1.
Akihabara
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Akihabara is a common name for the area around Akihabara Station in the Chiyoda ward of Tokyo, Japan. The area called Akihabara mainly belongs to Sotokanda district, Akihabara gained the nickname Akihabara Electric Town shortly after World War II for being a major shopping center for household electronic goods and the post-war black market. Nowadays, Akihabara is considered by many to be a cultural center and a shopping district for video games, anime, manga. Icons from popular anime and manga are displayed prominently on the shops in the area, the main area of Akihabara is located on a street just west of Akihabara Station, where most of the major shops are situated. Most of the shops are just west of the station, and the anime and manga shops. As mentioned above, the area called Akihabara now ranges over some districts in Chiyoda ward, Sotokanda, Kanda-Hanaokachō, the administrative district called Akihabara exists in Taitō ward and borders on Sotokanda at the middle of Akihabara and Okachimachi stations, but its half is occupied by JR tracks. The area that is now Akihabara was once near a city gate of Edo and this made the region a home to many craftsmen and tradesmen, as well as some low class samurai. The locals nicknamed the shrine Akiba after the deity that could fire. After Akihabara Station was built in 1888, the shrine was moved to the Taitō ward where it resides today. Since its opening in 1890, Akihabara Station became a freight transit point. Then, in the 1920s, the station saw a large volume of passengers after opening for public transport, and after World War II, the black market thrived in the absence of a strong government. This disconnection of Akihabara from government authority has allowed the district to grow as a market city and this new specialization brought in a new type of consumer, computer nerds or otaku. The market in Akihabara naturally latched onto their new customer base that was focused on anime, manga, on Sunday 8 June 2008 at 12,33 JST, a man drove into a crowd with a truck, then stabbed at least 17 people using a dagger. Seven died and ten were injured, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department arrested Tomohiro Katō,25, on suspicion of attempted murder, and arrested him again weeks later on suspicion of murder. Kato was eventually sentenced to death by the Tokyo District Court in 2011, the influence of otaku culture has shaped Akihabaras businesses and buildings to reflect the interests of otaku and gained the district worldwide fame for its distinctive imagery. Akihabara tries to create an atmosphere as close as possible to the game and anime worlds of customers interest, the streets of Akihabara are covered with anime and manga icons, and cosplayers line the sidewalks handing out advertisements, especially for maid cafés. The idol group AKB48, one of Japans highest selling contemporary musical acts, runs its own theater in Akihabara, the design of many of the buildings serves to create the sort of atmosphere that draws in otaku. Akihabaras role as a market has also allowed a large amount of amateur work to find a passionate audience in the otaku who frequent the area
2.
J-pop
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J-pop, natively also known simply as pops, is a musical genre that entered the musical mainstream of Japan in the 1990s. J-pop was further defined by new groups in the late 1970s, particularly electronic synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Eventually, J-pop replaced kayōkyoku in the Japanese music scene, the term was coined by the Japanese media to distinguish Japanese music from foreign music, and now refers to most Japanese popular music. The origin of modern J-pop is said to be Japanese-language rock music inspired by the likes of The Beatles, unlike the Japanese music genre called kayōkyoku, J-pop uses a special kind of pronunciation, which is similar to that of English. One notable singer to do so is Keisuke Kuwata, who pronounced the Japanese word karada as kyerada, additionally, unlike Western music, the major second was usually not used in Japanese music, except art music, before rock music became popular in Japan. At first, the term J-pop was used only for Western-style musicians in Japan, such as Pizzicato Five and Flippers Guitar, on the other hand, Mitsuhiro Hidaka of AAA from Avex Trax said that J-pop was originally derived from the Eurobeat genre. However, the became a blanket term, covering other music genres—such as the majority of Japanese rock music of the 1990s. O. A. Because the band did not want to perform J-pop music, their album featured the 1980s Pop of MTV, according to his fellow band member Toru Hidaka, the 1990s music that influenced him was not listened to by fans of other music in Japan at that time. Hide of Greeeen openly described their genre as J-pop. He said, I also love rock, hip hop and breakbeats, for example, hip hop musicians learn the culture of hip hop when they begin their career. We are not like those musicians and we love the music as very much. Those professional people may say What are you doing, but I think that our musical style is cool after all. By the Taishō period, Western musical techniques and instruments, which had introduced to Japan in the Meiji period, were widely used. Influenced by Western genres such as jazz and blues, ryūkōka incorporated Western instruments such as the violin, harmonica, however, the melodies were often written according to the traditional Japanese pentatonic scale. In the 1930s, Ichiro Fujiyama released popular songs with his tenor voice, Fujiyama sang songs with a lower volume than opera through the microphone. Jazz musician Ryoichi Hattori attempted to produce Japanese native music which had a flavor of blues and he composed Noriko Awayas hit song Wakare no Blues. Awaya became a popular singer and was called Queen of Blues in Japan. Due to pressure from the Imperial Army during the war, the performance of music was temporarily halted in Japan
3.
