It’s Thursday morning, Japan time, Wednesday night, U.S. time, and it’s looking like Obama has closed the deal. By any measure, McCain has not made the breakthrough he needed in either of the first two debates, and the V.P. debate had zero effect on the polls. McCain was said to have an advantage in the first debate, because the focus was foreign policy. He was said to have a chance of “winning” the second, because he is supposedly more comfortable with the town hall meeting format. (I guess he’s more comfortable when they’re packed with his supporters.) Is there a chance he’ll make a comeback in the final debate? No. It’s clear that this is one old dog who cannot learn new tricks. He’s shown us his stuff, and he hasn’t got anything more. McCain’s recent wave of negative attacks–particularly Palin’s performances in front of rabid fans–have backfired. The McCain campaign politely informed us in advance that they were going to go negative, and the Obama campaign responded with a brilliant little documentary that makes a case against McCain without sounding unfair or mean-spirited (unlike McCain’s dishonorable “dishonorable” ad).

And though I was worried a couple of weeks ago about the possibility of an electoral college draw, or even a loss for Obama, that now seems as unlikely as the Dow surging 1000 points tomorrow. The possibility of an anomalous Obama-Palin administration is now essentially zero, though it was amusing to consider for a while.

Here’s how things look right now on RealClearPolitics‘ current electoral map. (Click on the image to see the most current map.)

RealClearPolitics' Electoral Map, 10 p.m. E.S.T., October 8

Here’s their map in “No Toss Up States” mode. (Again, click the image for the most current map.)

RealClearPolitics' "No Toss Ups" Map, 10 p.m. E.S.T., October 8

And here’s my more pessimistic “No Toss Ups” map, after shaving 3% off Obama’s current numbers. (Where knocking off 3% resulted in a dead heat, e.g. Florida and Nevada, I gave the states to McCain.)

Matt's more pessimistic map

And just for good measure, here’s Pollster.com’s electoral map. (Once again, click the image for the most current map.)

Pollster.com's Electoral Map, 10 p.m. E.S.T., October 8

And if that’s not enough data for you, just take a look at how the gamblers are betting over at Intrade.com.

Seriously. What could possibly happen in the next month to result in McCain garnering 270 electoral votes? Barring Obama’s sudden demise, nothing. The muckrakers have found every bit of dirt on Obama that exists, and it’s all already out there. (McCain, on the other hand, has plenty of dirt that is known of but which is not yet widely known. Just read Rolling Stone’s devastating exposé here.) Even a new Bin Laden video or a terrorist attack won’t help the Republicans this time. On the contrary, the debates have highlighted that it is Obama who has the steady, firm hand, and McCain who is both erratic and trigger-happy.

I don’t believe in jinxes, but to spare myself some embarrassment should the unthinkable actually occur, I won’t connect the dots here and state the obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this current information.

Don’t forget to vote.

I managed to acquire a bunch of prewar Japanese animation, and thought I would introduce some of the better stuff here. These are five short pieces from 1934 and 1935. Of the three silent films, two (”Sankichi the Monkey” and “A Japanese Tom Thumb”) had musical scores that are now lost. All three have Japanese subtitles.

In the days before talkies, it was common in Japan for silent films of all kinds to be narrated live by a benshi, a practice that was a natural outgrowth of the traditional narration of such Japanese performance arts as noh, bunraku, and kabuki. Unfortunately, there are no surviving recordings (as far as I know) of the benshi narration of any prewar animation, and narrations added more recently are of course not in the public domain. But since we modern folks can’t stand to watch video that is truly silent, I added the sound of a movie projector (public domain!) to the silent videos. (^_^) One of the films is so good, I went to the trouble of adding English subtitles.

First up is “Dekobô’s Automobile Journey” (Dekobô no jidôsha ryokô). Nothing is known about this film beyond the fact that the voice actress was apparently Kazuko Matsuura. It’s probably from the early to mid 1930s. It’s not a true talkie, but a “record talkie,” in which the film is distributed with a soundtrack on a record, wich must be played as closely in synch with the film as possible. It’s also, as you will see, completely nuts. There are dozens of short, prewar Japanese animations that fall under the “completely nuts” rubric. This is actually one of the more coherent and better crafted of these. Most are a jumble of bizarre (nay, “surreal”) slapstick that begins and ends abruptly, as if something is missing. This one has a subtitle, “A Trip to the Moon,” but it ends the very moment the protagonist and his dog land on the Moon. At least, I think that’s where they land. Matsuura hurriedly tries to provide a semblance of closure in the last few seconds of narration, but it doesn’t help much. Nonetheless, the production values are better than most of the “completely nuts” animation produced at the time, and while the protagonist comes off as a psycho (beating the crap out of an eagle for laughing at his flat tire), his dog is cute.

