Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World 1591589088, 9781591589082

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Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World „ ♦. r

Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog, Editors

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Mangatopia

MANGATOPIA ESSAYS ON MANGA AND ANIME IN THE MODERN WORLD

Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog, Editors

@ LIBRARIES UNLIMITED AN IMPRINT OF ABC-CLIO, LLC Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England

Copyright 2011 by Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review or reproducibles, which may be copied for classroom and educational programs only, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mangatopia : essays on manga and anime in the modern world / Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog, editors, p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-59158-908-2 (hardcopy : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-59158-909-9 (ebook) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—Japan—History and criticism. 2. Animated films—Japan—History and criticism. 3. Animated television programs—Japan— History and criticism. 4. Popular culture—Japanese influences. I. Perper, Timothy, 1939- II. Cornog, Martha. NCI764.5.J3M36 2011 741.5'952—dc23 2011027230 ISBN: 978-1-59158-908-2 EISBN: 978-1-59158-909-9 15

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Libraries Unlimited An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper (oo) Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction to a Semiotic Revolution: It May Not Be Kansas Anymore, but It Is the Kansai

xv

Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog

PART I: ART IN CONTEXTS Chapter 1: Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: Her Life and Manga

3

Kinko Ito Introduction

3

Her Early Days

6

Ide’s Debut in Girls’ Comics

7

Ide’s Family Life

10

Ladies’Comics

H

Conclusion

17

Chapter 2: Films on Paper: Cinematic Narrative in Gekiga

21

Deborah Shamoon Looking Away: The Pillow Shot in Cinema

22

Looking Around: The Aspect-to-Aspect Transition

24

vi

Contents

Cinematic Narrative in Manga

25

A Brief History of Gekiga

26

The Aspect-to-Aspect Transition in Gekiga

28

Films on Paper

33

Chapter 3: Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

37

William L. Benzon Stories as Equipment for Living

38

Geopolitics: What Is Japan?

39

The Ontology Lab

40

Primordial Scenes

41

Parade of the Creatures

43

Varieties of the Human

44

Radiation and Artifice in the Building of Worlds

46

At the Core: Grief and Loss

47

Things to Come: Astro Boy and Beyond

49

Chapter 4: Heirs and Graces—Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit in the Realm of Japanese Fantasy

53

Paul Jackson Fantastic Frontiers

55

Beyond the Horizon

58

Folkloric Fantasy

61

PART II: FANSHIPS AND ART Chapter 5: Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

71

Frenchy Lunning Cos-: Shojo Style Emerges

72

-Play: Performativity

78

“I”-Dentity

85

Contents

vii

Chapter 6: Love through a Different Lens: Japanese Homoerotic Manga through the Eyes of American Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Other Sexualities Readers

89

Robin E. Brenner and Snow Wildsmith U.S. and Japanese Comics with GLBTQ Representation

91

Surveying GLBTQ Readers in the United States

100

Conclusion

115

Chapter 7: Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Boys’ Love, Masculinity, and Sexual Identities

119

Mark McHarry Presence

121

Beginnings

122

Opposition

123

Valuing Indistinctness

125

Ungendering Masculinity

126

An Epistemological Break

128

Chapter 8: Reading Right to Left: The Surprisingly Broad Appeal of Manga and Anime; or, “Wait a Minute”

135

Patrick Drazen Japanese Culture: For Japanese Only?

135

“When You Assume ...”

136

American Fans and Their Preferences

137

Voices of Diverse American Fandom

140

Themes in Question

143

PART III: POLITICS Chapter 9: Manga from Right to Left

151

Matthew Penney Recent Events, Shifting Positions

151

The Future of Japan’s Past

152

v---

Contents

History from the Right and Manga Conventions

154

History from the Left

158

Fiction from the Mainstream

162

Conclusion

170

Chapter 10: All Life Is Genocide: The Philosophical Pessimism of Osamu Tezuka

173

Ada Palmer Karma out of Time

175

War of Nature

176

Dangerou sException

178

Aggression and Nostalgia

179

Rebellion and Acceptance

181

Ambassador of Peace

183

Impossible Peace

184

Accepting Authentic Pessimism

186

Chapter 11: Believe in Comics: Forms of Expression in Barefoot Gen

191

Thomas LaMarre History and Manga Expression

192

Biopolitics and Trauma

193

The Plastic Line

198

Cartoon and Mechanical Projection

202

Chapter 12: Cultural Politics of J-Culture and “Soft Power”: Tentative Remarks from a European Perspective

209

Marco Pellitteri Transnational Bonds Based on Manga and Anime: Viewpoints

210

Transnationalism and Nationalism

212

Proximities and Commonalities

213

Odorless Cultures, Fragrant Cultures, and Perfumed Cultures

215

The Odor of Anime

218

Contents

ix

The Perception of Anime and Manga in Europe as Conditioned by the Understanding of Japan

222

European Perception of J-Culture: Recent Developments

226

Japanese Nationalist Tendencies in Future Manga and Anime in Europe?

226

Conclusions

230

Afterword: It Isn’t the Kansai Anymore, Either

237

Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog Index

239

About the Editors and Contributors

251

Illustrations Figure 1.1. Figure 1.2.

Chikae Ide in her studio. From Viva! Volleyball.

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Figure 1.3. Figure 1.4. Figure 2.1.

Some of Ide’s assistants working in their studio. From The house of demons. Aspectual transitions or pillow shots in “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” enhance the mood of urban alienation. Aspectual transition in the long right-hand panel emphasizes the theme of abandonment in “Abandon the Old in Tokyo.” Core relationships. Nakahara established the image of the demure, yet alluring coy Japanese schoolgirl, dressed in the school uniform of the post-war era in Japan. Two young women cosplaying the characters Alan and Ann from the Sailor Moon R anime. A large group cosplaying the main cast of the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Cosplay photo of the Verrsen Werks female cosplay team cross-dressing from the anime Gravitation. Voguing for cameras, onlookers, and themselves, these young women create a netherworld that is the transversal space in which the players reiterate and perform the narratives and subjectivities of their community. A common sort of photograph taken during an anime convention: a gang of friends made during the con (and previous cons) from the otaku community, many in cosplay. Respondents’gender and sexuality.

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Figure 2.2.

Figure 3.1. Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.2. Figure 5.3. Figure 5.4. Figure 5.5.

Figure 5.6.

Figure 6.1.

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31 48

74 77 78 79

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86 102

Illustrations

xii Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 7.1. 10.1. 10.2. 10.3. 10.4. 10.5. 10.6.

Years reading Japanese manga. Percentage of manga read that is yaoi/yuri. Who reads yaoi/yuri? Top 20 yaoi creators. Top 20 yuri creators. “Captive Brothers” by Kiriko Moth. “The Death of Rock,” from Adventures of Rock. Apollo’s Song. Apollo’s Song. Rock in Phoenix, Future. Black Jack in “Shrinking Bodies.” Autobiographical depiction of young Tezuka witnessing a firebombing, in Kami no toride (Paper fortress).

102 103 103 104 105

122 174 177 178 180 182

186

Acknowledgments Books are collaborative projects, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to a variety of people. First, many thanks to our contributors, especially those who have been also our colleagues at Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts: Frenchy Lunning (its editor-in-chief), Thomas LaMarre, and Patrick Drazen, who were always on tap with assistance and com¬ ments. Marco Pellitteri was a font of knowledge and vision, and his critical acumen was invaluable. The participants in the Anime and Manga Research Circle e-list were also always ready to contribute opinions and points of view. Martha extends special thanks to the manga experts on the panel she moder¬ ated at the 2010 American Library Association conference: Brigid Alverson, Robin Brenner (also a contributor), and Katherine Dacey. As always, our warmest thanks to our veteran editor Barbara Ittner, who has survived two of our books. These contributors and collaborators who contrib¬ uted many hours of work to the volume deserve our greatest appreciation, for without them, this book would not exist. Thanks, folks!

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Introduction to a Semiotic Revolution: It May Not Be Kansas Anymore, but It Is the Kansai TIMOTHY PERPER AND MARTHA CORNOG

When Akim, Ghost in the Shell, and Sailor Moon arrived in the United States from Japan in the 1990s, manga and anime entered a transnational flow of cul¬ tural goods that spiraled outwards into ever more complex loops of influence, fandom, and marketing (Matsui 2009). By then, manga and anime had already crossed the horizons of European popular art and culture (Pellitteri 2010 and Marco Pellitteri, chapter 12, this volume) and had likewise reached Southeast Asian audiences and markets (Wong 2006). In one direction of the arrow, none of this was new; Raoul Walsh’s 1924 silent film The Thief of Baghdad, which starred Douglas Fairbanks, had within two years been adapted and remade as an animated fdm in Japan: Noburo Ofuji’s 1926 Bagadajo no tozoku (The Thief of Baghdad Castle; see Miyao 2007). But what has made the manga and anime explosion of recent years different is that now Japan, and increas¬ ingly Korea and China, are exporting cultural goods to the Eurocentric West¬ ern world—and with extravagant aesthetic, cultural, and commercial success. For at least some U.S. critics, journalists, and commercial commentators, manga and anime have constituted a bewildering intrusion or even challenge to the unquestioned (although parochial) view that U.S. production values embody the worldwide standard for comics and for animation. How could anyone else excel at cartoons when Superman and Batman define the com¬ ics, or when Fantasia and 101 Dalmatians define animation? If Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the 1988 ne plus ultra of innovative fdmmaking, what was this Akira thing all about? The college students who formed the first defin¬ able fanbase for anime in the United States had it right when they said that they’d never seen anything like this before (Napier 2005). But they loved it— together with Robotech, Ninja Scroll, and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

XVI

Introduction to a Semiotic Revolution

But more astonishments lay ahead. The hero-worshipping boys who were RobotecKs and Gundam's first fans had sisters. And the sisters and their fe¬ male friends adored Sailor Moon—and then Cardcaptor Sakura, Fruits Bas¬ ket, and FAKE. By today, girls and young women form a large percentage of the manga/anime fanbase, a striking change from a three-decades historical predominance of young males in U.S. comics fandom (Robbins 2009). Be¬ cause European experience with manga and anime predated U.S. familiarity, older continental women have maintained their enthusiasm for these Japanese art-forms, leading to extensive translation and publication in France, Italy, Spain, and Germany of manga originally written by adult women for adult women—the genres called josei and rediisu (see Kinko Ito, chapter 1, this vol¬ ume, for a biographical discussion of Chikae Ide, a major josei manga artist). Simultaneously, a shift occurred in cartoon and comics criticism both in the United States and in Europe. Moving from an outlaw child of establishment print and publishing, comics and cartooning criticism renewed itself, a pro¬ cess greatly helped by the Internet and by blogging. It was difficult for alert critics to ignore the simply stunning beauty of animated films such as Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 Princess Mononoke and Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 Innocence— or, more recently, Kenji Kamiyama’s 2007 Seirei no moribito (see Paul Jackson, chapter 4, this volume). Some earlier commentators, such as Ivan Stang (1988, 257-58), had foreseen the potential impact of anime such as Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s 1984 Lensman, a masterpiece of over-the-top swashbuckling ro¬ mance, adventure, and comedy, including a scene unequalled in animation of a riot in a discotheque. Part of this shift in comics criticism produced theories about how cartoon¬ ing works and achieves its effects, including writing by Scott McCloud, Neil Cohn (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/NeilCohn), and Alan Cholodenko, among others (Cholodenko 1991, 2007; McCloud 1993). In turn, their work stimulated further theoretical analysis, for example, by Thomas LaMarre and by Deborah Shamoon (some in this volume; see also LaMarre 2009). Much work of this kind is being published in Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts (http://www.mechademia.org), several of whose editors are represented in this collection: Frenchy Lunning, herself the editor of Mechademia, Thomas LaMarre, Patrick Drazen, and ourselves. So manga and anime did more than entertain an increasing number of ardent fans in the United States and Europe. Manga and anime also forced Western viewers and critics to revision the nature of cartooning, comics, and animation. In part, the revisioning has occurred because manga and anime overtly combine political, social, and emotional issues into narrative entire¬ ties, in stark contrast to the kiddie fare of Saturday morning cartoons on U.S. television. But this combination has characterized manga from the early post-World War II days of Osamu Tezuka (see Ada Palmer, chapter 10, and William Benzon, chapter 3, in this volume) and is central to both right-wing and left-wing

Introduction to a Semiotic Revolution

xv u

views of manga (see Matthew Penney, chapter 9, this volume). No one can ignore the politics of emotionality when the subject matter of manga is the bombing of Hiroshima (see Thomas LaMarre, chapter 11, this volume). Nor can one ignore the history of Japanese art when looking at manga and anime. Transnational flows of influence may have arrived in Japan from the United States and Europe, but, equally, Japanese art has, since the 19th cen¬ tury, influenced Eurocentric art—for example, as Japonisme in France (Wichmann 1999). But manga and anime have been, if not immune, then relatively indifferent, to two of the cornerstones of modem Eurocentric art. One is abstractionism, dating roughly from 1900 to 1910 in Europe, central to work by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But far more than drawing on European models of abstract art, manga and anime depend on recogniz¬ ably Japanese forms of minimalism and abstraction—which Westerners may recognize only at a distance when gazing uncertainly at flower arranging and wondering what it means. Many viewers, we imagine, do not make complex aesthetic assessments when they watch giant robots stomping through the landscape or when they watch some poor high school lad tom between the seductions of two equally pretty heroines. But the minimalism is there, in a succinct focus on the image, on its symmetry, and on an elegance of line and coloring that wastes no space or effort. So we are grateful when scholars such as Deborah Shamoon and Thomas LaMarre (chapter 2 and chapter 11, respectively, in this volume) explicate the origins and nature of some of these techniques. But above all, manga and anime have not abandoned realism with the en¬ thusiasm with which Eurocentric art surrendered to the blandishments of ab¬ stractionism. Of course, abstract, even surreal, manga and anime exist, some of them masterpieces, such as Kazuya Tsurumaki’s 2000 FLCL and Kunihiko Ikuhara’s 1999 film Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse. But even Utena remains rooted in realism, as do manga and anime stories of de¬ mons, aliens, yokai, robots, androids, dakini, and a mind-boggling array of other beings all inhabiting the interstices of modem Tokyo—or in Armitage, Mars. Such realism transcends the definitions of 19th century European art of the kind where the French realist painter Gustave Courbet was asked to paint an angel and he replied, “Show me an angel and I will paint one” (“Courbet, Gustave” 2004). For Courbetian realism, art is “what my eyes see” (Clair 2003): the objects of art must exist in the mundane here-and-now of this physical world, for otherwise they are aesthetically empty phantasms and hallucinations. The counter-reply is not that worlds without fantasy are boring; nor is the answer that fantasy contains Truths of the Inner Mind inaccessible through literalism and accessible only symbolically, as Jung might have said (Jung et al. 1968). Instead, one answer to Courbet’s realism is aesthetic, not psy¬ chological: animated fdms such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Sailor Moon

xviii

Introduction to a Semiotic Revolution

are drawn with impeccable stylishness and with detailed, loving attention to verisimilitude, and yet they are fantasies vivid, immediate, and real. Anime and manga have a tangible realism where sword-swinging heroines such as Utena (Perper and Comog 2008) seem to be sitting in the artist’s studio having their portraits painted. Such art provides an aesthetically realist—and visually realistic—map of the impossible. Paul Jackson (chapter 4, this volume) shows how folklore and tradition combine with computer graphics in a hyperrealism beyond the real to create worlds never seen before—but which become famil¬ iar and appealing to us in exquisite detail. It is a very new aesthetic we see here: a semiotic revolution where meanings spiraling back and forth across the world reassemble themselves into new forms and representations of real¬ ity, imagined or not. And, in the meantime, the fans are running around having a wonderful time. Yet, in a nice complement to the complexities of the art itself, fan culture is neither simple nor pure joyousness. A great deal is involved in the fan custom of dressing up like your favorite anime character at a fan convention (cosplay or costume-play; see Frenchy Lunning, chapter 5, this volume). Fans make nuanced and complex decisions and evaluations about what they see (see Pat¬ rick Drazen, chapter 8, this volume). They also write and draw their own fan art. Some of it startles outsiders, such as the “male homosexuality” of yaoi and BL, acronyms for art drawn by women artists and read by women, show¬ ing male-male romances and sexual engagements. Three of our contributors expand on yaoi and BL: Robin Brenner, Snow Wildsmith, and Mark McHarry. At every point, we perceive not a static system of media engorgement at the expense of the consumer but a dialectical process of exchange among artist, society, and audience. By dialectical, we mean that richly entwined interac¬ tions among artist, society, and audience have shaped manga and anime first in Japan and now across the world. One should, we suggest, forget about linear models of social function when dealing with such complexities. For example, Ryutaro Nakamura’s 2007 anime Ghost Hound involves—among other things!—a secret government laboratory hidden in the mountains creat¬ ing artificial life for unknown but undoubtedly noxious reasons. The sudden manifestation of these artificial beings draws down upon itself the renewed and intensified curiosity of various other beings, including a tengu demon who lives in these mountains, some high school students, a pretty girl medium exploited by the bad guys, yakuza mobsters, and a group of Buddhist monks who watch the denouement while floating serenely in mid-air. No, not lin¬ ear ... not at all, especially not when the artificial creatures escape at the end, coalesce into two flying dragons who entwine in an unmistakable embrace, and then disappear into a hole in the sky. There, we assume, they will rear baby dragons. Do you think it might be a metaphor? Increasingly, libraries and librarians have become aware of manga and anime. These art-forms are hard to ignore when, as one librarian exclaimed.

Introduction to a Semiotic Revolution

xix

“I have kids in a piranha pack coming upstairs, clawing their way to the [graphic novel] collection!” (audience member. New York Comic-Con, 2008). A mixed metaphor, but vivid nonetheless: scholarly attention, fan enthusiasm, and unparalleled commercial success for manga and anime have converged to create a need for good information. So we assembled this collection of essays to showcase discussions of manga and anime not just for librarians but for all intelligent readers interested in the future of the book and the story. We asked a number of manga and anime experts, some academics, some not, to write about topics of their choice, with the understanding that the result should be insightful, informative, and interesting. And they did. So enjoy their essays. They are—above all—well-written and thoughtful analyses of the complexities of manga and anime in the modem world.

REFERENCES Cholodenko, Alan, ed. 1991. The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation. Sydney, Australia: Power Publications and the Australian Film Commission. Cholodenko, Alan, ed. 2007. The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation. Cham¬ paign: University of Illinois Press. Clair, Jean. 2003. “Femalic Molds.” Translated by Taylor M. Stapleton, tout-fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2 (5). Available at: http://www.toutfait.com/ issues/volume2/issue_5/news/clair/clair.html. (Originally published in \Sur\ Marcel Duchamps et le fin de Tart. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.) “Courbet, Gustave.” 2004. The Oxford Dictionary of Art. Edited by Ian Chilvers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.enotes.com/oxford-art-encyclopedia/ courbet-gustave. Jung, Carl G., M.-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, and Aniela Jaffe. 1968. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell. LaMarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Matsui, Takeshi. 2009. The Diffusion of Foreign Cultural Products: The Case Analysis of Japanese Comics (Manga) Market in the US. Working Paper 37. Available at: http:// www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap37.html. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Miyao, Daisuke. 2007. ‘Thieves of Baghdad: Translational Networks of Cinema and Anime in the 1920s.” Mechademia 2: 83-103. Napier, Susan. 2005. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contempo¬ rary Japanese Animation. Rev. ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pellitteri, Marco. 2010. The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination—A European Perspective. Translated by Roberto Branca with Christie Lee Barber. Latina, Italy: Tunue. (Originally published as II drago e la saetta. Modelli, strategic e identitd dell’immaginario giapponese. Latina: Tunue, 2008.) Perper, Timothy, and Martha Comog. 2008. ‘“I Never Said I Was a Boy’: Utena, Arita Forland, and the (Non) Phallic Woman.” International Journal of Comic Art 10 (2): 328-53.

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Robbins, Trina. 2009. “Girls, Women, and Comics.” In Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics: Issues and Insights for Libraries. Edited by Martha Comog and Timothy Perper, 45-60. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Libraries Unlimited. Stang, Ivan. 1988. High Weirdness by Mail. New York: Fireside. Wichmann, Siegfried. 1999. Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art since 1858. Translated by Mary Whittall, James Ramsay, Helen Watanabe, Cornelius Cardew, and Susan Bruni. London: Thames and Hudson. Wong, Wendy Siuyi. 2006. “Globalizing Manga: From Japan to Hong Kong and Beyond.” Mechademia 1: 23-45.

PART I Art in Contexts

1 Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: Her Life and Manga KINKOITO

This chapter introduces the work and life of Chikae Ide, one of the leading women manga artists in Japan (see Figure l.l).1 Ide depicts the intricate web of everyday Japanese human relationships, emotions, and feelings, and her works provide insight into the reality of Japanese society and culture. Through Ide’s stories, we can understand Japanese men and women in history and in the contemporary world. Ide’s manga has been fascinating her fans for more than 40 years.2

INTRODUCTION Chikae Ide debuted in 1966 with a manga story in Ribon (Ribbon), a leading girls’ comic magazine. Since then, she has contributed volumes of comic stories to numerous weekly and monthly magazines for girls, men, and women. Her work has appeared in Ribon, BE LOVE, Shiikan manga TIMES (Weekly manga times). Mystery la comic, MAY, Mystery JOUR, Family Mys¬ tery, Sutekina shufutachi (Wonderful housewives), and Hontoniatta shufu no taiken (The real experiences of housewives), among other magazines and an¬ thologies. Many of her serial works have been compiled into numerous books called komikku (comic books). Her weekly stories include Rasetsu no ie (The house of demons), which ran for six years in Shiikan josei (Weekly women), and Onna kansatsui (A female medical examiner), which was serialized in Shiikan manga TIMES from 2004 to 2009. She has drawn close to 60,000 pages of comics. She has also drawn comics under different names, including

Art in Contexts

Figure 1.1. Chikae Ide in her studio. Photo taken by Kinko Ito, January 7, 2009. Photo by Kinko lto. Used with permission.

Michiru Yuki and Satoe Nomori, which she used when she changed her draw¬ ing style and genre. Her stories range from action/adventure, history, and suspense to romance and horror, depicting widely different human emotions: love and hatred, appre¬ ciation and resentment, happiness and jealousy, compassion and vengeance. Currently, Ide draws manga for comic magazines as well as for publishers who act as agents for Internet and cell-phone providers of digital manga. More than 150 of Ide’s works can be read via cell phone, including manga she drew years ago for weekly and monthly comic magazines, along with more re¬ cent manga drawn exclusively for the emerging cell-phone market. The newer comics include stories about the third Tokugawa Shogun Iemitsu (1604-1651) and the women in his harem; another Tokugawa story titled Oryo, the woman Ryoma Sakamoto loved3; and a story about a kidnapped 18-year-old girl and the life-changing experiences she endures. It is generally said that only the top 10 to 20 percent of manga artists can make a full-time living at their craft. Another 50 percent earn half as much as popular artists by working as assistants. The remaining manga artists have to

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics

5

find other jobs to supplement their income (Yamada 2004, 111). However, Ide believes that 10 to 20 percent is an overstatement (Ito 2010). According to her, far fewer manga artists can make living solely by drawing manga. Most girls’ and ladies’ comic magazines ask their readers to vote for the best and worst three stories in each issue. The publishers encourage readers to vote by offer¬ ing prizes such as brand-name handbags, wallets, scarves, digital cameras, gift certificates, or 10 kilograms of premium rice to randomly chosen respon¬ dents. Artists whose manga are voted most popular are then asked to create another story or series in the magazine, while unpopular artists’ contracts are terminated. These artists may find it necessary to become assistants to more popular and successful manga artists or get married (Ito 2010). Ide says. Debuting is relatively easy if you have abilities, but it is very difficult to keep creating comics for a long time. I always try my best to draw manga that are entertaining and touching. The fact that Ide has been producing manga for more than four decades in this competitive market testifies to her talent and popularity. Ide’s workday begins at 10:00 a.m., when she goes to her studio. She works until 1:00 p.m., when she breaks for lunch. She then works until 7:00 p.m. and has dinner at 8:00 p.m. She goes back to work again and finishes her day between 11:00 p.m. and midnight. Ide loves sports such as softball, tennis, swimming, ping-pong, and volleyball. She is an avid fan of American basket¬ ball and has been to Chicago to watch NBA games. She sometimes watches television or a DVD before going to sleep. She likes American television dra¬ mas such as Sex in the City and CSI. These shows are not only entertaining but help her with her drawing. Ide’s studio and living quarters are in a sleek three-story building in front of a train station. On the first floor is a residence that Ide shares with her son, and on the second floor, a studio for her assistants. There is a kitchen where they can prepare meals and a room where they can rest or stay overnight when they have to meet deadlines. The third floor has two studios—one for Ide and another for Kayono, her oldest daughter, who is a popular girls’ comic artist. Ide says that her assistants’ livelihood depends on her comics’ popularity, and as a general rule she accepts all job offers from publishers and tries her best to meet all their requirements. Ide says that she is happiest when creating an imaginary world on paper, whether she is drawing stories about the Shogun’s harem during the Tokugawa Period (1600-1867), the life of medical examiner Dr. Asuka Kamijo, the clin¬ ical cases of sex therapist Kyosuke Hikawa, or the nasty battles between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law. She is also elated when her editor ap¬ proves her storyboards without alterations. Ide says in the “Internet Diary” sec¬ tion of her Website, “I forget everything and focus on my work, which is right in front of me. I forget who I am and become the protagonist completely.”4 Ide

Art in Contexts

6

told me that she has great concentration. When she is drawing manga, she is so immersed in the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts that she is often touched and overcome with emotions herself. Tears well up in her eyes, and she cries as she draws. Ide truly loves and enjoys creating a special world in her comics. Ide lives in the Kansai region, where large metropolitan cities, including Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, are located. She says that it is possible to live any¬ where in Japan now and be a manga artist as long as the services of takkyubin (private overnight delivery companies) are available. She says, For example, when I want to send this manuscript today, I call the delivery service company. As long as they come here and pick it up by the evening, it will reach my editor in Tokyo by noon tomorrow. The service is very convenient and reliable. When push comes to shove, I can call a special delivery service company. They come to my studio on a motorcycle, take my manuscript to the Kansai International Airport, off the coast in Osaka, fly it to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, and then it will be delivered to my editor in just six hours. Thanks to technological developments, it is now possible to send manga man¬ uscripts electronically in the text format on a computer. However, Ide always sends her manuscripts via a delivery service because manuscripts on paper are much clearer and more beautiful than the ones sent electronically.

HER EARLY DAYS Chikae Ide was bom in Nagano Prefecture in central Japan, which hosted the 18th Winter Olympic Games in 1998. She was the youngest child in her family and has a brother and three sisters. Just like any other Japanese child, Ide started reading manga when very young (Ito 2004). In those days, there were a few girls’ magazines with comic stories revolving around similar “tear-jerker” patterns of mother-child relationships. Ide soon tired of the girls’ manga and started reading boys’ manga, which had heroes, adventures, and action as themes. She liked manga regardless of the genre as long as it was interesting. Ide says that she was very lucky to be bom in Japan where the culture and tradition of visual texts and comics have existed for a long time. The history of Japanese comics goes back to ancient times. Manga has been flourishing and thriving as an art, a visual form of conveying information, and a huge entertainment industry for the masses for more than a thousand years (Ito 2005). In such a country, Ide’s talents in creating visual narratives could find their full expression in a very positive climate. Ide started drawing pictures when she was five. Her brother had a pic¬ ture book of young Ushiwakamam, who later became Yoshitsune Minamoto (1159-1189), a legendary Japanese folk-hero and samurai whose brother Yoritomo founded the Shogunate in Kamakura in 1192. Ide tried to copy the picture of young Ushiwakamam every day. One day while she was drawing.

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics

7

her father stopped by and showed her how to draw the famous and popular hero figure. He did it so well and with such ease that young Ide was quite im¬ pressed with his talent—but felt jealous of it, too. She tried very hard to draw Ushiwakamaru just like her father did. Days went by, and in the process, she was awakened to the joy of drawing pictures. When she was in elementary school, Ide read Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, borrowed from her brother. It was her very first mystery novel. She needed to look up many words in the dictionary, but she truly enjoyed the story. Since then, Ide has read all of Christie’s works, which has helped her create many successful mystery manga series that have appeared in comic magazines such as Family Mystery, Mystery JOUR, and Mystery la comic. Seiichi Morimura, a very popular and well-known Japanese mystery novelist and Ide’s friend, gave her permanent permission to make storyboards and create dialogues from his works as she sees fit, and many of his stories have been made into Ide’s comics. Ide says, Regardless of genre, your comic story is more popular and liked when you add elements of a mystery full of suspense and an unexpected ending. It will be a page-turner. Another genre Ide loves is history. She enjoys reading historical novels, and some of her manga take place during Japanese feudalism. Ide read various manga when she was small, but she was not inspired to become a manga artist. Rather, she wanted to become a novelist, and she read almost all the books in her senior high school’s library; this became a foun¬ dation and knowledge base for her comic stories later on in her career. She wanted to go to a university, but her father convinced her to go to work and get married instead. Upon graduation from high school, she left home and obtained a job at Toshimaen, a big amusement park in Tokyo with various rides and several swimming pools. Ide worked in the publicity department; her work entailed reading newspaper and magazine articles and creating scrapbooks of informa¬ tion concerning amusement parks in Japan and around the world. This job helped her gain knowledge about the world in general. She finished her work at 5:00 p.m. every day and drew manga from 5:30 p.m. to midnight in her apartment. Ide kept taking her manuscripts to publishers in Tokyo, and in about six months she debuted in a monthly magazine.

IDE'S DEBUT IN GIRLS' COMICS Yakko no Shindobaddo (Yakko's Sindbad) Chikae Ide debuted in December 1966 with a 16-page manga titled Yakko no Shindobaddo (Yakko’s Sindbad), her first comic story. Yakko, the spirited and boyish protagonist, plays the role of Sindbad in a play on the day of the

8

Art in Contexts

school festival. On the same day, Yakko helps arrest a thief. Her schoolmates finally start to respect her, and Yakko begins to like herself and accept herself as she is. Yakko no Shindobaddo appeared in Ribon, published by Shueisha in Tokyo, one of the major publishers of books, magazines, and comics in Japan. Ribon and Nakayoshi (Good friends), published by Kodansha, both had their ini¬ tial issues in 1955. Until the 1960s, male artists drew most girls’ manga; few women artists were part of the profession. In 1963, two other weekly magazines began: Shojo furendo (Girls’ friend), published by Kodansha, and Magaretto (Margaret), published by Shueisha. Many women comic artists de¬ buted in these magazines as a result of demand for this newly created genre of manga called girls’ comics. Another magazine, Shojo komikku (Girls’ comic), was founded by Shogakukan in 1968. In these magazines, Masako Watanabe, Miyako Maki, and Hideko Mizuno provided heartwarming, sentimental manga stories that included fashion, fancifulness, beauty, elegance, and psychology. These artists laid the foundation for girls’ comics as a developing genre. When Japanese girls’ comics first emerged, many stories dealt with girls’ dreams and fantasies, and the attractive heroines and beautifully drawn pic¬ tures captivated Japanese girl readers. These stories focused on emotions and on the psychology of female protagonists and their development as human beings. Ide’s first manga readily fell in this category. The girls’ comic magazines mentioned above came with supplements such as stickers, cards, pencils, paper dolls, cards, and so on, that featured the artwork of popular women artists. Merchandise—notebooks, pens, writ¬ ing boards, pencil cases, and erasers—was also very popular among Japanese girls.5 In addition, these items added to the profits from the comic magazines and books just like today’s toys for boys based on manga action figures (Evers 2001; Gravett 2004; Ito 2008; Shimizu 1991; Yonezawa 2007). Ide says that she was at the right place at the right time when she debuted. Her drawing talents blossomed just as several girls’ weekly and monthly comic magazines began to thrive, and women manga artists were needed to keep up with the hectic production schedules. Publishers needed new talents quickly, and they were aggressive in their recruitment efforts. Even though female comic artists were not paid as much as male artists, the occupation became highly desirable for many girls and young women who were avid readers. Most Japanese manga artists are “independent and individually responsible for the conceptualization and completion of their work . . . [and] they retain not only creative control but also the rights to their work. They are rich and they are famous” (Schodt 1988, 138). Popular manga artists are millionaires, some of the richest people in Japan. By the early 1970s, women artists were the majority when it came to work¬ ing on girls’ comic titles. There are several hundred women comic artists today. Japan is unique in that women have been “able to cultivate comics into the country’s most empowering forum for female communication” (Gravett 2004, 74). Ide says, “If there had not been the manga boom when I debuted.

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies ’ Comics

9

I would have been just an ordinary woman. I am very glad and thankful that my dream to become a manga artist came true.”

Viva! Volleyball In October 1964 the Olympic Games were held in Tokyo, and the Japanese women’s volleyball team, nicknamed “The Witches of the East,” won a gold medal. Afterward, sportsmanship became a popular theme in girls’ comics, and volleyball was one of the star sports among girls along with gymnastics, swimming, skating, and tennis. Chikae Ide’s Viva! Volleyball appeared in Ribon from 1968 to 1971 (Figure 1.2). The protagonist was an eighth-grade student named Chie Hosokawa. She is a very good student and a member of her school’s volleyball team. However, she is hesitant and nervous and has a very difficult time with the very tough training program; she does not have high self-esteem. One day, Chie watches the All Japan Team practice, pouring out their “blood, sweat, and tears” to win a match, and it changes her life. Chie is now determined to become a better player, and she practices very hard. The story describes the teammates’ friendship and love, a junior team member’s accidental death, and Chie’s experiences studying abroad. Ide’s comics enthralled her readers with their thrilling story development.

Figure 1.2. From

Viva!

Volleyball

(originally appeared in the monthly magazine Ribon from 1968 to 1971). The protagonist, Chie, is drawn with long eyelashes, pencil-thin eyebrows, and eyes that take up half her face and are dotted with dots and sparkles— typical girls’ manga facial features and eyes in the 1960s and 1970s. Chie’s adolescent breasts are meticulously covered with a towel (Ide 2003a, 1:74). Copyright © Amagi, 2003. Used with permission.

Art in Contexts

10

Viva! Volleyball can be considered a classic masterpiece of the subgenre of Japanese comics called supokon manga (sports spirit manga). The themes of sports spirit manga include severe training, dogged perseverance, compe¬ titions, injuries, complications from social and psychological conflicts, and struggles such as team members falling in love with their coaches or trainers, sportsmanship, and winning the games. Viva! Volleyball also describes revo¬ lutionary volleyball techniques, international competitions, breathtaking tour¬ naments, and all-encompassing human emotions and feelings toward one’s friends, family members, or love interests as well as schoolgirls’ developing independence—all very important topics to the manga’s audience (Schodt 1988; Takeuchi, Yonezawa, and Yamada 2006; Yonezawa 2007).

Girls' Manga Eyes Many protagonists and other characters that appeared in girls’ comics in the late 1960s were drawn with huge eyes, which are considered one of the most distinctive styles in girls’ manga. It was not only the size of the eyes, which covered between one-third to one-half of a character’s face, but also “numer¬ ous stars, sparkles, and glittering dots” appeared in the eyes in addition to “enormous, dilated orbs of black pupils.” These eyes are derisively known as “girls’ manga eyes” (Shiokawa 1999, 101). I asked Ide why her early works included these unique girls’ manga eyes. She responded, “For the Japanese, big eyes are the symbols of beauty.” Furthermore, in Japan, people believe that the eyes reflect human emotions as much as verbal messages. The heroines of these girls’ comics were also drawn with distinctive facial features: “pencil-thin eye-brows, long, full eyelashes,” which, together with the huge eyes, are all supposed to “evoke gentleness and femininity” (Schodt 1988, 91). However, female protagonists in the late 1960s lacked marked sex¬ ual features, especially breasts, which were usually covered strategically by hands, clothes, or flowers. Blooming flowers such as roses, cherry blossoms, lilies, and daisies filled the background of the frames (Schodt 1988). Ide’s early comics followed these patterns of distinctive eyes and covering of overt sexual features.

IDE'S FAMILY LIFE Ide met her husband-to-be in a bullet train. He attracted her notice because he was veiy tall and handsome, and she readily admits that she liked his body. Ide says, “He had a beautiful, what do you call it, a beautiful body line.” She married him while in her 30s and had three children: a son and two daughters. While her children were small and needed attention, Ide reduced her manga workload, plus she occasionally did illustrations for books. Unfortunately, her marriage was not really happy because her husband was violent to her and their small children. She says.

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies ’ Comics

11

My marriage and family was a nightmare. My husband was in charge of our finances. He took all the money that I earned by working very hard. He spent a lot of money on his cars, he did not work at all, and he ran up debts. Ide still remembers days when they could not pay the gas bills. Her husband became angry with her editor one day and hit him, and so the editor’s publish¬ ing house boycotted her work for the next 20 years. Ide says about her mar¬ riage, “At least I had three children, and I feel happy about that.” Ide wanted a divorce, but it took ten years to settle matters with her husband. Ide’s nightmarish experiences of domestic violence are recreated in her la¬ dies’ comics: the anger, hatred, fear, resentment, and frustration that she felt toward her husband are manifested in the characters in her manga The house of demons. Ide had to pay off the huge debt that her ex-husband left her, and he still tried to get money from her even after the divorce. Ide says that her own life experiences help her draw ladies’ comic stories that are much more realistic and down-to-earth than those found in girls’ com¬ ics, which tend to be filled with fantasies, romances, boys’ love (BL comics— see chapters 6 and 7 in this volume), and interpersonal problems. She says, “You can use imagination to draw girls’ comics, but the readers of ladies’ comics are adult women and you must have experience in everyday matters.” Kayono, Ide’s oldest daughter, is today a popular girls’ manga artist whose works are sold in Japan and Europe, and Ide often helps her by suggesting ideas and giving her advice. Ide says that Kayono’s style is more modem and her personal sensitivities and talents are reflected in her works. Having recov¬ ered from her nightmarish marriage and difficult divorce, Ide now lives in har¬ mony and serenity with her grown children. She is very happy that she lives with her son and, moreover, that Kayono and her husband live near them. She is also pleased that her younger daughter recently obtained a job (Ide 2002).

LADIES' COMICS Ladies’ comics is a genre of Japanese comics specialized for young and adult women in Japan (Takeuchi, Yonezawa, and Yamada 2006). Note that the designation of adult does not necessarily mean pornographic, as it does in adult movies. In this context, the English word ladies is used simply as a synonym for women and does not mean a polite woman of high social status. In the early 1970s, a new genre of comics emerged that targeted junior high school girls and older girls. Shueisha, publisher of Ribon, started pub¬ lishing Shukan sebuntln (Weekly seventeen), Futabasha started the magazine Papiyon, and Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Production began Fani. These maga¬ zines disappeared without having major impact because the age range of the targeted readers was very narrow; in other words, their market was not a large enough critical mass to sustain publication. However, these magazines did play a role as stepping stones between girls’ comics and the 1980s emergence of ladies’ comics for adult women (Ito 2008).

12

Art in Contexts

Ide contributed to Shukan sebuntln under the name Michiru Yuki because she wanted to draw pictures of protagonists and other characters in styles different from Viva! Volleyball. For Shukan sebuntln, Ide mainly drew stories dealing with historical themes, including Roman women warriors and love between Alexander the Great and a princess, with settings in ancient Egypt and China. Japanese ladies’ comics emerged in the 1980s, when manga as a whole gained popularity and legitimacy as a medium of entertainment, and dur¬ ing this manga boom, the sales of comic magazines and books skyrocketed. Many new comic magazines were created because manga guaranteed huge profits. The 1980s was also the time of economic expansion in Japan when the “bubble economy” developed after the Plaza Accord of September 1985, which was “the international agreement to drive down the value of the dollar” (Wood 1992, 19). The 1980s became a spectacle of brazen new wealth as a re¬ sult of booming land prices and stock manipulation. Young Japanese working women became richer and more independent financially and psychologically. Their sexuality also became freer and more open, as well. In 1986 the publications VAL and Feel started, and many adult women who grew up reading comics welcomed these new magazines, which contained erotic and sexual scenes (Ito 2002). These early ladies’ comics were often misinterpreted by the mass media and general public as women’s pornogra¬ phy, but with the television dramatization of many of the ladies’ comic series in the last dozen years or so, this misunderstanding has been more or less eliminated. Ide drew manga for girls’ and teens’ comic magazines at the beginning of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s, married, raised three children, and returned as a ladies’ comic artist in the 1980s when the acceptance, legiti¬ macy, and popularity of ladies’ comics as entertainment were escalating. Ide was introduced to a new editor in charge of ladies’ comics, and she became quite successful drawing in this new genre. The time was right for her to take advantage of the emerging genre and start drawing again. Today, on average, she draws 300 to 400 pages each month. Ide is helped by several full-time and part-time assistants; at one point, she had 14 of them! In addition, about 15 years ago, she formed a production company now called Amagi. Consist¬ ing of Ide and her assistants, this company creates manga by a publisher’s order and submits it for publication (Figure 1.3). Only a very few ladies’ comic artists take the risk to form their own production companies, although this is fairly common among popular and rich male artists. Ladies’ comics are created and drawn by women artists; readers are young women and mature adults. Ladies’ comic categories include love and ro¬ mance, drama, horror, and sexually explicit materials comparable to soft pom. The majority of ladies’ comics deal with everyday social, emotional, and psy¬ chological issues that adult women encounter at home, at work, or in the com¬ munity. Ide says.

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics

13

Figure 1.3. Some of Ide’s assistants working in their studio. They are all women. Photo taken by Kinko Ito, January 7, 2009. Photo by Kinko Ito. Used with permission.

When ladies’ comics first emerged, only the erotic genre received attention, and ladies’ comics in general was called pornography. There had been erotic manga for men for a long time, but it was the first time that erotic manga for women were created. That is why it created a lot of commotion in the mass media. Soft pom manga comprises only a fraction of ladies’ comics today; it is defi¬ nitely not in the majority. The topics and themes of Ide’s manga vary widely, and she depicts scenes that entail nudity but are not pornographic. Her drawings of naked bodies are beauti¬ ful, and they appeal to her readers’ aesthetics and emotions. According to Ide, If there is a man and a woman in love, it is natural for them to feel amorous and make love. Love, romance, sex, and sometimes even violence (e.g., rape, domestic violence, etc.) are some of the subjects that adult readers expect, and they increase sales. When ladies’ comics first emerged, many stories featured a heroine who did not have a strong identity or sense of self as an independent individual. The

Art in Contexts

14

heroine did not respect herself and thought she was vulnerable as a person. She was not quite sure about the meaning of her life. However, eventually a Prince Charming would show up at her door and sweep her off her feet. The success of these comic stories depended on including marriage in the plot, especially hypergamy (marrying someone of higher status), and finding a handsome, cool, reliable, kind, sensitive, and loving man with a very good career, income, and job security. A heroine gains money, social status, a huge mansion with maids, and other benefits after she marries her prince. The hero¬ ine must remain beautiful, affectionate, and caring, because her husband is the reason for her existence, and she needs to love her handsome husband and lovely children always (Erino 1993). More recent ladies’ comic stories tend to be much more diverse. The hero¬ ines are no longer first and foremost young, single, and looking for a husband. They may be single, married, separated, single mothers, widows, and so on, and their ages vary. Many are bored housewives whose lives lack excitement, but others have jobs or careers that make a difference in society or even for hu¬ manity (Ito 2000, 2002, 2009). Recent themes cover a wide variety of topics, including the mother-in-law-daughter-in-law relationship, toxic neighbors, crimes committed by women, women’s health issues, and horror, to name a few. Ide’s ladies’ comic stories range from depicting the realistic everyday life of a housewife to more romantic and sensual stories as well as pragmatic case studies. Ide is especially known for her comics that deal with mother-inlaw-daughter-in-law relationships. With the TV dramatization of one of her comic stories, Rasetsu no ie, she became viewed as an expert on that particular relationship and has been interviewed about the subject on television and in women’s magazines.

Ide's Approach to Ladies' Comics Most of Ide’s recent stories deal with social and psychological issues and depict serious aspects of human nature and experiences in relationships. Ide says, I would like my readers to notice something important in their everyday life and realize the significance of the event. I’d like them to pay attention to things that they had not noticed or thought about before. Women tend to get too busy taking care of everyday matters and miss important things in their lives. I want them to experience love and touching emotions. Several of Ide’s Japanese publishers solicit real-life stories from readers. Ide and her editor discuss solicited stories before she turns them into comic stories. Ide also provides advice when her fans and readers share problems in their lives. She says.

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics

15

A woman already knows and understands what her position is and what her problems are, and what to do about them, but she needs some kind of reas¬ surance that what she is doing is appropriate. Her readers want to share their stories so they can be heard and supported emotionally. Ide says that for the readers who submit stories, writing about their experiences is therapeutic and provides psychological satisfaction. As Ito maintains, it is cathartic for both the writer and the readers to vicariously ex¬ perience another’s life (Ito 2009). A reader can also immerse herself in dreams unattainable in her real life: romance, luxury, or revenge against her live-in mother-in-law by reading comic stories. Ide says, “Japanese women like stories that include jealousy and revenge and the satisfaction that derives from taking revenge.” Japan is still very much a man’s paradise: men rule many aspects of social life. Women lack equal power, even though equal rights are guaranteed by the constitution. What Japanese women lack and want in their everyday lives may be found in the imaginary world of ladies’ comics. The experience of reading about imaginary others who have achieved what so many women find unattainable can be a satisfactory and empowering experience, however vicarious it is (Ito

2010). Ide tries her best to make her manga interesting. She says. The readers of ladies’ comics include housewives. For them, family budget¬ ing is very important, and they are always thinking about saving money. When it comes to money, they often need to decide what to purchase, food for the family or ladies’ comic magazines? The contents of comics must be worth the money that readers pay, which usu¬ ally ranges from $3.50 to $6.00. Ide says that the most important ingredients for successful ladies’ comics are: infidelity, sex, love, romance, money, jealousy, hatred, and revenge. Japa¬ nese women readers love reading ladies’ comics that include all of the above factors, but they still prefer a happy ending to the stories.

The House of Demons Rasetsu no ie is a significant work of Ide’s; it has become her legacy in the world of ladies’ comics (Figure 1.4). For six years starting in 1988, she serialized Rasetsu no ie in Shukan josei magazine, published by Shufu-toSeikatsusha in Tokyo. Shukan josei is not a comic magazine. It is a general magazine with articles about the Imperial Family, gossip about celebri¬ ties, tips on household chores such as cooking and cleaning, and readers’ opinions.

16

Art in Contexts

Figure 1.4. From The house of demons (originally appeared in Shukan josei, published by Shufu-to-Seikatsusha for six years starting in 1988). Ide uses a very dynamic layout for this page. Yoko accuses of her mother-in-law of being an abuser, a bully, who hurts oth¬ ers. Yoko thinks that the battle between her and her mother-in-law will last until one of them dies. Like many girls’ comic artists in the 1970s, Ide put Yoko and her mother-in-law in the center of the page and then drew the frames af¬ terward (Ide 2003b, 1:523). Copyright © Amagi, 2003. Used with permission.

Kojien dictionary lists the meaning of rasetsu as a demon that runs very fast, lures people with its super powers, and eats humans (Shinmura 1991, 2668). Rasetsu no ie depicts the hatred, resentment, anger, jealousy, and revenge between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law, issues faced uni¬ versally in this relationship that are often worsened in Japanese households with multigenerational family members living together (Benedict 1986 [1946]). In Rasetsu no ie, Yoko Togoshi, the protagonist, is an ordinary office worker, commonly called an OL (office lady). She is courted by an elite businessman, Takashi Ogura, and marries him even though she had reservations about his family, especially his mother, who had been abusing her own mother-in-law and Takashi’s unfriendly younger sister. Yoko’s marriage is a typical case of tama no koshi (hypergamy). Yoko marries into the purple, and she reaches the height of happiness. However, this is also the beginning of her nightmare with her in-laws, including her sister-in-law. Before Yoko marries Takashi, her mother warns her, “Everyone has a demon in his or her heart.” One day Yoko witnesses her own mother breaking the favorite comb of her grandmother, which had been her deceased husband’s first gift to her. On that day, Yoko’s mother did not hide from her daughter the hatred she felt against her mother-in-law. Yoko does not believe in demons,

Chikae Me, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics

17

but she eventually realizes how much wisdom her mother possessed about the daughter-in-law-mother-in-law relationship. Yoko and Takashi’s happy honeymoon days do not last long. Takashi is transferred to a branch office abroad and leaves Japan but does not take his wife with him. Yoko moves in with her parents-in-law at her husband’s re¬ quest. The mother-in-law bullies Yoko in every possible way and abuses her verbally, emotionally, and psychologically. She is definitely a mother-in-law from hell. Yoko begins to feel neurotic about her situation, yet she has to fight and take revenge in order to keep her sanity and protect her son until she finally wins at the end of the story. The plot includes suspense, mystery, voo¬ doo, murder/suicide, domestic violence, emotional abuse, abuse of elders, and so on, along with positive depictions of romance, maternal love, family cohe¬ sion, and trust. Ide’s story gives readers a sense of chilling horror. It shows that we all have demons inside us, yet her story also increases our awareness of our weaknesses and strengths, compassion, growth, and development as human beings. Rasetsu no ie was compiled into two volumes of manga with a total length of 1,500 pages. The series was made into a hit television drama that aired on TV Asahi networks from April to June 1998.

CONCLUSION Ide has been a very popular manga artist since her December 1966 debut in Ribon. She has drawn more than 60,000 pages of manga for Japanese weekly and monthly girls,’ men’s, and ladies’ comic magazines, and some of her works have been translated and sold in other Asian countries. Her drawing style has changed over the years. Her early works in girls’ comic magazines showed characters with huge eyes spotted with stars, dots, and orbs, which represented the standard of Japanese beauty and spoke of feelings and emo¬ tions loudly. These rather distorted figures with huge eyes and the body with long legs excited young readers. Nowadays, Ide draws for adult men and women, but her drawings are not of a pornographic nature. All her ladies’ comic stories include what she con¬ siders the essential ingredients for success in an appealing narrative: love, romance, sex, extramarital affairs, money, jealousy, hatred, and revenge. Ide would like her readers to experience catharsis as they read her comic stories. She also makes sure her stories are interesting and entertaining and include unexpected surprises, as well as happy endings, albeit, if they need to end unhappily, they end with the hope that the situation will get better. She makes sure that the course of events makes sense and the dialogue has esprit. Ide is very health conscious. She attributes the youthful deaths of many manga artists to bad habits that lead to chronic health problems: heavy smok¬ ing, lack of sleep, and lack of exercise. Ide takes vitamins and mineral supple¬ ments, purchases special kinds of water and energy drinks, exercises regularly

Art in Contexts

18

on a treadmill right next to her desk in her studio, goes swimming occasion¬ ally, and tries to sleep eight hours each night. Drawing comics is the major passion in her life. Ide says, “Drawing is a catharsis for me. If I don’t do it, I might go crazy.” Ide hopes to be drawing manga for many years to come. She wants to keep drawing interesting and entertaining manga, and create stories that adult women enjoy because the stories help them appreciate life. Ide always intends to provide her readers with manga from which her readers can learn or become aware of something that is very important in their lives, namely love and touching emotions.

NOTES 1. Generally the Japanese word manga means caricature, cartoon, comics, and comic strips as well as illustrations. The term, however, is most often used to refer to comic art and stdri manga (story comics) in the contemporary world. 2. The information on Chikae Ide’s life and works for this chapter comes from her Website (www.ide-chikae.net) and my interviews with her in her studio on December 17, 2007; January 7, 2009; and March 27, 2009, as well as numerous phone conversations and e-mails exchanged between us over the three-year period. 3. Ryoma Sakamoto was a low-ranking samurai who became a patriot and political leader at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He is one of the best-loved historical figures in Japan. 4. Entry of January 13, 2009, http://www.ide-chikae.net/diary/diary-f.html. 5. Editors’ note: Today, such objects are collector’s items among fans. A sample shojo vintage pencil case can be seen at http://kawaiijapan-kawaiijapan.blogspot.com/2009/04/ kawai i - vintge-j apan-manga-penci 1 -case.html.

REFERENCES Benedict, Ruth. (1946) 1986. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company. Erino, Miya. 1993. Redeiisu komikku no joseigaku [Gender studies through ladies’ com¬ ics], Tokyo: Kosaido Shuppan. Evers, Izumi. 2001. “Nakayoshi: Kodansha’s Classic Shojo Manga Magazine.” PULP 5 (9): 6-7. Gravett, Paul. 2004. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King Publishing. Ide, Chikae. 2002. Jitsuroku Rasetsu no ie [The documentary: The house of demons]. Tokyo: Kabushikikaisha Wani Books. Ide, Chikae. 2003a. Viva! Volleyball. 3 vols. Tokyo: Bunkasha. (Originally serialized in Ribon between 1968 and 1971.) Ide, Chikae. 2003b. Rasetsu no ie [The house of demons], 2 vols. Tokyo: Ohzora Shuppan. Ito, Kinko. 2000. “The Manga Culture in Japan.” Japan Studies Review 4: 1-16. Ito, Kinko. 2002. “The World of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: From Romantic Fantasy to Lustful Perversion.” International Journal of Comic Art 36 (1): 68-85. Ito, Kinko. 2004. “Growing up Japanese Reading Manga.” International Journal of Comic Art 6 (2): 392-403. Ito, Kinko. 2005. “A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society.” Journal of Popular Culture 38 (3): 456-75.

Chikae Ide, the Queen of Japanese Ladies’ Comics

19

Ito, Kinko. 2008. “Masako Watanabe: 50 Years of Making Girls’ and Ladies’ Comics in Japan.” International Journal of Comic Art 10 (2): 199-208. Ito, Kinko. 2009. “New Trends in the Production of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: Diversifica¬ tion and Catharsis.” Japan Studies Review 13: 111-30. Ito, Kinko. 2010. A Sociology of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: Images of the Life, Loves, and Sexual Fantasies of Adult Japanese Women. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Schodt, Frederick L. 1988. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Shimizu, Isao. 1991. Manga no rekishi [The history of manga], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Shinmura, Izuru. 1991. Kojien. 4th ed. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Shiokawa, Kanako. 1999. “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics.” In Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy. Edited by John A. Lent, 93-125. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Takeuchi, Osamu, Yoshihiko Yonezawa, and Tomoko Yamada. 2006. Gendai manga hakubutsukan 1945-2005 [The encyclopedia of contemporary manga 1945-2005]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Wood, Christopher. 1992. The Bubble Economy: Japan’s Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the ’80s and the Dramatic Bust of the ’90s. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Yamada, Masahiro. 2004. Kibo kakusa shakai [The hope disparity society]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Yonezawa, Yoshihiro. 2007. Sengo shojo manga no rekishi [The postwar history of girls’ comics]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo.

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2 Films on Paper: Cinematic Narrative in Gekiga DEBORAH SHAMOON

Fans of Japanese pop culture who live outside Japan often are exposed to anime before manga, as the exportation of anime has tended to precede trans¬ lation of manga. Informed fans, however, know that in Japan many popular anime television shows and movies are based on manga; that is, often the manga comes first. This seems to make economic sense: manga is cheaper and faster to produce than anime, so animation studios can wait to see if a story is popular before starting production. Yet while the ordering of “manga first, anime next” seems to have a kind of evolutionary logic (that is, still images come before moving pictures), in fact many narrative features of postwar manga derive from live-action cinema. Indeed, although manga and anime are easily seen as closely related in terms of both production and consumption, the relationship between manga and liveaction cinema is less well known. In this chapter, I discuss how one narrative technique moved from cinema to manga, as an example of cinematism in manga. My larger purpose is to suggest a different way of thinking about narrative in manga and the relationships between technologies of visual storytelling—to complicate the idea that manga is merely a low-tech form of anime. What does it mean to say that manga is inherently cinematic? When did manga artists begin to borrow cinematic techniques, and why? I describe a specific cinematic technique, the pillow shot, and how it developed in gekiga, a genre of manga for adults from the 1960s (Kinsella 2000,25-37). As primary examples, I use YoshihiroTatsumi’s 1970 short story “Tokyono ubasuteyama” (Abandon the Old in Tokyo, 2006) and the 1970-to-1976 series Kozure okami (Lone Wolf and Cub, 2000) by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. Both of these works use a cinematic method of storytelling that first appeared in the late 1950s and has since spread from gekiga to manga of all genres.

22

Art in Contexts

LOOKING AWAY: THE PILLOW SHOT IN CINEMA In order to understand how elements of visual storytelling were imported into manga from live action cinema, we must first take a brief detour through film studies. In film, one key feature of the narrative is editing, that is, juxta¬ posing shots in such a way as to create meaning. Much of mainstream cinema (in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere) follows the rules of continuity editing, meaning that shots are joined together to create a seamless narrative that can be easily understood by the viewer. Of course, the construction of visual narrative also relies on a number of other elements, and there are many mainstream films that break or bend the rules of continuity editing. However, since the cut between shots in film is one key site for borrowing narrative tech¬ niques used in creating transitions between panels in manga, the construction of continuity will be the main focus of this essay. Japanese manga critics have discussed how some editing and framing tech¬ niques from film have been borrowed by manga, including the close-up and shot-reverse-shot (Takahashi 2004, 117; Kumi 2008, 10). The pillow shot, however, has not been discussed in manga criticism. But before looking at manga, we must first understand how this technique functions in film. The pillow shot is usually associated with director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), al¬ though it has become a regular feature of Japanese films and animation of all kinds. The pillow shot refers to a moment in which the camera cuts away from the main action to a static view of scenery, such as buildings, trees, or objects within a room. It is distinct from the establishing shot because it does not always occur at the beginning of a scene; it is also distinct from the insert or cutaway shot because it does not necessarily contain significant diegetic information. For instance, rather than fixing the location of the action, a pil¬ low shot might depict generalized environmental details such as clouds, or multiple scenes around the same city. The purpose of the pillow shot is to set a mood rather than to establish the location of the action or move the plot for¬ ward. Also, it is not directly motivated by any of the actors on screen; that is, it is not an eye-line match to something a character is looking at. The term pillow shot was coined by film critic Noel Burch in reference to the makura kotoba or pillow word, a form of ornamentation in ancient Japanese poetry (1979, 161-75). Makura kotoba in poetry are set phrases that modify names of places or people. This device is one of the most ancient fea¬ tures of Japanese poetry, appearing in the Man ’yoshu (Collection often thou¬ sand leaves), a poetry collection compiled in the eighth century. The meanings of some of these set phrases have been lost over time, but usually there is some association with a visual or auditory image, for instance, “the mountaingirded Hatsuse,” or “the Kume clan, valiant in battle” (McCullough 1985, 83). This is similar to the epithet in Homeric poetry, such as “the wine-dark sea” or “Achilles of the flowing hair.”

Films on Paper

23

However, Burch’s interpretation of the pillow shot is somewhat problem¬ atic, for several reasons. First, as film scholar Scott Nygren argues, Burch misreads both the pillow shot and the pillow word as inherently meaningless. Nygren shows instead that pillow shots function as visual symbols: Many of Ozu’s so-called pillow shots, creatively misinterpreted by Burch as narratively empty in order to develop an analogy to the pillow word in Japanese verse, actually function in this way [i.e., symbolically]. Burch is not precisely wrong, since the formal analogy of Ozu’s visual technique to rhythmically repeating formulas in poetry is helpful, but he omits the ref¬ erential element present in both Ozu’s films and in the poetic technique. In general, abstraction and representation coexist in the Japanese arts, rather than moving categorically towards materialist realism or “pure” forms. (2007, 138-39) In other words, the pillow shot is not an unmotivated or meaningless orna¬ ment. According to Nygren, Ozu uses pillow shots to add symbolic depth to his films. Some of Ozu’s more famous pillow shots are views of the unlovely suburban Tokyo neighborhoods where his domestic dramas are set, including the shots of trains, laundry on the line, empty fields, or oil tanks, which under¬ score the drab, confined lives of the people who live there. Second, Burch’s analysis of Japanese film in general has been rightly criti¬ cized for being essentialist. As Japanese film scholar Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto ar¬ gues, Burch was primarily interested in using the example of Japanese cinema as the extreme Other to the West, specifically Hollywood cinema, and for that reason, he tends to make Orientalist generalizations (2000, 19-22). The term pillow shot itself is an example of this generalizing and essentializing ten¬ dency, in that he makes a direct connection between 20th-century film editing techniques and a poetic ornament that was already archaic when it was first written down in the eighth century. Film studies in general and Japanese film studies in particular have recently tended to shy away from formal analysis because it has led to the kinds of problems that arise in Burch’s work (Yoshi¬ moto 2000, 22). However, despite the significant problems with his work as a whole, in the pillow shot Burch identified an editing technique that appears often in Japanese film, and his term has stuck over time. I argue that it is pos¬ sible to use that term without reproducing the essentializing tendencies that characterize Burch’s approach to Japanese film. My use of the term pillow shot varies from Burch’s original definition. First, like Nygren, I see the pillow shot not as an empty sign but as contrib¬ uting significant symbolic meaning to the diegesis. Second, Burch was pri¬ marily interested in the pillow shot as one among many features of Japanese cinema that he saw as disrupting the conventions of continuity editing, but I do not see it that way. Because Burch viewed Japanese film as an alternative

24

Art in Contexts

to a Hollywood norm, his analysis operates on the plane of smooth continuity versus disruptive effects, such as the pillow shot. However, Japanese audi¬ ences accustomed to those effects would not necessarily see them as disrup¬ tive (Wada-Marciano 2008, 89). Because the pillow shot always incorporates elements of the scenery immediately surrounding the characters, the effect is of another layer of symbolic meaning, not a disruption. Pillow shots appear regularly in films of all genres in Japan, including anime, and usually contain some symbolic meaning. In jidaigeki (historical dramas), particularly chanbara (action featuring sword-fighting), the pillow shot often appears in moments of great emotional tension. It may seem coun¬ terintuitive to a Western audience to cut away from the main character’s face just as the scene is reaching a climax, but the pillow shot here serves to un¬ derscore the emotion of the moment. For instance, in Shurayukihime (Lady Snowblood [1973] 2004), when on a beach, the heroine Yuki confronts one of her enemies, Takemura Banzo [Japanese name order—Eds.], a pillow shot of the rolling waves is intercut with close-ups on the characters’ eyes. The rough sea mirrors Yuki’s roiling emotions and also foreshadows Banzo’s fate: in just a few moments, Yuki will kill him and throw his body into the ocean. This is a common pattern in chanbara scenes. Before a fight, the two samurai will face off with swords drawn, sizing each other up for many moments. When the ac¬ tion occurs, it is usually over in just a few seconds, with sword strokes that are almost too fast to see. Pillow shots draw out the drama by slowing the action, but they do not disrupt the continuity.

