Fandom – Page 4 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

“Akiba-kei” nerd to run for the upper house: ZAKZAK is there

An Akihabara Nerd to Run for the Upper House… Tarui Dresses Like a Fantasy Warrior on RPG-like Homepage

The LDP’s Foreign Minister Taro Aso is well-known for being popular among the Akihabara (read:anime/manga/video game nerd) set, but there is one man in the DPJ who considers himself an “Akiba-kei” (Akihabara-style otaku). That man is 39-year-old Yoshikazu Tarui, a former Lower House member. He is gaining attention for his uniqueness in such odd moves as putting pictures of himself dressed like a fantasy warrior on his business cards and homepage and displaying images of DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa dressed as “King Zawa.”

Open Tarui’s homepage, and a story on the theme of “a country built on entertainment” will begin. It’s set up like a role-playing game, and King Zawa asks “Warrior Tarui”: “Hey, what happened Tarui? What is it?” as the story progresses.

Tarui is well known as a professional wrestling and kickboxing fan in the DPJ, and “Killer Kan” a great general played by Acting President Naoto Kan also shows up. This is a pun on the famous wrestler Killer Khan who was big in New Japan Pro Wrestling and famous for his special move the Mongolian Chop. DPJ Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama’s appearance is still in the planning stages, reportedly.

Tarui is running in this summer’s upper house race as a proportional representation candidate, but in response to questions from Yukan Fuji (=ZAKZAK), he explains, “Since there are no Akiba-kei Diet members in Nagata-cho, I thought that I’d try and grab the segment of people who are interested in pop culture and digital contents, so I made this site.” His campaign promise is “promotion of the entertainment content industry.”

He has a fold-out business card with the word “Tarutsu” on the cover in the style of famous video game magazine “Famitsu” along with a photo of Tarui dressed as a warrior. Open the card, and along with pictures of Tarui with “King Zawa” and “Killer Kan” there is a pun-filled message: 「かったるい国政、変えたるい！！」 (I’ll change the tired old national politics!). On the back is the strong slogan: “Bring the first akiba-kei Diet member in history back to national politics!”

You’d think he’d have confidence in this masterwork, but Tarui actually seems to be keeping his distance: “I gave this to Kan, but I’ve been too scared to show it to Ozawa since I made it without asking. This might freak regular people out, so I am not giving it out so much. I am mostly just giving it to people in the industry.

Certainly, there are those in Nagatocho who are cool on the wacky concept, saying “all we can do is laught,” but a source close to Tarui explains that he’s “a totally serious person.”

Actually, in Tarui’s own running column in “Weekly Famitsu” magazine, he seriously explains his ‘pet project’: “Promotion of entertainment not only has economic effects for the country, but will also help to raise [Japan’s] image. Would you want to fire a missile at Korea after having seen Winter Sonata? If you consider those feelings, you can understand that entertainment content is truly the best diplomat for prevention of wat and boosting tourism and economic exchange!”

Even Aso must be surprised at this guy!

ZAKZAK 2007/02/13

Both sides are likely to run celebrities and other fluff candidates for the national PR seats this summer, but a seasoned policy wonk with a taste for the absurd? I like.

How do free manga make money in a declining manga market?

Since my last translation of something about the anime industry was something of a hit, I thought I’d do a little pandering and take a look at an emerging free manga in Japan as reported by Weekly Oriental Economy:

Free manga magazines: How exactly do they make money?

(2007/01/31)
People are abuzz about the free weekly manga (comic book) that is being handed out around Tokyo. The person behind it all let us know his business model (printed in Weekly Oriental Economy’s Feb. 3, 2007 edition)

The first free manga magazine in Japan, Comic Gumbo, has been released in Tokyo. Just recently, a “free paper” market has sprung up upon the success of Recruit Co.’s “R25” and “Hot Pepper” (see some of the contents of R25 at neomarxisme). In response, this manga magazine has pounded its way in.

The printer is Digima, a venture publishing firm. Company president Akihiko Kai (age 36) founded the company in Sept. 2005 after serving as an operating officer at Dentsu (Japan’s top ad agency) and Trans Cosmos (marketing/offshoring). Gumbo’s target audience is salarymen aged 20-40, and every Tuesday and Wednesday 100,000 copies are handed out at areas including major stations on JR’s Yamanote Line.