Anime
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Anime is Japanese hand-drawn or computer animation. The word is the pronunciation of animation in Japanese, where this term references all animation. Arguably, the abstract approach to the words meaning may open up the possibility of anime produced in countries other than Japan. For simplicity, many Westerners strictly view anime as a Japanese animation product, some scholars suggest defining anime as specifically or quintessentially Japanese may be related to a new form of orientalism. The earliest commercial Japanese animation dates to 1917, and Japanese anime production has continued to increase steadily. Anime is distributed theatrically, by way of television broadcasts, directly to home media and it is classified into numerous genres targeting diverse broad and niche audiences. Anime is an art form with distinctive production methods and techniques that have been adapted over time in response to emergent technologies. It consists of an ideal story-telling mechanism, combining art, characterization, cinematography. The production of anime focuses less on the animation of movement and more on the realism of settings as well as the use of effects, including panning, zooming. Being hand-drawn, anime is separated from reality by a gap of fiction that provides an ideal path for escapism that audiences can immerse themselves into with relative ease. Diverse art styles are used and character proportions and features can be quite varied, the anime industry consists of over 430 production studios, including major names like Studio Ghibli, Gainax, and Toei Animation. Despite comprising only a fraction of Japans domestic film market, anime makes up a majority of Japanese DVD sales and it has also seen international success after the rise of English-dubbed programming. This rise in popularity has resulted in non-Japanese productions using the anime art style. Anime is an art form, specifically animation, that all genres found in cinema. In Japanese, the term refers to all forms of animation from around the world. In English, anime is more used to denote a Japanese-style animated film or television entertainment or as a style of animation created in Japan. The etymology of the anime is disputed. The English term animation is written in Japanese katakana as アニメーション and is アニメ in its shortened form, in English, anime—when used as a common noun—normally functions as a mass noun
4.
Momoiro Clover Z
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Momoiro Clover Z is a Japanese idol group. It is commonly abbreviated as MCZ or Momoclo, the five members of MCZ are known for energetic performances, incorporating elements of ballet, gymnastics, and action movies. MCZ are the first female group to hold a concert at National Olympic Stadium in Japan. They are the group to provide theme music for three major Japanese anime television series with worldwide distribution, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z. In 2013, MCZ grossed the fourth highest total sales revenue by a music artist in Japan, during 2016, about 636 thousand people attended their live concerts, the most ever for a Japanese female group. MCZ has been ranked as the most popular female Japanese idol group from 2013 to 2016, MCZ has collaborated with other performers, including a 2015 recording with American hard rock band KISS, marking KISS first ever collaborative recording. In 2016, their first overseas tour titled Trans America Ultra Live was held in Hawaii, Los Angeles, on stage, Momoiro Clover Z members are easily distinguished by the colors of their clothes, similar to the characters from Power Rangers. In some songs and music videos, the group loosely parodies them, before the group made its debut, other girls were in the lineup, Sumire Fujishiro, Manami Ikura, Yukina Kashiwa, Tsukina Takai, Miyū Wagawa, and Runa Yumikawa. Formed in the spring of 2008 as a unit, the group was originally named Momoiro Clover. The name was chosen to imply that the group was composed of innocent girls who wanted to bring happiness to people, later in 2011, after the departure of Akari Hayami from the group, management added the letter Z to the groups name. The groups slogan is Idols you can meet right now, Momoiro Clover began as a street act in 2008, performing for bystanders in Tokyos Yoyogi Park. As most members were attending school on weekdays, the group was active mainly on weekends. In a one-year period, Momoiro Clover had a number of line-up changes, in March 2009, they became a five-member unit composed of Reni Takagi, Kanako Momota, Akari Hayami, Shiori Tamai, and Ayaka Sasaki. To support and promote their first indie single, Momoiro Punch, Momoiro Clover took advantage of holidays from May to August. They gave a total of 104 concerts in 24 electronic stores of the Yamada Denki network, the girls slept in the minivan, and groups managers drove. In the middle of the tour, Momoka Ariyasu was added to the group as a sixth member, the single was sold only at the groups live events and those sales were enough for it to place 11th in the Oricon Daily Singles Chart and 23rd in the weekly chart. In March 2010, the girls stated their goals, to take first place on Oricon, to participate in Kōhaku Uta Gassen and they usually performed in a small club with live music or on a roof of a department store. They sometimes set a stage of National Olympic Stadium, where notable musicians are allowed to perform
5.
