Curated playlist
Culture of Japan
- Spirited AwayIn Spirited Away, a girl's parents turn into pigs in an abandoned resort town. Ten-year-old Chihiro is left alone.
- MangaManga began with a four-page magazine that lasted only three issues. Eshinbun Nipponchi launched in 1874.
- Japan ExpoJapan Expo was cancelled in 2005 because its venue could not safely hold the crowds.
- Visual novelSome popular visual novels have no choices to make at all. Planetarian offers the player no choices whatsoever.
- AnimeOsamu Tezuka's money-saving shortcuts became anime's defining look. He adapted Disney techniques.
- YakuzaThe yakuza, the members of Japan's organized crime syndicates, are named after a losing hand of cards. In the traditional game Oicho-Kabu, players try to draw three cards that add up to nine. A total of ten or more counts only by its…
- Chibi (style)In the mid-1990s, Sailor Moon's daughter Chibiusa, whose name means Little Rabbit, introduced chibi to American fans.
- KamishibaiKamishibai, the Japanese art of telling stories with painted boards on the street, turned up in Tokyo's Shitamachi district around 1930, "like the wind on a street corner." Nobody knows exactly where the twentieth-century version came…
- Agency for Cultural AffairsJapan's Agency for Cultural Affairs names living national treasures, because a skill lives only in a body.
- BonsaiA bonsai pine in Tokyo's Imperial Palace was already being trained by 1610. It is thought to be at least 500 years old.