LOOKING AROUND: THE ASPECT-TO-ASPECT TRANSITION Although the pillow shot also occurs in manga, it has not been named as such. One analogous discussion is American cartoonist Scott McCloud’s description in Understanding Comics of transitions between panels (1994, 60-93). McCloud identifies six types of transitions, which he calls momentto-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-toaspect, and non sequitur (1994,70-74). All of these are different ways to show the progression of the action, except for aspect-to-aspect and non sequitur, the latter of which is reserved only for experimental, nonnarrative comics. McCloud defines the aspect-to-aspect transition as “a wandering eye on differ¬ ent aspects of a place, mood, or idea” (1994, 72) and says that it is “most often used to establish a mood or sense of place” (1994, 79). These panels show as¬ pects of the scenery to enhance emotion, very similar to the way a pillow shot functions in film, although McCloud does not use that term. In Understanding Comics, McCloud conducts a small survey of U.S. and European comics of diverse genres and finds that, for the most part, they do not use the aspectto-aspect transition (1994, 75-76). Unfortunately, McCloud falls into the same kind of Orientalist essentializing as Burch, and mistakenly attributes the aspect-to-aspect transition to a legacy from classical Japanese art (1994, 82).

Films on Paper

25

How can we discuss the aspectual transition without relying on mislead¬ ing generalizations? In an attempt to refine McCloud’s rather loosely defined transitions, linguist Neil Cohn creates his own categories based on the subject of a panel relative to the size of a human body, and finds that manga are more likely than U.S. comics to focus on a body part (Cohn 2010, 199). But in shifting his focus from the transitions between panels to the subjects of pan¬ els, and imposing a grammar on those panels, Cohn elides the pillow shot or aspectual transition with other close-ups even when they function differently (Cohn 2010, 197). Perhaps because the importance of the aspectual transition is more evident primarily in comparison to Western comics, Japanese critics have not discussed it much either. For instance, Fusanosuke Natsume and Inuhiko Yomota spend more time discussing the shape and content of the panels and how they guide the eye across the page than parsing the semiotic relation¬ ship of one panel to the next (Natsume 1995, 168-83; Yomota 1994, 37-38). Manga editor Kentaro Takeno points to a similar technique he calls taiihd (counterpoint) that he sees in the late 1960s work of gekiga artists Yoshiharu Tsuge and Shigeru Mizuki (1995, 210-15). Specifically, Takeno argues that repeated wordless panels showing the scenery add emotional symbolism to the story. Although the panels he uses as examples do not contain dialog or narration, all contain the two main characters and help to move the action for¬ ward. Because the panels relate to plot progression, Takeno’s theory of coun¬ terpoint is slightly different from the aspect-to-aspect transition. The missing link in all of these studies is the influence of cinema on manga, specifically, editing techniques common to cinema that were borrowed by manga artists. Manga scholar Akihiko Takahashi, who uses McCloud’s six transition types in his analysis, discusses the aspect-to-aspect transition that he sees in the horror manga of Kazuo Umezu (2004, 136-38). Unlike McCloud, Takahashi rightly cites all these transition types as deriving from cinema (2004, 105). However, Takahashi relies on the Japanese translation of Understanding Com¬ ics, which renders the word “aspect” as kyoku, or part, leading him to analyze the aspect-to-aspect transition as any frame showing only a part of the action, such as a close-up (2004, 115). My interpretation of this transition type is based on the definition of the word “aspect” not as “part” but as “view” or “scene,” that is, a static image of scenery, not a close-up on the action. In other words, the aspectual transition, like the pillow shot, has symbolic value but does not move the plot forward.

CINEMATIC NARRATIVE IN MANGA In Japanese language scholarship, the concept of eiga-teki shuho (cinematism) has been raised frequently but not necessarily in relation to narrative continuity. When Japanese scholars discuss cinematic style in manga, the art¬ ist most frequently mentioned is Osamu Tezuka (Yomota 1994, 14; YokotaMurakami 2006, 52). Tezuka is a towering figure in the history of manga

Art in Contexts

26

and made many important innovations in developing sustained narrative tech¬ niques. However, it is important to consider exactly what aspects of his work have been labeled cinematic or, more specifically, what elements of film he borrowed. Tezuka was fascinated with cinema, but as Yokota-Murakami points out, the dynamic scenes from his early work are significantly different from the way a movie camera records motion (2006, 52-57). Tezuka’s greatest influence from cinema, however, had little to do with visual narrative and everything to do with the film industry. Tezuka created his own imaginary studio system and fit all of his fictional characters into it (Power 2009, 66-88). From his very earliest work, and extending throughout his career, he used the same stock characters, casting them in different roles as if they were live actors (Power 2009, 72). The pillow shot or aspect-to-aspect transition does not appear at all in Tezuka’s early works such as Metropolis (1949). He only begins to use it later, in mature works of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Buddha (1974-1984), in direct reaction to the challenge he perceived from gekiga’s popularity (Power 2009, 131). More recent Japanese scholarship has contested the myth of Tezuka as the central figure in the history of manga and expanded the concept of cinematic narration (Ito 2005, 208-19). Yokota-Murakami attributes cinematic vision to panels that repeatedly show the same subject from various angles, distances, and points of view (2006, 61-72). Yokota-Murakami argues that it was only when artists such as Shotaro Ishinomori incorporated the “camera eye” or a cinematic point of view that manga developed as a more expressive medium (2006, 69-71). Although it may be impossible to tell who among the many manga artists experimenting with new visual styles was the first to borrow the pillow shot from cinema, it was likely not Tezuka.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GEKIGA The aspect-to-aspect transition seems to have first appeared in the 1950s in gekiga, a genre that borrowed visual narrative techniques from cinema to create a new kind of serious story for adults. Because the history of gekiga is not well known in the West, I will briefly review how the genre formed in the 1950s and 1960s to show how gekiga artists drew on cinema to create a new, more sophisticated manga genre. Although manga was popular with children as early as the 1920s and 1930s, the industry as it functions today only came into being around the 1950s, and it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that artists began to create more sophisticated stories for an older audience. At this time, as most people could not afford to buy books or magazines, manga were mainly distributed as kashibon or akabon (rental books) (Kinsella 2000, 50). Also in the 1950s, a significant part of children’s entertainment included kami shibai—literally, paper theater, a form of oral storytelling using painted picture panels—and

Films on Paper

27

many writers and artists produced both manga and kami shibai (Ingulsrud and Allen 2009, 45; Nash 2009). The gekiga genre was developed by a loosely organized group of teenage artists who were looking to publish serious stories told in a dramatic visual style borrowed from film noir. Two of these artists have published autobi¬ ographies in manga format, Yoshihiro Tatsumi in Gekiga hyoryu (A drifting life, 2009) and Tomohiko Matsumoto in Gekiga bakatachi!! (Gekiga fools, 2009). A common theme in both books is the importance of cinema for their creative process. For instance, Matsumoto shows himself and three other art¬ ists, including Tatsumi, going to see Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai (Seven samurai, 1954). After the movie, Takao Saito exclaims, “Now that’s manga! We have to use film techniques to make our work that exciting” (Matsumoto 2009, 16). In a recent interview, both Tatsumi and Matsumoto admit to having been avid moviegoers in the 1950s, and Matsumoto men¬ tions having been a fan of Ozu’s films in particular (“AX gekiga archives” 2008, 200). Matsumoto attributes their appropriation of film techniques to the editorial attitude at their first publisher, Hinomaru Bunko. Matsumoto writes, “Admir¬ ing cinema was their [the editors’] job. The roots of gekiga were nourished in no small part by cinema” (2009, 112). As for Tatsumi, he records discussions about films with his editors at Hinomaru Bunko and notes that he “incor¬ porated as many filmic techniques into his work as possible” (2009, 388). Tatsumi also reads and learns about visual storytelling techniques by read¬ ing Scenario, a magazine for aspiring screenwriters (2009, 189). In his ef¬ forts to come up with the name gekiga, some possibilities Tatsumi considers are katsudoga and katsuga (2009, 629), derived from the phrase katsudo eiga (literally, moving pictures, an early term for cinema), indicating how closely the new genre was tied to cinema—he wanted to evoke the image of films on paper. In 1959, Tatsumi formed the Gekiga Workshop with artists Susumu Yamamori, Fumiyasu Ishikawa, Masaaki Sato, Motomitsu K., Takao Saito, and Shoichi Sakurai (Tatsumi’s older brother). To promote the group, he wrote a “Gekiga Manifesto” and mailed it to publishers and artists (2009, 730). The Gekiga Manifesto reads in part: [S]tory manga has been vitalized through the influence exerted by the su¬ personic development of other media such as film, television, and radio. . .. Manga and gekiga differ in methodology, but perhaps more importantly, in their readerships. The demand for manga, written for adolescents, i.e., those readers between childhood and adulthood, has never been answered, because there has never been a forum for such works. This hitherto ne¬ glected reader segment is gekiga’s intended target. It was, in fact, the rental book market that contributed significantly to the development of gekiga. (2009, 852)

28

Art in Contexts

As Tatsumi explains in the manifesto, the two major components of the new genre were a teenage demographic, that is, sophisticated stories intended to appeal to teen readers, and a complex visual style influenced by other media, particularly fdm. Tatsumi ends Gekiga hyoryii with a comment on the political mood of the 1960s, which was marked by increasing social unrest and violence. On witnessing a student demonstration, he says, “It’s an incredible force fueled by anger! That’s the element that gekiga has forgotten ... anger!” (2009, 827, ellipses in original). Social protest was the third element of gekiga that finally propelled the new genre to prominence among young people in the 1960s. Through the 1960s, gekiga was closely tied to the student protest move¬ ment. Many gekiga had explicitly political content, such as Kamuiden (The legend of Kamui, 1964-1971) by Sanpei Shirato, a former kami shibai artist. Since gekiga was aimed at teens and adults, many of the stories were quite violent and sexual. In a recent interview, Tatsumi expressed frustration at the association of gekiga with sex and violence, and argued instead that he was more interested in portraying everyday life. He also reflected on the underly¬ ing meaning of the word, pointing out that the first character of the compound, geki, can also mean theater: [I]t’s theatrical, it’s about setting scenes up and structurally moving from frame to frame so that there’s a relation between the very first frame and the very last frame. It’s like a screenplay. I’ve been influenced by film. That’s one thing that I’m sure I do well, pacing stories. (Cha 2009) As Tatsumi mentions, the term gekiga now is used rather loosely to describe manga of any genre that is violent or shocking, and the term manga no longer implies comics written only for children. However, at its peak in the 1960s, gekiga was a key part of the development of manga as a medium, not only because of the push to reach older readers but also because artists used cin¬ ematic techniques to create a more sophisticated visual style. From the start, cinematism was a key part of gekiga.

THE ASPECT-TO-ASPECTTRANSITION IN GEKIGA The aspect-to-aspect transition was one of the cinematic techniques devel¬ oped by gekiga artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This technique ap¬ pears in the kashibon anthologies Machi (Town) and Kage (Shadow) where gekiga developed in that period. Both titles featured short stories, mostly crime fiction, by members of the Gekiga Workshop. Although it may be impossible to determine who used this technique first, the aspect-to-aspect transition ap¬ pears frequently as early as the mid-1950s. Tatsumi’s early kashibon Kurofubuki (1956), recently translated as Black Blizzard, has several examples of the aspect-to-aspect transition in panels that show only the blowing snow in order to enhance the mood (2010, 111, 113).

Films on Paper

29

Examples by other artists include “Shoko” (Proof) by Tomohiko Matsumoto (Machi 1959), in scenes of a plane wreck featuring several panels that show only the setting unrelated to the action, such as panels of birds flying and pine branches (1959, 23), and repeated views of the sun through the trees (1959, 20, 22). In another story in the same volume, “Ujimushi yard” (Low-down no good rat) by Teppei Hayano, several panels are inserted into the action that show the cityscape, for instance, a panel of a train rushing past followed by a panel of the main character walking in silhouette (1959, 123). A third story, “Arashi no kyotan” (Storm of stray bullets) by Kei Horiuchi, shows the protagonist run¬ ning down the street in the rain, with a single panel inserted in the middle of the page that shows only the rain falling on the pavement (1959, 175). In the Janu¬ ary 1961 issue of Kage, the lead story by Susumu Yamamori, as well as three interlinked short stories “Taikutsu na yoru” (A dull evening) by Motomitsu K., all feature aspectual transitions on the opening page. For instance, the second of Motomitsu K.’s stories begins with a panel showing the outside of a hotel, then a view of the city from a window in the hotel, and finally a hand holding a cigarette (1961, 149). In all these examples, the panel does not add any new information about the setting or plot but functions to enhance the rhythm and mood of the page. The aspectual transition is well-suited to crime fiction of the sort published in Machi and Kage, which was heavily influenced by film noir. But its ex¬ pressive possibilities are limitless, and it quickly spread to other genres. For instance, it appears in the 1960s kashibon anthology Gakuen (Schoolhouse), also published by Tatsumi, which was marketed to girls and features mostly romance stories. The short story “Koke no uchi” (House of moss) by Sachiko Obara (Gakuen 1967) is a romantic ghost story. Like “Taikutsu na yoru,” “Koke no uchi” begins with an establishing shot and then features several panels showing different aspects of the setting, in this case, Hokuriku Dam (1967, 37). Fitting with the ghostly theme, panels showing only the moon are interspersed throughout the action (1967, 68, 76) as well as a close up of a bird on a branch (1967, 46). By the late 1960s, the aspectual transition had become a standard feature not only of gekiga but also of any story that favors mood and emotion.

"Abandon the Old in Tokyo" Although the above examples demonstrate how early in the history of gekiga the aspectual transition appeared, it is hard to get a sense of how the device functions through piecemeal examples. Tatsumi’s short story “Aban¬ don the Old in Tokyo” shows how the aspect-to-aspect transition contributes to the mood and rhythm of the story as a whole. “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” projects the modern problem of caring for aged parents onto the folk tale “Ubasuteyama” (Granny-abandoning-mountain), which refers to the practice of leaving old people to die on a mountainside during times of famine (Cornell

30

Figure 2.1. Aspectual transitions or pillow shots in “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” enhance the mood of urban alienation (Tatsumi 2006, 43). Artwork © Yoshihird Tatsumi. Used with permission by Drawn & Quarterly.

Art in Contexts

°.!GN (THIRD PANEL' •• VCUR SECOND MC.v.E. cpaCIOUS VACATION HO.V,£ V {,000,000 - V 11,000,OOC- XXX PROPERTY

1991, 71-87). In Tatsumi’s story, a young man, Nakamura, attempts to move his bedridden mother into a separate apartment to hide the squalor of her ex¬ istence from his girlfriend. But just as he regrets abandoning his mother, he returns to find that she has committed suicide. The aspect-to-aspect transition appears frequently in panels showing views of the neighborhood, which are not motivated by the forward momentum of the plot. For instance, when Nakamura goes to work, there is an entire page of pan¬ els showing the crowds on the train and in the street (Figure 2.1) (Tatsumi 2006, 43). In the middle two panels, Nakamura, shown as a tiny face in the crowd, notices a sign for luxury vacation homes, presumably giving him the idea to move his mother into a second apartment. But the panels before and after these two on the same page do not feature Nakamura at all, only the hordes of commuters in the train station and on the street, a faceless mob that emphasizes the impersonality and alienation of life in the city. On the fol¬ lowing pages, Nakamura goes to work as a garbage man, an occupation that also underscores the larger theme of the story, as his coworkers complain that people are quick to toss out anything old (2006, 45). On the last page of this scene are several panels showing Nakamura and his coworkers driving away from the dump. However, alongside the action is a long vertical panel that gives a dramatic view of the junk left behind in the dump (Figure 2.2)

Films on Paper

31

Figure 2.2. Aspectual transition in the long right-hand panel emphasizes the theme of abandonment in “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” (Tatsumi 2006, 46). Artwork © Yoshihird Tatsumi. Used with SIGN.- LANDFILL

permission by Drawn & Quarterly.

(2006, 46). This panel does not move the plot forward and is not motivated by an eye-line match or any action by the characters. Instead, it shows an aspect of the landscape that emphasizes outrage and regret over the throw¬ away mentality of modem society. At other times, there are small panels that show close-ups of objects near the main characters, such as a bowl of rice (2006, 52) or a cigarette (2006, 53). These panels provide some specificity and detail to the story, while also breaking away from what could become the monotony of a series of talking heads in a story without much action. These kinds of aspect-to-aspect transitions provide visual variety and draw the reader into the story with images of familiar objects.

Lone Wolf and Cub The aspect-to-aspect transition, like the pillow shot in fdm, is not limited to domestic dramas but also appears frequently in action comics, particularly jidaigeki, or historical dramas. One example of a jidaigeki series that uses the aspectual transition often is Lone Wolf and Cub, written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Goseki Kojima, originally serialized from 1970 to 1976 in Weekly Manga Action. This very popular, long-running series is made up of loosely connected short stories about a ronin assassin,1 Ogami Itto (Japanese

32

Art in Contexts

name order), who is responsible for caring for his infant son, Daigoro, as he seeks revenge for his wife’s murder. Kojima, a contemporary of Tezuka, got his start as a painter for kami shibai in the 1950s and then transitioned into the kashibon market and the gekiga genre. His artistic style for Lone Wolf and Cub suggests classical scroll paintings in his expressive brushwork. However, the pacing and transitions are clearly drawn from jidaigeki film, not from classical art. Kojima uses the aspect-to-aspect transition frequently, to achieve effects ranging from overt symbolism to more subtle, lyrical expressions. For ex¬ ample, the aspect-to-aspect transition appears repeatedly in the story “Wait¬ ing for the Rains,” to create a visual rhyme. In this story, Ogami visits a sick woman at a remote temple with the intention of killing her fugitive lover when the lover comes to see her. Her lover, who has been gone for two years, promised to return with the autumn rains. For this reason, there are numerous panels showing the autumn maple leaves throughout the story. The first panel showing the maple leaves is motivated by the plot: the nun who is caring for the sick woman comments on the beauty of the maple leaves, and opens a sliding door to allow the woman to see them (2000, 165). First we see the nun opening the doors, then a panel of the leaves viewed through the open doors. But the next two panels on the same page show the leaves again, from differ¬ ent perspectives not motivated by eye-line matches with any of the characters. As the story progresses, more panels showing only leaves appear in aspectual transitions (2000, 166, 170, 172). Through the repeated use of this image in the aspect-to-aspect transition, the leaves become a symbol of the woman’s pathetic, futile love throughout the story. The image of leaves returns at a pivotal moment with added meaning and emphasis in an action scene when the returning lover faces off in a duel with Ogami. As the two men prepare to fight, most of the page shows close-ups of them taking their stances and rushing at each other. However, a thin verti¬ cal panel to the right shows nothing but leaves in the rain (2000, 176). This aspect-to-aspect transition during their duel does not give a sense of a wander¬ ing eye taking in the calm landscape, as it had earlier in the story, but rather heightens the pathos of the moment. By this point, the image of the leaves has been fixed as a symbol of futile love, and it returns as a leitmotif just before the fugitive lover’s death. In this regard, the aspect-to-aspect transition func¬ tions as a kind of visual poetry. Although this example of the aspect-to-aspect transition relates to one of Ogami’s victims, in the majority of the series, the technique is used far more often in relation to Ogami himself. Often the aspect-to-aspect transitions show scenes of landscape when Ogami faces off against an enemy. Sometimes small panels depict a dead tree or windswept leaves (2000, 88, 117), but often there is a crow or flock of crows flying (2000, 117, 144, 228, 264). For instance, when Ogami challenges the head of the Yagyu clan, his main antagonists, there is a long, horizontal panel showing the black silhouettes of several stone stu-

Films on Paper

33

pas surrounded by a flock of crows in the distance (2000, 290-91). It is a stark, dramatic image that contrasts sharply with the dense rendering of the other panels and cuts the double-page spread completely in half. Why stop the action so completely at this climactic moment? As in the example from the film Lady Snowblood, it is common in jidaigeki films to slow the action with pillow shots during duels in order to lengthen what would otherwise be a very quick fight and to increase the sense of drama. In this case, the crows are a leitmotif associated with Ogami, symbolizing the carnage that inevitably follows him and the bleak hopelessness of his position as a ronin. Kojima’s use of aspect-to-aspect transitions frequently goes beyond the di¬ rect symbolism of the crow or the maple leaves. Unlike most shonen and shojo manga but typical of gekiga, Lone Wolf and Cub is drawn in a very realistic style. In particular, the characters do not have the exaggerated eyes typical of most manga, which use the large eyes as a way to draw the reader into the story and help the reader identify with the characters. In such cases, the main character usually has the largest eyes (Yomota 1994, 168). Here, however, the inducement is not to identify with Ogami but to admire him from a distance. Like the samurai in jidaigeki film, he remains stoic and aloof. As a result, his face is not particularly expressive. The panel of crows appearing in the middle of Ogami’s duel serves as a replacement for the emotion that he does not show on his face, heightening the drama and pathos by looking away, rather than looking into his eyes. The kind of aspectual transition to create a visual rhyme or leitmotif seen in Lone Wolf and Cub occurs in other manga genres, as well. Often, the ob¬ ject viewed is part of the natural scenery, especially in historical dramas, and sometimes drawn from motifs common in classical Japanese art (maple leaves, cherry blossoms, and so on). However, it would be a mistake to assume that the aspectual transition derives from classical art. The direct antecedent for these images is cinema.

FILMS ON PAPER The aspect-to-aspect transition is one of the more powerful expressive techniques employed by manga artists. More than passive visual symbols, these panels can encourage reader identification with the characters, heighten drama or emotion, and profoundly affect the pacing, slowing the story to draw out and thus emphasize emotional or dramatic moments. However, the adop¬ tion of the pillow shot effect by manga from cinema has broader implica¬ tions as well. Consideration of the history of manga in general, and gekiga in particular, suggests that the comic book as a medium is inherently cinematic. Although there are premodem examples of using text and image together to tell a story in Japan (such as emaki, or picture scrolls), and McCloud points to other examples from Western art, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Hogarth en¬ gravings (1994, 15-16), there is clearly something different about the division

34

Art in Contexts

of the page into panels and the pacing of the narrative across multiple panels as occurs in comics. Comics in their current form did not appear in Japan or the West until the 20th century. Groensteen writes, “[Cjomics and cinema owe their late birth—relative to literature—to technological evolutions, that is to say, for comics, the invention of lithography” (2007, 8). While it is true that modem printing techniques allowed for comics to be published in newspapers and magazines, I would argue even further that the technology of film is what fundamentally changed the way we conceive of visual narrative and made modem comics possible. The mechanical reproduction of images, particularly the still and motionpicture camera, had a profound impact on the way we view the world. While it is often taken as a truism that the camera changed art of all kinds as well as the way we think about human vision, Jonathan Crary goes even further and argues that fundamental shifts in the way we think about vision occurred before the camera was invented, and in some ways, made that invention pos¬ sible. Crary writes. What takes place from around 1810 to 1840 is an uprooting of vision from stable and fixed relations. ... In a sense, what occurs is a new valuation of visual experience: it is given an unprecedented mobility and exchangeabil¬ ity, abstracted from any founding site or referent. (1992, 14) In other words, the break with classical art is inextricably related not only to new technology but also to new social roles, which create the ability to make meaning from unrelated visual images. Further, writing on the phenomenol¬ ogy of cinema, Vivian Sobchack writes, A film’s continuous and autonomous visual production and meaningful or¬ ganization of its visible images testifies ... to an anonymous, mobile, em¬ bodied, and ethically invested subject of worldly space. (1992, 62) Although Sobchack here is specifically contrasting film to photography, her contention about the sophistication needed to interpret the moving picture image is in part also true for comics because comics are sequential. Sobchack and Crary write within a Western cultural context, but the point is true for Japan as well: making sense of the codes of visual narration is directly re¬ lated to the prevalence of cinematography in the modem world. Even though the materials necessary to create comics are low-tech in the extreme (ink on paper), the sophisticated visual code of comics presupposes thorough famil¬ iarity with not just the visual conventions of cinema but also with the modes of thought and perception that Crary and Sobchack describe. Comics as a medium today would not exist without the editing and fram¬ ing conventions of film. Although a few Japanese critics, such as Akihiko Takahashi, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, and Inuhiko Yomota, have written on

Films on Paper

35

manga’s cinematic qualities, there is still far more to be examined in the rela¬ tionship between film and manga, and at a more fundamental level.

NOTES A version of this chapter was presented at the Society for Film and Media Studies Con¬ ference, March 2010. Thanks to the participants for their helpful comments. Thanks also to students in my spring 2007 course on Japanese pop culture at the University of Notre Dame, particularly John Cappa for his insights on Lone Wolf and Cub. Archival research on gekiga was conducted at the International Manga Museum in Kyoto. I am grateful to the staff there for their patience and generosity, particularly Yu ltd and Tomoko Watanabe. 1. Editors’ note: Ronin is a term from the feudal period of Japan, 1185-1868. A rdnin was a samurai without a master, typically due to the master’s defeat, and therefore at loose ends and stigmatized. Options for such individuals varied and were sometimes seriously limited.

REFERENCES “AX gekiga archives: Tatsumi Yoshihiro x Matsumoto Tomohiko.” Interview. 2008. AX 61 (February 29): 193-212. Burch, Noel. 1979. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cha, Kai-Ming. 2009. “Tatsumi Talks about A Drifting Life.” Publishers Weekly (May 18). Available at: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6659171 .html. Cohn, Neil. 2010. “Japanese Visual Language: The Structure of Manga.” In Manga: An An¬ thology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Edited by Toni Johnson-Woods, 187-203. New York: Continuum. Cornell, Laurel L. 1991. “The Deaths of Old Women: Folklore and Differential Mortality in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” In Recreating Japanese Women, 1600 1945. Edited by Gail Lee Bernstein, 71-87. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nine¬ teenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gakuen [Schoolhouse], 1967. Vol. 16. Tokyo: Daiichi Production.

Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ingulsrud, John E., and Kate Allen. 2009. Reading Japan Cool: Patterns of Manga Literacy and Discourse. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, ltd, Go. 2005. Tezuka izu deddo: Hirakareta manga hyogenron e [Tezuka is dead: Postmod¬ ernist and modernist approaches to Japanese manga]. Tokyo: NTT Shuppan. Kage [Shadow], 1961. Osaka: Hinomaru Bunko.

Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese So¬ ciety. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Koike, Kazuo, and Goseki Kojima. 2000. Lone Wolf and Cub [Kozure okami], Vol. 1. Translated by Dana Lewis. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Kumi, Kaoru. 2008. Miyazaki Hayao no jidai [The age of Hayao Miyazaki]. Tokyo:

Choeisha. Lady Snowblood [Shurayukihime]. (1973) 2004. DVD. Wilmington, NC: AnimEigo. Machi [Town], 1959. Vol. 3. Osaka: Central Publishing.

Art in Contexts

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Matsumoto, Tomohiko. 2009. Gekiga bakatachi!! [Gekiga fools]. Tokyo: Seirin Kogeisha. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Paperbacks. McCullough, Helen Craig. 1985. Brocade by Night: Kokin Wakashu and the Court Style in Classical Japanese Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nash, Eric P. 2009. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. New York: Abrams ComicArts. Natsume, Fusanosuke. 1995. Manga noyomikata [How to read comics]. Tokyo: Takarajima. Nygren, Scott. 2007. Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. Min¬ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Power, Natsu Onoda. 2009. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Takahashi, Akihiko. 2004. “Umezu Kazuo no komawari riron” [Theory of Kazuo Umezu’s panel distribution]. Kanazawa Bijutsu Kogei Daigaku kiyo [Bulletin of the Kanazawa College of Art] 48: 100-51. Takeno, Kentaro. 1995. “Fukei to dorama no taiiho” [Counterpoint of scenery and drama]. In Manga no yomikata [How to read comics]. Edited by Fusanosuke Natsume, 210-15. Tokyo: Takarajima. Tatsumi, Yoshihird 2006. “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” [Tokyo no ubasuteyama]. In Aban¬ don the Old in Tokyo. Translated by Oniki Yuji, 37-67. New York: Drawn and Quarterly. Tatsumi, Yoshihird 2009. A Drifting Life [Gekiga horyu]. Translated by Taro Nettleton. New York: Drawn and Quarterly. Tatsumi, Yoshihird 2010. Black Blizzard [Kurofubuki]. Translated by Akemi Wegmiiller. New York: Drawn and Quarterly. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. 2008. Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki. 2006. Manga yokubosuru [Manga desires]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Yomota, Inuhiko. 1994. Manga genron [Principles of comics theory], Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. 2000. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

3

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan WILLIAM L. BENZON

On August, 15, 1945, the Empire of Japan came to an end. It was on that day that the Japanese people heard a radio broadcast in which Emperor Hirohito read the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, announcing Japan’s surrender. As an abstract entity, the Empire was at an end. Yes, the land was still there, the people, too, and the infrastructure of an advanced civilization, though much was in shambles. But certain symbolic and social bonds that had held Japan together as a single sociocultural entity—those bonds were sun¬ dered: for example, the Imperial rhetoric that the Emperor’s lineage went back in time to the mythological origins of the Japanese islands (Benzon 2010). Even for someone such as Osamu Tezuka, who was not a partisan of the mili¬ tarist regime that had ruled Japan, Japan’s surrender and all it implied must have engendered a profound existential problem. What was to come next? As Frederik Schodt notes: With the end of the war, new difficulties appeared. Tezuka also witnessed starvation among a once proud people, and during the wild, unstructured early days of the occupation, he suffered the humiliation and anger of being beaten by a group of drunken American GIs who could not understand his broken English. It was a brutal and direct experience in cultural misun¬ derstanding that he never forgot. Like all young Japanese of his age, he had also seen how an authoritarian government—his own—had been able to manipulate information and public opinion, and how, after the war, the entire value system of the country was overturned and replaced by a new democratic ideology. It was horrifying, he later said, to realize that “the world could turn 180 degrees, and that the government could switch the

Art in Contexts

38

concept of reality,” so that what had been “black” or “white” only days before was suddenly reversed. (2007, 29-30) How did Tezuka allow the old, Imperial Japan to die in his mind so that he could create a new Japan to replace it? How did he restore a sense of order and meaning to the world? I certainly do not have a general answer to those questions. It seems to me, however, that the process would have been comparable in scope and magnitude to mourning the death, for example, of one’s parents. As such, it would have been a process that involved Tezuka’s whole psyche. This process was certainly emotional, grieving for the old Japan, but it would also have been intellectual. Imagine a conceptual system as a vast network of interconnected concepts; think of a large roadmap where each city, town, and junction is a concept and the roads are relations between concepts. For the Japanese of Tezuka’s day, “Imperial Japan” would have been a sub-network within that larger network, one not only with connections to an extensive range of related concepts about Japan but also about humans and families, about animals and artificial things, and about the kinds of actions and agency appropriate to each. Now, remove Imperial Japan from the network. What happens? What happens is that the network has a lot of dangling connections. As an analogy, recall what happened to world-wide air travel when New York City airports shut down in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. Those connections have to be repaired or replaced. That reconnect¬ ing and replacing is, at least in part, what Tezuka was doing, one wave after another, in his early so-called science fiction trilogy: Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld. Tezuka was using his fiction as a means of working through that process so as to arrive at the beginnings of a new—and nonimperial— conception of Japan, its place in the world, and the place of individual Japa¬ nese people in this emerging Japan.

STORIES AS EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING Before making this argument, I want to clarify just what I am arguing. And to do that I must first state what I’m not doing. I’m not arguing that the death and re-creation of Japan is something that is somehow hidden in these Tezuka texts below the surface, as we often say, perhaps without even thinking about what such language might mean. What surface? The page? How can mean¬ ing hide under there? Somewhere between the recto and the verso? There’s not much room there. “No,” you say, “it’s a metaphor, a way of speaking.” A metaphor for just what, exactly? That is. I’m not arguing that these science fiction stories about boys and de¬ tectives and radiation and robots and all that stuff—that these stories are really about something else. They’re not. They’re about just what they appear to be about. But those appearances can be put to both cognitive and emotional use.

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

39

Consider the position that Kenneth Burke articulated in his essay, “Litera¬ ture as Equipment for Living.” Using words and phrases from several defini¬ tions of the term strategy (the phrases quoted in the following passage), he asserts that surely, the most highly alembicated1 and sophisticated work of art. . . could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” (1973, 298) Further, to the extent that these stories are shared, members of a society can articulate their desires and feelings to one another, thereby making themselves mutually at home in the world. I am thus arguing that in these three manga, Tezuka provided his read¬ ers with templates for making conceptual and emotional sense of their ut¬ terly changed world. Obviously, other people from different times and places are going to bring different concerns and interests to these texts. They aren’t going to “find” the concerns of postwar Japanese “hidden” in these texts. They will use the texts to cope with their own lives. My task, then, is to demonstrate that these stories contain material suited to the difficult and deeply conflicted tasks of grieving for a lost Japan and creat¬ ing a new one. First I will consider how Japan is explicitly figured in each manga, thereby establishing that, in some obvious way, Japan really is in play in these manga. Then I will consider the use of primordial imagery, artificial creatures, radiation, and so forth, concluding with a look to the future through a few remarks about Astro Boy.

GEOPOLITICS: WHAT IS JAPAN? The first of the science fiction trilogy to be published, Lost World (1948; English translation, Tezuka 2003a), is set on two planets: earth and Mamango, a twin of earth that comes near earth every five million years. The geographi¬ cal location of the earth-bound events is not clear; no locations are named, no cities, no countries. A Japanese audience would locate these events in Japan by default, and some of the characters have Japanese names, such as Kenichi Shikishima, one of the central figures in the story. When the story ends, two people, a man, Shikishima, and a woman, Ayame, remain on Mamango and will create a new race of human beings of Japanese descent, but the land will not be in Japan. The second one published, Metropolis (1949; English translation, Tezuka 2003b), is mostly set in some large city named Metropolis, which is explic¬ itly not in Japan. However, two of the central characters. Detective Mustachio and his nephew Kenichi, are identified as being from Japan and thus

Art in Contexts

40

being Japanese: Mustachio announces himself as being from Japan (2003b 46, cf. 53). Japan is now explicitly identified in the story; it is a named place that is differentiated from other named places such as Metropolis and Long Boot Island. But Japan is not a site of action that is significant to the story. The last of the three, Nextworld (1951; English translation, Tezuka 2003c), is set in locations all over the world. Much of it takes place in the capitalist Nation of Star (obviously representing the United States) and the socialist Federation of Uran (representing the Soviet Union). But the story begins in Japan, has episodes there, and ends in Japan. In one plotline, the earth is being threatened by a large approaching mass of gas from outer space. Once this phenomenon is perceived and categorized as an earth-wide threat, there is a segment where the heads of Star and Uran say, “Let’s escape to Japan” (2003c, 2:99). Japan is an explicit destination for the most powerful politicians on earth. Not only that, but Tezuka presents Japan with Japan-specific cultural features, such as a chanting priest (2003c, 1:90, 2:109, 119), a sumo wrestler (2003c, 1:94-96), and a man in a judo costume (2003c, 2:118). Such features do not appear in Lost World, although it is set in Japan; nor, of course, do these features appear in Metropolis. Finally, Tezuka has given Japan a differentiated geopolitical identity. Star and Uran are in conflict and eventually go to war; Japan does not participate in that conflict. Whatever the geographical relationships between the three na¬ tions, Tezuka has given Japan an important political role to play in the world. On this one matter, Japan as a geographical and political entity, we see a clear progression from one text to another. Such a progression seems implied by the titles themselves, from Lost World (pointing to the past), to Metropolis (not temporally marked at all), to Nextworld (pointing to the future) (Perper 2010). In the first text, Japan is not mentioned at all, but it is the setting for the action in the first half of the story. In the second, Japan is named, but is peripheral to the action. In the last one, Japan is named and becomes a primary locus of ac¬ tion on the international scene. The reader now has a new way of seeing Japan’s place in the world as a central one; it is the primary mediating force between two major powers that threaten to destroy the world through their conflict.

THE ONTOLOGY LAB Let’s think of Tezuka’s treatment of Japan as a rough and ready framework in which to examine these stories. It leads us to look for progressive change in story elements—characters, plot points, themes—that more or less parallels the change we see in how he deals with Japan. In particular. I’m interested in ontological issues. Here I must be careful, for I mean “ontology” not in the philosophical sense of the ultimate nature of the things and processes that constitute the universe but in the sense it has in the cognitive sciences, where it is a matter of how people think about the world (psychology) or what kinds of entities to include

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

41

in a database (computer science). For example, in Lost World, Tezuka presents us with two young women who started out as intelligent plants grown in a laboratory (2003a, 123). The plants are then placed into human-form molds and injected with hormones (124) that transform them into humans, Ayame and Momiji. I don’t think we should be concerned about whether or not that’s how the real world is, that such things as intelligent plants that can be trans¬ formed into humans exist. Nor do I think that that’s Tezuka’s concern either. Rather, he is playing against the ordinary sense of what kinds of things exist in the world and how they are related. In this case, Tezuka explicitly shows us a process of creation in which we see certain things, leafy plants in containers in a laboratory, and characters make certain remarks, for example, “They’re not cookie molds. I’ll put them on those plants and then, once I inject them with special hormones, the plants will grow rapidly into a perfect fit for these human molds” (2003a, 124). In this way Tezuka may lead the reader to explicitly think about form (human) and substance (plant). He calls our attention to these basic perceptual and cog¬ nitive categories (on ontological cognition see, e.g.. Bloom and Hays 1978; Keil 1979, 1992) without, however, having to enter into abstract philosophi¬ cal discourse. Plants are not, in the mundane world, intelligent and language capable. But in Lost World they are, and Tezuka emphasizes this ontological deviation, or inventiveness, if you will, by showing us the process by which it comes about. It is in that sense, then, that these stories are ontological laboratories. Te¬ zuka is reworking his worldview, a vast network of concepts, and to do that he has to attend to the conceptual joints and marrows of that worldview, to twist them out of shape and realign them. And he does that step by step. In Lost World he attends to plants, animals, and humans and the relations among them. He’ll have some plant and animal oddities in Metropolis, and robots, as well—which he didn’t have in Lost World. But his attention is elsewhere, on the social categories of gender and of lineage: what’s a family? Can an artificial being without a father be a real human? What about a human child, Emmy, living with her criminal older sister? Is that a family? In Nextworld the family is no longer problematic; Tezuka features two of them, without comment. One is headed by a capitalist businessman from Star, and the other is headed by a socialist bureaucrat from Uran. Tezuka’s attention is now on the nature of larger society and the nation in its context among other nations. It is in this enlarged context that he can, at last, present himself and his readers with a new Japan.

PRIMORDIAL SCENES One of the motifs that appears in each of these texts, the primordial scene, is a jungle populated with strange, though not necessarily unnatural, creatures. This is a world without humans and, thus, without nations.

Art in Contexts

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The second half of Lost World (Tezuka 2003a) takes place on the planet Mamango. Mamango has mountains and jungles (fdled with large leafy ferns, such as in the two-page spread in 2003a, 176—77) and is populated by dino¬ saurs. The story ends with two people remaining on Mamango: a young scien¬ tist, Dr. Shikishima, and a young woman. Miss Ayame, one of the intelligent plants discussed previously. In the story’s penultimate scene, we’re back on earth where one Dr. Jupiter delivers a radio address about Mamango in which he informs us that that planet... was a panorama of earth’s past! Moreover, ladies and gentle¬ men! Shockingly . . . miraculous homo sapien forms appeared! They were a still young boy [i.e., Shikishima] and girl [Ayame]. Perhaps they will be as were earth’s Adam and Eve_They will be the first of mankind’s progeni¬ tors on Mamango. (2003a, 244) Thus, this primordial scene is linked directly to the emergence of a new human race of mixed Japanese descent (remember, Ayame is a plant) but in a place far away from Japan. Metropolis (Tezuka 2003b) opens with its primordial scene, which is framed as a lecture by one Dr. Yorkshire Bell, a rotund chap sporting a monocle and a Darwinesque beard. The lecture is about evolution, more or less, and opens with a two-page spread depicting dinosaurs fighting in a leafy jungle, and ends with two panels (2003b, 12): the top one shows a group of soldiers at the edge of a forest deployed around a machine gun. The bottom, and larger panel, shows a nighttime city skyscape. In the course of six pages, Tezuka takes us from dinosaurs fighting it out in the jungle to war-prone humanity living in cities. As in Lost World, we’ve got a sequence from a world without humans to one with. This brief sequence is set on earth and precedes all the events in the main story. The existence of worlds without humans is thus more strongly present in Lost World than in Metropolis. Nextworld treats the primordial motif a bit differently. The story opens with a five-page sequence (2003c, 1:9-13) set on Horseshoe Island, which is being explored by one Dr. Kagashi Yamadano. He finds himself surrounded by very strange flora and fauna, and remarks, “Th-this is an island of mon¬ sters” (2003c, 1:11, bold in original). Rather later in the story, we’ll learn that this island was used for testing atomic bombs and that the monsters are thus mutant creatures. In five panels (2003c, 1:12-13), Yamadano pursues and captures a smallish creature of some unknown kind. Then we’re in Tokyo with Yamadano walking from the train station to his home and laboratory, bagged creature in hand. Eventually we learn that that creature is a Fumoon, a superintelligent humanoid life-form. This primordial scene is perfused with the unintended fruits of mankind’s works—those irradiated mutants—in a way that the primordial scenes in Lost World and Metropolis are not. Those primordial worlds were innocent

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

43

of human works; this one is not. It would thus seem that one price of a new Japan is giving up the notion of a world that is pure in the sense that it lacks human activity. As science or even philosophy, that makes little sense. But as mythology, it is fine.

PARADE OF THE CREATURES Another important motif involves a parade, or display, of many and various creatures. Lost World (Tezuka 2003a) has three such parades. The first occurs early in the book, in chapter 2, “The Glass Palace.” A crime had been com¬ mitted in the first chapter, and Mustachio arrives on the scene to investigate. There he finds a young rabbit-boy, Mimio, on the scene. Mimio suggests they visit Dr. Kenichi Shikishima. Mimio tells Mustachio that Shikishima is a great scientist who surgically alters the brains of animals so that they become (like) the brains of humans. Mimio is himself a rabbit who has been so transformed. Tezuka gives us a two-page spread (2003a, 18-19) depicting this process. We see dogs, mice, cats, cows, deer, and horses in process. On the right-hand side we see a group of doctors gathered around an operating table working on some unseen animal. In another place we see a classroom where the postoper¬ ative animals are being trained in human behavior. Subsequent pages (2003a, 20-23) give us a more detailed look at classes where the new animal-humans receive lessons in pronunciation and deportment. The second parade happens in chapter 9, “Plants with Souls.” We’re still in Dr. Shikishima’s complex, but now we’re in the laboratory of one Dr. Makero Butamo. He raises intelligent plants that he then places into molds to give them the form of human females, two of which play roles in the story: Momiji and the afore-mentioned Ayame. Butamo gives examples of movement in plants by way of explicating his process (Tezuka 2003a, 120-23). First he explains that some plants wilt and bloom in response to the weather. Then he gives examples of plants that are more active, such as the carnivorous Venus flytrap. Both of these creature parades contain remarks that break the fiction by calling attention to the book itself. Immediately before the first parade Mus¬ tachio remarks that Mimio is “like something straight out of a comic book” (2003a, 17), while one of the doctors remarks, “Turning animals into humans is an idea that nobody but a comic book writer would put to use” (19). When Butamo begins telling Mustachio about his plant research, he says, “Well, please read this page carefully and then you can turn to the next one” (120). This leads us to the third parade, on a two-page spread near the end of the book (240^11). It is a crowd scene, the only one in the book. This crowd is packed with characters from other comics, such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Betty Boop, Blondie and Dagwood, Popeye, Maggie and Jiggs, The Little King, and, I rather suspect, others that I don’t recognize. This two-page spread may well be an allusion to a similar display that appeared in the Asahi Graph in 1937 (Schodt 1986, 46).

Art in Contexts

44

Metropolis has one, but perhaps two, such parades. The “perhaps” is for the opening sequence, which I’ve already discussed under the rubric of a primor¬ dial scene. As we move through this five-page sequence, there are creatures in every panel, starting with reptilian dinosaurs, then mammals, and finally humans. The parade that first captured my attention, however, is the one near the physical center of the book (2003b, 92-93 out of 155 pages) and in the structural center. As I have demonstrated in an earlier essay (Benzon 2006), Metropolis has a ring structure: A, B, C, D, X, D’, C’, B’, A’. This parade is in that X section, the structural center. What has happened is that the evil Duke Red has bombarded the sun with omothenium rays, causing black spots on its surface that have, in turn, inter¬ fered with the ionosphere (Tezuka 2003b, 145). That interference has caused unnatural effects on earth. We’ve already seen giant rats. The two-page spread at the center of the story depicts giant bees, ants (just the mandibles pulling a man underground), grasshoppers, an oversized pumpkin, and a man using a fish as bait to catch a giant earthworm. Dr. Yorkshire Bell tells us that this is happening all over (93). Finally, we have the parade in Nextworld. It is near the middle of the sec¬ ond volume (Tezuka 2003c, 2:68-71), and it is reminiscent of the first parade from Lost World, for it depicts a variety of animals being altered: cattle, pigs, porcupines, a rhinoceros, elephants, giraffes, birds, and others. In other ways, however, it is quite different. The altering is being done by the Fumoon, superintelligent humanoids that evolved in response to radioactive fallout. They are gathering a limited number of humans along with samples of all the animals and are preparing to transport them off the earth’s surface to save them from an incoming gas cloud. While their intentions are benign, the Fumoon are not human, and their plans for exodus become unnecessary as the gas cloud turns out to be harmless. What finally happens, however, is both complicated and obscure. Suffice to say, the Fumoon leave and the earth remains more or less as it was when the story began. The effect of each of these parades is to call the reader’s attention to the fact that these are creatures. They aren’t enacting events in the story in these panels; they are being displayed so that we might examine them and notice their fea¬ tures. Note, however, that the making of these creatures is much more impor¬ tant in Lost World than it is in Metropolis or in Nextworld. In Metropolis they just happen, the result of radiation. In Nextworld, some just happen, while oth¬ ers are made. But the makers aren’t humans, they’re the mutant Fumoon, and Tezuka doesn’t devote as many pages to the making as he does in Lost World.

VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN Most of the actors in these stories are natural human beings, but not all of them. As we have already seen with the paraded creatures, Tezuka has given us many humans of unnatural kinds: the animal and plant humans from

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

45

Lost World and the humanoid Fumoon of Nextworld. Consider the two plant women in Lost World, Momiji and Ayame. Why two plant women? While Ayame becomes the mother of a new race of humans, Momiji is eaten during a food shortage in the voyage to Mamango. What contrast is Tezuka making here? The criminal who ate Momiji saw only her plant substance, and so, in an act of karmic justice, he was later killed in a fight with Mustachio. In effect, he was thinking in the old way and could not or would not grasp the implications of Momiji’s form and intelligence. As far as he was concerned she was just a rather odd plant and, as such, she was edible. In contrast, Shikishima accepted Ayame’s humanity, thus indicating that he accepted new ways of being in the world. Tezuka explores other varieties of the human, as well. Metropolis features electromechanical robots that are made by and work for Duke Red, a crimi¬ nal boss. But, above all, Tezuka created Michi, one of the strangest and most compelling figures in any of these stories. Michi is an artificial being {jinzo ningen in Japanese) made of synthetic cells; as such, Michi stands in contrast to ordinary electro-mechanical robots (robotto in Japanese). Duke Red ordered one Dr. Lawton to create a human being who would be super-strong and able to fly. He also dictated that the being’s face be modeled on that of a statue, the Angel of Rome. Lawton did as he was ordered, but he also made Michi capable of being either male or female. A switch in the throat determines the gender. Despite possessing superpower, Michi is also very needy and spends most of the story searching for her father so she can learn whether or not she’s human. There is, however, an interesting complexity about Michi’s parentage. Duke Red did more than order Lawton to create her. Apparently, he bombarded the sun with omothenium rays in order to activate the synthetic cells Lawton used in her creation (Tezuka 2003b, 76). She is thus a creature of both deliberate design (Lawton) and mutant happenstance (omothenium rays). There is no reason, however, to believe Red wanted to create those giant rats and other abnormalities in the natural world that are overrunning the world; they’re just unintended consequences of the omothenium rays. Because of the role those rays played in her genesis, however, they give Michi a link to those unnatural animals. That she is also the deliberate product of human craft additionally makes her kin to the Red’s electro-mechanical robots, none of which are convincingly anthropomorphic. Finally, she herself is convincingly anthropomorphic. She appears human and spends over half the story trying to figure out whether or not she is. She is a complex creature, a demiurge if you will, who comes close to incorporating all creaturedom within herself. Note that, for Michi, the question of whether or not she is human hinges on finding her father. That is, it depends not on her physical nature but on her so¬ cial nature, her lineage. This facet of humanity was not foregrounded in Lost World, but it is central to Metropolis, as is Michi’s peculiar dual-gender, which

46

Art in Contexts

is central to the plot (see Benzon 2006 for an explication). Just why Tezuka placed the gender switch in Michi’s throat is something of a puzzle, for it’s so very odd. And perhaps that’s the point. At two places in the narrative we see someone stick a hand down Michi’s throat to flip the gender switch. It’s a very memorable image. You don’t forget it. Tezuka thus clobbers us over the head with the existence of gender and its importance in human life. Turning to Nextworld, we have the Fumoon, superintelligent, vaguely human, but physically small and slender. They also have a capacity for tele¬ pathic communication. Though their exodus scheme proves unnecessary, they still play a very important role in the story: they stop the war between Star and Uran. That war could have devastated the planet. Thus, these unnatural creatures, spawn of radiation created by Star and Uran, come back to foil their makers, as Michi ended Duke Red’s career. Finally, we have Miss Popova and Miss Cocoa in Nextworld. Cocoa is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy plutocrat from Star, while Popova is a genius engineer and plant manager who is the daughter of a high-placed Uran bu¬ reaucrat. The existence of family, then, is casually asserted, which is quite different from Metropolis where the matter of Michi’s family is deeply prob¬ lematic. Popova and Cocoa look alike, however, and are so perceived in the story (e.g., 2003c, 1:156). That is, in some sense they are very much alike, the same person. But they are also quite different: one of them acts like a stereo¬ typical young woman (Cocoa) while the other acts like a stereotypical young man (Popova). Tezuka thus seems to be asserting that a woman’s gender role is socially constructed and not a function of biology. In Metropolis, gender is a matter of a switch, a component of the individual organism. In Nextworld it is a func¬ tion of social structure, a very different and more sophisticated point. Tezuka underlines that point in an early conversation between Redonov, a Uran of¬ ficial (but not Popova’s father), and Cocoa’s father (2003c, 1:50-53). That conversation results in mutual declarations of war. Just why that particular conversational topic should have that result is not at all obvious. Although the two nations were at odds with one another, that particular matter is not the sort of thing that leads to such declarations. It is as though Tezuka regarded equality between men and women to be such an incendiary issue that such a declaration seemed natural. But then, the dualgendered Michi in Metropolis had that much power within herself and came close to destroying Metropolis.

RADIATION AND ARTIFICE IN THE BUILDING OF WORLDS Now I want to focus attention on just how these various unnatural creatures, these artificial beings, come about. Some are made through deliberate action, while others just happen, the unintended and indirect result of deliberate ac¬ tion. In Lost World, humans create unnatural creatures directly and with de-

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

47

liberation. But they are no threat to humans, presumably because they are the result of deliberate artifice. Meanwhile, this twin planet just happens along and Tezuka manages to populate it with a natural human, Shikishima, and one made through artifice, Ayame. Metropolis presents a more complicated situation. We do not have any plants and animals that have been altered by deliberate artifice. But we have a new category of artificial creatures, electro-mechanical robots, and these are deliber¬ ately manufactured. While they pose no inherent threat to humans, they become so in reaction to mistreatment by their boss, the evil Duke Red. But we also have all those mutant creatures, plant and animal, that do threaten the earth. They are the unanticipated result of Duke Red’s omothenium radiation. The demiurge, Michi, straddles the artifactual and the mutant, and also the male and female. Finally, in Nextworld, the artificial creation of unnatural creatures is “shoved” into the world of mutants and then banished from the planet. At some time in the past, before the story begins, Star and Uran have tested atom bombs and those bombs have released radiation. All the mutants we see in the story, all the odd creatures, the Fumoon foremost among them, are the result of those mutations. None are the result of deliberate human intervention. To¬ ward the end of the story, however, we see the Fumoon using their technologi¬ cally advanced artifice both to prepare a massive migration from the earth’s surface and to alter the animals they’re going to take on the trip. And that is what happens: they blast off and, at the very end of the story, the last Fumoon, Rokoko, is sent after them. Note, however, that whereas the remade animals of Lost World become human, the remade animals of Nextworld remain animals; the remaking is sterile. There are no unnatural creatures left on the earth. None created by artifice, none the result of mutation. And Japan now has an explicit place in the world order. That is to say, this new Japan exists in a world inhabited only by natural creatures. Thus, as we move from one story to the next, we move from a world where unnatural creatures are made through human deliberation (Lost World), to a world where deliberation and mutation are equally important in creating the unnatural {Metropolis), to a world where mutation dominates over delib¬ eration {Nextworld).

AT THE CORE: GRIEF AND LOSS Let us take one last pass through these stories, this time looking at grief and loss, which are common events in these stories as they are in life. The first readers of these three manga lived in a society that had just lost a devastat¬ ing war. Most of them would have lost one or more close relatives or friends. Beyond that, as I observed at the outset, they have lost Japan, or at least a certain construction of myths and symbols that was the sociocultural heart of the nation. Readers would have to deal with that loss as well as with their more personal losses.

Art in Contexts

48

Figure 3.1. Core relationships. As we have already seen, Mimio is created from a rabbit through deliberate artifice. Michi involves both deliberate artifice (Dr. Lawton) and the indirect workings of radiation. Rokoko is a creature of radiation.

Title

Human

Artificial

Lost World

Mustachio

Mimio

Metropolis

Kenichi

Michi

Nextworld

Kenichi

Rokoko

Tezuka ends each story in a way that allows readers to focus grief on a sin¬ gle relationship. Each of these core relationships is between a natural human being and an artificial human-like being. The human suffers the loss of the unnatural being. Think of this unnatural being, this artificial being, as the symbolic Japan of the ancien regime, as it were. Consider this simple table in Figure 3.1. In the first case, the character invested with the new is separate from the character that must mourn the old. In the second and third cases, however, one character does both. But the loss is deeper in the third case. Both Mimio and Mustachio enter Lost World in the first chapter, Mimio even before Mustachio, and help one another throughout the story. Mimio dies when the spaceship returning to earth became disabled. Mustachio is able to parachute away, but Mimio is lost. The final panel shows Mustachio looking at Mimio’s boot, which is all that remains of him. At the same time, of course, Shikishima and Ayame are out there on Mamango, starting a new world. The character invested with the new is thus separate from the character that must mourn the old. This character does so while standing in an unnamed Japan. Shikishima is “played” by Kenichi, one “actor” in Tezuka’s well-known cast of characters. Kenichi, of course, appears in both Metropolis and Nextworld as, actually, Kenichi (no family name in either story). In those stories, it is the Kenichi character who experiences the “core” loss of the story. That is, the character who was invested with the new Japan in Lost World now comes down to earth where he is also the character who experiences loss. Metropolis ends with a fight between Kenichi and Michi, making for a com¬ plicated ending. Michi begins to dissolve when the omothenium rays cease, and so Kenichi wins by default. Even as Michi is being taken to the hospital, Dr. Yorkshire Bell delivers a radio broadcast about Michi’s story revealing that she was consumed with rage when she learned that she was without parents. That earns her the sympathy of the people, who go to the hospital to express those sympathies to Michi herself. Michi’s loss is thus both a personal loss for

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

49

Kenichi, who’d been a friend to Michi throughout the story until that fight, and a general loss for the people of Metropolis. While Michi was an advanced being, and so in some sense a creature of the future, Michi was also symboli¬ cally linked to most of the world in the story. Michi’s loss is thus a suitable vehicle for feelings about the loss of Japan, the creature of myth and symbol. This loss, however, does not take place in Japan; Japan is nowhere to be found in the story—it’s only alluded to. Finally, Nextworld, another complicated case. Rokoko is the Fumoon that Yamadano captured on Horseshoe Island at the very beginning. Kenichi spends a great deal of time with her. It becomes obvious in the second vol¬ ume that they’ve become closely and mutually attached, which makes their relationship much different than that between Kenichi and Michi. Further, where Michi was needy and all but lost, Rokoko was active and resourceful. She’s the Fumoon who was designated as liaison to humans, which gives her the authority to make special provisions for Kenichi in the evacuation of earth (2003c, 2:82-83). But things don’t work out that way. Instead, the Fumoon leave without her and she remains behind with Kenichi, Mustachio, and others. At the very end, she’s piled into a rocket and sent into space. Kenichi tries to stop this, but fails. And so he loses her. But he did not have to fight her. And he experiences his loss while standing securely on Japa¬ nese soil. Mimio was just himself, a plucky rabbit boy, and no more. Michi was her¬ self, but also, symbolically, the world. Rokoko is the representative of an al¬ ternative race of human-like beings. Her departure, like Michi’s dissolution, signals the return of earth to its normal state. A normal state, however, that has a new Japan with its place in a different international order. The various artificial and unnatural beings have served their imaginative purpose and are no longer needed for that Japan, the one in Nextworld. But they are being held in reserve, as it were, for use in other stories, stories told in the real Japan, the Japan where people actually read Nextworld, and many other manga.

THINGS TO COME: ASTRO BOY AND BEYOND Nextworld was published in January and February of 1951 (Tezuka Produc¬ tions n.d.), which later saw the birth of Tezuka’s best-known character, Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom), known in English as Astro Boy, in April (Schodt 2007, 177). It is easy to see anticipations of Astro and his world in the three texts we have been examining. Astro’s world is, of course, technologically advanced, with Astro being the most sophisticated example of that technol¬ ogy. He is boy-sized, like Kenichi and Michi, but is electromechanical, unlike Michi. And he does not suffer Michi’s sense of being lost in the world—in this regard, it is worth noting that Tezuka provided him with robot parents.

Art in Contexts

50

Yet, however much his fans may have been enthralled by the advanced technology Tezuka depicted, that is not what most interested Tezuka himself (Schodt 2007, 121). He had been deeply affected by his experience of dis¬ crimination during the postwar occupation, and that’s what interested him: many, if not most, of the Astro Boy stories involve discrimination against robots by humans. He regarded robots as another variety of the human and, as such, deserving the rights and respect due to humans. Tetsuwan Atomu, however, was only one of many titles Tezuka created. A bit later, in the mid-1950s, Tezuka created the title Ribon no kishi (trans¬ lated into English as Princess Knight) about a person bom with both a male and a female heart (Schodt 1996, 253-57). Surely Michi, but also Popova, anticipates this development. And this trope, the bi-gendered individual, has become a staple of manga and anime. Robots and humans of all kinds, and in all sorts of worlds: these are the common fare of mangatopia, if you will. I have argued that Tezuka created the various creatures in Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld in an effort to create an imaginative alternative to the Japan that had lost, and become lost in, the war. These are the seeds of the New Type named in Gundam and that Takashi Murakami evokes in this passage: Robots are refined to a level at which they compensate for the inadequacy of human communication, expand human capabilities, and even possess selfconsciousness. With the aid of such robots, humans can evolve into super¬ human New Types. . . . Amidst it all, people awaken and evolve toward a new humanity. (2005, 148) While Murakami seems overly anxious about the cult of the cute, he gets to the essential point, our march toward a new humanity. We are, alas, still too burdened with the rotting detritus of 19th century empires to see a clear path to a new and peaceful future. The very possibility of such a future, however, depends on the imaginative forces Tezuka catalyzed in these three manga, forces that invoked a reconception of our relationship with the natural world, with our own artifice, and of our relations with one another. The rest is up to us—if we are young enough—and to our grandchildren if we are older. And, of course, their robotic friends.

NOTE 1. Editors’ note: “Alembicated” means overly refined.

