AniFem Round-Up
Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Societal Melancholia in the Wake of Imperialism
Wind-Up Bird, like several of Murakami’s later works, deals with social issues — particularly atrocities that have been suppressed in mainstream historical accounts.
The AniFem Guide to Shojosei Series Coming Out in Spring 2026
It’s a quieter season than Winter, but there are still some long-awaited titles and cool creators to look forward to!
Agents of the Four Seasons: Dance of Spring – Episode 1
Compelling female characters with a tight-knit relationship, effective fantasy writing, and lovely visuals—spring is here, and we’re off to a good start!
STEEL BALL RUN JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure – Episode 1
JJBA is always a fun watch, but the 19th century Western setting definitely comes with some replicated racial stereotypes.
Beyond AniFem
Meiko Kaji’s 60 Year Career Has Been Defined By Stubborn Ambition (Aftermath, Isaiah Colbert)
Best known in the West for Lady Snowblood, Kaji has had an incredibly broad and accomplished acting career.
“I have to say, I became quite numb to the process. It wasn’t even that I thought I was struggling. It was just something that I had to do,” she said. “So I really never thought about my own desires or my own will. And if I were to go up to a higher-up or a director and say, ‘This is the kind of thing I want to do’ or ‘This is what I don’t want to do,’ they would just look at me and say, ‘Well, quit and try your luck elsewhere.’ But I did know that anything that was put in front of me, I would go for it.”
Kaji is careful not to romanticize the grind she survived; she knows the cost of those early years too well. But she also believes those early struggles can teach more than they take, especially for young actors thumbing through her filmography.
“These films last forever, and if you wanted to go back and watch them today, you could. So, oftentimes, there are people that are very young in their teens and twenties that show up to set and say, ‘Let me do any work here. ‘I want to become an actor,’ and ‘Let me just observe on set,’” she said. “What I tell these young people is to watch my early films. That they should see that my acting in these films is such a disappointment that perhaps it’ll give them some kind of confidence to go their own way with their career as an actor.”
Over time, Kaji—both actress and occasional singer—carved out her niche by playing a constellation of outlaw heroines across ninkyo eiga, pinky-violence films, yakuza dramas, and arthouse films, giving voice to women who lived defiantly on society’s margins. Her roles include the vengeful Nami “Scorpion” Matsushima in Shunya Ito’s The Female Prisoner Scorpion series, ex-con Nami “the Red Cherry Blossom” Higuchi in Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s Wandering Ginza Butterfly, and most famously, the incandescent Yuki from Toshiya Fujita’s live-action adaptation of Kazuo Kamimura’s namesake manga, Lady Snowblood.
When I asked whether her early filmography reflected the woman she was behind the scenes, Kaji admitted that some of those roles did mirror a certain rebellious spirit. Her refusal to fail and not easily crumble under pressure, even if it meant quite literally delivering a knock-out performance in a single take.
Tokyo Pokémon Center Murder Highlights Gaps in Japan’s Stalking Law (Unseen Japan, Jay Allen)
Multiple criticisms have been aimed at existing stalking laws as insufficient to either protect victims or rehabilitate perpetrators.
The preventable tragedy follows a series of other high-profile stalking/murder incidents in Japan.
In 2025, police arrested Shirai Hideyuki for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, 20-year-old Okazaki Asahi. The murder came after Okazaki reported Shirai to the police on nine separate occasions. Even after she was murdered, it took police over four months to enter Shirai’s home to look for evidence, at which point they found Okazaki’s skeletal remains.
Okazaki’s murder comes after another high-profile stalking and murder incident in 2023, when 31-year-old Terauchi Susumu murdered 38-year-old Kawano Miki after she broke up with him. In that case, Terauchi had been under a restraining order for months; he attacked Kawano shortly after she had it lifted, feeling the danger was over.
In 2025, according to the National Police Agency (NPA), there were 3,717 cases of stalking in Japan – a new record. Police fielded over 22,000 cases of consultation related to stalking, the second-highest number ever.
Notes Towards A ‘Woke 2’ (Aftermath, Gita Jackson)
A call for concrete action and community in 2026.
Now in 2026, that talk is cheap. People—and corporations—who loudly demonstrate how much they are aware of the right things, how woke they are, are not always behaving in alignment with those values. In 2021, Target made a commitment to invest $2 billion into Black-owned businesses by stocking their products in its stores. By 2025, after America elected Donald Trump president again, Target had rolled back its DEI initiatives, including scaling back its investment in stocking products from Black-owned businesses. A long time ago, that might have felt like a betrayal, but I don’t put much faith in publicly-traded corporations to do the right thing anymore.
Wokeness as an ideology became about showing people how much you are aware of things happening around you, rather than a cogent plan about what to do with your newfound awareness. Being aware is really easy to do, and if just being aware becomes in itself a virtue, then there’s the potential for an ecosystem that is centered around showing other people how much you know. Oh, you’re fighting for Black Lives? I bet you don’t even know about these other marginalized groups of people that also need help! I have watched the brightest minds of my generation, starving hysterical naked, arguing about whether or not the finale of Stephen Universe was sufficiently righteous on the internet.
Knowing and being able to see the firmament that upholds injustice is useful, but you also have to know what to do with that knowledge. I felt proud of seeing different celebrities extol the virtues of the “This Is America” music video, but at the end of the day, it’s just a music video. What did I think people sharing it a lot was going to do? “Stay woke,” raising awareness, cannot be where one’s desire to do good terminates. When all you ask of a person is that they stay aware, attention and consumption takes the place of action. Getting out into the street to march was wonderful, but not when the marches are aimless and without goals, or when they become a platform for people to gain new Instagram followers (follow me to know where the next action is!). Wokeness can be instead about small, interpersonal actions, a way of linking humans together in a chain of community.
Worker in Japan fired 4 days after revealing autism left discontented after court win (The Mainichi, Shohei Kato)
The plaintiff was fired three years into their job upon disclosing they are autistic.
Yamakawa later sought advice from a labor union in Tokyo. After repeated rounds of collective bargaining, the company withdrew the dismissal notice. During these negotiations, it was revealed that the company head had disclosed Yamakawa’s disability to other employees without their consent. Despite ongoing negotiations, they failed to reach an agreement on conditions, and Yamakawa has not yet been reinstated.
In November 2022, Yamakawa filed a lawsuit with the Yokohama District Court against the company, claiming that the dismissal and personal information leak constituted disability discrimination and seeking damages, including unpaid wages. After more than three years in court, the judge ruled in January this year that the dismissal was “discriminatory and illegally infringed on the plaintiff’s personal rights,” ordering the firm to pay 800,000 yen (about $5,000).
However, since the ruling did not specify relevant disability-related laws and did not acknowledge wage payments, Yamakawa appealed. The company has also appealed the decision.
Why had Yamakawa chosen not to disclose their disability during the hiring process? They said they felt there was a risk, saying that “sometimes you are turned away immediately or judged with bias from the start if you reveal it.” Despite this, they decided to disclose their disability because, they said, “I had confidence in the achievements I had built over my three-year career.” Unfortunately, the outcome was far from favorable.
Survey: 60% of foreign residents want to live in Saitama forever (The Asahi Shimbun, Shun Nakamura)
The survey is collected from 1064 responses.
Asked if they are “content with life in Saitama Prefecture,” more than 90 percent replied they were “fully” or “somewhat” satisfied.
While 69.5 percent cited the prefecture’s “stable security situation and easy-to-live environment,” 52.5 percent stressed that the area is suitable for “understanding the culture and customs of Japanese society.”
However, less than 20 percent cited “sufficient multilingual support” or “extensive social welfare services” as sources of satisfaction.
As for the causes of a “sense of dissatisfaction” among foreign residents, the questionnaire found that 39.3 percent–the largest portion–were particularly concerned about “discrimination against non-Japanese.”
The survey delved into what services the respondents “expect from the prefectural government.”
Allowed to give multiple answers, 34.1 percent of them sought “expanded multilingual information dissemination and consultation programs,” 31.4 percent needed “Japanese language learning assistance,” 31.2 percent wanted “more comprehensive welfare packages,” and 30.9 percent cited “a specialized drive to eradicate discriminatory views.”
In a comment section where respondents could freely express their requests to the prefecture, many called for extensive Japanese language training programs and countermeasures against discrimination.
A noticeable number pushed for stricter regulations on non-Japanese who do not abide by laws and rules.
