“Ganige” apparently is short for manGA, aNIme, and GAmes (geemu), and it’s also a topic of discussion at eAT’08 KANAZAWA this year, according to anime!anime!. This weekend “Ganige Sangyou tte Kotobuki?” (”Congratulations to the Ganige Industry”) will be the topic of the twelfth annual eAT KANAZAWA event, which is the city of Kanazawa’s annual cultural exchange event.

I’m too sleepy to finish translating the rest of the article, which seems to be about past eAT KANAZAWA events. I’m happy about this year’s because finally someone besides me (and my travelling companion) will know that Kanazawa exists. It’s a beautiful city, home to some of Japan’s last remaining pre-WWII architecture as well as much of its gold-leafing and lacquering industry. I know that sounds nerdy, so let me rephrase in weaboo tourist-speak: I went to a real geisha house and drank gold leaf tea omg!

Japan Probe reports that people flying into Osaka are being greeted with a photo op: a group of cosplayers! Shown in their article are two maids, one of the ten million characters from Gundam Seed that I can never remember the name of, and a Rei Ayanami. Oh, and one of the maids is also a catgirl (double RAWR!).

Kotaku’s report (by Bashcraft) makes note of the recent foreigner-fingerprinting scheme, but having seen this article about the cosplayers, I have a brilliant plan to make the fingerprinting more amenable to the foreigners. It’s very simple:

Train cute maids and other cosplayers to do the fingerprinting.

Who would say no to being fingerprinted by Rei or Asuka? You could even have a couple of charming butlers– maybe a Walter and a Hayate –to help out with any nervous foreign ladies who arrive. Then we gaijin are charmed into giving you our fingerprints. And phone numbers. And money, probably. C’mon, it’s a win-win!

Original source: Mainichi
Secondary source: Japan Probe, Kotaku, Danny Choo

Posted by gia in Misc, News, Otaku • Comments (3)

A column has popped up on mycom about us foreign otaku (otaku gaikokujin). Apparently the author stopped one night at a cheap inn (I’m guessing it was a hostel) and met a bunch of CRAAAAZY GAIJIN OTAKU TYPES, who he chatted with.

Let’s see, there were mostly Finnish and French people around, and the author was impressed with how smoothly the conversation went (although the foreigners had to use dictionaries on occasion), they really liked JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and of course there were non-otaku foreigners too, and they really liked the rural areas of Japan and the onsens. The author also notes that their knowledge of Japanese pop culture wasn’t limited to just anime, manga, and games, but also one Fin really liked visual kei.

I don’t have time to go through all of the article at the moment, but all in all it sounds like the author was fairly impressed by the foreign otaku (rather than repulsed). Groovy!

Posted by gia in Anime, Gossip, JP News, Misc, News, Otaku • Comments (1)