One of the things that’s always escaped me is what Japanese people think of Japanese anime. Looking at the sales figures provides you with some measure of an average Japanese anime fan’s taste, but what about their first-hand reactions? People generally know about 2ch, but what about the Japanese aniblogsphere? Do they have a comparable blogging culture to ours, with there being a general (though somewhat skewed) perception of “blogger = elitist/critic/hipster/etc.”?

As of now, I’ve only just skimmed the surface of the Japanese aniblogsphere, but the early returns suggest to me that their blogsphere has evolved in an entirely different way from ours. English aniblogging is a niche over here, with a small number of bloggers holding a large amount of sway over a relatively closed community. The Japanese blogsphere, meanwhile, is huge. Compare the scale of their aniblog directory to Anime Nano and you’ll see that blogging for them is a rather established thing. The blogs are even being ranked in terms of some kind of arbitrary scale that I have not quite worked out yet.

Naturally, this suggests that the Japanese blogsphere is more likely to represent the mainstream Japanese fan’s opinion than that of a “snob”.

In this sporadic series of posts, I’ll introduce you to a Japanese aniblogger’s website, tell you about their tastes from what they’ve written about themselves and then translate one post which I feel is representative of their writing style.

First up: Uozanankyoku from To Love Ru Love. As you might be able to guess, he likes To Love-Ru.

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