Next we have “Sankichi the Monkey: Shock Troops” (Osaru no Sankichi: totsugeki tai), a silent film from 1934 directed by Mitsuyo Seo. Seo would go on to create Japan’s first feature-length animated films, Momotaroh’s Sea Eagle (1943, 37 minutes) and Momotaroh: Divine Warriors of the Sea (1945, 74 minutes). If you didn’t guess from the titles and production dates, these were both war propaganda films, surprisingly well funded by the military government. They’re both quite good, too. If I can track these down, I’ll upload them as well. Anyway, Sankichi gives us a glimpse of Seo’s budding talent. It also offers a glimpse of post-Manchurian Incident militarism. Too bad the musical score is lost.

“The Routing of the Tengu” (Tengu taiji) is also from 1934, and also by a director destined for greatness, Noburô Ôfuji. This is plenty surreal, but not “completely nuts.” It’s coherent, has a proper beginning, middle and end, and is well made. It’s also cute and funny even 74 years later. Ôfuji shows an obvious American influence (the hero looks like Betty Boop in drag), but his material and motifs are distinctively Japanese. There are tongue in cheek references to kabuki melodrama, e.g., the scene in which the hero vows to avenge his fallen (or rather “flattened”) comrade, and bounces off on one foot as the night watchman clacks his sticks together kabuki-style. This is a great little animation, but you don’t really have to understand Japanese to appreciate it, since the action is pretty much self explanatory. I should note, though, that the nemeses in this film are tengu, a sort of goblin from Japanese legend. Tengu are traditionally represented in two ways. The most common form is with a human face and a long, phallic nose. The other has a humanoid face with a short beak. Here, the rank-and-file tengu have beaks, and the big boss…well, see for yourself.

Next we have another by Seo, this one from 1935. Since the title (Issun Bôshi Chibisuke monogatari) is essentially untranslatable, I have dubbed it “The Japanese Tom Thumb.” It is a comical adaptation of the Japanese legend of Issun Bôshi, a thumb-sized young man who comes to Kyoto to make his way in the world, and becomes an unlikely hero, defeating an ogre who makes, well, “man-sized” men tremble. Again, too bad the soundtrack is lost. The absence of music makes the opening sequence a bit tedious, but it’s worth watching till the end.

Finally I offer “Why Sea Water Is Salty” (Umi no mizu ha naze karai), also from 1935. This was directed by Yasushi Murata, a prolific but little-remembered prewar animator. I had low expectations when I first watched this, because everything else I had seen by him was mediocre if not just plain lousy. (He was the director of the serviceable if uninspiring “Corporal Norakuro” I introduced last time.) But this is a ten-minute masterpiece. It is probably the best-crafted, least derivative prewar short I have seen. There is a minimum of slapstick, the drawing style is fairly realistic, and yet the film works as entertainment. Note the facial expressions and subtle body language. This is another adaptation of a Japanese folktale, and could easily have become the kind of fluff that “A Japanese Tom Thumb” was, but Murata’s muse must have descended big time. I really love this one. Here’s my subtitled version, uploaded to Youtube:

There is an English-language version of “Why Sea Water Is Salty” (and the other four films, too) available on the wildly overpriced “Japanese Anime Classic Collection” (ISBN 978-4-903759-01-2), but note that that version has an new soundtrack, includes new Japanese narration, and the English subtitles are a translation of the new narration, not the original Japanese subtitles. As far as I know, this animation is copyright-free in the U.S. (and perhaps elsewhere), and I have no problem with people using my subtitled version in classes or other screenings, as long as you don’t try to make any money off it. Here’s a much higher quality version for download. This file is MPEG-4 (mp4), 720 x 480 pixels, H.264 encoded, and the sound is AAC, monaural, 44.1 kHz. I made it with iMovie on a Mac. If you have any trouble with it, please let me know. Also, if you do use it to show in class or in some other kind of screening, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. You don’t need my permission; I’d just like to know if anyone finds it useful.