Chiptune
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Chiptune, also known as chip music or 8-bit music, is synthesized electronic music which is made for programmable sound generator sound chips used in vintage computers, consoles, and arcade machines. The term also refers to tracker format music which sounds similar to older PSG-created music and music that combines PSG sounds with modern musical styles. By the early 1980s, personal computers became less expensive and more accessible than they had previously been and this led to a proliferation of outdated personal computers and game consoles that had been abandoned by consumers as they upgraded to newer machines. They were in low demand by consumers as a whole, and not difficult to find, while it has been a mostly underground genre, chiptune has had periods of moderate popularity in the 1980s and 21st century, and has influenced the development of electronic dance music. The terms chip music and chiptune refer to music made by the sound chips found within early gaming systems, a waveform generator is a fundamental module in a sound synthesis system. A waveform generator usually produces a basic geometrical waveform with a fixed or variable timbre, common waveform generator configurations usually included two or three simple waveforms and often a single pseudo-random-noise generator. Available waveforms often included pulse wave, square wave, triangle wave, two notable examples of systems employing this technology comprise the Game Boy and the Commodore 64. The Game Boy uses two pulse channels, a channel for 4-bit PCM playback, and a pseudo-random-noise generator, the Commodore 64, however, used the MOS Technology SID chip which offered 3 channels, each switchable between pulse, saw-tooth, triangle, and noise. Unlike the Game Boy, the channels on the Commodore 64 allowed full control over wave duty cycles. The SID was a technically advanced chip, offering many other features including ring modulation. Due to limited number of voices in those primitive chips, one of the challenges is to produce rich polyphonic music with them. The usual method to emulate it is via quick arpeggios, which is one of the most relevant features of chiptune music, the earliest precursors to chip music can be found in the early history of computer music. In 1951, the computers CSIRAC and Ferranti Mark 1 were used to perform real-time synthesized digital music in public. One of the earliest commercial computer music albums came from the First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival, held August 25,1978, the First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival recordings were published by Creative Computing in 1979. The Global TV program Science International credited a PDP-11/10 for the music, Chiptune music began to appear with the video game music produced during the golden age of video arcade games. An early example was the tune in Tomohiro Nishikados arcade game Gun Fight. The first video game to feature continuous background music was Rally-X. It was also one of the earliest games to use a converter to produce sampled sounds
6.
Comiket
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Comiket, otherwise known as the Comic Market, is the worlds largest dōjinshi fair, held twice a year in Tokyo, Japan. The first Comiket was held on December 21,1975, with only about 32 participating circles, attendance has since swelled to over a half million people. It is a grassroots, DIY effort for selling dōjinshi, self-published Japanese works, the continuing operation of Comiket is the responsibility of the Comic Market Preparatory Committee. Comiket was founded in 1975 by Yoshihiro Yonezawa and a circle of friends, including Teruo Harada and Jun Aniwa and they wished to study manga and explore its potential, as commercial offerings were unchallenging and mainstream, following the closure of COM. Comiket was also founded as a form of the SF Taikai convention. Comic Market is held twice a year, once in August and these are typically referred to as NatsuComi and FuyuComi respectively. NatsuComi is three long, and usually is held during the weekend around August 15. FuyuComi is two to three long, and usually is held between December 28 and 31. The current convention location is the Tokyo Big Sight convention center near Ariake, in Odaiba, Kōtō, the major part of the convention runs from 10 a. m. to 4 p. m. though the company booths run all the way until 5 p. m. On the last day of the convention, the booths and Cosplay Square close an hour earlier. Due to the popularity of the event, the official Comic Market website advises first-time attendees to arrive in the afternoon to avoid having to wait in line. Those arriving at 10 a. m. can expect to wait in line for about an hour before being able to enter, attendees who arrive on the first train can expect to wait about five hours before entering at roughly 10 or 10,30 a. m. In 1982, there were fewer than 10,000 attendees at Comiket, however, by 1989, there were over 100,000 attendees. Approximately 35,000 sellers, known as circles, participate in each edition of Comiket, attendee numbers topped half a million for the first time during Comic Market 66, in August 2004. Since Comic Market 72 in 2007, attendee numbers have fluctuated in the region of 500,000 for the edition and 560,000 for the summer edition. Comiket 82 took place on 10–12 August 2012 and attracted an estimated 560,000 attendees, because there is no registration requirement for non-seller attendees, these attendee numbers are estimates based on how many people enter Tokyo Big Sight during the days of the convention. Because of the number of people gathering in a single place. Area hotels, trains, and bus services also make special arrangements to accommodate the large crowds, since Comikets inception, artist attendance has been predominantly female, though there have been recent changes in that in the last several Comikets
7.
