My Someday Anime Vacation

When I have a busy schedule, I tend not to look for new - or new-to-me - anime to watch. Instead, I feel like watching old favorites. It’s like going for comfort food, something familiar, rather than drumming up the energy to try something new (and that I may not like).

I’ve had a busy schedule for the past few years actually. Nevertheless, I’ve made the effort to add new anime series to my current watchlist when I could.

I have a theory. When time is short and all you want to do is unwind, you don’t want to take the risk that something new might disappoint. If you’ve been an anime fan for years you already have a catalog of stuff that you’ve watched. You know your favorites, right down to which title would best suit the mood you’re in, so you choose that one.

And it’s not likely to be something heavy or depressing. I’ll give you an example using Hollywood movies.

Let’s say a couple is home from work. It’s Friday night. They’re too tired to go out but they want to relax and watch something after dinner.

There’s a reason why they’ll drag out their Indiana Jones DVD, or the first Star Wars movie, or Guardians of the Galaxy and watch it for the millionth time. They want to enjoy something familiar and easy to watch.

Here’s an example that clearly shows why the opposite isn’t true.

I remember when Schindler’s List came out. The critics called it brilliant and a masterpiece and some said it was the best movie ever made. It told the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German manufacturer who saved the lives of Jewish refugees during WWII. At the end of the movie, Schindler is overcome with emotion when he realizes that he could have saved more people than he did, though those that he did save express their gratitude to him.

It’s a powerful and memorable film. Whether it was the greatest movie ever made is debatable - but I’d say one thing about it is beyond debate: it’s not the kind of film you feel like watching every day. I mean, it’s not like that couple is going to order pizza in on Friday night and say “Let’s watch Schindler’s List again.”

My point is this. Nobody has to know which anime series you turn to when you just want to relax. It’s one of those personal things. You’re not trying to impress anybody.

So lately I’ve been fitting in episodes of some of my favorite anime series, just an episode or two here and there when I have the chance. And when you’re watching for enjoyment, it’s funny, but you don’t even have to think about what to watch. The choice is made for you as you reach for the DVD or click on the show on the streaming site.

So if I had the time to take a vacation and just watch anime, these would be my first picks.

K, aka K Project, is a perennial favorite of mine. I’ve written a lot about K in the past.

When I try to explain why I love this series so much, I feel like I can’t find the words. K is about a fictional modern-day Japan that is secretly controlled by a group of “kings,” each with their own supernatural powers. The origin of these powers lies in the Dresden Slate, an artifact dating from Nazi Germany, which relates to the Silver King - the first and original king.

Each king has his own signature color. The Blue King is the enforcer, the chief law enforcement officer who leads an elite police force. The Red King - the Blue King’s nemesis - is the punk-like leader of a clan of misfits and delinquents. The Green King is the villain of season two.

The Colorless King is, as you might guess, mysterious and an anomaly. The Gold King - an august and grand figure - is the hidden power behind Japan’s Prime Minister and government. And finally, the Gray King is introduced in season two. At first, he seems like a throwaway type of character, easy to overlook. Basically, he hides in plain sight.

Season one starts out with the murder of a Red King clansman and ends with the death of one of the kings. The next part of the story is told in a movie, K: Missing Kings, and the series concludes with season two, which reveals the mystery of the Dresden Slate and the disposition of all the kings.

The story strings you along with unanswered questions and mysteries piled on mysteries, as the music and beautiful character designs captivate your senses. The setting is the fictional “Shizume City” and it really feels like its own world, a perfectly rendered fantasy world of secret kings and their clans hidden within ordinary modern Japanese life.

It’s incredibly stylish. If you’ve been an anime fan for a minute, you’ve watched anime series that had tons of style but scrimped on the substance. The K universe has both style and substance in spades. The story is fascinating and keeps you engaged, while the gorgeous visuals give you everything you could want to gaze at.

The story told in season one is of two mysteries: who killed the Red King clansman, and who is Yashiro Isana, a white-haired boy who fell from the sky and onto the Ashinaka High School campus. He is suspected of the Red clansman’s murder at first; but his true identity is a much deeper mystery, one that - once solved - actually resolves all the mysteries.

I’m not sure that K is for everyone. It has a cult following among certain fans. I can only suggest that you give it a try. It has a unique atmosphere all its own and you may find yourself as enraptured with it as I am.

The second anime series I would rewatch in its entirety if I had the time is Kuroko’s Basketball (Kuroko no Basket).

I can’t believe it’s been ten years since the Kuroko’s Basketball anime began streaming. The series ran from 2012 to 2015 in the U.S.

Tetsuya Kuroko enrolls at Seiren High School with a secret mission. He joins the basketball team and befriends Taiga Kagami, a towering power forward. Behind Kuroko’s placid unreadable face is a history with certain players from his middle school known as Kiseki no Sedai, the “Generation of Miracles.”

This basketball team at Teiko Middle School consisted of a once-in-a-generation group of brilliant players, all of whom have names that are color-coded to their hair color: Kise, the blond; Midorima, the green-haired one; Aomine with the blue hair; Murasakibara, who has purple hair; and finally Akashi, the red-haired scary Svengali-like team leader.

Kuroko was the shadowy sixth man, the brilliant assist player that no one remembers but without whom the Kiseki no Sedai would have failed.

But Kuroko doesn’t want recognition. Towards the end, the Kiseki no Sedai became arrogant and complacent, seeking individual glory instead of playing for the joy of the game as they did when they started out. Kuroko wants to bring his old friends back to themselves, to have them drop their inflated egos and love the game and each other again.

As Seiren builds its fledgling team and goes out to battle the other high schools where the Kiseki no Sedai members currently play, Kuroko gets his chance to wake his old teammates up.

Kuroko’s Basketball is a perfectly crafted shonen story. It pushes all the right shonen story buttons and is a joy to watch.

If time was limited, I would at least rewatch the second Touou-Seiren game arc in season two, episodes 39-43. This was the arc where Kuroko and Kagami faced Daiki Aomine and Touou Academy for the second time. Among all of his Generation of Miracles teammates, Kuroko was closest to Aomine and vice-versa. It’s Aomine’s soul that Kuroko most wants to save, so to speak, which infuses this arc with more tension and drama than the other tournament game arcs.

Finally - Gundam 00. I’ve been wanting to rewatch this one for a few years now.

It’s the year 2307. The earth has been depleted of fossil fuels and so the planet is now powered through the use of solar energy collectors. Wars have broken out between various nations on the planet, so a private military force called Celestial Being is formed to intervene and eradicate “unjust” wars backed by the use of four Gundams.

Celestial Being itself is governed by Veda, a supercomputer that determines which targets the Gundams should attack based on its information and analysis.

You can probably see the problem already. A “perfect” solution of a powerful enforcement mechanism/team that stops wrongdoers and supposedly never makes mistakes... would at minimum fall prey to real world pressures, political and otherwise, and corruption would always be a possibility (not to mention the danger of some group or government outright stealing Celestial Being’s power and capabilities at some point). (And further - what gives Celestial Being the right to play God? A valid question, in my view.)

I was the copy editor for Bandai Entertainment’s Gundam 00: Novel 3 Fallen Angels. I remember how excited I was to be even a small part of the Gundam universe.

Gundam 00 is my favorite Gundam series. It resenbles Gundam Wing with its four bishonen Gundam pilot protagonists, but 00’s story is much more complex and interesting as it shows differing ideologies and various political factions vying for Celestial Being’s power, as well as all the arguments for and against its very existence. It’s this deep-ranging story involving politics and philosophy that makes Gundam 00 special among the Gundam series.

And this may sound trivial, but I’m a student of art and design and I’ve always loved Gundam 00’s use of color. A lot of anime series have beautiful color design (I would include K in this list), but even among them, Gundam 00 stands out.

