{"id":1362,"date":"2013-03-06T13:52:32","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1362"},"modified":"2013-04-23T11:50:07","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T18:50:07","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s3e14-new-york-tokyo-and-back-again-with-roland-kelts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1362","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E14: New York, Tokyo, and Back Again with Roland Kelts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/rolandkelts.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1370\" title=\"rolandkelts\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/rolandkelts.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"244\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park, Los Angeles with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.japanamericabook.com\/\">Roland Kelts<\/a>, visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, contributing editor to the literary journals <em>A Public Space<\/em> and Japan&#8217;s <em>Monkey Business International<\/em>, which he will be launching in New York City with Motoyuki Shibata, Paul Auster and Gen&#8217;ichiro Takahashi and others this May, and author of the book <em>Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.<\/em> They discuss whether Japan has yet really figured out how to sell its pop culture abroad; the success of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crunchyroll.com\/\">CrunchyRoll.com<\/a>; his time growing up as a partial outsider in the white northeastern United States, and how anime and manga&#8217;s focus on the outsider thus resonated with him; the commission he received from the Coppolas to write a story about Japan, which had him live in Osaka for a year; the subsequent offers that came his way to write about Murakami, Miyazaki, and Japanese youth culture; why the Wachowskis like anime so much;\u00a0 what his youthful Anglophilia revealed to him about the parallels, especially aesthetic, between Britain and Japan; how we even have sushi in American convenience stores, yet nothing like Japanese street vending machines; whether he felt, as did novelist <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=664\">Todd Shimoda<\/a>, a not-fully-foreign presence in Japan; how he splits his time between New York and Tokyo, and the importance of maintaining ties with his native land; how the geographical oscillation provides him perspective on both cities, and what escapes his attention (Lena Dunham, for example) when he&#8217;s away from each; the relative lack of coded engagement and easier physical flow of New York; his understanding of American psychology coming through a cross-country drive of vast spaces and non-major cities; and the passing of Donald Richie, which raises questions of how best to write about Japan, a country which must now return to doing more with less.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/s3e14-new-york-tokyo-and-back-again-with-roland-kelts\"><em>Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a> or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>(Illustration: Gant Powell)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park, Los Angeles with Roland Kelts, visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, contributing editor to the literary journals A Public Space and Japan&#8217;s Monkey Business International, which he will be launching in New York City with Motoyuki Shibata, Paul Auster and Gen&#8217;ichiro Takahashi and others this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1362"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1365,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions\/1365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}