New Freak Guide to Freak World

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: The Dark Side of the Cool Stuff
Macias, a 31-year-old resident of San Francisco, is an American expert on Japan's manga, anime and digital subcultures who has been visiting Akihabara and other parts of Tokyo for research since 1999. He is the coauthor, with Tomohiro Machiyama, of Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo, published this month by Stone Bridge Press.
"One (purpose of the book) is to give you something to do once you get here," Macias says. "If you go to every place mentioned in this book you're going to have a pretty great trip. It'll be pretty shocking, it'll be pretty twisted, but it's definitely off the beaten path."
..."Otaku are pretty depressing people sometimes; I'm not going to pretend that everyone's wonderful and rivers are made out of chocolate. Some of these are very lonely, disturbed people," Macias warns, before thoughtfully adding, "But they do make the world a stranger place."
To safely enjoy the otaku world, Macias says, "the key is to keep yourself informed, check your moral barometer every day, make sure you've got the whole good and evil thing balanced out, and have some fun." As for the line between fantasy and reality, "leave a little trail of bread crumbs" to find your way back.

[Taro Toporific]

Yomiuri: The Dark Side of the Cool Stuff
Macias, a 31-year-old resident of San Francisco, is an American expert on Japan's manga, anime and digital subcultures

"I have extremely otaku Japanese language skills. The first kanji I learned were like uchusenkan--'space battleship'--or daikaiju--'giant monster.'"

....new book therefore aims to provide an authentically Japanese "tour through hell."

[Charles]

People like good old Donald Richie thought I was stupid, basically.

Good old Donald Richie. You should have listened to him, he is wiser than you. But now you'll never get another chance.

"California has a strong Pacific cultural influence," he says. "Ultraman was on TV..."

Ultraman was on TV in IOWA when I was a kid, you dipshit.

[Kuang_Grade]

I'll probably pick this up....I had thought there was definitely a market for this type book but I wasn't as full myself to think I was the one to write it...I'm more of an Otaku poser than the real deal... although I will admit that I have a very special place in my heart for my complete (with all the variants/secrets) glico ultraman kubricks set I picked up on my last trip.

But for a so called expert, he's approaching this market all wrong....He needs do it as 4000 yen (J pricing for street cred) semi annual magazine that also comes in a 9000 yen limited edition that comes with an easy to damage silver tin foil cover of, say, KOSMOS from Xenosaga, and then a super ultra mega rare secret edition that is exactly like the limited edition except it has gold foil cover and 20 cent keychain and costs 18,500 yen.

[Mulboyne]

Japan Times: Way of the corporate giant robot
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM, by Yoshiyuki Tomino, translated by Frederik L. Schodt with an introduction by Mark Simmons. Stone Bridge Press, 2004, $14.95 (paper).
Yoshiyuki "Kill 'em All" Tomino is the mega-prolific creator of the Mobile Suit Gundam phenomenon, known, perhaps a little patronizingly, as the "Star Wars of Japan." He is really more of a C.S. Lewis of SF anime -- the inventor of an absurdly huge and detailed fictional world as coherent, obsessive and confidently executed as Narnia or even J.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.
...Stone Bridge Press has re-released his original "Mobile Suit Gundam" trilogy of novels -- "Awakening," "Escalation" and "Confrontation" (first published in the United States in 1990) -- as a three-volume set, translated by manga/anime authority Frederik L. Schodt and introduced by super-otaku Gundam expert Mark Simmons, to sync with the steady rise in fame of the Gundam franchise in America.