LLMs are secretly obsessed with Japan.

Researchers proved every major LLM is secretly obsessed with Japan.

And they finally figured out why.

For years, we’ve been told that AI is entirely Western-centric, that it just reflects Silicon Valley and American values.

A landmark paper by Cardiff and Basque researchers… pic.twitter.com/ZfyypmmbjL

— Superman (@thesupermanmx) July 20, 2026

The Real Folk Blues (virtual session 2020)

Cat and bird

by Enoki Toshiyuki pic.twitter.com/a3TJ9rj8Bq

— Ramin Nasibov (@RaminNasibov) May 13, 2026

Two cats on a roof

Under a crescent moon, two cats fraternize on the rooftop. Below them is the shadow of two people conversing behind the translucent sliding screen. The marginal text comments that “there’s no difference between high love and low love” (Japanese postcard, 1908) pic.twitter.com/nZlhKAeOpw

— Journal of Art in Society (@artinsociety) May 11, 2026

Tulip garden in Hokkaido

Tulip Garden, Hokkaido, Japan🇯🇵 pic.twitter.com/LtOimE2BC7

— World's Amazing Things (@Hana_b30) May 6, 2026

Fishboat on Moonlit Sea

Fishboat on Moonlit Sea
Koho Shoda
1930 pic.twitter.com/5qphAANhwr

— .stuff (@vintagestuff4) April 19, 2026

Flatulating rhythm, Oh, those wacky Japanese!

In this video you shall become acquainted with ancient Japanese fart art.

Please enjoy. pic.twitter.com/iiaTgbGg77

— Klara (@klara_sjo) March 18, 2026

Tree with pink blossoms [Japan]

Reiji Hiramatsu
Such a beautiful piece of work
Japanese artist inspired by Monet pic.twitter.com/s6zQW9nb4l

— helen warlow (@HWarlow) March 3, 2026

Chrysanthemums Bloom

It's the time of year that the chrysanthemum (kiku) comes into bloom: a flower in Japan that's perhaps only 2nd to the cherry blossom, and one with a wide range of associations. Its luxurious petals won it the title of imperial family crest, as well as floral motif on the cover… pic.twitter.com/p5ZQVu9GjA

— Spoon & Tamago (@Johnny_suputama) October 13, 2025

Hiromi, interviewed by Rick Beato

YouTube:

In this interview, I sit down with Japanese piano virtuoso Hiromi to talk about her playing, her influences, and her approach to improvisation. We cover her career, her unique style, and what drives her as a musician.

Hiromi is AWESOME!

The Japanese Anime Invasion

Joshua Hunt, How Anime Took Over America, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 3, 2025. Selected passages.

From the opening:

Like the name Walt Disney, the word “anime” brings to mind not just an aesthetic but a distinctive storytelling ethos. My own first encounter with anime was at a middle-school sleepover in the mid-1990s, where I watched a bootleg VHS copy of the Japanese anime film “Akira.” It was mesmerizing.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian masterpiece was unlike anything my friends and I had experienced. The film held us in its thrall from the opening scene, in which Tokyo is silently swallowed up by a nuclear-scale blast that eventually gives birth to Neo-Tokyo, populated by biker gangs, mystics and powerful psychic beings who are the worst-kept secret of a crumbling military bureaucracy. “Akira” (1988).

Everything about “Akira,” from its gamelan-inspired soundtrack to its unusually complex characters, seemed fresh and exciting — it was so new, in fact, that Americans had not yet agreed on what to call it: anime, Japanime or Japanimation. This inability to define the form did no harm to its countercultural appeal. By 1996, Roger Ebert had called anime “the fastest-growing underground cult in the movie world.”

Ebert was especially impressed by “Akira” and Mamoru Oshii’s “Ghost in the Shell,” whose imagery and themes — cyborg police officers, hacker terrorists and the nature of identity in a technologically advanced society — would inspire the filmmakers behind “The Matrix.” It’s now clear that the thrill of these early anime imports was tied to the way they anticipated the contemporary world, offering a glimpse of a more connected, paranoid and altogether less stable planet years before we got here.

