Friday, September 02, 2016

Gateway to Asia

Manga Book Binding

I often bill Portland as one of those Chinese Gate cities, where you may preview the so-called Far East, which is further West from our side, or maybe North along the coast and over to Nippon.

You'll find lots of Japanese influence in stateside culture here, including in the Manga section at Barnes & Noble.  You'll notice the book binding puts the cover on "the back", with pages turning from left to right.  Fewer magazines adopt that format, though still purport their authenticity as true Manga specimens.

At OSCONs and such you'll find Manga characters pressed into service for didactic purposes, teaching calculus, or maybe chemistry.

Japanese speakers may first learn about Synergetics + Linux on a Raspberry Pi, thanks to some fantasy characters talking about "spells" (Linux commands) and Wizardry (shades of Harry Potter).

The Japanese edition of Scientific American had that article by Yasushi Kajikawa, present at SNEC's creation.  We've had a lot of time to build on these modular studies since then.

Maybe in some back street in Okinawa you'll come across such an underground comic.  The fact that Antiprism + Povray were first pipelined in an Oregon VML (a subtype of PWS) won't matter.

That's just the ambient Pacific Rim economy hard at work.  Next up:  Anime.

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