Japan for the Uninvited

Movie violence is a watered-down version of real violence. Keep diluting it, and you get TV violence, slapstick violence, cartoon violence, and finally: Pokemon violence. Good, honest thuggery, saturated with enough cuteness that kids can convince their parents to take them to see it. Basically, a teenage runaway wanders around ...

Pachinko is the largest industry in the world's second largest economy, but few people outside Japan have ever heard of it. Raking in over 30 trillion yen every year (to the pathetic 18 trillion of Japan's massive car industry), it's also the world's largest gambling enterprise. Vegas is small ...

Banana Yoshimoto's 1987 breakthrough, 'Kitchen', featured a transexual father and a boy who wears his dead girlfriend's school uniform. Since then, the writer (real name Mahoko Yoshimoto) has sold over 6 million books. Her father, Takaaki Yoshimoto, was a philosopher and leading light of the New Left in the 1960s, so Mahoko's ...