Hopefully I’ll have some more old Japanese animation to post in the near future.

In my last post, I introduced some figures from the most recent Mainichi Newspaper survey of Japanese reading habits. I presented a couple of bar graphs showing the percentage of adults, by sex and age bracket, who read one or more “manga books” per month on average. Today I offer a bunch of pie charts showing more detailed data. These charts might not make any sense if you didn’t read the last post, so be sure to check that one out first. One thing I didn’t note last time is that a manga book (in most cases, a paperback) is not the kind of 22-page stapled leaflet that most people think of when they hear “comic book”: the standard length of the typical manga paperback is 200 pages. Most Japanese readers can read such a book in about 20 to 45 minutes. So when someone says they read seven or more manga books per month, that means they are reading a minimum of some 1400 pages of manga per month.

Ladies first:

Three things strike me about these charts. First, the biggest drop from late teens to women and their thirties is in those who report reading an average of two manga books per month. Second, compared with the drop in casual readers, the decline of heavy users–those who read at least five manga books per month–seems less pronounced. Third, if you compare these graphs with the graph I posted yesterday about the percentage of women who read manga magazines, you will see that younger women readers report reading manga books far more than manga magazines, but by the time they reach their forties, there’s not much difference between reported readership of manga books and magazines. What these things mean is anybody’s guess. I have my own ideas, but I’ll save that for a future post.

And now the gentlemen:

What’s striking about the men’s response is that it is in a way the reverse of the women’s. The most dramatic decline is in the percentage who report reading seven or more manga books per month. The decline in those who read between one and six is fairly proportional. You will also notice that within an age bracket, there is not much difference between reported readership of manga books and manga magazines. Again, what these things mean is anbody’s guess.

And there remains the puzzling problem I mentioned yesterday of older respondents being less likely to answer this question. Those gray wedges in my pie charts are a big question mark. Do those people not read manga books? If not, why didn’t they choose “zero”? My hunch is that they do read manga, but did not feel that the choices offered (or the whole idea of “average number per month”) were adequate to describe their manga reading practices. They may go months without reading a manga, then spend weeks reading (or re-reading) some long series. They may read portions of manga laying around the house (belonging to a child or spouse), but not read them to the end. They may read those thick, magazine-like reprints of old manga that are sold in convenience stores, and are not sure if such books count as “magazines” or “books.”

Hmm. Maybe I can convince Mainichi or some other newspaper to let me design a survey on manga-reading practices.

NOTE: If you enjoyed these statistics, you might also be interested in Paul Gravett’s overview of comics-reading around the world. (Thanks to The Comics Reporter both for bringing Paul’s article to my attention and linking to my own.)

You probably know the answer is “a lot more than Americans read comics.” But for those of you who would like to know just how much is “a lot,” here’s the latest data. The Mainichi Newspaper has been conducting a survey on reading practices every year since 1947. The last survey was taken September 7-9, 2007, and the complete results were published in March of this year. The polling method was a two-stage, stratified random sample of 4,800 men and women 16 years or older. Pollsters visited the randomly selected homes (in 300 areas in large cities, mid-size cities, small cities, and small towns all over Japan), gave the selected individual the questionnaire to fill out, then came back to collect it later. There were 2,685 valid responses (a response rate of 56%).

The survey is about reading practices in general, and not specifically about manga, so from the point of view of somehow who has spent many years trying to perfect ways of asking people about their manga-reading habits (that would be me), the manga-specific questions seem flawed, but Mainichi’s been doing this a long time, and if nothing else the survey gives us an idea of how much Japanese think they’re reading manga.

As you may know, manga is generally first serialized in thick anthology magazines printed on cheap paper, and then individual works are gathered into paperback form. The magazines are commonly B5 size (about 7 x 10 inches), and the paperbacks tend to be about 102 x 176 mm (about 4 x 7 inches) or A5 (about 6 x 8 inches). The magazines, unlike American comics, are not collected, but are rather tossed into the recycling bin. Paperbacks, on the other hand, are for keeping on your bookshelf.

The two survey questions I’m going to focus on here are about how much people read these two different manga formats. First, let’s look at magazines. The question asked translates something like, “What genres of magazines do you read. (Mark all that apply.)” They then offer 16 types of magazine genres (such as “general,” “fashion/trends,” “economy/business/money”), one of which is manga. And here are a couple of slick graphs I made using iWork’s Numbers:

As you can see, there’s a big gender gap here. This might lead you to assume that fewer women than men read manga, but compare these two graphs with the two below. (I’ll get back to why women read manga magazines less later.)