The music is awesome, especially the opening and ending themes. This is Chiaki Ishikawa with the haunting third ending theme, “Prototype.”




Hopefully I’ll find more free time to rewatch these old favorites soon. I can’t believe it’s the end of February already. This year is moving quickly. I need to remember that, as the saying goes, How you spend your time is how you spend your life and simply watch more anime if it is indeed still that important to me - as with all activities that are important to me. There’s always enough time for what we truly want to do.

Anime Songs - Once More with Feeling

I’ve been searching through You Tube recently, looking for my favorite anime songs. I don’t know if this is a nostalgia trip or – as I suspect – an opening up to embrace music again, which was a big part of my life a long time ago.

I’m currently writing my seventh book in The Queendoms Series. It’s the final book in the series and I’m preparing to compose two pieces of music for it.

So I have an inner drive now to listen to music that provoked feelings in me, and I’m not surprised that a lot of it comes from anime. In the same way that anime has been my main entertainment source since 2005, my favorite music has also come from anime.

The following You Tube links are, as always, subject to being taken down by "Uncle Google" at any time, so I’ve included the song title and band/composer so you can look them up elsewhere if you want.

I’ve written before about Mirage of Blaze, one of the series that brought me into anime. Mirage of Blaze was a great anime for me to discover right at the beginning. It hit a lot of my buttons: adult story, m/m romance, paranormal, Japanese history. Some sixteen years later, I still love it.

Takaya Ougi is a troubled teen with an attitude. Little does he know that he’s the reincarnation of Kagetora Uesugi of the Uesugi clan from Japan’s Warring States era four hundred years ago. He’s also a “soul possessor,” meaning his Kagetora soul ousts the owner of a baby’s body at birth, taking it over so that he can live again. The purpose of being a soul possessor is to fight the Feudal Underworld, an army of samurai spirits who seek to overthrow modern-day Japan.

Another soul possessor, Nobutsuna Naoe, also lived during the Warring States era, belonging to a different clan. He’s now reincarnated into the body of a handsome middle-aged man. Oh, and – he’s been in love with Kagetora for four hundred years.

The music is by Koichiro Kameyama. This is the main theme, a slow elegiac melody that captures the loneliness and isolation of being a soul possessor, and the angst of Naoe’s unrequited feelings for Kagetora.

Song: Harukanaru Zanshou – Sengoku Zan’ei
Composer: Koichiro Kameyama



Yuki Kajiura is a well-known composer for anime series such as Fate/Zero, Madoka Magica, Sword Art Online, and others. I saw her in concert at Anime Expo years ago. She speaks surprisingly great English (she explained at the concert that she practiced a lot with a friend). I love all of her anime music, but my favorites are “Will” and “Confidence” from Pandora Hearts.

Song: Confidence
Composer: Yuki Kajiura



I feel like I’m always referencing Full Metal Alchemist when it comes to “best of” or “my favorite” posts, but this ending theme from the original FMA series has such a lovely melody that it’s become one of my favorite pieces of music, period.

Song: Tobira no Mukou e
Band: Yellow Generation



In my last post, I talked about the phenomenon of “character songs” and how even the supporting characters in an anime often get their own songs.

Here’s an example from an older title. Angelique began as a video game in 1995, which then was produced as an anime starting in 2006. It’s an early reverse harem story in which a teenage girl is transported to a magic land where she competes to become the new Queen, while being assisted by nine handsome guardians.

So here is a beautiful character song from Angelique sung by seiyuu Nobuo Tobita, one of my favorite Japanese voice actors. He played the character of guardian Lumiale.

Song: Gekkou Yoku
Vocal Artist: Nobuo Tobita



Not to belabor the point, but again – this is a character song for a supporting character in an ancient anime series, and it’s a beautiful song. How many songs like this are buried deep in the enormous catalog of anime-related music that I’ll never hear? Somebody threw this up on You Tube twelve years ago – that’s the only reason I ever found it.

