Today, it was announced that the "KAWAii!!"-themed fashion shows, concerts and live performances will be returning for the annual San Francisco J-POP festival. Fans will have an opportunity to revel in edgy sides of J-POP style through autographs and meet-and-greets with some of J-Pop fashion's best upcoming stars.

In addition, there will be a J-POP Summit KAWAii!! Pop-Up shop featuring a fashion boutique full of unique items and labels from Tokyo. The shop will be open inside the NEW PEOPLE building at 1746 Post St. in San Francisco.

Click for the full press release.

As one of the upcoming Guests of Honor at San Francisco's annual J-POP Summit at Japantown, the 5-member all-girl dance group Tokyo Girls Style will be performing and singing live this July 19&20th in the U.S. for their first time. In addition, the group has announced that they have launched a crowd-funding project, "Let's All Join Hands to Make Sunflowers Bloom Girls' Style in San Francisco."

Over the weekend, Japanese idol group AKB48 announced the vote count results for the AKB48 37th Single Senbatsu General Election at Ajinomoto Stadium. For this election, the top 80 girls were chosen; an increase over the previous 64 girls from past elections. 263 girls were eligible for candidacy including members from AKB48, SKE48, NMB48 and HKT48. Unlike last year, girls who were previously incumbent members of AKB-affiliated groups for more than four years were not eligible.

Over the weekend, Aniplex of America released a slew of detailed updates for their upcoming releases of the Gurren Lagann, Madoka Magica and Anohana movies on DVD/Blu-ray, along with Silver Spoon DVD. All releases will be available for pre-order on 5/27 and will be sold at select retailers on July 15th.

Set to debut at Anime Expo 2014, along with an appearance by writer Reki Kawahara and illustrator abec, Aniplex of America has confirmed its global simulcast details for their upcoming release of Sword Art Online II starting July 5th. The anime will be streamed across the world through the distribution channels Hulu, Crunchyroll and DAISUKI.

Let me start off this review by being honest. When the Steins;Gate anime was originally simulcasted back in 2011 I decided to drop the series, despite being thoroughly entertained, as I knew that the original twenty-four episode adaptation would miss that "special something" as with most novel-to-screen adaptations. I consciously decided to gamble and pray that JAST USA would eventually localize the Steins;Gate visual novel since there were a cornucopia of rumors swirling around the game's potential localization on the Internet. So thus began my long four-year waiting period for the much-anticipated release of the visual novel and in 2014 my hopes were finally answered. After playing through the fifty-hour plus visual novel and watching the follow-up OVA and film I can truly call Steins; Gate for what it is: an epic time travel masterpiece.

Fresh off of their release of the titles Narcissu 1st & 2nd and World End Economica on the Steam distribution platform, English localization group has announced that they are working on a translation of Japanese amateur group Alice in Dissonance's visual novel Fault Milestone One.

Earlier today, Aniplex of America and Sony Music Entertainment announced that they will be hosting a special Kill la Kill event at Anime Expo 2014 in Los Angeles on Friday, July 4th. The event will include a talk session with multiple guests from the series, a premiere screening for the first episode of the Kill la Kill English dub and a concert featuring Eir Aoi whose songs "Sirius" and "Sanbika" were featured in Studio Trigger's twenty-four episode animated series.

After reaching #2 on the Oricon music charts in Japan with "LANDSCAPE," J-pop artist LiSA's newest single "Rising Hope" has finally arrived on iTunes worldwide. Her fifth single, the title song is also the opening to Madhouse's twenty-six episode fantasy series The Irregular at Magic High School. The series is currently being simulcasted on a number of streaming services including Daisuki and Crunchyroll.

Today it was announced that North American video game and anime publisher NIS America will be releasing Clamp's classic anime series Cardcaptor Sakura in a Blu-ray Premium Edition and DVD standard edition on August 5. Both editions will feature a bonus monaural English dub.