Japan to Sponsor International Manga Contest? 26
antifoidulus writes "According to Yahoo! news Japan is trying to boost its image abroad by promoting manga and anime, including possibly an international manga contest. They are also trying to double the number of people who eat Japanese food at least once a year to 1.2 billion(about 10x the population of Japan). While the article states that in the west the appeal of Japan is increasing, Japan is still having problems with its relations to fellow Asian countries such as China and South Korea."
Re:No! Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember, though, that the Germans have done a far bigger sackcloth-and-ashes repentance routine since the war than have the Japanese. I gather they still officially deny what happened at Nanking, which is scarcely conducive to good relations. Then there was that business last year with the rather... questionable content of some of their high school history books. From what I see there's still a huge problem with the attitude of the Japanese themselves to the war... sure, they 'regret' it, so we hear whenever they almost but not quite apologise. But it sometimes seems like what they regret is that they lost.
Re:Let me be the first to say that... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood [wikipedia.org] you will see that they are increasingly being translated into English. I would not be suprised to start seeing some of these appear on screens in the US, or more likely the UK, in the next ten years.
All that said, I have seen way more Japanese films than Indian films, but they were almost all older Kurosawa black and white films. India does not have the historical cultural influence on the US like it does in the UK, since it was once a British colony, but that is changing with the growing numbers of Indian nationals moving to the US for college, grad school, and/or work.