When I wrote An open letter to Asian people from a weeaboo, I wanted to apologize for my unprompted and enthusiastic interest in everything Japanese.

However, I never considered they’d find my obsession entertaining.

That’s exactly what I discovered last night when I was contacted by a Japanese television producer—Kaoru Inagawa of the show Wafu-Souhonke. Aired online and in Japan, Inagawa’s show features people all over the world who love Japanese culture and products.

Here’s an episode shot in Los Angeles. I don’t know any Japanese, but it looks like the camera crew is walking around Hollywood, asking people about their interest in Japan and whether they own anything from Japan. If anyone can translate, help me out!

Inagawa said she contacted me because I live near Washington DC and own a kotatsu. How did I even get a kotatsu, she wanted to know. I bought it at Ginza, a Japanese furniture store in Dupont Circle. What brand? I never checked—it’s a Morita. She wanted to know about my yukata, my bento box collection, and my interest in Japanese cooking, too.

Inagawa wasn’t fazed by my anime or manga collections, but she definitely surprised by how I, a white American, was so invested in her culture.

“Surely you are half-Japanese?” she asked.

“Nope, just really, really otaku,” I replied.

She was especially curious about whether I have any friends like me. I talked about my friends volunteering at Sakura Matsuri later today, everyone at Anime USA, and bringing onigiri to Kevin Bolk’s holiday party—she was intrigued by onigiri as a party food.

After our chat, Inagawa followed up with an email, part of which she’s given me permission to post on my blog:

“If you find some people who really really love Japanese culture and collect something from Japan or are into unique Japanese traditional things at the festival, please let me know. For example, who does Japanese painting and uses brushes from Japan, or who are into Shodo (Japanese writing) or Japanese archery… something very traditional and unique is what we are looking for. Let me know if you know anyone, so I can convince the director to do a show in your area!”

Otaku in the DMV area: do you fit the bill? Please write to me about your love for Japan. You know we’d all look great on TV dubbed over by peppy Japanese voice actors. Let’s make it happen!

P.S. Also if you’re around DC, see you at Sakura Matsuri today!

Last week I had the opportunity to be interviewed for filmmaker Jeff Clark’s documentary on American otaku.

Jeff and I met through Anime USA. Since, I’m temporarily filling in our press position there, he wrote to me to inquire about filming at the convention. After I approved him, he checked out my website and asked if I’d be interested in being part of his project. Obviously I was more than happy to help!

We talked about my documentary work at conventions as a fan and an observer, and he asked me some fascinating questions that I hadn’t given much thought to before and really helped me see my work with new eyes. The answers, of course, will be in the final film.

I admit it was difficult for me to loosen up and speak naturally in front of the camera. I’ve done a lot of filming, but very rarely have I been filmed myself! I am feeling a lot of new respect for my interview subjects over the years.

Six months in the making, the documentary as of yet doesn’t have a release date. But I’ll be sure to announce it when it does!

I didn’t want to take my Race/Community reporting class. I couldn’t see why this was a required class and the class I wanted to take instead, on website building, was just an elective. While my future job might depend on my programming abilities, who wants a white woman to write their race beat?

Well, Race/Community was about so much more than that. It taught me to look beyond labels and provided me with tools to tell peoples’ stories in genuine ways, minus the judgment that sometimes seeps in to this kind of reporting. Overall, it’s the most valuable course I took this semester.

I focused most of my work in the class on local young people with Muscular Dystrophy. You can find two excerpts from my final on American Observer here and here. My total piece was over 3500 words! So when it came time to create the multimedia part of my piece, I focused on why this project was important to me. And some of you who know me already know why: my amazing boyfriend John lost his brother to the disease.

This April, a park was opened in John’s hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia, in memory of his brother. I covered the event from a personal angle in the video below. It’s a very different approach from my usually removed, journalistic angle. Do you like it better than my usual work? Check it out below:

T-MODE’s “matsuri” helped John discover a new talent!

Great, thanks for asking! For the tiniest convention I’ve ever attended, (“fun sized,” as the Vice Chair told me,) T-MODE certainly had a lot to offer. I especially enjoyed playing Japanese-style festival games at the matsuri.

Regarding filming, this was possibly my most successful endeavor yet. Having my own camera is allowing me to get really acquainted with just one machine and understand how to implement it to the fullest. I also used my mini-tripod for the first time, and it really made a difference.

As of now, I have more footage than I know what to do with! I’ve already made a short video about the T-MODE staff, but that’s just scratching the surface. I talked to artists, dealers, guests, and attendees plus got plenty of B-roll. Some of this will go toward promotional stuff for T-MODE if they want it, but the bulk of it will make great material for my documentary-in-process.

