It is with at least a little embarrassment that I must announce that I have now been doing this podcast for ten years. The first episode of the Zannen, Canada podcast was posted on March 18, 2015. It was the result of a few small creative decisions I agonized over for way too long, driven by a simple need to have some kind of outlet to air my pent-up anime-related grievances that seemed so very important when I was getting the show started up. After all, things had gone to hell since I ended the Zannen, Canada blog a few years prior, and the people needed a voice.
Living in the cruel, terrible times that have emerged since then has made it a bit hard to return to a headspace where anime being geoblocked on Hulu carried any kind of urgency, and even in simpler times there wasn't a massive audience that wanted to hear me complain about it every month in a podcast. Thankfully, I was able to pivot my focus towards finding a narrative around anime and its fandom in Canada, which I have found to be much more substantial and rewarding. Finding cultural cohesion and pride around something like carries a fair bit more weight, especially at this particular moment in history, and it's probably the reason that so many of you have stuck around over the years, so thank you for that!
I don't have anything recorded for today, but I am aiming to have an episode out before the end of the month. I would like to take this opportunity to highlight one of the touchstones of my show: my interview with the late John Rooney, recorded all the way back in 2016. John was a true legend of Canadian broadcasting. He not only served as the Director of Programming at YTV from 2005 to 2009 while helping shape the Bionix block, but also worked with virtually every English language youth television company either as a programming lead or consultant and was a prominent advocate for 2SLGBTQ+ representation in youth media and production. If you ever watched He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special on YTV during oddly prominent timeslots, you can probably thank him for that too. John sadly passed away at the end of 2020 due to complications from a stroke. Looking back on this interview, I really had no idea how much of an honour it really was to have him on and I don't even come close to asking the types of questions I should have. Nevertheless, you can find that classic episode here:
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