Believe it or not I haven’t posted for about half a year. My dad ended up in the hospital in early December and things have been hectic ever since. I have been running around with him to various appointments and a surgery after he was discharged. These are still continuing. And I had a part-time job as a lobby screener at a Japanese senior residence from late-January till the end of March. After that I was able to relax but soon realized the flood in the basement was actually very serious and was caused by a punctured tube that carried water from the sink to the fridge. I had to get the wall, floor and ceiling tiles removed from the affected areas in the basement and last month I finally had someone come in and do renovations on our upstairs washroom and the basement.
Honestly it feels like a year has passed. I am quite exhausted. And to make things worse, Japan Post stopped shipping packages from Japan to Canada in mid-December. That leaves us with the expensive DHL option which charges $20 service charge to pay the customs duties for you. I can’t live without my manga so I have been using them to ship over some of my manga. I really hope Japan Post will resume shipping packages to Canada as it is becoming costly using DHL.
My plan is to start up with reviews again within the month or two. I still need some time to get relaxed and there is a election coming up so I am now getting prepared to work for that in early-June. I have my training tomorrow. In the meantime I have updated the pages about where you can read BL manga (paid and free). My manga bookshelf has not been updated since November so I hope to get around to that eventually too.
And to close, I am sharing the link to the YouTube video of the talk event on May 12, 2022 by the Japan Foundation in New York titled Boys’ Love: The History and Transformation of BL in Asia. Here’s the description from the information website:
For our third episode of a special “Girls’ culture series”, we will focus on Boys’ Love (BL) genre and its media explosion across Asia. BL is male-male romantic content, originally created and marketed towards women by female manga artists in Japan to challenge gender and sexual norms in the 1970s. Over the years, BL has seen a tremendous growth in popularity and become a global phenomenon, expanding into media such as anime, prose fiction, live-action dramas, and fan fiction. As BL became more popular in other parts of Asia, it has evolved uniquely in each Asian country, taking on new meanings and forms within their own cultures. Come join our panel discussion with four Boys’ Love experts: Akiko Mizoguchi, Hyojin KIM, Kristine Michelle Santos and Thomas Baudinette. They will delve into the history and transformation of BL genre across Asia through the examples of Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Thailand, while exploring the transnational popularity and cultural influence of the BL genre in Asia.
To read up about the presenters see here.