Marcel Winatschek

Tasty Is the Flesh

Sure, I understand why people become vegetarians or even full-on vegans. Once you’ve looked into the sad eyes of an innocent lamb just before it’s led, together with its tiny friends and the rest of its loudly bleating family, to a fully automated slaughter line, where it’s torn apart before the wide-open eyes of its loved ones, you start thinking differently about the piece of meat on your plate. I, too, tried to join the cult of supposedly better people. With my eating-disordered girlfriend, I grazed for months on broccoli, nuts, and hummus, until I dragged myself, starving, into a Burger King, where a kind employee revived me with cheap animal scraps before releasing me back into the wild. The relationship ended shortly afterward.

Of Beasts and Breasts

Let’s get straight to it: Monster Musume is hardly the deepest, smartest, or even remotely most elegant anime under the sun. Quite the opposite. Its utterly idiotic story could fit on a cummed on cookie, the dialogue mostly consists of yelling, scolding, and moaning, and the artwork looks as if it came straight from some seventh-rate hentai dating sim made by obscure Eastern-European hobby developers that Steam throws at you in ten-packs for pocket change. Monster Musume is one of those typical harem anime already told a thousand times, in which a perpetually nosebleeding protagonist is pursued by around ten hopelessly horny girls. Only this time they’re sexy monster women with larger or smaller breasts who urgently want to be mounted right now. Nice.

20 Nights in Tokyo

I’ve decided to use Japan as the thematic foundation for my upcoming bachelor’s thesis in design. How exactly I want to approach this is still somewhat uncertain. At first, I intended to shoot a documentary about the colorful underground cultures in the Land of the Rising Sun. Cultures permeated by depression, anxiety about the future, and a kind of resentment toward society by their followers. I wanted to cover everything from eccentric horror manga and underage idol groups to rape porn that only narrowly falls under artistic freedom, and speak with pop-culture experts about whether Japan’s aging population might eventually cause these scenes to die out. However, this plan ultimately struck me as somewhat too overambitious. I should probably be a little more modest.

What If...?

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and one almost essential question spins endlessly in my head: What if...? While others quietly masturbate late at night or are kindly taken to the seventh heaven by their partners, drifting off with a faint smile before waking refreshed to expand their successful résumés, I spend the night thinking. What if I’d made tea instead of coffee? What if I’d been nicer to the woman at the train kiosk yesterday? What if I had chosen Spotify over Apple Music? Moved to Hamburg instead of Berlin? Confessed my love to the cute girl next door? Read more books? Not cheated on ex-girlfriends? Not been lazy? Not been an asshole? What if I hadn’t spent so much time pondering what might have been?

Goodbye Kumamoto

My time here in Kumamoto is now coming to an end. For a full year I have been an exchange student at the Faculty of Design of Japan’s Sojo University, exploring new ideas in both artistic and technical fields. Day after day, I wandered the two campuses that rise above the city, learning about typography, painting, and graphic design in lecture halls, tinkering with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis in the computer club, and studying Japanese in the library with friends. I’ve met so many wonderful people, traveled across half the country with them, and through them gained deep insights into a different kind of society – glimpses that remain forever closed to most travelers. It’s hard to express how grateful I am to have lived through these colorful adventures.

The Queen of J-Pop

What Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, or Mariah Carey might be in Western realms, that is what women named Hikaru Utada, Namie Amuro, and Seiko Matsuda are in Japan. Grand shows, powerful voices, and an abundance of feminine energy – this is how the Far Eastern audience knows and loves its female superstars. They dazzle with charisma, glamour, and emotional performances that blend strength with elegance. These artists are more than singers, they are icons who have shaped the image of Japanese pop culture for decades, inspiring countless fans across generations. Their concerts fill arenas, their songs dominate the charts, and their influence stretches far beyond Japan’s borders, defining what it means to be a pop legend in Asia’s ever-evolving music scene.

I Love Tomboys

When I was twelve and scratched the naked, hairy ass of my first so-called girlfriend in our homemade hideout, somewhere under cardboard boxes, rat poison, and industrial pallets, I knew what the rest of my life would look like. She wasn’t one of those normal girls who plastered their faces with makeup, ran to pedicures, and shaved their legs, but my best buddy – for years. We jumped like Power Rangers over sacks of earth, beat each other senseless in the woods, and late at night watched the first soft-core porn on some shabby TV channel, together with her little brothers, to laugh at her own flesh and blood and shove them whooping down the stairs. I admired Mara through and through. She was my first tomboy.

Dystopian Decadence

A misaligned photograph of the future, born in the fever of Japan’s growth in the sixties and seventies. Traditions, quiet and fine, threaded through with wabi-sabi as an inner pulse, keep time beneath the noise. Buildings that refuse to shed their rust, that keep a film of dull gray on the fingers, stand as patient witnesses. A floating consolation, and a smell of open country, move down the lanes and linger in the alleys. The story of Millennium Parade unfolds in a forked-off Tokyo, grown out of this zone – our shared room of side-by-side living. The city has laid aside its earlier addiction to polish and noiseless urbanity. Instead, it sets out toward a strange, beautiful, absurdly ideal future metropolis, nourished by disorder and yet leaning toward transcendence.

The End of the World

By now I had long since resigned myself to the fact that for months I could neither really laugh nor cry. I had degenerated into a feelingless phantom in this endlessly same world, drifting from party to party, from person to person, and yet no longer truly taking part. In life. Everything had decayed into the same everyday mush. No matter how hard I searched. And then I sit there and, in a single instant, everything changes. I do not see it. No explosion, no scream, no ending. Nothing. Only me and my head and some switch inside it that flipped. Suddenly. And that forces me to burst out of the ruined normality. Out into the night air, out of the loop that had me on repeat.

Don’t Stop Shooting!

I finally watched Shinichiro Ueda’s 2017 film One Cut of the Dead the other day. And what can I say? It is, as anyone who has seen it can attest, absolutely fantastic. The big problem is that I really shouldn’t reveal anything about it, not even the genre, because otherwise I strip away all the fun. Only this much: One Cut of the Dead opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a small film crew is in the middle of shooting a zombie picture... But of course it’s not an ordinary warehouse. Rumor has it that military experiments were carried out here... on human beings! Then, as if from nowhere, real zombies suddenly appear and terrorize the crew. A bloody struggle for survival begins...