Otaku
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Otaku is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, commonly the anime and manga fandom. Its contemporary usage originated with Akio Nakamoris 1983 essay in Manga Burikko, Otaku may be used as a pejorative, its negativity stems from the stereotypical view of otaku and the medias reporting on Tsutomu Miyazaki, The Otaku Murderer, in 1989. According to studies published in 2013, the term has become less negative, Otaku subculture is a central theme of various anime and manga works, documentaries and academic research. The subculture began in the 1980s as changing social mentalities and the nurturing of otaku traits by Japanese schools combined with the resignation of such individuals to become social outcasts. The subcultures birth coincided with the boom, after the release of works such as Mobile Suit Gundam before it branched into Comic Market. The definition of otaku subsequently became more complex, and numerous classifications of otaku emerged, in 2005, the Nomura Research Institute divided otaku into twelve groups and estimated the size and market impact of each of these groups. Other institutions have split it further or focus on an otaku interest. These publications classify distinct groups including anime, manga, camera, automobile, idol, the economic impact of otaku has been estimated to be as high as ¥2 trillion. Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another persons house or family and this word is often used metaphorically, as an honorific second-person pronoun. In this usage, its literal translation is you, for example, in the anime Macross, first aired in 1982, the character Lynn Minmay uses the term this way. His 1983 series An Investigation of Otaku, printed in the lolicon magazine Manga Burikko, animators Haruhiko Mikimoto and Shōji Kawamori had used the term between themselves as an honorific second-person pronoun since the late 1970s. Supposedly, some used it past the point in their relationships where others would have moved on to a less formal style. Because this misuse indicated social awkwardness, Nakamori chose the word itself to label the fans, morikawa Kaichirō, an author and lecturer at Meiji University, identified this as the origin of its contemporary usage. However, a different claim points to a 1981 Variety magazine essay, in 1989, the case of Tsutomu Miyazaki, The Otaku Murderer, brought the fandom, very negatively, to national attention. Later that year, the contemporary knowledge magazine Bessatsu Takarajima dedicated its 104th issue to the topic of otaku and it was called Otaku no Hon and delved into the subculture of otaku with 19 articles by otaku insiders, among them Akio Nakamori. This publication has been claimed by scholar Rudyard Pesimo to have popularized the term, in modern Japanese slang, the term otaku is mostly equivalent to geek or nerd, but in a more derogatory manner than used in the West. However, it can relate to any fan of any theme, topic. When these people are referred to as otaku, they are judged for their behaviors -, the word entered English as a loanword from the Japanese language
8.
Hardcore (electronic dance music genre)
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Hardcore Techno is a subgenre of electronic dance music that originated in the Netherlands from the emergent raves/gabber in the 1990s. To understand the emergence of one has to go back to the 1970s. Groups such as Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Foetus, the message diffused by industrial was then very provocative. Some of the sounds and experimentation of industrial have directly influenced hardcore since the beginning of the movement. In the mid-1980s, under the influence of the Belgian group Front 242, electronic body music, a new genre more accessible and more dancing inspired by industrial and new wave, appeared. This style is characterized by minimalism, cold sounds unlike disco, funk or house, with beats, generally combined with aggressive vocals. When EBM has met new beat, another Belgian genre, and acid house, all the elements were here for the arrival of hardcore. The term hardcore is not new in the music world, the term hardcore techno has first been used by EBM groups like à, GRUMH. Pankow, and Leæther Strip in the late 1980s, although their music had nothing to do with hardcore, à, GRUMH. s Sucking Energy, released in 1985, was the first track ever to use the term hardcore, within an EDM context. Around 1993, the style became clearly defined and was simply named hardcore, acardipane founded the label Planet Core Productions in 1989 and has produced more than 500 tracks, including 300 by himself till 1996. Another important name of the scene has started at PCP, Miroslav Pajic. Among other things, the group PCP has popularized a slow, heavy, minimal, just during the single year 1993, four compilations were released with increasing success. At the same time, another scene grew around the DJ The Producer, Traffik, Bryan Fury and they have quickly been followed by SpeedyQs, Armaguet Nad, La Peste, Sarin Assault, XMF in which works The Hacker. Manu le Malin has given a great visibility to the genre in France, micropoint, composed by Radium and Al Core, which exists since middle 1990s has had a great success with their album Neurophonie in 1998. This album is considered as the start of the subgenre frenchcore, leading to a huge attraction for the hardcore in France. In the late 1990s, hardcore progressively changed, the early hardcore progressively died, leaving the place to other more accessible styles like mákina and hardstyle. Happy hardcore continues its movement underground and has evolved bringing out other related genres such as eurobeat, UK hardcore, Freeform hardcore, Hardcore is usually composed using music sequencers, and many earlier tracks were produced on home computers with module tracker software. Some examples of the software used are FL Studio, Ableton Live, Cubase, Logic, Nuendo, the wide availability of computers, combined with the absence of financial remuneration, means that many hardcore musicians write for their own enjoyment and the pleasure of innovation
