ReDotPop

When Can We Be Friends?

[29.Mar.09] :. When it comes to sports, while we may be swimming in the cool pool of popular culture, if those sports happen to pit South Korea against Japan, then we have strayed into the searing hot tub of politics.

Jero: Oh Yes, He Can

[17.Feb.09] :. How a young 'half-breed' is reviving a very old, traditional, insular, often ridiculed form of Japanese music.

In a Groove, in a Grove

[6.Nov.08] :. Even in the dead of summer when a cacophony of cicadas clinging to the limbs assail the ears, the visitor caught in the grove cannot help but be sucked into the mystical vortex.

When Bathing Suits None and All

[6.Jun.08] :. In the ReDot realm, while no bathing suits are allowed for any at bath-time, bathing suits one and all.

Creating Japan: The Truth About the Myth

[1.Feb.08] :. Separated lovers, a hero, a villain, creepy surrogates, immortal power, the wrath of the gods, a perilous journey to hell and back, a breakneck chase, daring escapes, fortune, and an ending that will make you cry yourself to sleep.

High Moon: The Japanese Western

[4.Oct.07] :. ReDotPop’s version of the western, the re-emerging samurai genre, serves as moral compass, as spiritual guide at a time when it is needed most.

You Are Where You Eat

[7.Jun.07] :. This is a story about food. Specifically, the transformative powers of the humble udon noodle.

Fishing for Deep Dot Pearls

[1.Feb.07] :. In many popular Japanese films, enduring elements of Japanese/US relations, endemic attitudes of superiority and equality among races, and volatile notions of convention and propriety are pitted against emergent, maverick, fun-loving difference.

The Saga of Sagi Society

[29.Sep.06] :. We ReDotPoppers find ourselves in the moment of con, in an age of deceit, trapped within the epoch of cheat, run-through by an ideology of insincerity. It is definitely time for a new Emperor, a Hisato, whose name includes virtue.

Breaking News in Japan

[25.May.06] :. Athletes such as Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui prop up the national psyche at a time when youth crime, economic decline, and political dysfunction are at their highest.

Meditations on the Festival of Mediations

[31.Mar.06] :. The Japan Media Arts Festival succeeded in capturing the bedlam of multiplicities, the noise of creative expression, the messy complexity of negotiated meaning that is Art.

A Change in Seasons (Greetings)

[24.Jan.06] :. He wants to stay in your good graces, so Holden and his family (yes! the whole family, for including close relations in this complicated, frenzied relations ritual are important!) send their nenga jou to you. All the way from the land of ReDotPop.

RedWebPop

[22.Nov.05] :. On-line suicide clubs, pornographic blogs, lethal chat rooms, and killer confessionals: Japan's webbed world is often a murky realm where the psychologically meek meet the morally interrupted. A peek inside ReDot's weird wild web.

Cool Hand Koizumi?

[23.Sep.05] :. Japan's PM, Junichiro Koizumi, is a master of those tricky steps in the political waltz.

PinkDotPop

[29.Jul.05] :. The 'fun' in fertility. Japan's unzipped, let it all hang out there approach to sex, er, 'fertilty'.

ReDotFlow: J-Pop That Would Hit Anywhere

[13.Apr.05] :. ReDotFlow has been expressed through greater interactions and collaborations between countries; record and entertainment companies, producers, singers and musicians on both ends of the Asian region. Holden provides an in-depth look at how music from Japan spans pop culture boundaries.

ReDotFlow: J-Pop That Would Hit Anywhere

[13.Apr.05] :. ReDotFlow has been expressed through greater interactions and collaborations between countries; record and entertainment companies, producers, singers and musicians on both ends of the Asian region. Holden provides an in-depth look at how music from Japan spans pop culture boundaries.

ReDotFlow: J-Pop That Would Hit Anywhere

[13.Apr.05] :. ReDotFlow has been expressed through greater interactions and collaborations between countries; record and entertainment companies, producers, singers and musicians on both ends of the Asian region. Holden provides an in-depth look at how music from Japan spans pop culture boundaries.

The Gist List: ReDotPop’s Most Memorable Moments, circa 2004 (part 3 of 3)

[16.Feb.05] :. It is perhaps the biggest story of ReDotPop 2004: baseball came to Sendai, bringing with it a dramatic strike between management and the players that struck at the very core of Japanese identity. The strike itself was so typically Japanese: the players continued to play weekday games -- so as not to inconvenience the fans too greatly -- and only suspended play on the weekends; and the fans became deeply embroiled in the matter. Holden wraps up his reflection on life in Japan, 2004, with this quintessential example of what it means to be Japanese in these times.

The Gist List: ReDotPop’s Most Memorable Moments, circa 2004 (part 2 of 3)

[9.Feb.05] :. Neighborly relations, intimacies among relations, relating, long-distance... a look at life in Japan, 2004, continues with stories of a resiliant abductee, a consummate baseball player, players in the film industry, and of course, members (of varying merit) in the Royal Family.

The Gist List: ReDotPop’s Most Memorable Moments Moments, circa 2004 (part 1 of 3)

[2.Feb.05] :. New Years' celebrations in Japan can get pretty roudy, as anyone who has suffered asphyxiation by rice cake would tell you - if they were alive to tell. Like New Years' celebrations the world over, the occasion calls for reflection on the year just passed. Holden looks back on 2004 in ReDotPop land with tongue-in-cheek. This is the first of three installments.

ReDotBlueDotPop: At Home, Away

[29.Sep.04] :. Holden takes a two-hour plane ride from Tokyo to Seoul and finds himself in a completely different, yet paradoxically very similar world of Japanese and Korean pop culture.

The Trials and Tribulations of Parenting Adolescent Techies

[26.May.04] :. ReDotPop faces tech-savvy, consumer-primed, expensive adolescence in the form of teenaged cell phone users. Holden wavers between pride and panic as his offspring dabble in art via on-screen decals, and explore a range of music via ring options.

Can Pop Last Forever?

[31.Mar.04] :. Is pop as ephemeral as a cherry blossom... like youth, so quick to burst with beauty and excitement, so quick to fade? Or is it a perpetually regenerating force, like the magnificent and tenacious sakura that hosts the blossom?

WhiteDotPop

[28.Jan.04] :. Japan is so much more than simply a handful of groups characterized by crystal-clear definitions and cut-and-dried allegiances: male, female; 'enka', rock; wheat tea, Coca-Cola; 'kimono', blue jeans.

DeaDotPop?

[19.Nov.03] :. ReDotPop -- A Concept Due Its Title -- It is a sniff-the-breeze, taste-the-frisky-freshness-of-freedom problem that has no Japanese word to describe it.

DeaDotPop?

[24.Sep.03] :. It wasn't until I disembarked in Narita, with my bottle of French brandy and Eiffel Tower mug and Polish soccer scarf and amber bracelet from the darkest Slavic forests, that I reentered the world of the living.

SMAP: The Story of Everything

[20.Aug.03] :. It wouldn't be far-fetched to venture that SMAP is a cultural institution, a cottage industry, and a magical commodity that works tirelessly to beget more commodities.

Spy-day Night at the Fights

[28.May.03] :. So much of Japanese TV these days appears predicated on this harsh formula: spying, confrontation, setting up and exposing the cads, giving them their due, then watching them twist and turn in the turbulent wind.

The Great Wave

[5.Feb.03] :. The false notion that culture exported worldwide is an American invention has been swept into the historical soup of misconception, along with famous fallacies such as Aryan supremacy and the glories of Stalinism or Maoism.

The Noble Sarariman

[6.Nov.02] :. He was a dupe, a fool, a brainless, clueless buffoon who'd been sold a bag of goods, and willingly sacrificed everything to gain nothing in a world that had quickly gone to garbage.

The Schizophrenic Collide-a-Scope

[4.Sep.02] :. Commercials not only serve as the sort of national archives for domestic events and values -- the town crier, if you will -- but advertising is one of the ways that popular culture actually manages to persist.

In the Main It’s More Than the Mane

[10.Jul.02] :. . . . (F)or all its post-war success, its unrivalled rise from the ashes, Japan views itself as the national equivalent of Charley Brown.

Aware of What They Wear?

[23.Apr.02] :. 'Do you know,' I inquired in wonder, 'what that . . .' careful how I pointed my finger, 'um . . . means?' She followed the line of query to the tip of her extremis, mouthed the words written thereon, returned her eyes to my general direction, face reddening (possibly implicating her in the act of cognizance), and replied, 'No?'

Consolidating Culture

[13.Feb.02] :. In such creations one finds evidence of the Japanese people's 'innate propensity toward shrinking things'.

Mediations of Japan: Ashita ga aru sa

[25.Sep.01] :. ReDotPop -- Ashita ga aru sa.

Mediations of Japan: Japan’s Beat Generation

[19.Apr.01] :. ReDotPop -- Japan's Beat Generation.

Mediations of Japan: The O-N Series

[8.Jan.01] :. ReDotPop -- The O-N Series.

Mediations of Japan: Brought to you by Public Transportation

[7.Oct.00] :. ReDotPop -- Brought to you by Public Transportation.

Mediations of Japan: Ranma

[5.Jul.00] :. ReDotPop -- Ranma.

Mediations of Japan: Food

[13.May.00] :. ReDotPop -- Food: With the duo endlessly crooning about crustaceans over radios, on variety shows, as backing in television commercials, through speakers in elevators and restaurants, via CD rentals, and in karaoke boxes, Puffy had Japan from Hiroshima to Hakodate singing the praises of scarfing shellfish along summer shorelines.

Sumo

[5.Apr.00] :. : This story is about sumo, but it begins in the back of a van.