When there are so many Koreans setting up their booths at comiket every year and when you have no problems getting around in Seoul in Japanese, you'd think that there must be a lot of otaku in Korea. Surprisingly, this was far from true, or rather everyone is either hiding or suppressing their "unusual" hobbies.

Ever wondered how close China is to Japan?　Not geographically of course, you know what I mean!

Bandai Visual from Bandai Namco group has just released a website (http://www.yomban.jp) for digital browsing of manga, novels and essays for the PC and mobile phones in Japan. Called YOMBAN, short for Yomu meaning read and Ban from Bandai Visual, the site started on February 2, 2009 and its contents would be refreshed every fifteen days. The surprise is, the contents are all for free!

I'm back in Singapore again Lah and today is cosplay day in Sin City cuz two major cosplay events were held at the Singapore Discovery Center and Ngee Ann Polytechnic on the same day. Click on to check out the cosplay scene in sunny Singapore~ 

It was announced today that Naruto's library of past episodes and new episodes will be available on Crunchyroll about one hour after their Japanese broadcast from January 8, 2009.

The anime will be subtitled, high-quality without any advertisements and accessible worldwide. Only paid subscribers can view the new episodes once it is uploaded but it will be available for free seven days after its release.

Recently, there was an exodus of hobby shops from one shopping mall to the other. They have gathered at the top floor of "Plaza Singapura", appropriately next to a cinema. Here you can find a good variety of Japanese and Western figures, gaming shop, an imitation weapon shop for cosplayers and even a rental showcase!

Singapore, the little red dot on the map probably boasts one of the more vocal and active online otaku communities around. Despite being such a small country (where you only need two hours to travel from one end to the other), there is quite a number of so-called otaku spots within this tiny island.

Mission Taipei was another whirlwind chase. In one day, I had to hunt down the otaku spots, give out flyers for our Akihabara Tours in our banana maid uniform, visit two maid cafes, do PR for our Chinese site to all the otaku shops and find some potential partners - all accomplished!!

Check out this photo-intensive report:

According to Nikkei, publisher Kondansha will publish and sell translations of its manga in America from September this year. The subsidiary was established in New York with 2 million dollars of capital and is headed by Yoshinobu Noma, the vice president of Kodansha.

Kodansha U.S.A intends to publish manga titles that are popular in Japan first and then expand into other genres such as novels if it goes well. Printing, market reseaarch and distribution will be outsourced to local companies while sales and marketing strategy will be handled by Kodansha.

BBMF Group, inc is the big bad manga factory that is causing alarm within the publishing industry in Japan today. The emanga mobile contents providor is creating ripples in the traditional publishing industry with its aggressive growth plan and powerful vision for the emanga market. BBMF has a factory in Nanking that scans manga pages to make digital manga content for Japanese mobile phones. With mobile manga, you can say bye bye to manga kissas and shelves of mangas in small Japanese houses.

Four college boys majoring in computer programming decided to make a website one day for fun. They all love Japanese anime so they decided to start up a video streaming website for Asian dramas and anime with a "voice" - a persona named Shinji. Never in their wildest dream would they imagine that it would become such a huge global community of anime fans today.

Last week, it was suddenly decided that I had to go to China for a secret mission and so on Tuesday afternoon, after two meetings in the morning I headed to Narita Airport without knowing what to expect. I only had three days to complete the mission and I was scheduled to visit many places, including a factory, a trading company, a pirated cosplay costume maker and an original goods distributor.