The next song is from an anime series with around 900 episodes about a bunch of pirates (lol). I don’t watch One Piece mainly because the character designs squick my eye (I’ve said before that I’m picky about character designs), and also because it feels like it’s too late to start in on it. It’s a little daunting to consider catching up on 900 episodes.

If I’m in a certain mood, tears will come up listening to this.

Song: Memories
Vocal Artist: Maki Otsuki



And here’s another, newer example of an anime song featuring supporting characters in an anime series.

I know I seem obsessed with K, also known as K Project. It’s just a great series, one of my go-to series to rewatch. The K anime canon consists of the first season, a movie called K: Missing Kings, a second season, and a post-series series called K: Seven Stories.

K: Seven Stories is a collection of six one-hour anime episodes based on side stories from the manga and light novels. In addition, there’s a separate disc of short episodes set in an alternative universe where the K characters are singing idols, which comprises the seventh story in K: Seven Stories.

Each of the six episodes focuses on some of the most memorable characters from K, including the Red King and Blue King and their first meeting, and the pre-teen Sukuna Gojo and how he joins the Green clan.

The two most popular characters in the K universe are actually supporting characters: Misaki Yata from the Red clan and Saruhiko Fushimi who was formerly with the Red clan, but then later defects to the Blue clan. At the beginning of K’s first season, the two have a love-hate relationship based on Misaki resenting Saruhiko for leaving the Reds for the Blues.

The fourth episode of K: Seven Stories is about Misaki and Saruhiko. It’s a flashback to their early days when they were young teenagers before they joined the Red clan. They had a very deep friendship back then, with the cheerful Misaki bringing light into the life of Saruhiko who came from a rich family, but whose father was creepy and psychologically abusive.

The music for K is - like K itself - a little different. A single band did the opening and closing themes for the whole series, a band called angela (the band doesn’t capitalize their name).

Misaki and Saruhiko’s episode is called “Lost Small World.” I like to think the title refers to that moment in time when the two only had each other, living in a small safe world unto itself, a world now lost to time.

Song: Lost Small World
Band: angela



Finally, the last song doesn’t have anything to do with anime, although the band, Ikimono Gakari, is known for the Naruto anime theme song “Blue Bird.”

Song: Sakura
Band: Ikimono Gakari



The Japanese seem to instinctively get what entertainment – films, TV series, novels, music – is all about. It’s to make you feel things. I’ve read the translated lyrics for "Sakura" and it’s a lost love story as you might expect from watching the two actors in the music video.

But you don’t need to know what the song is about to feel it, do you? I can’t remember when I first heard "Sakura," but songs like this are timeless.

Excuse me, but I think I'm in the mood for some You Tube videos now. ;-)

Anime in the Covid Year of 2020 – Attack on Titan Returns, Muhyo and Roji, K: Seven Stories, Haikyuu, and Thoughts on Boruto

It’s been a year where anime seemed almost beside the point, and yet, by the end of it — for me at least — it felt relevant again in a new way.

Back in March, the production of Boruto went dark for a few months, as workers in Japan hunkered down in the pandemic as did those elsewhere.

When Boruto started up again with new episodes in summer, I recall feeling a little guilty almost. Like, there’s a pandemic on, and I missed anime, but not to the point where I wanted animation workers to go back into production offices and get sick drawing my entertainment.

There’s never been an experience like the pandemic of this year, and some of my reactions to things were all over the place. I’ve since settled down, remembering that people in Japan - like people here in the U.S. - actually wanted to return to work, so it’s okay.

The big news about Boruto is that Masashi Kishimoto is returning to write the manga. I’ve written here before about how Boruto has never lived up to Naruto, but the totally obvious reason for that never occurred to me before I heard this news.

One of the main reasons that made Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden so awesome was its storytelling, its amazing world-building. Konoha, the ninja village of Naruto and his friends, felt as real as anything with its large group of characters and all of their fascinating backstories. Not to mention the ninja universe itself, the five great shinobi nations and their histories.