Here’s video number one:

Looks like I just can’t stick to my updating schedule this week! Since Thursday evening, I’ve been busy covering T-MODE. With around 300 attendees, I’ve had free range of the place and access to interviews with convention chairs and even honored guests. One such guest that I got an interview with yesterday was author Roland Kelts, whom I had the privilege of hearing at Anime Boston earlier this month. Only this time, I got to talk with him directly.

Sometimes I even climbed on tables to get the perfect shot.

My goal was to get some good quotes from Kelts to use in my documentary-in-the-making about anime fandom in America. For better or for worse, my video camera died during the interview so I decided to ask Kelts what he thought about my project since, as the author of a book about Japanese pop culture in America, he’s a documentarian himself. I wrote down his advice, and I’ve transcribed it for you below:

“I would suggest writing a book on top of making a film. There’s only so much you can do psychologically in a film. You can show people and have voice overs, which are always boring, and show talking heads, which is also boring. My filmmaker friends say, “Kelts, you’re just an old print guy,” but this is my opinion.

“For people interested in covering anime, the next interesting territory is going to be fandom. Someone should cover what happens at these big conventions. Who are these kids who drove all night to Seattle in order to party for the weekend with their friends? What’s with all the cosplay- even crossplay? If not for the conventions, people wouldn’t walk into Starbucks downtown wearing these outfits. Cons liberate fans to really let loose.

“It’s not just the medium, the anime, that causes this behavior. It’s the convention, it’s the event. Someone young needs to follow them, to find out jpw many people are staying in a hotel room, what they’re willing to put up with. And keep in mind there is no willful participation on the behalf of the producers. Anime directors never said, ‘Hey, if we get Americans into anime, they’ll start going to conventions to hang out together.’

“New manifestations of fandom have grown in the soil of the U.S. – there are anime conventions every weekend, and they’re breaking records every year. And what’s more, they’re showing up around something as nebulous as Japanese pop culture. Maybe people in these numbers would show up for a boat show in Miami, but intense numbers of people are showing up for Japanese culture conventions all over the place. Would this many people show up for a Hollywood convention?

“It’s a real phenomenon. Someone just has to be willing to do the legwork. As an author, that’s what I care about most. To write my book, I had to go talk to people. I didn’t just sit and deconstruct anime films in my basement.

“We call it Japanese culture but it doesn’t just come out of some big maw called Japan. Lots of different people are making lots of different things. The same way, people in Japan don’t think of American imports as American pop-culture. Green Day, Brittany Spears, and Rihanna are all so different from one another and they’re known as themselves, not as American pop culture. It’s Starbucks, not an American coffee shop.

“The idea of what Americans are interested as something just called anime even is dated. You’d have to look at all the different types of imports, what American fans are really into.”

Thanks Roland Kelts for your invaluable advice. Your print sensibilities have reminded me to focus on the topic itself, not just the medium. And while I’m not sure how I feel about writing a book, a series of print articles might make a great supplement to my film work.

Edit: my article with video is now up on the American Observer Web site here.

I just uploaded the last video I will be creating from my Katsucon 2010 footage. I’m publishing it on my school’s graduate student publication, the American Observer, later today, but I wanted my blog readers to be the first to see it.

This video is a compilation of reactions from some of the guests I talked to at the maid cafe. Sorry I couldn’t get everybody in it! If you took the time to speak with me at the cafe this year, whether you’re in the final cut or not, thank you so much for your time.

And so, here it is:

P.S. You may have noticed that I’m making a few changes around the site, including a page dedicated just to links. If you have a page or blog that you think I should link to, post it in the comments!

It’s only natural that my love of infographics has led to an intense affection for data. About a week ago, I decided I wanted to make some infographics about the rise of fandom documentaries, how diverse they are, and how they’re getting so popular that even Joss Whedon is getting on the fandom-doc train.

The only problem is, no such data exists! Even IMDB can’t help me find a complete list of fandom documentaries (at least, without me having to sort through 20,000 documentaries on every subject. Really.)

So I’m tossing this question out to you, internet users and fellow fans. I’ve made a list of the 30 documentaries I could find so far. If you see something missing, let me know in the comments or by email. I know you’ll find something I’m missing. Thanks in advance!

I’ve been working on redesigning this blog lately. Now that I talk mainly about anime, games, and fandom, I’m considering a design that reflects my status as an otaku journalist. One problem I’ve run into is that I really would like to use an 8-bit Space Invader icon on my logo, but I’m not sure if it’s a fair use image.

