Andrez Bergen is senior editor of Impact magazine in the UK. He’s a long-term writer on Japanese pop culture, music, anime, movies and weird stuff who has covered the space since 2001. Andrez also runs Tokyo-based IF? Records, makes music as Little Nobody, writes a personal blog called JapaneseCultureGoNow!, and can be found on Twitter @andreziffy
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- Top 12 Manga Romps Ever (with a catch)
- May 12th, 2010Category: Culture
- Today I chatted with my student Aiko K, an apprentice mangaka who works on both shojo and shonen styles of manga but personally prefers doing horror stuff herself. Somehow we got to talking about a few different tomes I'd read myself over the years, and ended up with ... » Continue Reading
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- Shikinejima: Flying Fish Island
- May 4th, 2010Category: Travel
- Just a three hour jet-ferry ride from Tokyo is an island amidst the Izu islets called Shikinejima. Jima means island in Japanese, and Shikinejima is your basic garden variety jima, even if your first impression, upon approaching (with flying fish spiral ... » Continue Reading
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- Gumyo-ji Temple Sakura Beer
- April 28th, 2010Category: Uncategorized
- hanks to Yokohama's oldest surviving place of worship, Gumyo-ji Temple (ぐみょうじ) - which was apparently built a millennium ago - comes one of those joys you stumble across anew even after almost a decade in Japan. In this case that joy is something that combines two ... » Continue Reading
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- Hiroshi Abe’s New Trick
- April 19th, 2010Category: Arts & Entertainment
- I like Hiroshi Abe. The last time I saw him (aside from in recurrent TV advertising here in Japan) was in the 2008 reshooting of Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 epic Kakushi toride no san akunin (The Hidden Fortress) – the movie that George Lucas has admitted made such a hug ... » Continue Reading
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- Tokyo Parasite Musuem
- April 16th, 2010Category: Travel
- Situated not all that far from Meguro Station, in Tokyo, is an unforgettable rejoinder to the foodstuffs unveiled elsewhere in this blog. The Tokyo Parasite Museum is a trendy dating locale for young couples (no joke), and right near its entrance you get the gist o ... » Continue Reading
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- Michiko to Hatchin
- April 12th, 2010Category: Arts & Entertainment
- If Fuji TV wanted to kick off their 50th year on air with a sizeable bang, they certainly picked the spot-on anime series to do so: Michiko to Hatchin (Michiko and Hatchin) sizzled when it first hit screens back in October 2008, and at the time it promised to be a sol ... » Continue Reading
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- Tsukiji Market: Big Fish out of Water
- April 5th, 2010Category: Uncategorized
- Stats have it that there’re almost a hundred centralized wholesale markets in 56 cities across Japan: 50-odd for fish, 19 for flowers, and 10 for meat. Tsukiji, here in Tokyo, is the heftiest of the lot; in fact it’s the biggest fish market in the world. Remember th ... » Continue Reading
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- Tokyo’s Postmodern Architectural Purge
- April 2nd, 2010Category: Arts & Entertainment
- One of my preferred sci-fi flicks from the early ‘50s is The Thing from Another World, with James Arness menacing a crew of American military trapped on an Arctic base. The direction, while credited to Christian Nyby, smacked more of Howard Hawks’ style — and while Ha ... » Continue Reading
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- Ryuhei Kitamura versus Kitamura Ryuhei
- March 29th, 2010Category: Uncategorized
- "Versus was the movie that changed my life and it means everything to me. The spirit of it is pure me and that's why it was so special. Fight your destiny, find out who you are, fight through to the end for your love; it ain't over till it's over... That theme and mes ... » Continue Reading
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- Masayuki Yoshinaga: Goth Lolita Fashion Guru
- March 23rd, 2010Category: Uncategorized
- Masayuki Yoshinaga and I have a couple of things in common. We were both born in the same year, we relocated our lives to Tokyo, and the two of us like to indulge in a spot of photography. But Osaka-born Yoshinaga has had a tiny bit more success behind the viewfinde ... » Continue Reading