Conforming to American standards:

As an added challenge, writers had to come up with inventive ways of placating the standards departments that policed American television broadcasts. “The Bible Belt is what you had to think of as your audience,” said the voice actor Terry Klassen, who also worked as a writer on some “Dragon Ball Z” scripts. “So anything that had to do with Eastern prayer or looking to the heavens or having different levels of spiritualism, you had to change that, take that all out and sort of make it a more nonreligious quest.” Sometimes this meant altering a character’s name — from Mr. Satan to Hercule, for example. But other times it meant rotoscoping — a technique for tracing over footage — to make changes as innocuous as transforming beer into orange juice.

Funimation and Cartoon Network:

Before partnering with Cartoon Network, Funimation had shopped “Dragon Ball Z” to networks like ABC, which passed. “They said that the cartoons in the U.S. need to be like ‘Scooby-Doo,’ where every show has a beginning and end and you don’t need to worry about the next one,” said Daniel Cocanougher, a founder of Funimation. “This episodic-type stuff, it doesn’t work in the U.S.,” he recalled the network saying. “Dragon Ball Z” would end up being the first blockbuster anime series on American television.

Toonami picked up the first 56 episodes for a daily after-school broadcast that started in 1998. It was an immediate hit. “Within a year, we were the No. 1 show on Cartoon Network and helped take them from 40 million households to 80 million households,” Cocanougher told me. Just a few years after its debut on Toonami, he said, the series had helped make Funimation the fifth-largest distributor of VHS tapes and DVDs in the United States, just behind Columbia and Universal. “There was a generation of kids that got to see a cartoon that took its characters seriously, where people lived and died,” DeMarco told me. “There were real stakes, and people loved and had families, and it wasn’t just reset after every episode.”

The one-two punch of “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon,” which also found success in America, served as a foundation for everything that followed.

Miyazaki:

Shows like “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon” were largely aimed at children; different as they were from American cartoons, they were still cartoons. What got American adults interested in anime was the singular artistic vision of Hayao Miyazaki, who cultivated a large audience among cinaesthetes.

Just a few years before his movie “Spirited Away” won an Academy Award for best animated feature, in 2003, I saw his 1988 film “My Neighbor Totoro” at a small film festival in Minneapolis. Miyazaki’s work changed the way I looked at anime, and animation more broadly, in the same way David Lynch changed the way I looked at cinema; both filmmakers gave free rein to their subconscious and steadfastly refused to choose between style and substance. Winning the Oscar put Miyazaki in the same league as Walt Disney, earning anime the same kind of artistic credibility that Disney had garnered through films like “Bambi” and “Fantasia.”

Black Americans:

From this early stage on, Black Americans were overrepresented in anime fandom. Arthell Isom, whose D’ART Shtajio is Japan’s first Black-owned animation studio, shared his theory with me that Black Americans identified with anime protagonists who often come from the margins of society. Perhaps, he suggested, they were also so used to being absent from the media they consumed that they had an easier time watching and identifying with Asian protagonists than white audiences did.

A decade or so later, the generation of rappers who grew up watching Toonami after school seemed to take every opportunity to announce their anime fandom, from Lil Uzi Vert (“Throw up gang signs, Naruto”) to Megan Thee Stallion [...]

American style:

Like Champagne in France, something can be anime only if it is produced in Japan. But the boundaries of the genre have become blurrier as anime’s stylistic markers show up in the work of American and European animators, beginning as early as 2005 with Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which replicated the look and feel of anime but was made in the United States. More recently, American shows have been retrofitted into anime. The popular American cartoon series “Rick and Morty,” for example, shows few obvious anime influences, but its creators are such big fans that in 2024 they debuted a stand-alone series called “Rick and Morty: The Anime,” which was produced in Japan by a seasoned animator.

The trend toward reworking Western intellectual property as anime is accelerating. When I visited Isom’s animation studio in Tokyo, he had recently finished work on a “Star Wars” anime for Lucasfilm. And in November, when I met Gianni Sirgy, a content creator who helps run a TikTok channel called TheAnimeMen, he told me that he had been hired to help promote a “Lord of the Rings” anime film produced by Warner Bros. Entertainment. This made me wonder: Now that anime is truly mainstream, will the form’s outsider appeal be sacrificed as part of a scheme to create yet another delivery system for the same intellectual property that Hollywood has been regurgitating for decades?

