Tag: Japan

Book: Igor Mozheiko “West Wind — Fair Weather”

No comments

We often reproach Americans for supposedly knowing nothing about World War II, for thinking they “won it,” when without the Soviet Union Hitler wouldn’t have been defeated. Of course, that’s all true. But it’s just as true that we ourselves know very little about their side of the war.

What can most of us name off the top of our heads? The Normandy landings (which have been chewed over from every angle in movies and in dozens of games)… and then the meeting on the Elbe. Oh right — we might have heard something about Pearl Harbor, and that they fought the Japanese a little bit over there, and that the evil Americans dropped two nuclear bombs, and that was that.

As executive producers, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg decided to tell more of the war through American eyes. First, in 2001, they released Band of Brothers about combat in Europe. And nine years later, in 2010, they followed with The Pacific about a part of the war we barely know at all — because the Soviet Union didn’t take part in it, and so it simply wasn’t something people talked about. (And I very much recommend both series if you haven’t seen them.)

Read more

Book: Frederik L. Schodt “Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics”

1 comment

At one point in my work, I had to closely engage with the manga and anime industry (in the entertainment field, it’s quite normal for different areas of the entertainment industry to overlap: many games and movies are based on anime, and vice versa). However, I could never say I was a fan of this genre (unlike my older daughters). In my childhood, we didn’t have many comics, let alone their Japanese form in the style of manga, and my exposure to anime was limited to a couple of animated films that were allowed on Soviet cinema screens. I vaguely remember two: Taro, the Dragon Boy (which I really liked as a kid) and, later on, Puss in Boots: Travels Around the World. But we didn’t even know back then that this was anime.

After a closer encounter with it, I decided at some point to study the subject in more depth. Some aspects seemed quite strange to me, as someone raised in a completely different culture. For instance, when we were preparing to launch World of Tanks in South Korea, our Korean office practically created all the training materials from scratch, and to me, these pages on the site looked wild — it was a huge scroll of content in the form of a manga-style comic. But that’s just how they’re accustomed to receiving information.

As I delved deeper into the topic, I learned many interesting facts that all anime fans know, but the average person probably hasn’t even heard of. For example, many well-known Western franchises either have Japanese roots or were simply “borrowed” from Japanese creators due to a rather unique approach to copyright at the time. Here are just a few prominent examples to give you an idea:

Read more

Book: Boris Akunin “Just Masa”

No comments

The Winter Queen, the first novel by Boris Akunin about Erast Fandorin, was released in 1998 and almost immediately caused a sensation in literary circles. I usually approached widely popular books with caution, so I didn’t start reading the series about the remarkable detective until Boris Akunin had already written seven or eight books. But once I devoured the first one, I eagerly moved on to the next. And so it went until I had read them all in succession.

After that, I consistently bought each new book in the series as soon as it was released, read it right away, and waited for the next one. However, after the tenth book, The Diamond Chariot, I felt that the best days were behind. The books were still good, but they no longer sparked the same excitement as the earlier ones. The final novel, Not Saying Goodbye, where Erast Petrovich finally leaves, brought more sadness and melancholy than anything else. After fifteen novels, his story came to an end, but I still longed to revisit it, hopefully at the level of the best books.

Then, in 2020, Boris Akunin unexpectedly released the novel Just Masa. No, it’s not about Erast Petrovich, but rather about his loyal servant and companion—the Japanese Masahiro Shibata. Masa first appears in the fourth novel in the series, The Death of Achilles. As I recall, Akunin describes the first meeting between Erast Fandorin and the young yakuza from Yokohama in the tenth novel, The Diamond Chariot, where much of the story focuses on the young detective’s life in Japan.

Read more