DenDen Garden

https://www.vocamap.jp/ bookmarking is a largely useless endeavor, up until you run an audit over the thousands you’ve tagged laboriously. one pattern that does repeat across my bookmarks is the number of interactive charts and maps, likely because I have…

this post is not a review of walpurgisnacht. rest assured, this is also not a post to judge if homura has ever actually done anything wrong. engaging with walpurgisnacht requires, in my mind, being a dog that has always believed that shaft could catch the…

memory, I’ve heard or read somewhere, is primarily associative. in a mapping of memory to the web, backlinks reinforce the associations that end up also fertilizing factory SEO farms. this is much of the reason why it can be fun to follow the degrees need…

Left: The Super Bon Odori stage at Chokaigi 2026.

Source: Meteostat from overseas, it can be difficult to accept that comiket is a physical gathering when most of our contact with it is limited to the spoils that end up scanned, or more recently, ripped from digital storefronts. if you are more plugged i…

hare hare yukai will soon be a two decade old song. surely this does also mean haruhi is a two decade old anime, but I don’t need to pretend there’s a cultural footprint where there is none to inspect. haruhi after her disappearance is, appropriately, a f…

last year was the wednesday of all years, which is a difficult accomplishment for anyone with a living memory reading this post close to when it is first being published. if that’s not you, I’m honestly thrilled you’re reading another new year post, becau…

japan may have one the most developed muzak soundscapes in the world. its best vistas, yamanote departure melodies and muji, depend mostly on a casiopea or YMO touch. for anything else, you can mostly expect sickly sweet MIDI synths that are a hybrid comb…

Tracing the tradition of single flowers posed in vases to maximalist flower stands for 2D characters is probably easier when your culture already elevates the flower as a heritage.

This article first appeared in Japanese for Async Voice's Current State of Vocaloid Culture: Overseas Edition, initially available at Literary Flea Market Tokyo 41 and THE VOCALOID M@STER 61.

Buzzword trends as reported by Oricon for the second half of 2025, using survey results sampling readers of Pucchigumi (young elementary school girls), Ciao (older elementary school girls), and CoroCoro Comic (elementary school boys).