MangaBlog

It’s worth checking out just for the manga-ized drawing of Rosie the Riveter with the slogan, in Japanese and English, “Not just for boys,” but there’s also some worthwhile reading in this article about a shojo manga themed art exhibit at California State University Chico. The curator of the show, art professor Masami Toku, observes

When Japanese students are asked to draw a picture of their family, they are likely to create a drawing like a photograph, with the important people in the center and the less important people cut off on the edges.

In comparison, American children will draw a one-dimensional picture including only the most important people.

“When Japanese children are asked to draw a playground, they will create an exaggerated hand with a ball,” she said.

They draw that way because manga has a great influence on children’s artistic abilities.

I’m seeing a little of that at home. Another of Toku’s comments explains the cheery optimism of many shojo heroines:

Manga grew out of what Toku calls the devastation of Japan from World War II to the present. Manga offers a way to cope.

“Imagine Japan’s male-dominated society,” she said. “Japanese manga encourages girls to keep their inner hope.”

I suppose that’s a good thing, although a healthy dose of assertiveness would be a boon to most of the girls I’m reading about. Anyway, I think Chico State must be about the coolest university on earth, and if I were 17 again, I’d go there.

“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!

I haven’t had much time to post, but the pace of manga acquisition continues unabated in my household. My latest reviews, of Fruits Basket 5 and Ultra Maniac 1, are up on Manga Life. This has turned into a little project for me, to sit down and read Furuba in sequence and really think about it as a complete work, rather looking at it a volume at a time. This is a rewarding exercise and I highly recommend it.
My 12-year-old has been working our inter-library loan system to get Imadoki, Kill Me Kiss Me, Alice 19th, and W Juliet. I’m noticing that all these are rated for Older Teens and wondering if I should be reading them first, but—too late!
Meanwhile, the 11-year-old is wallowing in Yotsuba 3 and Full Moon 3, which I bought today basically as bribes to make her do her math homework. We also bought Dramacon today and ordered Steady Beat.
And that chuckling noise you hear in the background is my husband reading Cromartie High School (another treasure from inter-library loan).

I haven’t been blogging much because my father just moved in with me. Dad suffers from dementia and is also recovering from brain surgery. A big chunk of his long-term memory seems to be just gone, which leaves him with little to think or talk about, even though he is more lucid and alert than he was a few months ago. So I’m looking for things that will amuse him and stimulate his memory a bit.

The evening Dad arrived, I was at Art Spiegelman’s talk at the Peabody-Essex Museum, which I covered for a local paper. The next day, while I was trying to figure out what to talk to him about, I remembered something Spiegelman said:

Comics burn their way into your brain because comics do what your brain does. The way you get images, the way you remember things, is not in a hologram … A baby when a week or two old can recognize a “Have a nice day” face and recognize it as connected to its mother’s smile. We’re wired to get these iconic images, these simple images.

So I did a little experiment: I got out a book of Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” strips (a Spiegelman favorite) and showed it to him.
It worked.

Something about those strips really got to Dad. He’s too young to remember them actually running in the paper, and he couldn’t read them (my book is in French), but he really got into looking at the pictures. The next day I took him to the library and we picked out a couple of books of old newspaper strips–the Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat, Li’l Abner. He looked at them for hours and talked about them for days. This is a man who literally can’t remember what happened two minutes ago. He can’t recall my mother, to whom he was married for 44 years. Yet he remembers the setup of Krazy Kat. I think Spiegelman is right; comics must reach down to some essential core in the brain.

Interestingly, Dad was always a comics reader, at a time when that was considerably less socially acceptable for an adult than it is now. The fact that he was a theoretical physicist teaching at a major university helped mute any criticism. He mostly went for the funny stuff—the Sunday funnies, Archie, the British weeklies when we lived overseas, and of course, Mad.

As he adjusts to living here, Dad has gotten more lucid, and we’ve found more things to interest him—classical music, his old readers from when he was in grade school, a book on ancient Egypt, drives to the ocean or the country. It seems like some of his long-term memory has returned, at least on his good days. But even on a bad day, he likes the funny papers.

We’ll pardon the headline–Demand for anime, manga has libraries wide-eyed–because this article from the Daily Breeze (“LAX to L.A. Harbor”) has some interesting insight into the thought process behind buying manga for libraries. Seems manga has been in short supply at the Torrance, CA, library, so the Friends of the Library ponied up a $10,000 grant to buy more.
What caught my eye is that while most libraries seem to toss all manga into the Young Adult category, Torrance is going to calibrate it a little more finely:

To make sure titles are age appropriate, books and videos will be categorized into four different age groups — 9 and up, 10-13, 13-15 and general adult audience. Library employees will enlist the help of local anime publishers to determine in which age group the titles belong.

(You’d think there would be a lot of overlap between the 9 and up and 10-13 categories; maybe they meant 9 and under?) The article notes something that I have already observed, that the age rating on the cover is not always a good guide for American readers, at least those who think 10-year-olds are too young for panty shots. On the other hand, this line seems a bit gratuitous:

While anime is well known for producing big-busted, scantily clad female superheroes dealing in decidedly adult situations, the library said it will not purchase any sexually explicit material.

OK, great, no hentai manga, but for the record, the Japanese did not invent “big-busted, scantily clad female superheroes.” We have a few in America, too.

Christopher Butcher at Comics.212.net has lists of the 10 most popular manga and the “The 10 Great Manga They Don’t Want You To Read.” Five of the manga on the first list are read in my house: Fruits Basket, Rurouni Kenshin, DN Angel, Inu Yasha (but only by me) and Kare Kano, although I’m not sure why my kids haven’t picked up on Naruto. I suspect it’s too shonen for them. Most of the books on the second list look like they’re worth checking out. The only one I have read is Yotsuba, and I’m not sure who it is exactly that doesn’t want me to read it. Perhaps Chris is referring to the publisher, who for some reason doesn’t list Yotsuba on its website.