Live Webinar
Japanese Pop Culture:
Connecting the World throughManga and Anime
Part of the Living Traditions series

Tues., Feb. 15, 2022
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST (4:00 pm—5:00pm PDT)
Share your photos and comments on social media with #JSFromHome

Living Traditions webinar series is co-presented with Portland Japanese Garden and supported by the Government of Japan.

Talks+ Programs at Japan Society are generously sponsored by MUFG (Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group) and ORIX Corporation
USA. Additional support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Sandy Heck Lecture Fund, and Helen and Kenneth A. Cowin.

Speaker Profiles

Roland Kelts is a Tokyo-based Japanese-American
writer, journalist, scholar and authority on Japaneseand Western cultures. His best-selling first book,JAPANAMERICA, is considered the ultimate guide to
Japan's pop culture juggernaut — required reading formany Hollywood producers, artists and academics
worldwide. His writing is published in The New Yorker,
The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New YorkTimes, Zoetrope: All Story, The Times Literary Supplement and others, and he is a primary source on
Japan for CNN, the BBC, NPR and NHK. He is also acolumnist for The Japan Times, a contributing editorof MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, and a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has given
speeches on Japan for think tanks, embassies, universities, pop culture conventions and private eventsin the US, Europe and Asia, including TED Talks andThe World Economic Forum. Kelts has taught at The
University of Tokyo, New York University, Columbia
University and Sophia University. He has won several
awards and fellowships, including a 2017 Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University.

© Lisa KatoJulia Mechler works for mixi, inc., a Japanese mobile gaming company, as a business development
manager overseeing US-based teams that produce
gaming app content. Julia also creates manga, publishing her first comic book, Hymn of the Teada, anOkinawan-themed comic book released by Heavy
Metal Magazine. She began her career as a motion
graphics designer at the Los Angeles branch of a Japanese anime/gaming company. Though her career
focuses on digital entertainment, she is also an expert
on Okinawan traditional performing arts, producing
shows in Okinawa that mesh traditional dance anddigital entertainment.

@japansociety@japansociety@japansociety

Speaker Profiles

William Tsutsui is an award-winning scholar andteacher, specializing in the economic, environmental,and cultural history of modern Japan. Educated atHarvard, Oxford, and Princeton Universities, he has
published widely on Japanese popular culture andglobalization, the Japan’s postwar “imagination of disaster,” and giant monster movies in Japan and theUnited States. His 2004 book Godzilla on My Mind:
Fifty Years of the King of Monsters was called a “cultclassic” by the New York Times and a Japanesetranslation was published by Chūkō sōsho. He hasreceived Fulbright and Marshall Fellowships and wasawarded the John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2000. He currently serves as
President and Professor of History at Ottawa University, and previously taught at the University of Kansas,
Southern Methodist University, and Hendrix College.
In 2020-2021, he was the Edwin O. Reischauer Distinguished Visiting Professor at Harvard.

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