I'm off to Powell's in Portland today with Roland Kelts, who'll be talking there this evening about Japanamerica. I'm hoping to ask the Powell folks about their plan to make movies about authors and their books. Perhaps they'd be interested in our own efforts in this field.

What attracts writers to New Orleans? Jason Berry and Christine Wiltz will be discussing this very question this Friday on a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival.

Much has been said about the loss of so many gifted musicians in New Orleans because of the broken levees. While this is true and it's not clear if they will ever be allowed to come back, the literary scene, on the other hand, is thriving. Perhaps tragedy draws out the writer in all of us. Jason and Christine will riff on this theme with the guidance of moderator Ralph Adamo this Friday at 10 am.

If you can't make it to one of Roland Kelts' two Pacific Northwest events this week, tune in to KUOW's The Beat on Thursday. It looks like there will be a segment with Roland talking about the Japanese community in Seattle, Sakura Con and the anime and manga boom.

Also, one reader of our blog already contacted me about getting an autographed copy of Japanamerica. Since Chin Music Press is selling the books at Roland's Japan America Society event on March 29, I'd be glad to set aside copies for those of you who contact me. In fact, if anyone would like a signed copy of Kuhaku (Roland's entry is the eloquent and disturbing "Father Hunters"), I imagine we could get Roland to sign a few of those too. if you're interested in either of these offers, send me a mail at bruce-at-mark-chinmusicpress-dot-com. This deal won't be in the CMP store, so I'll walk you through the ordering process.

Ross MacDonald, illustrator, letterpressman and maker of olde books and things for movies has this to say about a book he did for the Zorro movie:

This huge book was created for the film. Printed on vellum paper, hand bound in fifteenth century style. The covers are covered with leather which was hand dyed in a multistage process, and then handmade metal clasps and corners were attached. A design was burned into the leather with a hot iron bar.

Ladies and gents, you're going to hearing a lot more from this woman in the coming months because she's the author of our next title, Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese Woman. If you think you know Japanese women, think again. Sumie Kawakami's book will give you a whole new perspective.

Some of you may remember Sumie's writing from our first book, Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan. She wrote the 'Floating Feeling' pieces about women cheating on their husbands. Goodbye Madame Butterfly expands on that theme and takes a broader look at women -- from young people in their 20s to the middle aged -- and their relationships with men.

The book will be in stores this fall, but stay tuned here for special offers and events beginning this summer.

Roland Kelts will be in town next week for two events promoting his new book, Japanamerica. He'll be talking at Powell's in Portland on March 27 at 7:30 pm, and on Thursday the 29th, he'll be addressing the Japan America Society of Washington at City University in Bellevue.

I'll be at both events, and Chin Music will be the bookseller at the Bellevue event, so come out, say hi and hear Roland talk about how Japanese pop culture has seeped into the American mainstream. It's a great read that reveals, among other things, how Pac Man was inspired by a Shakey's pizza.

Snagged from Kottke, here's a fascinating list of trends in the top 1000 books held by libraries around the world.

Friend and sushi chef Taichi Kitamura got a nice write-up in the Post-Intelligencer yesterday. Right on the cover of the Life & Arts section. Taichi's one of those guys who's dedicated to his craft and who loves to talk to people about Japan. If you want a quick primer on Japan today, go to his restaurant in Fremont — Chiso — and make sure to sit at the sushi counter. He'll answer any question you can fire at him.

Chin Music Press has just won its first award. The cover of Last of the Red Hot Poppas was awarded a HOW International Design Award of merit in the covers category. It's featured in their International Design Annual and will eventually be online.

Let me congratulate Craig, of course, but also two people who helped make this crazy global origami-book-cover project end up so beautiful: Illustrator Leslie Staub and the president of Yushin Printing in Japan, Kohiyama-san, who actually helped fold the poster/cover by hand. Now that's a work ethic!

Briefly, Craig and Leslie coordinated the very exact dimensions of the artwork from CMP HQ in Tokyo and Leslie's studio in Durham, NC. Then Leslie painted Rex and the other characters on a gold-leaf background and a man named Bubba took a photo of the finished art and sent it to Craig. Kohiyama-san then finished the project by having his staff make the first couple of folds by hand on the thousands of posters we printed. A machine did the final folds.

So time to uncork the champagne. Congrats Craig, Leslie and Kohiyama-san. And thanks to Jason Berry for giving us something special to wrap!

Minor edit by Craig: Regarding the folding — actually the final copies were also done by hand. The folding machine used was only able to do two folds. The cover itself required either two folds + an "unfold-pullout" or three folds. So in the end Kohiyama-san and his workers unfolded or refolded every single one of the 4,000 copies. And still got us the completed book from data to a Seattle bound boat in two weeks!

After eons of neglect and mal-nutrition I've finally gotten around to fixing the RSS feed on Buzztracker. Apologies to everyone subscribed -- it was one of those small details that sunk to the bottom of my to-do list. For 8 months.

I rebuilt it with the feed creator php class which I am assuming will be more reliable than my hobbled together, home-brewed duct-tape solution that died, inexplicably, a long time ago.

Like the author of the immensely popular A People's History of the United States, Japanese political commentator Minoru Morita weaves a deep sense of history into all his writing. He is just 10 years younger than the 85-year-old Zinn, and he is just as productive, having published close to 40 books in Japanese. There are differences, of course, but Morita's writing has that sharp insight and knack for showing history in a different light that Zinn has also made a career on.

I've had the pleasure of translating Mr. Morita's weekly column since the first of the year. I've done a lot of translation through the years, but I've almost never come across a job where I'm nodding my head in agreement and chuckling as I write. Translating can be a frustrating job, but translating Mr. Morita's writings made me realize what a fruitful career it could be — as long as you're translating those writers that speak to you.

The following examples of Morita's analysis of the Japanese political scene may seem overly brazen when taken out of context, but believe me, he does build a credible, solid case for calling Junichiro Koizumi the worst prime minister ever. It's been an eye-opener working with him. Here are a few samples from recent weeks:

Since World War II, but especially since the rapid economic growth of the 1960s, Japan has been unusually egalitarian among capitalist states. The basic mentality was that all Japanese were middle class. The gap between the haves and have-nots has been so small that it was pointless to compare it with the gaps of other capitalist states. But this trend came to a halt in 1982 with the emergence of the Yasuhiro Nakasone Cabinet. Prime Minister Nakasone subordinated Japan to the American Republican Party led by then President Ronald Reagan, as reflected in their chummy "Ron-Yasu" relationship.

The current Bush administration's stance toward Japan has been to Anglicize its security and diplomatic policies while Americanizing its economy. The Koizumi administration bought into this approach completely and pushed Japan hard in those directions. Koizumi Anglicized Japan's security and diplomacy and brought about American-style structural reform to create a more versatile market system in line with Republican thinking. The logic Koizumi used to push this program was "free competition and individual responsibility."

This piece from today's New York Times reports that writers trying to find a readership may be better off investing in some simple audio gear than looking for a literary agent to hawk their writings. Just another sign of how fast this whole industry is changing. One Internet entrepreneur who has had success building an audience with his audiobooks but it this way:

“I’m just completely impatient with the publishing world,” (Mr. Jeffrey) said. “Even if a publisher said yes tomorrow, it would be a full year before the book was in the marketplace. Coming from the Internet, that was just insane to me.”