Manga Madness

Often times, while waiting for a train, I am fortunate enough to have a rail side bookstore to wandering around. Outside of Osaka Station, I’ve not been able to find a bookstore with English books. Japanese books are so wonky to me. You flip through the pages from back to front and the text is read vertically. Obviously there is only so far this is going to go when it comes to personal amusement. Sometimes if you flip the pages fast enough it looks like the Kanji characters are actually descending down like Space Invaders. Yup, time moves pretty slow when waiting on a train. Not understanding the books I turn to magazines. Magazines are pretty much the same here as they are back home. Lots of air brushed women in skimpy outfits, ads for stuff you don’t car about and topical articles about the latest celebrity scandal. You know, real news. However, again, though there is more to see here (especially in the wrestling magazines that have very gory photos of Japanese death matches) I can’t read the articles and magazines can only be thumbed through for a few minutes before I lose interest. With them out of the way it leaves comics, thick and chunky, Japanese style. All photo, minimal text and stories I can follow, a comic book is a nice companion on a train platform when you have time to kill. Japanese comics also build biceps as most of them are the size of the New York City telephone directory. Comics, or manga as it is called here, is huge here. One doesn’t need to look at the sizes of the monthly books to see that. Just pass a store like Family Mart or 7-11 and you’ll see at least a half dozen to a dozen people of all ages, though mostly students, flipping through books. Entire sections of bookstores are devoted to manga be it smaller comics, those phone book sized one or even novel sized books that you can cart around in your pocket. As mentioned in my cartoon character post, many of Japan’s most popular animated icons got their start in manga books. Over the last decade manga has invaded the Western world. There are currently two sides debating the wheres whys and whens of Manga. In one camp there are those who believe the books were born out of American influence during the US occupation of Japan after World War II. Americans soldiers introduced comics to the Japanese and it was also this time that the animation style of Disney cartoons were starting to make a spark in Asia. Others disagree that the United States is the primary influence on the art form sighting comic like images being drawn in Japan as far back as the 1200s. Some see a continuation of ancient woodblock prints in comics and in that the influence is deep rooted in Japanese culture. Studies have been done, for example, that show great similarities between manga comics and books written in the late 1800s which show links in themes. Scholars also point out a possible link to kamishibai, a street performance using pictures and narration. In the early years two manga series broke out: Astro Boy (1951) and Sazae-san (1946). The artists of these books were begin the style that would form over the years. Audiences grew for manga books in the 1960s and dozens of new books came out of this boom. More girls were being drawn to the books now and series like Little Witch Sally were popular. In the late 60s a group of women developed Shojo Manga, books drawn mainly by women for female readers. Here saw the rise of strong, independent female leads instead of just characters to be rescued or be love interests. Gekiga-style manga was also born out of this time and although individual series books in this style would die out in the 1970s the influence of the style is still see today. Gekiga introduced more serious stories to manga books which now saw adults paging through comics along with their kids. Today, manga takes in more money in one week then the entire American comics industry does per year. Hundreds of new stories are put out monthly for readers to follow. I give props to anybody who can remember those 900 pagers from one month to the next. So popular are these books that overnight cafes are scattered about the country where people can come and read the night away. In 2006 manga books took in 4.4 billion dollars in Japan and raking in a few million in the US. Usually the books are black and white with a few color pages for spice. Unlike a comic back home, manga books contain many different stories with different characters that seldom relate to one another. Did I mention sex and violence!? Oh yeah! Sex and violence. Not all of it is cute hamsters and small children. In fact, in some instances the cute hamsters and small children are engaging in the sex and violence. Which brings me to why I penned (typed, fine you technical dweebs) this little history lesson. A few weeks back I sent off my daughter’s birthday present and realized I didn’t send her any manga, a staple of Japanese culture. How could I have missed that. Maybe my subconscious envisioned a million bucks worth of shipping charges for sending phone book sized comics overseas. Well, I thought, there’s always Christmas and ever the one to get the jump on my holiday shopping, even in a country that doesn’t celebrate the holiday, I moseyed on into a comic section today and decided to pick up a book for Des. It’s a good thing I had to foresight to selectively scan some of these things. A pointer for you folks reading this who might want to send books back home to your kids: just because there are cute puppies on the cover doesn’t mean the book is rated G. Now with the absurd censorship laws in Japan even drawings have to edit out genitalia but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an abundance of cute little manga girls getting violated in all sorts of strange ways by both men, animal, objects, and the most disturbing, things that resemble Pokemon. I can see my daughter now: “Mom, how come Pikachu never does THAT on the show?” Where sex is censored violence is perfectly acceptable. This mentality never made any sense to me. Not back home and not here. So you can flip through a manga book and get all your blood and beheadings without having to turn on the news. Glancing down at the nine year old reading one of these books he could hardly light had me wondering if all the answers to why so many of my kids try to oblitereated one another lies within the pages of these books with the big breasted school girls on them. Though dissimilar in many regards, both Japanese and American comics can agree on the simple fact that you have to draw you female characters breasts the size hot air balloons. The search continues for a nice bloodless, breastless book to send to my twelve year old. Now armed with the knowledge to not trust covers with puppies and hamsters, I am on the look out for flowers and butterflies. Surly no artist could turn flowers and butterflies into something nasty. Could they?