When the Boruto manga began, I recall reading that Kishimoto was going to be less involved with it, but I didn’t really get that he wasn’t writing the story, and nor was he doing the art.

Well — no offense to the people who were, but — now I understand why Boruto’s storyline moved so slowly and had so much filler (or what felt like filler).

The fact that Kishimoto is taking over again would be cause for unmitigated celebration... save for a rumor I heard. The rumor is that the two most important characters in the Naruto/Boruto universe are getting killed off.

If this turns out to be true... let’s just say that I will genuinely freak out. Although it makes sense in story and mythic terms to have Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, the two main figures in the backstory of Boruto’s universe, die so that Boruto and Sarada and others of the new generation can step up, for me personally that would leave too big of a hole in the whole universe. It would basically hollow out Boruto for me, because the series has for too long traded on our nostalgia for the old characters and their history without building its own standalone resonance with solid storytelling and character development. Without Naruto and Sasuke, Boruto would be like an aftereffect in the Naruto universe, one without a lot of meaning for me.

I can only hope that Kishimoto doesn’t do it.

On a lighter note, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation had its second season on Funimation this time instead of Crunchyroll, so what I call my “emergency Funimation subscription” came in handy this summer. (I keep a paid subscription year-round to Funimation for those occasional anime series that Crunchyroll doesn’t license.)

Muhyo and Roji is one of those anime series that is enjoyable and not too cliffhangery when a season ends, meaning you can look forward to it coming back at some point without being anxious about it. It’s weird that Crunchyroll had its first season, but Funimation got its second season. Apparently, both companies will be under Sony’s umbrella soon, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way in the ultimate sense.

In this covid year of 2020, a lot of us ate comfort foods while stuck at home. The same principle was followed for entertainment. People watched their favorite movies and TV shows for the enjoyment of the familiar.

I did the same with one of my favorite anime series, K, or rather K’s final iteration—K: Seven Stories, a post-series set of six episodes that beautifully finishes the K universe.

K: Seven Stories is a send-off or coda that brings closure to the entire world of K in a way that respects each character and each clan in all their quirkiness. The characters that intrigued you the most while watching the two TV seasons and the movie K: Missing Kings are explored in greater depth. Knowing how the main story ends, the opportunity to see these characters in their full humanity adds poignancy to the viewing. Even Gojo Sukuna, the young brat in the Green Clan, gets a full episode where we see how he longed for a sense of family and found it in the Greens, the most oddball clan of them all.

The final episode of K: Seven Stories is wonderful. It presents a mysterious situation where characters you know are dead are somehow alive again, and everyone is enjoying themselves in a sort of timeless Groundhog Day world where each day is fun and there are no lasting consequences for anything you do.

Eventually, of course, everyone tires of it, and begins to seek answers and a way out. The final scene brings the curtain down on K as the mysterious observer who has briefly appeared in all six episodes reveals his/her identity as the one behind the timeloop. The universe of K ends with its most emotional episode, one that has the characters affirming life even with its painful losses as something beautiful to be treasured. I love K. It’s a seriously underrated anime series, one that I wish more anime fans would watch.

That being said — a weird thing happened recently with K’s producers, the Go Hands animation studio. Some Go Hands designers were found to have plagiarized character/costume designs from other sources for its upcoming Tokyo Babylon 2021 anime series based on CLAMP’s original Tokyo Babylon series from the 1990s.

This amazes me for two reasons. First, K had awesome character and costume designs, meaning that Go Hands is perfectly capable of doing great original designs themselves. In fact, one of the distinctive things about K was that director Shingo Suzuki was also credited as K’s character designer — which I imagine has to be the only time in anime when those two very different jobs were performed by the same person.

The second thing that makes this odd is that CLAMP has always been known for fantastic character and costume designs. Couldn’t they have asked CLAMP to do these new designs?

Go Hands is hardly the first case of plagiarism in anime and manga — it happens occasionally and it’s always unfortunate. Hopefully they will get beyond this, and we’ll all get to see Tokyo Babylon 2021 sooner rather than later.