The size of Japan’s comic book market is approx. 500 billion yen (about US$4.1 billion, in annual sales I’m assuming). However, readers, who are mostly young people, have been stolen away by mobile phones and the Internet, setting the market on a downward trend. Kai explains: “To get into the market as a latecomer we needed to be bold by making our product free.”

What’s surprising is the fullness of content in the pages that wouldn’t make you think it’s free. The inaugural issue for Jan. 16-17 contained 12 series and was 230 pages long. There is also an impressive lineup of writers, including Tatsuya Egawa, author of Tokyo University Story (he’s doing a manga version of Botchan [English translation of the original novel at No-Sword]). The manuscript payments made to regular contributors are reportedly in line with other manga magazines.

Aggressive use of the Internet

So, can this be profitable? The company has not released its revenue plans, but there are only 26 pages of ads, constituting 10% of the entire book. This is far fewer than R25, which is 40% ads, indicating that they are not relying on ad revenue.

Actually, Digima allows readers to access past series on the Internet for a monthly fee of 500 yen. If membership grows healthily, then this by itself will serve as a major revenue source. In addition, the company intends to issue a trade paperback in the first half of this year. These two are what Kai envisions as the main revenue streams for his company.

The reason that Gumbo has included 12 series is simple. The more series there are, the more likely it is that one will become a hit. If a hit emerges, the trade paperback edition will become a long seller, allowing for healthy returns.

Free distribution is simply a method to lower the hurdles for entry into the market. The subsequent non-free businesses will be the main focus, making this fundamentally different from the free newspapers. The inaugural issue immediately “sold out” its 100,000 copies, succeeding in finding their way into readers’ hands. Will it be able to earn loyal fans? Gumbo’s true battle will be from here on out.

(Writer: Akihiko Fujio; Photo: Koichi Imai)

Comment: I don’t know about paying 500 yen/month just to read manga unless there were a series I was really into (or if I were into scanlations), but hey it sounds like a good enough model if the quality actually is high enough to result in hit paperbacks and TV/movie licenses.

Aso’s cultural diplomacy: so far so good

If Foreign Minister Taro Aso can keep wonderful photo opportunities like this up, I would support him for prime minister no matter who he might want to nuke:

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso, front centre, poses with Bulgaria’s sumo wrestlers during the opening ceremony of a donation to Bulgarian Sumo Federaton, in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, Thursday, Jan.

Bulgaria was likely singled out as it’s the home country of star Sumo wrestler Kotooshu. Kotooshu is currently an ozeki, one rank under Yokozuna, though he is unlikely to achieve yokozuna status, the top rank in the sport, for some time (~~Japanese~~　 Mongolian wrestler Hakuho might make it this year to the delight of people who want to see more ~~Japanese~~ Mongolian faces in the sport).

Aso has made promotion of Japanese cultural exports, chiefly anime and manga, a priority as he sees it integral to cultivating Japan’s “soft power.” You can read the details of his cultural diplomacy ideas (essentially, the main pillar in building a “Japan brand”) here.

China’s animation industry set to overtake Japan’s?

The latest issue of Japanese news weekly AERA (more like a Japanese version of Time magazine than many other weeklies) contains an interesting bit on China’s animation industry that fits in nicely with my last few posts. Full translation follows:

Anime to make a comeback in China, where it started

by Reiko Miyake

China has been “invaded” by Japanese-made animation, but in fact this was the former world power that taught animation to Japan

China as a nation is currently putting its efforts into developing “Donghua.” Donghua is Chinese for animation and comic books. In the past 3 or 4 years, 19 cities nationwide including Shanghai, Changchun, and Hangzhou have been equipped as “Donghua headquarters” or centers for the animation industry. Schools to develop talent and studios are being established in earnest.

According to sources close to the issue, the scale of China’s animation character market amounts to as much as 100 billion yuan (approx. 1.5 trillion yen). Japanese animation such as Pokemon and Case Closed are enormously popular, and up to now a multitude of pirated versions have been distributed. While dominated by Japanee animation and Disney, here and there original Chinese-made animation has started to come out such as “Indigo Cat.”

A longer history than Japan’s

Inspections of imported animated works are strict, in part because of protection of domestic works. The first company to truly attempt to export to China was Mulan Productions. They are very skilled at the business of managing copyrights in China. They have produced many hits, starting with Crayon Shinchan in 2002 and following up with Dragonball and Fruits Basket.