In terms of nationality, Chinese accounted for the largest number, at 333, followed by 203 Vietnamese, 139 Filipinos and 61 Indonesians.
Japan to toughen requirements for citizenship, skirt Diet approval (The Asahi Shimbun, Yuki Nikaido)
These changes would double the current required length of residency for prospective citizenship.
Atsushi Kondo, a professor of constitutional law at Meijo University and an expert on immigration policy, warned the move is problematic.
“This review substantially changes the minimum residency period stipulated by the Nationality Law,” he said. “To do this without a legal revision goes against the rule of law and could even be unconstitutional.”
Kondo explained that because the Constitution establishes popular sovereignty and mandates that requirements for citizenship should be set by law, the Nationality Law’s provisions carry a particularly significant weight.
He also questioned the direction of the policy, noting that Japan is moving against the trend in many other countries.
While some nations like Italy and Spain have a 10-year residency requirement, others, including Germany, France and the Netherlands, require five years. Brazil requires four years, and Canada three.
In fact, Germany, facing a high immigrant population, revised its law in 2024 to shorten the residency requirement from eight years to five. The reduction was intended to enhance immigrants’ sense of national belonging and reduce social friction, Kondo noted.
Former Nippon Ichi Software president says the “salaryman-ification” of Japan’s game industry is why there are fewer “individual creators” like Hideo Kojima and Suda51 (Automaton, Dorde P)
The creativity-killing grind of anime production has always been one of those unconfirmed but easy to guess factors, sadly.
Compared to the production of films, anime, manga and music, Niikawa explains that the video game industry has a much tighter corporate framework for tackling projects, relying on staff who work as full-time company employees. To illustrate, he notes that, for example, manga artists are not “working under” a publisher, and they compete on a project-by-project basis. This means that even if the project ends up failing, they can easily move on to the next thing while still pursuing what they truly believe is “the right thing.”
On the other hand, when you’re a developer who works for a company, various other factors, like company policies and decision-making, as well as profitability, come into play, making it more difficult for “individuality” to come through. “The fact that AAA titles all tend to take a similar creative direction, and the fact that we keep getting more and more sequels might not be completely unrelated to this, I believe. So, if you’re looking to take on a bolder challenge, going indie or establishing your own company probably allows for a much higher degree of freedom after all,” Niikawa adds.
That being said, with triple As and indies being two extremes, Niikawa believes that the way mid-sized companies approach creating new titles will be a crucial point for the future of Japan’s game industry. “Of course, I understand that there are business circumstances and conditions due to which [businesses] have no choice but to play it safe. But if they play it too safe, there is a high chance that they will eventually decline.”
‘Wicked Spot’ Is a Fun, Sapphic Rom-Com That Yeets a Witch Into the Magical World of Influencer Culture (Gizmodo, Isaiah Colbert)
The new series from mangaka Sal Jiang.
While Wicked Spot doesn’t break out the airplane runway lights, making Hana and Sada look like a guaranteed endgame by the end of its first volume, Jiang definitely does her big thing, laying down enough blushes, stolen glances, and odd-couple spark between them, channeling the same flirtatious promise as Sumiko Arai’s The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All.
If anything, TGSWIIWAGA (“Green Yuri,” for short) is a picture-perfect twin to Wicked Spot‘s charming, witchy, sapphic vibes. Only, where Green Yuri feels like a high-school-era Nana that actually commits to the sapphic yearning of its leads, Wicked Spot reads like a (somehow) even more yuri-tinged take on Kamome Shirahama‘s slept-on pre-Witch Hat Atelier series, Eniale & Dewiela. Honestly, that’s as good a back-of-the-box quote as any new manga destined to inspire the meme-ready Google search “Does Wicked Spot is gay?” could hope for.
Considering Jiang is already a household name among yuri fans, having written the spicy, toxic yuri workplace series Black and White: Tough Love at the Office, it’s likely that Wicked Spot won’t leave people feeling queer-baited over whether or not its opposites-attract girlies with horror icon names will eventually work it out on the remix.
VIDEO: In case you haven’t yet heard about Witch Hat Atelier (Ft. Alex Henderson).
VIDEO: Retrospective on toku magical girl series Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan.
Comments are open! Please read our comments policy before joining the conversation and contact us if you have any problems.