Tuesday, October 8, 2013, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
The Nippon Club
145 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 (between 6th and 7th Aves.)

Explore Japanese culture and learn the language at the same time!
We offer a series of special workshops and lectures that combine fun cultural activities and language learning together throughout the year.

Join us for presentations by Hiroyuki Itoh, the CEO of Crypton Future Media, Inc., and Tom Looser, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at NYU, about the cultural background of the global popularity of Hatsune Miku, Japan’s number one virtual idol! Their discussion will be followed by Q & A with audience. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet the creator of Hatsune Miku!

Speakers:
Hiroyuki Itoh is the CEO of Crypton Future Media, INC., a music technology company based in Sapporo, Japan. Since 1995, Crypton Future Media is importing music software and various other sound media, but also developing diverse music software, such as the singing voice synthesizer Hatsune Miku which was first released in 2007. Hiroyuki ITOH has established himself as visionary “Meta-Creator,” gradually introducing advanced services that assist the creative process of Crypton product users. Among those is a platform where not only music producers but also illustration artists can exchange artwork and collaborate with each other in the creative process (piapro.jp). He embarked on yet another new challenge: the English singing version of Hatsune Miku and the software was released this past August.

Tom Looser (PhD in Anthropology, U. of Chicago) is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at NYU. His areas of research include Cultural Anthropology and Japanese studies; art, architecture and urban form; new media studies and animation; and critical theory. A senior editor for the journal Mechademia, he is the author of Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater, and has published articles in a variety of venues including Japan Forum, Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Journal of Pacific Asia, and Cultural Anthropology.

For more information about the event, please visit:
http://www.jfny.org/language/events.htm