Takashi Mita, chief of the company’s International Business Headquarters, explains: “First of all, the quantity of foreign animation that is shown in China is is restricted as a whole. It is subject to a strict inspection from the perspective of public order and morality, and works that contain many portrayals of sexual activity or violence are taboo. All in all, the condition for export is that the works are healthy for children.”

Looking just at the situation in the past few years, Japan looks like a developed country while China looks like a late bloomer in terms of their respective animation industries. However, it is not very well-known that China’s animation history is actually longer and had a major impact on the developing stages of Japanese animation.

At a Tokyo cinema in 1942, a young Osamu Tezuka watched “Princess Iron Fan,” an animated film based on the Chinese epic Journey into the West that was produced in Shanghai, which was an animation production center at the time. The fact that the intense emotion he felt at that time formed the basis for Tezuka to produce animation is an anecdote known by those in Japan’s animation industry. After becoming a comic book artist, Tezuka met with Princess director Wan Lai-Ming time and again.

After WW2, Wan and others gathered in 1957 to create the Shanghai Art and Film Production Studio, a nationally-run animation studio. These are the roots of Japan’s animation industry as well as China’s.

Decline due to the Cultural Revolution

Subsequently, Japanese animation has developed as both an art and an industry to take a 60% share of the $25 billion animation market. Meanwhile, China’s industry declined due to the Cultural Revolution after peaking in the 60s and 70s.

So, Chinese animation industry is now attempting to revive itself once again. The works that the Shanghai Art and Film Production Studio created from the 60s to the 80s will be shown from December 16 at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Features gaining the most attention are 4 ink-painted short films. The Tadpole Searches for His Mother, made in the 60s, is a classic in which the movements of frogs and tadpoles are drawn in ink style, which though slightly blurred is very lively. It was shown at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Honorable Mention.

Almost 50 years later, focus is once again on ink expression in China’s animation productions as students of a Chinese technician development school produce a 3-D animation using the techniques of ink animation. Director Wan’s long-format “Sun Wukong on the Rampage” will also be shown.

Japan’s animation industry hollowing out?

Japanese weekly business magazine Shukan Toyo Keizai (Weekly Oriental Economy) has given me a very nice Xmas present: They finally post some free content online! I was even more delighted to discover that one featured article discusses a topic that’s come up in a recent post: the “decline” of Japan’s animation industry. According to animation critic Ryota Fujitsu (who incidentally also is on the selection committee for the Nippon Otaku Awards) argues that rather than declining per se it’s “hollowing out” due to outsourcing of animators. I decided to translate it in full since it brings up some interesting issues. Let’s have a look:

The Hollowing Out of Japan’s Animation Industry Continues

(2006/12/19)

Currently, Japan’s animation industry wouldn’t be viable without the presence of Korean and Chinese subcontracting companies. Why must the industry rely on foreign outsourcing? If you trace the causes of this dependence, you’ll find the answer lies in the low production costs. Normally, production costs of a 30-minute program amount to around 10 million yen apiece. However, it costs even more than that for a more elaborate project, and there are also many works that are produced for prices lower than 1 million yen. This situation has been going on for years, and you could say it has become entrenched. So as a result, the issue of low wages for animation staff, chiefly represented by the animators, has been repeated in the media. This is despite the facts that dozens of animated programs are shown every week, and animation has been proclaimed as “a subculture representative of Japan” by the media.

One third of animators make less than 1 million yen annually

The typical lifestyle of a contemporary animator was detailed in the 2005 study “Status of Activities and Lifestyles of Performing Artists” conducted by the Japan Council of Performers’ Organizations (tr: report available here in Japanese only).

According to this source, animators work an average of 10.2 hours a day, an estimated 250 hours per month. Despite this, 26.8% of the make less than 1 million yen per year, 38.2% earn an average annual income of between 1 million and 3 million yen annually. Meanwhile, 80% of in-between (douga) animators are paid by quantity, with per-cel prices averaging 186.9 yen. 73.7% had annual incomes of less than 1 million yen.
Continue reading Japan’s animation industry hollowing out?

