“American teens mop up raunchy Japanese manga” is the (slightly disturbing) headline of a Mainichi Daily News article that appears to say just the opposite. The article starts out with a tantalizing lede:
Americans can’t get enough of shojo manga, the racy comic books for elementary schoolgirls that have recently been filled with stories with such themes as homosexual love and relations between incestuous lesbian sisters, according to [newsweekly] Shukan Shincho (10/20).
In a classic tabloid bait-and-switch move, it then goes on to note that while American schoolgirls are snapping up shojo manga, they are reading “not the lucid [lurid?] type frequently sold here, but the stories about detectives and heroic types les [sic] likely to rile the Puritanical streak of most Americans.”
(Paging the Mainichi Daily News copy editor! Break time is OVER!)
OK, let’s parse this logically:
1. Japanese manga are full of racy sex stuff
2. Americans can’t get enough Japanese manga
3. Therefore, Americans are reading racy Japanese sex comics. No! Wait! They’re reading tame Japanese detective comics.
Confused? The article then repeats this weird sequence:
In Japan, shojo manga are probably most famous, or infamous as the case may be, for their stories packed with shocks. Graphic sexuality is common and appears to be the type of Japanese culture now popular in the U.S.
“There’s a rating system and if something is restricted, it’s written on the cover of the book, along with the recommended age for readers. Most of the graphic sex scenes and sex talk have been cut from the comics,” Kinokuniya’s Nozaki says, adding that there are still some cultural differences that exist.
So, graphic comic book sex is the most popular aspect of Japanese culture in America, and we know that because Americans eliminate it from the books we import from Japan. Got that? Brain cells… dying…
The problem with this article is it doesn’t distinguish between different segments of the market. There’s plenty of “adult” manga, plenty of gay-themed manga (nothin’ wrong with that!), but the article explicitly says that the big growth in the market is in cleaned-up shojo manga, underneath a headline that says just the opposite.
The real harm in a story like this, of course, is that some American media will pick up on it and turn it into a scare story for grownups, who, knowing nothing about manga, will start to get really suspicious of all those schoolgirls in short skirts. Next thing you know, Tohru Honda will be banned in Boston and Ultra Maniac will be the featured title at the next book-burning. Spare me!
