Matt Thorn’s blog about shôjo manga, manga in general, comics in general, and life in general
Posts about non-sh?jo manga
I had recently a very pleasant interview with Publishers Weekly‘s Kai Ming Cha about Fantagraphics’ new manga line.
The line about a Porsche at the end was a reference to a joke I had made earlier in the interview about Gary Groth’s Complete Peanuts Porsche, but that ended up being cut. As did my comment that the Fantagraphics offices look like a condemned house. Probably for the best.
First, a brief update on the Christopher Handley case. A source who prefers to remain anonymous tells me that Handley’s sentencing is scheduled for August 18, though “the pre-trial probation officer said it might take longer to get their report done.”
And now some fun news, for a change.
On June 11, I had the enormous privilege of attending a party in Tokyo celebrating Moto Hagio’s 40th year as a professional manga artist. I’m guessing there were maybe 200 people at the main reception, maybe 60 or so at the post-party-party, and about 30 at the post-post-party-party.
The main reception was held at the Tokyo Kaikan. The hosts of the party included such luminaries as Galaxy Express 999 creator Leiji Matsumoto, Tomorrow’s Joe creator Tetsuya Chiba, and science fiction author Baku Yumemakura. One of the highlights for me was a performance by biwa musician Gessui Kuroda. Setting to music lyrics written by Hagio for her fantasy classic Gin no sankaku (“The Silver Triangle”), Gessui delivered a powerful and otherwordly performance that gave me goosebumps.
This was probably one of the few formal receptions I’ve ever attended that I can say I truly enjoyed. This sort of thing tends to (naturally) be attended almost exclusively by people involved in the manga industry, but at this party there were people from a dazzling variety of fields: theater (director Hideki Noda was there); science-fiction author Mari Kotani (who I hadn’t seen in ages!); film; music; fine art; et cetera.
I got to see some people I hadn’t seen in a long time (such as erotic manga artist Milk Morizono), and got to meet some people I’d never met before, such as: Patalliro! creator Mineo Maya (and his lovely wife and daughter); pioneering shoujo manga art Miyako Maki; sci-fi manga artist Reiko Shimizu; and Hagio’s three charming nieces, Ikue, Satomi, and Naoko. My friend and fellow shoujo manga critic Yukari Fujimoto was there, decked out in an original Comme des Garçon T-shirt that was a collaboration between Hagio and John Galliano.
You could feel the love and admiration for Hagio in the crowd (not to mention the quality of the company she keeps), and I felt honored to be included in their numbers. It was truly a night to remember. My biggest regret is that I learned later that Nodame Cantabile creator Tomoko Ninomiya was also there, yet I missed the opportunity to meet her! She was there with her baby son. (And she came down with appendicitis the next day, which means Nodame is once again on hold!)
Now let’s see if I can convince WordPress to let me add some images.
 The formalities |
 Gessui Kuroda playing The Silver Triangle on a biwa |
 Me with shoujo manga legend Miyako Maki |
 The star of the show |
 Note the tiara! |
 Me with Mineo Maya |
 Yukari Fujimoto, Mineo Maya, his daughter, Reiko Shimizu, and Mayas wife |
 Me with the Hagio nieces, Ikue, Naoko, and Satomi |
 Me and Hagio |
 Me with Chiho Saito |
In my last post, I did a little play on words (“Law and (Gag) Orders”), but I just want to clarify that I myself am not subject to any legally-binding gag order, and as far as I know, no one involved in the Handley case is subject to a “gag order” in the strict sense of an order issued by the court. As I understand it, the conditions of the plea bargain Handley agreed to include a (rather standard, I suppose) restriction on what Handley or anyone of his surrogates can say about the case. (Obviously the prosecution is not going to be happy if they strike a plea agreement, and the defendant then tells the media, “I’m acually innocent, but I signed the plea agreement because I was threatened with a harsher sentence if I didn’t.”) The repercussions of violating those conditions, though, are very real, since the prosecution can withdraw the plea agreement, or ask the judge for a harsher sentence.
Can you say “coercive plea agreement“?
In the meantime, I am trying to find a list of the materials deemed obscene by the prosecution, preferably in Japanese, so that I can check it out for myself. (Remember that I live in Japan, where the material is quite legal.)
At this point, all we have are rumors and speculation. For example, a widely referenced article from MTV’s Splash Page contains this passage:
“There is explicit sex in yaoi comics,” Handley’s lawyer Eric Chase told MTV. “And the men are drawn in a very androgynous style, which has the effect of making them look really young. There’s a real taboo in Japan about showing pubic hair, so they’re all drawn without it, which also makes them look young. So what concerned the authorities were the depictions of children in explicit sexual situations that they believed to be obscene. But there are no actual children. It was all very crude images from a comic book.”
Based on this quote, many commentators have concluded that the problematic books were (at least in part) yaoi. The Splash Page writer herself draws the same conclusion when she says, “[Handley] was arrested in Iowa for possession of obscene material based on his private collection, which included lolicon and yaoi manga.” Yet a careful reading of the quote reveals that Chase does not say that the problematic material in Handley’s case was yaoi. His statement could also easily be read as simply offering an example of a kind of manga that could be mistaken for depictions of minors in sexual situations.
I myself concluded that the material must be explicitly pornographic, based on this description from the indictment (quoted here):
a copy of a book containing visual depictions, namely drawings and cartoons, that depicted graphic bestiality, including sexual intercourse, between human beings and animals such as pigs, monkeys, and others.
Yet things I have read and heard since have made me skeptical of this description. The bottom line is we cannot comment on the specifics of the material until those specifics are made public. And as far as I can tell, they have not.
But regardless of whether the manga in question are the kind of thing any manga collecter would have on her shelf or are explicitly pornographic, as long as the material passes the Miller Test (as even the most explicit legal pornography evidently does), the material should be protected by the First Amendment.
As in “gag orders.”
It seems that it is in the best interest Christopher Handley’s defense that I remove the correspondence I had posted yesterday.
It’s frustrating, obviously, but the last thing I want to do is anything that might result in a harsher sentence for Mr. Handley.
For what its worth, both Ms. Handley and I were acting in “good faith,” but you know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
I honestly don’t know what I can do or say at the moment that would have a positive impact on the proceedings, so I am just going to quietly continue to collect information and observe from the sidelines until Mr. Handley’s sentence has been handed down.
Yes, I’m still alive. For what it’s worth. Back when I started this blog, some kind soul raved about the number of images and said s/he hoped I didn’t end up suffering “blog burnout.” Well, I did. Until I find a much, much easier way to get images from the printed page to this page, I’m afraid there just won’t be as many images as I was uploading before.
So what brings me back from the Land of the Lost? The Christopher Handley case. To make a long story short: Handley was charged in May 2007 “with receipt of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children”; The visual representations were manga; The few court documents currently available make it clear that “There is no dispute that the images at issue in this case do not involve real children but instead depict cartoons of children”; on May 20 of this year, Handley “pleaded guilty [...] in Des Moines, Iowa, to possessing obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children and mailing obscene material.”
For more detailed information on what actually happened and what it might mean, I recommend you read:
Any number of people have written better commentary on the case than I could, so I would like instead to describe my own very peripheral involvement in the case.
For legal reasons, I have been asked to remove the correspondence I had posted earlier. I apologize for the trouble.
I have never met Mr. Handley, and know nothing about him as a person, other than the image painted for me by his loving mother. But whether I would like him or not, or think he is a “nice guy” or not, is irrelevant. It’s also irrelevant that I personally find lolicon manga, and a lot of other hentai manga, to be offensive and disturbing. As others have pointed out, to support free expression is not just to defend expression you like, but rather to defend expression you despise.
The chilling bottom line is that an American may very well go to prison for acquiring and looking at drawings of characters who do not actually exist.
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.
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.
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:
At Tokyo Station
Shamelessly jealous of Inspired by that good-for-nothing my dear friend Shaenon Garrity’s blog post about Noboru Ôshiro’s 1940 classic Kasei Tanken (“Mars Exploration”), I’ve decided to ride her coattails follow her lead and introduce another wartime classic by Ôshiro, Kisha Ryokô (“A Train Journey”), published in 1941.
Rather than spending a couple of hours slickly incorporating captioned thumbnails into this post (like I did last time), I’m just going to dump the thumbnails below. There are simple captions for each image. You can also navigate the gallery here.
Keep in mind that this manga was published in hardcover format in 1941, a time when virtually all media had been turned into pro-war, ultra-nationalistic propaganda, and yet contains not the slightest hint of propaganda. It is the simple story of a father and son taking a train trip from Tokyo to Kyoto, and learning about the places they pass on the way. It even includes a detailed visual explanation of how animation is made. The book is drop dead gorgeous from beginning to end. But for reasons unknown to me, the book ends abruptly when the train reaches Nagoya. I would dearly love to see the rest of the story, assuming it was ever finished.
There’s a lot more I could say about the manga and about Ôshiro himself, but I’ve got to get to bed, so rather than delaying another day, I’ll just put this out there. Comments and questions very much welcome!
The book can be bought at Amazon.co.jp.