There's much more at the link, especially the images, lots of them.

Check the credits:

‘‘Demon Slayer,’’ ‘‘Pokémon,’’ ‘‘Sailor Moon,’’ ‘‘Bambi,’’ ‘‘Revolutionary Girl Utena,’’ ‘‘Ranma ½,’’ ‘‘Dragon Ball Z’’ and ‘‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’’: Screenshots from YouTube. ‘‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’’ and ‘‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’’: Screenshots from Netflix. ‘‘One Piece,’’ ‘‘Haikyu!!,’’ ‘‘Akira’’ and ‘‘Dragon Ball Z’’: Screenshots from Crunchyroll. ‘‘Ghost in the Shell’’: Screenshots from Criterion Channel. Weekly Shōnen Jump covers: Screenshots from Comicvine. ‘‘Doraemon’’: Screenshots from Oricon News. Pokémon items: Screenshot from PokémonCenter.

Grave of the Fireflies [Media Notes 170]

YouTube:

Film critic Roger Ebert reviewing the Japanese anime "Grave of The Fireflies", a Studio Ghibli film of 1988. Contemplating on animation and Asian film making. Amazed by his empathy and sensitivity through his description of this film, his interpretation is almost moving.

This is one of the most harrowing and tender films I've ever seen, and one of the best. Stunning.

Parent-child co-sleeping is common in Asia [East and West]

Mike Ives, Sharing a Bed With Your Kid? It’s Totally Normal in Asia. NYTimes, July 22, 2025.

In the United States and some other Western countries, many parents wince at the idea of sharing a bed with their young child on a regular basis.

But in other places, long-term bed sharing through infancy, toddlerhood and beyond is seen as totally normal. For many families in Asia, in particular, the question is not whether to do it, but when to stop.

How and where young children sleep is a big deal for the whole family. It can have implications for an infant’s safety and a child’s development. It can also affect parental sleep, intimacy and mental health, and can influence how families configure their homes.

Western practice:

In the West, and especially in the United States, bed sharing tends to be unpopular and contentious. That is partly because the American Academy of Pediatrics and other experts warn that it can be unsafe for infants 6 months of age or younger.

Many Western parents put infants to sleep in cribs or beds in a separate room — often using a practice known as “sleep training,” in which infants are taught to sleep independently. Modern ideas about separating mothers and babies at night have their roots in campaigns by “Victorian-era influencers” in Britain and the United States, according to “How Babies Sleep,” a book published this year by the anthropologist Helen Ball.

Even though there isn’t much scientific literature on bed sharing, studies generally show that the practice is far more common in Asia than in the West. [...]

One multicountry survey of parents of infants and toddlers from 2010 found that bed-sharing rates were over 60 percent in China, Japan and South Korea, and over 70 percent in India and parts of Southeast Asia. The rates in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States ranged from 5 to 15 percent.

Priorities:

In some Asian societies, many couples prioritize the mother-child bond over their own sleep health and marital relationships, said Heejung Park, a professor of psychology at Scripps College in California who has studied bed sharing in the region. [...]

In India, the cultural attachment to bed sharing is so deep that it tends to persist even among urban elites who are exposed to “Western sleep training culture,” said Himani Dalmia, a sleep specialist in New Delhi who runs a support group for parents and shares a bed with her children, 7 and 9.

Singapore is an exception:

One apparent exception in the region is Singapore, a wealthy city-state where reported bed sharing rates are lower than in other East and Southeast Asian countries. Sleep training seems to be increasingly popular there, and some Singaporean parents are reluctant to admit to bed sharing, said Elaine Chow, the president of a local breastfeeding support group.

Ah, those “intimacy” issues:

Some of Ms. Kim’s friends have children who stayed in the family bed until age 12, even at the expense of their parents’ sleep quality and sex lives. That would be too much for her, she said. So she and her husband have decided that their girls will move into what is now their playroom in about two years.

There's more at the link.

The Jazz Avengers – Maybe I know

💌Booking : thejazzavengers2022@gmail.com
✨Instagram: @thejazzavengers
✨Twitter: @thejazzavengers
✨Facebook: / thejazzavengers

Member
Drums : Senri Kawaguchi  [fierce!]
Bass : Juna Serita  [fierce!]
Guitar : Chizuru Segawa
Keyboard : Marie Takeda
Soprano Saxophone : Ami Nakazono
Alto Saxophone : Miho Terachi
Alto Saxophone : WaKaNa
Tenor Saxophone : Miku Yonezawa [fierce!]