The second question is about manga paperbacks. (In the survey they just call them “manga books,” but in reality only a tiny fraction of manga books sold are hardcover.) The questions translates, “What is the average number of books, magazines, and videos you read or watch per month? (”Weekly magazines” includes weekly photo  magazines and weekly manga magazines, “Monthly magazines” includes quarterly and semimonthly magazines, and monthly manga magazines.) Here are the response by sex for “manga books”:

I should note that the questionnaire goes into more detail, allowing respondents to choose from 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 or more. Here I’ve lumped together everyone who chose 1 or more. As you can see, there’s still a gender gap, but it’s far smaller than that for magazines. So why the difference? Well, it’s complicated. Really complicated. Most Japanese use public transportation to get to work and school, and whereas men feel no inhibitions about reading manga magazines on trains and buses, women do. The magazines are bulky and have gaudy, colorful covers. Most women simply don’t want to be seen reading them in public, so women who do buy them tend to read them at home. Looked at the other way, a lot of men buy them just to kill time on the train or bus. Another factor is the nature of the content. Almost by definition, manga for women tend to focus on relationships, are often deeply moving. So a lot of women prefer to read in privacy where they don’t have to worry about being moved to tears. Another major factor is money. Women are stingy, because they generally have more things to spend money on (clothing, cosmetics) than do men. They would rather not spend money on a magazine they are going to dispose of as soon as they finish reading it. (A lot of women read manga magazines in bookstores and put them back on the shelves without buying them.)

Paperbacks are a different story. Women buy manga paperbacks by their favorites manga artists and will keep them for years, rereading them occasionally or lending them to friends or family to read. They are also less inhibited about reading paperbacks in public, because they are much smaller, and most bookstores put generic paper covers on them if you ask them to. Looked at the other way, a lot of the men who read manga magazines to kill time during commutes are satisfied after one reading, and don’t bother to buy the paperbacks of stories they have read. (By the way, this analysis is mostly my own original analysis based on two decades of research, so if you refer to it somewhere, please cite me.)

But just how accurate the above numbers are is debatable. First, it is self-reporting, not objectively observed behavior. Women may be more inclined than men to underestimate the amount of manga they read. The fact that the questionnaire asks for “averages” doesn’t help. Do you know how many books, magazines, or comics you read on average per month? I don’t. In my own surveys, I found it was more productive to ask “About how many manga paperbacks (magazines) have you read in the past 30 days?” That’s a question most people can answer fairly accurately, because they can remember specific books they’ve read recently. This questionnaire’s results show clearly that there’s a problem with the question about “manga books”: the number of non-responses to the question rises dramtically with the age of the respondent. Here’s the percentage of respondents who didn’t anwer this question, by age bracket:

late teens: 3%
20s: 10%
30s: 19%
40s: 22%
50s: 40%
60s: 49 %
70s and up: 55%

This no-response rate is considerably higher than that of any of the other non-manga genres asked about.  Clearly, older respondents either 1) didn’t understand the question, or 2) understood it, but didn’t know how to answer it. They may not have been sure what was meant by “manga book.” They may not have been sure if they should only count books they actually bought themselves. They may simply have not been able to come up with an “average.”

But any way you slice it, you can see that “a lot” of Japanese adults read manga. Roughly three-quarters of late-teens, two-thirds of those in their twenties, two-fifths of those in their thirties, a quarter of those in their forties, and a tenth of those in their fifties read at least some manga every month.

Mainichi also did a survey of school-age kids. Maybe I’ll introduce that one sometime soon.

Political junkie that I am, I was fiddling with the electoral college map over on RealClearPolitics.com. It’s not like this is an obsession of mine. I only do it once or twice a day. Here’s what the map looks like today:

RealClearPolitics Electoral Map, Sept. 25

State polls have been shifting ever so gradually in Obama’s favor recently, but still, when you click the “No Toss Up States” menu, this is what you get:

No Toss Up States, Sept. 25

Obama barely edges out McCain. (270 electoral votes are needed to win.) This “No Toss Up States” map has not changed in weeks. Obama always ends up with 273 electoral votes. Not a lot of breathing room. Obviously, some of toss-up states could shift. If Obama wins the states that are currently described as “leaning Obama,” and also picks up either Florida or Ohio, he wins with room to spare. Not quite a landslide, but a comfortable win. But I am not optimistic about either state. McCain’s current leads in these states is really slim, but if you take into account 1) the Bradley Effect, and 2) the fact that both states went for Bush in 2000 and 2004, I think it’s safe to assume they will go to McCain. Looking at the other toss-up states, it seems to me that Obama will likely win the states where he currently enjoys a slim lead…except one.

New Hampshire. Little New Hampshire, with just four electoral votes. Today, Obama’s lead there is an infinitesimal 0.8%. In 2000, Bush won the state by a slim 1.3%. In 2004, Kerry won it by exactly the same slim margin. Take into account the Bradley Effect again, and, unless Obama gains at least five percentage points over the few weeks, it seems likely New Hampshire will go to McCain. Which gives us this result:

New Hampshire goes to McCain

Note that the name I gave that image file is “wtf.” Naive me, I had always assumed that the total number of electoral votes was an odd number–that, indeed, it could not be an even number. But there’s nothing in the Constitution forbidding an even number of total electoral votes.

So what the hell do you do when there’s a tie? Well, as it turns out, the House of Representatives chooses the president. No sweat, you say. Obama’s a shoe-in. Yes, he is.

But Joe Biden is not.

You see, in the event that no candidate for President wins a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses. (And each state’s delegation gets only one vote, so where you have both Democrats and Republicans, the state delegations have to hammer out a consensus.) This has actually happened twice before in U.S. history: once in 1800, and once in 1824.

But in the event that no candidate for Vice President wins a majority of electoral votes, it is the Senate that chooses. (And unlike the House of Representatives, each senator votes individually.) As you may know, whereas today candidates for President and Vice President run together on the same “ticket,” in days of yore they ran separately, and it was not uncommon for a President and Vice President to be from different parties. And there is nothing in the Constitution about “running mates” and “tickets,” so if I wanted to, I could run for Vice President without being any Presidential candidate’s “running mate.”

Given the current composition of the Senate, it is conceivable that Senator Leiberman of Connecticut could vote for Governor Palin, and that the Senate would be tied.

Now here’s where things get confusing (assuming you’re not confused already). The Constitution says nothing about what to do if the Senate ends up in a tie. In ordinary lawmaking, as you probably know, it is the President of the Senate–which is to say the sitting Vice President–who breaks ties in the Senate. But apparently Constitutional scholars do not agree on whether or not he would have the same authority in the case of choosing the Vice President.

We could end up with another Constitutional crisis, but this time it wouldn’t be about hanging chads. And given the current composition of the Supreme Court, I think they would very quickly (well before Inauguration Day) give Cheney the authority to break the tie.

Now how do you suppose he would vote?

So try to wrap your head around the possibility of an Obama/Palin administration.

To paraphrase Al Gore, “You win some, you lose some, there’s that little known third category, and then there’s that even more unlikely fourth category.”

Meiji Period girls magazines

I’ve been thinking about (and reading about) the word “shôjo” lately. That may sound odd, since I’ve been studying shôjo manga for two decades, but lately I’ve been thinking about the word itself and how it is used. The word itself has been used in Japan for centuries, but it didn’t really become “popular,” it seems, until the turn of the century, which is to say the latter Meiji Period. You can read more about the word on the Wikipedia article I’ve been helping to edit. But since the 1950s, the use of the word in colloquial Japanese had declined to the point where now it is used basically as an adjective for a genre of manga and fiction, and also as a “news/legal” word that is rarely used in daily conversation. For a while, though, it was all the rage. I recently finished reading a great little novel by Nobuko Yoshiya from 1939 titled Otome Techô (”A Maiden’s Handbook”), and she must use the word no fewer than once every ten pages or so.

Newest issue of Shôjo Comic

But what really came as a shock to me was the realization that, unless I’m overlooking something, the word “shôjo” now appears in the title of just one girls’ magazine, Shôjo Comic. There are two other extant girls’ magazines (Bessatsu Friend and BetsuComi) that used to include the word “shôjo” in the title, but the one dropped “shôjo” in 1984, and the other dropped it in 2002.

Shôjo Kakumei--If I showed you the content, I could be arrested

Ironically, the last newly-created magazine to include the word in the title was Shôjo Kakumei (”Girls’ Revolution”), which was an “erotic” (I would say “pornographic”) manga magazine geared at teens, and founded in 1998. (Just imagine how quickly an American publisher trying to publish such a magazine would end up behind bars.) But the revolution did not last, and the magazine disappeared in 2004. Another irony is that the last hold-out, Shôjo Comic, which was once commonly read by elementary-school girls, has also become increasingly erotic in content, so much so that the popular weekly magazine Shûkan Bunshun published an article in its May 31, 2007 issue titled “Be Careful! Shôjo Comic’s Incredible Sexual Content: ‘Incest,’ ‘Outdoor Sex,’ ‘Discipline Play,’ Manga Read By Elementary School Children”.

July 1917 issue of Shin Shôjo (New Girl)

“Shôjo” used to have connotations of purity, education, intelligence, gentleness, modernity, a hint of melancholy, and maybe even a touch of the magical. It was “romantic,” but not in the “girl meets boy” sense. (If anything, it was in the “girl meets girl” sense.) Along with the word jogakusei (”female student”), it was the embodiment of the school-age girl before the end of World War II. It was probably mixed-sex education that killed the “shôjo.” Whether that death was a good or bad thing is not something I’m going to go into today, but I suspect it was a mix of both.

So I got to thinking about the use of the word “shôjo” in girls’ magazine titles, and did some digging. Geek that I am, I naturally collected my findings into a graph and a timeline. I found 36 magazines published between 1902 (when the first girls’ magazine was created) and 2008 that include the word “shôjo” in the title. I’ve probably missed some, but if I have, they are obscure and short-lived.

First, the timeline. Since it covers more than a century, it’s obviously quite large. Click on the image below to see a 768 x 11623 pixel version.

Girls' magazines with the word "shôjo" in the title, 1902 - 2008

Here’s a PDF version.

And here’s a graph of the number of girls’ magazines/periodicals with the word “shôjo” in the title over the same period of time.

Number of periodicals with

And here’s a PDF of the graph.

May 1931 issue of Shôjo no Tomo

The “shôjo” peak is in the late 1910s and the 1920s. As you can see from the timeline, though, this is largely due to publishers trying to jump on the shôjo magazine bandwagon. Most of the magazines created during this period folded in less than a year. But throughout this period there were a handful of bestsellers, most notably Shôjo no Tomo (”Girls’ Friend”, 1908 - 1955), Shôjo Club (”Girls’ Club”, 1923 - 1962), and Shôjo Gahô (”Girls’ Illustrated”, 1912 - 1942). (Keep in mind that I am only talking about magazines with “shôjo” in the title. There were other popular girls’ magazines, such as Reijokai. (Don’t ask me to translate that one.) Shôjo no Tomo in particular is remarkable not just for its popularity and quality, but for the fact that it holds the record for the longest running girls’ magazine in Japanese history (47 years).

January 1956 issue of Shojo Book

There is a drastic plunge in the last years of World War II, due to censorship, a shortage of paper, and general poverty. Only Shôjo no Tomo and Shôjo Club survived the war (though just barely; by 1945 they were shadows of their former selves). The stylish Shôjo Gahô might have hung in there, too, if it hadn’t been forcibly merged with its greatest rival, Shôjo no Tomo, by the military government in 1942.

August 25, 1963 issue of Shôjo Friend

After the war, we see another spike. This also makes sense. Censorship was (largely) lifted under the Occupation Government and the economy was gradually improving, so it’s only natural that publishers would try to pick up where they left off, and to the publishers, “shôjo” was still the natural term to use. But here again we see a bunch of magazines that folded within five years. Throughout the 1950s, the word “shôjo” seems to have lost the potency it once enjoyed, and was now being used simply to identify a magazine as being for girls. Publishers began to try to distinguish new magazines from the pack, while at the same time identifying them as “feminine,” by choosing titles such as Margaret (from the French “marguerite”, which is what the Japanese call a daisy). By the 1970s, publishers pretty much stopped including the word in the titles of new girls’ magazines. Now it seems all but extinct.

But I have a feeling it will come back again someday.

Perhaps with a bit of nostalgic irony.

