Anime King Arthur? Anime Sherlock Holmes? What?
Happy New Year and Akemashite Omedetou from all of us at J-List! We hope 2018 is a wonderful year for everyone, filled with peace, prosperity and pantsu.
One of the basic rules of life in Japan is that the roles of New Year’s Day and Christmas are flipped. In the West, Christmas is generally a solemn event while New Year’s is an excuse to have a loud party and pop a bottle of champagne, but in Japan, things are the opposite. Christmas is time for a party with firecrackers and karaoke, and January 1st is an extremely quiet day to do nothing but relax in the kotatsu and eat mikan oranges, then go to a Shinto shrine to pray for good luck in the new year. After the shrine, you go visiting with family, bringing new year greetings and eating unique foods like pickled radishes and sweet beans that are as familiar to Japanese as Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce is to Americans. Most of all, you try to rest, because if you’re busy on the first day of the year, you’ll supposedly be busy all year long. So, what was your New Year’s celebration like?
It can be fun to take a step back and look at how we perceive famous historical or fictional characters through the filter of our popular culture. Over the centuries, iconic names like King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, Joan of Arc and Gilgamesh have been portrayed in different ways, always filtered through the local pop culture of that country. Hollywood will generally be Hollywood, lavishing any story with huge CGI budgets and lots of exploding cars, while England will be more subtle, applying their own meticulous approach to story and character building and keeping everything properly British. Japan, as usual, will take any historical or legendary character and turn them into an extremely cute female character, anthropomorphizing and genderbending and doing whatever is needed to get the proper moe reactions from fans. So, how do you feel about anime King Arthur? Anime Sherlock Holmes? Which one would you choose?
(If you like the idea of anime King Arthur and other remixed historical characters, you should totally play Eiyu*Senki, a fabulous game of world conquest and harem building. Buy the Steam version on sale now (there’s a DLC uncensor patch), or pick up the Limited or Collector’s editions from J-List!)
The new year is here, and J-List is coming out swinging with new and restocked products on the site. Enjoy our new figures, gorgeous traditional items (including Year of the Dog decorations), delicious Japanese snacks, and our usual lineup of naughty products for guys and girls. Browse the site now, and get a great start to 2018!
