Loneliness is a theme that has threaded its way through a great body of Japanese literature over the past 120+ years. It’s something that has been explored by the country’s greatest writers in several ways, showing it as a result of subjects as varied as fractured psyches, troubled marriages, and…
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We’re at that point in the development of our medium where there’s a game for every imaginable task and occupation; or at least, that’s what you’d think on a cursory google of any job followed by the word “simulator”. And yet, it’s rare to find many games which seek to…
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A Time Magazine article from 1958 describes a group of Japanese labourers who, while digging a road into a hillside during the postwar building boom, uncovered a cache of strange terracotta figures: clay representations of people, horses, birds, and houses. Having no idea what to do with them, the workers…
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Ocarina of Time’s Link isn’t what you’d picture when you think of a video game protagonist – at least not at first. Not the first time you play it. There’s nothing special about Link. He’s a kid in the Kokiri Forest, the only one without a fairy. When he finally…
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Over in the world of literature, there has been quite the kerfuffle over the last week or so. News broke that the estate of Roald Dahl, and the publisher of his books, Puffin, would be taking the author’s body of work and, on the advice of sensitivity readers, making several…
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The High&Low film series (available via Netflix in the west) is many things. First and foremost, the film series offers some of the most wildly entertaining action to come out of Japan’s cinema industry in recent years. The action in these films is big. So big that you’d be forgiven…
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If you’ve got access to Netflix, then you’ve probably seen the Rilakkuma animated series. Rilakkuma and Kaoru launched back in 2019, and a second season: Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure, finally landed, after some delays, in late 2022. As stop-motion animations, each of the short, generally sweet episodes across both seasons…
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It’s easy to understand why One Thousand and One Nights – also known as 1001 Nights and Arabian Nights – has fallen out of vogue in modern culture and has rarely been touched in video games. There are dozens of games produced based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Grimm’s…
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I once found it quite hard to get into racing. I have friends who are big fans, and who can talk endlessly about the microscopic detail that goes into every car, but as an outsider, I admit it’s easy to miss the complexity for the simple – cars go fast.…
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Most people with a casual interest in Japanese culture are aware of kabuki theatre on some level. Even if they’ve never witnessed a performance, the mannerisms and make-up of kabuki theatre are one of Japan’s great artistic exports. Noh is to kabuki what opera is to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals,…
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