The French Film That Inspired Japanese Anime

Staff, The French Film That Changed Japanese Animation, Animation Obsessive, June 1, 2025.

The film wasn’t meant to come out — but it did. In 1952, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep appeared at the Venice Film Festival. It was a French animated feature by Paul Grimault, who later set out to destroy many copies of it, and to lock away the rest.

It was his magnum opus. When The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep got started in the ‘40s, it was “expected to be the European answer to American-made feature films,” according to historian Giannalberto Bendazzi. It’s a surreal tale about a tyrant king and two paintings (a shepherdess, a chimney sweep) that come to life and try to escape his vast, vertical kingdom. Dazzling and hyper-technical animation brings it together.

But, after a few years of production, the project’s scope outstripped its budget. Grimault ran out of money. It was quickly assembled and released anyway.

“[D]espite Grimault’s opposition, his partner André Sarrut decided to exploit the film before its completion (one-fifth was yet to be filmed),” Bendazzi wrote. “Lawsuits, criticism from the press and intellectuals’ indignation could not prevent the film from being shown in an incomplete version.”

That version toured the world. There was an English dub — now reportedly in the public domain, and free on the Internet Archive. More impactful was the Japanese release of 1955. Its title was Yabunirami no Bokun (“The Cross-Eyed Tyrant”), and it took root.

Japan’s press and intelligentsia raved about Grimault’s film. Its incompleteness barely registered. Here was a movie beyond Disney, they argued — something with a deep political meaning, ties to modern art and its own approach to animated characters. “It is not a children’s cartoon (manga), but a sort of experimental film,” noted the Asahi Shimbun.

It did well in theaters. And, in the years ahead, it grew into a near-universal reference point for Japan’s animation industry.4 Among its fans were the young Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and their colleagues at the studio Toei Doga in Tokyo.

“If I had not seen this film,” Takahata later wrote, “I would have never imagined entering the world of animation.”

When Takahata first watched Grimault’s film in the 1950s, he was attending university. It “made a vivid impression on me,” he said.5 This thing went “way beyond established ideas at the time.”

Miyazaki's reaction, quoted in the post:

I first saw The Cross-Eyed Tyrant in manga form. At that time, manga versions of movies were being created and circulated without paying for the license. Osamu Tezuka also created manga based on Disney’s Pinocchio. That was the era. I thought the manga version was interesting.

There's much more at the link.

Conjunctions on the Autumn Equinox [Shinnyo-en at St. Bartholomew’s Church]

I’m bumping this post from 2013 to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and as a reminder that we need some Buddhist wisdom in the world today.

Early yesterday afternoon I found myself sitting in the sanctuary at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. The Parish was founded in 1835; this is its third church, built in the second decade of the 20th Century. It is Byzantine in style, with glittering mosaics on the interior.

The pipe organ is the largest in New York City, and one of the ten largest in the world. I didn’t know this when I sat there yesterday, for that was the first time I’d even been in the church. “Byzantine” didn’t even click in my mind yesterday, as I sat between my sister and her friend, Yasuko. But I was certainly thinking “icons” (“iconoclasm”), “Greek Orthodox,” and even “Russian,” the conjunction of which all but added up to Byzantine. But didn’t quite get there for me. This was, after all, an Episcopal Church, no?

Yes.

The Wikipedia tells me that it is this parish that brought Leopold Stokowski from Europe in 1905 to be its organist and choir director.

Holy crap! says I to myself, no way!

Way.

Stokowski went on to direct the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. He had become something of a celebrity by the time when, over 30 years later, he ran into Walt Disney at a restaurant in Los Angeles. Walt invited him over to his table and Fantasia was hatched. Not then and there, mind you, it took awhile. But that’s when the wheels started turning.

Walt’s father, Elias, had been one of many carpenters who worked on The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. And that fair featured a Japanese exhibit and pavilion on a small 16 acre in a lagoon. It was the unexpected hit of the fair and the first time most Westerners would have had an opportunity to encounter the Japanese, who’d only recently been subject to forced entry by Admiral Perry in 1853.

