What are Yōkai?
We have two amazing Yōkai experts from Japan, Matt Alt and Matthew Meyer. Matt Alt is presenting the important history of Yōkai and how Yōkai play an important role in modern Japan today. On the other hand, Matthew Meyer is presenting his Yōkai illustrations, Yōkai stories, and sharing his experience of living in Japan as an artist.
This is a great chance to learn&discuss about a significant of Japanese anime, video games, manga, pop culture, literature, and more!! We will have a time for Q&A at the end, so please bring your questions and join our conversations!
Matt Alt was as a civil servant, a translator for the US Patent and Trademark Office. By day he helped attorneys decipher Japanese intellectual property ranging from sanitary napkins to nuclear reactor components. But at nights and on weekends, he found himself living a second life, translating video games and writing for websites and magazines about his passion for the Japanese heroes, robots, and monsters that had first inspired him as a child.
He was the co-host of the popular NHK World television show Japanology Plus from 2015 to 2020. His essays and cultural commentary regularly appear in a variety of media outlets, including The New Yorker online, BBC Culture, CNN Go, The Economist 1843, Wired, Slate, The Independent, The Japan Times, and Newsweek Japan.
Matthew Meyer is an illustrator and folklorist based in Japan. He received a BFA in illustration from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2005. His work is focused on Japanese folklore, particularly yōkai stories.
He is the author and illustrator of several encyclopedias of Japanese folklore, including The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (2012), The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits (2015), The Book of the Hakutaku (2018), and The Fox’s Wedding (2022). He is also the creator of yokai.com, an online illustrated database of Japanese ghosts and monsters.
[http://patreon.com/osarusan] Amazon.com: Matthew Meyer: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle
