With the “Artifacts of Anime Fandom” Flickr site no longer being maintained or updated, we decided to take our image files to a new group “The Anime and Manga Historical Archive” covering anime, manga and the fandom from 1950-2000.  We hope you can participate by posting Anime Convention program guides before 2000 or even newsletters from your anime club, flyer images, anime BBS flyers from those earlier years.

You can access the group here:

The Anime and Manga Historical Archive (1950-2000)

On March 27, 2013, Rumiko Takahashi fans in Japan were treated with the first Rumiko Takahashi set release with “Urusei Yatsura” vol. 1 featuring episodes 1-69.  The new series presented in 1080p High Definition in standard 4:3.  Here are the other UY sets planned for released throughout the year.  Volume 2 will be released on July 31st, volume 3 for November 27th and the final volume slated for March 27, 2014.

In Japan, Toshihiro Kawamoto is one of the anime legends that fans just can’t get enough of when he comes to the United States as a guest of honor at an anime convention.

While in high school and after graduating, Kawamoto became interested in becoming an animator thanks to the “Macross” and “Mobile Suit Gundam” series.  Inspired by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s character designs, after graduating at Tokyo Designer Gakuin College, he was offered a job to work on the 1986 animated film “Arion” supervised by Yoshinobu Inano and mentored by lead character designer Sachiko Kamimura.

During his earlier years, Kawamoto had worked on some of the highly regard classic titles such as “Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, “Metal Armor Dragonar”, “Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack” and “Venus Wars”.

J!-ENT recently took part in a media Q&A roundtable with Toshihiro Kawamoto which you can read here!  Very cool!

At Tokyo Anime Fair, there were booklets passed out by the Nerima City Office about Nerima City, the home of anime.  And I was surprised to see how the city was the home of many anime titles, old and new.  And how rich the history of animation is in the city and how the memories are preserved through yearly events.  I scanned a few pages from the booklet, enjoy!

I hope you can add the city of Nerima to your destination when visiting Japan. You can find more info. in English at www.animation-nerima.jp/ but also by visiting the Nerima City Home Page at www.city.nerima.tokyo.jp.

Hi everyone, our J!-ENT special feature on anime, manga, video games, cosplay, J-Pop, toys and even reprinting a few of our old school anime interviews is available!  280-pages…and it’s FREE!  Check it out! PDF is about 66MB.