AKICILJ: Japanese pop culture recommendations for Alex.

[rivka]

Alex is learning about Japan this week. We're going to be doing origami and reading stories and going to the museum to look at classical Japanese art and eating sushi and learning to write a few kanji and so on. But modern Japanese pop culture is so vibrant, and is such a massive international phenomenon, that I'd really like to expose Alex to some of that, rather than just the high and/or folk culture elements that kids' educational materials tend to include.

I know that there are people on my friends list who follow Japanese pop culture, and others whose teenage kids follow it. It would be awesome if you could link me to web-available resources like songs/music videos, cartoons, toys, clothes, etc. which are young-child appropriate (that's the part that makes just Googling this on my own tricky) and which would give Alex an idea of things that might be enjoyed by young Japanese girls.

(No tentacle porn please, kthxbai.)

Comments

[tchemgrrl.livejournal.com]

(deleted and reposted for html fail)

I'm trying to think of the kid-friendliest manga/anime I've watched that's not already super-common on tv. All three of these are heavy on the interesting female characters and are available on Netflix.

-Kaleido Star is a really cute anime about a girl who wants to join a Cirque de Soleil-style performance troupe. (Its central theme--"I'm going to work hard to become the best [X] EVAR" is super, super common in kid-friendly anime.)
-Bamboo Blade is a similar one in that way, about a high school Kendo team, and very much a "regular kids doing regular stuff" kind of series. Of these two, I suspect that you might prefer Bamboo Blade but Alex would prefer the sparkliness of Kaleido Star.
-Azumanga Daioh has no central plot whatsoever--it's just a bunch of junior high school girls and their teacher living their lives, but it has more of the type of cultural touchstones that might be useful for an actual lesson. Things Alex might notice that would show up in most episodes--their school uniforms, their school lunches, the idea of cultural variations within Japan (a character that's new to town is constantly shown as not knowing how things work in Tokyo and having a funny accent. She's got a Texan accent in the English dub.) There is some very, very mild PG stuff that an adult will catch (a male teacher that's always hanging around when the girls are having a swimming lesson, a female teacher that goes bar-hopping with her friend on weekends), but I can't think of anything I wouldn't want a child to see.

Bento would be another fun thing, unless you want to avoid the inevitable requests for a fancy lunch. The LJ Bento community (http://community.livejournal.com/bentolunch/) is very friendly with everything from the simple to ornate. This (http://www.e-obento.com/main-Frame-set.htm) is my favorite bento blog, which is in Japanese though online translators sometimes help a bit. Click a month on the top to get started.

JBox/JList (http://www.jbox.com/) (JBox is the <18-safe version) has a lot of amusing things for sale under the "Traditional", "Wacky" and "Snack" sections. It's a mix of goofy tourist junk and actual stuff that people get homesick for, as far as I can tell, but it might be a fun place to wander for ideas.

[tchemgrrl.livejournal.com]

Oh, and for reading material: Yotsuba&! is an incredibly adorable and child-appropriate manga that shows a four-year old child named Yotsuba discovering many things in day-to-day Japanese life. (A typical storyline: Yotsuba learns that recycling is good for the earth, and so she tapes an empty potato chip package to her shirt and deems it a "snack pocket". Then she asks for snacks to fill the new pocket. That kind of thing.)

If Alex has read any comics, she might find the backwards-relative-to-American comics interesting. The language is not early-reader simple, though.