Haikyuu returned this fall. I enjoyed this season, though I’ve lost track of which level of the tournament they’re at given the huge gaps of time between each season.

Haikyuu finally got hit by the curse that hits many anime series at some time or another: the badly animated episode. A few weeks before the season ended, there was one episode where the character faces looked a little off, and the comments ensued on Crunchyroll as you might expect.

Production I.G. is known for its quality animation, but many production companies farm out some of their animation work overseas to Korea or Vietnam. Not to blame the overseas contractors, because who knows where the fault lay this time, but it seems production deadlines affect even the best of shows.

So now, Haikyuu is over once again, and who knows when it will return for another season. There was a four-year hiatus before it resumed again this year. Let’s hope it’s not another four years before the next season.

Onyx Equinox is Crunchyroll’s first original series. The story is based on Mesoamerican mythology and represents a departure from the site’s main focus on Japanese anime.

I have a lot of thoughts about Onyx Equinox, so I’ll be doing a post on it in January.

One of the delights of anime is the short-episode series, like Yamishibai (returning in winter 2021!). It’s hard to resist a series with a good premise that gives you five-minute episodes. Who doesn’t have five minutes to watch anime?

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun has even shorter episodes — about a minute and a half apiece. Astonishingly, not only is it very funny, but its more serious episodes actually have me tearing up.

It’s about a young woman and her overeager, happy-all-the-time dog, and her evil but somehow adorable cat. As one Crunchyroll commenter put it, after watching an episode about the young woman’s former dog who passed away, “GREAT, NOW I’M CRYING INTO MY FOOD.” That's a tribute to the power of anime, seriously. What other form of entertainment can do that to you in 90 seconds flat?

And finally — Attack on Titan is in its last season.

Attack on Titan is unlike any other series, defying easy categorization. It’s shonen, sure, but its alternate Earth setting and those amazing, horrifying titans put it into a category of its own. Not to mention how the show’s popularity basically saved the U.S. manga localization industry in the early 2010s, and by association, anime in the U.S. as well.

The fact that Attack on Titan is ending makes me a little nostalgic. It was around the time of Attack on Titan’s initial popularity that I began to feel out of step with anime in general. My posts on this blog were spotty from 2015 to around 2018, when I came back to anime with renewed enthusiasm.

This is the 11th year I’ve been writing this anime blog. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog or the editing work I do in this industry. Like many, I suspect, this covid year has led to some soul searching for me as to how I want to spend my time going forward.

But for now, there will be no big changes. I’ll continue to blog here on anime and manga as my work schedule permits. I still feel that anime is relevant in my life, and every year there are series that surprise me. Anime can still surprise me with its variety and artistry, so there’s life here yet. And thanks for continuing to read this blog – it is much appreciated. :-)

Winter 2020 Watchlist - The Return of Haikyuu

After a few dry anime seasons - dry for me, anyway - I find myself watching more anime than ever. I wasn’t looking forward to anything this winter other than the return of Haikyuu, but suddenly my watchlists on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime are flooded with an episode or two of something to watch nearly every day of the week.

But first... the holdovers from fall 2019.

What to say about Babylon... A series that started off as fantastic has now unraveled into a morass.

I really hate to say that about this series, because it was dark and fascinating at first. A new ward in Tokyo adopts a law that makes suicide legal, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What prosecutor/investigator Zen Seizaki discovers is a conspiracy behind the law involving the ward’s mayor and a mysterious and ultimately terrifying woman - the true villain of the piece – Ai Magase.

There was a break between episode 8 and 9 that lasted one month. Last Monday was Episode 11. The series is listed at MAL as being 12 episodes long. We haven’t seen Ai Magase since Episode 8, the setting changed from Japan to the U.S. for some reason, and the show has gotten lost in philosophizing about good and evil in the abstract, seemingly forgetting its own plot.

