nobody in the Western world knew much about at all. The author, Frederik L. Schodt, was a freelance interpreter from Washington, DC who lived in Japan as a kid and traveled extensively between the Japan and the US—often as a private interpreter for Tezuka Osamu, the God of manga (Japanese comic books). And he predicted a social trend that was nearly beyond comprehension in the 1980s. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism. If you've noticed an unusually large number of utilitarian humanoids hailing from Japan in the last few years, then you probably won't be surprised to hear about the country's official robot initiative. Right now, Japan is in the midst of executing a grand plan to make robots an integrated part of everyday life. To compensate for the shortage of young workers willing to do menial tasks, the Japan Robot Association, the government, and several technology institutions drafted a formal plan to create a society in which robots live side by side with humans by the year 2010. Since 2010 is just a couple years away, I called up a roboticist at the forefront of this movement to find out how it's going. More »
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I've been trying to figure out ways that I can defy age. I'm turning 30 this year, which means I will have a harder time remembering things, filtering information, and staying in shape. Since I'm not Ray Kurzweil and I can't afford plastic surgery, I'm banking on Brain Age 2, Nintendo's cognitive training software, to keep me away from wrinkles and Alzheimer's. Every day before I go to bed, I do a round of math problems (they give me the numbers; I have to find the sign that will make sense out of them), I play a song a virtual piano with my stylus (yesterday it was The Blue Bells of Scotland), and I count the change from my imaginary purchase. The primary goal is to beat yesterday's me—if I can do that on a fairly consistent basis, maybe that means I'm reversing the aging process, at least cognitively. More »
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Welcome to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. If you've ever questioned whether you're really an alien or a cyborg, well, you're not alone. Young-goon, the protagonist featured in acclaimed director Park Chan-wook's latest film, I'm a Cyborg But That's OK, is sent to a mental hospital after she tries to wire herself into a machine she's building at a radio factory. More »
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Welcome to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Keigo Oyamada, aka Cornelius, is a sound artist best known for his perfectly timed synchronization of beats, robot noises, and trippy music videos showing everything from spinning cows to lips that grow exponentially to little kids with butterflies. He's teamed up with video director Koichiro Tsujikawa and CG artist Munechika Inudo (think Dead or Alive 3) to create some intricately detailed videos that could only come from the finest futurist brains in Japan. Keep reading for two iconic music videos from his latest album, Sensuous, and a translation of the live commentary he gave me at his Tokyo studio last week. More »
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At a young age, my brain was hijacked by the game of Tetris. Now it helps me navigate through life. When I was in the sixth grade, my friend Chiyo and I used to play this addictive puzzle game—developed in 1985 by a Russian engineer—for hours on end with a single 100 yen coin at an arcade in Tokyo. We probably should have been doing homework or at least pretending to, but instead, there we were, every day after school, sitting side by side executing crazy maneuvers with our joysticks. The mantras that I repeated in my head while playing the game at max speed as a pre-teen are totally in sync with some basic tenets of Asian philosophy. More »
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Yoshihiro NakaMats, 79, is Japan's most prolific - and bizarre - inventor. He claims to have 3,350 patents (Thomas Edison only had 1,093), and that several of them are for the floppy disk. "Everyone knows about the floppy disk," he says. "But I also invented the fax machine, automatic pachinko, and the taxi meter." While running for mayor of Tokyo last spring, he announced that he possessed three secret tools that would save the world from mass destruction: a device capable of turning North Korean missiles around in mid-air, a love potion more effective than Viagra that would reverse the declining birth rate, and a new water-to-fuel technology that fights global warming. The weird thing is that he could be telling the truth. More »
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Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), creator of Astro Boy and over 700 manga series, is often called the God of Comics or the Disney of the East. But neither title acknowledges the mark he's left on science fiction. If you don't know who he is, then you should get to know him — now. For decades, Tezuka's works weren't accessible to the non-Japanese-reading public. NBC aired over half of the Astro Boy anime series in the sixties, but the original manga wasn't published in English until 2002. At last, a handful of publishers is actively translating and releasing some of Tezuka's lesser known titles into English. One of the best is Apollo's Song, published in English for the first time a few months ago by Vertical Inc. Its an elegant, compact representation of Tezuka's scifi genius — and a milestone in Japanese free expression due to its frank depiction of sexuality in a postapocalyptic world. More »
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