 

That was 120 years ago. Now, or rather yesterday, I was sitting in an Episcopal sanctuary for an Autumn equinox ceremony offered by a relatively new Buddhist sect, Shinnyo-en. My sister, Sally, who lives in Philadelphia, had come to New York for the occasion. It was a special one because the current head of the sect, Her Holiness Shinso Ito, had traveled from Japan to conduct the ceremonies, Sharing the Light of Peace on Saturday (yesterday), to be followed today (Sunday) by floating lanterns in Central Park.

After the principals had processed into the sanctuary (paced by the ringing of a lovely little bell), the ceremony began with three prayers. A blue-clad Sufi priestess danced and whirled a prayer while a young woman sang, relieving her guitar of the need for gentle weeping. Then a Catholic priest sang his Latin in a voice ancient as the hills and young as the dawn. Finally, a Hindu priestess chanted a sutra, threading her syllables through three millennia of microtonal immediacy and grace.

Much of the service was conducted in chant. There was a choir of chanters to the left, with a young pure-voiced woman in the front row leading the way. Much of the chanting was call-and-response, with the congregation joining in the response. During the last half Her Holiness delivered a brief message; she spoke a few sentences in Japanese, which were then translated into English. Before that the Episcopal choir sang something. And somewhere in there some paper bits in the shape of flower petals (see the image at the head of this post) got tossed around. I stuck two of them into the pages of hymnals in front of me.

At the end of the ceremony 20 or so lanterns were lit had given to some 20 leaders of various faiths who then lined up, two deep, in front of the altar, holding their lanterns. It was a VERY touching moment.

The principals processed out of the ceremony...

...leaving the ushers with the task of getting us out of the sanctuary and back into the daylight.

On the way out I happened to see Steve Love, whom I’d met a number of years ago while working with Zeal Greenberg on World Island.

We chatted.

* * * * *

For a post about an utterly different service, see Religion on the Ground, Sunday Service. For a different encounter with the Japanese in Manhattan, again on a mission of peace, see The Japanese Take Manhattan, Protest Nukes.

Japan then and now

I think this is interesting. 🤔✨ pic.twitter.com/IxaUuNq2iJ

— tkasasagi 🐻 (@tkasasagi) April 11, 2025

Soaring brass [Mnozil rocks out] and dignified kids [Nakagurose Elementary School]

I love Mnozil, and I love those Japanese kids. I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle.

 

I love these guys, and I love this particular clip, crude, rude, loud, and bombastic though it is. And funny too. 

But I particularly like the passage that starts at about 3:23 and continues through 3:49, where the trumpets play in harmony, to about 4:14, where they're switching gears to move into the next section of the melody. That passage has been haunting me for the last two or three days. It pops into my inner ear and plays over and over until...it doesn't or until I listen to this clip.

Why? Well, I suppose in part because I'm a trumpeter and the trumpets get to soar. I know what it is to play like that. But you don't have to be a trumpeter to get there. You just have to like music.

* * * * *

I love these guys too, the whole clip. But they're not guys, most of them are girls–though there are a few guys here and there. I've been listening to this one for maybe 10 years. That long?

They clearly love what they're doing. They're serious about it. Above all, they're dignified. And, in a way, they're adult. Better, when they're performing they're no longer kids–for, as you can plainly see, that's what they are–they're just people making music.

No particular age. Age doesn't matter here.

Just musical beings.

The Cat Prince assumes his place

信州は標高が高い為に春が遅く旧暦の4月までお雛様を飾っています。季節の変わり目ご自愛下さい。
（猫王子は気がむくと登壇します…） pic.twitter.com/SawjQBNZTH

— いのうえもんぺ (@don_guri_gura) March 29, 2025

Google Translate: Because the state is at a high altitude, spring comes late and Hina dolls are displayed until April of the lunar calendar. Please take care of yourself as the seasons change. (The Cat Prince will take to the stage whenever he feels like it...)

Today is Sakura Day 🌸 #SakuraDay

今日はさくらの日なのでハートの桜を置いておきますね🌸　#さくらの日 pic.twitter.com/39Sbrm36dF

— ハスカップ07 (@haskap1017) March 27, 2025