I don’t honestly think they can wrap up the series in any real or satisfying way with only one episode left, but I’m invested enough to watch on Monday to see if they can do it.

And then there’s Boruto. One day, I’m going to write a whole post about how Boruto trades too much on our nostalgia for the original characters in Naruto without forcing us to care enough about the new generation of characters... but that day is not today.

Before I talk about Haiykuu... I’ve picked up two other series this season that are nice surprises.

Case Files of Jeweler Richard looks like it would be a light repast, something like the European pastries and royal milk tea the show’s lead character enjoys in his parlor. It is, however, deeper than that.

The fey and lovely Richard is a British jeweler par excellence. He speaks many languages in dealing with his international clientele. One day he’s saved from being attacked by drunken louts by a young Japanese man, Seigi Nakata, who becomes his employee.

Each episode focuses on a single kind of jewel and what its significance is, as a mystery gets solved. Pretty standard stuff, except that the stories so far have been more serious than you’d expect from the set-up. The first episode dealt with Seigi’s own grandmother, who raised him and supported him by – being a thief. The second episode featured a young woman, engaged to a nice young man, who is in severe conflict. It turns out that she is gay, and accepted the engagement in a desperate and doomed attempt to deny her sexuality and the hard road in life it often leads to in Japan.

At the beginning of the episode, Richard cautions Seigi that he is never to show discrimination or judgment toward any of their customers. This is obviously tied in to what the rest of the episode is about, but still, it seems like more than you’d expect from this kind of series.

Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga. With a title like this, you know first off that it’s a comedy. I was expecting it to be one of those satirical anime series where each episode is 8 or 10 minutes long like Skullface Bookseller Honda-san, but actually each episode is the standard 24 minutes or so in length.

Oda Nobunaga, the fierce Warring States general, the scourge of the era, has now been reincarnated in modern-day Japan as a dog named “Cinnamon” by his young female owner.

He’s not alone. The other Warring States generals are here too, and are also dogs: Date “Boo” Masamune, Takeda “Lucky” Shingen, Uesugi “Julian” Kenshin. They and Oda meet up at the local dog park to relive their old battles and reminisce about the past.

It’s light and funny, in part because each sketch or story only lasts a few minutes, followed by some quick funny bits, and then another little story. For a series that only has a single punch line (they’re dogs now!), the producers know that for it to work, they have to keep it moving, and they do.

And now, finally, after a one-season delay, Pet is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Pet was worth the wait. It’s an exploration of what could happen if people had the ability not only to reach into another person’s mind, but also to change their memories. The first episode leaves you a bit puzzled, but the second episode lays out exactly how the “crushers,” as they’re referred to, do it, and it’s a really wild ride.

I never did a review of Haikyuu when the first season came out way back in 2014, so I think I’ll do it now.

Haikyuu is the story of Shoyo Hinata, an enthusiastic, ever-striving volleyball player for Karasuno High. Despite his shrimpy height, he has outsize skills, particularly in jumping insanely high.

His uncomplicated optimism keeps him moving past obstacles, including the people who don’t believe in him. And his radiant smile could power a thousand suns.

As in all shonen sports anime - he has a rival, of sorts.

Tobio Kageyama is already a star in the high school volleyball world, but he has a problem. He’s not a team player, and in fact suffered a dark moment of humiliating rejection from his teammates at his former school after they tired of his self-centered arrogance. When he comes to Karasuno, he’s pretty dismissive of the chibi Hinata, but the odd couple soon becomes the cornerstone of the team’s offense.

Haikyuu - for whatever reason - had a four-year hiatus between this season and the third season back in 2016. I’ll be honest and say that I barely remember what happened in season three, as I don’t follow the manga. It’s not the only anime production that has had a huge gap between seasons (Attack on Titan had a similar long break), but from the more casual fan, in other words, someone who likes Haikyuu but who doesn’t wait with bated breath for each episode - the producers expected an awful lot of patience here.

