[steven]

I think I fall in the boat of not really being into anime even though I live in Japan. I've watched a couple though. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are good just because it's almost ingrained in the culture. I knew a little bit about it before coming to Japan... enough to understand when people would make reference to it. While it's funny and exciting most of the time, it does get boring at points. I've almost seen all of them now and am glad that I took the time to do so simply because seemingly every Japanese person knows about it.

Another one that I saw that I really liked was Urayasu tekkin kazoku. I had never heard of it before I came to Japan. Incidentally, the way I found it was by looking for glockenspiel movies on youtube. The word for glockenspiel in Japanese happens to be "tekkin". When I searched for it my wife was sitting next to me and when that anime came up she said "natsukashii". So we ended up watching all of them. It's really funny... if not a little bit vulgar. It makes some jokes that rely quite a bit on the culture though, so it might be confusing. It also has a very fast talking narrator, who is hilarious.

But ya... if anime is not your thing don't let other people force it on you. I remember anime being some-what popular at my high school. Every time I tried to watch one of the animes recommended to me it was a bore-fest. Luckily there's more to Japan than anime!