References:

http://www.kikuyo-lib.jp/08_menu.htm

http://www.oya-bunko.or.jp/soukan/cdzasshim.htm

http://www.oya-bunko.or.jp/soukan/cdzasshit2.htm

http://www.oya-bunko.or.jp/soukan/cdzasshit3.htm

http://www.iiclo.or.jp/

http://www.sugoroku.net/history/taisyo3.html

I also relied on this fantastic little book.

Someone asked me some questions about early anime over on my Wikipedia user page, so I spent a few hours today digging around and was happy to find a few clips on YouTube. And since my gallery is still down, making it awkward to post images, I thought I’d introduce some of the antique anime I found.

First, some background. While there’s some indication that someone in Japan may have been making animation somewhere between 1907 and 1912…

…there’s no doubt that the form got its real start in 1917, when at least five short animated pieces (the first three by Rakuten Kitazawa’s apprentice Hekoten Shimokawa, the fourth by Seitarô Kitayama, and the fifth by Jun’ichi Kôuchi) were created and screened. All five were long believed to have been lost, but in 2007, Kôuchi’s “A Dull-Edged Sword” (Namakura Katana) was discovered at an Osaka antique flea market. I couldn’t find a video of the entire two-minute piece, but this clip from a Japanese television show offers us a glimpse. Only the first 1 minute and 5 seconds are worth watching. After that it’s just talking heads.

Due in large part to the devastation caused by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, virtually every other Japanese animation made prior to 1924 has been lost. And while there were some noteworthy pieces made over the next ten years, unfortunately YouTube apparently didn’t get the memo, so we leap forward to 1933 to watch the vastly more sophisticated “Feud of the Foxes and Raccoon Dogs in Moving Pictures” (Ugoki E Kori Tatehiki), directed by Ikuo Ôishi (11 minutes 24 seconds).

The influence of American cartoons is obvious, but Ôishi does a great job of incorporating traditional Japanese motifs into this fun bit of nonsense. This is one of the best prewar short animations I’ve ever seen.
“The Forest Baseball Team” (Mori no Yakûdan), directed by Sei’ichi Harada in 1934, might be a bit of a let-down after that one, but keep in mind that this is just one minute out of an eight-minute short. (Why the uploader didn’t upload the whole thing is a bit of a mystery.)

Here’s another one from 1934, “Corporal Norakuro” (Norakuro Gochô), directed by Yasushi Murata. Norakuro (literally “stray black”), an accident-prone member of the “Dog Army”, was the most popular manga character of the day. This was the second of five Norakuro shorts made between 1933 and 1938.

And here’s another one from 1934, which has the somewhat puzzling title, “Toybox Series No. 3: Picturebook 1936″ (Omachabako Shirîzu Dai San Wa - Ehon Senkyûhyakusanjûroku Nen). You’ll notice the unabashed rip-offs of Felix and Mickey, but just about every character in this animation is a toy that would have been available in Japan at the time (thus the “toybox” in the title). Why the story is set two years in the future, I have no idea. No director is named. (8 minutes.)

We have another ten-year YouTube gap, and end with a couple of clips from the feature-length (74 minute) war propaganda film, “Momotarô, Divine Warrior of the Sea” (Momotarô Umi no Shinpei). This was directed by the brilliant Mitsuyo Ose in 1945, and was a sequel to his 1943 “Momotarô’s Sea Eagle” (Momotarô no Umiwashi), which, at 37 minutes, was Japan’s first ever feature length animation. The first clip is the first 2 minutes of the film. The second video is an 8-minute montage of the songs from the movie. (Yes, a musical war propaganda animation.)


And that’s it for today. I’m trying to get hold of a four-disk DVD box set of prewar and wartime anime. If I do, I’ll be sure to upload some more goodies here.

In trying to upgrade my blog software, I have somehow screwed up my gallery, so most of the images have disappeared from my blog. I am working on the problem, but for now all I have is a visually boring blog. To bad, since I was working on an entry introducing another even older Japanese girls’ magazine.

Wrap-around cover of A Fairy Tale: The Adventures of Little Shô, Vol. 1

As promised, in introduction to Japan’s first hit manga, Shô-chan no bôken (”The Adventures of Little Shô”), written by Shôsei Oda and drawn by Katsuichi Kabashima. The Adventures of Little Shô was published in several forums and formats over three decades.