In any event... Haikyuu follows the basic shonen sports story template to a T. A scrappy but underperforming high school team learns to work together, with each individual player fighting to overcome his own personal obstacles, until they begin to achieve hard-won successes and ultimately advance to the final round tournament of whatever sport it is they play.

Kuroko’s Basketball is by far still my favorite anime in this genre. Plus, the character designs are way more attractive in that series. ;-)

Haikyuu is geared toward more of a younger audience, in my view. The tone is clean and wholesome in that particularly Japanese way of encouraging boys to do their best, play fair, and support others in order to win. As a shonen sports anime, it’s a model of the genre, following the template nearly flawlessly.

So why am I not as enthusiastic about Haikyuu as I am, say, Kuroko’s Basketball?

Well...

Because it’s VOLLEYBALL.

Forgive me if you’re a fan of the sport, but I don’t find volleyball that compelling. As opposed to basketball, which is inherently exciting, volleyball just doesn’t do it for me. I am completely willing to own this as a personal fault. It’s the reason that I simply like Haikyuu, rather than love it.

In addition to all the new series for winter 2020, I should mention that Crunchyroll is adding value these days in terms of extra episodes of older series, OVAs, and movies. In the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed a number of Naruto Shippuuden movies, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet OVAs, and best of all - K: Seven Stories, a short anime series in the K universe I never thought I’d get the chance to see. I’m not sure why this explosion of bonus extras is hitting Crunchyroll right now, but it’s really a lot of fun. Keep it up, Crunchyroll. =D

Ten Years Later

Once upon a time, there was a young American girl.

Her grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Japan, making the girl a third-generation Japanese-American.

She grew up in a white neighborhood in Southern California, a child in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s. Not that long after WWII, with Pearl Harbor within living memory of most people.

She felt American inside, even if some people she met saw her face and considered her a foreigner. Her parents, who spoke both English and Japanese, only spoke English at home, perhaps to ensure that she would be seen as American as possible by other Americans.

They never taught her anything about the culture of her grandparents and ancestors.

She didn’t mind. After all, she was American.

Many years passed.

One evening, she was watching the Starz Network and saw something she’d never seen before.

It was something called anime — animation from Japan.

It blew her mind.

Not only was the story adult in tone, but it was what she knew as slash — a romance between two men. She had no idea that entertainment like this existed outside of fandom, and from a foreign country too.

Japan. A country she was connected to by blood made shows like this. She was staggered to find this out.

But that wasn’t all. The Starz Network also had other anime series.

Slowly, as if being drawn in against her will, she began to search out more anime to watch.

It was her first exposure to Japanese manga and anime art styles, and what she saw changed her whole view on art.

She particularly loved how some anime series created entire universes one could lose oneself in — the setting, characters and stories forming whole worlds in themselves.

She fell in love with so many characters... and the seiyuu who played them.

She attended many anime conventions, discovering the love her fellow fans had for anime.

... And that sometimes, one could meet a Shonen Jump editor in real life that you’d seen in an anime.

She started a blog so she could write about her love for anime and manga.

And she began taking Japanese lessons, finally starting to learn the language of her grandparents — and discovered what her name was in Japanese (ジャン 鈴川).

Since she’d worked as an editor before, she began freelancing as a translation rewriter/editor for the U.S. companies that published manga and anime-related books.

She edited many books in the field:

Even the yaoi light novels she loved to read... she became the editor of some of those books as well.

The world she entered when she became an anime fan expanded her sense of storytelling and setting, and inspired her first published novel.

That novel set her on the road to other fictional worlds, and other series that she is still writing today.

Her love for anime and manga gave her a second career in editing, as well as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream — to be a published fiction writer.

It brought her full-circle in terms of acceptance and appreciation for her heritage as a Japanese-American.

So be open, and stay curious as to the world around you. Because one day, you may be watching television or surfing the Internet and not expecting your life to change, but — it can.

A gift that takes your life in a new direction can come to you, unexpected, sent to you by the universe with hidden hands.

Thank you for reading this blog for the past ten years.