It seems that today Japanese popular culture is getting more attention. As a graduate student at the University Of Oregon Asian Studies Program, studying specifically Japan, I'm interested in it all.

First, it would be helpful to learn Japanese. In addition, it would be useful to know how to write Japanese as well. To help you out, there is the Online CJK-English Dictionary or Jeffery's Waei-Eiwa Jiten.

Next, you could try to look at one of the best general links to Japanese web sites, the Japan Window, a joint project between NTT, the Japanese government and Stanford University. The Council of East Asia Librarians Homepage is another excellent and comprehensive resource for all sort of web pages about East Asia. For a slightly more irreverent collections of links but still highly useful, there is always the Anti-Japanophile Japan Page. If you ever travel to Japan, it would be good to know what the exchange rate is. Additionally useful is a guide to the new Japanese postal codes.

Also highly useful is news from Japan. The Daily Yomiuri and The Japan Times, two English language Japanese newspapers have decent news websites, updated daily.

More fun is finding out schedules and travel information in Japan. Here is a couple pages for rail and air.

Now, some of the pages that these links lead to might look like gibberish, unless you are able to view Japanese encoded pages. Babel, a great international font resource is also useful to look at, giving good tips on not only international fonts, but information on making your computer multilingual.

If you wish to learn about Japanese culture, or just order some neat products, you could try Mangajin magazine, which features not only a magazine that uses manga to learn Japanese, but also has available all sorts of odds and ends goodies. For a larger selection of anime and manga translated into English, you can try Viz Communications, the largest distributor of anime and manga in the US. They also carry many popular titles such as Ranma 1/2. For other information, there is J-pop an online magazine covering the world of Japanese pop culture run by the folks at Viz. Another must for manga fans to check out is Comic Box, the premier magazine of manga criticism in Japan. For a more serious and general discussion of Japan and other Far Eastern cultures, you can check the back issues of Journal of Asian Studies.

If you are looking for anime or manga, a more general search resource for information on a particular title is the Anime Web Turnpike. There you can find site with information on many series and writers, such as the work of Hiyao Miyazaki, director of My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delievery Service.

For a good selection of information about Japanese popular music, you can try out the Music in Japan page. While trying to find good information on Japanese pop is hard to find, since the pages disappear and appear fairly frequently, this page list a good selection of pages, covering wide range of styles. The best resource for Japanese pop is Bonsai's Jpop Pages, giving links to a wide range of pages to a wide range of groups.

And just because the city has a special place in my heart, I have to include the City of Yokohama Home Page, which has some information about the city.

Page created and maintained by Bryan Chaney

Created October 29th, 1996
Modified January 9th, 2001

image copyright © 1997 Time-Warner Inc. and Amblin Entertainment, used without permission.

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