Otaku, No Video

Just used Google’s new Real-Time Insights Finder to look at the search term “anime”. Here’s interest in that search term, by country:

Note that the United States, Britain, and Australia aren’t even in the list. (Japan isn’t listed, because Japanese otaku would search using Japanese characters.)

Search by city, and a few American cities show up, but are still dwarfed by Pacific and South American cities.

This tells me that America is far from the largest potential overseas market for anime. Now, the average American surely has more spending money than the average Chilean, so that’s a factor. But as countries like Chile, Peru, and the Philippines rise in economic power, and American fans buy fewer and fewer discs of anime, I can see Japan looking elsewhere for money and increasingly ignoring America.

Maybe.

Funimation launched a new website design recently. The design is a bit cramped and slow, but certainly easy to navigate.

With some trepidation and a certain girding of my loins, I headed over to the new forum.

The conversation is civil and reasonable. When folks ask questions, the answers come from official sources, ANN, and the like.

I wonder what they’ve done to make the discourse flow this well. Granted, all of the content comes from their closed beta, which must have been strongly curated.

I hope they continue with their strong curation. The web needs more of that.

Fractale © A-1 Pictures

Hiroki Azuma–author of the otaku-critical book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and creator of the anime series Fractale–has just launched a new website. Genron is intended to be “an English-based web portal for critical discourse in Japan.”

Azuma writes in his introduction:

Japanese society has undergone a major change both politically and culturally during the quarter-century from the end of…the Cold War to the burst of the economic bubble. Living conditions changed significantly and so did the beliefs and norms and the sense of “selfhood”. However…much of what is said about Japan still fails, unfortunately, to adapt to [this change]. This gap in awareness is wide enough in Japan…but it is even more serious outside of the country. For example, what people talk about or who the opinion leaders are on Twitter in the Japanese-speaking world, remain largely unknown abroad. This is despite the fact that it is said that Japanese accounts for 25% of all the messages posted on Twitter!

…The products and cultural values that Japan gives life to are appreciated around the world. However, although Japanese intellectuals and people in the publishing industry have been extremely passionate about analyzing the latest trends abroad to present them to a Japanese audience, very few have shown interest in doing the opposite, analyzing changes in Japan to present them to an international audience. Genron is being established to blast a hole into such a situation.

I’m very excited about this. If Azuma can pull it off, this will be a fantastically useful view of true Japanese modern culture, especially as it’s changed in the past few decades.

Here’s hoping!

I have no commentary on this snippet from this post on Hau Omochikaeri; just stumbled on it and found it interesting:

The problem with anime is that it is constrained by the cour system where the story must be condensed into a set number of episodes. This causes some series to feel rushed. In other anime, there is a shift of focus from the story to character presentation. This is why you see an increase in fanservice, as this is designed to lure in viewers and increase subsequent merchandise sales at the expense of storyline development. In eroge, there is no such constraint so the character and plot development are much better constructed. Not only that, but due to the interactivity mentioned earlier, the player can decide on which character’s story they would like to follow, thereby increasing both the dynamic nature and personal enjoyment of the game.

(And yeah, the title is a bit much. Just having some fun!)

From what little I can gather online, Aum Shinrikyo–the cult responsible for the sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo subways in 1995–produced a recruitment video. Being Japanese, they made it as an anime. Clips below:

The anime connection: That sarin gas attack occurred halfway through production on Neon Genesis Evangelion, apparently forcing Anno to rewrite an Eva storyline with a similar premise. That may have been the point at which Eva‘s plot wobbled off its tracks.

Some claim that Anno was a member of, or at least inspired by, Aum when making Eva. Indeed, Aum Shinrikyo’s radio station was named “Evangelion tes Basileias” (Ancient Greek for ”Gospel of the Kingdom”).

The passage of the Tokyo Youth Ordinance Bill amendment sparked a lot of blog posts. But what’s the actual state of Japanese obscenity law? Robert Clyde Allen asked me to find out.

Here’s what I’ve learned. Disclaimer: This is undoubtedly an incomplete report. I welcome additional information in the comments.

The core Japanese obscenity law is article 175 of the Criminal Code (or Penal Code) of Japan, from 1907 (!):

A person who distributes, sells or displays in public an obscene document, drawing or other objects shall be punished by imprisonment with work for not more than 2 years, a fine of not more than 2,500,000 yen or a petty fine. The same shall apply to a person who possesses the same for the purpose of sale.

“Obscenity” has traditionally been defined as exposed genitalia and/or pubic hair, so that’s been censored. Apparently, the law was recently amended to state that exposed genitalia is not automatically obscene, but I haven’t found the specifics on that.

NEVA (the Nihon Ethics of Video Assocation) was the group that applied mosaics and other censoring to pornography. NEVA officially disbanded in 2007–2008 after a governtment raid revealing that NEVA was getting more and more lax in their application of mosaics, but NEVA has announced plans to re-form.

In terms of enforcement, there are almost no arrests and very few significant fines resulting from article 175. Usually, offending material is simply seized, and that’s the end of the matter. Occasionally, the offender is slapped with a small fine.

Practically speaking, child pornography has also been considered obscene, though production and distribution of child pornography was not officially outlawed until 1999. Possession of child pornography is still a legal gray area.

Now, here’s where things get interesting from an anime/manga perspective.

