MangaBlog

The Japan Times has a fairly dry article on why non-Japanese, especially in the U.S., study Japan. For most of us, these paragraphs are the only part of interest:

The fourth trend is the widening gap between academic works and the public’s knowledge of Japan. Traditionally, there has been a certain intellectual link between academic studies on Japan and the promotion of understanding of Japan in general.

Recently, however, interest in and understanding of Japan has been increasingly divorced from some academic works on Japan. Young people’s fascination with manga and anime has weakened, or at least blurred, the established link between some traditional types of Japanese studies and young intellectuals’ interest in Japan.

This garnered an interesting response on Japundit. Here’s the opening salvo:

If you spend enough time in Japan, then you know that anime and manga (and video games for that matter) are not necessarily mainstream cultural activities; my favorite travel book even warns travelers against the assumption that all Japanese will share an enthusiasm for these forms of entertainment. Most Japanese people I know consider shared events like matsuri to be a truer representation of Japanese culture. I once had a long talk with a Shinto priest who told me that he believes his job is essentially “to celebrate and preserve the essence of Japanese culture.”

On the other hand, it’s not the Edo period anymore:

I remember, for example, some JET friends who came back from Japan disappointed that they did not find the land of Lady Murasaki; Japan turned out to be much more chaotic than the country our classes on Japanese aesthetics had portrayed (these same professors did not want to discuss Japan post 1930, by the way, because by then the war was looming on the horizon and war is ugly). Yes, you can find practitioners of old arts like lacquer making and kimono embroidery, but these things aren’t the focus of the majority of the population.

This point of view is heavily critiqued in the comments, which are definitely worth reading. Many commenters become interested in different aspects of Japanese life through manga. And I thought this was spot-on:

The problem I see is that people like that Shinto priest have an outdated and romantic view of the “Japanese essence,” as if there is such a thing. Shinto is just as much an invented tradition as the ninja. Foreigners can be just as guilty in this romanticism (see: The Last Samurai, for example. By which I mean, DON’T see it, it sucks.) People who persist in their interest in Japan, and who advance even a little in academia, get their rose-colored glasses torn off pretty damn quick.

In other words, one era’s pop culture is the next era’s classical tradition, so relax and enjoy. Someday, people will be writing PhD theses and holding seminars on Mink and One Piece.

Here’s why we read alternative newspapers. The “Shojo Manga” exhibit has reached Chicago, and the coverage it’s getting is a study in contrasts. New City has a well written article by Isaac Adamson that hits all the main points and does it accurately. It starts with a couple of examples of manga plots, then dives right in with a brief explanation:

Featuring some 200 works from nearly two-dozen artists, “Shojo Manga!” is the first exhibition touring the U.S. to show how women in Japan have been staking out their comic-book territory since the medium exploded in the aftermath of World War II. Along the way, the exhibition offers a penetrating glance into the fantasies, insecurities and shifting social roles of women in Japan.

And instead of tossing off “big eyes,” Adamson gives us a paragraph about the manga look:

Instead of hard bold lines and garish colors, girls’ comics often use pastels and a soft glow effect. Everyone has great hair and glamorous clothes, and historical pieces get a lot of mileage out of frilly shirts, flowing gowns and flowery backdrops. They offer up a fantasy world light years away from the drab school uniforms, glass and steel monoliths, and rabbit-hutch apartment buildings that make up many kids’ waking realities. Almost all characters in manga have oversized, twinkling eyes—but in shojo manga their eyes don’t contain individual stars so much as entire galaxies.

The curator, an art professor at Chico State, is called in to explain the popularity of yaoi manga:

“Some Japanese women no longer believe in love between men and women as superior since they see the reality after the happy ending,” says Dr. Masami Toku, the exhibition’s curator.

… and the author concludes that manga are an enormous medium and can’t be stereotyped:

But as the exhibit gleefully demonstrates, not all girls’ comics are about love or coming of age. Similarly, there’s no dominant visual style on display. As the contemporary “shojo manga” world expands and fragments, girls’ comics have spawned ladies’ comics, romantic homoeroticism has become a genre of self-parody, and (gasp!) artists have even started drawing ugly-looking people with normal-sized eyes.

As a newspaper writer, I know that the only thing harder to write than a good intro is a good close. Adamson has wisely saved a nugget for the end: Osamu Tezuka’s daughter-in-law is a shoujo manga artist—and sometimes she crosses over and does shounen. I didn’t even know that.

OK, here’s how the Chicago Tribune handles the same story:

Manga mania
Your love of Japanese culture extends to all things edible: You can’t make it through the week without maki, and you like your wasabi with a warm sake pairing (in traditional masu, natch). Now’s your chance to one-up your sushi-noshing neighbors on more than tableside trivia. Check out “Shojo Manga! Girl Power!” and see 200-plus examples of “girl comics” by more than 20 Japanese artists and ponder the genre’s influence on gender roles in Japan since World War II.

I know it’s only a calendar entry, and hopefully they’ll follow up with something more thoughtful, but this paragraph manages to be both obnoxious and uninformative in under 100 words, which takes some doing. Wasabi and warm sake? Methinks the writer grabbed a sushi bar menu and chose a couple of words at random.

Start saving your shillings! Del Rey, which licenses manga from Kodansha, is expanding its operations to the UK.

Random House will launch 15 titles in August 2006 priced £5.99 each (including the bestselling series xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa by superstar manga creators CLAMP) with 45 titles over seven series to be published by December 2006. These will be supported by a dedicated interactive website.