Money quotes from Patrick Macias

Patrick Macias, journalist/author and expert on Japanese anime/manga culture, is one of my favorite commentators on Japan. Though I can’t say I share his affinity for Ultraman reruns and shitty 1970s Japanese rock bands, part of what I like about Macias is the fact that he understands Japanese culture but nevertheless takes what he enjoys from the country (namely otaku culture) without compromising his personality or values. A recent interview he granted podcast Otaku Generation featured some of his typical wit. I’ll transcribe some of the choice quotes so you don’t have to listen to the tinny, irrelevant banter of the questioners:

“I was told that the worst that I could do as a gaijin writer on Japan was to live in Japan because you need this perspective if you want anyone to pay attention to you. Otherwise you’re just one of those kind of circus monkeys they have on the TV shows there who sort of read the newspapers in the morning talking about American foreign policy even though even though they haven’t been in America for, you know, 10 or 15 years.”

“Pizza is a joke in Japan. People should be arrested for what they call pizza there. I think the mafia should just go over there and start shooting people ‘cuz that shit is not pizza. It’s like a tortilla with cheese on it and tomato sauce… And you don’t get that bloated, gassy feeling two hours later. It goes down too easy. With pizza, it’s got to be a struggle against your own humanity to digest it. At least American pizza should be… Even Mama Celeste would destroy the average pizza in Japan. Totino’s party pizza is gourmet compared to what you can get in Japan for top dollar.”
Continue reading Money quotes from Patrick Macias

Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics

If you enjoyed my recent posts on WW2 era comic book covers and are in the New York area, you may want to check out Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics, an exhibition running at The New York Jewish Museum from September 15, 2006 to January 28, 2007. Curated by Jerry Robinson, whose best known creation is The Joker, possibly the best known comic book supervillian of all time, showcases art from the golden age of comic books (from the popularization of the art form in the late 1930s until it came under a period of attack in the early 1950s) in the context of the socio-political conditions of the time. Naturally, since this is The Jewish Museum and the vast majority of early comic book creators were Jewish, there is a strong focus on the relationship that these creators’ Jewish identity had to their art.

Comic book news site Newsarama has a very interesting interview with Jerry Robinson about the exhibit.

NRAMA: Do you have any insight into why Jews were such a big part of the comic book industry in the beginning?

JR: I’ve done a lot of research on this and it’s going to become a book based on the two exhibitions and it will be published by one of the major art publishers in America. Jewish artists and creators have been prominent in New York culture since the turn of the century. A lot of artists, writers, poets, also scientists and other professions were in that first wave of immigration in the 1890’s/1900’s. Then the next wave was due to the rise of Nazism and that wave included a lot of artists, writers and theatrical people. So from that whole first half of the 20th Century, New York absorbed a lot of diverse talent, along with many other immigrants of other nationalities, German, Italian, Russian, etc. But many of them were Jewish and were prominent in their areas. For example, the early movie industry was also dominated by a lot of Jewish actors, writers, filmmakers from Europe. They immigrated to New York and settled in the Lower East Side and at one time there were hundreds of theaters around the country that were showing Jewish plays and performances. The film industry, again, had many prominent Jews such MGM with David O. Selznick, Carl Laemmle with Universal. I can’t name them all.

I was pleased to see that in the interview he also mentioned the exhibit’s collection of covers he chose to include Captain America #1, which earlier this week I called my favorite of the WW2 era anti-Axis covers.

Unfortunately, I will not be back home in the New York area until next summer so I will be missing out on this exhibit, but it sounds well worth visiting for anyone interested in the history of American popular culture, American/New York Jewish history, or comic books at all. And of course, while on this topic I must make a very strong recommendation that anyone with even the slightest, teeniest bit of interest in this stuff immediately get your hands on a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. Don’t let the fact that it won the Pulitzer prize for literary scare you off. This fictionalized account of the careers of a a duo of Siegel and Schuster-esque creators of a Nazi-fighting superhero by the name of The Escapist is amazingly fun to read.

Qoogle rules

Thanks to Momus, I have discovered this sweet Japanese video site, Qoogle. It works like Digg to pick up popular videos on Youtube.

Highlight: The first episode of Doraemon. As a big Doraemon fan this is pretty sweet, complete with the lame music. And Giant’s voice is different somehow.

Colbert: “I want you to address my pachinko analogy”

Recent exchange from the Colbert Report:

Biologist/god critic Richard Dawkins: [Evolution] is a highly non-random process. The big thing that everyone misunderstands about Darwinism is they think it’s chance, they think it’s an accident, and it’s not an accident.

Colbert: Well, it’s too complex for us to perceive, you know, it’s like, I know a pachinko machine isn’t an accident, either, there’s a reason why it bounces from nail to nail, but it looks random to me, right?

Dawkins: Nothing in nature looks random.

Colbert: I want you to address my pachinko analogy!

Dawkins: I’ve never even heard of it, what is that?

Colbert: You’ve never heard of pachinko? Oh, it’s like Japanese pinball. It’s great, they make pornographic versions of it over there.

The Colbert character proves once again to be more complex than meets the eye. Just when you thought you knew his aggressively ignorant conservatism, off he goes and admits not only to an interest in other cultures but even a playful love of pornography!

But anyway, I’d like to show you a little of what Colbert was talking about. Yes, pachinko is similar to pinball, but unlike in the US where pachinko continues a slow fade into near-extinction, the vertically played Japanese game remains Japan’s top gambling institution, beating out horse betting and lotto-type games (not necessarily in that order). The gambling business side of pachinko is only semi-legal and the parlor owners are well known for ties with North Korea. But if casino-type games are your cup of tea, then platforms such as 슬롯사이트 may be perfect for you.

As for the machines themselves, my personal favorites are the ones featuring the chinful mug of the game’s biggest promoter, wrestling legend and former Diet member Antonio Inoki, who incidentally also has close ties with the North Korean elites:

Are there pornographic pachinko machines? The Cutie Honey series, featuring big-breasted anime women, may count:

More famously, there are numerous machines featuring 80s anime sensation Urusei Yatsura:

The game features the bikini-clad character Lum, and the outside of pachinko parlors are often plastered with her image. Similarly, you’ll also see some risque shots of Fujiko-san from Lupin III to advertise pachinko games based on the seminal anime series:

If you want to call these games pornographic I wouldn’t object, but at worst they are the softcore stuff similar to what you’d find in American comic books. The difference, I think, is that Americans visiting Japan (like myself) would probably feel uneasy with the flagrant, in your face placement of these images in public outside pachinko parlors, especially placed in the context of plentiful pornography (bikini shots in kid’s comics, men reading newspapers featuring full nudity on the train) and casual misogyny found throughout Japan’s pop culture.

Incidentally, there’s been a recent (2004-ish) release of a pachinko version of the epic anime title Neon Genesis Evangelion, for those who might like that sort of thing:

The best WW2 comic cover

The other day when I said that the style of WW2 era propagandistic superhero comics just couldn’t work today, but there is one anti-Nazi comic book of that era that deserves to be better remembered as an iconic image of the war period in America. This dramatic cover, published in March, 1941, marked the very first appearance of Captain America, who was given the very unusual honor of premiering in his own full length comic, instead of being tried out as a backup character in an anthology.

Why is this cover so different from the others? Where the DC covers were full-fledged propaganda posters, this is a proper comic book cover. Of the seven DC covers I posted before, five of them have propagandistic slogans as corny as any you would find on an official government poster, and the sixth is a highly stylized, static image of Superman standing astride the world holding Hitler and Tojo in each hand, clearly symbolizing the globally dominant power of the USA. The seventh cover, which depicts Superman ready to punch out the oddly jaundiced looking Japanese pilot of a warplane, is the only one that actually looks like it could be a comic book action scene as opposed to a propaganda poster, but the simplicity of the scene and the isolation of the two characters on a largely monochromatic background still feels kind of static.

On the other hand, we have Captain America-not about to punch Hitler, but clearly having just done so. There are Nazi officers all around, firing bullets at the Captain, who has clearly interrupted a planning session of “sabotage plans for U.S.A.,” which are conveniently laying on the ground, labelled in English. By opening with such a dynamic and dramatic scene, Captain America is portrayed from the beginning as a man of action and the champion of American virtue-but not necessarily the vehicle of the official government line and propaganda.

Why is that? Well, notice the date-March 1941. The US did not enter WW2 until December of that year, but the creators and publishers of Captain America at Marvel Comics (then called Timely Comics) were clearly urging us to. It is of course no coincidence that both the writer (Joseph Simon) and artist (Jack Kirby) were both New York Jews, the sons of immigrants from Europe. In fact, at this time basically the entire comic books industry was New York Jews. Naturally, they were no fans of Hitler, and this cover reflects what must have been a universal fantasy at the time. Certainly I myself, as a member of a New York Jewish family born decades after WW2, can hardly imagine anything more satisfing than smashing Hitler in the face. Even the staunchest critics of modern US foreign policy should admit that the cover of Captain America #1 is best summed up in one word: awesome.