Archives by date

You are browsing the site archives by date.

Sadamasa Arikawa (Eiji Tsuburaya's pretoge), the author, and Haruo Nakajima

Godzilla and Reality

The new Godzilla movie (titled Shin Gojira or “New Godzilla”) premiered in Japan about 24 hours ago. The reports I’m hearing from fans over there whose opinions I trust are pretty bad. I actually happen to like their new Godzilla design. It’s kind of creepy in a cool way. Godzilla hasn’t been genuinely scary, at […]

Me and Koichi Takano in 1996. He is hungover. I am not.

God and Ultraman

Last night I watched episode 45 of Ultraman 80, “The Endlessly Challenging Soul of the Baltan Alien” on Crunchyroll. Ultraman 80 was the 1980 entry in the long-running Ultraman TV series produced by Tsuburaya Productions, the company I worked at for 15 years. In this episode, a young boy takes a photo of a UFO, […]

“White people,” “Black People” and Other Kinds of People

In the past week we’ve seen videos of three humans being killed by other humans called “police.” Two of these humans were what folks in the USA call “Black people.” One was what folks in the USA call a “White person.” Then someone opened fire on some police officers in Dallas, killing five of them. […]

#StraightPrideDay is Dumb But I Totally Get It

I am a white “cis-gendered” heterosexual male. So, in terms of what they call “identity politics” these days I’m nobody. Because I’m everybody. Of course I’m privileged and all of that. Nobody sees me on the street and yells out racial slurs, or makes unwanted sexual advances, or pulls me aside at airport security because […]