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In Boston recently, a journalist asked me: Is Japan really doing anything with its "soft power," or is it just a lot of talk

With a few notable exceptions, the explosion of interest in Japan's pop cultural exports has been ignited by foreigners' passions and sustained by Internet accessibility. The phenomenon is largely demand-driven, a product of quality content being sought and consumed by overseas fans, academics and artists. Japanese pop culture is being pulled into foreign markets far more than it is being pushed.

(www.animemasterpieces.com), a venture that combines anime screenings with lectures, seminars and study guides.

 Proposed Panel for SCMS Conference, Los Angeles, March 17-21  The Artificial Life of Film: Dolls, Puppets, Automata, and Cyborgs in Cinema  Organizer Names:  Deborah Levitt, Assistant Professor, Culture and Media Studies,  Eugene Lang College, The New School  Allison de Fren, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow,  Ammerman Center for  Arts & Technology, Connecticut College  Summary: From the early films of Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, and the  Surrealist movement to Blade Runner, Being John Malkovich, Ghost in  the Shell, and Lars and the Real Girl, the cinema has had an enduring  fascination with artificial humans due to their unique ability to  picture the tensions between motion and stasis, animation and  inanimation, humanity and artificiality, the real and the virtual,  and the vital and the mechanical. Artificial bodies have also made  diverse appearances in film theory, from the "spiritual automaton"of  Gilles Deleuze to Roland Barthes' meditations on a cinematic  automaton in Camera Lucida to the broad field of reflections on  cyborgs and/in cinema. This panel seeks to interrogate any or all of  these conjugations of cinema and artificial lives — material and  philosophical, live action or animated, in fiction or documentary. We  are interested in the kinds of performativities engendered by these  ambivalent bodies: their uncanniness, their ontological  destabilizations, their epistemological games of masking and  unmasking. Papers might also consider how artificiality is mobilized  within particular genres or what kinds of meanings accumulate around  artificial bodies in relation to gender or race. We are interested in  how these figures help to construct a new genealogy of audiovisual  culture, one that could illuminate cinema's digital or animatic  present and future, as well as connections to various moments in the  historical long durée of dolls, puppets, and automata.  Please send an abstract of up to 300 words, five key references, and  a brief bio to levittd@newschool.edu and adefren@conncoll.edu by  August 10th.

They also said that an alarming loss of Bible knowledge among teens is eroding students’ ability to understand British and American literature impairing their study of art, music, history, and culture.

Especially with regard to targeting the problem among teens I suspect that a Manga Bible or a LOLCatsBible will do far more to impart basic Bible knowledge than a sort-of scholarly Study Bible.

Sales of fanzines had never really caused big problems so long as they were done only at one-day fanzine exhibitions. However, some fanzines now sell in the thousands or tens of thousands of copies due to an increase in the number of bookstores selling them and the popularity of Internet shopping.

Even after the man had stopped selling it by himself, his fanzine carrying Doraemon’s “final” episode continued to be sold at Internet auctions, sometimes going for tens of thousands of yen.

Yet the series remains unfinished due to Fujiko’s death in 1996.