A statue of young swordsman Tanjiro Kamado, the title character in the Demon Slayer anime franchise, is displayed at a cinema in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district on Sept. 9. | AFP-JIJI Sony Pictures' Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle has become the top movie in U.S. and Canadian theaters, setting an opening weekend record for the Japanese anime genre. The film, about a boy who joins an organization that hunts demons after his little sister is turned into one, brought in $70 million, the division of Sony said Sunday. That topped the previous $31 million record set by Pokemon: The First Movie -- Mewtwo Strikes Back in 1999. Box Office Pro had forecast weekend sales of $60 million to $75 million. The opening underscores the surging global appeal of Japanese anime.

Last April, Facebook's AI research lab (FAIR) announced and released as open source its BlenderBot social chat app. While the neophyte AI immediately proved far less prone to racist outbursts than previous attempts, BlenderBot was not without its shortcomings. For one, the system had the recollection capacity of a goldfish -- any subject or data point the AI wasn't initially trained simply didn't exist in its online reality, as evidenced by the OG BB's continued insistence that Tom Brady still plays for the New England Patriots. For another, due to its limited knowledge of current events, the system had a strong tendency to hallucinate knowledge, like a digital Dunning-Kruger effect. But the advancements BlenderBot 2.0 displays, which FAIR debuted on Friday, should make the AI far more sociable, knowledgeable, and capable.

One of the seismic cultural shifts of the pandemic era has been a migration into fantasies. Some of them are troubling, such as the conspiratorial prejudice that has fuelled QAnon and the recent surge in violence against those of Asian descent. Others are restorative: the immersive worlds of books, the virtual realities of video games, the hypnotic lull of binge-streamed television series. Many of the escapes that we use to nourish ourselves originated in Japan. The stunning success of Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which sold thirty-one million copies worldwide last year, is a striking example.

Early one morning at the beginning of December, I rushed to the nearest newsstand to purchase a copy of the Nikkei Marketing Journal. It was somehow reassuring once again to see, emblazoned atop page one, the publication's traditional sumo-style banzuke (ranking sheet) -- a layout virtually unchanged since 1971 -- listing Japan's top-selling hit products of 2020. Before dissecting the 2020 rankings, it's worth examining how this annual list began. The 1970s marked the time when discerning consumers in Japan began showing a preference for greater variety. Prior to that time, manufacturers had been content to sell their rice cookers, washing machines, TV sets and other mass-produced household items by appealing mainly through brand affinity.