Black Jack, the Greatest Gory-Cute Scifi Manga Ever

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 »

My Virtual Journey On A Ribosome Spaceship And To The Far Ends of the Galaxy

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 »

Coming Soon from China: Dystopic Futures, the Next Steve Jobs, and a World Full of Drumming Androids

Welcome 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 »

Mac Funamizu's Gadget Designs of the Future

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 »

Futurist Japanese Artists Show Us Life in the Next Century

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 »

Japan Gears Up to Become a Full-On Robot Nation

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 »