This isn’t an unusual question. In America, we’re constantly concerned about copyright and fair use; whether or not we’re stealing somebody’s work. Whether it’s a picture, a song, a book, or a movie, somebody owns the rights to it. If it isn’t the creator him or herself, then it might be a major corporation. And ownership is notoriously hard to determine. But if these items are parts of our overall culture, why do we as a country own and control their use?

This is a question animator Nina Paley ran into while she was working on her 2008 film, Sita Sings the Blues. If the inspirations for her film– Annette Hanshaw’s 1920′s jazz vocals; and the Ramayana, the ancient sanskrit epic– were owned by other people, how could she make her movie legal for people to watch? As a result of not being able to obtain a copyright, Sita became the first full-length “copyleft” film, licensed entirely under Creative Commons.

A still from Paley’s film, Sita Sings the Blues.

Last week I attended a lecture by Nina Paley that was put on by the Women’s Coalition at the American University School of Communication. I’ve been fascinated by Nina’s plight and gutsy solution since Boing Boing began covering it in 2006.

Paley began her talk with a definition of culture: “It comes from somewhere, it’s going somewhere, and it’s just passing through.” As a fan of Japanese culture, you can see why this stuck with me. Afterward, she discussed memes. Now you can bet your lolcats that I thought I knew what a meme was, but I hadn’t hear her definition: “a unit of culture. Just like genes exist by copying, the same is true with memes.” It didn’t take her much time to convince me that the supposed ownership of cultural units is bad for our society.

While cultural units are put under copyright and restricted use in order to protect the creators, Paley said that this doesn’t usually work out. For example, corporations end up owning the rights to artists’ work for decades after they are gone. Paley pointed out how artificial this ownership is- you can see on the Sita site that multiple corporations own percentages of the same Annette Hanshaw song, adding up to 103% instead of 100%!

Paley’s solution? Creative Commons. Anyone can download her movie, and everyone owns it. People can use her work as inspiration or build off of it. She thinks this is great. Rather than getting offended that other artists would make greeting cards based off her work, she is happy to have inspired people the way the Ramayana and Annette Hanshaw inspired her. Through a CC license, the memes can keep spreading.

Today, Paley works at Question Copyright as the artist in residence. She has almost paid off all her legal fees plus the expense of her film. Her theory that people are willing to pay for quality even when it’s out there for free worked out.

Readers, do you think copyright is an outdated restriction on culture, or an important way to keep artists’ work safe?

Maybe you guessed this after I missed my Wednesday and then even my Friday post updates, but I’ve been working extra hard on getting something workable out of my Katsucon 16 footage. Many thanks to maids Sarah Blandy, Hanna Korangkool, and Daniel Redmond; cameraman Alex Thompson; and everyone at the American University New Media Center who helped me salvage my film.

Well, as I suspected, there wasn’t enough for a full documentary, but I did get three videos out of it (so far, that is. I plan to do a fourth one focusing on cafe guests.) I ended up breaking a lot of my film rules; I usually refrain from doing jump cuts or from having my off-camera voice in the video. But in these cases, it couldn’t be helped. I don’t want this to seem like an apology for my videos because I really am proud of them, but more of a disclaimer in case you’re wondering why my editing style changed.

So, without further ado, here are the videos!

The bad news: I will not be producing a maid cafe documentary.

The good news: I will still be writing a maid cafe story.

The camera I unwittingly used. Photo from archivist David Mattinson.

What happened: Sometimes you can do everything right, but still lose your footage. I’ve spent the last couple days trying to capture my video to no avail. When I checked the original tapes, they were corrupted for reasons nobody at my school’s camera rental or media center can determine. Despite the photo, I’m not even sure it’s an issue with the camera, which has since worked fine. Also, even the worst camera is designed to warn you when it is ruining your tapes, and we never received an error message.

But here’s the fact: the footage is too buggy, noisy, and pixelated to use. It’s the worst case scenario for any filmmaker. But I have an ace up my sleeve- I am also a traditional journalist.

So the new plan is for a print story, using all my powers of description and the choicest quotes from my interviews. (Even though the sound is unusable, it is still comprehensible enough for me to find quotes.) I will use the least choppy of my video stills to illustrate the story, and take the 15 minutes of usable footage I have to put together an audio or video clip to fit.

The lesson here is that there’s always a way to get the story, even when things go wrong. As much as modern journalism relies on technology, when it comes down to it, people make the stories, not the camera.