Little Shô's first appearance, January 25, 1923

The Adventures of Little Shô is a sort of Art Nouveau/Japanesque fantasy about a boy of indeterminate age who rescues and befriends a large talking squirrel (who apparently has no name other than “Squirrel”), with whom he has a stunning range of adventures. Each adventure is quite short, most running between 10 and 16 pages, and range from the mundane (a trip to Osaka) to the bizarre (one adventure has Shô flying an airplane, battling a dinosaur, being rescued by a mammoth, and dancing with fairies who look like flappers with butterfly wings). If these strips had been published in English, they would have seemed perfectly at home on the Sunday supplement of an American newspaper of the day, except for one striking characteristic. Mixed in with characters in modern dress, Kewpies, centaurs, pith helmets, steam locomotives, and Western fairies are characters in kimono and creatures from Japanese folklore and legend. Kabashima manages to pull off this melange in the most natural way, probably because a hodgepodge of Japanese and Western, traditional and modern, was simply everyday reality for Japanese in the Taisho Period (1912-1926) and early Showa Period (1926 - 1989).

Shô-chan in his trademark cap

The Adventures of Little Shô first appeared on January 25, 1923, as four-panel daily comic strip in the premiere issue of the short-lived Asahi Graph newspaper. The newspaper folded after its 220th issue on September 1, 1923, when the Great Kantô Earthquake devastated the offices of the newspaper, along with most of Tokyo. Perhaps because of the small amount of space allotted to the strip, these early episodes seem literally cramped. Little Shô and other characters often seem to be stooping in order to fit into the small panels.

The somewhat more spacious Asahi Newspaper version of Little Shô

After a short absence, Little Shô made a comeback on the pages of the morning edition of the Asahi Newspaper on October 20, 1923, and, except for a brief break in the autumn of 1924, the strip ran until October 31, 1925. In the Asahi Newspaper, the strip was given more space, and the artist and writer were better able to realize the strip’s potential.

The Asahi Newspaper Corporation also published a series of seven comic books titled Otogi: Shô-chan no bôken (”A Fairy Tale: The Adventures of Little Shô”). Each volume is a 44-page stapled booklet, roughly 18.5 cm high and 26 cm wide. They are printed in full color, though some pages are two color (using red and black ink). The first 6 volumes can be seen in their entirety on the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery, although the size of the scans makes them difficult to read. At the end of this post I’ve appended thumbnails for the entire first volume.

Meanwhile, the Asahi Graph was reborn as a weekly magazine, and Little Shô appeared on its pages from March 12 to August 27, 1924 under the title Suiyôbi no Shô-chan (”Wednesday’s Little Shô”)

In Little Shô Since Then, panel layouts are less rigid

The strip was revived once again on the pages of the Asahi Newspaper under the title Shô-chan no sono go (”Little Shô Since Then”), running from February 12 to May 18, 1926. This incarnation was given even more space, and Kabashima used it to add a bit of variety to the layouts, staggering the panels and occasionally including larger panels.

Little Shô was so popular during his run that his trademark knit beanie with the oversized pom-pom became all the rage among Japanese children. Even though Shô-chan himself even though the character is remembered only by manga history buffs and the few people still alive who remember reading his adventures as children, this style of cap is still known in Japan as a Shô-chan bô (”Little Shô Hat”).

A page from the gorgeously illustrated A Picture Story: The Adventures of Little Shô

Little Shô’s final incarnation was in Emonogatari Shô-chan no bôken (”A Picture Story: The Adventures of Little Shô”), which was published by Kodansha in two volumes in January 1950 and December 1951. This is the most gorgeous of all the Little Shô incarnations, and shows off Kabashima’s draftsmanship in all its glory.

The original editions of Little Shô’s various books are extremely hard to come by, and are worth a fortune. Even reproductions are pricey. Fortunately, Shogakukan published a very nice volume of excerpts from the various Little Shô series in 2003. The first 34 pages are in beautiful full color, and the book includes several informative essays (which provided the bulk of information I’m providing here). The book is titled simply Shô-chan no bôken (”The Adventures of Little Shô”, ISBN4-7780-3001-X).

Shô battles a nightmarish horde of bodyless Tengu

Shô has a thoroughly Art Nouveau dream.

Shô battles a Ceratosaurus, is rescued by a Mammoth, and dances with a fairy, all in four pages.

And here’s the entire first volume of the comic book series, A Fairy Tale: The Adventures of Little Shô: