In today’s installment, we look at an old Japanese music tradition: enka. The pithy explanation is that it’s the Japanese equivalent of an American country-western song, but instead of beer, trucks, dogs, and break-ups, there’s sake, sakura, nostalgia, and break-ups. Of course, that’s only a small fraction of the story. Wikipedia has a decent-length entry
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It’s another edition of Weekend Spotlight. The current request: more covers. Look up what we’ve done before before investigating this week’s half-boiled list of hits. Now, count up your songs!
【ニコニコ動画】ブラック★ロックシューター PV This is the trailer you will see if you head over to the Black★Rock Shooter channel on Nico. The site opened on Tuesday to help promote the anime which will be bundled with the September issue of Hobby Japan (available July 24th), as well as upcoming issues of Megami Magazine (July 30) and Monthly
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Vocaloid NND Weekly Ranking Weekly Vocaloid Ranking #144 “Unselected” The summer is heating up (at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) and it’s only gotten hotter with new news on Vocaloids Lily and Tonio. It’s shaping up to be a battle of East and West, Europe and Asia, green tea and black
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“Conpeitou” by BF. Just a friendly reminder (or first notice, if you weren’t here last week) that the Weekly Vocaloid Ranking is taking a personal day and will air tomorrow. In order to tide you over, you can check out Nico’s weekly ranking, the Week 144 omake, a recommended video from last week’s sub-30, or
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If you’ve been following this blog long enough and carefully enough, you’ll notice that I was conspicuously absent for most of the Spring. I apologize for that, and all I have to explain myself are a diploma and these pictures from my Las Vegas trip. Seriously, though, I do feel bad for disappearing and hope
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This weekend is an interesting coincidence. Anime Expo is going on right now, with quite an array of guests. One being Megumi “Gumi” Nakajima (her Macross foil, May’n, is there, too) and another is Yuu “Luka” Asakawa. Such an odd pairing in such an odd place captures the imagination. Well, it captures my imagination, anyway,
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The B★RS animation site announced that the 50-minute anime will be streamed for free June 25th through August 31st. It is unclear at this point if it’ll be Japan-only or not. This is all part of a big promo push during that time that starts with a free DVD extra as part of Hobby Japan
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Nico Nico Douga hit 10 Million uploads last Friday night, nearly approximately 3 years and 1 week after the site went live. It’s a major milestone and everyone involved at Niwango should be proud. So who got the magic 10 Million? Click the jump and find out.
For those of you in locations that follow Daylight Savings Time, we set the clocks ahead one hour on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Since that hour is lost, we need to budget our time accordingly, so some short but sweet songs await you after the break.