Discover Japanese Yokai Folklore

What are Yokai?

We have two amazing Yokai experts from Japan, Matt Alt and Matthew Meyer.  Matt Alt is presenting the important history of Yokai and how Yokai play an important role in modern Japan today. On the other hand, Matthew Meyer is presenting his Yokai illustrations, Yokai 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!

Register now to join us in October 27th @6pm (EST)/Online 

You will receive the Zoom link after registering.

-About Speakers-

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.

In 2003 he left his homeland of America for Tokyo. There he co-founded AltJapan Co., Ltd., a company that specializes in localization — producing the English-language versions of popular Japanese video games, comic books, and other forms of entertainment. This work immersed him in what Japan calls the “media mix,” an interconnected creative ecosystem of products, publications, productions, and producers. It is a place few foreigners ever get to see, the beating heart of Japan’s pop cultural machine. This background, coupled with my fluency in the Japanese language, has given him a seat at the table with the nation’s top creators for many years. His conversations with them have given him a singular understanding of the ways Japanese tastemakers create, and a chance to see the unpredictable moment when new concepts spark into life.

He still translate today. But his true passion is harnessing a unique combination of insider experience, linguistic skills, and investigative insight to deliver compelling stories that have never been told in the English language. Japanese pop culture, and the ways it is made and consumed both in Japan and abroad, is more than his hobby or his reporting beat. It is his lifeblood.

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.

Matt Alt

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://yokai.com]

[http://patreon.com/osarusan]