In 2004, Suwa Yuuji was tried and convicted on obscenity charges for violating article 175 with his manga Misshitsu.  He appealed to the Japanese High Court, which not only upheld the obscenity ruling, it actually increased his fine.  More importantly, Misshitsu was completely removed from the marketplace, and a number of bookstores then removed their adults-only sections.

(This is why the anime/manga industry’s worried about the Tokyo Youth Ordinance Bill amendment, as it may re-classify a lot of material as adults-only…and a lot of bookstores don’t have adults-only sections any more.)

The Tokyo Youth Ordinance Bill itself is part of a larger ordinance, the ”Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths. ” Its purpose is to restrict childrens’ access to materials considered harmful on two fronts:

1. Filtering childrens’ access to the internet (requiring porn filters on cell phones sold to children, for example).
2. Directions to the publishing industry about how they publish material harmful to minors. These are mostly self-regulation directions, calling on the industry to limit childrens’ access to inappropriate materials.

Of course, the Tokyo Youth Ordinance Bill only applies in Tokyo. However, since Tokyo is the epicenter of the anime and manga industry (housing Comiket, Akihabara, and most anime studios), any change in law there will have a major effect on the industry.

© Enterbrain, Kotetsu Sakura

bluemist‘s post about Amagami SS got me thinking about the difficulty of adapting a dating sim to an anime.

Let’s take a typical dating sim cast: 5 girls, each with two endings (“good” and ”bad”). How do you adapt that into a show?

You can try to tell all the stories at once, waiting until the end to narrow down to one girl. I understand this is how KyoAni approached Air and Kanon.

You can focus on one girl, and let the others fall by the wayside.

You can split the show and focus on a couple of girls. This is what ef — a tale of memories did, by creating two protagonists, grouping a couple of girls with each, and following their stories that way. In each story, the protagonist ends up with one girl while rejecting another.

Or there’s Amagami SS‘s solution: The 24-episode series is divided equally among the six girls. Every 4 episodes tells the story of one girl, then resets and focuses on another. It’s just like a dating sim: play through one storyline, then restart and pick another girl.

It’s a brilliant choice. The main difficulty lies in keeping each story interesting even to fans of a particular girl, so fans don’t just watch the storyline involving their favorite character. So long as the other characters stick around and factor in to each storyline, it works fine.

More importantly, this allows anime fans to experience something much closer to the visual novel experience.

I do love Osamu Tezuka’s work, but some of his titles are rapidly going out of print. Here’s what you can (and can’t) find; links go to the Amazon.com page for the first volume of each series.

Easily Available

The following works can be found on Amazon and similar retailers new or used for about their original price (or less!):

Adolf – The story of three men named Adolf during World War II. Please forgive the cheesy covers.

Apollo’s Song – A cautionary tale about violence and sexuality, this is one of Tezuka’s stranger stories, in which a violent young man is forced to live through multiple tragic lives to learn compassion.

Astro Boy – Tezuka’s most popular work, and one of his most light-hearted. Astro is always an easy read, though it frequently touches on difficult subjects like bigotry, aggression, and obsession.

Ayako – Just released. Haven’t read it. Has a naked woman on the cover.

Buddha – A biography of Buddha’s early  years, light on the mysticism and heavy on the realism.

Black Jack – The story of a miracle-working doctor, Tezuka wrote Black Jack while he was redefining his style in response to the serious gekiga movement. As a result, Black Jack deals more directly with modern themes and problems, like obsession with everlasting life and beauty.

Dororo – Only 3 volumes! Granted, Dororo begins with a silly premise: a man promises his unborn son’s limbs and organs to various demons; the half-living lump of his son is abandoned, then rescued by a surgeon who gives him enough prosthetics that he can function. But this gives rise to a classic samurai story, as the young man crisscrosses the countryside in search of these demons.

Metropolis – Inspiration for the relatively recent film, this is one of Tezuka’s earliest works, and it shows. Only one volume, and it’s starting to rise in price on the used book sites.

Lost World — Another early Tezuka work. Mostly action/adventure fun.

MW – Tezuka’s musings on why bad things happen to good people. An almost absurd amount of tragedy and evil occurs in the pages of this single-volume work.

Nextworld – Yet another very early Tezuka work, a rollicking adventure story that touches on a few grander themes.

Ode to Kirihito – I haven’t read this one yet. It’s about a guy who contracts a disease that turns him into a monster, so it’s a full-scale horror story.

Mixed Availability

Phoenix – Tezuka’s masterpiece, spanning millions of years and a breathtaking array of characters and situations to probe the mysteries of the human spirit. The first volume of Phoenix now goes for hundreds of dollars (U.S.), and others are rising in price, but most are available for $12.

Hard to Find

These titles are hard or impossible to find, even used.

Crime and Punishment — Released in 1990 as a bilingual manga; now well out-of-print and unavailable even from used book sites like Alibris.

Princess Knight – The first shoujo manga.

Swallowing the Earth — Another one I haven’t read yet, it’s apparently a slapstick story about the world’s dependence on the gold standard, mixed with quiet points about modern sexuality and other social issues. Color me intrigued.

And of course, this post only lists those few of Tezuka’s works that have been published in English; the man produced hundreds of manga.

Anything else I should add? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks!