According to ANN, major Japanese retail chain, Tsutaya (a division of the Culture Convenience Club company), will begin offering manga rentals to customers beginning April 2007.

Tsutaya, which currently maintains outlets in most major Japanese cities, rents movies, CDs, CD singles, and other items on a per store basis.

Manga rental will initially be available at 100 retailers. Each retailer will initially carry approximately 30,000 manga volumes with room for more as the program catches on. If the store is successful in renting manga - meaning high rental per capita rates and returns - it is highly likely that all 1300 Tsutaya stores in Japan will begin renting manga.

Manga renting in Japan is nothing new, however, this would be the first time its done on a national level by a single retail chain. This has the potential to provide a secondary source of income for publishers outside of retail sales.

Wired has recently added an article detailing some of the many exciting developments taking place in Dubai. The most notable development of course being the “Burj Dubai”, which when complete will be the tallest building in the world.

Check out the full article here.

Just as there is Japan Academy Awards to U.S. Oscars, there is Bunshun Raspberry Awards to Golden Raspberry Awards in the US. Just as its US model, Japan’s Bunshun Raspberry Awards are given to the worst movies in the year selected by 32 movie critics in Japan.

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FUNimation Entertainment announces the acquisition of Ragnarok, the 26-episode anime series based off the popular MMORPG, from GDH, the company behind hits such as Samurai 7, Basilisk and Trinity Blood.

The series follows two young travelers who set out on a journey of epic proportions and begin the mystery and legendary battle of Ragnarok!

Ragnarok brings what 300,000 online players across the world have discovered to TV.

The DVDs are currently scheduled to hit the streets in Fall 2007.

One of the activities you will probably want to carry out if you ever visit Japan is to check out at least one of the castles that the country has to offer. While surfing around a couple of days ago I noticed the site JCastle.Info which provides very comprehensive details on just about every major castle in Japan (82 in their database as of writing).

Profile Page

As might be expected, each castle is given its own page in which you can find information such as the castle’s: year founded, founder, location, website address, history, and more.

Photo Gallery

Coupled with each site is a gallery of images showing the different features and angles of the castle in question. All the images are of a good quality, and each comes with a description.

Google Maps

Using the Google Maps API, JCastle.Info has made is possible to view and select each castle via the popular Google Maps interface.

Miscellaneous

The site contains a number of miscellaneous articles including a general history of castles in Japan and structural information relating to Japanese castles.

Link: http://www.jcastle.info

That’s right, plans are underway for a live-action version of Ghost in the Shell!!

The movie will be developed by a Hollywood film studio, with Production I.G. (the company responsible for Innocence and Stand Alone Complex) negotiating distribution and managing all other aspects relating to production of the film.

This has the potential to be a really great film, lets just hope Hollywood doesn’t massacre this great series.

Via: ANN

To help Japanese people learn English, the following video was created. In the video we see a poor young Japanese girl being attacked by two invading, illegal alien, American devils -all foreigners are evil, right?. The video then cuts to a group of dancers (wtf? lol) shouting out phrases which could be useful in such a situation, and then switches back and forth between the girl and the dancers.

Chotto sumimasen

So desu ka..

Hentai!!

Check out the whole video here.

Straight from the CES 2007 show floor, we have a new piece of technology known as the R2-D2 DVD Projector. Brought to you by Nikko Home Electronics, the R2-D2 functions as a projector with an 800×600 Resolution projecting a recommended image size of 80 inches (diagonal).

The little droid promises full DVD Playback, CD Playback, and even has an iPod dock. R2-D2 can also move and adjust to either project an image onto your wall or onto the ceiling.

The DVD player supports retail DVD’s, DVD-R/RW, Video CD, SVCD, Audio CD, MP3, MP4 and WMA, and is equipped to deliver DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1. R2 is also capable of projecting digital images via multi-memory card slot. Supported card types are SD, MMC, MS, Smart Media and even USB Flashdrives.

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For those of you into gangster anime/movies, Magnum Photos has recently released a collection of real-life Yakuza photos.

View the whole gallery here.

More details of Viz’s Death Note Anime license have just been revealed.

The first detail is that as well as downloads being offered, DVDs will also be released -at a substantially later date I am guessing.

The second detail is that the downloads will be subs, and the DVDs will contain both languages (actually they say just “dubs” in their press release, but I believe this is a blunder).

All the big Death Note fansub groups such as TW and Live-Evil appear to have dropped the series. There are however a number of smaller groups such as Animanda who plan to continue. Lets watch this and see what happens..