That’s a pleasantly ambitious schedule. I’m not sure how you buy manga in Britain now, but I imagine that this move will make Del Rey books not only easier to get but also cheaper.

Here’s what happens when there are too many articles like the one posted below. The Manganews Forum translates an article from the Japanese press about Osaka prefecture requiring “adult” manga to be shrink-wrapped:

In order to raise the effectiveness of the Fostering Healthy Young People Regulation, the prefecture has imposed a duty of individual shrink-wrapping to adult magazines and alike. The prefecture has also made plans to tighten its measure, such as specifying harmful books, which includes shoujo manga with excessive obscene depiction.

[snip]

Shoujo manga with obscene depictions will be submitted to the Prefecture’s Youth Healthy Training Council, where it will be determined whether the title is consider a “harmful book” and to be shrink-wrapped.

A news story from Canada warns parents of the Danger that Lurks Between the Covers (of manga, that is):

The graphic novels, or Japanese mangas, illustrated in wide-eyed, comic-book style, were not as innocent as the bright cartoon covers made them appear — some containing pictorial stories rife with sexual content.

What happened is that a 13-year-old took out some manga from his local library, and his mom looked at them and flipped.

“There’s pictures of young men and women together, there’s a picture of a man sticking his hands up her skirt, there’s pictures of them having sex … But the dialogue that goes with it is just as bad,” Dergo said of the books her son brought home.

The series in question is something called Happy Mania, which is rated 18+, although the mother also has some harsh words for Love Hina.

The library director points out that while provincial law forbids the library to lend R-rated movies to kids, there is no such provision for M-rated comics. I think he’s a bit disingenuous when he says “There is actually no accepted rating system for books whatsoever,” because the publishers do rate manga, and their ratings are fairly accurate. But what about other books? The adult fiction section is full of novels with much more sex and much less literary merit that this kid could have taken out without triggering an article in the local paper.

I do think this is an excellent argument for libraries not to put all their graphic novels in the YA section, however. I absolutely think the library should carry this book and lend it to anyone with a card, but they should not shelve it next to Fruits Basket and Astro Boy, which I suspect may have happened in this case (the article doesn’t say). The bigger danger is that libraries will not carry books that can’t be put in YA, and will miss out on some of the better graphic novels because of that.

Some quick links and good reads:

My German is not very good, but the upshot of this article seems to be that costumed manga girls overran the Leipzig book fair. It’s pretty funny to run it through BabelFish:

With some one sees eighty per cent of the Pobacken, nearly all runs around on dangerously high rubber paragraphs. “the girls are condemned dangerous”, say a dealer, who gezimmerten tried, to guard its from raw boards one guest and.

I’m not letting my girls wear rubber paragraphs of any height until they are at least 16.

On the AoD blog, the much more thoughtful translator Tomo Kimura discusses some of the decisions she made in translating Full Moon o Sagashite.

Australia discovers Osamu Tezuka: The National Gallery of Victoria is having a show on the godfather of manga later this year. The manga market is small at the moment; Australians spent AU$750,000 last year on manga, while U.S. sales were the equivalent of AU$164 million. But Australia has its own home-grown manga/anime magazine, OzTaku, and its own manga expert, Monash University assistant lecturer Craig Norris. Here’s Norris’s take on why manga will catch on down under:

“For many fans, one of the things they find so refreshing about manga and anime is it’s not trapped in Australia. It’s not the Crocodile Hunter or Crocodile Dundee, it’s not Kath and Kim, it’s not this Australian image. It’s a global, cosmopolitan, sci-fi, futuristic, beautiful boy kind of image. It’s everything that Australian pop culture isn’t giving them at the moment; it’s the stories that aren’t being told indigenously,” he says.

The Calgary Herald has an article that focuses on movies made from graphic novels but contains some interesting nuggets, including this:

To graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, cadets from the class of 2006 must study Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a graphic novel set during the Iranian revolution.

And this comment from writer Stephen Weiner on the popularity of manga:

“I call it the content revolution,” Weiner says. “The format is the same, words and pictures, but the stories are drastically different. The stories have been so limiting for so long in comic books, that it sort of took the rest of the world to show us what can be done in comics.”

Weiner also voices what most of us know, that book sales figures understate sales of graphic novels:

“The same way the New York bestseller lists just take certain stores into account, graphic novel sales often don’t take into account independent comic book store sales.”

Speaking of manga sales, the February numbers are out and David Taylor at Love Manga has posted and interpreted them. Tokyopop did a little better than Viz this month, with Loveless making a strong debut, perhaps because of pre-release buzz. At Precocious Curmudgeon, David Welsh adds his take.

Also on Love Manga, a nice roundup on the Rising Stars of Manga entry that bears suspicious similarities to Blade of the Immortal. Besides side-by-side postings of the panels (which has been done elsewhere), the post is worth reading for the comments. Lillian Diaz-Pryzbl of Tokyopop weighs in:

Heh. The whole Samurai Zombie being selected thing can entirely be attributed to the fact that none of the three editors who decided on the top 20 entries (including myself) have read Blade of the Immortal (for shame!). I thought, “Hey, this looks a lot like one of those dark, rough-edged samurai manga,” but no connection was made beyond that. :-)

As for what to do next, Diaz-Pryzbl notes that

originality is a factor in our final judging (which was done two weeks ago, actually), and originality in plot and concept was also something that this story was lacking, even before the plagiarism came up.

But some of the commenters are critical of Tokyopop for not taking the story down from the RSoM site.

If you’re wondering what to buy next, TangognaT reviews Absolute Boyfriend and Golgo 13.