REFERENCES Benzon, William L. 2006. Tezuka s Metropolis: A Modem Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos.” In Heurisiken der literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexteme perspektiven

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auf literatur. Edited by Uta Klein, Ktaja Mellmann, and Sterranie Metzger, 527-45. Paderborn, Germany: mentis Verlag GmbH. Benzon, William L. 2010. “Time’s Arrow in Literary Space.” The Valve: A Literary Organ. http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/times_arrow_in_literary_space/. Bloom, David, and David G. Hays. 1978. “Designation in English.” In Anaphora in Dis¬ course. Edited by John V. Hinds, 1-68. Champaign, IL: Linguistic Research. Burke, Kenneth. 1973. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” In The Philosophy of Literary Form, 293-304. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keil, Frank C. 1979. Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keil, Frank C. 1992. Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murakami, Takashi. 2005. “Earth in My Window.” In Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Ex¬ ploding Subculture, 98-149. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Perper, Timothy. 2010. Comment on William Benzon, “Time’s Arrow in Literary Space.” The Valve: A Literary Organ, http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/times_arrow_ in_literary_space/#27763. Schodt, Frederik L. 1986. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Schodt, Frederik L. 1996. Dreamland Japan. Berkeley, CA: Stonebridge Press. Schodt, Frederik L. 2007 The Astro Boy Essays. Berkeley, CA: Stonebridge Press. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003a. Lost World. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003b. Metropolis. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003c. Nextworld. 2 vols. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka Productions, n.d. Tezuka Osamu [English]: Manga; Next World. http://tezuka osamu.net/en/manga/99.html.

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4 Heirs and Graces— Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit in the Realm of Japanese Fantasy PAUL JACKSON

It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine. —J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories’’ (1947, 147) The anime series Guardian of the Spirit (2008) is a remarkable work of fan¬ tasy. The fictional world it creates is enticingly foreign, yet—a crucial point— it remains tangibly real. The series opens with Balsa, a female bodyguard and spear wielder, descending a mountain pass before reaching a rich tapestry of rice paddies. Peasants work ankle deep in flooded fields. As Balsa confidently crosses the demarcating pathways, her spear sheathed and resting over one shoulder, we can almost feel the dry, cracked earth crumbling underfoot. At this point, there is very little to suggest that Guardian of the Spirit isn’t a piece of historical fiction. But, despite intentional similarities, this isn’t our world. Rather, the series’ setting is like an inverse reflection of Japan cast upon the icy surface of an unknown lake, in places almost indistinguishable from the world above yet elsewhere dramatically distorted by the hidden depths it conceals. Guardian of the Spirit is the first in the Moribito (Guardian) series of young adult, light-fantasy novels by Nahoko Uehashi, an assistant professor of an¬ thropology at Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University who specializes in Aus¬ tralian aborigines (Uehashi 2008; Production I.G 2007b; Kodansha Children’s Books 2008). The franchise is a typical example of a multiplatform property, appearing first as novels published from 1996 to 2007 in 10 volumes, then

54

Art in Contexts

a radio dramatization and anime adaptation, and finally returning to print in the form of a manga serial (Fujiwara 2007). This cross-media pollination is testament to readers’ appetite for the series, its characters, and their world. More than 400,000 copies of the Moribito novels have been sold in their na¬ tive Japan, and the series has been duly honored by a string of prestigious children’s literature awards (Kodansha Children’s Books 2008).1 The anime series, written and directed by Kenji Kamiyama and animated by Production I.G, greatly expands upon its source material (Guardian of the Spirit 2008; Production I.G 2007a). Upon her arrival in Kosenkyo, the capital of New Yogo and home of the country’s ruling Mikado, Balsa witnesses what appears to be a freak accident. The Aoyumi River marks the city’s boundary. Its raised banks are joined by two revealingly different structures: the first, a rickety suspension bridge se¬ cured with decaying ropes, allows peasants passage into the capital; running parallel is a regally arched second bridge, reserved for royalty and their en¬ tourage. As Balsa continues her journey, crossing the suspension bridge with the Aoyumi River raging underfoot, the peasants around her dutifully fall to their knees: the Second Prince is being escorted across the arch bridge in an ox-drawn carriage. Suddenly enraged, the beast bucks and struggles against its harness. But unable to free itself, the ox careens into the river below, pull¬ ing the carriage and prince along with it. Balsa quickly leaps to the prince’s rescue. As she struggles to locate the young boy, the freezing river biting her skin and tugging at her robes, she is enveloped by an uncanny blue light that miraculously calms the surrounding water. At its center is Prince Chagum; the light is emanating from inside his body. Balsa eventually resurfaces with Chagum safely in her arms, unconscious but still breathing. As a reward for Chagum’s rescue, Balsa is invited to the royal palace, and she reluctantly accepts. After bathing and eating, she retires to an ornate bed¬ room, its exquisite tatami mat larger than most peasants’ family homes. As she reflects upon the day’s events. Balsa hears hurried footsteps approach¬ ing. Suddenly alert, she reaches for her spear. As Balsa prepares to strike, the Second Queen enters with the bleary eyed and barely awake Chagum clinging to her guiding hand. The queen explains that the “accident” over the Aoyumi River was actually the second attempt on her son’s life. He is believed to be possessed by a water spirit that not only threatens his life but also signals a dreadful drought and throws into question the legends upon which the Mi¬ kado’s rule is founded. Could Balsa help her save her child? Seeing no alter¬ native, Balsa accepts the young prince into her care. They flee as the queen’s men set the palace wing ablaze to disguise Chagum’s fate. Kamiyama began his career at Studio Fuga, a producer of background art¬ work for a number of better-known anime studios. Some of Hayao Miyaza¬ ki s directorial outings feature handiwork from Fuga, as do many works of Kamiyama’s future employer: Production I.G. Rightly praised for their me¬ ticulously detailed and realistic animation. Production I.G’s defining works

Heirs and Graces—Moribito

55

include Mamoru Oshii’s mecha-police-procedural Patlabor and the genredefining Ghost in the Shell films. Kamiyama made his directorial debut in 2002 with MiniPato, a lighthearted companion to the Patlabor series. The same year saw the premiere of Production I.G’s Stand Alone Complex, Kamiyama’s much lauded continuation of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. After Guardian of the Spirit, Kamiyama moved on to write and direct Eden of the East, set in near-future Japan (Production I.G 2007a).2 The press surrounding Kamiyama’s adaptation of Guardian of the Spirit has routinely labeled the series as a work of Asian high fantasy. Uehashi too seems keen to acknowledge her story’s innate Japanese qualities. The series masterfully straddles the boundaries of two worlds. Both are uniquely Japa¬ nese: one a mirror of feudal Japan with flourishes of the fantastic; the other a variation on established Shinto mythology, populated by yokai (monsters) and other spirits of myth and legend. To understand Japanese fantasy, and Guard¬ ian of the Spirit's place within it, we must first look more broadly at fantasy as a literary genre.

FANTASTIC FRONTIERS Precisely what defines a work of fantasy as such is difficult to pinpoint. It is a genre of myriad guises, subject to endless debate. For every shared charac¬ teristic, it appears, there is a multitude of seemingly irreconcilable differences. However, several revealing theories greatly bolster our understanding of fan¬ tasy and the fantastic. It is impossible to discuss these critical frameworks in their entirety here, but drawing on the commonalities that run throughout will better enable us to progress through our exploration of Guardian of the Spirit. One of the major theoreticians of the literary fantastic is Tzvetan Todorov. His structuralist approach to the genre positions the fantastic at the centre of expanding strata of descriptive classifications. Todorov broadly locates the fantastic between the neighboring genres of poetry and allegory. Beneath this layer he further specifies the relationship between the fantastic, the un¬ canny, and the marvelous. Delving deeper still, Todorov isolates the fantas¬ tic by introducing two sub-genres: the fantastic-uncanny—in which “events that seem supernatural throughout a story receive a rational explanation at its end” (Todorov 1975, 44)—and the fantastic-marvelous—“narratives that are presented as fantastic and that end with an acceptance of the supernatural” (Todorov 1975, 52). Finally, between the two, Todorov locates the fantastic itself, a no-space, which he revealingly identifies as “a frontier between two adjacent realms” (Todorov 1975, 44). Todorov argues that when a narrative’s protagonist is confronted by an event that cannot be easily explained, the protagonist must choose between two possible explanations. We are now walking the frontier line. Either the event can be rationalized by the accepted laws of their world (in most cases this is also our world, or “reality”), a dream or illusion for example, or it

56

Art in Contexts

cannot. For Todorov, the fantastic lasts only for the duration of this hesitancy. Once the event has been explained (the uncanny), or indeed has been deemed inexplicable (the marvelous), we cross the frontier. The fantastic dissipates, and the narrative returns to either the uncanny or marvelous, the aforemen¬ tioned two realms. In his essay “The Frontiers of Utopia,” Louis Marin (1993) touches upon many of Todorov’s observations. For Marin, the frontier between realms is encapsulated not by uncertainty but by the limitless horizon, through which he describes how “it seems possible to glimpse the other side of the sky, a ‘beyond space’... a bridge .. . established between the visible and the invis¬ ible” (Marin 1993, 8). In between these two realms lies what Marin calls a neutral place: “neither the one nor the other, neither this edge nor the other” (ibid., 10). It is within this no-space that travelers can find utopia—which, it has been argued, is the basis for most forms of fantasy. Marin traces the etymology of utopia from the Greek ou-topia (non-place) through eu-topia (good place) before finally reaching Utopia, the titular island of Thomas More’s 1516 novel (More 1965). At its simplest, the term first used by More has come to represent an ideal system. Utopia’s positioning beyond the horizon immediately renders it separate from reality, leading some to sug¬ gest that the concept is implicitly political—for its perfection cannot be found at home—and utopian authors to be subversive in their intent. In his essay, Marin (1993) later proposes that Utopia, in its ever-changing state, is the sym¬ bolic destination of all travel narratives. Returning to anime, both Todorov’s and Marin’s observations are bril¬ liantly illustrated by Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001). Chihiro, the film’s young protagonist, is moving away from home and school, leaving behind her friends and classmates. As her parents drive her to their new neighborhood, she lies dejected on the backseat clutching a bouquet of wilting flowers given to her as a parting gift, her bottom lip protruding in prepubescent protest. Having missed their correct turn-off, Chihiro’s father plummets down a forest path lined with Shinto shrines. The thicket thins to reveal a tunnel leading into a distressed building. Chihiro’s father slams on his brakes. Curiosity piqued, Chihiro’s parents enter the tunnel, their daughter reluc¬ tantly following behind. They pass through a deserted waiting room, dust danc¬ ing in the sunlight as it pours through stained-glass windows, before reaching a vast field punctured, here and there, by more deserted buildings. They ven¬ ture deeper to discover a ghost town of seemingly abandoned eateries, beyond which looms an imposing bathhouse. Unable to resist the tempting bounty of treats laid out mysteriously before them at one of the food stands, Chihiro’s parents gorge themselves on a mouthwatering platter of meats and simmering stocks. As a consequence, they are transformed into pigs, their food-splattered snouts and hooves clumsily scattering their feast. Chihiro flees but is unable to reach the tunnel through which she entered. Terrified, she meets a young boy

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57

who consoles her and directs her to seek work in the bathhouse until she can free her parents. Chihiro has now crossed the horizon. True to Marin’s prescription, Miyazaki uses the opening scenes of Spirited Away to establish a frontier between realms. The world beyond the tunnel is foreshadowed by the prominence of the Shinto imagery that precedes it. By entering the tunnel, Chihiro and her parents have crossed the frontier to a realm beyond the horizon. When Chihiro realizes that she can’t escape this new realm, she exclaims: “This can’t be happening—I’m dreaming!” This un¬ certainty is the basis of Todorov’s definition of the fantastic. Although Chihiro experiences various states of acceptance throughout the fdm, this hesitancy is ultimately unresolved. Following her tenure in the bathhouse and passing a test imposed by the wily mistress of the establishment, Chihiro is successfully reunited with her parents in their human form. They have no recollection of their transformation or of the elapsed time. At this point, the evidence Mi¬ yazaki presents to us suggests that the events at the bathhouse were indeed a dream or illusion. Once we return to reality, however, evidence of the passage of time is plain to see: Chihiro’s family car is dust-filled and the surrounding area overgrown. We are thus unable to determine if the preceding events were real or illusory. By Todorov’s definition, Spirited Away is a true work of the fantastic. The fdm is simifarly true to the understood notions of Utopia. Take the implicit politics of Spirited Away, for example: animation critic Andrew Osmond ob¬ serves that the fdm’s setting acts as “a nostalgic reminder of past decades when Japanese bathhouses were important community centres” and goes on to note that “Miyazaki intersperses such reminders of Japan’s heritage with jabs at the country today” (Osmond 2008, 12, 13). Furthermore, later in the fdm, a prolonged rainfall floods the land around the bathhouse, effectively rendering the building an island akin to More’s original Utopia. In one re¬ vealing scene, Chihiro sits on the balcony of her sleeping quarters. As she dangles her feet freely over the edge, she stares longingly at the horizon. The twinkling lights that lay beyond it are (for now) unreachable. Chihiro’s col¬ league Lin remarks wistfully that one day she’ll get to the town visible on the horizon. Their present inability to leave the bathhouse suggests the underlying possibility of dystopia—again evident in More’s novel. Our digression from Guardian of the Spirit to the frontiers of the fantastic has revealed the underlying features of fantasy fiction. In his study of Spirited Away, Osmond warns us of the pitfalls of overstating the fdm’s Japaneseness. The same cannot be said for Guardian of the Spirit. Uehashi herself invites readers to enter a “world that carries the scent of Japan” (Uehashi 2008, 260). Here, the realm beyond the horizon has very specific similarities with the other world, a spiritual realm glimpsed throughout Japanese folklore and mythology. For Japanese viewers, at least, it has been visited many times before. Its contours have been charted, its coasts mapped, and its inhabitants surveyed. We will now examine Guardian of the Spirit's interpretation of this

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established other-world to later determine how it affects our understanding of the fantastic.

BEYOND THE HORIZON Like fantasy, the idea of two divided worlds is of central importance to Japanese mythology and folklore. Existing at once above and below our own realm, this other world is home to kami, the spiritual beings of Shinto wor¬ ship; tama, spirits of the dead; and the myriad yokai that haunt Japan’s folkloric past. The two worlds are each tethered to the other. In places they exist so closely that one invisibly overlays the other like a particle-thin fdm, perfectly matching its contours and crevices. Some believe that the entrance to the spiri¬ tual realm can be found deep below the ocean’s surface through the guarded gates of Ryugu, an underwater kingdom of spectacular beauty. Others point to Japan’s mountains as the home of kami and tama. In either case, these inter¬ sections can be profoundly affecting. Carmen Blacker notes: The fertility of the rice crop, the due onset of the rains, the occurrence of storms, sickness, fire and accident, all these lay in the gift of the inhabitants of the other world. (Blacker 1999, 21) Similar beliefs are held by the Australian Aborigines, Uehashi’s academic specialty. For them, the world is composed of three separate plains, each ex¬ isting in unison: the human world of people, behaviors, and ceremony; the physical world of sun, stars, animals, and land; and the sacred world that determines the underlying laws of existence. Aboriginal storytellers explain how the newly created world was flat and lifeless. Sacred beings broke free from the earth’s surface, allowing the sun to rise from its subterranean con¬ fines. These beings then traveled the land, shaping its mountains and rivers, creating the elements and even life itself. They eventually tired of these acts of creation and returned into the earth that birthed them. In sacred places of the physical world, their spirits can be found in plants, rock, and other forms (Aboriginal Art & Culture Center n.d.). Blacker’s observations are directly re¬ flected in Guardian of the Spirit. The human world, known by the indigenous Yakoo tribes as Sagu, is only one plain of existence. Beyond it lies Nayugu, a spiritual realm akin to the Other World of Shinto myth. It transpires that the being residing within and possessing prince Chagum is the unhatched egg of Nyunga Ro Im, described by a Yakoo magic weaver as “a spirit that belches out clouds and generates water in both Nayugu and Sagu.” Every hundred years, the water spirit lays an egg, and its offspring hatches in the human world. By means unknown, its eggs are incubated for a period of gestation inside living hosts. If all the eggs fail to hatch, the human world will suffer a terrible drought: rice crops will wither as rivers run dry.

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Blacker notes that although passage from the spiritual to the human realms is easily accomplished by kami and tama, the reverse journey is much more troublesome for humans. To successfully navigate the space between worlds, human shamans must first undergo extensive training including fasting and studying sacred texts (often under the pounding weight of a waterfall). They must clothe themselves in magical garments and frequently communicate with spirits. The journey itself may be undertaken in two ways: [either in] ecstatic visionary form; his soul alone travels, his body left be¬ hind meanwhile in a state of suspended animation . . . [or] he may accom¬ plish the journey by means of symbolic mimesis; the other world projected by means of powerful symbolism on to the geography of our own. (Blacker 1999, 22) Both these methods of travel can be found in Guardian of the Spirit. Epi¬ sode 11, “Flower Wine for Tanda,” features a journey in ecstatic visionary form. Saya is an orphan girl and friend of Balsa, living in a riverside shack in Ogi No Naka, a poverty-struck district of Kosenkyo. Facing the prospect of an arranged marriage, she collapses into a mysterious coma. At first, believing her unconscious state to be a result of too much flower wine, her would-be father-in-law takes her to Tanda, an herbalist and healer. Recognizing that Saya’s spirit has somehow become detached from her body, he meditates until he, too, has achieved another state of consciousness. He climbs free from the confines of his body and into the spiritual realm. Although he can still per¬ ceive the human world around him, he can neither interact nor communicate with it. Having helped Saya regain consciousness in the human world, Tanda wan¬ ders beyond the confines of that world entirely, passing an invisible barrier onto the vast, unspoiled plains of Nayuga. This barrier between realms be¬ comes increasingly blurred as the series progresses. As for young Chagum, as the spirit he carries nears birth, he begins to experience a journey of sym¬ bolic mimesis. His body physically wanders the human world, but his spirit overlooks Nayuga, experiencing the sensation of its winds and the warmth of its sun. Neither Tanda nor Chagum is a shaman in the Shinto mould. The series does, however, feature another character who more clearly matches a Shintotype shamen: Master Torogai, a Yakoo magic weaver. Fittingly, it is through her that we first glimpse the inhabitants of the other realm. In the process of investigating Nyunga Ro Im, she consults a race of water dwellers native to Nayuga. One such creature is described by Uehashi as human in shape, but its hair was like seaweed, and a slimy bluish-white film covered its skin. Its eyes were lidless, its mouth lipless, and it had only two small holes for a nose. (Uehashi 2008, 100)

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Uehashi’s description immediately recalls the kappa, a well-known yokai first illustrated as early as 1776. Toriyama Sekien’s encyclopedic catalog of yokai illustrations depicts the creature as frog-like with mottled skin, webbed hands, and a mess of dark, tangled hair (Foster 2008, 58). Kamiyama’s interpretation of the creature is further removed from this early sighting than Uehashi’s, but it still shares many characteristics. Torogai’s communion with the water species later brings her face-to-“face” with another inhabitant of the second realm. Pursued by a fire spirit through the inner caverns of a mountain, Torogai finds herself trapped with no means of escape. Suddenly, an imposing stalactite springs to life and swallows To¬ rogai whole. Fortunately for her, the creature’s excrement is another gift from the spirit world—back on the surface, having survived digestion, she climbs from a bubbling pit of oil. The stalactite spirit may be more playful than the established kami and yokai, but it remains true to Blacker’s observations nonetheless. However, the division between Sagu and Nayugu is only one frontier that must be crossed during the course of Guardian of the Spirit. Unusual for a fantasy series, these other, more everyday frontiers are equally difficult to cross. The line between royalty and the common man, in particular, is repeat¬ edly drawn. This division not only affects Chagum when he passes out of his mother’s care but also is equally ingrained in his well-travelled bodyguard. Early in Uehashi’s novel. Balsa is introduced to the Second Queen following Chagum’s rescue. Although characterized by her worldly wisdom, Balsa still fears that she will be struck blind instantly upon making eye contact with the queen as royalist legends in her world report. To better understand these transitions, we can refer to anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1974) idea of liminality (limen means “threshold”). Turner proposes that every change in state or social position is composed of three phases: sepa¬ ration, marginality, and reaggregation. Separation is the process in which a subject is stripped of the signifiers of social status and is detached from current social connections. During the marginal—or liminal—period, the subject ex¬ ists outside of their previous positioning in society before reentry in the third and final phase. Turner describes the liminal period as “neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification” (Turner 1974, 232). His turn of phrase immediately recalls Marin’s description of the space between horizons as quoted above. Utopia exists here, too. In Guardian of the Spirit, this is clearly represented in Chagum’s coming of age. He begins the series cocooned in the labyrinthine palace, ignorant of both the commoners he will one day rule and the indigenous Yakoo people. He enters the liminal period when he is entrusted into Balsa’s care. He is stripped of any associations with the palace and is “reduced to an equality with his fel¬ low initiands regardless of their preritual status” (Turner 1974, 232). This is evident in the friendships he builds with the peasant children that neighbor his new home and, later, a Yakoo girl who shares her knowledge of Nyunga Ro

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Im. It seems that the only other child Chagum has known is his older brother, and it is only in the liminal period that he is able to behave like a regular boy of his age. In the final episode, Chagum is reunited with his mother and re¬ sumes his place within the royal family—but tellingly wearing Yakoo clothing and carrying Balsa’s knife, brought from her homeland of Kanbal. The Yakoo and Yogoese people undergo similar transitions. Both are force¬ fully detached from their segregated cultural identities to aid Chagum and the egg he carries. In the liminal phase, they share their individual expertise before being reintegrated into their separate cultures, newfound knowledge intact. Having explored Guardian of the Spirit's adoption of Japan’s traditional ideas and beliefs, we can now consider how these ideas and beliefs affect our understanding of the fantastic as outlined by Todorov and Marin.

FOLKLORIC FANTASY Japanese literature has a long history of fantasy dating back to antiquity. The year 1120 saw the publication of Konjaku monogatari (Tales of ancient times), which collected over 1,000 folktales, many featuring traits of the fan¬ tastic (Jones 1959). It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that examples of what we now recognize as modem fantasy began to emerge: Japan’s first dedicated fantasy magazine, Genso to kaiki (Roman and fantastique) was published in 1973 and lasted 12 issues; it offered both domestic fiction and translations of noteworthy international fantasy (Clute and Grant 1997, 515). The decade also saw the publication in 1979 of the first volume of Kaoru Kurimoto’s life work: The Guin Saga, a heroic fantasy epic featuring an amnesiac warrior with a magically grafted leopard face. The series remains the longest running sequence of novels ever written by a single author: 126 volumes in total; more were planned, but Kurimoto passed away before they reached fruition (Kurimoto 2003). Like Guardian of the Spirit, The Guin Saga has been adapted into both manga and anime. The latter, released in 2009, marked the 30th anniver¬ sary of the series and began to air shortly before Kurimoto’s death. Like The Guin Saga, many examples of Japanese fantasy can be broadly categorized as genre fantasy. Almost always High fantasy, Heroic fantasy or Sword and Sorcery ... the hallmark of Genre fantasy is that it is set in a secondary world. In less imag¬ inative works this is just a granted—a fantasyland derivative of J.R.R. Tol¬ kien’s Middle Earth. But it can more interestingly be an alternate reality or alternate world accessible from this one via some kind of portal or shift in perception. (Clute and Grant 1997, 396) Whereas Tolkien’s Middle Earth is the archetypal secondary world, draw¬ ing upon a wide ranging and diverse set of influences—including Norse

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mythology, Beowulf, and the stories of E. R. Eddison—the secondary worlds of genre fantasy, invariably published after The Lord of the Rings, are stereotypically “fantastic”; they are familiar reflections of locations we have already visited—snow-capped peaks and lush meadows—populated by creatures al¬ ready encountered—crusading barbarians and fair elves. Genre fantasy is thus more about familiarity than it is about originality; its enjoyment stems from knowing a familiar set of genre conventions and recognizing when an author or director deviates from them. One of the most accomplished anime examples of genre fantasy is Kazuki Akane’s Vision of Escaflowne. Hitomi, the series’ protagonist, is an ordinary high school girl until she encounters a handsome swordsman on the athlet¬ ics field where she practices. She soon finds her destiny entwined with this mystery prince and is magically transported to Gaea, a secondary world of knights, dragons, and scheming royal heirs. This idea of inadvertently spiral¬ ing through a portal to another realm has become a staple plot device of much fantasy anime, including The Twelve Kingdoms and Brave Story. Clearly, Guardian of the Spirit has aspirations beyond genre fantasy, but it is hardly the only such work. In Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Princess Mononoke (1997), Prince Ashitaka protects his rural village from a marauding boar god. In the process, his arm is enveloped in an oily substance that pulsates like a tangled rope of feeding leeches. Having reluctantly felled the beast, Ashitaka convenes with the village oracle (a figure not unlike Master Torogai). There he discovers the cause of the beast’s rage—an iron ball had pierced its hide and nestled itself deep within—and his own fate: he is cursed and scarred and will eventually die of his wounds. He travels west in search of a cure. His journey eventually leads to the manufacturer of the bullet that caused the boar’s madness and, as a result, his own cursed condition: an iron mill run by the enigmatic Lady Eboshi. Surrounding the mill, a thriving community is slowly stripping the land of its resources. Former brothel girls joyously pump the mill’s bellows, but at what price does their freedom come? The spirits surrounding the mill—including a deer god, the lord of the forest, and thousands of kodama (tree sprits) featured throughout Japanese folklore—are being threatened by the steady depletion of their natural habitat. Like Guard¬ ian of the Spirit, Princess Mononoke features at its heart the often-tumultuous relationship between the realm of man and the creatures of Shinto myth. More recently, the television series Mushi-Shi (2008) offered a verita¬ ble tome of riches far more valuable than anything found in the dungeons of a genre-fantasy quest. The series follows Ginko, a traveling Mushi-Shi (a healer), as he studies and interacts with the inhabitants of the spirit realm. Mushi are born from the flowing Kouki, a river of life in its purest form cours¬ ing beneath the earth’s surface. Like the kami of Shinto myth, mushi are be¬ ings possessed with the power to profoundly affect the human realm and its denizens. The series doesn’t feature a sustained narrative but instead offers self-contained stories, each featuring a different variety of mushi. This lends

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the series an affinity with traditional folktales in form as well as content (Jackson 2010). While Mushi-Shi and the other works discussed here are all highly indi¬ vidual examples of fantasy fiction, they do feature a number of shared char¬ acteristics that allow us to understand them collectively as folkloric fantasy. Although Guardian of the Spirit takes place in a secondary world, this isn’t always a qualifying criterion of folkloric fantasy; both Mushi-Shi and Prin¬ cess Mononoke are actually set in Japan’s historical past. Nevertheless, set¬ ting is of principal importance; these works all take place at the traditional intersections between human and spiritual realms: the entrances—or liminal thresholds—to the underwater kingdom of Ryugu and the forested mountains said to be home of kami. The worlds of folkloric fantasy, be they reflections of our own reality or secondary worlds, are inextricably linked to a spiritual realm that shares the same characteristics as the other realm described in Shinto myth and featured throughout classic Japanese folklore. Although, during the course of a story, passage between these worlds routinely occurs, their narrative function is no¬ tably different from the portal shifts of genre fantasy. In genre fantasy, two separate worlds exist in isolation; they have their own rituals, ecosystems, and geographies. And in terms of narrative, a character typically lives in one world (reality) and is magically transported to another before ultimately returning to the first. Similarly, for the most part, the inhabitants of one world are unaware of the denizens of the other. In folkloric fantasy, two worlds exist in unison; they bleed into each and overlap to collectively form a singular whole. Not only is each world aware of the other, one cannot exist without the other. Alongside glimpses of the fantastic, works of folkloric fantasy also main¬ tain a prevailing sense of realism through meticulously depicted scenes of routine and labor. Following their escape from Kosenkyo, for example. Balsa and Chagum set up home in a water mill. Initially dilapidated—weeds have infdtrated the thatch roof; moss colors the outside walls—Balsa soon restores the building and begins to produce grain. Chagum marvels at the mill’s rustic mechanisms but is humbled by the dawning realization of his sheltered up¬ bringing and inexperience. Similarly, in Princess Mononoke, Ashitaka spends time in Eboshi’s iron mill: he eats with the riflewomen and guards, visits lep¬ ers manufacturing guns, and assists in pumping the bellows. Unlike genre fantasy, the characters featured in these works are not cast¬ aways from another time or place; they have not fallen down a rabbit hole or been displaced by some other unknown magic. Rather they have been nour¬ ished by food borne from the world around them. They have trod its familiar paths and slept under its myriad stars. Often they are travelers privy to experi¬ ences that escape those bound together in cities and towns. Although all the characters of folkloric fantasy share their world with the spirit realm and its inhabitants, the principal protagonists are often set apart by their encounters with the fantastic: Chagum carries the egg of a water spirit;

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Ashitaka, the curse of a dying god. Ginko too has been changed by his en¬ counters. As a child he stared for too long into the other realm, losing an eye and staining his hair brilliant white as a result. At this point, it would be helpful to revisit Spirited Away. True to the defini¬ tion of genre fantasy, the film’s narrative does, for the most part, take place in a secondary world accessible only by unknown means. This journey to the world of the bathhouse, and the curious creatures that reside there, begins and ends with scenes of reality. But that is where the genre fantasy similarities end: the film is neither high fantasy, heroic fantasy, nor sword and sorcery. And its setting is anything but derivative: Miyazaki’s creativity and inventive¬ ness ensure that the world beyond this particular horizon is without peer, thus unfulfilling the main criteria of genre fantasy: familiarity. Similarly, although the creatures that work in and visit the bathhouse may appear to be in the tradition of classic folklore, a hallmark of folkloric fan¬ tasy, they are, in fact, almost entirely Miyazaki’s creations. The two worlds of Spirited Away also remain largely separate; the events of one don’t affect the other. Toward the end of the film, Chihiro rides upon a lithe and majestic dragon. The scene reveals that the dragon is the spirit of a river that played a significant role in Chihiro’s childhood. This relationship between worlds suggests the other realm of Shinto myth, but it isn’t developed any further and remains a comparatively minor plot development, thus falling short of the full interaction between worlds that is of central importance to folkloric fantasy. Spirited Away, which brilliantly illustrates Todorov and Marin’s ideas, therefore does not fulfill the criteria of folkloric fantasy. On the other hand, we have established that Guardian of the Spirit, Mushi-Shi, and Princess Mononoke are indeed works of folkloric fantasy, but how does this affect their relationship to Todorov’s definition of the fantastic? As already discussed, the worlds beyond their particular horizons have very specific similarities with the other realm of Shinto myth. For the characters of Guardian of the Spirit, the existence of this other realm and the physical effects that it has on their own are as irrefutable as the scientific laws that govern our world are to us. Indicative of this, once Torogai has diagnosed Chagum’s mysterious condi¬ tion, there is no question of the validity of her claims. So Balsa and Tanda immediately become focused on finding a solution. Elsewhere, Shuga, a Star Reader, is convinced that Chagum is alive based solely upon the evidence of cloud formations and rivers. In Mushi-Shi, Ginko catalogues the mushi that he encounters in the same way botanists might record their discoveries. They are as measurable and real as the butterflies of an entomologist’s collection. This tangibility of, and implicit faith in, the other realm forces us to question if Todorov’s idea of hesitation is still a relevant definition for folkloric fantasy such as Guardian of the Spirit. Similarly, if the other realm beyond the hori¬ zon becomes known and at least partially understood, does it have the same magnetic draw for travelers seeking Utopia as Marin proposes?

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First appearances might suggest that these works don’t feature Utopia at all. However, if we consider Marin’s etymological history of Utopia, separating its idea from the physical connotations of More’s island, it becomes clear that it is indeed as much a part of folkloric fantasy as it is within fantasy’s other forms. Describing the neutral place between frontiers, Marin writes, “It is the place where two kings meet to make peace after having been at war with each other for many years” (Marin 1993, 10). Marin’s observation perfectly encapsulates the Utopian element of folkloric fantasy. The three anime that we are discussing here—Guardian of the Spirit, Princess Mononoke, and MushiShi—are all concerned with the interactions between separate realms and with how each affects the other. When these realms are at odds, the effects can be disastrous to both. In Guardian of the Spirit, the egg inside Chagum’s body is (only) one such interaction. If it fails to hatch, both the human and spiritual realms will suffer devastating drought, Chagum will die, and Nyunga Ro Im will presumably become extinct. To avoid these fates, both realms need to exist in harmony; a perfect system: Utopia. Almost every episode of MushiShi features similar examples of the spirit realm cohabiting with the human world, including marriages and childbirth between the inhabitants of each. Princess Mononoke, on the other hand, shows us the devastating consequences of failing to do so. Here Utopia is a state as opposed to a physical destination. Applying Todorov’s definition of the fantastic is equally troublesome, if not more so. The works of folkloric fantasy that we are discussing almost certainly do not meet Todorov’s criteria of the fantastic. Because the interac¬ tion between realms can be explained, be they by Master Torogai in Guardian of the Spirit or Ginko in Mushi-Shi, if not by the audience themselves, they cannot, Todorov argues, be considered purely fantastic. Although a character may initially be at a loss to explain an event or phenomenon, answers cer¬ tainly exist even if they presently lie beyond human understanding. A recur¬ ring episode structure of Mushi-Shi finds Ginko confronted by the seemingly inexplicable—the supporting cast may have already decreed it so—but by the episode’s conclusion an explanation will almost certainly have been found in the form of a mushi and its unique qualities. Guardian of the Spirit and the other works of folkloric fantasy would thus ultimately fall into the category of the fantastic-uncanny. The mystery of the blue light that shone forth from Chagum’s body under the Aoyumi River is thus explained, as is the enraged boar god who cursed Ashitaka. To accept this, however, would be to sell these works of folkloric fantasy short. Although true to the fantastic-uncanny, these three stories also operate on an entirely different level. Todorov’s criteria are primarily concerned with manifestation of the fantastic in literature and not, per se, the fantastic as a literary genre. The examples he discusses often reveal that what looks beyond explanation may, in fact, be a series of otherwise unremarkable events: the ghost of a departed lover, in reality, might be a glimpse of an estranged sister or perhaps the reflection of a moth-eaten wedding dress in a grimy window.

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Almost as an antithesis to this, folkloric fantasy specializes in delivering other¬ worldly explanations for everyday phenomena: where else can viewers believe that rain is bom from a water spirit that belches clouds? Or that a deer god is behind every flower’s bloom? It is testament to the immersive world-building of these works that these fantastic—or indeed irrational—explanations seem entirely believable. There is still one frontier, however, that we have overlooked: that which separates us, the viewers, from the world onscreen. As J.R.R. Tolkien elo¬ quently expresses in the quote that opened this discussion, the best fantasy fic¬ tion is that which enables us to experience reality afresh. These stories allow the fantastic to seep into our world and lurk just outside of our field of vision. The characters of folkloric fantasy live on the threshold of worlds. On one side are the marvels of the spiritual realm, on the other are the familiar routines of the every day. Guardian of the Spirit invites us to share that vantage point— and to find ourselves on that threshold.

NOTES 1. Seirei no moribito (Guardian of the spirit) was honored with the Noma Children’s Literature Award and the Sankei Award for Children’s Books & Publications; Yami no moribito (Guardian of the darkness), book two of the sequence, won the Iwaya Sazanami Literature Award; and Kami no moribito (Guardian of the god), book five, scooped a prize from the Shogakukan publishing company in 2003. The Scholastic edition of Guardian of the Spirit won the 2009 Batchelder Award for most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English. 2. In 2007 Production I.G celebrated its 20th anniversary with the television series Ghost Hound. Originally conceived by Masamune Shirow, the celebrated manga-ka be¬ hind Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, the series explored the spirit realm of Shinto myth in a manner entirely different from Guardian of the Spirit: a deeply unsettling exploration of the psychology of its young protagonists. Production I.G also recently animated another of Uehashi’s light-fantasy novels Kemono no souja (Beast player). Spanning 50 episodes, the series was retitled Kemono no souja Erin (Beast player Erin) and follows the travails of a young girl aspiring to be a veterinarian in a rural fantasy world.

REFERENCES Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre—Alice Springs, n.d. “The Dreamtime.” http://aborigi nalart.com.au/culture/dreamtime.html. Blacker, Carmen. 1999. The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. 3rd ed. London: Routledge Curzon. Clute, John, and John Grant. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit. Foster, Michael Dylan. 2008. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Cul¬ ture ofYokai. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fujiwara, Kamui. 2007. Seirei no moribito. Tokyo: Square Enix. Guardian of the Spirit (Seirei no moribito). 2008. DVD. New York: Media Blasters.

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Jackson, Paul. 2010. “The Space between Worlds: Mushishi and Japanese Folklore.” In Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies. Edited by Frenchy Lunning, 341 —43. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, S. W. 1959. Ages Ago: Thirty-Seven Tales from the Konjaku Monogatari Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kodansha Children’s Books. 2008. “Author: Nahoko Uehashi.” http://monitor.kodansha. co.jp/children/authorlist/n_uehashi.html. Kurimoto, Kaoru. 2003. The Gain Saga: The Leopard Mask. Translated by Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander. New York: Vertical. Marin, Louis. 1993. “The Frontiers of Utopia.” In Utopias and the Millennium. Edited by Stephen Bann and Krishan Kumar, 7-16. London: Reaktion Books. More, Thomas. 1965. Utopia. Translated by Paul Turner. London: Penguin Books. Mushi-Shi. 2008. DVD. Fort Worth, TX: FUNimation Entertainment. Osmond, Andrew. 2008. Spirited Away. London: British Film Institute. Princess Mononoke (Mononoke hime). 1997. DVD. Tokyo, Japan: Studio Ghibli. Production I.G. 2007a. “Interview with Director Kenji Kamiyama.” http://www.productio nig.com/contents/works_sp/53_/s08_/index.html. Production I.G. 2007b. “Interview with Novelist Nahoko Uehashi.” http://www.productio nig.com/contents/works_sp/53_/s08_/000778.html. Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi). 2001. DVD. Tokyo, Japan: Studio Ghibli. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1947. “On Fairy Stories.” In The Monsters and the Critics, 109-61. Lon¬ don: Harper Collins. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Uehashi, Nahoko. 2008. Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. Translated by Cathy Hirano. New York: Scholastic.

PART II Fanships and Art

5 Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection FRENCHY LUNNING

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. —Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (2007, 83) Manga and anime have spawned several compelling fan-based offspring, but by far the most interesting to me is the peculiar but rapidly proliferat¬ ing performance-based movement called cosplay. Purportedly originating in Japan in 1978 with a performance by Mari Kotani parodying either a manga or anime character,1 fan performances of popular cultural narratives seem to have welled up in various parts of the world around that time. At 1960s sci-fi conventions. Star Trek fans had begun to dress as their beloved characters and in fact, as evidenced by the innumerable YouTube clips and online fan photo¬ graphs, continue to do so even now. U.S. Civil War reenacting events also re¬ appeared with a renewed enthusiasm near this time, brought on by centennial celebrations. Such historical enacting continued to grow in popularity.2 Online legend has it that Nov Takahashi saw Star Trek costumes worn at the 1984 Los Angeles Science Fiction Worldcon and coined the term kosu-pure (ZI7.7°U) (Takahashi 2008,114). This shortened version of the term costume-play would come to signify the practice of fans in their own countries and later, globally, costuming and performing in character the narratives of anime and manga. So it was a strange conjunction of several quite disparate events that provoked the outbreak of costumed performance and masquerade that came to be known as cosplay. For American fans, anime/manga cosplayers seem to have first appeared at the San Diego Comic-Con International convention in 1979 (Patten 2004, 7, 29).3 This is also about when critical acknowledgement of shojo manga began to

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seep out of Japan, especially to the West Coast of the United States. In Amer¬ ica, comics had been the nearly exclusive domain of men and boys since the 1960s. For nearly 30 years, males dominated U.S. comics culture as creators, publishers, and readers (Robbins 2009). The emergence of shojo manga of¬ fered young women a comics narrative presence and popular cultural potential for the first time in decades. Rather than focusing on the sex, violence, action, and the dorky adolescent male humor typical of American comic genres at that time, shojo manga was and is quite different: Aimed at girls from their teenage years to their early twenties, the genre of shojo manga features distinctive decoration and expressive artwork, along with stories that emphasize the inner feelings of the characters; thus, it is best defined as a genre that combines poetry with illustrations. (Takahashi 2008, 114) This opened the way for young women to participate in the fan cultures, so notably there was an emergence of women into the male culture of comic book consumption and in ways that were, to a large extent, exclusive to girl cultures. Although cosplay has been and is performed by both genders, young women have predominated as designers and performers.

COS~: SHOJO STYLE EMERGES One of the clues to the emergence of cosplay lies in the profound role that fashion and clothing play in girl cultures, particularly those within pa¬ triarchal social systems. As the secondary subject in a patriarchy, the young girl seeks a way to achieve a place in a society where male culture has pro¬ vided strict structures within which the female subject can operate. Freud suggested that: as a kind of compensation for her recognition of her inferiority, the girl may develop a narcissistic investment in her own body, treating] it as the corresponding male would an external love object. She pampers her body ... it becomes her greatest asset . . . giving her some notion of her own worth.... If man believes he has the phallus (the object of desire) then woman believes she is the phallus. . . . He has the object of desire while she is the object of desire. (Grosz 1993, 110) Most young girls begin to understand this at a very early age through the power that comes from being pretty and, barring that privilege, from the consump¬ tion and application (in capitalist consumer cultures) of clothing designed to provide the implication of beauty—which works via a particular cultural representation, generated through the various fashion industries dedicated to furthering the societal ideal that girls are positioned as objects of desire. These

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

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representations arrive through virtually all forms of media and culture but particularly from fashion magazines, which are produced for women of all ages. Thus, fashion and modeling, the performative aspect of fashion, become key aspects in the pampering investment and vestment of the body, and conse¬ quently provide a sense of agency and pleasure as well as lending to everyday life the aura of a performance. It is perhaps easier, then, to understand how cosplay appeared early on in the fandom of anime and manga. Japanese shojo manga art has always been based in fashion illustrations, since from its early beginnings in the shojo bunka— the subculture of Japanese girls—creators were frequently also fashion illus¬ trators (Takahashi 2008, 114). In the early period of shojo publications, 1910 to 1920s, Yumeji Takehisa (1884-1934) was one of the most popular illustra¬ tors of Shojo kai (Girls’ world), one of the early shojo magazines that were to become forerunners of the shojo manga. Takehisa drew young, pale, thin girls, with exquisite details of their clothing illustrated. They were posed in delicate yet formulaic poses representing what was considered the ideal shojo of the time. Takehisa also: designed and marketed his own lines of fashions, stationary, accessories and home decorations . .. [and] particularly popular among girls were letter sets and hair accessories. . . . Takehisa was the first and most important illustra¬ tor to create a coherent style that reflected the ideal shojo image. (Takahashi 2008, 117) Later, after World War II, when the demand for such periodicals was very high, Jun’ichi Nakahara (1913-1983) emerged with his Westernized designs of clothing that drove fashion trends in a postwar Japan. Not only an illustra¬ tor for the newly emerging genre of manga for girls, Nakahara also worked as a fashion designer, stylist, and editor. His fashion plates reveal the new shojo ideal: a contemporary, Westernized fashion model with large clear eyes that address the viewer directly; a tall, thin model’s body; and contemporary. West¬ ern clothing and hair styles popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Rather than the demure, downcast eyes and modest postures of the earlier shojo, Nakahara’s shojo appears as mildly confrontational, modem, and self-aware. Manga had taken a first step toward what would become the remarkable shojo power of contemporary Japanese comics. In shojo manga stories, it is the play between panels depicting close-ups of the all-powerful and emotional massive eyes of the shojo, and the panels depicting full-body portraits, that gives the genre its unique visual narrative power: A convention inherited from Nakahara’s illustrations, part of their allure for women has always been that they were all about fashion—full-body images appear on the page like mannequins modeling the latest ensembles in store windows. (Takahashi 2008, 125)

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Yet it was not in the strange and wonderful fashions of shojo heroines that cos¬ play initially found its allure as much as it was—especially for Americans—in the obsession with the complex persona of the Japanese uniformed schoolgirl, the foundational subject and iconic, ever-present figure of the shojo culture (Figure 5.1). The schoolgirl emerges from the Japanese all-girl school where students are required to wear uniforms, at that time usually a variation of the sailor suit: a white middy blouse with a tie and a blue pleated skirt, or more recently, blazers and skirts. Deborah Shamoon suggests that it is this uniformed sameness that engendered an aesthetic of sameness in shojo manga, specifi¬ cally, and in the shojo culture in general. A key aspect to that sameness in the prewar shojo Japanese society was the concept of:

Figure 5.1. Nakahara established the image of the de¬ mure, yet alluring coy Japanese schoolgirl, dressed in the school uniform of the post-war era in Japan. This formula would become the profile of the shojo: large liquid eyes, tiny mouth and nose, and thin body with elongated limbs. Copyright © Junichi Nakahara/Himawariya. Used with permission from the Nakahara estate.

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

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doseiai (homogender) relationships among shojo . . . and ideally, at least [of]—platonic character. ... It was coupling not merely with someone of the same sex, but with one who exhibited the modes of dress, speech, and behavior. .. . The ideal of doseiai encouraged sameness, loving the one who looks just like the self. (Shamoon 2008, 141) This concept was considered part of normal female development and em¬ ployed as a means of delaying heterosexual relations before marriage in pre¬ war Japan. This is evidenced in the work of Nakahara, whose illustrations frequently showed “girls in pairs, fitting the doseiai stories he was illustrat¬ ing . . . with similar features and wearing identical uniforms strikfing] poses that reflect their close emotional bonds” (Shamoon 2008, 141). In the postwar era, with the awareness of Western prohibitions of same-sex relations, this attitude may have altered to some extent. Yet it is key to understanding the narratives of shojo manga—then as now. Of course this assessment harkens back to Freud’s notion of feminine nar¬ cissism as a defense against the patriarchal restrictions of society—in that “loving someone who looks like the self’ is the very definition of narcissism itself. But Shamoon’s description also begins to link together the yearnings that aroused in many manga fans the desire to enact roles of manga and anime characters. For as one cosplayer told me. Cosplaying is—on some level—about sexuality, whether or not it is pur¬ poseful. Some characters are innately sexy or crossgendered—it is about flirting and exploration—sexual exploration without consequences.4 By the 1970s, the Stonewall Riots of 1969 had brought homosexuality out of the closet and onto the streets. Young manga fans—intrigued by the char¬ acters of manga and anime, whose gender identifications lacked the rigidity of American comics—were also intrigued by the potential reflected in both feminist and queer movements and perhaps identified with their extremely marginalized status in society. At least at the surface level, cosplay would seem to be more about play¬ ing dress-up with cool characters from anime and manga, with an emphasis on the characters as a player in a play rather than any sort of symbolic gen¬ dered statement. But in fact, dress-up—even as child’s play—is fraught with the negotiations and representations of power and gender. Here the choice of anime and manga characters as subjects of cosplay ramps up this negotia¬ tion through its radical and subversive qualities of gender instability. Princi¬ pally, shojo manga and anime are known for their unique narrative device of gender blending, transforming, and cross-playing for the key characters. This device makes these characters nearly irresistible subjects for cosplaying fans, particularly since cosplayers are principally young women. Their predisposi-

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tion as females acculturated within the confines of the male gaze and conse¬ quently positioned as “objects”—transforms the child’s play of dress-up into a strategy of power negotiation. By cosplaying a shojo character and performatively [and] mimetically ‘becoming’ [that character, cosplayers] simultane¬ ously alter the nature of power-over as it operates in the general culture, and claim power for themselves” (Rosenfeld 2002, 204)—more precisely, power over the designation of gender and the desire that wells up between the per¬ former and the audience. This is profoundly important for cosplayers, since members of fandom are abject subjects. The Japanese use the originally denigrating term of otaku to designate fan populations of anime, manga, keitai (mobile phone) novels, and gaming that have adopted a regime of obsessive ritual behavior and celebrate these narra¬ tives with specific fan behaviors. Consequently, a community has developed around the desire and yearning “of” and “for” the popular cultural characters of these narratives. For the Japanese, Sharon Kinsella suggests that these char¬ acters and their narratives represent the refusal to grow up and take on adult social relations . . . [and] without social roles, otaku had no fixed identities, no fixed gender roles, and no fixed sexuality. (Darlington 2009) This situation is particularly acute in the case of the shojo, who as a young female is highly marginalized in Japanese mainstream society. But in popular culture, the shojo has paradoxically become a massively popular and complex constellation of power relations, subversive identities, and characters found in all forms of media in Japan and increasingly globally—think Hello Kitty. Yet otaku, and the shojo in particular, are in fact an abjected population, representing not only Kristevian abjection (Felluga 2003) but also abjection in its very everyday and poignant sense. Within their abject profile and com¬ munity, these subjects have accumulated a cornucopia of identities that have been imaginatively suggested by anime and manga and mirror the lack of fixed identities, gender roles, and sexualities. Julia Kristeva has further articu¬ lated this movement of abjection as a thrust to the side of an otherness—not as an object but as a “Not I” (Kristeva 1982, 4). This denial of self becomes a key gesture toward the desire to mask: to take up a guise under which the cosplayer, as a subset of the otaku culture, uses the narratives of anime and manga and thus operates as a mime of abjection. Cosplayers—specifically anime and manga cosplayers—reveal their abject status through their visual morphology in costume. That morphology is read from the body of manga and anime and the bodies represented in manga and anime: bodies that are in no way stabilized and in no way actual. The cosplayer’s dressing-up is an articulation of abjected excess and, as such, cosplay accepts and recognizes all body forms, genders, and sexualities of the fan

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

77

Figure 5.2. Two young women cos¬ playing the characters Alan and Ann from the Sailor Moon R anime. Photo from the collection of Kaylene Ruwart. Used with permission.

community in the practice. Body form, as the signifier and origin of the abjected position, becomes in cosplay supplanted by imaginary identities, which elides the founding condition of the abject body. In cosplay, the obsession with character accuracy and its extreme concen¬ tration on costume form and fabric link it to the obsessional character of fetish practices (Figure 5.2). As Anne McClintock defines it: Fetishes can be seen as the displacement onto an object (or person) of the contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level . . . but are lived with profound intensity in the imagination and the flesh. (Mc¬ Clintock 1995, 184) The use of these costuming forms and practices creates a space of abjection, a stage on which the fetishized imaginary identities supplant the real identity through the crisis and trauma of abjection. These imaginary identities secure for the cosplayer a temporary symbolic control and agency. The cosplayer enacts, embodies, and performs identities through a role scripted through the narratives of popular culture and the gender anxieties of fans. Cosplay is a drag performance.

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-PLAY: PERFORMATIVITY

In Japan, the key cosplay event is Comiket—a huge affair “held in summer and winter . .. often in unbearably hot or cold conditions” (Dresscloth 2008), where thousands of cosplayers convene on the roof of the convention facility. In the United States, there are literally hundreds of anime conventions all over the country every year, with attendance reaching into the thousands—all of which have cosplay events. Two types of events for cosplayers are typically held at conventions: the Masquerade and the Hall Contest (Figure 5.3). The Masquerade is usually a performance of skits that are prepared by cosplay groups and feature anime, manga, or game characters; the groups perform ei¬ ther a parody, a scene that is actual or fictional, or a burlesque of song, karoke, or other musical performance that has only a passing relation to the narrative indicated. The performances are then judged and awards presented by a panel of experts or convention guests for various categories of costume preparation and performance. The Hall Contest literally takes place in the convention facility hallway, and cosplayers hang about performing, posing, and voguing5 while the judges un¬ systematically hand out prizes for various aspects of the costumes and perfor¬ mances. Beyond those events, cosplayers are to be found everywhere within the convention facility all through the convention weekend, performing and

Figure 5.3. A large group cosplaying the main cast of the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children in the lobby of the Coralville Convention Center in Coralville, Iowa, at AnimeIowa in 2008. Photo from the collection of Kaylene Ruwart. Used with permission.

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

79

posing for photographs and for each other. These performances are compel¬ ling for several reasons, but one key element stands out as particularly intrigu¬ ing: much in these performances pivots around gender or sexual play. This element becomes obvious in the taxonomy of terms created by cosplayers to describe the various modes of costuming. Cosplaying as characters of the opposite sex, which frequently happens in cosplay, is called crossplay (see Figure 5.4). This is frequently confused with the term for cosplaying as characters who dress as the opposite sex, which is called cross-dressing. The two practices sometimes coincide, but some Japanese manga and anime characters cross-dress to start with, so it adds to the confusion for outsiders. But the cosplayers are savvy and quick to assess the situation. In addition, there is a small but growing niche group of dollers. This refers to male or female cosplayers who perform as female dolls and wear bodysuits and masks to transform fully into female characters (Dresscloth 2008).6 This proliferation of gendered categories, replete with these strict defini¬ tions, rules, and regulations guarding the boundaries of performance, make this massively popular cultural practice indicative of the profound changes emerging in popular culture around the presentation, performance, and cita¬ tion of genders. Though cosplay roles are not always shojo but are also shonen (boys’ manga or anime), even when cosplaying shonen characters, it seems to

Figure 5.4. Cosplay photo of the Verrsen Werks female cosplay team cross-dressing from the anime Gravita¬ tion as the two male main characters, Shuichi Shindo and Eiri Yuki, inspired by a playing-card set. Photo from the collection of Kaylene Ruwart. Used with permission.

80

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be a goal of cosplayers to create slash cosplay narratives with existing shonen manga characters. (Slash refers to a fan-fiction category that places the lead characters—usually male heterosexual shonen characters—into same-sex sex¬ ual relationships.) As a cosplayer informed me: “Cosplayers can drag shonen characters into the shojo realm: that is, to couple boys with boys for their own [the cosplayer’s own] enjoyment. They [cosplayers] want to see them [the shonen characters] together.”7 There are various explanations for why these characters are now classified as shojo, but the most pertinent explanation is that the manga stories from which these characters extend were written ini¬ tially by women for girls. Japanese girls have liked reading stories where the lovers were on equal footing—not as one subservient to the other, as occurred in heterosexual love stories. And why is this gender play so immensely popular currently? Commonly acknowledged as a staple of such explanations is Judith Butler’s notion of gen¬ der as a constructed category that is evinced through a “gender performance, which is a ‘bounded act,’ the playing out of hyperbolic norms that highlight the constructedness of gender” (Gentile 2009, 17). These explanations have been highly touted in academia and offer a partial understanding, but do not approach the active and structural enactments of these gender performances. In unwrapping the complex layers and folds-within-folds of the gender per¬ formative matrix of cosplay, we will traverse through these layers to undress the cosplayer—a layer at a time—and in so doing, discover the mechanisms and devices at work in the cosplay phenomenon. How can simple cosplay—a girl playing a female shojo character, for example—still be drag? Butler describes drag as gender performativity this way: [Saying that] gender is like drag, or is drag is to suggest that imitation is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. (Gentile 2009, 17) This is to suggest that at the same time that drag deterritorializes (disrupts and dissociates the location wherein it emerges) heterosexual norms through a gender masquerade, it also and at the same time reterritorializes heterosexual norms by reinstating normative gender roles as the character role, even though it is a highly parodied one. The cosplayer as a marginalized individualized subject, regardless of geni¬ tals, will masquerade as a character from the repertoire of manga characters whose fundamental aspect is generally accepted in the otaku culture as having the potential for an utterly mutable gender. Thus—in the immediate lunge to reterritorialize we have the wide and ever-emerging cosplay categorizations and designations of crossplayers, cross-dressers, dollers, and so forth. This means that the pivoting operation of the simultaneous and contradictory tra-

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

81

jectories of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are consequently mir¬ rored in the ironic turn that is the active aspect of drag itself. So our girl playing the female shojo character in the Hall Contest amongst the cosplaying community, or performing for the camera, is actually playing gender mutability under the guise of character, rather than any gender speci¬ ficity. Yet, it is still drag: it still plays gender as character, even if it is a female body under the purportedly female character. But the shojo female character automatically and imaginatively is cast as a fluid gender, easily slipping into other genders regardless of whether that specific character performs in that manga in that way or not. It is in fact, the weight and wonder of shojo manga as a specific narrative formation and genre—internalized and celebrated in the otaku community—that is acknowledged in the cosplay performance, since, according to both Hebdige and Rosenfeld: The centrality to drag of costuming and style leads back to questions of mi¬ mesis and desire. Style carries implications of individual self-representation as well as group identification that underscore its broad importance to mar¬ ginal cultures ... [if it is] a community of desire, then style—which is mi¬ metic in that it is produced through mutual modeling by individuals within a cultural field—becomes a montage of signs of desire, and aesthetic trap¬ pings become capable both of identifying potential objects of desire, and of invoking desire itself... the importance of supposedly superficial aesthetic and stylistic elements cannot be underestimated. (Rosenfeld 2002, 204) Through the specific aspects of the costume, the cosplay performer creates an occasion for the citation of hypostatized identity and genders, gleaned from a manga or anime narrative. The shojo character as popular cultural artifact represents a nonnormative parodied gender identity as a classification, a type, and a totality, complete with the sets, lights, and costumes that simultaneously both shuts down and releases deconstructing emergence of meanings. The drag identity becomes a series of snapshots of shifting gender illusions made possible by the release of the founding identity: it is a flickering series of mo¬ mentarily stabilized spaces that are fundamentally unstable. For example, one cosplay informant told me of a male cosplayer, well known for his high standards of costume production and performance, who performed the butch character of Sailor Uranus, or Haruka, from the extremely popular shojo manga Sailor Moon. Interestingly, in the Hall Contest he would dress in the boy’s school uniform that Haruka wears at school and then would change for the Masquerade into Sailor Uranus wearing the female costume of the Sailor Scouts. When asked why he switched, he replied that it was easier to wear the male costume for running around the convention, but it is the Mas¬ querade that was the most important showcase for his character.8 The utter ease with which this cosplayer could play the gender shifting of the Haruka character is characteristic of cosplayers and convention behavior. Of course, in calling forth the tactic of drag performance, the further critique of camp is

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also invoked. Camp and drag are tactics that both come from the theatre of the queer culture and as such, immediately suggest the marginal, the subversive, and the sexual, particularly through the slash improvisations: Similarly, the more recent Japanese tradition of fan parody is associated with anime and manga [fans] who both undermine and pay homage to popu¬ lar mainstream anime and manga by creating their own counter-narratives that involve well-known characters in fantastic, often absurd, situations and unexpected homoerotic pairings. (Darlington 2009, 2) This situation creates what Susan Sontag describes “as a ‘love of the exagger¬ ated,’ ‘a failed seriousness,’ and ‘a privileging of style over content’” (Malian and McGillis 2005, 4). Cosplay, by its very aesthetic of abject excesses mani¬ fested through absurdity, stark artificiality, and the overabundance of hypergendered codes and artifacts, illustrates—along with camp—the following description: Camp’s favoring of exaggeration and artifice highlights its “in-between” border status: it is part of popular culture, yet its affiliation with queer cul¬ ture ensures that it hovers on the margins of the dominant culture. (Malian and McGillis 2005, 4) The actual mechanism by which the subject performs her or his disappear¬ ing act in the calling forth of multiple and oppositional roles (Malian and McGillis 2005, 4) is lived and performed in a nether-world of multiple, fan¬ tastical, and potential identities. This is the place where it all happens as de¬ sire blossoms into the negotiation. Irony and paradox erupt in the moment of simultaneous play between the normative and the subversive, the self and the character, the normative gender roles with the renegade, and the multiple sub¬ jectivities and desires—and spawns not a singular performed identity or role but a shimmering multitude of desires and identities that I am identifying— after Felix Guattari—as the transversal moment. Bryan Reynolds, who has created an acting technique based on this concept, defines it this way: Transversal theory maintains that people occupy subjective territories, their own as well as through various kinds of sharing and overlappings. Subject territories are multidimensional, combined conceptual, emotional, and physical ranges of experience ... its boundaries continue to be per¬ meable and fluid insofar as imagination is capable of exceeding social, biological, and physical constraint and mutability is possible for all things. (Marshall and Reynolds 2007, 2) I began to receive this insight while watching cosplayers as they performed not only in the regulated events but also as they wandered around in the hall¬ ways, conglomerating together, posing, voguing, and inter-acting with the

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

83

other cosplayers and convention attendees (Figure 5.5). It became clear that they no longer—if they ever did—were acting in character: instead, they were slipping and sliding into all manner of identities that have no names but are identifiable through rapid-fire snippets of gestures, manic vocal peculiarities, and poses, to be popular cultural iconic characterizations and quotations of erotic and gendered types. This display of multiple identity eruptions begins precisely as the costume is put on and the subject encounters other otaku. At once the subject expands to the transversal position, in that transitional events tend to happen in an “intermediate area of experience” and a “potential space.” Transversality seems to create this potential space of creativity and collectivity (Genosko 2002, 71). This concept was developed by Guattari in a psychiatric hospital as a tactic to produce agency in patients. It is also used by teachers of foreign language as part of the pedagogy: students are asked to take a name in the language they are learning in order to excuse them from their identity, allowing them the freedom to express themselves linguistically in different ways not governed by their founding identity.9

Figure 5.5. Voguing for cameras, onlookers, and themselves, these young women create a netherworld that is the transversal space in which the play¬ ers reiterate and perform the narratives and subjectivities of their community. All costumes are from the anime Burst Angel. Photo from the collection of Kaylene Ruwart. Used with permission.

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The notion of collectivity is key to understanding the potential space held within the transversal state: cosplay is about the performer and the audience simultaneously. Cosplay is almost always a group activity at conventions. Even if the cosplayer arrives alone, he or she is immediately brought into the community of cosplayers and begins to act as performer and audience. Cosplaying starts with the desire to find community for the abject individual. As one cosplayer put it: It is a conversation-starter. It is social networking: everyone is a fan. Pre¬ tending to be another character is a lot of fun. You are acting as a charac¬ ter, then someone joins in a spontaneous improv, within or without canon boundaries.10 It is in this netherworld, this nonlocal local space of possibilities and multi¬ plicities of potential, that exists as the transversal—which is created by the intensely felt bonds of the otaku community that not only allows for these performances but also seeks them out to simultaneously perform and watch almost constantly throughout the convention period. This brings us finally to the “why” of cosplay—and perhaps the why of any of the proliferating costume-based events that are springing up in mainstream culture in a surprising variety of forms. Genosko nails it this way: The Institutional object is known by means of group subjectivity, and the innovative creative tool used to pose the question is transversality. The fore¬ grounding of the institutional context and the positing of this object, knowable through the subjectivity of the group, entails that the object plays a vitally important role in the life of such groups; just as the Lacanian objet a is the cause of the subject’s—[and] here, the group’s desire—and informs its fantasy life, the institutional object is what is real for these group sub¬ jects because they participate in its creation through negotiation and in the process develop new forms of subjectivity. (2002, 72) That is to say, the “institutional object” we are discussing here is the perfor¬ mance of cosplay and the context within which this object shimmers is the mainstream culture with its regulated, mediated, and judgmental authority. Cosplay, as it was and is created and recreated by the abject otaku community, plays a vital role in the life of such groups as the missing jouissance—the objet a. Cosplay not only informs group members’ fantasy lives but it also rec¬ reates and extends those fantasy lives through the performances of these “po¬ tential new subjectivities” that are translated through the subversive texts of anime and manga. Cosplay is indeed what is real for the otaku subject, and as such, it is devotedly performed every month throughout the world. Cosplay¬ ers do it because new subjectivities provide the pleasures and acceptance they lack in mainstream culture as abject subjects. It is therapeutic: “it is, rather, a

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

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space in which becomings are truly creative—radically open and simply not what is now actual” (Genosko 2002, 75).

'T'-DENTITY As a culture, we tend to think and speak of the identity of ourselves and of others in the singular number: each person as a singular and unique iden¬ tity. But it is becoming evident that what we conceive of as a distinct and particular singularity is in fact a multitude of identity affects and desires that swirl in constellations within each individual psyche, which the ego then cre¬ ates situationally into identity formations—constructing aspects, desires, and affects for each social and nonsocial event—and through time and situation condenses these aspects, desires, and affects into sets of successful traits that we then read as a singular whole identity or “self.” These psychic landscapes form what we then perceive to be ourselves and others. But this has been be¬ cause identity could only be read as the modernist binaried individual singu¬ lar: we have had no model of a subject that could accommodate a subjectivity with the potential multiplicity of identifying traits as still fluid, still potential and contingent—and still be considered sane. According to Michel Foucault’s construct, modernist institutions and pro¬ hibitions had provided a particular set of rules that closed down what could be thought or said, privileging the singular masculine subject. Cosplay shows up in the late 1970s (Patten 2004, 29) as the postmodern discourse entered its most productive stage. This is coincident with the beginning phase of the globalization of anime and manga through the development of fan groups and various exchange systems (Internet and conventions) of nascent otaku com¬ munities (Figure 5.6). The postmodern paradigm shifted constructs of subjec¬ tivity to consider potential pluralities of genders and sexualities. Additionally, with the shifting focus toward the marginal, the culture began to realign what was seeable and sayable—if only for the emergent youth affiliations of the time. Foucault defined this process as the “technologies of the self,” describ¬ ing it as follows: The way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested, and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group. (Best and Kellner 1991,62) The shojo subject with her mutable gender and her focus on feminine cos¬ tumes and subjects, found in these strange but compelling narratives, provides a map and model of a potential subjectivity comprised of multiple identity expressions for the new psychic landscape of emerging subjects.11 The abject otaku cosplayer has little to lose in embracing this still subversive subject

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Figure 5.6. A common sort of photograph taken during an anime convention: a gang of friends made during the con (and previous cons) from the otaku community, many in cosplay. The costumes are street clothes based on the characters from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the actual costumes of which were worn the previous day. Taken at Animelowa 2008. Photo from the collection of Kay lene Ruwart. Used with permission.

position, and much to gain. As a community, otaku have embraced the shojo subject, spreading the burden of difference amongst them and sharing their outsider status together, and in the process have built an emergent subject form of mutable genders and identities that may eventually change the way we think about how we define ourselves and each other.

NOTES 1. Mari Kotani and Takayuki Tatsumi have validated that Mari Kotani was the first cosplayer in Japan of anime and manga, but there may have been sci-fi cosplayers already in existence there, as well. 2. Civil War enactors appeared even before the Civil War ended, but reenacting reap¬ peared as an event around this time (Hadden 1999, 4). 3. Fred Patten wrote of his 1980 first sighting of cosplayers, stating, “This is also the first (?) convention to include several anime character costumes in its Masquerade, with a

Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection

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group of six San Diego fans led by Karen Schaubelt as Captain Harlock and Star Blazer characters.” This is perhaps inaccurate, as Patten notes by including a question mark after his statement, alluding to the lack of his knowledge of this act as the seminal act. But there really is no official documentation of most of these early events. Patten was an early fan and key to many of the seminal events and conventions where much of the innovations of these fan-based practices occurred. Patten is as close as we get to a primary source on much of the history of early anime/manga fandom (Patten 2004 29). 4. Discussion with Kaylene Ruwart, December 29, 2009, cosplayer and cosplay group member for 10 years. 5. A practice in popular cultural events to dance or walk using fashion model-like poses, in a parody of runway walking. 6. Dollers seem to be a specifically Japanese form at the time of this writing. 7. Discussion with Kaylene Ruwart, December 29, 2009. 8. Ibid. 9. Cosplay informant Kaylene Ruwart, who also taught Japanese at the Concordia Lan¬ guage Camp in Minnesota, explained how this tactic was used to free the student to take on other identities, which helps in accessing a new language (see note 4). Guattari, as Gary Genosko explains, “found the work of desire in the multiplication, and multiplicity, of groupuscules freed from the impasses of inferiority, looking outwards, towards collective identity beyond the bourgeois individual, family and workplace... had figured transversality as an anti-dogma, autopoetic virtual, viral machinic power” (2002, 13). 10. Discussion with Kaylene Ruwart, December 29, 2009. 11. As the popularity of cosplaying has mushroomed since its beginnings—from 6 cosplayers in 1980 and 22 in 1983—terminology shifted from costuming to cosplaying in the following decades. By 2003 at Anime Expo with 18,000 attendees, it was “impossible to walk three feet without accidently stepping in front of someone taking a photo of a cosplayer” (Patten 2004, 32, 84).

REFERENCES Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford. Darlington, Tania. 2009. “The Queering of Haruhi Fujioka: Cross-Dressing, Camp and Commoner Culture in Ouran High School Host Club." ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4 (3). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4_3/darlington/. Dresscloth. 2008. “Cosplay.” (September 18). http://www.articlesbase.com/cosmeticsarticles/cosplay-567330.html. Felluga, Dino. 2003. “Introductory Guide to Critical Theory; The Abject.” Purdue Univer¬ sity (November 28). http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/ defmitions/abject.html. Genosko, Gary. 2002. Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. London: Continuum. Gentile, Kathy Justice. 2009. “Sublime Drag: Supernatural Masculinity in Gothic Fiction.” Gothic Studies 11 (1): 16-31. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. “Lesbian Fetishism?” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, 101-15. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hadden, Robert Lee. 1999. Reliving the Civil War: A Reenactor’s Handbook. Mechanics-

burg, PA: Stackpole. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Malian, Kerry, and Roderick McGillis. 2005. “Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children’s Culture.” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’etudes americaines 35 (1): 1-19. Marshall, Chris, and Bryan Reynolds. 2007. “Transversal Acting.” The Semiotic Review of Books 17 (1): 1-5. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. London: Routledge. Patten, Fred. 2004. Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Robbins, Trina. 2009. “Girls, Women, and Comics.” In Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics. Edited by Martha Cornog and Timothy Perper, 45-60. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/ Libraries Unlimited. Rosenfeld, Kathryn. 2002. “Drag King Magic: Performing/Becoming the Other.” In Drag King Anthology. Edited by Donna Troka, Kathleen LeBesco, and Jean Bobby Noble, 201-20. Philadelphia: Haworth Press. Shamoon, Deborah. 2008. “Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga.” In Japanese Visual Cul¬ ture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Edited by Mark W. MacWiliiams, 137-54. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Takahashi, Mizuki. 2008. “Opening the Closed World of Shojo Manga.” In Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Edited by Mark W. MacWil¬ iiams, 114-36. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Wilde, Oscar. 2007. The Critic as Artist. New York: Mondail.

6 Love through a Different Lens: Japanese Homoerotic Manga through the Eyes of American Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Other Sexualities Readers ROBIN E. BRENNER AND SNOW WILDSMITH

In 2008, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Roundtable of the American Library Association (ALA/GLBTRT) asked us to be part of a panel called “GLBT Graphic Novels and Comics” at ALA’s Annual Conference in Anaheim, California. Because of the growing popularity in the United States of Japanese manga with homoerotic storylines, GLBTRT wanted us to talk about what these comics are and why they are popular with U.S. readers. The goal was to help librarians learn more about the patrons who were reading such titles—specifically gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (GLBTQ) patrons—so that librarians could make more informed decisions about collecting these comics. To get a better idea about the U.S. popularity of

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these same-sex romance titles before the panel began, we surveyed online fans (mostly located in North America) to seek out the opinions and reactions of GLBTQ readers. We inquired to find out who they are, how they self-identify their sexuality, why they read same-sex romance manga, and both what ap¬ peals and doesn’t appeal to them about these subgenres of romance manga. During the panel, we talked about the representation of homosexual char¬ acters in U.S. comics, the types of homoerotic storylines in Japanese manga, and the reasons for the popularity of these types of manga with both heteroand homosexual readers in the United States. U.S. fans broadly distinguish between yaoi manga with male-male themes and yuri manga with femalefemale themes (see the Glossary). Both kinds of manga are discussed in more detail later. So before we turn to the results of our survey, we will briefly summarize and compare the representation of homosexuality in U.S. comics versus Japanese manga.

GLOSSARY

bara: "rose." Japanese fiction about male-male romance produced for male homosexual readers in various formats. Content and drawing styles usually differ from those in BL (see below)/yaoi work, which is produced for female readers; bara male charac¬ ters tend toward muscular and overtly masculine, bishonen: "beautiful boy." Japanese term for a male aesthetic typi¬ cally characterized by beauty and grace tending toward androg¬ yny, usually with full or long hair. A bishonen type may range from preteen through mature maleness. Shortens to bishie col¬ loquially in the United States. boys' love, BL: An expression used in Japan for commercially pro¬ duced fiction in various formats that features male-male romance and may feature sex, developed typically for female consumers on a par with other romance narratives. The term is also used for the genre as such. Males can be of any age, typically teen through full adulthood. The term shonen-ai (see below) is also used, dojinshi: Japanese fan-produced comics. Dojinshi may but doesn't always reuse characters from commercial manga/anime of vari¬ ous genres. Many manga artists got their start in dojinshi. Dojinshi may be reproduced and sold in a limited fashion. Commercially published manga artists sometimes themselves produce dojinshi. dojinshika: Someone who creates dojinshi.

seme: In Japanese, literally, "the attacker." Used to refer to the more aggressive partner in a BL or yaoi narrative. Pronounced se-meh. (See also chapter 7, note 2, this volume.)

shonen-ai: "boy love." Another term sometimes used in the United States for less explicit yaoi material (Levi 2009, 148).

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slash or slash fiction: American term for fan-created same-sex ro¬ mance narratives based around TV shows, movies, books, and so on, such as Kirk/Spock or K/S slash starring the well-known Star Trek characters. Femslash may be used for work depicting femalefemale romances. The term slash itself refers to the virgule, the typographical slash symbol (/) and not to bloody mayhem as in the expression slasher flick. uke: In Japanese, literally, "the receiver." Used to refer to the more submissive partner in a BL or yaoi narrative. Pronounced oo-keh. (See also chapter 7, note 2, this volume), yaoi: A term originally coined in Japan for BL-themed dojinshi. In the United States, the term is now often used as an umbrella genre term for Japanese BL titles commercially distributed in Jap¬ anese and sometimes English, for Japanese BL-themed dojinshi, and for U.S. fan-produced material based on manga/anime. yuri: "lily." Japanese fiction in various formats about romance be¬ tween two female characters, preteen through adult. Sexual relationships may be depicted between older characters. The term has some use in the United States in reference to Japaneseproduced materials, commercial or fan, and U.S. fan creations based on manga/anime.

U.S. AND JAPANESE COMICS WITH GLBTQ REPRESENTATION In discussing the portrayal of GLBTQ characters in comics, we must be clear about how yaoi and yuri manga represent same-sex desire and homo¬ sexual characters, and how that differs from representations in U.S. comics. While comics produced in the United States featuring GLBTQ characters re¬ flect North American cultural definitions of GLBTQ identities and society, Japanese manga by definition contains signals and stereotypes specific to Ja¬ pan’s history and the Japanese creators’ experiences and attitudes, while also falling in line with the publishers’ defined target audiences. So before we can look at the appeal of yaoi and yuri manga, we must first discuss how these subgenres are similar to and different from what U.S. readers expect when seeking out GLBTQ content in their reading. Our survey respondents actively seek out GLBTQ content in the comics for¬ mat, and a portrait of what is and is not available in U.S. comics provides a necessary framework for looking at yaoi and yuri manga’s appeal to these readers. Same-sex desire is expressed in different ways and with different agendas (by creators, publishers, and characters), but the need for intimacy more intense than friendship between members of the same sex is the basic commonality.

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92 GLBTQ Representation in U.S. Comics

In the United States, inclusion of GLBTQ characters is fueled by a de¬ sire to represent reality and is often paired with a political intent to foster awareness of and acceptance for real-life counterparts (Sabin 1996, 124-26). Historically, GLBTQ comics came from the underground comix scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Gay Comix started by Howard Cruse in 1980 (Kitchen Sink Press, 1980-1984; Bob Ross, 1985-1988, 1991, 1992). Lesbian content was also notably featured in the feminist Wimmen’s Comix (Last Gasp, 1972-1992) (Slade 2001, 941; Kaplan 2006, 86). As comics pro¬ gressed from ubiquitous reading to the more specialized collector market by the 1980s, GLBTQ subjects and characters remained mostly outside of main¬ stream superhero comics but gradually began to make their presence known to the comics world. Today openly homosexual independent creators such as Alison Bechdel {Dykes to Watch Out For, Houghton Mifflin and Alyson Books; Fun Home, Mariner Books), Ariel Schrag {Awkward and Definition and Potential, Touch¬ stone/Simon & Schuster), Diane DiMassa {Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, Cleis Press), and Tim Fish {Cavalcade of Boys, Young Bot¬ toms in Love, Poison Press) are being published by both independent comic publishers and mainstream book publishers. Both underground comix in the past and their descendents in today’s independent comics penned by openly GLBTQ creators and their allies address realistic issues such as coming out, prejudice, political landmarks, and romantic struggles (Sabin 1996, 124). GLBTQ romances in U.S. comics are found mainly in independent comics, such as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’ epic Love and Rockets (Fantagraphics), Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise (Abstract Studio), and Andi Watson’s Paris (SLG). In two examples of manga influence, June Kim’s 12 Days was published by the manga publisher TOKYOPOP, while Abby Denson’s Tough Love: High School Confidential (Manic D Press) was inspired by yaoi titles (Denson n.d.). In U.S. mainstream superhero comics, GLBTQ characters are presented as members of the GLBTQ community integrated into the superhero world. The largest comics publishers—DC Comics, Marvel, and Dark Horse— include GLBTQ characters and relationships to reflect, albeit cautiously, current society. Straight allies as well as openly GLBT creators working within the comics industry have introduced gay, lesbian, and bisexual char¬ acters into ongoing storylines in slowly increasing numbers since the early 1990s when Northstar, a member of the superhero team Alpha Flight and later the X-Men, came out after years of comic book writers implying his homosexual orientation (Lendrum 2004). Representation in superhero com¬ ics today ranges from simply acknowledging a character as GLBTQ to fullfledged same-sex relationships and storylines, although the former is far more common.

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In mainstream examples, storylines are rarely defined as romances as such. Most often gay characters and relationships are only one part of a larger story arc, not its focus. In volumes of The Authority authored by Warren Ellis start¬ ing in 1999 (DC Comics), superhero team members Apollo and Midnighter are gay and a male couple, proceeding to get married and adopt a child, but their relationship is just one of many plots in an overarching political su¬ perhero drama (Ellis 2002). Far more common are storylines such as Judd Winick’s Green Lantern (DC Comics) with the arc “Hate Crime” in 2001. The gay-bashing of Terry Berg, an out gay man who was an assistant to Kyle Raynor (a.k.a. the Green Lantern), broke ground in raising the issue of hate crimes with audiences who may not have encountered such crimes person¬ ally, namely the straight, white young men who are the perceived audience for superhero comics (Lendrum 2004). Ultimately, though, the story zeroes in more on Raynor’s struggle to keep from giving in to revenge, rather than on his gay assistant. Greg Rucka’s Gotham Central (DC Comics) focused on a lead lesbian character in a noteworthy extended story in 2004, covering detective Renee Montoya’s forced outing to her colleagues and the public and addressing the politics and consequences of outing a person against his or her will (Rucka 2005). As more and more GLBTQ characters are added into the mix, there is more time for incidental representation rather than tales intended to carry a specific message. In Young Avengers (Marvel, 2005), two young male members of the teen superhero team, Hulkling and Wiccan, are revealed to be dating by the end of the sixth issue (Heinberg 2005), but their relationship takes a backseat to the dangers of teenagers taking up vigilante justice. In Runaways (Marvel), team member Karolina is revealed to be a lesbian and embarks on a relation¬ ship with an alien fiancee, Xavin, who, due to shape-shifting abilities, can change gender in order to appeal to Karolina’s desires (Vaughan 2006). As of 2006, Batwoman Kate Kane was created as an out lesbian (Heiberg 2006) and as of 2009 has become the lead character in DC’s flagship title, Detective Comics (McElhatton 2009). In all of these mainstream examples, the focus is still on representation rather than relationships, and controversy continues to abound. When hetero¬ sexual Buffy decided to sleep with her lesbian teammate Satsu in 2008’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Horse and creator Joss Whedon were accused of using the scene as a marketing tool (Emily Friedman 2008). In June 2009, X-Factor (Marvel) writer Peter David had former team members Rictor and Shatterstar reunite with a kiss after years of fan speculation about the nature of their relationship (Melrose 2009a). The original creator, Rob Liefield, was adamant that the characters were not gay and determined someday to “undo” the plot development (Melrose 2009b). However, barriers do continue to be broken down. Marvel Comics, which had caught flack in the past for its seemingly abusive treatment of its gay

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characters (Mangels 2006), announced in January 2010 that their new Nation X series will bring back Northstar in a storyline written by openly gay comic creator Tim Fish (Rudolph 2010). And in a surprise development from Archie Comics, an out gay teen joins the Riverdale High crew, attracting the attentions of the fickle Veronica who has not yet learned that he’s gay (Parent 2010).

Same-Sex Desire in Japanese Manga While GLBTQ content is visible only intermittently within the storylines of mainstream U.S. comics, same-sex desire is far more prevalent within mainstream Japanese manga. But despite this prevalence, the appearance of characters and storylines featuring same-sex desire are driven by a distinctly different set of societal and publishing initiatives. The historical acceptance of same-sex desire in Japanese poetry, fiction, and society creates a more fluid awareness of homoeroticism and sexuality. But this does not necessarily imply any mainstream acceptance of homosexuality in Japanese society. While fan¬ tasies in fiction may be accepted, there is still intense social pressure to live a heterosexual life (Ryder 2008), with marriage and children being considered a duty to one’s family and ancestors (Drazen 2003, 101). Within the Japanese arts, there are predecessors for same-sex desire in fic¬ tion and society. Descriptions of homosexual attraction appear as early as the 11th century in the classic novel Tale of Genji (Crompton 2003, 415). The practice of shudo in samurai culture (as with pederasty among the Ancient Greeks) and a similar tradition among Buddhist monks indicate that male same-sex practices have been a part of Japanese society for hundreds of years (McLelland 2005, 16-17). Apprentice actors in all-male kabuki troupes were frequently also prostitutes for male and female clients (McLelland 2005, 16-17). Homosexual acts were not in conflict with our modem definitions of heterosexuality: the act was considered separate from the person and partici¬ pating did not imply any particular preference (McLelland 2004). Within the major religious beliefs prevalent in Japan—Shintoism and Buddhism—there are no prohibitions against homosexual behavior or acts, so that religious sin has never been invoked in Japan in the way it often is in the United States and other Christianity-based cultures elsewhere in the world (McLelland 2004). But cultural attitudes shifted when Japan opened to the West in the 1870s and, in an effort to be perceived as modem and Westernized, the country adopted the then-popular ideas of Freud, which identified homosexuality as a sickness rather than an aspect of human nature (Shamoon 2008, 139). And, the prevalence of GLBTQ characters in Japanese pop culture, from manga to anime to television and films, does not mean GLBTQ members of society are currently accepted. Instead it means the depiction of such char¬ acters and relationships are permitted in fiction (McLelland 2000, 62). The Japanese manga industry was divided early on into target audience groups, taking the cue from earlier prose magazines of the 1920s through the 1940s

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(Schodt 1983, 12-13). Prose magazines were divided by age and gender, therefore manga magazines were launched to appeal to girls and boys sepa¬ rately, as well as to younger (up to teenage) and, later, adult audiences. Samesex themes in girls’ manga either grew out of the cultural acceptance of close female friendships, becoming yuri (Shamoon 2008, 140), or out of attempts to portray sexuality openly at a time when young women were not supposed to express sexual desires, leading to yaoi (Lunsing 2006).

Yuri The Japanese word yuri means “lily,” and its usage to refer to same-sex ro¬ mance manga featuring two women or girls is reportedly linked to magazine editor Bungaku Ito. In 1976, in his gay men’s magazine Barazoku (The rose tribe), Ito started a column for gay women called “Yurizoku no heya” (Lily tribe’s room) (Welker 2006). Because of previous associations with porno¬ graphic manga featuring female-female sexual situations, the term yuri is not always used by Japanese manga creators writing female-female romances to identify their work (Aoki 2008). When it is used, it refers to manga featuring strong friendship, love, and same sex attraction between girls and teenagers (Erica Friedman n.d.). Yuri may feature a close friendship, a kiss, or more explicit sexual encounters. In America, fans sometimes use the term shojo-ai (girls’ love) to mean romantic love between women, reserving yuri for sexual love between women (Erica Friedman n.d.). We have chosen in this chapter to use the term yuri as a blanket term for all manga featuring same-sex desire or relationships between women and girls. Yuri first began in the early part of the 20th century as a type of prose fiction in magazines aimed at girls, when stories of an idealized, relatively chaste love between girls was considered a suitable romantic fantasy for teenage girls. These tales were partly a product of homosocial schooling and social environ¬ ments and partly the societal intention to keep girls pure and, therefore, away from the dangers of heterosexual relationships (Shamoon 2008, 140). They were not considered to be lesbian stories. Instead they were proto-romances, allowing girls to indulge in a romantic ideal. They were considered acceptable because they were confined to this very specific fictional world (Ryder 2008). These first examples of yuri are also notable for the consistently young age of the characters (schoolgirls through teenagers) and in that the characters were both feminine, providing no sense of gender difference between the two lov¬ ers (Shamoon 2008, 141).

TRADEMARK FEATURES OF YURI Yuri's greatest characteristic may well be its lack of definable charac¬ teristics. Since yuri didn't start off with very explicit storylines, fans learned to look for details of style and/or narrative to decide if a title

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was yuri or not (Charlton n.d.). In Japan, the biggest differences in types of yuri are determined by the intended audience. There is yuri written by men for men, yuri written by women for women, and manga writ¬ ten by lesbians. Generally, the titles created for men have more overt sexuality than do the titles written for women (Aoki 2008).

,

Yaoi, Shonen-ai and BL In the 1970s, female manga creators who were already redefining girls’, or shojo, manga in format, style, and storytelling created BL, or shonen-ai, sto¬ rylines (Welker 2006).' The two female protagonists familiar from yuri tales shifted to be two boys falling in love (Shamoon 2008, 141). The terms BL, shonen-ai, and yaoi overlap somewhat among Japanese and American usage (see sidebar glossary), so for clarity and the purposes of this chapter, we are using yaoi as an umbrella term for Japanese and Japanese-inspired works fea¬ turing same-sex desire and relationships between two male characters as seen from the viewpoint of U.S. readers. Yaoi manga contain many of the same elements familiar from shojo romance manga, including first meetings, mutual recognition of romance, the confes¬ sion of love, the progression of intimacy from kissing through (sometimes) sexual activity, dealing with romantic rivals, suspicions of infidelity, and the reaction of the larger world to the pairing. Shojo manga has always been fo¬ cused on the emotional life of the protagonists, to the point of featuring far more internal monologue and emotional content than boys’, or shonen, manga (Takahashi 2008, 125). Yaoi reflects that shojo style of storytelling by follow¬ ing the characters’ internal lives as much as advancing the plot, and the focus is on relationships over any other plotline. Characters may be everything from teenage school boys (Maki Kazumi and Yukine Honami’s Desire, June; Yaya Sakuragi’s Tea for Two, BLU) to police officers (Sanami Matoh’s FAKE, BLU; Yuko Kuwabara’s Alcohol, Shirt and Kiss, June), gangsters (Shiuko Kano’s Yakuza in Love, Deux), boxers (Hinako Takanaga’s Love Round, Deux; Yugi Yamada’s Laugh Under the Sun, June), or samurai (Sanae Rokuya’s Red, June). But the plot remains secondary to the romance. In terms of character design, most yaoi manga creators take their cues from shojo manga, creating tall, beautiful young protagonists who fit the ideals of feminine beauty put forward in girls’ romances (Kinsella 2000, 117) rather than the traditional muscled, masculine physique idealized in traditional U.S. romance novels and/or U.S. gay subculture. Titles that exemplify this look include You Higuri’s Gorgeous Carat (BLU), Takanaga’s You Will Fall in Love (BLU), Toko Kawai’s Cut (801 Media), and Hotaru Odagiri’s Time Lag (June). There are also character traits that are part and parcel of the subgenre, most notably the idea that there is a seme (pronounced se-meh), literally translated

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as “the attacker’’ and here intended to mean the aggressive partner, and an uke (pronounced oo-keh), literally translated as “the receiver” and meaning the submissive partner (Jones 2005). In yaoi, the seme/uke pair is an expec¬ tation among Japanese creators and readers and is represented by how the characters are designed. The seme is larger, stronger, and more traditionally masculine, while the uke is smaller, weaker, and more feminine. In the lan¬ guage of manga character design, the seme has smaller eyes, a strong jaw, and a large physical frame. The uke is small-boned, thin, features larger eyes, and more delicate facial features (Kinsella 2000, 117). Examples of the sometimes extreme difference in character styles between the seme and the uke can be found in works such as Shungiku Nakamura’s Junjo Romantica (BLU), Lily Hoshino’s Mr. Flower Bride (Yen Press), Row Takakura’s I Can’t Stop Lov¬ ing You (Media Blasters/Kitty Media), Nabako Kamo’s Selfish Mr. Mermaid (June), and Tarako Kotobuki’s Love Pistols (BLU). There are creators who favor characters on more equal footing both physically and emotionally— Shinri Fuwa (A Gentleman’s Kiss, June), Makoto Tateno (Yellow, June), Fumi Yoshinaga (Ichigenme, 801 Media), Taishi Zaou {Living for Tomorrow, Doki Doki), and Yugi Yamada {Close the Last Door, June)—leading to a more re¬ alistic although still idealized image for the romantic leads, but the dual tradi¬ tion is prevalent in yaoi. This aspect of romance carried over from shojo romances has been critiqued in the United States as a heteronormative look at relationships and power dy¬ namics (see further on in this chapter). The fact that one partner is masculine and one feminine, from appearance down to character traits, belies the as¬ sertion that yaoi portrays romances between equals. The characters may be perceived by society as having the same worth, both being men, but inside the relationship strict masculine/feminine gender roles are maintained (Thomp¬ son 2007,416). The seme pursues the uke, and plots including nonconsensual sexual encounters and rape are frequently part of the seme confessing and proving his love for the uke. The uke is inexperienced and reluctant in par¬ ticipating in sex while the seme uses sex to persuade, at the very least, the uke into submission as in Kazuma Kadoka’s Kizuna (originally: BeBeautiful; June 2010 rerelease: June), Shungiku Nakamura’s Junjo Romantica (BLU), and Tamotsu Takamure and Sakae Maeda’s Jazz (June). The feminization of the uke has been seen as a stand-in for the female reader, and particularly to represent a young woman’s reluctance to imagine sexual relationships (Gra¬ ved: 2004, 80). Even more complicated, considering the female creators and readers of yaoi, are the consistent worries expressed by the uke of a fear and discomfort in being perceived as submissive both in the act of sex and within the relationship. Characters struggle with this in Youka Nida’s Embracing Love (BeBeautiful), Keiko Konno’s Star (June), and Saika Kunieda’s Future Lovers (Deux). There is little more insulting in many yaoi stories than being perceived as the woman in the relationship, and the uke s resistance to sex is entangled with his unwillingness to be associated with the weakness and

98

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surrender that women represent. (See chapter 7 for more on the origins and current culture in Japan relating to yaoi/BL manga.)

Bara Another publishing movement that occurred at the same time as the de¬ velopment of same-sex romances in shojo manga was the growth of maga¬ zines aimed at homosexual men. The earlier magazines for gay men were private magazines with limited circulation (McLelland 2005, 132—41). In 1971, straight publisher Ito started the afore mentioned Bamzoku, the first commercial gay men’s magazine in Japan, after deciding the time was right and the market was ready (McLelland 2005, 142). Barazoku avoided use of the term gei (gay), because in the 1970s that term was closely tied to the idea of transgenderism and effeminate gay men (McLelland 2005, 142). Instead, Barazoku used the term homo, as did other Japanese gay magazines of that time. In addition to using different terminology to reflect different ideas of what a gay man was or could be, gay magazines also used a new style of ho¬ moerotic art. Unlike the bishonen, or beautiful youths, celebrated in Japan’s past and still being adored in shojo manga, homo magazines used artists such as Mishima Go, who drew men who were hairy, muscular, and wellendowed (McLelland 2005, 135). Bara has come to be the term U.S. fans/ use to talk about manga for gay men, even though it is not used to identify the genre in Japan (Anderson 2008b). There are instead at least two publish¬ ers that print what U.S. fans would identify as bara using the label men’s love (Anderson 2008a). At this time, no bara titles have been translated and published in the United States as bara, though some stories from est em’s collection Red Blinds the Foolish (published as yaoi in the United States by Deux) were originally published in men’s love magazine Gekidan during 2007 and 2008.

Allure of Yaoi and Yuri Manga Yuri and yaoi manga count on the allure of forbidden relationships (Thomp¬ son 2007, 416), implicitly acknowledging that Japanese society at large is not welcoming to GLBTQ people or relationships. As the stories are romances, realistic tinges of drama including discovery, parental disapproval, peer dis¬ approval, and the loss of a traditional life of marriage and children are used only when the couple’s love story needs another stumbling block, not in order to address realistically these myriad issues for actual GLBTQ people in Japa¬ nese society. Protagonists rarely self-identify as gay or lesbian, and instead explain their love as overwhelming the limits of gender or preference (Thom 2004, 177). These romances thus neatly avoid having characters struggle with their sense of self. Conflict surrounding being a public couple is avoided by

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setting the tale in a homosocial, restricted environment such as a same-sex school (Mera Hakamada’s The Last Uniform, Seven Seas; Hyouta Fujiyama’s Ordinary Crush, June). The lovers either show no need or desire to be pub¬ lic about their relationship or only mention the dangers of coming out as a reason to keep quiet about their relationship. There is rarely any sense of ei¬ ther partner wishing to be public about the relationship. Keeping the secret is seen as neither suffocating or in conflict with being proud of the relationship but instead echoes the sentiment that what is private should remain private (Drazen 2003, 90). Creators may lessen the reality of being out to peers and family by addressing these issues only humorously or without any negative reactions. Many yaoi and yuri manga are imbued with the overarching feeling that these relationships cannot last as all young people must eventually grow up, get married, and conform to society. This time limit heightens the romance (Ryder 2008).

Audiences in Japan Intended audiences in Japan are more strictly defined than in the United States. Audience designation is signified mostly by the manga anthology magazines, which cater to a particular subset of the manga audience (Brenner 2007, 22). Manga magazines may be more broad, as with Shonen jump, where the intended audience is boys, tween and teen in age. However, the edi¬ tors and creators are well aware of the crossover audiences among girls and adult men (VIZ Media 2010). While smart editors and publishers are mindful of how their stories might cross over, the specifics of each magazine do re¬ strict what creators might publish. Editors and creators work together to craft stories that suit each publication, and creators move from publication to pub¬ lication precisely so they can try different types and levels of stories (Kinsella 2000, 55-56; Gravett 2004, 15). The approximately 68 Japanese yaoi manga magazines include BeBoy, BeBoy Gold, Drap, Dear+, and GUSH (ComiPedia n.d.). Currently the two yuri-only magazines are Yuri hime (targeted at women) and Yuri hime S (targeted mainly at men) (Aoki 2008).

Audiences in the United States Audiences in the United States do in many cases fall in line with the de¬ marcations set by Japanese publishers. Shonen manga is most often read by tween and teen boys and shojo by tween and teen girls. Yaoi’s audience is primarily women while yuri has both female and male readers. In 2003, when the first yaoi titles were translated into English and released in the United States—Sanami Matoh’s FAKE and Maki Murakami’s Gravitation (both TOKYOPOP) (ICv2 2003)—sales immediately proved that the West¬ ern audience was ready for the genre (ICv2 2004). After TOKYOPOP proved

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the publishing gamble was successful, numerous publishers entered the fray, including Central Park Media’s BeBeautiful imprint and Digital Manga’s June Manga line. From September to November of 2007, 32 of the 87 manga published in the United States were yaoi (ICv2 2007) and, in 2009, a volume of Shungiku Nakamura’s popular series Junjo Romantica became the first yaoi manga to appear on the New York Times Graphic Books Bestseller list (Aoki 2009). There are precedents within the U.S. fiction culture for stories similar to those found in yaoi and yuri. The direct corollary for U.S. manga fans, es¬ pecially those who have become fans after the turn of the millennium, is fan fiction. Fan fiction, or fictional works created by fans using source material from popular novels, television, movies, or videogames, has two subgenres related to homosexual pairings. The first is slash, or tales featuring male/male romances, and the second is femslash, or tales featuring female/female ro¬ mances (Lo 2006) (see glossary, above). Slash started in the United States in the 1970s within the Star Trek fan culture. Stories were written, then traded back and forth through the mail. The arrival of the Internet made slash both more accessible and more visible to the general public (Lo 2006). Slash and yaoi share similar origins: both came from female fans’ desire to create their own romances on their own terms; both draw inspiration from canonical works and shift the stated sexuality of the characters; both range from chaste romance to sexually explicit pornography; and both address issues of gen¬ der, power, and sexuality outside the more mainstream culture that the ca¬ nonical works represent. Femslash, as with yuri and its relation to yaoi, is a much smaller segment of fan fiction, but is also written by women for women (Lo 2006). In the traditional book-publishing world, prose romance is a booming busi¬ ness. With sales at $1.37 billion in 2008, romance novels made up 13.5 percent of the consumer book market (Romance Writers of America n.d.). Original male/male romance fiction, which started being published in the 1990s, first on the Internet, then in e-books, is beginning to move into the print world with publishers such as Running Press (which released its first titles in 2009)— though the subgenre is still too new for the industry to have sales statistics (Alimurung 2009).

SURVEYING GLBTQ READERS IN THE UNITED STATES We began work on this topic because we were interested in how readers who identify as GLBTQ interact with and enjoy yaoi and yuri manga even though they are not the target audience. We wanted to know whether, for ex¬ ample, gay men enjoy reading yaoi or find it too much of a straight woman’s fantasy of gayness, a criticism we had informally heard from GLBTQ col¬ leagues and manga fans.

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Methodology In order to investigate how GLBTQ fans react to yaoi and yuri manga, we reached out through an online survey posted via various U.S. manga interest sites, including: • • • •

yaoi fansites such as Aarinfantasy’s Yaoi Collection (http://www.aann fantasy.com/); yuricon (http://www.yuricon.org/); gay/bisexual men’s entertainment site AfterElton.com (http://www.afterel ton.com/); as well as a variety of manga journalists and bloggers.

Our survey was aimed at GLBTQ readers of yaoi and yuri, though a number of fans of both genres responded who self-identified as heterosexual. Our questions concerned respondents’ manga reading habits in general and, in re¬ lation to yaoi and yuri, what they enjoyed and disliked about these subgenres. In particular, we sought their reactions to the knowledge that although the stories concern same-sex desire, they are not marketed to nor generally writ¬ ten by or for the GLBTQ community. (For a copy of the survey, contact the authors.)

Respondents We stopped collecting information after we received 265 responses. About two-thirds were from women, roughly one-quarter men, and the remainder explained their gender identity as transgender, transsexual, androgynous, or genderqueer (see Figure 6.1). The target female audience for both yaoi and yuri does, by these numbers, seem to hold up in the United States, with fe¬ male readers substantially outnumbering male readers. The targeted nature of our survey’s placement meant more GLBTQ women and men filled out the survey, and the number of GLBTQ readers does show a definite interest from within the community. Among respondents, 77.8 percent identified as other than straight.

Yaoi and Yuri Reading Habits Most readers encountered yaoi and yuri as subgenres through prior famil¬ iarity with Japanese manga or anime: the majority had been reading manga for at least 5 years and many over 10 years (Figure 6.2). When queried about how much of their manga reading is made up of yaoi and yuri titles, the level of commitment to these subgenres varied according to the reader, and only 9.8 percent read only yaoi and yuri (Figure 6.3).

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102 SGay/Lesbian

KBisexual

»Heterosexual

* Other Sexuality*

65.7%

Men (26.l%of respondents)

Women (67.8% of respondents)

Other Gender** (6.1% of respondents)

Total Respondents in Each Sexuality

Figure 6.1. Respondents’ gender and sexuality. *Includes pansexual, asexual, and omnisexual. **Includes respondents who identify as transgender, transsexual, androgynous, and/or genderqueer.

Don’t read it except for yaoi/yuri/BL

jj

10.9%

i 10+years

0-1 years

|

■ 16.7%

|| 1.6%

Figure 6.2. Years reading Japanese manga.

Who reads what? Most heterosexual women preferred yaoi (92.7%) to yuri (34.1%). (See Figure 6.4.) The reverse was true for GLBTQ women: most of GLBTQ women read yuri (87.2%), but over half (56.4%) read yaoi, as well. By comparison, most GLBTQ men read yaoi (86.3%) but few (11.8%) read yuri. All straight men read yuri, while a quarter read yaoi. This further con¬ firms that women are more drawn to these subgenres than men and that within the GLBTQ community, women are the largest readership for both subgenres. The more surprising statistic—that a quarter of straight male respondents do

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Figure 6.3. Percentage of manga read that is yaoi/yuri.

BYaoi

1 Yuri

Figure 6.4. Who reads yaoi/yuri?

read yaoi—may imply that reading yuri, and romances in general, leads to an awareness of and interest in yaoi. When we requested respondents to share their favorite creators and titles (Figures 6.5 and 6.6), their lists show trends as to which audiences favor cer¬ tain creators and types of stories. Many readers listed titles readily available

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Eiki Eiki (Dear Myself, June; Train Train*, Doki Doki) You Higuri (Gorgeous Carat, BLU; Ludwig II, June) Satoru Kannagi, writer & Hotaru Odagiri, artist (Only the Ring Finger Knows, June) Maki Kazumi, writer & Yukine Honami, artist (Desire, June) Kazuma Kodaka (Kizuna, June) Yun Kouga {Loveless*, TOKYOPOP) Sanami Matoh (FAKE, TOKYOPOP) Kano Miyamoto (Say Please, Deux) Maki Murakami (Gravitation, TOKYOPOP) Shungiku Nakamura (Junjo Romantica, BLU) Bohra Naono** (The Future 1 Whisper to You, Libre Shuppan; Three Wolves Mountain, Libre Shuppan) Shuri Shiozu (Eerie Queerie, TOKYOPOP) Hinako Takanaga (Little Butterfly, June) Sooyeon Won (Let Dai, NETCOMICS) Yugi Yamada (Close the Last Door, June; Don’t Blame Me!, June) Ayano Yamane (Foreign Love Affair, 801 Media) Fumi Yoshinaga (The Moon and the Sandals, June; Gerard and Jacques, BLU)

Figure 6.5. Top 20 yaoi creators (in alphabetical order by family name). Note: All yaoi creators in this list are women. *These titles are not considered yaoi titles in terms of publishing and marketing, but the stories incorporate same-sex relationships and desires that make them appealing to yaoi readers. **At the time of the survey, none of her titles had been released in the United States, but multiple respondents mentioned her works. Media Blasters/Kitty Media has since released Yokai’s Hunger (2009).

in English, either those available through traditional means—comic shops, bookstores, and online vendors—or those accessible via scanlation sites. Older titles are frequently mentioned, including the early TOKYOPOP titles FAKE and Gravitation, showing that those titles that have had the longest presence in English remain gateway titles and are still favorites. A number of respondents included titles that are not marketed as yaoi or yuri but have elements that can be interpreted as either one subgenre or the other. Titles such as CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura (TOKYOPOP), Sailor Moon (TOKYOPOP), and Revolutionary Girl Utena (VIZ) were not mar¬ keted or written as what readers think of as yuri; and similarly titles such as CLAMP’s Tokyo Babylon (TOKYOPOP), Higuri’s Cantarella (GoComi), and Kazuya Minekura’s Wild Adapter (TOKYOPOP) are not considered yaoi. Most of these titles are officially shojo or josei (women’s) manga. They are not romances nor are the relationships a main storyline. However, all have elements of same-sex desire that can be read as homosexuality among the characters, and so readers cite them as favorites of the subgenre they enjoy.

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Satoru Akahori, writer [M], and Yukimaru Katsura, artist [F] (Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl, Seven Seas) Miyabi Fujieda [M] (Iono-sama Fanatics, Infinity Studios) Mera Hakamada [UK] (The Last Uniform, Seven Seas) Nanae Haruno** [F] (Pieta, Shueisha) Shizuru Hayashiya** [F] {Strawberry Shake Sweet, Magazine Magazine) Kaishaku [pen-name of Hitoshi Ota & Terumasa Shichinohe; UK] (Kannazuki no Miko: Destiny of Shrine Maiden, TOKYOPOP) Sakurako Kimino, writer [F], and Namuchi Takumi, artist [F] {Strawberry Panic! Seven Seas) Torajiro Kishi [M] {Maka-maka, Media Blasters/Kitty Media) Mako Komao, writer [UK] & Mizuo Shinonome, artist [UK] {First Love Sisters, Seven Seas) Oyuki Konno,** writer [F], and Satoru Nagasawa, artist [UK] {Maria-sama ga miteru, Shueisha) Milk Morinaga** [F] (Girl Friends, Futabasha) Chiho Saito [F] (Revolutionary Girl Utena*, VIZ Media) Takako Shimura** [F] (Aoi hana, Ohta Shuppan) Rica Takashima [F] (Rica ‘tte Kanjil? ALC Publishing) Naoko Takeuchi [F] (Sailor Moon*, Kodansha) Ebine Yamaji** [F] (Indigo Blue, Shodensha; Love My Life, Shodensha) Figure 6.6. Top 20 yuri creators (in alphabetical order by family name). Note: Gender is given after creator’s name: M = male; F = female; UK = unknown. *These titles are not considered yuri titles in terms of publishing and marketing, but they have same-sex relationships and desires that make them appealing to yuri readers. **These creators and their titles mentioned are not yet available in English as of July 2011.

Story Preferences Yaoi The types of stories favored by yaoi readers range through a variety of set¬ tings and types. FAKE follows two New York cops falling for each other while solving crimes and fighting personal demons. Gravitation, set in the world of pop music, portrays a romance between the hyper, naive teen pop idol Shuichi Shindo and the cold, reserved novelist Eiri Yuki. Foreign Love Affair is a de¬ liberately over-the-top romance between an Italian cruise ship captain and the son of a Japanese yakuza. Among the top 20 yaoi creators favored were Yoshinaga, Takanaga, Kano Miyamoto, Yugi Yamada, and others known for including more realistic ele¬ ments such as coming out (The Moon and the Sandals), struggling with soci¬ ety’s acceptance (Saika Kunieda’s Future Lovers, Deux), and family conflicts (Nitta’s Embracing Love). Their titles may still emphasize melodrama and humor, but the realistic notes ground the romances more in our world than in an idealized version. The appearance of these creators in the top 20 reflects

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what many respondents said in their comments: that U.S. yaoi readers prefer titles that reflect some level of reality over titles that are primarily fantasy. Considering preferences by gender, GLBTQ and heterosexual women both mentioned a wide range of yaoi creators and titles, from melodramatic com¬ edies or period fantasies such as Gravitation or Gorgeous Carat to the more grounded offerings of Yoshinaga and Nitta. GLBTQ men mentioned a number of the same yaoi creators and titles as fe¬ male readers did, including Gravitation, FAKE, and Yoshinaga’s many works including Gerard and Jacques and Antique Bakery. But certain creators were mentioned only by gay men, including Akimi Yoshida (Banana Fish, VIZ), Akira Honma (The Judged, DramaQueen), Hirotaka Kisaragi {Innocent Bird, BLU), Marimo Ragawa {New York, New York, Hakusensha; not published in English at this time), and Ritsu Natsumizu {Love Bus Stop, June). These titles together do follow the general trend of gay and bisexual men being drawn to more realistic romantic tales than over-the-top melodrama. Creators who feature more realistic, slice-of-life tales, including Yoshinaga, Yugi Yamada, and Satosumi Takaguchi {Shout Out Loud!, BLU), did rank higher in mentions by gay men. However, the variety of titles and creators they mentioned included as many silly romances, fantasies, and melodramas as female yaoi readers enjoyed. The three mentions of bara artists Gengoroh Tagame, Takeshi Matsu, and Tsukasa Matsuzaki, who have no work available in English, also came from gay or bisexual men.

Yuri Yuri titles also ranged widely, from humorous, light romances such as Strawberry Shake Sweet or Maria-sama ga miteru (Maria watches over us) to much more realistic titles such as Indigo Blue. The top yuri creators mentioned produce a range of story types. Sweet schoolgirl romances are the most widely visible yuri, and the titles of Oyuki Konno, Shizuru Hayashiya, and Milk Morinaga were thus at the top of many yuri fans’ lists. Miyabi Fujieda brings fantas¬ tical romantic comedy to the table, but Ebine Yamaji crafts much more realistic glimpses of young lesbian life, featuring conflicts with family and society. Straight men, the minority group of the survey, are predominantly yuri read¬ ers and mentioned many of the same creators as our female yuri readers did, including Hayashiya, Fujieda, Konno, and Morinaga. There was no notable tendency for straight male readers to prefer titles created by men, but a larger survey of heterosexual male readers of yuri might provide a clearer picture of affinity to male-authored titles for this audience. Of all of these yuri creators, Konno, Hayashiya, Morinaga, and Yamaji are not yet available in English. (Morinaga and Yamaji are available in French.) However, further down the list of top creators, a number of yuri creators avail¬ able in English do appear, including Sakurako Kimino, Kaishaku, Satoru Akahori and Yukimaru Katsura, and Mera Hakamada. A few of the titles by these

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creators, including Kaishaku’s Kannazuki no Miko: Destiny of Shrine Maiden and Akahori and Katsura’s Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl, are aimed a male audience, either being written by a male creator and/or being originally pub¬ lished in a shonen magazine. Sakurako Kimino’s Strawberry Panic! is based on a popular video game intended primarily for men, with a female creator penning the manga. While yaoi and yuri readers may enjoy a wide variety of creators and ti¬ tles, their stated favorites demonstrate that once they discover a subgenre they enjoy, they are willing to look for more of the same in diverse places. Yuri readers, faced with only a handful of titles available in English, are especially willing to seek out yuri through other means. They were more inclined to men¬ tion anime titles, including Simoun and Mai-Otome, showing a willingness to move beyond one format for more of the same content. Additionally, in the Internet age, fans can find far more online than what is available in English in print. Yuri fans are a strong and loyal community, so their online presence is organized and inviting to new fans. Scanlations—or scanned, translated, and downloadable digital copies of manga otherwise currently available only in Japanese—have become a way for any manga fan to read content from Japan, despite the illegality of such practices according to international copyright laws (Deppey 2005). Scanlations can be found through a variety of online sources. Yaoi fans as well use scanlation sites to find both new and old yaoi titles. GLBTQ women mentioned individual yuri works far more often than they mentioned non-yuri titles that could be construed as yuri, with the top yuri creators being mentioned by over 20 respondents. Considering the overall number of creators discussed, 36 percent of creators or titles mentioned by GLBTQ women are known for yuri, while 64 percent of creators or titles men¬ tioned are known for yaoi. This imbalance in the creators and titles is partially due to the very few yuri titles available either in print in English or online via scanlations. However, it also shows that GLBTQ women are, more than any other group, willing to embrace the alternate sexualities represented in both yaoi and yuri and do not limit their reading to yuri, the obvious choice given their expressed sexuality. A few artists, especially those that cross over in some way, were mentioned frequently by all types of readers. Yun Kouga, the creator behind Earthian (BLU), a classic boys’ love title, and her more risque non-yaoi title Loveless, was mentioned by yaoi and yuri readers of both genders. This likely occurred because even though Loveless has a yaoi vibe, it also features a strong yuri storyline in the fourth volume.

Appeal to U.S. Audiences Many articles and discussions (Thom 2004, 177; Camper 2006, 24) have addressed why the target audiences of straight women read and enjoy yaoi. Others have discussed how yuri is often perceived to be for straight men

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(Ryder 2008) or pornography (Charlton n.d.). But there is still fervent debate over the exact whys of the two genres’ appeal. Although readers seem to enjoy yaoi and yuri for diverse reasons, fans do give a few common answers when queried about their interest.

Likes Romance. For heterosexual women, the majority of responses indicated that the main appeal was simple: the stories are sexy and romantic. For this group, yaoi is appealing because looking at two gorgeous men falling in love or lust fulfdls their desires in terms of aesthetics and amorous tales. The appeal of romance to U.S. women is a proven market, and traditionally they are the target audience for genre romance prose novels. Women are also aggressively offered romance via other media such as romantic comedy fdms and televi¬ sion shows. As yaoi and yuri follow the tropes of the romance genre, the ap¬ peal of these stories to a female audience in the United States is not surprising, despite the genders of the romantic pair. Whereas gay and bisexual men responded with a variety of reasons for en¬ joying yaoi, many gay and bisexual men include the same reasons for enjoy¬ ing yaoi that heterosexual female readers do: they find it sexy. And because they are gay or bi they love reading lighter romances featuring same-sex de¬ sire. As with female readers, they enjoy seeing titles that reflect emotional attachment and romance as much or more than sex as the focus of a narrative. No identity expectations. In the case of yaoi, female readers liked feeling free of the expectation to identify with female characters. Many cited not en¬ joying heterosexual romances as much because of the sense that they were supposed to identify with the female lead, whereas with yaoi, they could choose who to identify with or they could step back from identifying with either partner. As one reader put it, Yaoi is . . . hot, whereas most media, being hot is what the girl has to do. In the media women are objectified, we’re the objects of sexual desire, but yaoi caters to what women want, without asking us to be anything. Best and only option. A number of men specifically cited the lack of gay male representation in other comics as the main reason they sought out yaoi; it became the only option. As one respondent commented, I read super-hero comics for a long time, and the only gay characters were these chin-up, sexless third-tier characters whose sexuality was referenced but never portrayed. So when I heard that there was a whole category of manga about same-sex relationships, I was eager to check it out. And the ones that actually do portray proper characters living rounded lives who act on their sexuality are really rewarding reading.

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Variety beyond realism. Stories that venture beyond realism and modem slice-of-life tales are also a plus for gay and bi male readers. One respondent commented, “They tend to feature storylines that differ from typical western ‘coming-out’ or ‘dealing with homophobia’ gay movies.” Another stated, [Yaoi] runs the gamut of being short and sweet, intense and steamy, or ach¬ ingly heartwarming. Sates the hunger for fiction where the knight in shining armor rides away into the sunset with dashing young squire behind his back. One respondent even commented that the fact that both women and men enjoy yaoi makes a connection that has rarely been forged in erotic media before: Despite its original purpose of being made by women and for women, it has become probably the only form of pornography that can be shared, enjoyed and discussed between both genders, almost independently of their sexual preferences. Matches reader gender preferences. GLBTQ women are drawn to yuri for similar reasons: seeing two cute girls or women fall in love is precisely what will push their romantic and sexual buttons. Many GLBTQ women bemoaned the lack of such light, romantic stories between women available in any other media, and so were delighted to find such stories in manga. The yuri that these women have found—from those in print in English to those available on online forums—tend to feature emotion above physical intimacy. Manga in general can be considered to be more concerned with emotions and rela¬ tionships than stereotypical Western comics or stories (Gravett 2006). Since yuri often focuses on the emotional storyline by using the shojo convention of featuring internal monologues and intimate thoughts as much, if not more so, than actual conversations, the emotional content of the subgenre is pushed to the forefront. Romance first, then sex. All readers were upfront about the visual appeal of explicit sexual encounters and had no qualms showing disappointment when the stories they read were not explicit enough for their tastes. But romance, rather than sexual acrobatics, was another significant appeal for all fans of these subgenres. A number of readers noted they enjoy romances of all types of pairings, and that the romance itself was the draw, not who was falling in love with whom. Most readers acknowledged that these romances are unre¬ alistic but did not count that as a barrier to enjoyment. One female reader stated. These remind me of the Harlequin Romances I read as a teen—heavy on the romance/angst, light on reality. Pure fun escape without running the risk of meeting up with my real life.

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Dislikes Thin stories. Heterosexual female readers of yaoi and yuri focused their cri¬ tiques on story issues, rather than the characters’ presented sexual identities or the creator’s accuracy in reflecting GLBTQ relationships. Common critiques of both yaoi and yuri from heterosexual readers pointed out as irritants a lack of cohesive action, little or no explanation of why couples end up together, inane plots, and/or a lack of character development. All of our readers be¬ moaned the lack of an actual plot. A majority of yaoi and yuri stories seem to run entirely on the romance plotline without providing a context or suspense in the sequence of events. In fact, some readers preferred to stick with series that have little or no actual relationship content, like Cantarella (GoComi), CLAMP’s X/1999 (VIZ) or Wild Adapter (TOKYOPOP), where they could enjoy the complex plots while also savoring the simmering sexual tension. Distasteful stereotypes. While female readers of yaoi felt released from the stereotypes surrounding female characters, yaoi readers of both genders acknowledged that yaoi is just as likely to perpetuate distasteful stereotypes about male characters. The most troublesome factor mentioned over and over again by both male and female readers of all sexual persuasions was the in¬ sistence that the couples must conform to a hetero-normative set. There must be one strong, macho partner and one submissive, feminine partner. The ex¬ tremes of this trope rankle because the feminine partner is essentially indistin¬ guishable in attitude and appearance from a typical heroine. Similarly, there is a limited set of types for character design: in yaoi, all of the young men are tall, slim, and beautiful. Some variety is offered by bara, wherein the men are drawn in a style akin to the “bear” aesthetic in the United States: heavier, mus¬ cular, and masculine. At this point, though, there are very few creators who draw men with body-types anywhere in between the sylvan yaoi type and the substantial bara type. One recently translated creator, est em, has successfully caught the attention of traditional yaoi readers by featuring characters that are neither androgynous waifs nor bulky muscle-men. Seduce Me After the Show, Red Blinds the Foolish (both from Deux), and An Age Called Blue (NETCOMICS) were all published in English after the survey was in progress. Sameness in characters and plots. Women who read yaoi and yuri, what¬ ever their stated sexual orientation, found the lack of diversity in lead char¬ acters and plotlines tiresome. With yaoi, many readers expressed annoyance at the same plots and set-ups being told over and over again. As for yuri, the majority of titles available in English, and much that is available only in Japa¬ nese, focus on schoolgirls and teenagers. Romantic cliches are also an intense deterrent for me when I look for a yaoi/ BL/yuri title. So many titles lean too heavily on popular themes such as: highschool student/teacher, pet/owner, “not gay” characters having same sex experiences, doctor/patient, thug/victim, mythological/magical encoun-

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ters, etc., that many can look and even read quite alike. There are certainly books which use these common themes and make compelling reads from them, but they are difficult to sort from the predictable and similar titles. All-teen content. As many GLBTQ women in the United States are looking for some reflection of their own fantasies and desires, they in particular were disappointed by the lack of adult characters and storylines within yuri: Also, the fixation on high schoolers gets old. I mean, is it too much to want to read about *adults* having sex? I’m all for the first stirrings of young love, but that’s only a tiny aspect. Not enough realism. Yuri may satisfy the romantic urge to see two women fall in love, but the lack of realism in the setting and environment of many yuri stories can be a drawback for readers hoping for a bit more real-life stakes in their romances. As one reader put it. Although I am a fan of fluff, sometimes the sheer number of it is too much. I want longer, well-thought-out plots, which involve more than just ro¬ mance, but also the character’s dreams, occupations, quirks. It’s all about balance and variety. GLBTQ men were at once tolerant of and frustrated by the fact that yaoi does not represent any realistic portrayal of gay men or their lives. One gay man noted the extreme representations as a turn off: Most characters in yaoi appear to be men from Mars—that is, it’s not that the reality of being gay isn’t well represented, but that the characters fre¬ quently don’t act like any men or even boys that I’ve ever seen anywhere. Many GLBTQ men were tom between the fact of yaoi’s existence and their complaints about the subgenre. On the one hand, they can get light, entertain¬ ing romances and erotica that feature two men. On the other hand, they must put up with the fact that the look and content of these manga remind them they are not the intended audience. One reader discusses the pull between the two sides: People don’t pick up a BL/yaoi book to read a realistic story about queer characters, they read them purely as escapist fluff. As long as both read¬ ers and authors of BL/yaoi comics are honest to themselves about that, it doesn’t bother me. I can think of it this way: no gays were harmed in the making of these comics. Granted: the portrayal of queer people is wildly unrealistic in BL/yaoi. But then again, so is the portrayal of queer characters

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in most other media. The difference is that these comics feature an unrealis¬ tically positive portrayal of queer characters (everyone in a BL book is thin, pretty and impeccably dressed, and all life’s troubles soon melt away), as opposed to the unrealistically negative portrayal of queer characters seen in most other media. Objectionable content. For most readers, the ludicrous or unrealistic ele¬ ments of yaoi and yuri, from magical twists, to blissful fairy-tale endings, are enjoyed or tolerated as part of the fantasy. In fact, many readers cited the fantastical elements of yaoi and yuri as part of the appeal. However, there are certain unrealistic aspects of yaoi and yuri manga that readers do find objec¬ tionable. In Japanese manga, particularly in those manga that explore sexual and romantic fantasies, creators feel free to push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in real society. Sexual fantasies featuring force, family members, and young partners are in Japan considered intriguing topics for exploration and speculation though any real-life act on these desires would be considered unacceptable and objectionable. These subjects are allowed only because they are fictional. So yaoi and yuri titles can include sequences where one character rapes the other with the intent of proving their commitment or forcing an ad¬ mission of love by provoking a physical reaction in the reluctant partner. Portrayed as romantic and persuasive within the story, this type of nonconsensual encounter was a frequently cited turn-off for readers, particularly when it was considered part and parcel of a romantic scene. One female reader commented, I don’t love the whole rape fantasy scene. I understand the “cultural context” of it (forcing someone to admit feelings) and that it is fantasy, but the appeal of the truly violent scenes (and the subsequent falling in love) escapes me. As another straight female reader put it, “Rape fantasies have their place, but not in love stories.” Moreover, yaoi and yuri both periodically feature tales featuring sibling in¬ cest either within the main plot or as a side story attached to a longer storyline, and a number of readers expressed distaste for these incest plotlines. The more difficult to pin down artistic and story qualities of lolicon and shota, which generally portray girls or boys, respectively, as looking or actually being prepubescent, were also a strong turnoff. No yaoi and yuri readers admitted to seeking out these types within the subgenre, and no lolicon or shota titles have been licensed in English. A couple of readers admit they might read stories with these elements in them if the creator or artist was talented enough to con¬ vince them of the narrative or romantic necessity, but very few readers were willing to overlook these deal breakers.

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Overall Assessment As most yaoi and yuri are written as fantasy for straight audiences and rarely represent what is it to be GLBTQ either in Japan or anywhere else, we asked whether GBTLQ readers found these stories annoying, refreshing, or something else entirely. The responses showed that readers were divided among these three reactions. Annoying. Those who found the fantasy of yaoi and yuri annoying under¬ stood the limits of the subgenre but wished for more. One male reader de¬ scribed yaoi conventions as, “. . . not evil or malicious, just annoying and in the end, boring. It strikes me as straight girl fantasies put into guys’ bodies.” Others expressed distaste for the hypocrisy that they see in portraying gay and lesbian characters but lending them almost zero credibility as characters with real concerns: It can be very annoying, depending on how it’s written. Some are clearly meant to be silly fluff, but when they take themselves super seriously, hyp¬ ing up the melodrama, and yet never deal with real gay issues . . . it’s just exhausting and eye-roll worthy. Similarly, the convention of having characters that don’t identify as gay or lesbian grated: I much prefer stories in which the characters actually identify as homosex¬ ual, instead of pretending that homosexuality is something that other people do, while they’ve just happened to fall in love with a person of the same sex. Many readers expressed annoyance not so much with the trend of romantic unreality but instead with the fact that there was so much yaoi and yuri avail¬ able without any other representation of GLBTQ characters or lives. There were a few statements where readers preferred some representation over none. As one reader noted. Not every yaoi, BL, and yuri story should be a solid reflection of real GLBTQ life as variation keeps new stories appearing, but the lack of GLBTQ aspects in what appears to be a majority of stories is irritating; it is as if they are being deliberately ignored by most writers. Another concern is that heterosexual readers will confuse the representations of GLBTQ people in yaoi and yuri with the reality of GLBTQ life in Japan or in general: It never bothered me before, in the early days I never read BL/yaoi for any sort of depiction of reality. I do however cringe when western readers get

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so caught up in the unrealism that they assume this is how GLBTQ are in Japan. It’s culture fetish in the worst way, and it’s disturbing. Asking the question did provoke many readers to express wishes for more representation of what it is really like to be GLBTQ in Japan. A few wondered if English-speaking readers have just not yet had the chance to see the more realistic titles being produced. This is also when readers cited particular titles as being akin to what they most desire. Yoshinaga’s works, Takaguchi’s Shout Out Loud!, Nitta’s Embracing Love, and Takanaga’s Little Butterfly were all mentioned as examples of yaoi titles that successfully combine the escapist romance that readers desired with real-life concerns such as coming out and society’s attitudes towards homosexuality. Refreshing. A number of respondents identified both fantasy and realistic elements in their response: they found the fantasy of a world where being GLBTQ was a nonissue refreshing, but at the same time they wished for more realistic representation of GLBTQ life. Many readers expressed a desire for manga that were more realistic about GLBTQ lives and issues in Japan and other settings but said that they would want those titles in addition to yuri and yaoi, not instead of them. That said, yuri readers considered yuri titles such as Maria-sama ga miteru. The Last Uniform, and Strawberry Shake Sweet as closer to their own reality than yaoi might be for gay men, acknowledg¬ ing that yuri creators are more often women writing about women like they themselves are, and so do not attempt to fit their pairs into gendered boxes in the way women yaoi creators do when writing about men—a less familiar species. However, most readers emphasized that they could ignore any problems because they knew what they were getting at the beginning: they were well aware that these titles are fantasies, romances, and outside of reality. Those who considered yaoi and yuri refreshing listed many reasons. Many noted that it’s not as if all fiction, especially romances, are considered realistic represen¬ tations, and they did not expect more realism from manga than they did from their prose reading. As one reader exclaimed, I don’t know that I need my manga to reflect the more issuey and com¬ plicated and depressing nuances of being GLBTQ, because they’re totally like romance novels! Only gay! And with pictures! Which is awesome. We deserve to have those too, not just bad porn and depressing realistic fiction. Another chimed in, “I want a romantic utopia I can flip open, read from right to left and escape into.” Hopeful and empowering. Many readers were drawn to yaoi and yuri be¬ cause they present an ideal or hopeful world where being GLBTQ is no longer an issue and couples are faced not with sexuality-specific issues but instead focus on the joys and pitfalls of romance that occur no matter who the couple

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is. “I like the fact that there is very little conflict with the outside world, that the relationship is the focus and not how society sees it. It’s delightful to have romance without judgment.” The idea of stepping into a world, as one reader puts it, “... where straight couples and homophobia do not rule society,” is an empowering fantasy, and many readers hope that even such fantastical repre¬ sentations may lead to furthering acceptance. “I find it refreshing; it’s a break from the outside world. It gives you some kind of hope that your future can turn out like that.”

CONCLUSION Even though yaoi and yuri manga are not written for a GLBTQ audience nor intended to be an accurate representation of GLBTQ life, these stories of love against the odds are enjoyed and even embraced by GLBTQ fans in the United States. Those fans are aware of the shortcomings, stereotypes, and fantasies that complicate yaoi and yuri’s reflection of their lives, and they are justifiably critical. However, readers continue to enjoy them because of and in spite of those failings. In our survey, we have only scratched the surface of GLBTQ yaoi and yuri readership. There is still much that can be learned. Our research touches on connections between shojo romance readers and yaoi and yuri readers, and further research is warranted into the connections to read¬ ing shojo manga in general, as well as the connections between the broader genres of romance, regardless of format. As the readers and the texts continue to evolve, the portrait of readers will undoubtedly change. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, where will yaoi and yuri fandom go for U.S. English-speakers? Does the future lie in creators from countries other than Japan? ALC Publishing’s Yuri Monogatari anthologies— six, as of March 2009—showcase yuri from creators all over the world. Yaoi Press has published “global yaoi manga”: titles created since 2004 feature art¬ ists from countries such as Spain, Italy, Prance, and the United States. NETCOMICS is releasing Korean boys’ love titles in print and online. Certainly, a young generation of U.S. creators are combining the romance of yaoi and yuri with the realism they desire to see via titles such as Abby Denson’s Tough Love: High School Confidential (Manic D Press), June Kim’s 12 Days, and Jen Lee Quick’s Off*beat (both TOKYOPOP). Online readers can find newer titles created by U.S. fans published independently. Alex Woolfson has pub¬ lished comics issues online at Yaoi91 l.com including A Shot in the Dark and Tough! Tina Anderson, well known in the U.S. BL community, has published in print (Only Word via the now defunct Iris Print) and through Digital Man¬ ga’s eManga online reading platform, releasing Games with Me in 2009. What effect will legal, publisher-driven online content have on the Ameri¬ can yaoi and yuri market? NetComics allows readers to read many licensed yaoi titles online for 25 cents a chapter. Yaoi publisher Digital Manga Pub¬ lishing (DMP) has a new eManga site where readers can read DMP titles

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and even submit their own titles for possible online publication. Fans of yaoi and yuri will continue to do what they have done since the early days of both subgenres—join together to enjoy stories, create new works, and look at love through a different lens.

NOTE 1. Both the Internet and Anglophone literature on yaoi and BL are very large (see, e.g., Aoyama 2009).

REFERENCES Alimurung, Gendy. 2009. “Man on Man: The New Gay Romance . . . Written by and for Straight Women.” LA Weekly (December 16). http://www.laweekly.com/2009-12-17/ art-books/man-on-man-the-new-gay-romance/. Anderson, Tina. 2008a. “Menslove Sales Stats . . . for the Second Half of 2008.” Gun’s Guy’s and Yaoi Blog, http://ggymeta.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/menslovesales-stats/. Anderson, Tina. 2008b. “That Damn Bara Article!” Gun’s Guy’s and Yaoi Blog, http:// ggymeta.wordpress.com/popular-gay-manga-posts/that-bara-article/. Aoki, Deb. 2008. “Interview: Erica Friedman.” Manga. About.com. http://manga.about. com/od/mangaartistswriters/a/EFriedman.htm. Aoki, Deb. 2009. “NY Times Manga Bestsellers: Boys Fove Manga Breaks into Top Ten.” Manga. About.com (July 17). http://www.manga.about.com/b/2009/07/17/ny-timesmanga-bestsellers-boy s-love-manga-breaks-into-top-10.htm. Aoyama, Tomoko. 2009. “Eureka Discovers Culture Girls, Fujoshi, and BL: Essay Review of Three Issues of the Japanese Fiterary Magazine Yuriika (Eureka).” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20 (April), http://intersections.anu.edu. au/issue20/aoyama.htm. Brenner, Robin. 2007. Understanding Manga and Anime. Westport, CT: Fibraries Unlimited. Camper, Cathy. 2006. “Yaoi 101: Girls Fove ‘Boys’ Fove.’” Women’s Review of Books 23 (3): 24-26. Charlton, Sabdha. n.d. “Yuri Fandom on the Internet.” Yuricon. http://www.yuricon.org/ essays/yuri_fandom.html. ComiPedia. n.d. “Search: Yaoi Magazines.” http://comipedia.com/search/node/yaoi%20 category%3A10%20yaoi. Accessed October 25, 2010. Crompton, Fouis. 2003. Homosexuality and Civilization. Boston: Harvard University Press. Denson, Abby. n.d. “Tough Love.” AbbyComix. http://www.abbycomix.com/tough_love. Deppey, Dirk. 2005. “Scanlation Nation: Amateur Manga Translators Tell their Stories.” The Comics Journal 269 (July 13). http://archives.tcj.com/269/n_scan.html. Drazen, Patrick. 2003. Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Ellis, Warren. 2002. The Absolute Authority. Fa Jolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics. Friedman, Emily. 2008. “Buffy’s Romp: Marketing Ploy or Part of the Plot?” ABC News/Enter tainment (March 6). http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=4396156&page=l.

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Friedman, Emily, n.d. “What Are Yuri and Shoujoai, Anyway?” Yuricon. http://www.yuri con.org/essays/whatisyuri.html. Gravett, Paul. 2004. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King. Gravett, Paul. 2006. “Manga: An Introduction.” PaulGravett.com (April 23). http://www. paulgravett.com/index.php/articles/article/manga/. Heinberg, Allan. 2005. Young Avengers. Vol. 1, Sidekicks. New York: Marvel Comics. Heiberg, Michelle. 2006. “Batwoman’s Lesbian Identity Is No Secret to Comic Book Fans.” AfterEllen (July 24). http://www.afterellen.eom/Print/2006/7/batwoman.html. ICv2. 2003. “More Manga from Tokyopop.” ICv2 (January 27). http://www.icv2.com/ articles/news/2289 .html. ICv2. 2004. “ICv2 Picks Manga Top 50.” ICv2 (April 22). http://www.icv2.com/articles/ news/4721 .html. ICv2. 2007. “Manga Surge on the Horizon: 87 New Series in the Fall.” ICv2 (July 6). http:// www.icv2.com/articles/news/10866.html. Jones, Vanessa E. 2005. “He Loves Him, She Loves Them: Japanese Comics about Gay Men Are Increasingly Popular among Women.” Boston Globe (April 25). http://www. boston. com/ae/books/articles/2005/04/25/he_loves_him_she_loves_them/. Kaplan, Arie. 2006. Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed! Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Neil Caiman and More. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture & Power in Contemporary Japanese Soci¬ ety. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lendrum, Robert. 2004. “Queering Super-Manhood: The Gay Superhero in Contemporary Mainstream Comic Books.” Journal for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology 2 (2): 69-73. http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/gr_jm_arts_sci/v3/pdf/V.2-2PDF/v22_lendrum.pdf. Levi, Antonia. 2009. “North American Reactions to Yaoi.” In The Japanification of Chil¬ dren’s Popular Culture. Edited by Mark I. West, 147-74. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Lo, Malinda. 2006. “Fan Fiction Comes out of the Closet.” AfterEllen (January 4). http:// www.afterellen.com/Print/2006/l/fanfiction.html?page=0%2C0. Lunsing, Wim. 2006. “Yaoi Ronso: Discussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japa¬ nese Girls’ Comics, Gay Comics and Gay Pornography.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 12 (January), http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issuel2/ lunsing.html. Mangels, Andy. 2006. “In and Out: A Brief History of Marvel’s 2006 Gay Policies.” Prism Comics (October 10). http://prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1304. McElhatton, Greg. 2009. “Detective Comics #854.” Comic Book Resources (June 25). http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id= 1154. McLelland, Mark. 2000. Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and So¬ cial Realities. Oxford, England: Routledge.

McLelland, Mark. 2004. “Japan.” GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/japan,3.html. McLelland, Mark. 2005. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers. Melrose, Kevin. 2009a. “Add Two More Names to the List of Gay Superheroes.” Robot 6. Comic Book Resources (June 29). http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/06/ add-two-more-names-to-the-list-of-gay-superheroes/. Melrose, Kevin. 2009b. “Liefield ‘Can’t Wait to Someday Undo’ Shatterstar Develop¬ ment.” Robot 6. Comic Book Resources (July 3). http://robot6.comicbookresources. com/2009/07/liefield-cant-wait-to-someday-undo-shatterstar-development/.

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Parent, Dan. 2010. “Isn’t it Bromantic?” Veronica 202 (November): 1-24. Romance Writers of America, n.d. “Romance Literature Statistics: Industry Statistics; 2008 ROMStat Report.” Romance Writers of America, http://www.rwanational.org/cs/ the_romance_genre/romance_literature_statistics/industry_statistics. Rucka, Greg. 2005. Gotham Central: Half a Life. New York: DC Comics. Rudolph, Christopher. 2010. “Tim Fish Makes His X-Men Debut.” Popnography. Out.com. (January 12). http://www.popnography.com/2010/01/tim-fish-makes-his-xmen-debut. html. Ryder, Caroline. 2008. “Lost in Translation.” The Advocate (October 21): 49-53. http:// www.advocate.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/Art/Lost_in_Translation/. Sabin, Roger. 1996. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press. Schodt, Frederik. 1983. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Shamoon, Deborah. 2008. “Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics, and Contemporary Japanese Culture.” In Japanese Visual Culture: Explora¬ tions in the World of Manga and Anime. Edited by Mark W. MacWilliams, 137-54. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Slade, Joseph W. 2001. Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Takahashi, Mizuki. 2008. “Opening the Closed World of Shojo Manga.” In Japanese Visual Culture: Exploration in the World of Manga and Anime. Edited by Mark W. MacWil¬ liams, 114-36. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Thompson, Jason. 2007. Manga: The Complete Guide. New York: Del Rey. Thorn, Matthew. 2004. “Girls and Women Getting out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan’s Amateur Comics Community.” In Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan. Edited by William W. Kelly, 169-87. New York: State University of New York Press, http://www.matt-thorn.com/shoujo_manga/outofhand/ index.php. Vaughan, Brian K. 2006. Runaways. Vol. 5, Escape to New York. New York: Marvel Comics. VIZ Media. 2010. Shonen Jump 2010 Media Kit. San Francisco: VIZ Media. http://shon enjump.viz.com/mediakit/images/SHONENJUMPMediaKit2010.pdf. Welker, James. 2006. “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: ‘Boys’ Love’ as Girls’ Love in Shojo Manga.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (3): 841-70.

7 Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Boys’ Love, Masculinity, and Sexual Identities MARK McHARRY

Boys’ love or BL (see glossary for terminology) emerged in the late 1960s as women in Japan began creating commercial manga about young males in ho¬ moerotic relationships and self-publishing similarly themed comics (dojinshi) using young male characters taken from popular shonen (boys) manga. Today in Japan and elsewhere, the genre comprises not only manga and dojinshi but also anime, fan fiction, artwork, fan and commercial videos, cosplay, video games, audio CDs, posters, movies, and related forms. One of the latter is the recent emergence of commercial English-language male-on-male romance fiction marketed to women (Wilson 2010).

GLOSSARY bara: "rose." Japanese fiction about male-male romance produced for male homosexual readers in various formats. Content and drawing styles usually differ from those in BL (see below)/yaoi work, which is produced for female readers; bara male charac¬ ters tend toward muscular and overtly masculine, bishonen: "beautiful boy." Japanese term for a male aesthetic typi¬ cally characterized by beauty and grace tending toward androg¬ yny, usually with full or long hair. A bishonen type may range from preteen through mature maleness. Shortens to bishie col¬ loquially in the United States.

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Fans hips and Art boys' love, BL: An expression used in Japan for commercially pro¬ duced fiction in various formats that features male-male romance and may feature sex, developed typically for female consumers on a par with other romance narratives. The term is also used for the genre as such. Males can be of any age, typically teen through full adulthood. The term shonen-ai (see below) is also used, dojinshi: Japanese fan-produced comics. Dojinshi may but doesn't always reuse characters from commercial manga/anime of vari¬ ous genres. Many manga artists got their start in dojinshi. Dojinshi may be reproduced and sold in a limited fashion. Commercially published manga artists sometimes themselves produce dojinshi. dojinshika: Someone who creates dojinshi. seme: In Japanese, literally, "the attacker." Used to refer to the more aggressive partner in a BL or yaoi narrative. Pronounced se-meh. See also note 2 in this chapter. shonen-ai: "boy love." Another term, sometimes used in the United States for less explicit yaoi material (Levi 2009, 148). slash or slash fiction: American term for fan-created same-sex ro¬ mance narratives based around TV shows, movies, books, and so on, such as Kirk/Spock or K/S slash starring the well-known Star Trek characters. Femslash may be used for work depicting femalefemale romances. The term slash itself refers to the virgule, the typographical slash symbol (/) and not to bloody mayhem as in the expression slasher flick. uke: In Japanese, literally, "the receiver." Used to refer to the more submissive partner in a BL or yaoi narrative. Pronounced oo-keh. See also note 2 in this chapter. yaoi: A term originally coined in Japan for BL-themed dojinshi. In the United States, the term is now often used as an umbrella genre term for Japanese BL titles commercially distributed in Japanese and sometimes English, for Japanese BL-themed dojinshi, and for U.S. fan-produced material based on manga/anime. yuri: "lily." Japanese fiction in various formats about romance be¬ tween two female characters, preteen through adult. Sexual relationships may be depicted between older characters. The term has some use in the United States in reference to Japaneseproduced materials, commercial or fan, and U.S. fan creations based on manga/anime.

The canonical shonen manga and anime used by many boys’ love fans as the basis for their characters and settings rarely provide signs signifying overt erotic desire. Yet boys’ love relationships very often transgress culturally dominant notions of masculinity, heteronormativity, and homonormativity.1

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Boys’ love characters in Japan, especially, but often in the West, are without signs of sexual identity. Their bodies move fluidly past constructions of iden¬ tity, gender, and sex, seemingly ignorant of real-world cultural boundaries. In much of BL, the style is playful, but the goal is serious: the characters’ at¬ tempting to surmount obstacles to connect or bond.2

PRESENCE In Japan, boys’ love themes and aesthetics are visible in popular culture. There are clearly marked sections in bookstores, manga such as BE-BOY GOLD are sold in convenience stores in small towns, and visual kei pop bands, dressed in androgynous style, perform and are interviewed on televi¬ sion. Tokyo’s Otome Road in the Higashi Ekebukuro district has billboards of intertwined bishonen3 on buildings to entice passers-by into stores selling BL products. Female boys’ love fans are the main characters of at least two com¬ mercial manga published in the West: Fujoshi kanojo (translation: My Girl¬ friend’s a Geek, from Media Blasters) and Moso shojo otaku-kei (translation: Fujoshi Rumi, from Yen Press). One of the most popular expressions of fan activity in Japan is Comic Mar¬ ket, also known as Comiket. In the past two years, this fan-organized event has attracted more than 550,000 people to Tokyo’s Big Sight convention center over three days twice a year to buy and sell dojinshi—much of it BL-themed— created by “circles,” that is, small groups of friends or individual artists. Fe¬ male fans of BL have outnumbered male fans of manga and anime featuring shojo (adolescent girls) almost since Comic Market’s inception in 1975, al¬ though in recent years the proportion of males attending has increased.4 BL’s Western expression is most often called yaoi. A Google search on Oc¬ tober 9, 2010, returned about 10,800,000 Web pages with the word yaoi, a number that has grown steadily from approximately 135,000 pages on May 4, 2003.5 Yaoi is seen on the Internet, at fan conventions, and in large U.S. chain bookstores. Outside the commercial sphere, yaoi authors and artists post com¬ ments, stories, and artwork to Websites; social media sites such as LiveJoumal, Facebook, and deviantART; and to fan-fiction archives such as FanFiction.net. (See Figure 7.1 for an example of fan art.) These posts frequently stimulate comments. A work in one form, such as a story, may inspire work in another, such as illustration. At the Otome Road bookstores I have visited, almost all of the customers were women, and women, not men, are often thought to be the fans of BL. Yet Japanese males create and consume boys’ love products, albeit not publicly and not nearly in the same numbers as females. The editor of BE-BOY and BE-BOY GOLD, the largest-circulation boys’ love magazines, once estimated that about 10 percent of her readers were male.6 In two recent Western sur¬ veys of 791 English- and Italian-language yaoi readers, 12 percent said they were male. To a question about respondents’ sexual orientation(s), 29 percent

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Figure 7.1. “Captive Brothers” by Kiriko Moth. “Captive Brothers” by Kiriko Moth © 2006.

identified as bisexual, gay, lesbian, or queer; 9 percent reported their orienta¬ tion as “don’t know”; and 2 percent marked themselves as “other.”7 Fan and commercial activities overlap. In Japan, many mangaka (manga artists) were or still are dojinshika (dojinshi artists). In the West, fans create scanlations, that is, unlicensed translations of manga and anime into English or another language that are scanned and posted on the Web. Yet, they may suspend this activity when a licensed translation is published, referring their readers to the commercial product.

BEGINNINGS Hideko Mizuno’s Fire! (1968) was one of the first shojo manga to feature a male protagonist. Many sources give Moto Hagio’s Juichigatsu no gimunajiumu (November gymnasium; 1971) as the first manga in the genre that would later be called “boys’ love.”8 It was Hagio’s Toma no shinzo (Thomas’s heart; 1974) and Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze to ki no uta (Song of wind and trees; 1976) that more than any other early boys’ love titles captured the imaginations of their readers. Both

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manga became best sellers and are still in print. Kazuko Suzuki writes that Kaze to ki no uta is an “influential masterpiece” and “one of the first attempts to depict true bonding or ideal relationships through pure male homosexual love” (1998, 251). The two works were inspired by the same source: Hagio and Takemiya’s visiting the cinema together to watch a 1964 movie made of Roger Peyrefitte’s novel Les amities particulieres (Special friendships; 1944) depicting the repression of an erotic relationship between two boys, ages 12 and 14, at a boarding school in France. These magna were also controversial. Nine years elapsed between Takemi¬ ya’s conception of Kaze and its approval for publication because she “refused to remove or fudge the sexual aspect” (Thom 2004, 170-71). Its images of adolescent boys’ erotic interactions may be the first of such widely circulated in Japan since the sexually explicit prints of the Edo period (1603-1868 c.E.). The early boys’ love mangaka were influenced by popular manga such as Osamu Tezuka’s Ribon no kishi (Princess knight; 1953) (Levi 2010, 2), a story about a cross-dressing princess with a male heart as well as a female heart, and the male friend who falls in love with her without realizing she is female. It was admired not only by Hagio but also by Ryoko Yamagishi. According to Anto¬ nia Levi, Yamagishi “tied boys’ love more fully into Japanese contexts” with Hi izuru tokoro no tens hi (Heaven’s son of the land of the rising sun; 1980), a story about the same-sex romances of Shotoku Taishi, an imperial prince of the sixth and seventh centuries thought to have brought Buddhism to Japan.9 Roughly co-terminous with the rise of commercial boys’ love manga in Japan was the development of fan-created and published works called yaoi. The term was coined as a sardonic acronym for yama-nashi, ochi-nashi, iminashi (no climax, no point or resolution, no meaning) by a group of fans who titled their 1979 dojinshi Rappori yaoi tokushu gou (Rappori: Special yaoi issue) (McHarry 2003). The group invented the acronym for this work be¬ cause it comprises a collection of scenes and episodes lacking any overarch¬ ing structure. In the early 1980s, there were yaoi parodies of Gundam (War story), but yaoi was put into Japanese vernacular by the popularity of Cap¬ tain Tsubasa in 1985, with dojinshi based on this popular manga about boys’ football (soccer), and also by the Saint Seiya manga boom of 1987 (e-mail communication with Matt Thom, 2003), whose story has a sizeable cast of mystical male warriors that provided fans with many potential pairings. In the West, it was the rise of the Web in the mid-1990s and the broadcast of Japa¬ nese anime on commercial television (notably Gundam Wing on the Cartoon Network) that helped propel yaoi’s popularity.

OPPOSITION From its start, Comic Market has been the major focal point not only for the development of BL and other dojinshi but also opposition to them. In the wake of the murders of several young girls in and around Tokyo for which a

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manga/anime fan, Tsutomu Miyazaki, was arrested in 1989, a moral panic put dojinshi, manga, and anime under stricter state scrutiny. Following Miyazaki’s arrest, police apprehended dozens of men and women and seized thousands of dojinshi from stores.10 As the number of Comic Market attendees grew, the organizers initiated content review as a condition of a dojinshi’s acceptance for sale, and staff began performing spot checks to ensure compliance with national and local laws." Smaller comic markets in at least two other prefectures were denied venues altogether. In 1998, Comic Market received threatening letters and was firebombed.12 On December 30, 2009, the day when the largest number of boys’ love dojinshi was sold, I saw a black sound truck outside Comic Market, its announcer mocking the event at ear-splitting volume to hundreds of passersby. He was ignored. In April 2010, the Osaka prefectural government, in the context of an inves¬ tigation of child pornography, designated eight boys’ love manga as “harmful publications,” prohibiting their sale or reading by anyone younger than 18. Another prefecture, Shiga, added the February 2010 issue of BE-BOY GOLD to its harmful-publications list.13 There is also opposition to BL among same-sex-attracted males. From 1992 to 1997, a debate took place in the Japanese feminist magazine Choisir. Masaaki Sato, whom Wim Lunsing identifies as “a gay activist/civil servant/drag queen” (Lunsing 2006, par. 4), complained that boys’ love authors were creat¬ ing “an escape from reality” (par. 17) with “a skewed image of gay men as beautiful” (par. 14). Sato touched off a debate dubbed the yaoi ronso (contro¬ versy). Wrote Sato, The more confused images of gay men circulate among the general public the harder it is for gay men to reconcile these images with their own lives and the more extreme their oppression becomes.. . . When you’re spying on gay sex, girls, take a look at yourself in the mirror. Just look at the expres¬ sion on your faces! [You look just like those dirty old men salivating over images of lesbian sex.] You can all go to hell for all I care. (Vincent 2002, 3) Some gay-identified men in North America have also expressed unease about or opposition to BL. Simon Sheppard, speaking on a panel at the fan event Yaoi-Con in 2002, called yaoi “a minstrel show.”14 Posting on the Web¬ site Kotaku in 2010, a self-identified gay man criticized BL as promoting “completely unrealistic depictions of life as a homosexual.” He wrote that his sexuality is being “trivialized” by young women and added that homophobia is “almost never” dealt with satisfactorily (Anon. 2010). BL is not without the potential of homophobia. Neal Akatsuka writes that because BL removes homosexuality from context and neutralizes it within heteronormative parameters, it marginalizes “the real-world limitations, anxi¬ eties, and dangers surrounding homosexuality” (2010, 171). Yet BL’s extra-

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homosexual context makes charges of homophobia hard to sustain. Akatsuka reasons that because BL evacuates social norms, it “is not necessarily either pro-gay or homophobic. It is not necessarily anything outside of the interpreta¬ tion by the reader” (2010, 172). Alan Williams concludes that “given that there is no single ‘gay’ interpretation of yaoi, firmly steering the genre and its sub¬ culture away from ‘homophobic’ discourse makes little sense” (2010, 229).

VALUING INDISTINCTNESS The words used above for same-sex attracted males in BL—“confused im¬ ages,” “minstrel show,” and “boy-girls”—critique the blurring of what should in these writers’ view be distinct: gay male identity and/or masculinity. Yet other males, such as some of those attending Yaoi-Con, welcome this indis¬ tinctness, believing sexual identities and masculinities to be multiple, contin¬ gent, and/or rejecting them in part or in whole. This is a view consonant with theories of postmodern identity formation as fractured and, as such, promising greater individual agency.15 Held annually since 2001 in and south of San Francisco, Yaoi-Con at¬ tracted more than 1,500 attendees in 2009; typically, 15 to 20 percent of at¬ tendees are male.16 Many are young and dress themselves as the embodiment of BL, the bishonen. Their presence has become one of the more popular topics in the con’s online discussion group, the Yaoi-Con Forum. The Forum participants are producing discourses about what it is to be a male participat¬ ing in yaoi, and hence about the meaning of masculinity. In so doing they are creating an episteme about what it is to be a bishonen, and what it is to be a male who enjoys yaoi, and, potentially, what it could be like for males in the world outside Yaoi-Con’s liminal space to use bishonen attributes and yaoi ideas in relationships with males and females—as indeed some males say they are doing.17 One example of such a discourse is a forum thread initiated in 2006. YaoiCon’s most popular event is the Bishounen Auction. The auction has bishonen, or bishies in Yaoi-Con parlance, performing a routine before an enthusiastic audience of hundreds of women and dozens of men. The poster, a prospective bishie, asked what the bishies do if they are bought and whether the auction was safe.18 Over the next four months there were 62 responses in which women and men offered him advice. One, a bishie from a previous auction, responded that not only was it safe but also that everyone helped each other out, and he offered to leave whomever he was with, no matter what they might be doing, should the new bishie need help.19 Several other males posted comments in response to a question in another thread asking attendees about their sexual orientation, with comments ranging from straight or maybe a little bi;20 to gay, bi, gay;21 bi or perhaps pansexual;22 to bi or “trysexual.”23

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In response to a thread titled “Homophobic yaoi-fans?”, some expressed an unwillingness to politicize identity. One said that it seemed pointless to label unless one is looking for a likely date.24 Another wrote that some people may not want homosexuality rammed down their throats.25 And a third said that he thought whatever heterosexual people could do, homosexuals like himself should be able to do, too, but nothing more.26 In at least three Forum posts, statements about maleness and/or sexual iden¬ tity were expressed as questions or with humor or deflected, rhetorical devices that allowed for the response to be contingent. A poster asked if a guy who is “sort of like a girl” counts as a guy.27 Another asked, what about fanboys like himself who support fangirls? He also said that he could not decide on his own sexual identity, and then described himself exploding.28 A third wrote that his physical sex was male but that his “mental sex” was questionable.29 The anti-homonormative, anti-unitary identity points of view seen in the above Yaoi-Con Forum posts fit with theories of gender that critique claims of identity formation as natural or given. Notions of identity posited by theo¬ rists such as Judith Butler maintain that a gender identity becomes linked to a subject by being interpellated by another, and iterated time and again by the subject and others.30 Yaoi-Con and its auction give the subject a degree of con¬ trol over this performance, an experience that can be liberatory. In response to a thread thanking fellow bishies for having taken part in the con and having joined with him in the auction, a heterosexual-identified bishie singled out some performers and praised their performances. He added that he adored the attention, and referred scornfully to those who had bullied him in high school, asking where their god was now.31

UNCENDERING MASCULINITY Expressed in these posts, and at the heart of BL, is an exclusion of norma¬ tive ideas of gay sexual identity as well as of culturally dominant constructs of masculinity. This is evident in contemporary boys’ love manga. In Kazusa Takashima’s popular Inu mo arukeba: Failin’ love (English edition: Man’s Best Friend: Inu Mo Arukeba) a high school upperclassman, Ukyo, devel¬ ops an erotic bond with Kuro, a stray dog he defends from attack by class¬ mates. When emotionally excited, Kuro transforms into the shape of a hunky young man, seemingly human but for his dog-like ears and tail. The second time the transformation occurs, Kuro proceeds, in his human form and at his initiation but with Ukyo’s enthusiastic consent, to have sex with the youth who owns him. The rest of the story shows them in a happy—and sexually explicit—relationship. Throughout the manga, Takashima emphasizes Kuro’s male sex and his power as seme (pronounced se-meh\ see note 2) in his interactions with Ukyo. But his is not human masculinity, which is denied him as he is a non-human. In comments to the reader after the story, Takashima writes that Kuro’s “dog-

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ness and stupid-ness when he was a man were really popular” (Takashima 2006, 176). He is, she says, “really a dog. Even when he takes on a human form, inside his head he’s still a dog, so human common sense doesn’t apply to him” (170). In my view, Kuro’s status as male but not a man is popular with readers because it strips away cultural accretions of masculinity while leaving intact his maleness. Takashima makes this idea explicit in a drawing of Kuro in his human form as he penetrates Ukyo. As Ukyo kisses his lover, he thinks, “Man or woman. . ./. . .Human or dog. . ./. . .It doesn’t matter anymore” (48^49, el¬ lipses in original). Takashima not only sets sex and species as comparable but also, in doing so, problematizes the idea that male sexuality is inherently linked to the human penis as the normative symbol of human phallocentricity and of its associated masculine authority and dominance.32 In depicting Ukyo’s pleasure at being penetrated—over which Ukyo as Kuro’s owner ulti¬ mately has power—Takashima lets her readers see, first, a nonmasculine but human penis that, second, can be pleasurable and desirable without the accre¬ tions of culturally defined masculinity. Her drawing intertwines the literal—the urgent reality of mutual desire— with the figural: the symbol of human masculine power rendered culturally nonmasculine. The reader’s apprehension of the literal (Ukyo about to be pen¬ etrated by Kuro) and the figural (penis as nonmasculine symbol) occurs al¬ most simultaneously. This simultaneity blurs the borders between figural and literal. It sets them together in time and space, and it gives them equivalency and parallelism. In so doing, it obstructs phallocentricity from positioning itself as the sole authority that defines masculinity and maleness in the real. It prevents the phallocentric idea from acting as part of a masculine identity from which to engage the nonmasculine. Stephen Whitehead writes that man engages the social by virtue of his inhab¬ iting a masculine state (2002, 215). He “can be made real only through discur¬ sive” enactment and that this process becomes the framework of what we call masculinity (Whitehead 2002,215). If so, then by excluding culturally freighted notions defining masculinity—in effect, by ungendering masculinity—boys’ love authors such as Takashima eliminate barriers that would impede them from creating their own visions of an overarching male eros. They thereby allow male and female readers to apprehend a new vision of maleness, one not culturally identified with social phallocentricity, normative homo-/heterosexuality, and male dominance. Identity formation is in part a reaction to oneself in society. Identity creates a space and a state for oneself to cohere around ideas. This coherence may be “Ac¬ tive” as in Lee Edelman’s characterization of “homo” (1994, xix), but its barri¬ ers are real. As it includes, identity excludes. By boys’ love authors making their protagonists male but not masculine, the authors form these identity barriers differently than the dominant ones in their cultures. They reshape them, make them labile, allow them greater or lesser force, and set them on different planes.

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The effect of these uses works against a binary gender system. BL almost by definition excludes females from major character roles. Bob Connell writes that “‘[mjasculinity’ does not exist except in contrast with ‘femininity’” (1995, 68). Quoting Paul Ricoeur, Whitehead reasons that “[t]he subject can never . . . feel masculine, other than through the gaze ... of the Other.”33 The exclusive use in BL of nonmasculine male-sex protagonists in the absence of the female Other undercuts the work of culturally maintained masculine bar¬ riers supporting distinct male-female categories.

AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL BREAK

BL fans are creating and disseminating works that envision ways of being that are marginalized or do not exist in their cultures. In this they are creating new ways of thinking about the self. In Thomas Flynn’s reading of Michel Foucault, shifts in knowledge that yield new ways of thinking may rise to the level of what Foucault called a coupure epistemologique (epistemological break) (Flynn 1994, 33). Foucault wrote that these “suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, inter¬ rupt its slow development. .. force it to enter a new time” (Foucault 1971,4). Their locations can be determined by what Foucault calls “fissures” in dis¬ course; that is, as gaps and breaks in discursive formations that contribute to a break (Flynn 2005, 54). BL and yaoi manga, art, and stories express new realms of imagination and fantasy. Though boys’ love images may be “nothing but pictures,” they nonetheless depict precisely such a Foucauldian epistemological break from existing notions of masculinities and male sexual identities. Drawing, looking at, reading, and fantasizing about these images and stories provide millions of people worldwide with a space in and from which they can create and share works that make real new—and liberatory—ideas about masculinity.

NOTES “Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys” was the working title of the book that I co-edited with AntoniaLevi and Dru Pagliassotti, which was published as Boys’Love Manga (McFarland, 2010). I am grateful to them for letting me use it in the title of this chapter. I read versions of this chapter at the conferences Ecritures du corps / Writing the Body (Universite Paris 13 Nord) and Textual Echoes (Umea universitet, Sweden). My thanks go to their organizers and to the other participants. 1. Relationships may be between a minor and an older person, among siblings, among multiple partners, or with authority figures or foes. Often sexual activity is nonconsensual, violent, and/or performed in public spaces. 2. For this chapter I use boys’ love and BL for boys’ love in Japan as well as for yaoi in the West even though there are significant differences in content, form, and fan practices among world regions. I also use yaoi in discussing yaoi’s origins in Japan as well as fan activities in the West.

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Among the differences is the prevalence of the seme/uke topos in boys’ love created in Japan compared to that in the United States. Semeru is a verb meaning “attack, assault.” Uke (pronounced oo-keh) has noun and verb forms meaning “accept, assure, receive.” In Japanese boys’ love, the seme (pronounced se-meh) is a male character who is older, taller, and more experienced than the uke. In U.S. yaoi fan fiction and art, this topos is less preva¬ lent, and in some works it may be marked as exceptional or problematized. 3. Bishonen (beautiful boy or boys) is a uniquely Japanese erotic topos. It is part of “an indigenous iconography of shudd that extended from such figures as Shotoku Taishi” (Pflugfelder 1999, 88) in the sixth and seventh centuries to the collapse of the shogunate following the U.S. intervention in 1853. Bishonen is still part of the vernacular. Shudd means the way of youth and is an Edo-period descriptor for the practice of erotic relations between male youth and older males. 4. Comic Market (2009, 3). Over 30 years up to 2004, women have represented 71 per¬ cent of those selling dojinshi at the Comic Market (men 29%) and 57 percent of attendees (men 43%) (Comic Market 2008, 21). At Comic Market 77 in December 2009, women represented 60 percent of those selling dojinshi (men 40%) (Comic Market 2009, 10), with the ratio of male-female attendees estimated at “roughly 50:50” (Comic Market 2009, 11). Unpublished data from a study underway in 2010 by Tokyo University confirm this trend (personal communication with Jin Nakamura, December 30, 2010). 5. Google searches are subject to large fluctuations as is characteristic of searches with a high number of returns, but the trend of steady and rapid growth between 2003 and 2010 is clear. (Editors’ notes: Our own Google searches on “yaoi” over this period reveal the same trend.) 6. The BE-BOY/BE-BOY GOLD editor, Iwamoto, made this estimate in response to my question at a Yaoi-Con press conference (October 19, 2002). Mark McLelland reports a discourse arising from letters that high school age boys sent BE-BOY. One boy is quoted as saying, “It’s not that I’m gay. . . . [Bjasically, if it’s beautiful then either is OK,” which he follows with the character signifying laughter (McLelland 2000, 249-50). Mark Vicars provides examples of his Japanese male lovers reading sadomasochistic boys’ love manga such as Amai hari (Sweet needle) (Vicars and Senior 2010). 7. The two surveys had no categories for “neither male nor female” or for “cis,” “inter¬ sex,” “transsexual,” and other genders, or for multiple sexual orientations/genders. The sur¬ veys were carried out by Dru Pagliassotti in English and by Simone Castagno and Veruska Sabucco in Italian, in 2005 and 2006-2007 respectively (Pagliassotti 2008). 8. Herve Brient writes that the term BE appeared in Japan in the mid-1990s, becoming more popular than June, shonen-ai (in part for the latter’s connotation of pedophilia), and yaoi (which had become linked to the activities of the dojinshika) (Brient 2008, 10). June and yaoi continue in use. A small area at Comic Market 79 was set aside for June (personal observation, December 30, 2010). 9. Ibid., cf. note 3. 10. Kinsella (2000, 132). Miyazaki is a male who collected manga featuring shojo (girls, generally adolescent), but female boys’ love dojinshika were also arrested and boys’ love dojinshi seized. For a discussion of the problematic relation between otaku (fans) and Japa¬ nese society, see my review of Hiroki Azuma’s book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (McHarry 2010). 11. Attendance trending up: Comic Market (2008, 6, 10). A volunteer lawyer for Comic Market told me that the checks are for obscenity and violations of Tokyo prefecture laws proscribing material considered harmful to children (personal communication, Tokyo, December 30, 2007).

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12. Denial of venues (Comic Market 2008, 10); firebomb and threatening letters (Comic Market 2008, 11). 13. Child pornography investigation (Anime News Network 2010a); prohibition of sale or reading, and Shiga prefecture (Anime News Network 2010b). 14. Gay Pom vs. Yaoi Panel, Yaoi-Con, San Francisco, October 18, 2002. 15. Michel Foucault identified sexuality as a post-17th-century creation of Western so¬ cieties (1978, 106) “calling for therapeutic or normalizing interventions” (68) into indi¬ viduals’ lives. He characterized it as “a technology of power” (108). Postmodern theory, including Foucauldian theory, holds that individuals have an ability and sometimes the will to resist sexuality’s normalizing power. For example, Bronwyn Davies writes that her realization of “[t]he shift away from the unitary self, the ‘I’ whose words come from and signal an essential self, towards an T who can be recognized as multiple, was for me . . . profoundly liberating” (1990, 505). 16. Overall attendance for 2009 is from Yaoi-Con organizers. The rough estimate of 15 to 20 percent is mine based on those whom I saw at Yaoi-Con each year from 2002 to 2010 (not including dealer representatives, a greater proportion of whom, except for the publish¬ ers, are men) as well as estimates by the people organizing Yaoi-Con. 17. Commenting in 2007 on a Publishers Weekly blog, a 17-year-old male wrote that yaoi is “not as unreal as you kind ladys would believe” since he himself was living a “yaio dream” with his mate [sic]. (Anon. II 2007) 18. Post 602, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Auction,” May 2006, http://www.yaoicon.com/ forums/featured-events/auction.html#602. 19. Post 604, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Auction,” May 2006, http://www.yaoicon.com/ forums/featured-events/auction.html#604. 20. Post 4526, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Single and Looking? Find Other Single Yaoi Fans Here~!” August 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/single-andlooking-find-other-single-yaoi-fans-here/page-3.html#4526. 21. Post 4632, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Single and Looking? Find Other Single Yaoi Fans Here-!” August 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/single-andlooking-find-other-single-yaoi-fans-here/page-8.html#4632. 22. Post 5544, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Single and Looking? Find Other Single Yaoi Fans Here-!” October 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/single-andlooking-find-other-single-yaoi-fans-here/page-15.html#5544. 23. Post 5728, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Single and Looking? Find Other Single Yaoi Fans Here-!” October 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/single-andlooking-fmd-other-single-yaoi-fans-here/page-16.html#5728. 24. Post 3252, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Homophobic Yaoi-fans?” February 2007, http:// www.yaoicon. com/forums/mi scellaneous/homophobic-yaoi-fans/page-2.html#3252. 25. Post 3257, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Homophobic Yaoi-fans?” January 2007, http:// www.yaoicon. com/forums/miscellaneous/homophobic-yaoi-fans/page-2.html#3257. 26. Post 3260, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Homophobic Yaoi-fans?” February 2007, http:// www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/homophobic-yaoi-fans/page-3.html#3260. 27. Post 5091, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Guys Going Not for the Yaoi but the Fan Girls,” September 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/guys-going-not-for-theyaoi-but-the-fan-girls/page-3.html#5091. 28. Post 288, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “How about a Head Count. Fangirls Left, Fanboys Right,” May 2006, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/how-about-a-headcount-fangirls-left-fanboys-right.html#288.

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29. Post 4153, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread “Single and Looking? Find Other Single Yaoi Fans Here-!” July 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/single-and-looking-findother-single-yaoi-fans-here.html#4153. 30. Butler (2004, 219). (Editors’ note: Interpellation is a process whereby individuals respond to and obey ideologically based labels and other forms of address and identity. For example, by recognizing themselves as being addressed as gay or straight, they subject themselves to the authority and domination of ideologies embodied in various institution¬ alized apparatuses of power and control. The term was first used by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. (See Nguyen n.d.)) 31. Post 4216, Yaoi-Con Forum, thread ‘To All 2006 Auction Bishies—a Belated Thank You,” July 2007, http://www.yaoicon.com/forums/miscellaneous/to-all-2006-auction-bishiesa-belated-thank-you/page-2.html#4216. 32. Oxford English Dictionary, “phallocentric” (draft revision), December 2008, http:// www.oed.com. The word “phallus” refers to the symbolic dimensions of the human male’s ejaculatory organ, whereas the word “penis” refers to the anatomical organ itself, whether that of a human or nonhuman. 33. Whitehead (2002, 216). Whitehead also cites Jacques Derrida’s observation that binary oppositions are generally implicated in discrete relations of power and privilege (2002, 69).

REFERENCES Akatsuka, Neal. 2010. “Uttering the Absurd, Revaluing the Abject: Femininity and the Dis¬ avowal of Homosexuality in Transnational Boys’ Love Manga.” In Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre. Edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 159-76. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Anime News Network. 2010a. “Osaka Considers Regulating Boys-Love Materials.” (April 4). http://www.animenewsnetwork.eom/news/2010-04-04/osaka-considers-regulatingboys-love-materials. Anime News Network. 2010b. “Osaka Designates 8 Boys-Love Manga Mags as ‘Harmful’ (updated).” (April 26). http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-04-26/osakadesignates-8-boys-love-manga-mags-as-harmful. Anon. 2010. Kotaku (April 27). http://kotaku.com/comment/22296892/. Anon. II. 2007. “Why Girls Love Boys Love.” The Beat: The News Blog of Comics Cul¬ ture. Publishers Weekly (June 8). (Message 22; comment to Heidi MacDonald.) http:// pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2006/11 /03/why-girls-love-boys-love/. Brient, Herve. 2008. “Une petite histoire du yaoi.” In Manga 10 000 images: Homosexu¬ ality et manga: Le yaoi. Edited by Herve Brient, 5-11. Versailles: Editions H. Butler, Judith. 2004. “Burning Acts, Injurious Speech.” In The Judith Butler Reader. Edited by Sara Salih with Judith Butler, 212-39. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Comic Market. 2008. What Is the Comic Market? A Presentation by the Comic Market Preparations Committee (February). http://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/WhatIsEng080 528.pdf. Comic Market. 2009. The Comic Market Today and Overseas Participants (December 30). http://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/C77/C77CMKSymposiumPresentationEnglish.pdl. Connell, Bob. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davies, Bronwyn. 1990. “The Problem of Desire.” Social Problems 37 (4): 501-16.

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Edelman, Lee. 1994. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. Flynn, Thomas R. 1994. “Foucault’s Remapping of History.” In The Cambridge Com¬ panion to Foucault. Edited by Gary Gutting, 2S-A6. New York: Cambridge University Press. Flynn, Thomas R. 2005. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. Vol. 2, A Poststructural¬ ist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1971. The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse of Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese So¬ ciety. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Levi, Antonia. 2009. “North American Reactions to Yaoi.” In The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture. Edited by Mark I. West, 147-74. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Levi, Antonia. 2010. “Introduction.” In Boys’Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre. Edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 1-8. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Lunsing, Wim. 2006. “Yaoi ronso: Discussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japa¬ nese Girls’ Comics, Gay Comics and Gay Pornography.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 12 (January), http://intersections.anu.edu/au/issuel2/ lunsing.html. McHarry, Mark. 2003. “Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love.” The Guide 23. http://archive. guidemag.com/magconten t/invokemagcon ten t.cfm?ID=FB 6 AEC3 D-D 13C4976-82C190236231C0F7. McHarry, Mark. 2010. “Review of Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 25 (November), http:// intersections.anu.edu.au/issue25/mcharry_review.htm. McLelland, Mark. 2000. Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and So¬ cial Realities. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Curzon. Nguyen, Cindy, n.d. “Interpellation.” http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/interpella tion.htm. Pagliassotti, Dru. 2008. “Reading Boys’ Love in the West.” Particip@tions 5 (2). http:// www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%202/5_02_pagliassotti.htm. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. 1999. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press. Suzuki, Kazuko. 1998. “Pornography or Therapy? Japanese Girls Creating the Yaoi Phe¬ nomenon.” In Millennium Girls: Today’s Girls Around the World. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness, 243-67. London: Rowman. Takashima, Kazusa. (2004) 2006. Man’s Best Friend: Inu MoArukeba. Los Angeles: BLU. Thom, Matthew. 2004. “Girls and Women Getting out of Hand: The Pleasures and Politics of Japan’s Amateur Comics Community.” In Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan. Edited by William W. Kelly, 169-87. Albany: State University of New York Press. Vicars, Mark, and Kim Senior. 2010. “Queering the Quotidian: Yaoi, Narrative Pleasures and Reader Response.

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Vincent, Keith J. 2002. “Envisioning the Homosexual in Yaoi.” Presented at the Conceptu¬ alising Gender in Different Cultural Contexts conference, School of Oriental and Afri¬ can Studies, University of London, May 2-3. Whitehead, Stephen M. 2002. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions. Cambridge: Polity. Williams, Alan. 2010. “Raping Apollo: Sexual Difference and the Yaoi Phenomenon.” In Boys’ Love Manga, Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre. Edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 221-31. Jeffer¬ son, NC: McFarland. Wilson, Cintra. 2010. “W4M4M?” Out (September): 98-103. http://out.com/detail. asp?page= 1 &id=27242.

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8 Reading Right to Left: The Surprisingly Broad Appeal of Manga and Anime; or, “Wait a Minute” PATRICK DRAZEN

JAPANESE CULTURE: FOR JAPANESE ONLY? In 2006 animation director Mamoru Hosoda saw the release of his film Toki-o kakeru shojo (The girl who leapt through time), which was based on a beloved Japanese science fiction book by Yasutaka Tsutsui. As the film began making the rounds of international film festivals, Hosoda was about to find out how beloved his anime was. During an interview before the Chicago Inter¬ national Film Festival, he made a comment heard often, in one way or another, from creators of Japanese anime and manga: It’s a classic novel . . . but ... we didn’t think about marketing the film ... overseas. However,... Kadokawa Publishing Company ... know[s] how to distribute films overseas. . . . My impression was that. . . girls and boys overseas would . . . react in a different manner. However, they re¬ sponded exactly the way Japanese teenagers responded. This surprised me. (Drazen 2008, 12) On the one hand, Japanese popular culture—which includes anime and manga plus pop music, live action film, fashion, and toys/artifacts along the lines of Hello Kitty—has been heralded as Japan’s 21st-century economic engine, an example of “soft power” (Otmazgin 2008) and Japan’s “Gross

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National Cool” (McGray 2002). On the other hand, the Japanese themselves see some sort of national exclusivity about their culture, a certain je ne sais quoi somehow beyond the understanding of Western “barbarians.” The numbers, however, at times speak against such proprietary limits. Manga titles have not only been published in English, among other languages, but several have set publishing records in the United States, and not simply for the “graphic novel” format. The first volume of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist was a record setter, as were Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya and Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto (Melrose 2007).

"WHEN YOU ASSUME . . In 1984, Fred Patten summed up the supposedly necessary process involved in adapting manga for American readers: Japanese comic books are . . . thicker but also . . . smaller . . . and without color, [creating the] impression with . . . Americans that they aren’t get¬ ting . . . value. . . . Japanese comics are laid out “backward,” . . . reading right-to-left. ... To translate them into English would require . . . reversing the art. . . . The sound effects ... in Japanese comics are . . . incomprehen¬ sible. (Patten 2004b, 246) But it did not turn out as Patten described. Indeed, most of the individual considerations related to this process beg follow-up explanations or ques¬ tions of their own, usually beginning, “Wait a minute.” Converting manga into Western-style comics actually lasted only about two decades and is no more. Most Western manga translations these days are published in Japanese-style paperback tankobon that read from right to left, or as Internet “scanlations” that also retain the Japanese layout. How did this happen when publishers and manga-watchers predicted otherwise? In Japanese manga publishing, the paperback book is usually the second step. The first step, using black-and-white art on heavily recycled paper for Japanese weekly/monthly manga anthology magazines, traces back to the years after World War II when Japan had little or no resources. As it hap¬ pened, the fact that manga have continued to be published the same way for decades, regardless of changes in the Japanese economy, is an example of Japan making a virtue—and then an art-form—of necessity. The lack of color has forced Japanese cartoonists to focus on developing the story, as most manga fans West and East will attest. In addition, working in black and white has caused artists to polish their style, intensifying action and emotion. Con¬ sequently, few Western readers feel “short-changed” by the lack of four-color printing. Reversing the artwork to read from the left, which so many Western pub¬ lishers felt necessary in the past to placate its perceived audience, technically

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isn’t as complicated as the preceding description makes it sound. Publication decisions in the West are generally easier than in Japan, where popular manga are converted into anime. In the United States, the market is anime-driven; if a series is popular, the manga will be translated. As for manga sound effects, translation does involve knowing Japanese al¬ phabets (hiragana and katakana) for writing the sounds as well as the sounds’ meanings—which are often culturally specific. For example, the sound word miin in a scene is an imitation of the sound of cicadas and is often used to cue the reader that the scene takes place during cicada season, that is, during high summer. This information isn’t trivial. One of the ecological disasters in Hideaki Anno’s anime Shinseiki Evangelion (Neon genesis Evangelion) has cicadas present throughout the series regardless of the calendar. This would signal a Japanese audience that something in nature had gone very wrong. Sometimes the onomatopoeia serves as a pun. One example occurs in the Ghost Hunt manga of Shiho Inada and Fuyumi Ono. This series about teen¬ age and young adult “ghostbusters” of Shibuya Psychic Research includes a scene of two members talking about their sullen, narcissistic boss. The two joke about addressing each other using yakuza (organized crime) slang, but realize that this would apply to their boss, as well. The next panel shows the group’s leader with the dramatic sound effect syllable DON (Inada and Ono 2006, 65-66). Manga contain many such multilingual puns; this one doesn’t require knowledge of Italian beyond a familiarity with Coppola’s Godfather films. Some publishers have clarified culturally specific meanings by adding notes between the frames, endnotes at the back of the book, or sound effects translated into English.

AMERICAN FANS AND THEIR PREFERENCES The nature of Western fandom embracing Japanese pop culture has changed over the years, with the major shift occurring in 1995 to 1997. Prior to this time, few manga were translated. Western audiences were almost exclusively exposed only to anime, and anime distributed to the West was almost exclu¬ sively science fiction, either inspired by or made to resemble George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise for one simple reason: this genre was presumed to be commercial. The genre attracted an American fan base similar to the sci-fi fan base that already existed: predominantly male. However, in the mid-1990s, Bishojo senshi Sailor Moon, based on a manga by Naoko Takeuchi, helped introduce the shojo (girls) anime genre to American television, where it be¬ came phenomenally successful. This, the first example of shojo anime widely broadcast in the United States, changed the fan base for anime and, later, manga to what it is now: from 90 percent male to roughly 50/50. This profile still holds at most anime conventions.

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As for Sailor Moon herself, she found popularity in countries as wide-rang¬ ing as Brazil, Germany, and the United States as well as Japan. The anime was even mentioned in the lyrics to the song “One Week” by the band Barenaked Ladies. Popularity translated into activism: the Web-driven fan move¬ ment called Save Our Sailors pressured producers to make translations available of four seasons of the series and the three theatrical release Sailor Moon animated fdm features (Save Our Sailors Campaign 1996-2004). The fifth season of the series, known as Sailor Stars, has yet to be translated and broadcast in America, largely because of the plainly lesbian romance between Haruka and Michiru, the ambiguous sexuality of the Three Lights singing group, and the yuri attraction between Usagi herself and Seiya. (See chapter 6 of this volume for a discussion of yuri romances.) Fan loyalty has endured: an acquaintance of mine whose niece belongs to a Girl Scout troop in northern Indiana noted that the Twilight series of teen vam¬ pire romance novels ended so unsatisfactorily that the Girl Scouts abandoned that fandom to return to Sailor Moon—which had stopped broadcasting on American television years before. The ethnic roots of anime/manga have become a paradox. Terri O’Malley, of the Fox Kids Network, commented specifically on the anime series known as Digimon: Digital Monsters. O’Malley stated, “The public is aware today that programs like Sailor Moon and Digimon are from Japan, and that the cast really has Japanese names, and they don’t care” (Patten 2004a, 340). However, this is at once both correct and incorrect. A Western audience, even for children’s programming from Japan, has come to expect a certain level of Japanese-ness in anime, even if the characters tend to look as if they emerged from Western cartoons. When Nelvana Studios of Canada adapted the anime series Cardcaptor Sakura (based on a manga by the CLAMP collective) for Western broadcast beginning in June 2000, at first names were anglicized wholesale: Sakura Kinomoto became Sakura Avalon, her friend Tomoyo be¬ came Madison, Mizuki Kaho became Layla Mackenzie, and so forth (Card¬ captor Sakura n.d.). Such name changes, intended to help Western audiences identify with the principal characters, were found to be unnecessary, and by the second season of Cardcaptor Sakura, Nelvana had reverted to the original Japanese character names. In one of several versions of the animated feature film Ginga Tetsudo 999 (Galaxy Express 999), based on manga by Reiji Matsumoto, changing the he¬ ro’s name from Tetsuro to Joey Smith was irrelevant: Western audiences have had no trouble identifying and empathizing with Tetsuro on his galactic quest, regardless of his name (Beck 2005, 91). Similarly, the title heroine of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind) did not need to have her character renamed Princess Zandra when the film was first dubbed as Warriors of the Wind (Toyama n.d.). In fact, this name change obscures the connection between Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and the character of the same name from Homer’s Odyssey. (Both stories offer a fearless noble-

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woman named Nausicaa, whose sense of curiosity and inquiry leads her to take chances and make profound discoveries others would avoid out of fear.) Having said this. Western publishers and distributors sometimes find that staying too close to the original (by, for example, refusing to provide an En¬ glish dub at all for an anime) can get in the way of audience understanding. Works of Japanese pop culture often benefit from a translation that is respect¬ ful without being simplistic, detailed without being pedantic, and accurate without being obsessive. While many manga translations approach this level of detail, bringing this kind of attention to anime—which exists in time rather than in space—is more difficult. Meaning has to be established “on the fly,” as it were, for anime. Additionally, whereas manga texts have to fit the available space, anime dialogue has to (more or less) fit the “flaps”—that is, character mouth movements, although this has rarely been crucial. Paradoxically again, there is a school of thought that holds that Japan as such doesn’t even enter into the discussion. Susan Napier, in a study of in¬ creasing Western interest in manga/anime, stated, “It appears that it is the ‘Otherness’ of anime rather than its specific ‘Japanese-ness’ that is one of its fundamental appeals to the [Western] fans” (Napier 2000, 255). Wait a minute. If Otherness were indeed part of the attraction of pop cul¬ ture, anyone could find value in anything. It would be the ultimate postmod¬ ernism: there would be kabuki fans in Rwanda, abstract art movements in Indonesia, Eisenstein film festivals in Yemen. While there is a borderlessness in contemporary culture, it is neither widespread nor broadly informed. In addition, taken to the extreme. Otherness implies plot devices that have little or no meaning to the consumers, who presumably have nothing like it in their experiences. Clearly, pure otherness is not required, and commonalities turn out to be more common than anticipated. There are Messianic analogies to Nausicaa allowing herself to be killed in the Ohmu stampede in Miyazaki’s Kaze no Tani no Naushika that can link the movie to the Western Christian tradition as well as offer an alternative to it. More broadly, the feature film based on Reiji’s Matsumoto’s manga Ginga Tetsudo 999 draws on one of the most universal of emotions: the bond between mother and child. This examination of the supposed difference between manga/anime and American comics begs two questions, which are actually one question and its mirror image. On the one hand, why did American producers feel that Japa¬ nese media needed to be recast in a form familiar to Western audiences to gain any acceptance at all? Similarly, why were Japanese producers convinced that manga and anime were completely opaque to Western audiences? These questions helped fuel my 2003 book Anime Explosion. Two feature films released at the same time, James Cameron’s Titanic from the United States and Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke) from Japan, dominated Japanese box offices in 1997. However, while Titanic told a story of class, love, and loss that was easily understood by Japanese mov¬ iegoers, American audiences did not similarly flock to Mononoke-hime and

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its message to preserve the natural world told in uncompromisingly Shintoist terms. Perhaps there are differences in tastes, otherness and commonalities notwithstanding. Some examples of Japanese pop culture have crossed over successfully to the West, usually as monster films featuring Gojira (aka Godzilla) and its brethren, or more recently as ghost stories such as Ringu (The ring) and Ju-on (The grudge). Yet even these films were often remade with Western actors and scripts that deleted certain plot points that were quintessentially Japanese. One very Japanese gesture was left out of The Ring, director Gore Verbinski’s U.S. adaptation of Ringu. Both films involve a divorcee with one week to remove a curse from herself and her son. In the Japanese version, this is accomplished by discovering the skull of a girl killed decades earlier. The Japanese heroine, in fact, clutches the skull to her bosom, sobbing over it and letting slime ooze from the eye sockets so that it may seem to be sobbing as well. This sequence was deleted from Verbinski’s version, but, having seen it in the film and knowing how lachrymose manga and anime can be, it’s hard to imagine a version of the film without the scene.

VOICES OF DIVERSE AMERICAN FANDOM Still, these technical variants are not what matters to American anime fans. A separate survey is needed to determine the ways Western fans of anime and manga approach these arts. The following interviews were collected unsys¬ tematically through e-mail during early 2010 by me from my acquaintances and dealt with peoples’ first experiences of manga/anime.

African American woman, 26 PD: When was the first manga you took an interest in reading? What was it? What (if anything) are you reading now? I read a little bit of JUMP when I lived in Japan in 2005, and I used to thumb through my uncle’s various manga, but I can’t say I was as into manga as I was anime. PD: What was the first anime you watched? How old were you when you saw it? Were you aware that it was Japanese? What (if anything) are you watching now? Unico\1 I had no clue it was Japanese because it was dubbed into En¬ glish. I grew up on Unico, not unlike most people growing up on American Saturday morning cartoons. My earliest cartoon memories are of Unico, and only later did I get into Strawberry Shortcake or Jem. PD: What was the first anime you watched with Japanese dialogue and English subtitles? Do you have a preference between translations versus subtitled anime? If so, why?

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Sailor Moon. No preference. PD: Have you studied the Japanese language? If so, how deeply? Somewhat. I’ve had books on it that I’ve read but I didn’t really study it until I was actually living in Japan. I didn’t have to use it everyday as I lived in the more metropolitan Osaka, but when I went to visit the more traditional Kyoto I had to use all the Japanese that I knew, which resulted in only a few sentences. PD: Have you ever experienced a scene in manga or anime which you thought offered a Japanese approach to life or a problem that you thought was better than a western solution? I thought Grave of the Fireflies dealt with anti-war and death in a way in which I don’t think America would try to do, with regards to using cute cartoon children as the tragic stars.

Chinese, gender and age unknown; college student Earliest exposure: Reading Saint Seiya manga as an illiterate at age 6 when I moved back from Germany to China. First one in America would be at age 8 watching Pokemon. Uniqueness: Unlike real action films which largely depend on good acting to bring out excellence, anime and manga simplify things and fully express the imagination of the creators. In a sense, anime is “perfection” because the [two-dimensional] realm binds imagination to a level where everything could be felt the way it was intended to. Additionally, anime/ manga seem to be more serious and emotional than their western counter¬ parts. It also helps that anime is developed enough that it aims at a wide age group as its audience. Japan-ness: I personally don’t see the attractiveness of trying to be Japa¬ nese. In fact I was disgusted on my recent trip to China when I met my cousin’s friend who added the phrase “Sugoi” to every sentence without knowing enough Japanese to even be conversational. However, anime is a fantasy world. And much as Trekkies learn to converse in Klingon, it follows that fel¬ low anime lovers would immerse themselves in Japanese culture. One thing that is unique about Japan, though, is that it may well be the first “post apocalyptic society” due to the WWII bombs. It could make sense then that a segment of its population would hide from reality within fantasy and thus anime was refined there. However, nowadays Korea is catching up with Japan in the anime field, and I see no nuclear warheads being dropped there, so this theory may hold false.

African American woman, 28 First anime I saw at age 11 was the Vampire Hunter D movie. It was very different, and I liked the storytelling style; anime stories aren’t generally juvenile.

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I watched Sailor Moon but I generally preferred animation more geared toward boys (except for Dragonball Z). The first manga I collected was Pet Shop of Horrors, after seeing the anime. Then I made a point of getting Great Teacher Onizuka; I love the crazy characters. My family are kind of sci-fi buffs. My sister loved Robotech, Battle of the Planets, and Voltron. I would have watched them anyway; I gravitate toward genres I would have followed in the west anyway. I loved Samurai Pizza Cats', it cracked me up. Some of the jokes would go over a little kid s head. I don’t think anime is a kid’s thing. I’m reading the Slam Dunk manga. I kind of like those underdog stories; I liked that [the hero] was good at basketball in his own weird way. Manga gives more time for characters to develop. American comics sto¬ ries haven’t really developed. My nephews love Dragon Ball. I loved the first series, but not later. That story was dragging a bit. Thank goodness for translators’ notes. There’s so many things about, say, the Japanese educational system that’s different from Chicago. The notes don’t get in the way, not to me. I wish I would see more characters of color in anime. I would say the same about video games. I always look for good character-driven stories. That attracts me to any series or book or manga. The issue of anime characters of color is subtle and complex. Ironically, Japanese manga portrayals of Africans and African Americans were, until fairly recently, learned from the stereotyped caricatures of the West. Many artists working before the civil rights battles of the 1960s presented black characters (if they were presented at all) either as being shaded versions of “white” characters (realizing that in this case white was not specifically Caucasian but a sort of default setting for the main characters, who were usually Japanese) or as nappy-headed thick-lipped caricatures, who were either Africans or American soldiers or sports figures. This changed gradu¬ ally; Osamu Tezuka used in several manga the figure of a Maasai warrior who was tall, thin, realistically drawn, and dignified. In Tezuka’s Black Jack manga, the black child who donates a skin graft to the child Black Jack after his accident is as cute as Atomu, Pinoko, or any other child char¬ acter. The most natural-looking black characters in anime can be found in recent series such as Eureka 7. Satoshi Kon’s 2003 movie Tokyo Godfathers has one character taken hostage by a brown-skinned gangster and his wife, who only speak Spanish, yet the hostage (a teenage girl) and the gangster’s wife still manage to communicate. However, people of color are such a tiny minority in Japan that most manga/anime artists can avoid showing them completely.

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And myself, a Caucasian man, 58 I was fortunate enough to see one of the first anime ever produced and distributed in the West: a retelling of the legend of the monkey who went to the West (which was also the basis for Dragon Ball, Saiyuki, and many other anime and manga), animated by Osamu Tezuka and distributed in an English dub as Alakazam the Great! Even at age eight I could tell that this was different from Disney, the Fleischers, or any Western animation. Except for Astro Boy and one or two other early TV series, my interest in anime would be awakened in 1981 with a collaborative U.S./Japanese feature film based on Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicom but clearly employing a Japanese artistic style. The animation was done by Japan’s Studio Topcraft, whose next project would be Miyazaki’s Kaze no Tani no Naushika, thus making Topcraft the genesis of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. When consumer videotape players appeared in 1983, so did many ex¬ amples of anime. I remember being very impressed by dubs of Kaze no Tani no Naushika and Ginga Tetsudo 999. From this point, there was no turning back. There were several Japanese bookstores in Chicago in the 1980s where I could find manga in Japanese, and in one of these stores I was immediately attracted to the cover art of Rumiko Takahashi’s Mezon Ikkoku. I went on to collect all 15 tankobon volumes of this manga, which tells in real time a romantic comedy about the seven-year courtship of a young widow, the landlady of an eccentric boarding-house, by one of her tenants. In its own way, I believe that Mezon Ikkoku is on a par with any of the similar works of Jane Austen. Since then, the anime and manga I have been exposed to are too many to list. Currently I am interested in the manga Ghost Hunt, Hikaru no Go, and Shaman King, the anime Ouran High School Host Club and xxxHolic, and Negima in both media. I found Mezon Ikkoku to be so interesting that I decided to learn Japanese to appreciate it in the original. I started by trying to translate a randomly purchased tankobon (My Friend Frankenstein by shojo artist Shinji Wada); after a year with little to show for it, I started taking language courses at the university where I worked.

THEMES IN QUESTION In reviewing my own comments as well as those made above by others, I re¬ alize that the hallmark of Japanese pop culture is neither its Japanese-ness nor its Otherness. Rather, it is the level of sophistication brought to media that in many cultures are reserved for juvenile literature and the most basic levels of entertainment. To be sure, manga/anime can contain slapstick, bad jokes, and

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bawdy humor; they can also contain moving romance, political intrigue, and religious speculation seldom seen in any kind of popular culture. Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist is an action tale as well as a discussion of the relative positions in society of religion and science, even if the science in this case— alchemy—is sometimes discussed in Buddhist terms intended to relate to a Japanese audience (the best example is in the episode titled “One Is All, All Is One”), and the series’ religions are fictional variants of Judeo-Christianity and Islam (the worship of the Sun God Leto and the cult of Ishbal, respectively). The point, to borrow from Samuel Johnson’s dog walking on its hind legs, is not that Japanese pop culture is especially insightful in this analysis, but that it attempts it at all. More importantly. Western fans recognize this sophistica¬ tion, even if it is not always cited as the major draw of the media. But wait a minute. Yes, the issues are being addressed in a manner and in a format that has been avoided in the United States and its culture. However, this doesn’t mean that the answers from manga or anime are necessarily right. After all, they’re only one set of answers to questions that have perplexed the great minds of many world cultures for centuries. One example is gender. In a search for answers to the question of what so¬ cial roles between men and women best promote harmony and justice within the context of religion and economics and history and a dozen other variables, a wide variety of answers can be found in many places, including popular cul¬ ture. Popular culture, however, doesn’t always guarantee the best answers. For example, take a statement from Hiroyuki Takei’s manga Shaman King. As the high school age series hero, Yoh Asakura, is engaged in a psychic battle, his fiancee, Anna (who’s also a medium), says the following to Tamao, another, younger medium who has a crush on Yoh: I’m getting into this whole fiancee thing, let me tell you. Women protect the home. There’s no point in meddling in battles between men. . . . The best thing we can do for Yoh now is to have faith that he’ll win, and have a nice meal ready for him when he comes home. (Takei 2005, 34-35) Is this position progressive or reactionary? Is it even possible in this day and age, in Japan or in the West? How much of this position is based on Japan’s long-standing idealization of the “Yamato nadeshiko” (literally the Japanese pink Dianthus carnation, the phrase describes the idealized Japanese female, the embodiment of loyalty, humility, and domesticity), and is this the kind of position embraced by the high school boys who read Weekly shonen jump magazine, where Shaman King was serialized, or of the magazine’s editors, or both? Pop culture, after all, is often less an accurate reflection of a culture than an idealized vision of that culture. This statement is clearly not the end of an argument about Japanese culture but a beginning. It can provoke discussion and debate but cannot settle it. Far more substantial works, including Ian Buruma’s Behind the Mask (Buruma

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1984), have tried, with varying success, to answer such questions. However, manga/anime clearly get points for raising the issues, however limited the format. The pop culture of other nations seldom shares such ambition. It should be no surprise that war in general, and the use of atomic bombs in particular, should be part of Japan’s popular culture, since Japan is to date the only country to have felt the effect of these weapons. Several artists have explored atomic warfare, from various perspectives. Manga artist Keiji Nakazawa was eight years old when he survived the atomic bombing of his home in Hiroshima; his adult works include the semiautobiographical manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) and the purely autobiographical Ore ga mita (I saw it); both titles deal with the bombing of Hiroshima. The science fiction anime Gall Force: Earth, Part 1 shows an invasion of earth from Mars, at a time when the nations of the earth, which were supposed to have destroyed their nuclear stockpiles years ago, have “conveniently” clung to some atomic bombs. A de¬ bate begins about whether to use these bombs on the invaders. (It turns out that they aren’t used, and it’s discovered that the invaders would only have become stronger if the atom bombs had been used on them.) Even Miyazaki’s Kaze no Tani no Naushika references the bomb. The film frequently mentions legends of the “God Soldiers” who laid waste the earth thousands of years earlier in what sounds like a nuclear holocaust. We see the actualization of the legend as a surviving God Soldier attacks a stampeding herd of Ohmu: the resulting blast looks suspiciously like the atomic bomb test footage recorded at Los Alamos. Of course, these examples, and many more, all come from a pacifist per¬ spective. As such, it isn’t a debate or a dialogue but a sermon, presenting a fixed point of view as the answer to the question. There is in fact a conser¬ vative, militaristic side to Japan’s culture, providing an argument counter to pacifist messages—see, for example, Matthew Penney’s essay on rightwing nationalistic manga, chapter 9 in this volume. In Japan, these debates as well as others are played out against the back¬ ground of certain favored Japanese myths and legends. Among the most prominent of these is the Shinto legend of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, who shuts herself and the sun in a cave, threatening to extinguish life on earth. In the Shinto creation mythology, the Kojiki, another goddess, Uzume, tempts Amaterasu back out of the cave and restores the sun by performing a striptease for the entertainment of the other gods. This event has appeared in a number of stories, told with a number of varia¬ tions. The first episode of the Mezon Ikkoku manga features a gender-bender parody reenactment of the Kojiki, with college student Godai locking himself in his closet and the other residents pretending that their new landlady is per¬ forming a drunken striptease (Takahashi 1980). Events are reversed in the final episode of the anime Ojamajo DoReMi (Little witch-girl DoReMi). The time has come for the series to end, and for Doremi and her friends to graduate from sixth grade and move on to junior high school. Doremi, however, doesn’t want to face this part of her life and

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locks herself in a deserted storefront. Like Amaterasu, she is eventually coaxed out of her cave; the events, though, are more tearful than bawdy. After seeing a few such examples, even the Western fan can pick up on the patterns, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to the Japanese. Things were dif¬ ferent decades ago, when Etsu Sugimoto wrote her memoir, A Daughter of the Samurai. The book concludes with the author imagining a dialogue with her very traditional “Honourable Grandmother.” Grandmother warns her: “The red barbarians cared nothing for beauty. They laughed at the Japanese boats, whose sails were made of rich brocade and their oars of carved wood, inlaid with coral and mother-of-pearl. They talked like tradesmen and did not want to learn the hearts of the children of the gods. . . . And now the people of our sacred land also talk like tradesmen and no longer are peace¬ ful and content.” “Will they never be peaceful and content again?” asked the little girl with anxious eyes. “The honourable teacher said that sailing ships bring lands nearer to each other.” “Listen!” said the grandmother, holding herself very straight. “Little Granddaughter, unless the red barbarians and the children of the gods learn each other’s hearts, the ships may sail and sail, but the two lands will never be nearer.” . . . The red barbarians and the children of the gods have not yet learned each other’s hearts; to them the secret is still unknown, but the ships are sailing— sailing—(Sugimoto 1934, 313-14) This passage shows part of the problem, at least in bygone days: the Japanese saw themselves as part of a Shinto special creation, an opinion that officially would continue until after the surrender in 1945. On the other hand, nonJapanese were simply “red barbarians.” Taking these roles as reality would establish, among other things, why westerners would need to have Japanese culture modified before they could understand it—even though this view ig¬ nores those westerners who can appreciate Japanese culture, from Buruma to Lafcadio Hearn. Certainly the metaphor of ships has completely fallen apart in the era of the Internet, since the modem media tourist no longer depends on someone else’s cultural vehicle but can make the trip to and from Japan on their own—for good or ill.

NOTE 1. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Sanrio Corporation tried to diversify into products other than Hello Kitty. Sanrio began publishing a shojo manga magazine and commissioned Osamu Tezuka to create a manga for it. The result was Unico, about a globe¬ trotting magical baby unicorn. The manga gave rise to two feature films. Both films have recently been reissued on DVD: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime. php?id=628; http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=629.

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REFERENCES Beck, Jerry. 2005. The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Buruma, Ian. 1984. Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes. New York: New American Library. Cardcaptor Sakura: Encyclopedia—Cardcaptor Sakura. n.d. Global Oneness. http://www .experiencefestival.eom/a/Cardcaptor_Sakura/id/l 946103. Drazen, Patrick. 2003. Anime Explosion: The What? Why? And Wow! of Japanese Anima¬ tion. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Drazen, Patrick. 2008. “Ahead of His Time.” Animation Magazine 22 (4): 12. Inada, Shiho, and Fuyumi Ono. 2006. Ghost Hunt. Vol. 4. Translated by Akira Tsubasa. New York: Del Rey. (Originally published in Japanese, 2000.) McGray, Douglas. 2002. “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” Foreign Policy (June/July): 44—54. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalmar/illustex/japfpmcgray.htm. Melrose, Kevin. 2007. “New Fruits Basket, FMA crack USA Today Book List.” USA Today (August 16). http://blog.newsarama.eom/2007/08/l 6/new-fruits-basket-fma-crack-usatoday-book-list/. Napier, Susan J. 2000. Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. New York: Palgrave. Otmazgin, Nissim Kadosh. 2008. “Contesting Soft Power: Japanese Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia.” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 8 (1): 73-101. Patten, Fred. 2004a. “Is Digimon Movie Destined for Success?” In Watching Anime, Read¬ ing Manga, 338-40. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. (Originally published in Anima¬ tion Magazine [94], 2000.) Patten, Fred. 2004b. “Mangamania!” In Watching Anime, Reading Manga, 222-A1. Berke¬ ley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. (Originally published in The Comics Journal [94], 1984.) Save Our Sailors Campaign. 1996-2004. “Chronicling the Sailor Moon Anime in the En¬ glish Speaking World!” http://www.saveoursailors.org/. Sugimoto, Etsu Inagaki. 1934. A Daughter of the Samurai. New York: Doubleday Doran. Takahashi, Rumiko. 1980. Mezon Ikkoku [Maison Ikkoku]. Vol. 1. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Takei, Hiroyuki. 2005. Shaman King. Vol. 7. Translated by Lillian Olsen. San Francisco: VIZ Media. Toyama, Ryoko. n.d. What Is Wrong with “Warriors of the Wind”? The Hayao Miyazaki Web. Kaze no Tani (Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind), http://www.nausicaa.net/mi yazaki/nausicaa/faq.html#warrior.

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PART III Politics

9 Manga from Right to Left MATTHEW PENNEY

In Japan, manga is read from the right. This statement is more than a simple truth about page layout—it also sums up common fears that manga is being read from the rightwmg, as well.

RECENT EVENTS, SHIFTING POSITIONS Before the 1990s, mainstream manga had no shortage of violent and sex¬ ist escapism and glorification of fundamentally conservative visions of social hierarchies. There were, however, few titles sympathetic to rightwing politi¬ cal views. Many of the individuals associated with the development of the manga industry in Japan, creators such as Osamu Tezuka, Shigeru Mizuki, and Shotaro Ishinomori, were on the opposite side, openly condemning trea¬ sured tropes of the Japanese right such as apologist views of Japan’s wars of the 1930s and 1940s and calls for revision of the “peace clause” of the postwar constitution (Penney 2008b; Power 2009). The 1990s, however, saw a shift in Japan’s public discourse. The collapse of the economic bubble after 1989 and with it, visions of Japan becoming the world’s premier economic power, brought about a crisis of identity. If Japa¬ nese could no longer count on international engagement from a position of economic hegemony, just what global role should the nation fill? Japan, con¬ stitutionally barred from dispatching troops overseas, participated in the 1991 Gulf War by paying $13 billion to support the allied effort (Kuroda 1994, 136). This move, however, met with widespread ridicule and a mantra of “they pay in yen, we in blood” in America and elsewhere (Feffer 2009). Other developments such as the rise of China, not only as an economic giant but also as a force in international relations, shocked the Japanese far right, which responded with often bigoted attacks on Chinese legitimacy. (For coverage of this issue, including manga representations, see Penney 2008a.)

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Contemporary to these developments were apologies made by Japanese Prime Ministers Hosokawa and Murayama, which ended decades of stalling and ambiguity by Japanese elites on issues of aggression and war crimes. These apologies represented a sea change in Japanese official responses to historical issues and sparked a host of positive moves such as more detailed accounts of the war period in school textbooks. They also infuriated rightwingers and helped to bring on a rush of neo-nationalist publishing, important examples of which downplay or deny Japanese wartime atrocities and paint Japanese imperialism in exclusively positive terms. From these trends emerged the first “hits” of rightwing manga—the manga version of Nobukatsu Fujioka’s attempt to blaze a trail for revisionist history. Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi (Manga history not taught by the text¬ books) and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s now infamous denialist polemic Sensoron (On war). This essay will compare rightwing titles such as Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi with other manga and ask: what is it about the manga me¬ dium that makes it so effective for communicating revisionist interpretations of history? In major Japanese bookstores, however, explicitly rightwing manga are confined to a solitary shelf among tens to hundreds of thousands of other vol¬ umes. In this essay, I will broaden the discussion of ideology in contemporary manga to include images critical of militarism and totalitarianism. First, I will assess how progressives have produced nonfiction history manga with a more mainstream focus than authors on the right. It is also important to go beyond nonfiction and examine how the ideological concerns of rightwing authors— exclusively positive stories of Japan’s wars and the idea that the individual exists to serve the state—are dealt with in more mainstream fictional manga. The diverse body of historical and fantasy titles may not always share the edu¬ cational purpose of nonfiction manga, but do share many ideological concerns by providing visions that oppose rightwing arguments and assertions with nuanced condemnations of militarism and totalitarianism in a form of pop cul¬ ture mythmaking that has deep connections to the conventions and archetypes of the medium as deep as anything in the rightwing output. Page layout aside, many Japanese manga are in fact nudging audiences to read from the left.

THE FUTURE OF JAPAN'S PAST Works of revisionist history existed in Japan in many forms before the 1990s. The first major example was Fusao Hayashi’s 1963 Daitoa Senso koteiron (An affirmation of the Greater East Asia War), the title of which effec¬ tively sums up the main drive of the revisionist approach (Hayashi 2001). The bulk of postwar academic writing and mass market history represented Ja¬ pan’s wars in Asia and the Pacific as, at best, a disastrous mistake that brought ruin to the Japanese islands and, at worst, as a brutal campaign of aggression that claimed countless lives across the region. Revisionist authors sought to

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change this view, deemphasizing the damage caused and attempting to rescue a “heroic narrative” that pictured Japanese as liberators of Asia, fighting a defensive war against Western imperialism. These points of view circulated in a variety of forms, but it was not until the 1990s that revisionism was estab¬ lished as a significant presence in the publishing mainstream. Nobukatsu Fujioka’s Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi series, which includes volumes in manga as well as in text, was the work most responsible for a boom in interest. In the early 1990s, Fujioka, a professor of education at Tokyo University, launched what was to become a crusade against historical representations crit¬ ical of Japan’s past. Fujioka was outraged by international criticism of Japan’s refusal to participate in military action during the Gulf War. Japan’s postwar constitution forbids the use of force as a way of settling international disputes. This principle, treasured by progressives and supported by a majority of the population, made direct involvement impossible. This, however, was widely regarded as “cowardly” in America and elsewhere (Feffer 2009). Responding to these criticisms, Fujioka wrote that Japan was, “after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which invaded Kuwait and was eventually subjected to UN sanctions, the ‘second loser’ of the war” (Fujioka 1996, 337). Fujioka saw the need to revise the “Peace Constitution” to allow Japan to increase its international standing and voice in world affairs while conceiving of these ideas primarily in a mili¬ tarized way. Progressives feared this would lead only to uncritical support of American wars and further alienate Japan from its East Asian neighbors. In order to undermine progressive concerns, Fujioka sought to paint an ide¬ alist Japan and a realist “world” in oppositional terms: For Japanese, the “Peace Constitution” is an ideal constitution. Schools also teach about war along these lines. However, this logic is just not accepted by the rest of the world. It is too bad, but in a world in which conflict is an ever-present reality, others do not necessarily think it acceptable for Japan to play the “good boy” and refuse to get involved. (Fujioka 1996, 340) Fujioka pointed to education in his attempt to explain what he perceived as Japan’s weakness and lack of understanding of international norms: There are a lot of factors that we can consider as having contributed to Japan turning into a country like this, but among them, I think that the one with the deepest connection [to our current problems] is the history education that Japanese have received throughout the postwar period, isn’t it? (Fujioka 1996, 341-42) In Fujioka’s view, a new style of history education was the best way to refash¬ ion the Japanese self-image. Through a new vision of history, Fujioka thought that Japan could realize a new, stronger, and more pragmatically oriented national identity:

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We are Japanese and it is only natural that we consider things from the point of view of the Japanese perspective and Japan’s national advantage and as a starting point, we must firmly acknowledge our country’s right to existence and right to pursue its national interests. (Fujioka 1996, 2) At the center of this approach are the concepts of a proud historical narra¬ tive and a single story that can unite Japanese—an exclusive revisioning of war history as Japan’s noble struggle to end colonialism (Fujioka 1996, 342). Most notably, in this consideration, there is no way to position war crimes other than to obscure or omit them from the narrative. The Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi series was Fujioka’s attempt to popular¬ ize his vision of Japanese history. It features three types of historical stories: Japanese standing up heroically against the West, Japanese striving to help Asia, and outsiders praising Japanese virtues. The stories average three to four pages in length—long enough for a feel-good vignette but not long enough to introduce any of the complexities of historiographical debates, controversies, or alternative interpretations. The earliest and most commercially successful volumes of the Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi series were revisionist but not strictly denialist.1 Fujioka wrote. When considering Japan’s modern wars, both the “Tokyo Trial view of his¬ tory” that makes Japan out to be the only bad guy, and the “Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War view of history” that claims that Japan didn’t do anything wrong at all, are both one-sided. (Fujioka 1996, 351) In early revisionist outings, Fujioka was not trying to deny inconvenient his¬ torical truths but rather to sideline them by presenting an alternative “positive” past. In doing so, he established a pattern that meshed well with the represen¬ tative conventions of the manga medium, leading to the mass-market success of the manga version of his own work and laying down the fundamental pat¬ tern of later manga revisionism.

HISTORY FROM THE RIGHT AND MANGA CONVENTIONS Historians with an interest in using alternative media to understand history, such as Robert Rosenstone and Natalie Zemon Davis, have pointed out that text should not have a monopoly on legitimate representation of the past and that visual media such as film are also a very effective means of presenting interpretations of history (Davis 2000; Rosenstone 1995). On-screen histories make use of distinct devices such as reducing diverse groups to a few repre¬ sentative characters, thus condensing visions of historical events; they may also include anachronisms due to available locations and the idiosyncrasies of surviving sources. Yet traditional prose history is also limiting, selective, and not uncommonly consciously manipulative in the way that narratives of

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the past are assembled. History-themed manga share many of the basic char¬ acteristics and conventions of filmic representations of the past. Chihiro Sato, in Raito noberu kenkyiijosetsu (An introduction to research on light novels), describes the attraction of nonfiction manga as “making possible the easy as¬ similation of large amounts of information in a short time” (Sato 2009, 53). To this end, events are often condensed to single panels where a prose history would use a paragraph. If the goal is to purposely limit perspectives on the past, history manga can be an ideal medium. While economy of representation is consistently important, nonfiction manga still rely on diverse approaches to depict the past. A historical event can be presented through a combination of text and images. Alternatively, se¬ quences can depict images selected to appear representative, not showing one specific documented occurrence but instead attempting to show a pattern of behavior or experience. And finally, prose explanations, lists, and other textual interjections may balance the manga sequences with content reminiscent of typical historical writing. Combining these devices, often on the same page, is what drives history manga. Revisionist history manga are empowered by the strategic alternation of these different styles of representation and also by the manipulation of stereotypes. Fusanosuke Natsume (1999) has argued that manga visuals consist of a se¬ ries of symbols and codes that do not seek to realistically depict but rather to suggest occurrences such as an explosion—conjured through a series of lines that in no way approach photographic realism but that can be just as impact¬ ful for readers familiar with the conventions of the medium. Physical traits suggest certain actual body types but may also be tied with personality traits, becoming a sort of common visual language. This side of manga representa¬ tion is of particular use in history manga where impressions—a noble soldier or scheming politician—are suggested by the images while the text provides terse historical background. This visual character of imagined vignettes cen¬ tral to the medium is useful also to revisionists who wish to limit the per¬ spectives on the past that are communicated and aids essentialism through the creation of representative characters. The revisionist Manga ky okas ho ga oshienai rekishi takes full advantage of this side of manga representation. “The Japanese soldiers who fought for Indonesian independence” is a chap¬ ter of Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi that employs both representative alternation and stereotypes to build a quick revisionist story. It begins with a representative image, concrete and detailed, of the brutality of Dutch rule in Indonesia. An Indonesian miner collapses from exhaustion, and comrades rush to his aid. A Dutchman with blonde hair and hooked nose—a visual caricature of white imperialism—whips the men, barking, “What are you bastards doing!? Who said that you could rest! ?” (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005,1:107). The Japanese occupation of the islands is then shown over a number of pages; caricatured Indonesians cheer, welcoming those they describe as their “yellow saviors” (ibid., 1:110). Following the Japanese takeover, however, the manga

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suddenly shifts from representative vignettes to an abstract historical lecture. Responding to one Indonesian who laments that Japanese have simply replaced Dutch colonial domination of the islands with their own, a smug representative of the Japanese forces gestures with pointer in hand to background text that outlines the new policies of the Japanese occupiers—allowing official use of Indonesian languages, providing military training to locals, and placing Indone¬ sians in high government positions. The smiling Japanese soldier quips, “See, we’re wonderful, aren’t we?” (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005, 1:111). Unlike Dutch rule, which was drawn in brutal shorthand, Japanese occu¬ pation is discussed only in terms of initial ideals. Actualities are never pic¬ tured, and Japanese atrocities in Indonesia are absent from the discussion. By switching between differing styles of representation—action for the Dutch and explanatory abstract for the Japanese—Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi achieves revisionist glorification of Japanese war history par excellence. In the end, shorthand conventions are once again used to stereotype. After the defeat of Japan, talking British and Dutch flags knock down a signboard that reads “Indonesian Independence,” shouting, “Don’t be naive! It’s your destiny to be ruled by whites!” (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005, 1:112). When interpreting revisionist history manga, it is important to note exactly who is given voice and why. In the above example, an Indonesian character is used to voice initial doubts, but there is no comeback description of the exploitative reality that lay behind the professed policies of the Japanese oc¬ cupiers. That aspect of history is simply not presented because the voice of authority in the narrative is transferred to the Japanese army. This means of presenting the past is used throughout Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi. The massacre of Koreans by angry mobs spurred on by rumors that Koreans had poisoned drinking water in the wake of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake is the focus of another chapter, “The police chief who protected Koreans after the Great Earthquake.” The slaughter of hundreds to thousands of Koreans is positioned in mainstream academic historiography as irrefutable evidence of popular distrust and discrimination against the Korean population by the Japa¬ nese empire. The manga does not deny this. Instead, it downplays by placing exclusive focus on one example when during the riots a group of Japanese police officers led by Station Chief Ogawa attempted to restore order. It is from Ogawa’s viewpoint that readers see events unfold. The story becomes a stage on which he performs a vision of Japanese benevolence for readers. Ogawa, unlike other characters that appear in this chapter, is drawn with ex¬ pressive eyes, alternatively determined and piercing, and finally benevolent— the cutesy arches that indicate kindness in manga shorthand. Conventions of manga representation immediately establish him as noble and kind (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005, 1:88). Making Ogawa into a representative of Japan’s elites limits contemporary readers’ gaze on the past. We hear nothing of the Korean victims of the mas¬ sacre nor of hardships faced by survivors attempting to integrate into neigh-

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borhoods that were first demolished by the earthquake and then tom further apart by racist paranoia. This formula leaves Koreans, unspeaking, as images of helpless victims aided by Japanese, effectively downplaying the violent racism of the riots. The Koreans are not only deprived of voice; in the visuals as well they are not given defining characteristics, fading into the background while the heroically depicted Ogawa speaks for what Fujioka and the manga illustrators wish to show as the fairness and balance of Japanese officialdom. On a larger scale, a similar formula is applied to the entire Korean peninsula. As the chapter title “The man called ‘The Benefactor of Korea’ Masutomi Yasugiemon” suggests, by showing Japanese colonialism only from the point of view of a Japanese educator who promoted scientific agriculture and mass literacy, the violence inherent in colonial occupation is masked (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005, 1:88). In its place is feel-good history supported by an art style that selectively lionizes Japanese elites. When others apart from Japanese and Korean nationals are given voice, it is simply to glorify Japan. “The Jews saved by a Kwantung army officer” focuses on a favorite story of Japanese revisionists: the efforts of a small number of Japanese diplomats and army figures to aid Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Europe. The chapter begins with an elderly Jewish man saying, “Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun and has an Emperor. I think that the Emperor is the Messiah” (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005, 1:98). In the end, a larger group of Jews is shown reflecting together, “We’re saved, we have to thank the people of Japan” (ibid., 1:104). The “Jewish point of view” effectively serves as bookends for the story of a rare exception that masks the enthusiastic Japa¬ nese support of the Nazi regime on other fronts. A text account would have to identify and contextualize the source of these comments, but here, the voice of the Other is absolute. These are limited characters, with exaggerated ethnic garb and characteristics, and only one or two speech balloons to establish their relationship with the Japanese, a carefully manufactured relationship that stands in the manga as exaggerated glorification in a nationalist narrative. In Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi, others frequently appear to speak to Japanese heroism. Stories of heroes, however, also require villains. Late in the work, American stereotypes are drafted to fill this role, standing for a homog¬ enized American worldview presented in negative terms in order to place war¬ time Japan in a contrastingly positive light. Following an account of Japan’s surrender, Americans appear in the form of terribly reductive caricatures. A beefy gentleman with fedora and cigar, and a lady with sunglasses and Ken¬ tucky Derby hat complete with exaggerated flower, read a newspaper that tells them that with victory over Japan, “The market of continental China is ours!” (Fujioka and Dynamic Production 2005, 1:135). Cartoonish opponents gloat¬ ing about broad conspiracies replace any need for nuanced consideration of geopolitics and with them, the wartime ambitions of Japan’s ruling elites. As in the Jewish example, freed by the conventions of the medium from the respon¬ sibility of attribution of quotes and ideas, these become the viewpoints of an

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entire group homogenized behind visual stereotypes. The views of cartoonish Americans quickly create a form of meta-history where groups unified through visual stereotypes are given unified motives. Americans become an essentialized exploiter in history, and, on the other side of the same formula, Japanese are homogenized as doomed heroes in a struggle against white imperialism. What lies at the end of the slippery slope of Fujioka’s revisionism is a cha¬ otic mishmash of stereotypes, attempts to homogenize diverse groups, and essentialist contrasts between heroic Japanese and dishonest others aided in the popular manga version by shorthand historical representation common to the medium. Manga representation effectively aided Fujioka’s project to present a strategically crafted vision of Japanese history packaged as a slick commercial product.

HISTORY FROM THE LEFT Fujioka’s strategies for obfuscation are the mainstream in neo-nationalist manga, but what about the broader field of nonfiction manga and, indeed, the manga industry as a whole? Fujioka’s writing and the manga based on it were marketed as an alternative to mainstream presentations of the past and have become popular as such. If Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi is what is not taught, if it is the alternative to the mainstream, then what do other visions of the past in popular culture look like? There is a wide range of manga that are pre¬ sented by publishers, not as alternative images of Japanese history, but as histo¬ ries of Japan proper—mainstream mass market history to serve as study guides, reference works, or a fundamental introduction to historiography. Among them are important titles by key manga creators such as Ishinomori, creator of the seminal 1960s and 1970s hits Cyborg 009 and Kamen rider (Masked rider). Because of its popularity, Ishinomori’s Nihon no rekishi (History of Japan) series should be central to any discussion of history manga: selling over 10 million copies of its 55 volumes, it helped to put history manga on the map of Japan’s pop culture sphere in the 1990s, spawning many imitators. Deeper than sales, however, Nihon no rekishi is also important because of the way that Ishinomori chose to represent the past. While certain manga conventions may have aided Fujiwara’s revisionist project, there is no essential connection between manga and neo-nationalism. In seeking to present a strategically lim¬ ited view of the past, Fujioka and the producers of Manga kyokasho ga oshie¬ nai rekishi made use of only a fraction of the representational tools available to history manga creators. Ishinomori, the man called “Prince of Manga,” just a step down in the pantheon from “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka, brought the full range of his talent to bear on historical representation of a very differ¬ ent kind than Fujioka’s revisionism. Ishinomori was an extremely versatile artist, and the nonfiction modem his¬ tory editions produced by him and his studio show the breadth and depth of artistic choices that can be used to build images of the past in history manga.

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For example, the images in history manga often serve not to evoke action but rather atmosphere that complements textual explanation. In the Asia-Pacific War volume of Nihon no relcishi, a text description of the Sanko (loot all, bum all, kill all) atrocities—a campaign of raids and mass killings, often of noncombatants, designed to break Chinese guerrilla resistance to the Japanese invasion—is imposed over sketches of human skulls, adding greatly to the horror of the passage (Ishinomori 1999, 10). It must be asked, however, is it the past that is being represented here or is it the author’s impression of the morality of past behavior that is being evoked through the use of a common signifier of horror and violence? Debates about Holocaust images in popu¬ lar culture have focused around the impossibility of accurate representation and the danger of detailed depictions of atrocities crossing the line to exploi¬ tation and being consumed as a simple entertainment product (Lang 2000). Ishinomori’s varied approach to history manga shows a notable sensitivity to concerns about the moral consequences of creating images of past suffering. Where authors such as Fujioka have simply omitted the darker side of Japan’s war legacies, Ishinomori responds by including difficult themes while simul¬ taneously resisting their commodification as simple “horror” in the entertain¬ ment mode by presenting an image of the aftermath of violence rather than the moment. The contrast with Fujioka’s approach to the difficult past is manifest. Ishinomori consistently punctuates the manga’s narrative of political events by drawing attention to Japanese war crimes, acts of aggression, and other critical themes. At the root of this is a scholarly framework with deep progres¬ sive roots. The volume detailing the Asia-Pacific War has dozens of footnotes and a bibliography made up of works by leftwing activists such as Shashin zusetsu Nihon no shinryaku (Japanese aggression in pictures and images) pro¬ duced in 1992 by the Ajia Minshu Hotei Junbikai (The Asia People’s Court Preparatory Committee) and also the mainstream of progressive historiogra¬ phy including Keiichi Eguchi’s Futatsu no taisen (The two world wars)—an important and meticulously detailed survey of Japan’s descent into milita¬ rism by one of the most prolific popularizers of information about Japanese war crimes. Ishinomori’s diverse approach to the artistic dimension of history manga is an important factor behind the achievement that is Nihon no rekishi, but its connections to progressive academia are also important influences on the critical but nuanced story of Japanese history that it tells. In using academic research as the foundation for the narrative in Nihon no rekishi and employing a detailed bibliography, Ishinomori’s work repre¬ sents one type of bridge between academic historiography and popular cul¬ ture. Other titles, however, penned directly by academics, effectively cut out the middleman. In this sense, history manga can be effectively linked with a lengthy trend in Japan’s public sphere: the opening of academic research to popular reading audiences. In the 1950s, the academic establishment frowned on professors who chose to bring their research to a broader readership by producing mass-market paperbacks. This began to change with titles such as

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Showashi (A history of Showa), written by Shigeki Tooyama, Seiichi Imai, and Akira Fujiwara in 1955. Presenting an honest survey of wartime misdeeds in popular format, the book was a strong seller and paved the way for other works that crossed the line between academic history and popular culture. The Nihon no rekishi series published in the 1960s by Chuokoron, which all told, sold over 10 million copies, proved decisively that academic historiography and mass market success were not mutually exclusive. By the 1990s, the line between academic culture and popular culture had been thoroughly blurred. There is now nothing strange about university professors taking the lead in scripting history manga for the average reader while leaving the artwork to professionals. One of the most popular examples of the intersection of manga and aca¬ demic history is Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon (A manga book for understanding Japanese history), which has gone through nearly 40 printings since it was first published in 1995. Written by Shizuoka University profes¬ sor Tetsuo Owada, Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon condenses into a single volume a temporally broader piece of Japanese history than either Fujioka’s or Ishinomori’s offerings. Everything from the years leading up to Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853 to the present—150 years of momentous change—is covered in fewer than 300 pages. As a result, the typical “econ¬ omy” of history manga is often taken to extremes. In this context, the detailed coverage of Japanese war crimes, and the way this meshes with Owada’s ex¬ pressed motives for presenting history in manga form, are very important. Fujioka’s stories provide a narrative designed to strategically shape readers’ views of the past. Owada, on the other hand, recognizing both the limits and the potential of history manga, hopes that a background account including as wide a variety of historical experience as possible will instead serve as a foundation for readers to build on through additional study or even their own research. He writes: People have been talking about the young giving up on the written word for a long time now. It is certain that the diversification of media, especially the emergence of television, has caused a large decline in the amount of time that people spend reading, but this is certainly not a phenomenon limited to young people. I also do not think that this should be taken as the decline of people’s intellectual curiosity, should it? I can’t help but think that the number of people with an interest in the past is increasing. (Owada 2009, 278-79) He does not believe that history manga with a popularizing focus represents a dumbing down but rather sees it meeting a new demand and a new wellspring of intellectual energy. Owada imagines “the one hundred million becoming historians”—a takeoff on the slogan “the one hundred million becoming id¬ iots” that heralded the television era in Japan, itself a takeoff on “the one

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hundred million as one fireball,” a glorification of death to the last in wartime propaganda. Atrocity images play an important part in what Owada judges to be nec¬ essary background for a popular reading audience. Here, popular interest in Japanese history is nudged in a left/progressive direction by a concerned aca¬ demic. Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon uses representative scenes of the brutality of the Japanese army to suggest a larger tragedy. Text vilifies the Japanese military: “Strengthened by their victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the military elite ignored the elected assembly and bent the government to their will, moving unceasingly down the path of mili¬ tarization” (Owada 2009, 206). Images are employed in a nuanced manner. In scenes depicting the invasion of China in the 1930s, Japanese soldiers are pictured from behind, appearing as advancing automatons under the flag of the rising sun. In a contrasting image, Chinese civilians, including women and children who dominate the image, run toward the reader’s viewpoint, their panicked, anguished expressions made clear (Owada 2009, 239^10). The sol¬ diers are not personalized or even humanized. This may distract from the issue of the war responsibility of the ordinary Japanese who made up the imperial military machine. However, this choice also keeps readers from taking away signs of excitement or struggle, leading them away from enjoying the violence vicariously. At Nanking, Japanese soldiers are shown gunning down unarmed captives and civilians without mercy (Owada 2009, 242). The narrative focus is on Chi¬ nese anger and links the past to present controversies over the way that war is remembered: “The Chinese people voiced their anger and indignation at the behavior of the Japanese forces, [and] the will to resist of all Chinese people was heightened” (Owada 2009, 243). Highlights are necessarily brief, but en¬ tire pages of textual explanation contribute context, “It is said that the number of Chinese soldiers and civilians killed in the Nanking Massacre is between 300,000 and 400,000, and this rests with the Comfort Women as two of the major tragedies of Japanese aggression on the continent” (Owada 2009, 243). Comments such as these, along with the accompanying manga images, make the suffering of others into a central part of the narration of Japan’s past. In contrast with the presentation of war crimes in China, the ruins of bombed-out Tokyo and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima are shown, but individual Jap¬ anese victims are not, effectively depersonalizing the destruction. This allows Owada and the artists behind Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon to depart from the limiting “victim’s view” of the war and present a powerful alternative to neo-nationalist tellings of Japanese history. As a whole, Owada’s work is not simply a one-sided reversal of Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi’s heroic stories. With the tremendous human cost of the war as background, Japanese who pressed for peace, trying to head off the rise of militarism, are praised. Descriptions of Japanese colonialism, while detailing inherent violence, also acknowledge the development of infrastructure

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in colonized regions and that some Japanese worked sincerely to raise stan¬ dards of living and promote responsible governance. In terms of giving readers a foundation of historical understanding through alternative media, however, Owada is sure to emphasize that Japanese history cannot rest as an exclusively Japanese story and that narratives of the past are strengthened, not weakened, by including the challenging and uncomfortable, not simply unabashedly na¬ tionalistic, episodes.

FICTION FROM THE MAINSTREAM While they are important counterpoints, the history manga of Ishinomori and Owada are no more representative of the manga mainstream than titles by neo-nationalists such as Fujioka and other authors such as Yoshinori Kobayashi and Sharin Yamano. The vast majority of manga being produced and sold in Japan, including manga that deal with historical themes, present fic¬ tionalized narratives and, unlike the history manga discussed above that were released directly in book form, run first in newsstand manga digests before finally hitting shelves as mass market soft-covers. If nonfiction history manga are considered as commercial products, what they are selling is informative narratives of the past. In contrast, fictional¬ ized historical narratives are not centered around relating historical informa¬ tion and circulate primarily as mass entertainment products. This does not, however, discount the potential for sophisticated interpretations of the past. Instead, it opens up a range of different devices for representation. Of these, the selective use of the stereotypes and archetypes of the medium stands out as an important side of critical war representation. Ishinomori and Owada stress the necessity of awareness of past crimes and of contrition through detailed background with foundations in progressive historical research. There are fic¬ tional manga that make use of the archetypes of boys’ manga—central to the development of the manga industry—to achieve similar effects.

Martial Arts Stories for Boys Ron (Dragon), which ran between 1991 and 2006 in Big Comic Original, a digest for mature readers that sells approximately 850,000 copies of its bi¬ weekly releases, is a seinen (young men) manga, but one that takes a shonen (boy’s) manga archetype as its starting point. Before beginning work on Ron, creator Motoka Murakami was most famous for his boy’s series Musashi no ken (Musashi’s sword), which ran in the digest Shonen Sunday between 1981 and 1985. Musashi no ken can best be described as a “samurai sports” series. The manga spans the childhood and young adulthood of Musashi, a boy who sees his father killed in a kendo (Japanese fencing) match but who diligently trains in the sport himself in order to capture some of the paternal strength

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and inner calm that he admired, carrying on a legacy of Japanese martial man¬ hood. The name “Musashi,” while written with different Chinese characters, also effectively links the main character with Musashi Miyamoto, the most famous of samurai swordsmen. In creating Ron, Murakami essentially remade his famous Musashi as Ryu Oshikoji, the heir of a Japanese aristocratic family enrolled at a training acad¬ emy for martial artists—a hotbed of militarist and nationalist sentiment—in the period between the two world wars. Many artists have moved popular archetypes from one series to another, but there can be few more controversial backdrops than this. Murakami’s view on the past, however, is much more in line with that of Ishinomori, Owada, and the progressive academic establishment than that of the revisionists. Many manga critically depict Japanese atrocities using vio¬ lent images. They also use other devices to look critically at the war period and Japanese militarism. Some have narrators or characters, including some tied up with the major archetypes of the canon of Japanese popular culture such as Murakami’s Ryu, that speak passionately about Japanese misdeeds and the necessity of reflection and apology, effectively linking the early vol¬ umes of the series with the 1990s trend toward political apologies.2 Reflection on Japan’s path to militarism and the wars of the 1930s and 1940s defines the early chapters of Ron, and the manga includes numerous moving individual vignettes. For example, Ryu comes upon a shopkeeper bru¬ tally beating a young child as he accuses the boy of theft. Ryu puts a stop to the violence and discovers that the child had simply taken some moldy potatoes that the man had thrown away (Murakami 1992, 64). The youth is Korean, the violence a product of racism. Ryu insists on apologizing to the boy, even going so far as to kowtow in the street. He remarks that as a fellow Japanese, he is ashamed of the grocer’s behavior. Author Murakami turns this incident into an allegory. Ryu tells his companions that he does not want to hear any excuses about the necessity of controlling Korea for the defense of Japan. Speaking with a voice from the present, not from the 1920s, Ryu states that Japan’s conquest of Korea was unjust, an argument that is as shocking to his fictional contemporaries as it is potentially convincing to readers (Murakami 1992, 73-74). Later, when visiting the boy’s home, Ryu and his companions meet an elderly Korean man whose son committed suicide after being tortured by the Japanese police. Murakami’s art style supports this critical exploration of the underbelly of the Japanese empire. The backgrounds in Ron can only be described as beautiful in their evocation of interwar Kyoto. This makes the contrast with the slum-like Korean quarter, the squalor of which is depicted in equal detail, that much more shocking. In this manner, Ron goes through the prewar years examining cases of Japanese racism and violence. The sincere apologies of the character who is being sketched as a paragon of Japanese martial virtue and manhood are the defining viewpoint through which the past is interpreted.

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Ryu Oshikoji is a Japanese pop culture archetype, but one that is fractured by the critical direction of Ron. Ryu practices the Chinese martial arts and uses them to fight against ultranationalist Japanese bullies. The manga also takes a turn that breaks down Japan-centric consideration of the past altogether as Ryu discovers that he has Chinese roots and begins to see the Japanese empire from a very different, and far more critical, position. His viewpoint, rather than obscuring perspectives on the past through simplification, can open up readers to the points of view of others. The contrast with Fujioka’s approach is very important to consider. Fujioka uses stereotypes to group Japanese heroes, foreign villains, and helpless Asians into essential categories. In Ron, arche¬ type is the very foundation for challenging such divisions. Ron’s use of the archetypes of martial arts shonen manga differentiates it from the progressive histories while achieving similar thematic effect. Another popular manga series, Munakata kyoju denkiko (Professor Munakata’s reflec¬ tions on the strange and fantastic), however, builds a similar expression of con¬ trition around a manga archetype with clear links to nonfiction: the professor.

Instructional Fiction The manga medium has a number of brooding, introspective academic characters. Munakata and other creations such as DaijiroMorohoshi’s Profes¬ sor Hieda from the Yokai hunter (Spirit hunter) series have become popular. From a narrative point of view, these characters offer significant advantages to creators. They are able to speak with the apparent authority of an academic expert and, indeed, are used as mouthpieces by which authors present schol¬ arly research to readers. Their stories, however, freed by fiction from the con¬ straints of evidence and factual reportage, often feature supernatural elements and other attractive commercial tropes. Munakata lcyoju denkiko was created by Yukinobu Hoshino and has been serialized in a number of monthly manga magazines since 1990. Munakata is a stoic middle-aged professor of folklore and anthropology. His is an infallible voice of authority in the story. His knowledge and social place as an interpreter of Japanese history for young characters are the threads that run through the series’ episodic chapters. Most of Munakata consists of the professor, along with students or colleagues, confronting demons, real or imagined, that have remained along with the artifacts and mythological traditions of prehistoric times. Supernatural events are linked to real archeological finds by Munak¬ ata’s improvised lectures. In considering the manga as a product, these lec¬ tures are delivered to other characters in the narrative, but are also targeted at readers as a major side of the series’ appeal. The mixture of information and entertainment is praised by figures such as manga critic and researcher Osamu Takeuchi, fantasy author Yoshiki Tanaka, and religious studies professor Toji Kamata, who provided essays for the compiled volumes of the series, as well as by fans of the series writing online.

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How does Hoshino join war commentary to Munakata’’s broader story? The linkages are both thematic and visual. Traveling in New Guinea, the site of fierce fighting during the Pacific War, Munakata listens to the story of a veteran, Kawamura. The account duplicates almost exactly the war experi¬ ence of manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, famed for his supernatural stories, who was gravely injured and rescued by islanders in the South Pacific theatre. As Mizuki did, Kawamura contrasts the islanders’ lifestyle—at peace and in har¬ mony with nature—with the brutality of war and the Japanese forces (Hoshino 2004, 171). That violence is soon made manifest when a group of Japanese soldiers, cut off from their units, appear at the village in search of food. They push young men and women to the ground, bayoneting them as Kawamura begs them to stop. In the present, Munakata attempts to set this violence in broad historical perspective, recounting how migrants from the South Pacific traveled to Japan in ancient times, helping to shape the development of its earliest civilization (Hoshino 2004, 179). In the 20th century, however, Japan, starting with the Korean peninsula and moving to China, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and New Guinea, carried out acts of aggression. It was from these countries that, over the course of thousands of years, count¬ less migrants crossed to the Japanese Archipelago. They shaped Japanese culture and became Japanese. What Japan did [in the Asia-Pacific War] was trample on its ancestral homelands and devastate people with the same blood—brothers and sisters. Just how terrible a sin was this? (Hoshino 2004, 186) Munakata may be fictional, but it is written from an instructional viewpoint with the professor himself as a sort of idealized authority on all things relating to Japan’s history. Munakata serves to pass along author Hoshino’s research into academic sources. What Hoshino does is reproduce the mainstream of academic discourse on war history by using an academic character within an overall fictional plot. This is the point of view, but what of the artistic choices? Kawamura’s story is shown in a visual style typical of the rest of the manga and other titles in the gekiga (dramatic pictures) style. Munakata’s explanation of Japanese war crimes, however, is followed by a page without text in which Hoshino replicates exactly photographs of atrocities—a Japa¬ nese soldier holding a severed head, a prisoner bayoneted, a pile of corpses. By reproducing actual photos, Munakata’s words are linked to progressive nonfiction histories that have, since the 1960s, used photographs of this type to call attention to the darker side of Japan’s wartime history. Here, manga visuals include images that are evidence of past crimes. The immediate switch from the codes and conventions of manga to realistic representation of photographs brings the authority of nonfiction to Munak¬ ata’s commentary. Combined with the rhetorical authority of the professor character type, Hoshino’s Munakata can be read as an example of potent

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fact-fiction syncretism that leads toward an affecting consideration of Japan s war legacies.

Historical Fiction Both Ron and Munakata kyoju denkiko employ manga archetypes in ways that link the narratives with discourses that read Japan’s war history from the left. A similar effect can be achieved by abandoning archetypes and visual stereotypes of the type central to Fujioka’s representations of the past. Few manga have done this as well as Susumu Higa’s Kajimunugatai (Told by the wind; The Battle of Okinawa) which ran in publisher Kodansha’s comic magazine Moningu (Morning) between 2001 and 2003 (Higa 2003). Moningu, one of Japan’s most popular comic magazines for young adults and 20-somethings, is also home to such popular series as Vagabond. It routinely sells in excess of 700,000 copies per issue. Higa is Okinawan, an ethnic minority centered around an island chain over 650 kilometers south of the Japanese mainland. Okinawa was the most significant piece of Japanese ter¬ ritory invaded by the American forces during the Pacific War. In the bloody fighting, more than 100,000 civilians lost their lives. With the consent of the Japanese authorities, the region remained occupied by America for over 25 years after the war ended. Okinawa, a land-mass that makes up only 0.6 percent of Japan, is still host to a full 75 percent of the American bases in the country, along with the pollution, military accidents, and crimes that go with them. Kajimunugatai is a history manga that brings past violence and present contradictions into focus. Higa’s storytelling approach in Kajimunugatai is distinct in that elements of the series are based in readings of historical sources concerning the Battle of Okinawa; others use facts as the foundation for essentially fictional narrative, and still others are pure fictional inventions. The first story, entitled “Told by the wind,” is based on newspaper reports of the unearthing of the remains of three American soldiers who were found to have died violently in the months after the Battle of Okinawa ended. Higa takes this as the starting point for a fictionalized story of the fate of the men that evokes the victimization of Oki¬ nawan civilians in both historical and contemporary perspectives. The chapter begins as a trio of American soldiers arrive at a small Oki¬ nawan village. They attempt to rape a mother and her young daughter. The young girl, Ayu, manages to escape as her mother tries to fight off the men. One of the soldiers shoots her dead while a second laments, “Ah, now we’ve gone and spoiled our fun” (Higa 2003, 12). This is a powerful scene. The trio of American assailants evokes the real gang rape and brutalization of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three American servicemen in 1995. This notorious attack sparked a mass protest movement against the continued American base presence in Okinawa and grabbed head¬ lines all over Japan. One mass demonstration, demanding justice and mea-

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sures to prevent future attacks, involved as many as 85,000 people. By using a similar image to begin Kajimunugatai, Higa effectively emphasizes the fact that the suffering of the people of Okinawa did not stop when the Battle of Okinawa ended. In the years between the end of the war and the return of Oki¬ nawa to Japanese control in 1972, Okinawan civilians had inadequate legal protection against crimes carried out by American soldiers. Most critics agree that in the eyes of the Japanese government, the concentration of American forces in Okinawa has been seen as a convenient way to minimize these prob¬ lems in mainland Japan. The role played by Japanese authorities in sanctioning American victimiza¬ tion of Okinawa is also dealt with in Higa’s manga. After the local woman is murdered, the villagers go as a group to a nearby American base in search of justice. They are barred from entering. It turns out that the Japanese guard at the gate is a former secret policeman who had tortured locals during the months of fighting because of groundless suspicions that they were American spies. This character has an allegorical role. In 1945, as many as thousands of Okinawans were tortured or executed by Japanese soldiers and agents. During the occupation a year later, these same victimizers were often the ones openly cooperating with the Americans, and in this case, preventing the local people from airing their grievances. What Higa sees as the hypocrisy and brutality of some mainland Japanese becomes a significant theme in Kajimunugatai. The villagers become desperate. The attack on Ayu and her mother was not an isolated incident. It is discovered that over half a dozen local women have been raped. A newly returned soldier, Akitsuki, offers to help the villag¬ ers. In developments that mirror Kurosawa Akira’s classic film Shichinin no samurai (Seven samurai), Akitsuki teaches the villagers to defend themselves with bamboo spears and to set traps for their assailants. When the three rapists return, the people of the village kill them. Akitsuki dies in the fight. While “Told by the wind” uses a concise historical vignette to evoke the suffering of Okinawa civilians due to individual acts of violence in the context of dual Japanese and American official complacency, the object of the series is by no means to demonize the United States, and it is in the second chapter that the scope of Higa’s ambitious approach and subtlety of his representative strategy become clear. Despite the critical stance toward America evident in “Told by the wind,” Kajimunugatai deliberately avoids looking only at the victimization of the people of Okinawa by American hands. The major focus of the collection is on acts of violence committed by Japanese soldiers. The second story is entitled “Told by the stars.” At the beginning, Japanese troops, seeking cover from artillery fire, drive a mother and her two young children out of their hiding place. A third child, the eldest daughter, Tomoko, returns with water but is horrified to discover that her brother and sister have been stabbed (Higa 2003, 73). As they lay dying, they tell her that their mother was beheaded by the Japanese soldiers. Tomoko, unable to save them, stays with the children until they bleed to death. Higa’s drawing style is very simple, but

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as in the seminal atomic bomb manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), the representation of extreme violence in a simple visual style creates a disso¬ nance that many readers find accentuates the shocking quality of the material. Tomoko is distraught but still hopes to find her mother alive. These hopes are dashed when she discovers the headless corpse. The young girl finds a group of soldiers resting nearby and begs them to tell her what happened. The leader of the group, puffing on a cigarette, tells Tomoko that he killed them after her mother talked back. He tells her nonchalantly, “It can’t be helped. This is war” (Higa 2003, 79). This callous killer is drawn in what can be described as an “everyman” fashion, and indeed, he has no notable characteristics to distin¬ guish him from Akitsuki who died protecting civilians in the previous chapter. In not using the visual stereotypes used to distinguish “good” and “bad” char¬ acters in manga shorthand, Higa’s art style plays up the fundamental theme of the series—that Japan’s wars gave rise to diverse groups of victims and victimizers, making clear categorization and easy, positive tellings of history impossible. In taking this approach, Higa offers a potent alternative to the us-versus-them mindset of the neo-nationalists, encouraging readers to avoid looking at the war in homogenizing terms. As “Told by the stars” continues, Tomoko is badly burned in an explosion, but is saved by American troops and nursed back to health in an army hos¬ pital. Taken as a whole, Kajimunugatai is remarkably balanced. In the first story, Americans are depicted as assailants; in the second, they are a benevo¬ lent presence while some Japanese soldiers are shown to be victimizers. One American listens to the story of the murder of Tomoko’s family and vows to help her achieve justice. Just as the appearance of murder parallels the heroic Akitsuki, the benevolent American appears physically little different from the American rapists in the first chapter. In continuing to eschew stereotypes, Higa captures something of the diversity of war experience and effectively ne¬ gates the rightist project of fitting Japanese into a monolithic “hero” category with Americans and others as uniform villains. Tomoko is grateful to the Americans who saved her and volunteers to help care for the other sick and wounded but is shocked to find the solider who killed her family alive among them. Tomoko speaks with some of the other women. They all agree that it was often the yugun (friendly forces) who were the worst enemy of the Okinawan people (Higa 2003, 93). One of the older women tells Tomoko that she witnessed the abduction and rape of Okinawan girls by the Japanese forces. Tomoko plans revenge, but in the end, she is satisfied with confronting her family’s murderer. The man tells her that he was a primary school teacher before the war and that he loved children. Because of his experience in China, however, he became a murderer. He tells Tomoko that, on the continent, “doing unspeakable things became easy” (Higa 2003, 112). The only concrete image shown on this page is a Japanese sword wet with blood. The Japanese sword, an effective symbol of past militarism, is associated with horror and

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atrocity. This is an attempt to fit the crimes carried out by Japanese soldiers in Okinawa into the larger context of atrocities committed across Asia. In continuing with diverse themes, Higa makes Japanese soldiers as victim¬ izes of Chinese and other Asian peoples into the central thread of another story: “Told by a bird.” This installment begins in China and shows an Oki¬ nawan draftee, Soichi Gakiya, being forced to bayonet a Chinese prisoner who has been bound and blindfolded. When he falters, an officer beats him, asking, “And you call yourself a Japanese man!?” (Higa 2003, 120). Gakiya misses purposefully, however, and his superior flogs him mercilessly with a wooden club. One of the other soldiers tells him casually, “It is better if you don’t think of it as a human target” (Higa 2003, 123). Higa’s art style consistently empha¬ sizes acts of violence with panels taking up half a page or more as he broadens his thematic approach to include other victims of Japanese wartime violence. Using the same sort of short chapters employed in Manga ky okas ho ga oshienai rekishi, Higa achieves a radically different effect. That these points of view from Okinawa and elsewhere are communicated to mainland Japanese readers in popular form is especially noteworthy. Higa has said, “I think that it is the fate of people bom here to have to come to terms with the Battle of Okinawa.”3 Memories of the battle circulate in Okinawa in many forms in¬ cluding prolific museums and classroom learning projects (Allen 2002). All too often, these points of view have fallen short of nationwide exposure but Higa’s manga, linked with critical antiwar ideas, is an important exception. Why do war manga that bring author and reader alike in contact with past stories of horror and loss have appeal? At the beginning of Kajimunugatai, Higa quotes film director Yoji Yamada, famed for the Otoko ha tsurai yo (It’s tough being a man) series: “I want to make movies while wishing for the hap¬ piness of the audience” (Higa 2003, inside cover). Higa has a similar intent, also adding that he aimed to bring a realistic portrait of war to readers. Hap¬ piness and the reality of war—evoked by the often tragic and horrific content of the manga—may seem difficult to reconcile. Higa is not, however, hoping that his audience will have a happy or entertaining reading experience. He simply wishes that the “stories [of tragedy] do not end with simple despair.” His aim is to organize stories of past suffering in a way that can inculcate antiwar feelings at present; his vision of happiness is a world free of the types of abuses and atrocities that he depicts. This approach, like that of Fujioka and other neo-nationalist authors, is centered around the potential of histori¬ cal narratives to shape contemporary attitudes and behavior. The difference in orientation, however, is also a testament to the diversity of representations of the past that circulate in popular manga. Higa’s Kajimunugatai was a critical success and was awarded a 2003 Cul¬ ture Prize by the Government of Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, the state s top honor for works of popular culture. The judges agreed that the work left an “unforgettable impression” and that its art style, while plain, “has the reverse effect of making [its images of the past] even more effective and convincing.”4

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CONCLUSION Japanese memories and images of the wars of the 1930s and 1940s are much derided outside of the country. In 1995, famed military historian John Keegan lashed out against them, writing that it is Japanese tribal practice, “not to admit that the tribe itself has done wrong, either in the present or the past. It would indeed be wrong to make such an admission; wrong for the tribe, wrong for any individual member” (quoted in Chomsky 1995). Views like this one, however, are much too simplistic to accurately evoke the often complex representations of war that appear in Japanese popular media such as manga. Describing the militarization of American popular culture, Henry A. Giroux has written, “Young people no longer learn military values in training camp or in military-oriented schools. These values are now disseminated through the pedagogical force of popular culture itself, which has become a major tool used by the armed forces to educate young people about the ideology and social relations that inform military life—minus a few of the unpleasant¬ ries” (Giroux 2004, 217). There are fears that a similar process is at work in Japanese popular culture. Indeed, many have reacted with alarm to the use of manga, a medium that has tremendous popular pull among Japanese youth, by authors such as Fujioka to inculcate a new style of robust patriotism rooted in a selective glorification of past wars. Scholars and other critics have taken aim at Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi and other neo-nationalist manga such as Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron, but the most compelling counters come from within the manga medium itself, either in the form of history manga with a progressive focus or fictional series that, through their deft manipulation of the manga medium’s major archetypes, produce images of the past every bit as nuanced as those in the mainstream of progressive academia. If manga is part of a dialogue on Japan’s past, then the views expressed can truly be said to range from right to left.

NOTES 1. Historiography is revisionist in the sense that it attempts to change or refocus pre¬ vailing interpretations of the past, often by weighing evidence in alternative ways. Denial simply negates historical experience in the face of surviving evidence or testimony. 2. For information about Japanese apologies and the debates about them in politics and wider society, see Yamazaki 2006. 3. “Kajimunugatai,” http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/festival/backnumber/15/sakuhin/kajimunu gatai.html. 4. “Kajimunugatai,” http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/2003/manga/000121/index.php.

REFERENCES Allen, Matthew. 2002. Identity and Resistance in Okinawa. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. “Guilt of War Belongs to All.” The Observer (July 30). http://www. chomsky.info/articles/ 19950730.htm.

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Davis, Natalie Zemo. 2000. Slaves on Screen—Film and Historical Vision. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feffer, John. 2009. “Japan: The Price of Normalcy.” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (January 10). www.japanfocus.org/-John-Feffer/3009. Fujioka, Nobukatsu. 1996. Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi [History not taught by the text¬ books]. Vol. 1. Tokyo: Sankei Shimbun Nyusu Sabisu. Fujioka, Nobukatsu, and Dynamic Production. 2005. Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi [Manga history not taught by the textbooks], 3 vols. Tokyo: Sankei Shimbun. Giroux, Henry A. 2004. “War on Terror: The Militarising of Public Space and Culture in the United States.” Third Text 18 (4): 211-21. Hayashi, Fusao. 2001. Daitoa senso koteiron [An affirmation of the Greater East Asia War]. Tokyo: Natsume Shobo. Higa, Susumu. 2003. Kajimunugatai [Told by the wind: The Battle of Okinawa]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Hoshino, Yukinobu. 2004. Munakata kyoju denkiko [Professor Munakata’s reflections on the strange and fantastic]. Vol. 4. Tokyo: Ushio Shuppansha. Ishinomori, Shotaro. 1999. Manga Nihon no rekishi [History of Japan], Vol. 52. Tokyo: Chubkoronsha. Kuroda, Yasumasa. 1994. “Japan: An Economic Superpower in Search of Its Proper Politi¬ cal Role in the Post-Cold War Era.” In The Gulf War and the New World Order. Edited by Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael, 132-52. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Lang, Berel. 2000. Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins University Press. Murakami, Motoka. 1992. Ron [Dragon]. Vol. 3. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Natsume, Fusanosuke. 1999. Manga no chikara [Power of manga]. Tokyo: Shobunsha. Owada, Tetsuo. 2009. Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon [A manga book for under¬ standing Japanese history]. Tokyo: Mikasa Shobo. Penney, Matthew. 2008a. “Foundations of Cooperation: Imagining the Future of SinoJapanese Relations.” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (April 5). www.japanfocus. org/-Matthew Penney/2731. Penney, Matthew. 2008b. “War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga ofMizuki Shigeru.” AviaPncific Journal: Japan Focus (September 21). www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/2905. Power, Natsu Onoda. 2009. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rosenstone, Robert. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of His¬ tory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sato, Chihiro. 2009. “Hyogen no paionia” [Pioneers of expression]. In Raito noberu kenkyu josetsu [An introduction to research on light novels]. Edited by Hirotaka Ichiyanagi and

Yoriko Kume, 51-72. Tokyo: Seikyusha. Tooyama, Shigeru, Seiichi Imai, and Akira Fujiwara. 1955. Showashi [A history of Showa]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Yamazaki, Jane W. 2006. Japanese Apologies for World War II: A Rhetorical Study. Lon¬ don: Routledge.

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10 All Life Is Genocide: The Philosophical Pessimism of Osamu Tezuka ADA PALMER

Our hero lies dying in the arm-wings of his birdman foster son. The father, Rock Holmes, discovered a new planet, Dimon, and, ever quick to adventure, led the first expedition to the planet of the birdmen with its cliffs of living mud and seas of crude oil. Rock shared human technology with his birdman friends, even adopting one orphan hatchling as his own. But the speedy industrializa¬ tion of birdman culture led to resource competition, invasion, slavery, retalia¬ tion, mass murder, war. Now with genocide on the horizon. Rock has leapt in the way of the opening volley of the last conflict, and both sides watch silent as the one person both races called friend breathes his last breath (Figure 10.1). His last words to his birdman son: “Please listen to my request. Neither of the two races should have gone to the other’s planet. Return to Dimon, taking your people with you” (Tezuka 1952-1954; translation in Osamu Tezuka 1990, 136). It is a grim ending, absolute pessimism about the possibility that humanity could ever coexist in peace with another race, and it is an ending that Osamu Tezuka, the “God of Manga,” would go on to write and rewrite dozens of times over the course of the career that founded modem manga. Rock and his unlucky birdmen friends appear in Adventures of Rock, begun in 1952. This was the same year Tezuka started the original Astro Boy (Tezuka 1952-1968), now an international icon of the hope that, through science, man¬ kind will build a brighter future.1 Astro Boy is the exception. In 1951 Tezuka wrote Nextworld (1951b), where a pixie-like telepathic race that evolved in Australia flees the Earth to avoid war with humanity. In Zero Man (1959— 1960) it was underground squirrel men who moved to Venus to escape war.

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Figure 10.1. “The Death of Rock,” from Adventures

of Rock (Osamu Tezuka 1990, 136;

original in Tezuka 1952-1954 as Rock monogatari). Copyright © Tezuka Productions.

It was Martians in Captain Ken (Tezuka 1960-1961), birdmen again in Birdman Anthology (Tezuka 1971-1973), and there, just as in Wonder Three (Te¬ zuka 1965-1966), an interplanetary council of wise, sentient aliens judged that humanity must be exterminated to prevent it from making war on all other races once mankind became space-bom. Of course, these are all kids’ stories. In Adolf (Tezuka 1983-1985), it was Nazis and Jews. Here we approach the true form of Tezuka’s obsession, bom of the horrors of his war experience, that spawned this apparent paradox: his famous technological optimism coex¬ isting with an absolute pessimism about human nature.

TIMELINE OF MAJOR TEZUKA WORKS DISCUSSED New Treasure Island—1947 Nextworld—1951 Ambassador Atom—1 951 Adventures of Rock—1 952-1954 Astro Boy, series 1—1952-1981 Phoenix. Dawn, version 1, Egypt, Greece, and Rome—1954-1 957 Tonkaradani—1 955 Chief Detective Kenichi—1955-1 960 Zero Man—1959-1960 Captain Ken—1960-1961 Wonder Three—1965-1 966 Vampires, part 1—1966-1967 Phoenix. Dawn, version 2—1 967 Phoenix, Future—1 967

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Dororo—1 967-1 969 Swallowing the Earth—1 968-1969 Vampires (part 2)—1 968-1 969 Phoenix. Yamato—1968-1 969 Phoenix. Space—1 969 Phoenix. Karma—1969-1 970 Apollo’s Song—1970 Alabaster—1 970-1 971 Phoenix. Resurrection—1 970-1971 Birdman Anthology—1971-1973 Ayako—1 972-1 973 Buddha—1 972-1982 Black Jack—1 973-1 983 Paper Fortress—1 974 MW—1976-78 Phoenix. Nostalgia—1 976-1 978 Phoenix. Civil War—1978-1 980 Phoenix. Life—1 980 Phoenix. Strange Beings—1981 Adolf—1983-1985 Phoenix. Sun—1986-1 988

KARMA OUT OF TIME More so than with most authors, the many works of Tezuka must be con¬ sidered as one interconnected project, expounding one unified metaphysics. Buddhism lies at the heart of this. The interwoven threads of karma and rein¬ carnation were the focus of Tezuka’s magnum opus Phoenix2 (Tezuka 19541955, 1956, 1957a, 1957b, 1967a, 1967b, 1968-1969c, 1969, 1969-1970, 1970-197 lb, 1971a, 1971b, 1971-1972, 1973, 1976-1978a, 1978-1980, 1980a, 1980b, 1981, 1986-1988) but stretch far beyond that single series. Frequently one sees a character suffer an apparently arbitrary fate in one Tezuka story that turns out to be the karmic consequence of a wish made or crime committed in a completely different story, written years earlier, or later.3 Karma is not limited by linear time. The Phoenix, the avatar of life and death in Tezuka’s universe, often punishes a character in the distant past for a crime he will commit in the far future.4 Similarly, Tezuka often turned the sufferings of one story into the repercussions of an evil deed that the author did not script until years later. Tezuka himself, of course, was limited by linear time, and as his career pro¬ gressed and his optimism and pessimism developed, the karmic connections he created in his new works let him recast the old works and make them retroactively

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comment on themes that were not yet mature when he first wrote them. Tezuka’s Star System aided this, a set of recurring characters whom he cast like actors in multiple roles in different stories—which is how our dying young Rock, who sac¬ rificed himself to save the bird people, could appear again as one of Astro Boy’s classmates (“Plant people,” in 1952-1968), again in Phoenix, Future (1967b) as an elite soldier, and in many other stories throughout Tezuka’s career.5 “Many” in this case is over a hundred, since we must not forget that Tezuka was incompara¬ bly productive and left a corpus of over 300 separate series, over 150,000 pages of manga, and dozens of animated works. Phoenix remains the linchpin, the point at which the structure of Tezuka’s karmic universe is most overt, so it is here that the specific character of his pessimism about human nature is most clearly visible. The scope of Phoenix is literally infinite, beginning in the pre-civilized tribal wars of the archaic past and extending to the distant future when life on earth is exterminated and must evolve again to begin the cycle anew. The series’ unique structure alternates between past and future, the first showing the two extreme ends of human his¬ tory and each subsequent chapter drawing closer to the present from past and future at once. War is constant, the real wars of Japanese history and the future wars that Tezuka sees continuing until the earth is gutted. Genocide is just as constant, beginning with the extermination of Nagi’s people by the Yamatai at the founding of ancient Japan in Phoenix, Dawn (1967a), through the many feudal wars of clan on clan until eventually the human race wipes itself out in one last nuclear apocalypse in Phoenix, Future (1967b). The future does not stop here, however, and neither does the genocide, for the new race of slug people who evolve from the slime left after humanity dies eventually wipe themselves out in a tiny civil war, echoing the self-destructive instincts of their predecessors. Even ants, dogs, monkeys, and alien races par¬ ticipate in the constant warfare, enough so to make clear Tezuka’s view that constant warfare, and the inability to coexist in peace with rival races demon¬ strated in Adventures of Rock and Zero Man, is a characteristic not exclusively of humans but of life in general. Left incomplete upon the author’s death, Phoenix’s alternation of past and future never reached the present, but notes left for a WWII chapter focusing on Japan’s invasion of Manchuria confirm Tezuka’s intention to anchor this cycle of genocide in the sins of his own day (2004-2008, 11:401-2).

WAR OF NATURE But “All life is sacred”6—isn’t that one of Tezuka’s mottos? Is this cynic the same nature-lover who wrote the techno-utopian Astro Boy and depicted the king of beasts fighting for harmony among all species in Kimba the White Lioni He is. But even so, Tezuka’s depictions of the animal world have never been the naive storybook forests, devoid of carnivores, that usually appear in children’s stories. His Disney-esque squirrels fight viciously for resources

All Life Is Genocide

Figure 10.2.

177

Apollo’s Song (Tezuka 2007a, 115; original

in Tezuka 1970 as Aporo no uta). Copyright © Tezuka Productions; English language copyright © Vertical Inc.

(Tezuka 1955);hiscutecubseatothercharacters(Tezuka2003-2005,4:163-66); and, despite Tezuka’s famous love for Bambi, when his adorable fawn gains human-like intelligence he grows into a monstrous stag and makes war on the humans to defend the forest (“Nadare the deer” 1974, in Tezuka 2008-2011, vol. 6). Tezuka did love nature and did consider all life sacred, but his concep¬ tion of nature, and the character of its sacredness, were far from idyllic. Apollo’s Song (Tezuka 1970) is a miniature version of Phoenix, following a single couple through multiple past and future incarnations. Here Tezuka does show a magical glen where the lion lies down by the lamb, or the jaguar by the squirrel in this case, but it is to mate, not to live (Figure 10.2). The “magic” is the magic of love and not romantic but natural love, the sacred drive that draws male to female and drives life to continue the creative end of the cycle of creation and destruction. Apollo’s Song is a romance, but the romance con¬ sists of pursuit, the hero chasing his object of desire in an infinite repeti¬ tion of the pattern defined in the opening scene where an army of personified sperm warriors rally and pursue their goddess-queen, the egg (Figure 10.3).

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Figure 10.3. Apollo’s Song (Tezuka 2007a, 10; original in Tezuka 1970 as Aporo no uta). Copyright © Tezuka Productions; En¬ glish language copyright © Vertical Inc.

For Tezuka, then, nature is defined by deadly competition: on the microscopic level where only one warrior can merge with the queen and create life; on the individual level where the drives to mate, eat, and live require one creature to destroy another; and on the species level. The instinct to war and genocide is an outgrowth of the competitive aggression that is, of Darwinian necessity, engrained in all living things.

DANGEROUS EXCEPTION But not all. Tezuka also explores an exception, the Moopies, an alien race that appears most commonly in Phoenix but also surfaces here and there throughout the Tezuka corpus. Moopies are shape-shifters, capable of taking on whatever form the circumstances require, from limbless space-lichen capable of surviv¬ ing in the cold and vacuum of a floating asteroid, to a beautiful woman capable of securing protection from a human lover. They are also perfectly kind, genu¬ inely desiring nothing more than the happiness of all they meet, and their tele¬ pathic ability to add hallucinatory paradises to their polymorphing forms lets them please allies or masters like no other. Moopies’ perfect adaptability and infinite fertility mean they have no need to compete for survival; they alone of all races in the universe are free to be good. They have no sperm to compete for

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distant eggs. This is their blessing from the Phoenix and, typical of her gifts, a curse as well. Indeed, the Moopies usually prefer to live as isolated space-lichen to avoid the dire consequences when they interact with other species. The dire consequences are not the Moopies being attacked, enslaved, or exploited, as one might expect when a juicy pacifist steps into a den of predators. Moopies are indeed much sought after by scientists, and by becoming bounteous females they can restore fertility to a species on the edge of extinction (Tezuka Phoenix, Nostagia 1976-1978a), but slavery is not the danger. Nostalgia is. In typical Phoenix reversed time, the first time we see Moopies is at the end of humanity, in Future when Hallelujah, the supercomputer ruler of one of the underground nations where the last humans huddle, orders the exter¬ mination of the Moopies, which have been living among humans as pets and lovers. The danger, as explained here, is nostalgia. Moopies lure people into dreams, making the youth turn their backs on the present and wallow in the past: retro fashions, jazz, swing dancing, the usual subjects of parental grip¬ ing. It is not until later volumes fill in the earlier future that Hallelujah’s order starts to make sense. Humanity in Phoenix did not go directly from our war¬ like past to the nuclear doom of the earth of Future. There was a space-faring age in between: starship captains, valiant colonists, mysterious aliens, galactic empires, the full glory of the future imagined by the sci-fi classics. It didn’t last. Colonies failed, captains weakened, empires fell. Humanity turned back again, back to insular societies, back to faction fighting, back to earth, drawn by that deadly force that Tezuka explores most fully in the chapter titled after it. Nostalgia (1976-1978a). In Nostalgia, Tezuka shows us a future where it is illegal for space-bom humans to return to earth, and mankind’s deadliest resources stand ready to destroy those who try. Why? Everyone wants to. Across the empire, from a thousand colonized worlds, humans are pouring back, drawn by the blue seas, green fields, and kind sun of a world neither they nor their ancestors have seen for generations. The call of earth, of nature, is the call of the past, a call that the Moopies have made stronger, granting kind but destructive glimpses of the distant mother whose touch all humans, by instinct, long to feel. Men are going home to die, and so is mankind. Future shows the world after this, when the space colonies are empty and earth is exhausted by too many chil¬ dren. Hallelujah’s order to exterminate the Moopies is a last, doomed attempt to fight nostalgia and rekindle the ambition that once drove humanity to strive, fight, and survive. The soldier whom Hallelujah—and Tezuka—choose to carry out the order is none other than the very same Rock who 14 years earlier died to let the birdmen live (Figure 10.4).

AGGRESSION AND NOSTALGIA Thus far we have examined Phoenix quite irrespective of its publishing chronology, since its internal logic operates outside of time. Still, Future Rock

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Figure 10.4. Rock in Phoenix, Future (Tezuka 2002, 19; original in Tezuka 1967b as Hi no tori, Mirai-hen). Copyright © Tezuka Productions; English language copyright © VIZ Media.

in 1967 is a very different beast from the boy hero of 1952-1954, and the Te¬ zuka who wrote birdmen and squirrel men in the 1950s is not the same Tezuka who wrote Dawn and Future in the 1960s or the Tezuka who spent three years on Nostalgia in the 1970s. In Future, the Rock whom we knew 10 years be¬ fore as an endearing if somewhat grim boy hero is now a hardened, gun-toting space officer, more than willing to shoot a comrade and to try to make the Moopie his (unwilling) mate when war destroys all other females. The change reflects a well-documented transition point in Tezuka’s career, coming in the mid-1960s: Tezuka’s new interest in evil (Atsushi Tanaka in Osamu Tezuka 1990, 179). The mid-1960s was a dark time for Tezuka. His animation studio, Mushi Pro, was failing; rival artists, many his former assistants, were receiving ever-increasing press (and sales); and he felt personally betrayed by a number of partners in his anime and manga projects. Perhaps because of this personal gloom, Tezuka’s works from 1966 on begin to be pessimistic on a new level, that of character, following not the destructive instincts of whole species but of individuals as he delves further into exploring charismatic villains. Rock was the first, cast as the criminal mastermind Makube Rokuro in Vampires (Tezuka 1966-1967, 1968-1969a) and the space officer in Phoe¬ nix, Future from the same period (Tezuka 1967b). Many equally dark works followed, including Swallowing the Earth (1968-1969b), Alabaster (Tezuka 1970-197la), and MW (Tezuka 1976-1978b), written at the same time as Phoenix, Nostalgia. The Star System made these works more shocking, as long-time Tezuka readers watched old, beloved friends such as Rock turn bad. It also let the new works recolor the old, as the young Rock who thought that birdmen and humans could never make peace is shown to be the young form of the slightly older Rock of Vampires, who realizes that morals are societal constructions and we are more powerful without them, and then the even older Rock of Phoenix, Future, who willingly pursues genocide to protect his own

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species. That it is Rock, always-pessimistic but now solidly a villain, who is the last human in Phoenix still fighting against nostalgia demonstrates more powerfully than ever the alliance in Tezuka’s mind between warlike aggres¬ sion and the will to survive. “All things are bom and all things die. This is the Law of Nature” (Tezuka 2004, episode 1). It is also the recurring lesson with which Tezuka begins and ends Phoenix, and that dictates the course he sees for humanity. Life must fight to survive: on the reproductive level, on the individual level, on the spe¬ cies level. Life also dies, grows old, returns instinctively to nature, and surren¬ ders. We see this on the species level in Phoenix. Humanity rises, blossoms, weakens, ends. When Moopies appear, humanity weakens faster; when good offers true peace and happiness in life, it brings nostalgia, surrender, death. It is not a bad thing; it is a natural thing, but it is not an easy thing to accept, for the reader or for Tezuka.

REBELLION AND ACCEPTANCE Black Jack (1973-1983) is the most open exploration of Tezuka’s own dis¬ comfort with this law of nature. The maverick doctor, who remains one of the most beloved manga characters of all time, is often discussed as a manifesta¬ tion of ex-med-student Tezuka’s frustration with the medical establishment. Yet in stories such as “Shrinking bodies” (1974, in 2008-2011, vol. 3) and “Two dark doctors” (1975, in 2008-2011, vol. 3), which end with Black Jack literally screaming at the heavens about the cruelty of death (Figure 10.5), the character is also clearly a manifestation of Tezuka’s frustration with the injustices of nature. The art of medicine, one of Tezuka’s favorite themes, is in one sense an act of rebellion against nature. The lesson Black Jack repeat¬ edly encounters is that such a rebellion can’t succeed. Patients die. Disasters strike. The mentor figures that aid Black Jack always reinforce the same lesson: whether it is Dr. Yamadano in “The Needle” (1975, in 2008-2011, vol. 2) who admonishes Black Jack not to underestimate the power of nature to cure even where doctors fail; Hyojisai in “Two at the baths” (1976, in 2008-2011, vol. 5) who warns Black Jack to accept death, to live humbly and not defy the gods of heaven and earth (that is, the Phoenix); or, most potently, Black Jack’s teacher and foster father Dr. Honma who dies on Black Jack’s operating table, but whose spirit lingers, wishing to console young Black Jack as he faces the harsh lesson Honma knows his student can never accept: all things are bom and all things die (“Sometimes like Pearls” in 2008-2011, 1:93-112). Honma knows this because he, Honma, is another reincarnation of long-suffering Saruta, the main character of Phoenix, still serving his punishment for the crime he committed in Phoenix, Space (Tezuka 1969): to live alone, ugly, spumed by women, maligned by his peers, ostracized, forever pursuing understand¬ ing of the Phoenix, coming closer, perhaps, than any other, but driven by the scientist’s ambition and rarely able to completely accept what he learns. Black

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Figure 10.5. Black Jack in “Shrinking Bodies” (Black Jack, in Tezuka 2008-2011,3 (2009): 48; original in Tezuka 19731983 as Burakku Jyakku, “Chidimu!!”). Copyright © Tezuka Productions; English language copyright © Vertical Inc.

Jack, too, can never accept it; he is the enemy of suicide, arch-enemy of Dr. Kiriko the euthanasia specialist, the enemy of accepting death. There is, of course, a Black Jack chapter entitled “Phoenix” (originally 1977, in 2008-2011, vol. 17). Here Black Jack comes close to the Phoenix herself, the bird whose blood has the power to grant immortality and who is the personification of accepting the cycle of life and death, but he does not pursue her. It is the doctor’s job, he proclaims here, to preserve and prolong life, not make it eternal. The desire to aid and make stronger can succeed, but the desire to conquer and prevent death is hubris. All things are bom and all things die, so for species in Phoenix, so for patients in Black Jack. But Tezuka could not accept his own story of acceptance. He had “Phoenix” removed from the collected Black Jack corpus as a rejected chapter because Black Jack, voice of Tezuka’s frustration with the law of nature, can never accept it.7 Dr. Black Jack does appear briefly in Phoenix, Nostalgia, reincarnated as Fox, the leader of a wild biker gang still living on earth, too comfortable to have ambitions among the stars. Many readers find the drunken, complacent Fox confusing, since he is so completely different from the passionate dark doctor of Black Jack. But Tezuka seems to be suggesting that at this late stage when humanity itself has passed the point of wanting to keep living, even Black Jack’s passion will give way to nostalgia.

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The Tezuka work most focused on the question of acceptance is Buddha (1972-1982), Tezuka’s manga biography of Siddhartha and, alongside Phoe¬ nix,, his second direct treatment of Buddhism. He began it the year before Black Jack and worked on both series in parallel with Phoenix for nearly 10 years. India of Siddhartha’s day is a typical Phoenix-worthy panorama of war, starvation, and suffering. And while sticking closely to the traditional facts of Buddha’s biography, Tezuka peoples it with figures from his Star Sys¬ tem, including Saruta, Yamadano, even Tezuka himself. Buddha’s role is to teach people how to understand and accept death and suffering, the same law of nature. Indeed, his vision of enlightenment and the interconnectedness of life is a direct visual parallel to the visions granted by the Phoenix to her cho¬ sen few, and the love-war of sperm against sperm that frames Apollo’s Song. For Saruta and others, Buddha is a moment of exception, when they are not freed from the cycle of growth and destruction but are helped to surrender to it, content. This contented surrender, like that of Black Jack’s mentors, does not gen¬ erally appear in Tezuka’s work before the 1970s, and while Tezuka clearly remains uncomfortable with acceptance, his depiction of himself among Bud¬ dha’s followers in the final volume makes clear that he wishes he could fully accept, since acceptance may lead to death, but it also leads to happiness. An even more uncomfortable follower, whose poignant struggle against death Tezuka elaborates over several volumes of Buddha, is King Bimbisara, played by Rock. Here, as in Phoenix, death does not make exceptions, not for Rock, not for the human race.

AMBASSADOR OF PEACE But there is an exception, a real exception in the Tezuka corpus—one char¬ acter that does not die and one time that two races live together and manage, barely, never to go to war. The character is Astro Boy. Astro’s world stands on the brink of war. Sophisticated humanoid robots threaten human lifestyles, human jobs, human identity, and humans’ status as earth’s dominant species. Almost every story arc revolves around a conflict between humans and robots, aggressive on one side or both, just like (and written in the same period as) the genocidal conflicts of Zero Man, Nextworld, and Adventures of Rock. How is war avoided? The answer is Astro himself, the “Ambassador of Peace,” the super robot with the first A.I. capable of human-like thought and refashioned by his sec¬ ond creator, Dr. Ochanomizu, as a tool to bridge the gap between humans and robots. Of course, his first creator. Dr. Tenma, created Astro as an attempt to resurrect his dead son, Tobio, another act of rebellion against the Phoenix, which, as usual, failed. Astro is not Tobio; Astro is not human; Astro does not possess the real passions and fears that make a human human. Astro is not part of nature. He does not arise from the war of all against all, never had ancestors

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who had to conquer or be conquered. He does not need to kill to eat and was never a sperm racing for its life against a million enemies. Astro can, there¬ fore, be good, an artificial goodness impossible in nature, completely devoid of the drive to compete and survive that defines all other life forms and other races. Like the Moopies, Astro is able to genuinely care only about others, but unlike them he cannot create the dream paradises that lull companions into deadly nostalgia. Astro’s powers make him a hero, frequently a savior, but he cannot grant humans’ every desire and so is a safe companion. Still, Astro’s status as an A.I. is not enough to make him the Ambassador of Peace. After all. Hallelujah, too, was the world’s most sophisticated A.I., and her selfish war in Phoenix, Future, started over insults from a rival A.I., wipes out the human race. Astro, however, is a child, a boy robot, never able to grow up. He has no nostalgia. Astro dwells forever in the early stage of life, like the early stage of mankind, focused on growth, exploration, creation, not yet backward-looking or death-seeking and without irony or cynicism. Astro has the drive to move forward, none to move back. He cannot die psychologi¬ cally, just as his ever-reparable robot body cannot be permanently harmed. Remember, even the villains that appear after Tezuka’s mid-career fascination with evil had seeds of aggression in them naturally (like all living things) but do not become villains without some transformative event: betrayal for Zephyrus (Swallowing the Earth), disfigurement for James Block (Alabaster), trauma for Yuki (MW), indoctrination for Adolf Kaufmann (Adolf), and all of the above for Rock in different incarnations.8 All these transformations create in these villains the capacity for nostalgia, nostalgia for the days before the dark transformation and desire to take vengeance. Astro does not experience physical trauma even when smashed to pieces, and his artificial brain has a limited capacity for mental trauma, limited by the absence of life’s aggressive drives. Astro is permanently—and artificially— pure. From a karmic sense, then, it makes sense that Astro can succeed in pre¬ venting the small-scale struggles between the human race and his own from developing into war where other boy heroes, even noble ones such as Tezuka’s original recurring pure-hearted boy protagonist Kenichi,9 failed. Astro has no cycle of development so he is free from the Phoenix’s law that all things are bom and all things die. Astro’s world, then, and only Astro’s within the whole Tezuka corpus can be saved from genocide by intervention of this unique, cosmic, karmic exception.

IMPOSSIBLE PEACE Does Tezuka think this is realistic? No. Earth will not achieve peace by developing a perfect childlike A.I. Astro’s success comes from his unique kar¬ mic status, not any expectation on Tezuka’s part that a boy robot would be able to de-Nazify Tezuka’s Adolf Kaufmann character (Tezuka 1983-1985) or talk Jews and Palestinians out of killing each other. Tezuka reminds us of

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this impossibility through incidents where Astro fails to prevent anti-robot violence or where his success is impossibly contrived. Remember, Tezuka himself hated how network executives made him remove the tragic stories from the original Astro Boy manga and end every television episode with a trite victory for good. Remember, too, that in the original version, the robot laws protecting the freedom and rights of robots were passed not through a triumph of cooperation but because Astro rescued some advanced aliens who, in gratitude, held earth at gunpoint and threatened to exterminate humanity unless robots were granted equal rights (Astro Boy, Tezuka 2002-2004, “Liv¬ ing mold from outer space” and “A declaration of robot rights” 8:9-64). Rea¬ son could not get two races to agree to coexist, only the threat of arms and only because our Ambassador of Peace was so good that he inspired passing aliens to commit an act of planetary charity. Our atomic powered super-boy is not Tezuka’s solution to humanity’s problems but his personification of the philosophical transformation mankind must undergo if we are ever to achieve lasting peace. We must conquer our innate animal aggression and preserve the impulses from the early stages of life: creation, curiosity, courage, hope, and other antidotes to deadly nostalgia. Of course. Astro was not all this when Tezuka created him in 1952. Tetsuwan Atom has long been recognized as an attempt, like Godzilla, to re¬ contextualize the atomic power that had so devastated Japan and turn it into something both culturally digestible and, in Astro’s case, positive. Certainly Astro served this role in 1952. Later, as Tezuka’s skills and message matured, and when postwar censorship lightened enough for him to depict Nazis and Americans instead of robots and birdmen, Tezuka was able to use the inter¬ weaving of other stories to add new sophistication to the boy hero that so per¬ manently dominated the hearts of his fans and, consequently, his career. Astro is wonderful, but the attempt to truly preserve humanity by becoming like him is unwise, dangerous, and impossible. Apollo’s Song shows us it is impos¬ sible because life is inherently aggressive, down to the cellular level. Phoenix shows us it is dangerous, because if we suppress aggression too much we will lose the passion for survival that is our only defense against nostalgia. Buddha shows us it is unwise, because if we spend our whole lives struggling against death we will make ourselves wretched. Black Jack, meanwhile, the dominant creation of Tezuka’s later career as Astro was of his earlier, teaches us that however unwise, dangerous, and impossible it may be, we will do it anyway. Tezuka spent the 1970s drawing Buddhist lessons about accepting death; he spent his final minutes on his deathbed begging the universe to let him live and keep working. However certain he may have been that the nature of life itself is against the possibility of any life being eternal, the narrative web he spent more than 40 years weaving was anything but a portrait of surrender. Philosophical pessimism can be a call to give up, but Tezuka’s pessimism was instead an attempt to share with fellow activists the understanding he came to, through his war experience and, after, of the cosmic nature of the challenges

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we face in the struggle for peace. After all, in the final pages of Phoenix, Future, the Phoenix, who has watched the human race destroy itself so many times, watches as humanity evolves yet again, hoping that, this time, man will succeed, realize his mistakes, and do something with the life bestowed upon us. Experience tells her we won’t, but having seen how hard we struggle makes her hope all the more; just so with Tezuka.

ACCEPTING AUTHENTIC PESSIMISM Tezuka Productions, the Japanese company entrusted with preserving Tezuka’s legacy, has created an official topic list of his philosophical messages: the Future, Love, Friendship, Life, Freedom, Science, Nature, War, Discrimi¬ nation, Courage, Parents and Children, Animals, Religion, Dreams, Destruc¬ tion, and Medicine. It is an excellent distillation, but it can be hard to see the connections among these diverse subjects, especially when many connections only appear when you compare multiple works. In Japan, Tezuka Productions is loyally and successfully preserving all parts of Tezuka’s message, includ¬ ing the pessimism, as proved by the film version of the grim antiwar crimeromance MW, developed at the same time as the recent Astro Boy CG movie. Despite the best efforts of Tezuka Productions, however, the rest of the world geared up for only the Astro Boy film; the commercial popularity of optimistic themes such as the future, friendship, love, freedom, and science (not to men¬ tion the cuteness of their mascot) have completely eclipsed the darker work in the international eye. Tezuka would have hated that, as he hated the trite happy endings networks forced on the first two Astro Boy television series.

Figure 10.6. Autobiographical depiction of young Tezuka witnessing a firebombing, in Kami no toride (Paper fortress) (Tezuka 1974, 32). Copyright © Tezuka Productions.

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The metaphysical system it took him 150,000 pages to elucidate is a grim one, bom of the grieving observations of a man who lived through history’s worst war only to watch more and more wars spread throughout his lifetime. At 17, Tezuka staggered through the aftermath of an American firebombing, watch¬ ing human corpses pile up like the discarded sperm he would later draw lit¬ tering love’s biological battlefield in Apollo’s Song (Figure 10.6).10 An innate, aggressive survival instinct that is both ally and enemy as we struggle against our destructive and nostalgic impulses, that is the human race to which Astro is sent as the Ambassador of Peace. This portrait remains critical to the subtle and interconnected messages that one of the 20th century’s most sophisticated Buddhist philosophers could not fit into any single work.

NOTES 1. Astro Boy, or rather Atom, was created as a supporting character in Ambassador Atom in 1951 (1951a), but Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) began serialization in 1952. 2. Phoenix was left unfinished at Tezuka’s death. The early volumes, the first Dawn (1954—1955) as well as Egypt (1956), Greece (1957b), and Rome (1957a), are separate from the main volumes, which begin with the second Dawn (1967a). The VIZ Media En¬ glish edition began with the solo release of Future (1967b) in 2002, then printed the entire series (Tezuka 2004—2008) beginning with the second Dawn (1967a). The four early sto¬ ries are collected in the last volume of this release. 3. See, for example, the case of Yamanobei in Phoenix, Future (1967b) whose strange fate answers the dying wish made by another version of himself in Black Jack “Tenacity” (Tezuka 2008-2011, vol. 3); cf. Palmer 2009 and Palmer 2010, 17-18. 4. Saruta’s punishment for his crime in Phoenix, Space is carried out not only in all other volumes of Phoenix but also in Black Jack, Buddha, Dororo (1967-1969), and even series written before Phoenix', cf. Palmer 2010, 19-21. 5. Rock Holmes appears in more than 60 Tezuka works. For more on Tezuka’s “Star System,” see Power 2009, ch. 4, 66-88; McCarthy 2009, ch. 2; Palmer 2010. 6. This phrase is repeated as the central theme throughout Buddha (1972-1982). 7. On Tezuka’s self-censorship of Black Jack issues, see Palmer 2009; Phoenix appears in vol. 17 of the Vertical set (Tezuka 2008-2011), a volume that collects stories Tezuka removed from earlier editions, though it does not make the set complete. 8. Strikingly, Vampires, Tezuka’s first serious foray into a story featuring a charismatic villain, does not give any such cause for Rock’s evil. The third volume presents a past reincarnation with a partial exploration, but no cause for his present evil is given. An expla¬ nation may have been planned for later in the unfinished series, but while Tezuka almost always supplies explanations for the origins of one-time villains, he frequently omits the formative backstories of Rock and other recurring stars, relying instead on his readers’ knowledge of them from other series. 9. Kenichi was the standard boy hero of Tezuka’s early works, from his first published manga New Treasure Island (1947) to Kimba the White Lion (1950-1954) and Chief De¬ tective Kenichi (1955-1960). English-speaking audiences know Kenichi as one of Astro’s most prominent classmates, and as the hero of Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Nextworld (1951b). Kenichi and Rock Holmes both began as boy detectives, and their light versus dark characters are directly contrasted in works such as Nextworld (and the Rintaro Metropolis movie [2001]), the incorruptible and ever-optimistic Kenichi coming through

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the worst unchanged while Rock’s suffering makes him become sullen and militant. As Tezuka’s growing interest in evil made Rock into a villain in the 1960s, the morally good boy detective Kenichi nearly vanished from Tezuka’s later works, appearing only in rare cameos such as ‘The ant’s legs,” in Black Jack (1974, in Tezuka 1973-1983). 10. For more in English on Tezuka’s life, see Schodt 2007; Power, 2009 especially ch. 2, 19—37; McCarthy 2009, especially ch. 1. Not in print in English but available in Japanese, French, and Italian is the excellent manga biography Tezuka Osamu monogatari, created by Tezuka Productions in 1992 (Ban and Tezuka Productions 1992).

REFERENCES Ban, Toshio, and Tezuka Productions. 1992. Tezuka Osamu monogatari. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. McCarthy, Helen. 2009. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. New York: Abrams ComicArts. Osamu Tezuka. 1990. Exhibition catalog. Tokyo: National Museum of Modem Art. Palmer, Ada. 2009. “Black Jack: The Excluded Issues and Tezuka’s Star System.” In Black Jack. Vol. 3 (hardcover edition only). By Osamu Tezuka, 345-51. New York: Vertical. Palmer, Ada. 2010. “ ‘You, God of Manga, Are Cruel!’” In Manga and Philosophy. Edited by Josef Steiff and Adam Barkman, 7-36. Chicago: Open Court. Power, Natsu Onoda. 2009. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Jackson: University of Mississippi. Schodt, Fred. 2007. The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom and the Manga/ Anime Revolution. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Tezuka, Osamu. 1947. Shin takarajima [New treasure island]. Tokyo: Ikuei Shuppan. Tezuka, Osamu. 1948. Rosuto warudo—zenseiki [Lost world]. Tokyo: Akita Shoten. Tezuka, Osamu. 1949. Metoroporisu [Metropolis]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1950-1954. Jungle taitei [Kimba the white lion]. Serialized in Manga shonen. Tokyo: Kobunsha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1951a. Atom Taishi [Ambassador Atom (or Captain Atom)]. Serialized in Shonen magazine. Tokyo: Kobunsha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1951b. Kitarubeki sekai. [Nextworld]. Tokyo: Fuji Shobo. Tezuka, Osamu. 1952-1954. Rock monogatari [Adventures of Rock]. Serialized in Shonen club. Tokyo: Kodansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1952-1968. Tetsuwan Atomu [Astro Boy series 1]. Serialized in Shonen magazine. Tokyo: Kobunsha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1954-1955. Hi no tori. Reimei hen. [Phoenix. Dawn, version 1]. Serial¬ ized in Manga shonen. [Tokyo?]: Gakudo Sha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1955-1960. Kenichi Tantei Chou [Chief Detective Kenichi], Serialized in Shonen club. 1955-1956. Tokyo: Kodansha; and Sanwa Children’s Newspapers. 1958-1960. Tokyo: Sanwa Bank. Tezuka, Osamu. 1955. Tonkaradani [Tonkara Valley story]. Serialized in Nakayoshi. Tokyo: Kodansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1956. Hi no tori. Ejiputo hen. [Phoenix. Egypt], Serialized in Shbjo club. Tokyo: Kodansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1957a. Hi no tori. Roma hen. [Phoenix. Rome], Serialized in Shbjo club. Tokyo: Kodansha.

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Tezuka, Osamu. 1957b. Hi no tori. Girisha hen. [Phoenix. Greece]. Serialized in Shojo club. Tokyo: Kodansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1959—1960. Zero Man. Serialized in Weekly shonen Sunday. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tezuka, Osamu. 1960-1961. Kyaputen Ken [Captain Ken]. Serialized in Weekly shonen Sunday. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tezuka, Osamu. 1965—1966. Wanda surl [Wonder three or The amazing three]. Serialized in Weekly shonen Sunday. 1965. Tokyo: Shogakukan; and in Weekly shonen magazine. 1966. Tokyo: Kodansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1966-1967. Banpaiya 1 [Vampires. Part 1], Serialized in Weekly shonen Sunday. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tezuka, Osamu. 1967a. Hi no tori. Reimei hen. [Phoenix. Dawn, version 2]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1967b. Hi no tori. Mirai-hen [Phoenix. Future]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1967-1969. Dororo. Serialized in Weekly shonen Sunday. 1967-1968. Tokyo: Shogakukan; and in King Adventure. 1969. Tokyo: Akita Shoten. Tezuka, Osamu. 1968-1969a. Banpaiya 2 [Vampires. Part 2]. Serialized in Shonen book. Tokyo: Shueisha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1968-1969b. Chikyu o nomu. [Swallowing the earth]. Serialized in Big Comic. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tezuka, Osamu. 1968-1969c. Hi no tori. Yamato. [Phoenix. Yamato]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1969. Hi no tori. Uchu-hen. [Phoenix. Space (or Universe)]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1969-1970. Hi no tori. Hd-o-hen. [Phoenix. Karma]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1970. Aporo no uta. [Apollo’s song]. Serialized in Weekly shonen king. Tokyo: Shonen Gahosha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1970-197la. Arabastaa. [Alabaster]. Serialized in Weekly shonen cham¬ pion. Tokyo: Akita Shoten. Tezuka, Osamu. 1970-1971b. Hi no tori. Fukkatsu-hen. [Phoenix. Resurrection]. Serial¬ ized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1971a. Hi no tori. Kyuukei. [Phoenix. Chapter of rest]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1971b. Hi no tori. Hagoromo-hen. [Phoenix. Robe of feathers]. Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1971-1972. Hi no tori. Bokyd-hen. [Phoenix. Chapter of nostalgia]. Seri¬ alized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production. Tezuka, Osamu. 1971-1973. Chojin taikei [Birdman anthology (also known as Superbird stories or Tomorrow the birds)]. Serialized in SF Magazine. Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobo. Tezuka, Osamu. 1972-1983. Budda dai nikan shimon shutsuyu [Buddha], Serialized in Kibo no tomu (1972-1978), Shonen world (1978-1979), and Comic Tom (1980-1983). Tokyo: Ushio Shuppansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1973. Hi no tori. Ranse-hen [Phoenix. Civil war, part 1], Serialized in COM. Tokyo: Mushi Production.

Tezuka, Osamu. 1973-1983. Burakku Jyakku [Black Jack]. Serialized in Weekly shonen champion. Tokyo: Akita Shoten.

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Tezuka, Osamu. 1974. Kami no toride [Paper fortress]. Serialized in Weekly shonen king. Tokyo: Shonen Gahosha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1976-1978a. Hi no tori. Bokyo-hen. [Phoenix. Nostalgia], Serialized in Manga shonen. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama. Tezuka, Osamu. 1976-1978b. Muu [MW], Serialized in Big Comic. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tezuka, Osamu. 1978-1980. Hi no tori. Ranse-hen. [Phoenix. Civil war, part 2], Serialized

in Manga shonen. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama. Tezuka, Osamu. 1980a. Hi no tori 2772. [Phoenix 2772]. Tokyo: Toho. (U.S. copyright, 1995. Plano, TX: Best Film and Video. VHS.) Tezuka, Osamu. 1980b. Hi no tori. Seimei-hen. [Phoenix. Life]. Serialized in Manga shonen. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama. Tezuka, Osamu. 1981 .Hi no tori. Igyo-hen. [Phoenix. Strange beings]. Serialized in Manga shonen. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama. Tezuka, Osamu. 1983-1985. Adorufu ni tsugu [Adolf or Tale of three Adolfs]. Serialized in Weekly bunshun. Tokyo: Bungeishunju. Tezuka, Osamu. 1986-1988. Hi no tori. Taiyo-hen. [Phoenix. Sun]. Serialized in The Wild Age. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Tezuka, Osamu. 1995-1996. Adolf. 5 vols. San Francisco: Cadence Books and VIZ Media. Tezuka, Osamu. 1998-1999. Black Jack. 2 vols. San Francisco: VIZ Media. Tezuka, Osamu. 2001. Metoroporisu [Metropolis]. Tokyo: Toho Company; Tokyo: Bandai Visual; Tokyo: Madhouse. (U.S. copyright, 2002. Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures. DVD.) Tezuka, Osamu. 2002. Phoenix. Vol. 2, Future. San Francisco: VIZ Media. Tezuka, Osamu. 2002-2004. Astro Boy. 23 vols. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003a. Lost World. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003b. Metropolis. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003c. Nextworld. 2 vols. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Tezuka, Osamu. 2003-2005. Buddha. 8 vols. New York: Vertical. Tezuka, Osamu. 2004. Hi no tori. [Phoenix], Tokyo: Tezuka Productions; Tokyo: Kado¬ kawa Shoten; Tokyo: Tohokushinsha Film. (U.S. copyright, 2007. New York: Media Blasters. DVD.)

Tezuka, Tezuka, Tezuka, Tezuka, Tezuka,

Osamu. Osamu. Osamu. Osamu. Osamu.

2004-2008. Phoenix. 12 vols. San Francisco: VIZ Media. 2007a. Apollo’s Song. New York: Vertical. 2007b. MW. New York: Vertical. 2008-2011. Blackjack. 17 vols. New York: Vertical. 2009. Swallowing the Earth. Gardena, CA: Digital Manga Publishing.

11

Believe in Comics: Forms of Expression in Barefoot Gen THOMAS LaMARRE

There are texts that ask to be read historically, as historical records, and yet their history is clearly not a matter of neutral, referential, and verifiable state¬ ments. Take oral histories or testimonies, for instance. We tend to confer his¬ torical authority on such texts or records on the basis of the writer’s or the speaker’s actual involvement with some historical event. Memory and experi¬ ence are usually granted historical authority on the basis of some verifiable connection to an actual event. We might then strategically introduce ethical gradations of experience or experiential positions, as Dominick LaCapra does in his account of genocide, differentiating victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and witnesses (LaCapra 1998, 85). Yet there remains some degree of tension between the claims of experience and the procedures of history, and a general tendency to grant the greater authority to historical verification. Hyunah Yang addresses this problem in her discussion of the testimonies of Korean women drafted into military sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War 13 (Yang 2008). She notes that a certain kind of historical analysis tends to impart authority only to those statements that can be verified by reference to Japanese military records. But why should military records that are not only incomplete but that were also compiled in accordance with institutional parameters be treated as more authoritative than the recollections of actual victims? And if we strip these testimonies of those statements that appear extraneous or irrelevant from the standpoint of institutional history (such as romantic fantasies or petty quarrels), are we really closer to an his¬ torical understanding of military sexual slavery? Such questions reveal a basic tension in how we negotiate the relation be¬ tween experience and history, which hinges on a tension between forms of expression and procedures of representation. This is not simply a problem of

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reality or history versus fantasy or fiction, for expression and representation are always entwined in advance. Rather the problem is that we are less able to deal with forms of expression than with procedures of representation, par¬ ticularly in the context of historical events and remembrance, and so we tend to give forms of expression short shrift, avoiding them or downplaying their importance. Yet forms of expression might also be said to have their histories, and as such, lead us directly to important questions about the “how” of writ¬ ing history rather than encouraging us to linger on the authority of what is written.

HISTORY AND MANGA EXPRESSION Analysis of forms of expression becomes important in the context of manga dealing with historical events, and especially with a manga such as Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen 1973-1987) whose author, Keiji Nakazawa, is a survi¬ vor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.1 At the age of six on August 6, 1945, Nakazawa lost his father, older sister, and younger brother to the blast: their house collapsed on them, and unable to escape the wreckage, the three were burned alive in the fires that raged through the city. Nakazawa, his mother, and two elder brothers survived but subsequently suffered not only from the effects of radiation and the traumatic loss of their family and their world but also from the privations of a Japan struggling with poverty and crime after the war. His manga of Hiroshima, today compiled in 10 volumes, centers on the 1945 to 1953 experiences of a young boy named Gen, reminiscent of but by no means identical to Nakazawa, as he, his family, and his friends struggle with the effects of the atomic bomb: illness, privation, and death. Barefoot Gen uses manga forms of expression to present a survivor’s account of the impact of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. What is more. Barefoot Gen does not strive to break with the conventions of boys’ manga or shonen manga but follows them faithfully. Consequently, we cannot simply extract a historical account or a historical witness from the form of manga itself. We have to deal with manga forms of expression, with the medium of manga. The pages that today constitute the first four volumes of the book edition of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga were initially serialized in Shukan shonen jump (June 1973-September 1974), a popular weekly shonen manga publication. Subsequent installments appeared in magazines such as Shimin, Bunka hydron (Cultural review), and Kyoiku hydron (Educational review), more associated with public education than with boys’ entertainment.2 Although the subse¬ quent volumes give the hero Gen longer, denser speeches,3 Barefoot Gen does not on the whole present any radical stylistic changes. It sticks to its shonenmanga-ness. As Yu ltd and Tomoyuki Omote have pointed out. Barefoot Gen is largely faithful to the conventions of shonen manga of the sort featured in its initial publication in Shonen jump. They note, “First, the striking prevalence of depictions of violence, and second, the main characters’ resolute fighting

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for their beliefs” (Ito and Omote 2006, 28). And they detect a “fascination for war-related items” common in boys’ manga (Ito and Omote 2006, 26). For Ito and Omote, the shonen manga fascination with war, violence, and resolute heroes threaten to push Barefoot Gen in the direction of entertain¬ ment rather than education or, we might say, toward manga expressiveness rather than historical seriousness. In my opinion, however, it is precisely this opposition between expressive forms and historical procedures that Barefoot Gen encourages us to challenge and rework. To meet this challenge, I pro¬ pose to look at this manga in two registers. First, I will consider the overall trajectory of political orientations in Barefoot Gen. In its steadfast refusal of the politics of national sovereignty and its fascination with biological ex¬ perimentation and vital forces, I see a trend toward the biopolitical. Second, I will look at manga expression at a fairly deep or fine level of analysis: that of the manga line and its affective implications. This is not because I see manga expression as the ultimate explanation for, or cause of, the political orientations of Barefoot Gen.4 My interest lies instead in how a medium, as a field of material orientations with its own history and historicity, cuts across apparently distinct registers (artist, medium, institutions, ethics), thus affect¬ ing historical and political orientations. Manga expression does not merely mediate an artist’s or author’s message. Nor is the (manga) medium the mes¬ sage. The medium guides and inflects the underlying material orientations of artists, writers, and readers. It tends to extend its field of material orientations across different registers of sociopolitical organization, thereby holding them together affectively if somewhat awkwardly.

BIOPOLITICS AND TRAUMA Originally a term for a surgical wound, trauma was “conceived on the model of a rupture of the skin or the protective envelope of the body resulting in a catastrophic global reaction of the entire organism” (Leys 2000, 19). It is dif¬ ficult to trace the transposition of this concept into Freudian psychology and psychiatry, and, as Ruth Leys notes, “There is something about trauma that troubles the Freudian project” (Leys 2000, 21). Nonetheless, the concept of a psychic wound or injury whose origin cannot be adequately grasped or re¬ membered by the subject because the violence cuts into the psyche itself, has proved exceedingly important in attempts to grapple with a broad spectrum of issues ranging from sexual harassment and child abuse to genocide and mili¬ tary crimes. In the context of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the concept of psychic trauma has provided a way not only to acknowledge the suffering of victims beyond the economy of injury and recovery but also to link the suffering of individuals to the Japanese nation. It is this use of trauma to connect individuals and nation that concerns me in the context of Barefoot Gen. Pheng Cheah (2008) argues that, because Freud’s theory posits the sover¬ eign integrity of the ego or psyche prior to the traumatic event, the Freudian

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concept of psychic trauma implies a politics of sovereignty, of bounded sub¬ jectivity and national boundaries. The concept of trauma implies a constitutive closure or bounded sovereign space that is irreparably breached by the trau¬ matic event that shatters the prior integrity of the subject. Cheah thus signals the tendency of trauma theory to posit national sovereignty prior to its inven¬ tion, which serves to naturalize nationality or national identity. To counter this tendency, he argues that we need to think of the constitutive exposure of the subject, and to address the constructedness of national sovereignty and iden¬ tity. Cheah’s aim is to move beyond the current tendency toward celebrating or pathologizing national sovereignty rather than confronting more pragmati¬ cally its politics of constructing nations. In the context of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cheah’s remarks help us understand how the atomic bombs have entered into the for¬ mation of foundational narratives of Japanese sovereignty in the postwar era.5 A range of studies has demonstrated how discourses and practices associated with the atomic bombs have fed directly into Japanese nationalism and national identity. Some commentators stress how the atomic bomb has spurred the for¬ mation in postwar Japan of a victim mentality with regard to War World U, which has encouraged indifference and even intolerance vis-a-vis the victims of Japanese aggression during its 15-year Asia-Pacific War (see for instance Honda 1993). Other discussions highlight the elimination of Korean victims of the atomic bomb from the Hiroshima Memorial Park (Yoneyama 1999). Still other analyses look at how, for contemporary rightwing commenta¬ tors, the atomic bombs represent Japan’s defeat and thus a deviant postwar nationalism—nationalism grounded in defeat and trauma rather than heroic deeds (Ivy 2005). In sum, in a variety of ways, the trauma of the actual vic¬ tims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been transformed into national psychic trauma, which ultimately serves to naturalize the nation and the boundaries of Japaneseness, because the concept of psychic trauma posits constitutive closure prior to the traumatic event. In contrast, although dealing with events that qualify as traumatic. Bare¬ foot Gen not only strives to undermine the national appropriation of the suf¬ fering of atomic bomb victims but also consistently takes an antinationalist and antiimperialist stance.6 The manga includes numerous references to dis¬ crimination against Koreans forced into labor, and throughout the manga, its hero, Gen, boldly decries those who started and sustained Japan’s 15-year Asia-Pacific War. In volume 5, when the emperor visits Hiroshima on Decem¬ ber 7, 1947, Gen speaks against those in the crowd crying, “Banzai,” or, “Ten thousand years” (5:62-63). For Gen and others who survived the bomb, the war is not over, and the imperial visit makes a mockery of their suffering, past and present. Barefoot Gen thus refuses a gesture common in studies of, and discourses on, Japanese war memory: while it constantly evokes the political context of war, it refuses to have victims subordinate their suffering to the po¬ litical, national context. In volume 7, for instance, a Japanese-American sol-

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dier argues that, in view of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese cannot complain about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and should recognize that the bombs put an end to the war (7:104-5). Gen replies angrily that the two events are not the same, and the suffering of the people at Hiroshima has to be taken into account. Such statements and arguments are not entirely original, and some may doubt their political efficacy or question the terms for them. It is neverthe¬ less significant that Barefoot Gen rejects the national appropriation of, and international political explanations for, the violence unleashed on Hiroshima. Simply put, the manga does not accept national sovereignty nor respect the lines between nations. Barefoot Gen draws a line elsewhere: between the people and the elite. In fact, much of the consistency of the manga’s political vision comes of its denunciation of those who profit from war at the expense of those who labor and suffer. Responsibility for the war within Japan fol¬ lows class lines to some extent: the rich are frequently depicted as exploiters and profiteers, and those who profit in any manner at the expense of others are denounced as perpetuating the war. In this respect. Barefoot Gen recalls the political legacy of proletarian literature, especially stories that dwelled on economic disparity and resistance to special police. The portrait of Gen’s father in the first volume is also reminiscent of proletarian literature: a pacifist war resister, the father is arrested and beaten for his statements against the war, and his family is harassed and tormented by patriotic neighbors, and denied food by the military authorities. War is to some extent class war, and if for Gen and company the war is still not over on December 7, 1947, when the emperor visits, it is because the atomic bomb has generated a population so damaged, diminished, and brutalized that it will accept subhuman conditions of life and labor. It is here that the political orientation of Barefoot Gen complicates a prole¬ tarian vision of politics centered on the industrial proletariat, shifting toward a set of biopolitical questions. The bulk of the manga takes place in the postwar years, and true to postwar Japan, the basic lines of conflict are not between the bourgeoisie and the industrialized masses of proletarian workers. The black market and “unofficial economies” are as important as industrial production, and in the manga, these other economies take precedence over industrial pro¬ duction, which remains almost peripheral to the ongoing conflicts.7 Gen and his friends do battle with emerging yakuza groups (see for instance 6:75-91, 99-105; and 7:157-77), which not only allows for some protracted shonen manga action scenes but also grounds the dynamics of conflict in a particular field of power. The effects of power are not primarily registered in terms of class exploitation or extraction of labor surplus. Nor is power seen in terms of subjectivization. It is a struggle to survive that is highlighted, a struggle for life, for food and shelter, a struggle to avoid enslavement or confinement. It is a struggle in which money has immediate physical consequences. In addition, the increased emphasis in the manga on torture and medical experimentation is indicative of its general gravitation toward biopolitical struggle.

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The general resistance to national sovereignty and the overall orientation toward the biopolitical in Barefoot Gen agrees with Cheah’s argument about the concept of psychic trauma. Cheah challenges the primacy of trauma in postcolonial and cultural theory because it implies an originary or a priori closure that invites a conflation of the individual psyche with national sub¬ jectivity. In contrast, Cheah stresses a sort of radical exposure prior to the construction of specific forms of closure. The ego for Cheah is constitutively open, so to speak—always already open to and contaminated by its others. This radical exposure is also the realm of the biopolitical for Cheah, and he draws directly on Foucault’s account of biopolitics. The hallmark of Foucault’s critical analytics of modem power is a refusal to think of modernity in terms of a single unified power formation (modern¬ ization or rationalization). Throughout his studies, he continued to address different kinds of power formations, different techniques or procedures for managing a multiplicity. Thus in his later work he spoke of three distinct ap¬ paratuses of power, which nonetheless can enter into mixtures: (1) sovereignty or sovereign power, which acts on the imaginary or psyche, forming subjectiv¬ ity; (2) disciplinary power, which entails dividing and segregating practices that make humans into individual bodies; and (3) security and biopolitical power, which strive to act on the real as such by following its flows and as¬ sessing them in statistical or probabilistic terms, thus constructing populations at the site where life interacts with politics.8 Politics is a matter of assessing and controlling life forces. Such power formations do not follow one another successively, with sov¬ ereignty giving way to discipline, or discipline to security. One or another of them may dominate at a particular place and time, but they are not mutually exclusive. They tend to conjoin and separate in various ways. If we look at Barefoot Gen in this manner, we see traces of all these power formations as¬ sociated with the atomic bomb. In the politicians’ speeches and remembrances of Hiroshima that Gen and his friends reject, we see the operations of sover¬ eign power, the construction of a national subjectivity. The manga also shows us the social ostracism of atomic bomb survivors, not only at the level of financial assistance from extended family and friends but also at the level of employment, health care, and marriage. The result is a disciplinary power that works to segregate survivors from the “normal” population, while making the survivors responsible for monitoring their interactions and intercourse. We see in volume 3 how survivor children are expected to act in certain ways toward others, especially in context of extended family relations and school. Finally, in the emphasis on the directly physical consequences of the circulation of money, and in stories of biological experimentation, we see the biopolitical. In volume 4, for instance, Gen and Ryuta (a boy whom he adopts as his younger brother) come upon American soldiers who are removing organs from the corpses of atomic bomb victims, for scientific testing (4:52). In volume 5, Gen encounters a man in the shameful trade of procuring the bod-

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ies of those recently dead of atomic-bomb-related illnesses, for dissection by the American military scientists (5:206-7). What is more, when Gen seeks medical treatment for his mother, he learns that there is “free” treatment only for those who are willing to become part of the clinical experiment. In conjunction with the general emphasis on physical privation and lingering illness, the increasing emphasis in the manga on biological experimentation situates the atomic bomb as a massive scientific experiment. There is in fact evidence that the American military decision to drop not just one atomic bomb but two different kinds of atomic bombs on Japanese cities with large civilian populations and little prior war damage, had less to do with hasten¬ ing the end of the war and saving lives and more to do with impressing the Soviets and with collecting scientific data on the bombs. But Barefoot Gen is not looking for a unitary causal explanation for the atomic bomb. It is concerned with human suffering and thus with the actual effects of power associated with the atomic bomb and the human experience of the bombings. Consequently, it doesn’t tend to unify the field of experience in the manner of trauma theory that has tended to make human suffering into a sign of national defeat or national victimization. The manga offers a different understanding of trauma, if we wish to retain that term. Trauma in Barefoot Gen does not assume the existence of a closed, unified psyche or nation prior to the traumatic event (the atomic bombing). Humans are always already ex¬ posed, and their lives precarious. Thus the atomic bomb does not entail a loss of prior unity, whether in the form of national belonging or even children’s innocence, which must then be recuperated. Humans appear exposed to tech¬ niques of power before and after the bomb. The effect of the atomic bomb is to lay bare such exposure, to expose exposure as it were. As such, the effects of the atomic bomb are not unitary and do not allow for a unified response. In this respect, in a manner that is easier to elucidate through the perspective of Foucault, the manga exposes multiple fields of power, showing how they unfold after the bomb (national subjectification, disciplinary ostracism, and medical experimentation for instance). Yet, even though it avoids a unitary or totalizing vision of the effects of the atomic bomb. Barefoot Gen does gravi¬ tate toward a biopolitical orientation. The biopolitical does not dominate or subsume other power formations (sovereignty, exploitation, domination, dis¬ cipline) but steps in to coordinate them. This biopolitical orientation has political and ethical consequences. Politi¬ cally, as implied in the discussion thus far, the framework of the nation and international relations appears simply corrupt, to be denounced. Similarly, institutions such as the school, the workplace, hospitals, elections, and even extended kinship prove inoperative. Because the manga refuses such institu¬ tions, the immediate family and personal friends tend to stand in as the basic political unit, largely coordinated around the charismatic Gen. The political unit becomes a Gen association, or a Gen society. While the initial emphasis on Gen’s family might appear consonant with the formation of a “natural”

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community based on bloodlines and thus repeating the ethnic politics of Japa¬ nese ultra-nationalism, the family in Barefoot Gen quickly shows its artificial¬ ity, embracing openness. Gen replaces his younger brother and older sister with survivors that look much like them. Gen also forms a new family-like group consisting of other children and an elderly writer who becomes a kind of father. Such family-like associations are predicated in turn upon Gen’s openness, his willingness to risk exposure to the world. It is particularly interesting that this artificially extended family or society is predicated upon ethico-aesthetic paradigms. Gen helps his substitute sister to renew her passion for singing and dancing. Gen and his friends encourage their adopted father to return to writing novels. Gen and his substitute brother assist a fatally injured victim in recovering his delight for painting before he dies, even posing for him naked. It is as if Gen operates as a catalyst for aesthetic self-help, with aesthetics serving ethically to open survivors to life again. We might conclude, especially in light of the discourses championing selfreliance and self-exposure in the manga, that an ethico-aesthetic relation is re¬ placing politics. But the two are inseparable. The ethics of aesthetic exposure respond to a biopolitical war that radically exposes human life for the sake of profit. Through its open-ended and artificial associations and substitutions, the “Gen society” strives to counter the biopolitical regime of endless war for security.

THE PLASTIC LINE Despite my initial insistence on forms of expression, my analysis of Bare¬ foot Gen has thus far been largely discursive and conceptual. I have primarily looked at the content of the manga, or more precisely, the form of content, which directs our attention toward a politics concerned with evaluating and controlling life. To some extent. Barefoot Gen invites a discursive reading be¬ cause it includes political statements, historical references, and fairly didactic responses to the action. Simply put, it is often preachy. A prime instance is the continual references to the stalk of wheat, which serves a symbol of the vitality and resilience of Gen and company and which constantly evokes pithy remarks about resilience in the face of adversity. In the first volume, when Gen’s family is deprived of their allotment of rice in punishment for their father’s antiwar activism, the father encourages them to plant wheat, telling them to grow strong and tall like the stalks of wheat, which springs back even when trampled. The wheat stalk thus becomes a symbol of strength, vitality, and resilience. As a symbol, wheat also carries broader connotations: it stands in contrast to rice, which is historically as¬ sociated with the emperor and a system of centralized sovereign control of the people. Wheat thus signals autonomy and resistance to centralized author¬ ity. Throughout the manga, there are statements to the effect that, in keeping

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with his father’s advice and wishes, Gen must bounce back from hardship and grow up as strong and vital as wheat. Yet, insofar as the manga does not merely discuss wheat but uses it iconically (Gen often appears with a stalk of wheat in hand), the stalk of wheat reminds us that the manga does not merely offer a representation of, or a discourse on, the biopolitical. The manga entails forms of expression, as well. The stalk of wheat is indeed an interesting figure in this respect, for it does not only represent or symbolize the resilience of life but also expresses and embodies it. The stalk of wheat brings into play a plastic line, a line that springs back or rebounds under pressure, a line that is at once elastic (passively accepting deformation) and springy (explosively responding and actively transforming). Aesthetically, this line implies and ex¬ presses an affective experience of vitality. In sum, because the stalk of wheat at once symbolizes and expresses the resilient forces of life, it links the form of content (symbolization, iconography, reference) and the form of expression (plastic line). For me, the expressive force of the plastic line not only provides a point of departure into an analysis of manga expression in Barefoot Gen but it also affords the key to understanding manga as a medium more generally. I do not see the plastic line as a tool for the conscious articulation of a discursive statement, a pro-life antiwar message. Rather I see the plastic line as a positive unconscious that guides and orients manga expression and, in Barefoot Gen, encourages the overall orientation of the manga toward the biopolitical at the levels of symbolization, discursive enunciations, and historical representation. The term “positive unconscious” may seem somewhat odd since it would seem to imply by way of contrast a negative unconscious, and the unconscious by definition is neither negative or positive. I borrow this turn of phrase from Foucault, who uses it to speak of “a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse,” for a similar reason: to indi¬ cate a level of manga that escapes the consciousness of artists and readers yet is part of the medium (Foucault 1973, xi). The plastic line might equally well be styled a “habitus” in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, a set of disposi¬ tions that generate practices and perceptions. But in either case it is important to keep in mind that the plastic line, as positive unconscious or habitus, is not simply a mental phenomenon or set of psychic dispositions. The plastic line is at once material (there is an actual line drawn and perceivable) and im¬ material (the effects of the line also derive from its non-determinacy, which are grounded in corporeal dispositions, conventions, and expectations that are never entirely conscious). Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished book on Walt Disney is the inspiration for my emphasis on the plastic line (Eisenstein 1988). Although Eisenstein was writ¬ ing about animation, his account begins with illustrations in children’s books and centers on the art of the line in understanding cartoons. For Eisenstein, there is not a sharp divide between comics and animations. In fact, comics and animations, especially those geared toward young audiences or general

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audiences, historically emerged in synchrony, almost as if they were one art with two media aspects (print and film). The term manga, which was largely synonymous with cartoon, could as easily refer to animation as to print com¬ ics in the 1930s, even without the rubric “film” that was sometimes added to it—-“manga-film” (manga eiga), that is, animated cartoons. Eisenstein calls attention to the elasticity of shapes, the mobility of con¬ tours, and the fluidity and diversity of forms, linking them to primordial protoplasm-like vitality and primitive exuberance, and coining the term “plasmaticness.” Eisenstein contrasts plasmaticness with “heartless geometrizing” (1988, 35) and the “formal logic of standardization” (1988, 42). Ele sees a tension, and potentially a dialectical contradiction, in the emergence of plasmaticity at historical moments characterized by formal standardization: LaFontaine’s fables in contrast to Descartes’s metaphysics and the formalities of the French court (1988, 35), and Disney’s cartoons in contrast to “Ford’s conveyer belts” and the oppressive regularity of work in America (1988, 3). He establishes a sharp contrast between plasmasticity and geometric or for¬ mal structure. Eisenstein’s account is based on the stroke drawing (1988, 43), a drawing in which the line traces a continuous contour in a single stroke, in form rather like an amoeba (1988, 83-84). While his comments are brief, I think we can understand them in the following way. Drawing a cartoon line is very different from drawing a line between two points, or a structural line. The continuous amoeba-like contour creates the sense of a center of motion within it. It makes for an animate center, as if there were a point within the contour that at once grounded and provided the impetus for mobility and elasticity of the line on either side of it (or with the amoeba, on all sides of it). With its animate center, the cartoon line doesn’t tend toward the efficiency and propriety of Euclidean geometry. Yet the plastic line is not omnipotent. It has its potentials and thus material limits. While Eisenstein’s account of plasmaticness is the inspiration for my atten¬ tion to the cartoon line, I would like to place greater emphasis on the explosive quality of plasticity.9 As the association of plastics with explosives implies, plasticity refers us not only to elasticity and flexibility (passive reaction) but also to the ability to bounce back, the capacity to adopt new form (active trans¬ formation). The plastic line is precisely a line that both gives way and bounces back, both bends and springs back. This is because it generates a point be¬ tween (or within) lines, and that point, as an animate center, enters into rela¬ tions with points outside the lines. If we take the example of an amoeba-like shape, there is a point outside the squiggly contour and a point inside it, which are linked directly, somehow in synchrony. As such, the “form” has an internal animate center (center of indetermination) that imparts “life” to it. In other words, the vitality of line is related to an animate center. We can think of this line as line between two points, because there is, on the one hand, the point inside it (center of indetermination); on the other hand, when a point outside

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the line strikes the line, a line with a genuine sense of plasticity will give way and bounce back with respect to the point inside. The outside point and the inside point come into communication, and the line becomes their medium of communication. If cartoonists do not draw in accordance with such guide¬ lines, the line looks weak and flimsy, merely elastic. The form does not appear endowed with life. It has no “soul,” no responsiveness or explosiveness. While Eisenstein does not speak at length to this aspect of the plasmaticity of the cartoon line (his book is after all unfinished), he notes something analogous in his passing references to pure affect (“affect freed of any purpose”: 1988, 10) and the soul of cartoon characters (1988, 41). Comics, cartoons, or manga cannot consist entirely of plastic lines, how¬ ever. There is another kind of line in comics, equally necessary: the structural line, which is most evident in the drawing of panels. The structural line is a line between two points, with a propensity for efficiency and propriety, be¬ cause its goal is to find the shortest distance between two points. As in the case of panel lines, it is commonly drawn with a ruler, imparting a sense of formal structure that frequently extends to perception and action. A genuine tension arises between the plastic line and the structural line in comics. At first glance, everything about Barefoot Gen appears to conspire against the plastic line, especially if we look for elasticity, flexibility, or delicacy of line. Indeed, as Takayuki Kawaguchi remarks, “Barefoot Gen employs the thick heavy lines prevalent in shonen manga magazines prevalent from the mid-1960s into the 1970s” (Kawaguchi 2008,111). In fact, the manga appears to favor structural lines: the structure of panels is very regular, and its se¬ quencing at the three levels of action, perception, and emotion is conventional. First, action is usually conveyed with full body images. It alternates between panels in which the character’s action is situated in a location (street, house, school) and panels in which the character’s body (or characters’ bodies) fills the panel, often captured in somewhat dramatic poses. Second, perceptual ori¬ entation is unambiguous: if we see a character looking or listening in a certain direction, we subsequently have a presentation of what the character sees or hears. Third, motion is rendered iconically for the most part, with a limited range of facial expressions in conjunction with emotion lines (surprise, anger, confusion, delight). In addition, dialogue stitches up any gaps between actions and emotions. It at once dispels ambiguity and broadens the palette. The dark thick ink lines and careful application of shading and tones within the lines, together with the tendency to avoid the use of negative space (forms and figures tend to fill the panels and only “lean” toward or open into other panels on the basis of a continuous sequence of action), contribute to the sense of an overall coordina¬ tion of various forces in which line and figure are subordinated to form and structure: character is subordinated to panel, and motion and emotion appear subordinated to a structure of action and reaction. On the whole, this might appear to be the antithesis of the plastic line.

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In Barefoot Gen, the plastic line becomes palpable primarily in scenes that entail gag-like violence, as when Gen’s brother playfully bonks him on the head, and his faces take on comedic expressions of agony (5:163), and in moments of delight where characters’ leg shoots out perpendicular to their body (3:198). These are slapstick or gag modalities of violent action and reac¬ tion, with an evocation of plasticity in the form of a body with the capacity to spring back. The plastic line also lingers in the conventions for character design of children and trustworthy or affectionate adults: the large low-set eyes, the prominent rounded cheekbones, the large head, and the generally rounded contours. There is nonetheless a general rigidifying of such qualities, and instead of plastic springiness, the plastic line tends toward the formal and structural. In sum, at the level of form, the plastic line is held back, and consequently the tension that arises between the plastic line and the structural line in Bare¬ foot Gen becomes dialectical, insofar as this tension begins to imply an inter¬ action of contradicting forces, ideas, or dispositions. Eiji Ootsuka (2008) calls attention to an analogous tension that turns into dialectical contradiction, but at the level of mecha design—that is, mechanical devices, machines, and ve¬ hicles ranging from airplanes and tanks to factories—versus character design in shonen manga, situating it as a response to war and violence.

CARTOON AND MECHANICAL PROJECTION Noting the impact of Disney cartoons on manga of the 1920s and 1930s, Ootsuka (2008, 118) sees something analogous to the plastic line but stresses how this plasticity makes for characters that appear to possess a “deathless body” (shinanai shintai). Characters undergo violent deformation yet do not die. They spring back. Ootsuka links this plasticity to the shonen hero: tech¬ niques of cartooning impart a sense of the immunity and safety in the midst of war and combat by generating invulnerable characters. In this respect, Gen of Barefoot Gen bears comparison not only to the boy heroes in the shonen manga of the postwar era but also to those of the wartime era cartoons, such as Boken Dankichi or Momotaro, which Ootsuka discusses later in his essay. Even with the tendency in Barefoot Gen to suppress the flexible contours of the plastic line, the sense of invulnerability and invincibility associated with cartoon-line boy heroes persists at the level of form. Despite the dangers that thrill and frighten readers, such heroes can provide readers with a sense of safety and security amid war, destruction, and poverty. Such plasticity be¬ comes inseparable from a fascination with war in that it allows us both to enter into war and to pull back from it. It affords a complex relation to war. Ootsuka addresses this complexity in his exploration of the contrast be¬ tween the deathless bodies of characters and the design of mecha. Where characters embody the fluidity and invincibility of the plastic line derived from cartoons, Ootsuka remarks how mecha design in manga derives from

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drawing styles dedicated to scientific representation, to accuracy, precision, and measurement for purposes of rationalized intervention or instrumentalization. This is analogous to what Eisenstein called heartless geometrizing. In his discussion of mecha, Ootsuka also moves quickly from drawing style to ideol¬ ogy: because such mecha styles tended to settle on weaponry (fighter planes, tanks, guns, robots, and even military factories), he associates them with death and destruction. As such, in the contrast between cartoon character and me¬ chanical entities, he sees a relation between human life and military death. In sum, for Ootsuka, within war manga itself, questions emerge precisely because of the basic contrast between drawing styles—or we might say, due to a fundamental incommensurability between plastic line and structural line— that makes for a dialectical struggle. True to the conventions of shdnen manga. Barefoot Gen presents a strong con¬ trast between character form and mechanical drawing. This contrast becomes especially evident in panels and sequences in which military weaponry appears. Exactly as Ootsuka indicates, airplanes, battleships, trains, and other vehicles are drawn in a style that derives from conventions for scientific accuracy and realism that were increasingly promoted by the Japanese military government in the early 20th century. The result is objects, usually modem weaponry, drawn in structurally precise detail, in a manner reminiscent of the exploded projection of assembly diagrams.10 While Ootsuka uses the term “weaponry realism” to describe this tendency of mecha design, I will refer to it as “mechanical projec¬ tion” for it is a sort of engineering or projection style that, although more com¬ monly used for modem mecha-style weaponry, extends beyond it. Two prime examples occur in volume 7. As Gen reads about the Enola Gay (which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima), the airplane is drawn above his head in illustration (7:55). The structurally precise and mechanically dense lines of the plane present a sharp contrast with the more rounded forms of Gen and his friends. Similarly, where a Japanese-American officer defends the American use of the atomic bomb by evoking Pearl Harbor, an illustration of the Japanese attack on American warships at Pearl Harbor appears in the panel alongside him (7:104). Mechanical projection is also used for apparently neutral depictions, as with the presentation of the temple Kiyomizudera (7:230). The children travel to Kyoto with their mother and visit Kiyomizudera, which the mother visited on her honeymoon with her now dead husband. Here the contrast between characters and mechanical projection style of the temple is striking, and while the temple itself is not associated with military weaponry per se, the char¬ acters’ conversations linger on mass death. The mother seems to foresee her own death and indeed soon dies, vomiting blood in a gruesomely spectacular manner as they leave the temple (7:234). In other words, a dialectical ten¬ sion between forces of life and death does indeed emerge around the contrast between the plastic line (children and trustworthy adults) and the structural lines of mechanical projection (machines, vehicles, and even architectures).

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The association of death with architectures goes even deeper: we have only to recall the recurrent images of the faces of Gen’s father, elder sister, and younger brother pinned between the beams of their fallen house. It is precisely because, under conditions of war, houses can transform into mecha-like weap¬ onry of destruction that the contrast between plastic line and structural line takes on new urgency. This becomes evident in an image in volume 7 (62-63) that expands the panel form across two pages to provide panoramic view of the horrors of August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima. Striking about this image is its insistence on the structural line and struc¬ tures. It is not a scene of wild disorder. Although the image spreads across two pages, the form of the panel is retained, with neat lines around the image. Structural lines abound: not only the railroad tracks but also their stone bed remain precisely rectilinear, and although the strongly ordered perspective serves to highlight the strangeness of the listing telephone poles, the poles retain a sense of structure. The emphasis on structure also serves to high¬ light the disappearance of houses along the tracks. Oddly, however, the col¬ lapsed houses remain orderly. The image is also organized with a sense of one-point perspective, an almost iconic one-point perspective view down the railroad tracks, with horizon and vanishing point. Yet, because the tracks do not converge on a vanishing point, the composition opens into an exploded projection. The result is a highly structured world in which structures are dis¬ turbingly regular and slightly askew, in a composition that promises enclosure yet remains hollow and open. The strong structural lines also serve to fore¬ ground what is horribly out of place: the humans walking toward us down the track, flesh melting from their limbs like wax from a candle. The image is horrifying because it depicts an actual event. Still, the force of the image does not (and cannot) derive wholly from its ability to represent actual suffering. The horror of this image derives from its meticulous use of structural lines. While the precise lining may be read as a quasi-documentary effect, it also implies, in the context of shonen manga, a spreading of mechani¬ cal projection across the world. The echoes of one-point perspective open into mechanical projection, transforming the world into an exploded projection, showing how the atomic bomb does not only destroy the physical dwellings of humans but also digs deeper in the nature of things, threatening to mechanize and explode existence itself. In addition, the mecha style serves to foreground human figures, and what makes these forms especially terrifying in the con¬ text of manga is the absence of plasticity. These forms are melting, liquefying, and the result is elasticity without any springiness, as if the very possibility of rebounding or springing back had been driven from existence. The image is expunged of the force of the plastic line. The effect of the atomic bomb is to drive plasticity from its world, to expel the plastic line even from comics, which is supposed to be its abode. The question of the image then is, “Can there be plasticity after the atomic bomb?” This question presages the basic question of Barefoot Gen, “Can there be comics after Hiroshima?”

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The answer of Barefoot Gen is resoundingly, “Yes.” But this yes takes a particular form. Clearly it would not be enough for Nakazawa to respond to the atomic bomb by embracing plasticity and covering the entire surface of the manga with plastic figures, expelling the structural line altogether. Such a gesture would not be true to comics, nor would it address the challenge of the atomic bomb to comics, which challenge lies in the ascendency of a mecha complex of lines in organizing existence. This is why Barefoot Gen sticks so tenaciously to plasticity, wherever it does appear. It is a gesture that gathers strength in the context of shonen manga conventions, because these conventions at once depend on and suppress the cartoon legacy, cease¬ lessly transforming it. And the very moments that might initially seem reso¬ lutely nonhistorical—gags, slapstick, cuteness—are what allow the manga to work through a series of compositional tensions, formal contrasts, and quasi-dialectical struggles, and to extend its field of material orientations across different registers of sociopolitical organization. By playing with the plastic line, by entertaining the possibility of its com¬ plete suppression and triumphant rebound, Barefoot Gen is in effect using the plastic line as a sort of affective glue. Because the plastic line implicates a point between lines and generates an animate center, it implies a specific way of managing multiplicity. (Among the infinite ways of drawing a line upon a white page, this plastic line cuts out one of many potential fields.) While this way of managing multiplicity is not synonymous with the biopolitical way of managing multiplicity and carving out a field of engagement, there is an af¬ finity between the two. This is how the plastic line comes to act as a positive unconscious for the biopolitical orientations in Barefoot Gen. We can of course extract a message from Barefoot Gen by aligning various contrasts and struggles, yet the result would probably be a rather beautiful but somewhat banal statement with spiritual overtones, such as “Life springs back when most oppressed,” or “The human spirit can triumph over any adversity,” or some vaguely Buddhist parable to the effect, “It is when you reach rock bottom that you can be saved.” But this is not what holds the different registers of Barefoot Gen together, imparting affective force to its ethical and political orientations. Before (and beyond) any expression of a politics or ethics based on life, humanism, peace, or cosmological harmony. Barefoot Gen enacts the ability of the plastic line to compose forces, enacting a belief in comics.

NOTES This chapter draws on a longer essay originally written for the First International Confer¬ ence on Comics held in Kyoto (see LaMarre 2010). Initially I had intended simply to pro¬ duce a shorter version of that essay for this book, but after giving a version of the paper in two venues and receiving excellent questions from the audience and commentators (Vi lashini Coopan, Boreth Ly, Jim Tobias, Mimi Long, Livia Monnet, and Matthew Penney),

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I ended up writing an overview and explanation of the general concerns and critical proj¬ ect underlying the longer paper, which is what you find here. I am grateful for their feedback. 1. For the English edition, I am using the recently completed translation of the entire 10 volumes (Nakazawa 2004—2009). Note also the Japanese edition (Nakazawa 1975-1987). References in the essay provide volume number and page number: (4:20) refers to vol. 4, p. 20. References are the same in the English and Japanese editions. 2. Ito and Omote (2006) provide an overview of the publication venues. See, too, Omote (2006). 3. As Tomonori Ootaki (2006) verifies in his careful analysis of speech patterns of characters in Barefoot Gen, Gen’s speech gradually comes to dominate the manga, deepen¬ ing the impression of the manga bearing a message, especially in conjunction with the an¬ tiwar speeches that peak in later volumes. But as Ootaki indicates, such an analysis would have to be supplemented by an analysis of image and panel, that is, forms of expression. 4. Due to space limitations, I did not have the opportunity here to discuss the impor¬ tance of different factors affecting the biopolitical emphasis in Barefoot Gen, such as the political situation of 1970s Japan, the formation of manga conventions and institutions, and Keiji Nakazawa’s particular experiences and ethical framework. 5. See Igarashi (2000). Takashi Murakami’s recent exhibition and catalog (2005) makes a similar gesture, calling on manga, anime, and otaku culture to reinscribe the atomic bombs and war defeat into a foundational narrative of Japanese sovereignty. 6. Yoshiaki Fukuma (2006) reminds us that Nakazawa initially had no interest in writ¬ ing atomic bomb manga, due to his opposition to the media appropriation of the atomic bombs, and it was only after the death of his mother in 1966 that he began to reconsider. 7. There is of course Gen’s older brother who goes to Kyushu to work in the mines, but this narrative line does not show the suffering of proletariat and soon dies out. 8. This topic is one of the major problematics in two of Michel Foucault’s collections (2007, 2008). Note that this is very different from Giorgio Agamben, who sees biopolitics as the underlying quasi-metaphysical truth of sovereignty (as in Agamben 1998). 9. I am drawing on Catherine Malabou’s (2008) distinction between flexibility and plasticity. 10. For a fuller account of exploded projection, see LaMarre (2009, ch. 10).

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2008. “Crises of Money.” Positions 16(1): 189-219. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1988. Eisenstein on Disney. Edited by Jay Leyda. Translated by Alan Upchurch. London: Methuen. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Population, Territory: Lectures at the College de France 1977-78. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-79. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Fukuma, Yoshiaki. 2006. “ ‘Genbaku manga’ no media-shi” [A media history of “atomic bomb manga”]. In “Hadashi no Gen” ga ita fukei: Manga, senso, kioku [Contexts of Barefoot Gen: Manga, war, memory]. Edited by Kazuma Yoshimura and Yoshiaki Fu¬ kuma, 12-13. Matsudo, Japan: Azusa Shuppansha. Honda, Katsuichi. 1993. “The Blindness of Japanese Peace Movements.” In Against Am¬ nesia and Complacency. Edited by John Lie, 69-74. New York: Monthly Review Press. Igarashi, Yoshikuni. 2000. “The Bomb, Hirohito, and History.” In Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, 19—46. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ito, Yu, and Tomoyuki Omote. 2006. “Barefoot Gen in Japan: An Attempt at Media His¬ tory.” Translated by Michael Schultz. In Reading Manga: Local and Global Percep¬ tions of Japanese Comics. Edited by Jaqueline Bemdt and Steffi Richter, 19-38. Berlin: Leipziger Universitatverlag. Ivy, Marilyn. 2005. “In/Comparable Horrors: Total War and the Japanese Thing.” Bound¬ ary 2 32 (2): 137-19. Kawaguchi, Takayuki. 2008. Genbaku bungaku to iu puroburematlku [The problematic of atomic bomb literature]. Fukuoka, Japan: Sogensha. LaCapra, Dominick. 1998. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni¬ versity Press. LaMarre, Thomas. 2009. TheAnime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. LaMarre, Thomas. 2010. “Manga Bomb: Between the Lines of Barefoot Gen.” In Comics Worlds and the World of Comics. Edited by Jacqueline Bemdt, 245-85. Kyoto: Kyoto Seika University. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Murakami, Takashi. 2005. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. New York: Japan Society Gallery. Nakazawa, Keiji. 1975-1987. Komikku-ban hadashi no Gen. [Barefoot Gen]. 10 vols. Tokyo: Sekibunsha. Nakazawa, Keiji. 2004-2009. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon History of HiroshimaAO vols. Translated by Project Gen. San Francisco: Last Gasp. Omote, Tomoyuki. 2006. “Manga-shi ni okeru ‘Gen’ no pojishon” [The position of “Gen” within manga history]. In “Hadashi no Gen” ga ita fukei: Manga, senso, kioku [Con¬ texts of Barefoot Gen: Manga, war, memory]. Edited by Kazuma Yoshimura and Yo¬ shiaki Fukuma, 59-86. Matsudo, Japan: Azusa Shuppansha. Ootaki, Tomonori. 2006. “Manga o ‘kotoba’ de yomu: Keiryo teki bunseki no kokoromi” [Reading the “words” of manga: An attempt at metrical analysis]. In “Hadashi no Gen” ga ita fukei: Manga, senso, kioku [Contexts of Barefoot Gen: Manga, war, memory]. Edited by Kazuma Yoshimura and Yoshiaki Fukuma, 139—40. Matsudo, Japan: Azusa Shuppansha. Ootsuka, Eiji. 2008. “Disarming Atom: Tezuka Osamu’s Manga at War and Peace.” In Mechademia 3: The Limits of the Human. Edited by Frenchy Lunning, 111-25. Min¬ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yang, Hyunah. 2008. “Finding the ‘Map of Memory’: Testimony of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Survivors.” Positions 16 (1): 79-107. Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. “Ethnic and Colonial Memories: The Korean Atom Bomb Memo¬ rial.” In Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory, 151-86. Berke¬ ley, CA: University of California Press.

12 Cultural Politics of J-CULTURE AND “SOFT Power”: Tentative Remarks from a European Perspective MARCO PELLITTERI

Until a few years ago, many European observers wrongly considered Japan a modem nation only because it is one of the main producers and exporters of mechanical goods: cars, motorbikes, cameras, and high quality audiovi¬ sual technologies. Actually, it has gained fame as an important cultural center, appreciated all over the world. Japanese cartoons, comics, videogames, toys and gadgets, pop music, adventure and romantic movies, works of fiction, and indeed all local mass culture products have gained success, especially throughout greater Asia, the main cultural exportation basin (Iwabuchi 2002). Starting from the 1960s, a slice of these exports, mostly cartoons and com¬ ics, became famous amongst American and then eventually European pro¬ ducers, readers, watchers, and consumers. Due to a series of business and historical co-occurrences in the late 1970s, from those years until today a huge quantity of Japanese animated series and then comics came to Europe, causing an important change in the broadcasting strategies of television chan¬ nels, in the comics publishing business, and in the tastes of the young public. Italy has always been the European country most central to this dynamic, fol¬ lowed by France. The first phase of this process took place with particular intensity from the second half of the 1970s through the 1980s. Messages and cultural meanings from Japanese products reached the attention of a large public of European

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and American youth, although not always in an obvious fashion. Content com¬ ing through recreational goods and narratives originally had specific Asian cultural meanings before migrating toward new audiences—audiences not always able to understand these meanings. Sometimes it is clear that authors and producers have tried to soften the cultural color of Japan, especially for videogames and cartoons. So some of these products have come to the West almost camouflaged behind the creases of exotic charm radiating from Japa¬ nese technologies and artistry. However, the imprint from this “Japaneseness has been impossible to completely eliminate. The cultural politics of J-culture as received in the West has raised much conjecture on all sides.

TRANSNATIONAL BONDS BASED ON MANGA AND ANIME: VIEWPOINTS Michel Foucault French philosopher Michel Foucault, in L’archeologie du savoir (The ar¬ cheology of knowledge), explains what he means when he describes “the bending point in a curve, the inversion of a regulating movement” (Foucault 2005, 13). The philosopher explains the concept of a “breaking point” deter¬ mining a historic change in a “colloquial regularity.” In analysing the struc¬ tures behind the formation and organization of the dominant knowledge, the French author says that most radical discontinuities are . . . the fractures produced by a work of theoretic transformation when it [and here Foucault quotes Althusser] “cre¬ ates a new science by removing it from the ideology of its past and reveals such past to be ideological.” (Foucault 2005, 8)' Applying this explanation to anime and other products of Japanese imagina¬ tion in the West, we can see such fractures as expressing transformations that re¬ create “foundations and renovat[e] ... the foundations themselves” (Foucault 2005, 8). Themes circulating through manga, anime, and pop cultures form a joint between the past and the future of youth cultural forms in technologically advanced societies, or a filter through which people would have to see to pro¬ duce what Foucault calls “a genealogy” (Foucault 1994, 136-56)—meaning here a genealogical reconstitution, not a canonical list of ancestors—of the thoughts, values, and ideologies of the postmodern imagination of those young Western people who enjoy anime, manga, videogames, and other Japanese fashions newly arrived in the West. This genealogy should identify the Foucaultian fractures to locate new comprehensions about cultural globalization and about how Eastern imagination and Western public relate to each other. In short, we should leave behind the ideologically filtered vision of observ¬ ers who, in past decades, have summarily examined Japanese cultural forms

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only from Eurocentric points of view, in order to see the breaking point pro¬ duced in local European cultural forms that have newly become habits, aes¬ thetic and general tastes, ideas, fashions, and behaviors that equally newly are—in the general perception—a hybrid of East and West.

Ulf Hannerz Swedish social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz devoted a book to transna¬ tional connections, pointing out that the concept of transnationality is more “humble” (Hannerz 1996, 6) than that of globalization, because it implies exchanges between nations in a more concrete and specific way as compared to generic globalized ones. Moreover, in the cultural and media fields, trans¬ nationality may be a better concept under which to classify all the problems that arise from the asymmetry of messages and the mixture of the aesthetics of narrative products that move out of a country toward other nations.

Kiyomitsu Yui Japanese sociologist Kiyomitsu Yui opportunely speaks of how one can dis¬ tinguish infra-national and supra-national entities and phenomena in the phase of an advanced modernity still based on the system of the nation-states (koto) (Yui 2006). He sees anime and manga as a hybrid of the infra-national and supra-national. This is because, on one hand, anime are a local form of cul¬ tural production with their thematic and aesthetic connotations. On the other hand, anime and manga have not encountered obstacles, especially recently, in moving into international distribution, but have been welcomed into other countries and appreciated by consumers in so many parts of the world for their contents and their design. Therefore I would conclude that these media are a cultural conglomerate that stays within a transnationality that has been further enhanced by the expansion of J-culture.

Ian Condry The type of transnationality that interests me the most travels through sys¬ tems of communication, that is, products of the cultural industry and popu¬ lar imagination, being spread by animation, cinema, and comics. American cultural anthropologist Ian Condry (2007) proposed that in recent years the Japanese national self-perceived identity is more and more touched and modi¬ fied by transnational identities promoted through the mass media, depending on the changing correlations between the contents of certain shows and the values of the Japanese public. Condry simultaneously emphasizes the theme of national identity and how recent entertainment products seem to result in a process of “indoctrination.”

Politics

2/2 TRANSNATIONALISM AND NATIONALISM

Today, in Japan, nationalistic drives have emerged in the mass media that westerners generally consider to be pure entertainment, that is, manga and anime. The large majority of products imported into Europe and America have little overt political content; and, where there are some political messages, they are not fully or even partially perceivable to Western publics. In truth, the tendency noted by Condry is double. Following Benedict Anderson (1991, referenced in Condry 2007)—and I myself cannot refrain from referencing at least Appadurai, too (1996), and Tomlinson (1999)—Condry notes that the globalized media have changed the ways in which national communities are perceived by their own members. According to Anderson (1991,6, referenced in Condry 2007), factors building perceptions of national communities were once the press, tourism through one’s own nation, and the bureaucracy on which the nation itself was founded. Instead, with new technologies and strat¬ egies and new media products diffused across the whole world, the imagined communities are built through the ethnic and national frontiers, in ways that clash with the most traditional notions of nationalism. While some media messages aim to consolidate the sovereignty of [the] Japanese nation through the reinforcement of a particular view of history, other media forms draw attention to transnationally imagined communi¬ ties, ... of which anime and hip-hop are just two of the many possible examples. (Condry 2007) On one hand, traditionally nationalist writings have emerged to reclaim the country’s identity as the starting point from which to rebuild the redefinition of a national political and ideological solidity in comparison to the perceived confusion brought by international communication factors. Examples include Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, author of an impetuous nationalistic essay based on a definite historical revisionism related to the war crimes of the Japa¬ nese army in Asia during the Second World War (Ishihara 2006, ref. in Condry 2007), and the patriotic manga by Yoshinori Kobayashi and Kaiji Kawaguchi.2 I return later to these topics. (See also Penney’s chapter 9 and LaMarre’s chap¬ ter 11 in this volume.) On the other hand, examples of popular fiction exist which, while reflecting or depicting the Japanese identity, do avoid reflecting the merits and flaws of the national past and present. Instead, they set themselves in a multi-ethnic and globalized context in ways that do not undo or mitigate their being Japa¬ nese but that establish relationships with other realities. According to Con¬ dry, many past and recent anime, such as Kidd senshi Gundam (Mobile suit Gundam) or Blood-\-, cover events such as war, race, morals, and belonging in problematic ways, pushing the audience to meditate and not to passively ac¬ cept this or that message (Otsuka and Sakakibara 2001, ref. in Condry 2007).3

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But it is also true that those who, more than every other group, actively reflect on the critical themes presented in anime are the fans, the most assiduous users. And in many cases, far from passively absorbing the contents of their favorite films or series, the fans elaborate those messages again on the basis of their own knowledge and further in-depth examination, until they become masters of the thematic implications generated by the beloved narrations. For example, consider fansubbers, the fans who create and disseminate sub¬ titles and not rarely provide other users—who can profit from this extra tool through Internet downloads—with explanatory notes on contents and refer¬ ences that could be obscure without deeper historical knowledge. This hap¬ pens for many series, including Blood+. Anime that receive this fond and philological treatment by foreign consumers morph from local products into authentically transnational ones.

PROXIMITIES AND COMMONALITIES From a Western (and more specifically, European) point of view, it is easy to think that the proliferation of Japanese popular culture in Asian countries is due to factors of cultural proximity: since South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are Asian countries, one can simply think that they are more or less bound to share at least some cultural traits with Japan, so that J-culture will be appreciated there. For example, let us think about the recurrence of some somatic traits such as the so-perceived almond-shaped eyes, which are an al¬ most instinctive reference for westerners. However, this idea of inherent cul¬ tural proximity seems not only very weak (see, e.g., Zaccagnino and Contrari 2007) but is also considered secondary by some Japanese researchers, who, when discussing the reasons for the positive reception of the Japanese cultural industry in the other countries of the Asian sphere, prefer to point out the proximity/sharing of a space and time between two or more countries (one producing the pop culture, one welcoming it): an idea that in its general sense can be defined as contemporaneity. A “dynamic contemporaneity,” as Koichi Iwabuchi says (2002, 2004a, 2007), is based not only on spatial proxim¬ ity but also on temporal contiguity, so that the nation generating pop culture and the target countries proceed toward a future where distances shorten and similarities increase, following a reduction of the political, social, and cultural divergences. This reasoning is valid for the Asian scene, but it seems to me that it could also be applied to the European point of view. The Japanese pop culture that arrived in Italy and in other European countries certainly has not had an effect on the local cultures as massive as in the various Asian countries, nor as much as the American pop culture has had in Europe, because in Europe Japanese pop culture acted on smaller groups of people. Nevertheless, the impact is slowly emerging in fan subcultures (according to the definition given in Jen¬ kins 1992, 1-2, 12-16) and, up to a point, also in the vast group of viewers/

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readers of Japanese products. This is proved by research carried out in Italy and Europe following various types of approaches (Impegnoso 1999; Pellitteri 1999; Molle 2001a, 2001b; Filippi and Di Tullio 2002; Vanhee 2004; Calderone 2006; Sabre 2006). Modernity was originally imagined as an expansion of Western civilization. On one hand, this attitude has forced many industrially developed or devel¬ oping non-Western countries to accept Westernizing forms of modernity—at least before the last few decades. On the other hand, these last decades have made it evident that speaking of modernity only from the Western point of view is inadequate for a correct understanding of the dynamics in play. In such a sense, Iwabuchi’s proximity based on contemporaneity, embodied through the progressive, mutual growing together of various national cultural traits, can in my opinion also be brought about through the action of the stron¬ ger cultural industries, supra-nationally diffused. It has happened with the American cultural industries in many European countries, and it is happening with the Japanese cultural industries in many Far East countries. Moreover, although to a much lesser extent, it is probably happening with J-culture in the United States, Italy, France, and in other Western nations. There is a term, transculture, which in my opinion effectively represents the new phase of the mass cultures that cross nations and civilizations. Sabrina Brancato writes: The traditional notion of culture is being revised. Especially in the socioanthropological and philosophical fields . . . people speak more and more often of transculturality and transculturalism. These new concepts put em¬ phasis on the dialogic nature of cultural influences, moving towards a con¬ ceptualization of the interaction in which nothing is ever completely “other” (foreign and extraneous), and therefore they serve to represent the processes of formation of cultural identity in all of their complexity. (2004) I propose here the word transacculturation, to point to dynamics of inclu¬ sion of themes, concepts, and Japanese imagination values in the fringes of Italian/European fans of Japanese comics and animation. The original concept was transculturation, introduced by Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz (1940). The term has ever since been used in the anthropological circle to describe the dynamic of assimilation, through a process of selection and inventive reprocessing, of a dominant culture by a subordinate or marginal group. (Brancato 2004) I have recast the term as transacculturation both to distinguish it from the former, which was focused on an imperialistic cultural logic, and to empha¬ size the process of cultural growth in a positive, or at least neutral, sense. It is clear that in most dynamics of this type one should not forget about

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components such as power, control, or colonialism. But in the specific case of Japanese anime and manga that arrived in Italy and France (and elsewhere in Europe, such as Spain, Switzerland, and Germany), those components can be put aside, because the process of transit and perception of those cultural prod¬ ucts in the aforementioned countries has been totally detached from colonial dynamics or imperialistic aims. What could and should be considered here is, instead, the set of preexistent conceptions of Japan, Japanese culture, and Japanese people among recipients of those products. (For an initial analysis, see Pellitteri 2010.) In the case of Italy, this process of progressive transacculturation has indeed started with the arrival of anime on television. I will not attempt to explain here the characteristics of this cultural crossing experienced by at least two generations of young Italian viewers and many European young people, since it is more extensively discussed elsewhere (cf. Pellitteri 2010). Instead, here it needs to be said that in the last few years this process has reached a second phase, following two parallel events. First, since the early 1990s, an unbeliev¬ able quantity of Japanese comics have arrived, added beyond the old televi¬ sion anime series, and then a fresh wave of less naive anime arrived, of better quality than those of the previous generation. Second, an all-Italian version developed of the phenomenon of prolonged adolescence—not limited only to the external level and to social behaviors—which had been seen in Japan since the 1980s. There is no question that the phenomenon has various causes. But partly, at least in the subcultures linked to Japanese narratives and commodities, it has outwardly assumed elements deriving from these Japanese influences. The attire, accessories, and attitudes of certain teenagers and young people today are inspired or conditioned by an aesthetical and behavioral tendency named kawaii (Pellitteri 2010, 177-222). Obviously, these observations should be strengthened by more precise analysis and by systematic surveys. Neverthe¬ less, I think that at the very least an interesting area of research has been located. If today many European and North American youth are heavily influenced by Japanese pop culture, it is largely due to the languages of anime and manga, and to the enormous intensity with which these have been aired on television and published in the newsstands and comics stores.

ODORLESS CULTURES, FRAGRANT CULTURES, AND PERFUMED CULTURES The concept of cultural odor has been defined by Iwabuchi in his essay Recentering Globalization (2002), which starts from the definition of mukokuseki (literally, stateless, that is, without country of origin). Iwabuchi be¬ lieves that the technological and cultural products that Japan exports all over the world are in various ways (or a least are seen as) odorless—that is, in many

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cases not reminiscent of the Japanese lifestyle, or of Japan at all. This is much unlike what happens for any Western fast food, or for Nike trainers, or for street-style pants: all these cultural objects clearly feel American and promise various types of dreams to their users. The point is also valid, for example, for Italian or French fashion and wines, or for the Vespa scooter, which all retain a pronounced cultural odor. Iwabuchi also provides an interesting distinction between odor and fra¬ grance, concepts tied to the prestige enjoyed by the country from which a certain cultural good originates. In his analysis, Japan does not enjoy a strong consideration in the West as a country exporting goods that are admired in¬ trinsically rather than only for their instrumental value. Widespread Japanese commodities such as the Walkman are used in Europe and in the United States for listening to local music and not to Japanese music, and even their national origin is ignored, despite the fact that the concept of portable music was in¬ vented in 1979 by three Japanese designers and has revolutionized both the modalities for listening to music and the relationship between people and their urban space all over the world (Hosokawa 1981). If goods of this type are therefore entirely odorless, others, such as Kawasaki or Honda motorbikes— whose Japanese origin is revealed in their very names—at the most spread an odor that makes them recognizable as Japanese but without any special prestige: Japanese people as good technicians, but with little style. These two types of examples altogether exclude the possibility that Japan can produce a real cultural fragrance, a scent capable of arousing admiration in Western observers/consu mers. Perhaps because working from a too Japanese point of view, Iwabuchi does not seem to me to realize that the universe of signs emanating from more than a few Japanese commodities does reveal their geographical and cultural ori¬ gins. Iwabuchi follows the reasoning of Colin Hoskins and Rolf Minis (1988), who attribute the success of Japanese objects such as the aforementioned Walkman to a real originality but without the explicit link to the incorporated cultural lifestyles. Now, Iwabuchi’s reasoning works perfectly well as long as we are talking about mukokuseki for commodities such as the Sony Walkman or Suzuki and Yamaha motorcycles. But since the Japanese researcher also includes manga and above all anime in this list of products, I believe that this part of his analysis needs reviewing. Certainly, I believe it cannot be applied to countries such as Italy. In fact, the limited associations of a Walkman or a motorcycle with Japan do not have much in common with the Japanese cultural odor emitted by products such as anime and manga, for reasons that will now be discussed. Eiji Otsuka and Toshiya Ueno, also, believe that Japanese anime and videogames are be¬ loved in the world for their pretence of neutrality (Iwabuchi 2004b, 61). But to the contrary, their cultural scent is strongly present, similar to what Chris Kohler has described in his essay on Japanese videogames, which communi-

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cate their Japanese origins even when American developers heavily modify the scripts and the look of the characters (Kohler 2005).

Two Complex Products with a Japanese Market It is certainly true that in the universe of Japanese merchandise, strategies of obvious acultural camouflage, which are fully part of the mukokuseki phe¬ nomenon, cohabit with syncretic strategies fusing multiple levels of cultural suggestion. This is the case for two symbolic products of pop Japanese culture aimed at young consumers: the characters Hello Kitty—the kawaii kitten— and Licca-chan (Rika-chan), the Archipelago’s most famous doll. Hello Kitty has been commercially designed as stateless: her physical design only looks Japanese to those who know well the visual techniques of manga and anime and therefore are also familiar with the kawaii style. Regarding her nationality, Yuko Yamaguchi, one of the main designers for products embodying the white and pink kitten, told Douglas McGray (2002) that Hello Kitty has a sort of parallel existence. In her fictional universe, she is a Londoner, and yet she is loved in the real world for being Japanese. It seems that Sanrio’s character is repeating the path undertaken by Licca-chan, the famous Takara doll that since 1967 has been beloved by young Japanese girls just like Mattel’s Barbie has been by Americans since 1959. In her fic¬ tional life, Licca-chan is a “half-caste,” being bom to a Japanese mother and a French father. Yet Japanese girls have always seen her as entirely Japanese and identified with her (Allison 2006, 143^18). The fusion of Western and Japanese elements in Hello Kitty and Licca-chan makes the products exotic in Japan and thus makes them sell well. For the juvenile public—often very receptive of everything with a Western scent— they are desirable and far less monotonous than a Japanese-only product. At the same time, the more Japanese aspect of the two products—and of many others, omitted here for simplicity only—recalls a standard to which Japanese consumers are bound to be accustomed. You can now see the double plan: a cultural aroma that smells foreign. Western, cool, coupled with a standard, familiar, reassuring background. In Hello Kitty’s case, the latter is her kawaii design; for Licca-chan, it is her discreet, chaste morphology, with the closed mouth—a sign of sobriety and purity (Allison 2006, 146).

Differences in Perception? Perhaps Iwabuchi’s belief that anime too are mukokuseki appears wrong be¬ cause some odor always escapes, at least a little bit; especially if it is smelled by people outside the original context of the supposedly antiseptic product. A dialogue revealing these divergences in perception between Western and Japanese observers regarding mukokuseki occurred between writer Peter

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Carey and anime author Yoshiyuki Tomino. Tomino is creator of the already mentioned sci-fi series Kidd senshi Gundam, where the setting is the solar system and the characters are not located culturally with the same preci¬ sion characteristic of most anime. In the dialogue, Tomino explains his own attempt—which he believes successful—to make the characters of the inter¬ planetary saga universal, but Carey appears genuinely skeptical. [Interpreter:] “Mr. Tomino ... tried to avoid ethnicity, and so replaced com¬ mon sense, which is based on culture, with general sense, which is a kind of universal sense that all human beings have. . . . Mr. Tomino tried to remove all cultural elements.” “Perhaps,” I [Carey] suggested, “he is being universal in a Japanese way.” Mr. Tomino was nice enough to laugh. “But when a character speaks,” I insisted, “and they speak the Japanese language, surely the way they speak must communicate some social value? If so, we foreigners can’t hear that. Might a character’s voice not suggest a place of birth or a level of education?” “Ahhhhh” said Mr. Tomino as if I had understood nothing. “Mr. Tomino thinks,” said [the interpreter], “that there is maybe some¬ thing in your own character which is interested in national identity. As for Mr. Tomino, he has avoided it completely. He has always tried to make his characters as standard and as universal as possible by not giving them local colour or national colour or ethnic colour.” (Carey 2003, 74) I believe that from even such a short commentary, we can conclude that many westerners and Japanese observers hold deeply different views on this topic. This is particularly evident in nations that, like Italy, have gotten used to the styles of anime and manga since the end of the 1970s. The point is also valid for those Japanese audiovisual products in which manufacturers have tried to reduce or hide the Japanese traits—presumably to make it easier to export them to foreign countries—and in which the Japanese aesthetical and dynamic factors are intuitively recognizable. I devote so much attention to the concept of mukokuseki because the reception of the Japanese imaginary characters in Italy would not have been the same if the Italian public had not received anime and then manga as clearly Japanese products, therefore refer¬ encing an all new and different cultural and aesthetical universe.

THE ODOR OF ANIME Western or Japanese? Kiyomitsu Yui says that mutual influences between Western and Japanese imagery can be observed in what he calls a “multiplication of the centres of globalization.” This process has caused the progressive fusion of expressive

Cultural Politics ofJ-Culture and “Soft Power

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codes and thus mixed aesthetics. In observing the faces of the anime char¬ acters, Yui notices stereotypical Western (meaning, in this case, Caucasian) characteristics besides the Japanese elements: The faces of heroes and heroines—especially heroines—are usually not typically Japanese. Sometimes they have blond hair, blue eyes. ... At the same time . . . these are not just purely Western faces. Instead, we have in¬ vented a sort of face of a new species who inhabits in the world of anime. In other words, after heavy influences from the West, we have Japanized them and then redistributed them around the world. (Yui 2004) In good measure, this is true. More than a few Japanese manga and anime heroes have blue eyes and variously colored hair, but their somatic traits do not clearly look Caucasian or Asian. Often the girls look “like Western mod¬ els, with long legs [and often] appear taller than their male counterparts, rep¬ resenting an ideal rather than a real image” (Nitschke 1996,173). Thus manga and anime heroes are often represented as types in which Japanese heritage and American and European influences are mixed together. In his discourse on mukokuseki, Iwabuchi (2002, 28-29) says that manga and anime are based on strategies of odorlessness and Caucasianization for the benefit of an in¬ ternational public. In reality, as I have described elsewhere, the design of the anime characters symbolically codifies Japanese somatic traits (cf. Pellitteri 2010, 100-7, 395^100). Moreover, during a countertendency of manga’s graphic tendencies in the 1980s, Tezuka’s lesson on how to draw characters following certain cliches of the Disney design was put alongside a style that returned to a conventionally Japanese physiognomy, or at least to a style closer to real Japanese physi¬ cal traits. This happened in josei manga (or ladies’ comics), comics for adult women, which include works by authors such as Akimi Yoshida, as well as in works of international notoriety such as Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, whose characters have more “Japanese” features and eyes (Schodt 1996, 62). The tendency is even stronger today, as shown in characters such as Iori from T’s by Masakazu Katsura and Saya in her schoolgirl uniform from the film Blood: The Last Vampire. Even ignoring this last aspect, one might wonder: are manga and anime characters mukokuseki, or are they drawn with Western physical traits? One might think that according to Iwabuchi, manga and anime characters are odorless because they are defined by Western traits (but this would not make them universal), and as such are desirable for foreign markets. Yet the fact remains that most characters in manga and anime are not based on Western types and, beyond that, are definitely not odorless. Japanese myths, idioms, customs, backgrounds, geography, scenography, build¬ ings, and rites are present in manga and anime, both for cinema and for television.

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Inevitable Odors In short, Japanese references of one sort or another in the art and themes of anime and manga seem to me inevitable, even if some Japanese researchers do not know how to notice them. The assumption that anime are like other odor¬ less products made in Japan—such as hi-fi equipment, the Walkman, or DVD players—is perhaps undermined by a partial lack of perceptiveness or by the conviction, in some cases perhaps with justification, that powerful Japanese cultural products have been spread in the West on the strength of the absence of recognizable aesthetic roots; they are supposed to be, in a bland sense, universal. In the conversation between Carey and the creator of Kidd senshi Gundam excerpted previously (Carey 2003, 74 ff.), Carey asks Tomino what Gundam’s “Japanese specificities” are. Tomino answers that he did not want to insert recognizable Japanese characteristics in his work, and when Carey pushes him to notice that Gundam's look and weapons are reminiscent of an ancient samurai, Tomino is surprised (Carey 2003, 76-77). However, it can be added that in Italy, just like in many other countries such as the United States or France, various Japanese series have been reworked for local markets by eliminating or attenuating Japanese characteristics such as names of people or places, and with the rewriting of some dialogues, or even—in extreme cases, such as the Americanization of the Pokemon ani¬ mated series for the American market—including a new soundtrack (Katsuno and Maret 2004, 83-85). Studies nevertheless show that, despite the various changes possible to make in a foreign—and particularly Japanese—series, a large part of the Western juvenile public can almost always recognize in some measure the foreign nature of the product, thanks to factors such as the style of direction, narrative themes, graphic techniques, and so on (Pellitteri 1999, passim; Impegnoso 2004, 79-90). This can only happen, however, as long as the changes are not too radical and the public is not completely unaccustomed to watching shows coming from far away indeed, since that is when an internal cultural system does not limit as much as it might the enjoyment of foreign products for what they are. This latter has been, in fact, the case at times for the United States, where several Japanese animated and live series officially arrived on television since 1963, but where the editing and dubbing operations for the most part were so very invasive that they made the final results very different from the original products. (The clandestine circulation of anime among U.S. fandom is an¬ other, and complex, topic; see Leonard 2005a, 2005b.)

Cultural Messages The cultural odor, again using Iwabuchi’s meaningful expression, is there¬ fore almost always an inextinguishable feature of the Japanese products even when there is a deliberate wish to cover it. To be in the presence of an anime or

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a manga set in Europe and/or inspired by a Western classical novel, or whose characters do not have obvious almond-shaped eyes, should not make one think about a strategy of imitation or dilution or cultural avoidance or cancel¬ lation. Even in these cases, the original cultural filter is present and suggests values, themes, and messages that will be taken in by the viewers, regardless of their nationality. This has essentially happened in two ways. 1. Through series that are clearly Japanese in their appearance and themes, with names, landscapes, customs, and habits of the charac¬ ters that are evidently Japanese. A character may wear a kimono or a scientist might wear the typical Japa¬ nese clogs, even in a science-fiction context (e.g., in Getter Robo from Toei Doga in 51 episodes from 1974). Battles between the protagonists and the enemies in a robot series, for example, often take place near Mount Fuji or Tokyo. Ads at the stadium and on the fans’ banners in a sports anime are writ¬ ten in ideograms. Characters eat rice while seated on the floor around low tables, using bowls and chopsticks. The same characters greet each other with a bow rather than with a handshake, or they pray in front of a statue of Bud¬ dha and not a crucifix or in a temple instead of a church. In these cases, the Japanese definition of the series is unequivocal: the origin is overtly declared. 2. Through shows that have their scenography and plots based on West¬ ern works—as in Alps no shojo Heidi (Heidi, girl of the Alps) or Akage no An (Red-haired Anne, that is, Anne of Green Gables)—or that use an exotic setting for stories taking place outside Japan—as in Candy Candy or Versailles no bara (Rose of Versailles).4 Here the matter is more complex. First, there is still no wish to disguise the Japanese origin and mentality under false pretences. Second, there is a moral underlying the messages given by the narration, conditioned by the authors’ culture and therefore by the national ethos and milieu. Such elements can fil¬ ter through in less evident ways compared to what happens in case 1. A. That there is no intent to camouflage Japanese themes for the sake of Western viewers is shown by the fact that, as it is well known, for decades anime authors and producers have mainly worked for a Japanese audience first; then often—but not necessarily—also for other Asian viewers; and then, even less frequently, for an American and eventually European audience. Even more recently, although the creation, production, and distribution of anime by now incorporates the possibility of selling to European and American markets, the pri¬ mary attention of the authors is still to create first and primarily for Japanese viewers. This is because in every case Japan is always the most lucrative market for television shows and derived merchandise.

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B. It is obvious that in any dramaturgical rewriting a more or less thick layer of the culture of the authors cannot be erased. In other words, this is a null problem. It has been misleadingly raised by those who in the past have seen the anime coming into the West as an illegitimate interference by Japanese animators in the educa¬ tion of Western children, at the historical moment when television became a free nanny in front of which to park the kids. (For the relationship between children and television, see, e.g., Bertolini and Manini 1988; Trisciuzzi, Ulivieri, and Cambi 1993; Detti 1998. ) Besides, the topic has been polluted by three other factors. The first has been that the wide audience for anime, varying by sex and age groups, has not been recognized because, as often discussed, in Europe animation is considered an expressive form exclusively for children. This resulted in a second factor: the dif¬ ficulty of judging on a case-by-case basis the actual messages of various series. Finally, almost a metafactor, is the instinctive con¬ tempt for anime aesthetics and themes held by three generations of adults, and a phobia of themes judged “bad for children” For years, this stigmatization of anime has impaired any judgment on anime’s qualities and limitations. (“Stigma” is used as in Goffman 1963. On the cultural stigma of Italian manga fans, see Impegnoso 1999. ) So in one way or another, Japanese aesthetics, messages, and values have reached the young Italian and European publics. With the exception of a small number of series that have undergone particularly heavy revision, the anime distributed in Italy have not been filtered by invasive changes. Instead, the products, despite some dubbing liberties, have remained mostly faithful with regard to the names of the characters and places. This is why the Italian case is remarkable for studying the reception in the West by young viewers of Japa¬ nese cultural models through anime. The Italian public has deeply inhaled the anime odor, recognizing it much better than what happened elsewhere. One of the research objectives that the dawning studies of this medium have set and are trying to bring forward is indeed the analysis of which messages and val¬ ues (be they Japanese or not) have been preferentially received and absorbed by the anime and manga publics.

THE PERCEPTION OF ANIME AND MANGA IN EUROPE AS CONDITIONED BYTHE UNDERSTANDING OF JAPAN In the 1970s, the relationship between Japanese industries and foreign mar¬ kets was based, from the Japanese point of view, on the attempt of Japan to work on two levels: the wish to penetrate the Asian markets and assume leadership (after all, Japan has never succeeded in hiding that it wants to be

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recognized as the natural leader of Asia) and the continuous desire to achieve an important role in the European and American markets. So far, this dual mission has only partly succeeded. The economic-diplo¬ matic missions undertaken by Japan in Europe as far back as in the 1970s did not obtain good results. For instance, in 1976 a delegation of important Japanese industrialists came to Europe to discuss the import and export com¬ petition between the EEC (European Economic Community) and Japan, but wherever the delegation went—London, Paris, Brussels—it was met above all with sour criticisms for the Japanese economic and production surpluses (Wilkinson 1981,206). Between that year and the next, European and Ameri¬ can demands to Japan escalated, so that Japan made a series of important concessions and formed international joint regulatory and study commissions to assess its economic relationships (Wilkinson 1981, 208). Tensions and mu¬ tual requests for attenuations and changes to international economic systems continued until the first half of the 1980s, heightened in 1979 by the different types of reactions to the great world energy crisis. Now, Japan did suffer that crisis as well, as had been the case in 1973. Yet Japan was able to respond in more balanced ways in comparison to the United States and Europe. On one hand, these events showed Japan’s great competitiveness. In fact, from the postwar period, the country was everything but a “paper tiger,” a name by which it had been called in the past. On the other hand, it was accused of conducting a real economic war—those were the years of the so-called Japan bashing. The European press, either specializing in finance or catering to popular audiences, was unified in fingering Japan as an economic danger and repeated the criticisms forthcoming in previous years, although now such blame was accompanied by awareness of the inferior competitiveness of Eu¬ ropean industry (Wilkinson 1981, 210). Endymion Wilkinson quotes various examples of anti-Japanese headlines that brought the usual stereotypes into the newspapers of several European countries: “Yellow Danger,” “Japanese Invasion,” “Disloyal and Untrustworthy Competitors,” “Enemy Number One,” “It Is Commercial War: The Japanese Attack!,” “A Yen for the Victory!,” “The Japanese Are Getting Ready to Devour Us,” “Will Japan Lead Us to the Third World War?” (1981, 208, 219). During the 1970s and early 1980s, even in Italy the press and the Parlia¬ ment had put out a mixture of admiring observation and—more frequently— worried warnings about import and export trends relating to Japan. In this climate, produced by the industrial environment and then reverberating into politics, Japan once again took on—in a way not entirely dissimilar from what had happened in the 1920s and 1930s—the role of the threatening, faraway country, aiming to erode European economic and industrial development. Most likely it was also for this reason that the worried cultural reactions in Italy from politicians, educators, press, and public opinion with respect to anime in the late 1970s and early 1980s bordered on xenophobic. Japan was already feared for its alleged commercial efforts “to conquer” Europe. So the

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idea that this country could also turn its attention to children with television products—which were held untrustworthy because they were perceived as being camouflaged with westernized dress—led to many misinterpretations. The perception of Japanese cultural products (such as anime) among European parents, politicians, pedagogists, and also many teenagers was fundamentally essentialistic: Japan as a monolithic, independent cultural entity. This kind of orientalistic/essentialistic vision of Japanese products still today underlies their perception among European publics. From the 1960s, Japan had begun exporting other goods to Western mar¬ kets. No longer just ships, tempered steel, cars, motorcycles, and electronic components but also products catering to the popular imagination spread by animated series first and by manga afterwards. This type of cultural export was not necessarily deliberate. Instead, it was facilitated by international col¬ laborations (with American networks and producers from 1963 on, and Euro¬ pean from the mid-1970s) through which Japanese technical and expressive know-how in the animation field met European entrepreneurial speculations. These consisted either of sharing production costs or of the selling at reduced prices of “packets” ready for use, excluding the dubbing in the local language. These series, all of them finished products, carried a formidable novelty effect during a period when television slots kept increasing. Let us think, for example, about the success of the program Force Five, broadcast in the United States starting in 1979 thanks to an idea from producer Jim Terry. The show used to be broadcast from Monday to Friday, and every day there was an episode from one out of five different robot anime series, from which action figures of the main characters were sold by Mattel. The five anime were Danguard Ace (Wakusei Robo Danguard Ace), Starvengers (Getter Robo G), Grandizer (UFO Robo Grendizer), Gaiking (Daikumaryu Gaiking) and Spaceketeers (SF Saiyuki Starzinger).5 In the United States, the action figures of these and other characters were commercialized as Shogun Warriors and were licensed by Popy—a Bandai branch. The situation that developed in the second half of the 1970s was of a trans¬ national diffusion of a colossal block of Japanese audiovisual products, made almost exclusively for the national Japanese public, which, after a first phase of introduction in the Asian markets, penetrated various Western countries be¬ yond East Asia—including North African and Middle Eastern areas. It can be said that, during that phase, the circulation of this Japanese imagination in the West had been, for the most part, of a pull type, and that in the following phase it had mostly been of a push type.6 With this, I mean that during the first phase Western entrepreneurs recognized the quality of Japanese audiovisual prod¬ ucts and the possibilities of their commercial success, “pulling” anime toward Europe and America and therefore stimulating the following, more aware, strategies of the Japanese companies. However, in a second phase, the same Japanese companies, by now well aware of the attraction of their products in

Cultural Politics of J-Culture and “Soft Power”

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the West, started to “push” anime and manga—and related merchandise—on extra-Asian markets and publics. A third phase, which corresponds to present day, could in turn be defined push and pull. Let us move back to Japan. Very imaginative observers have compared the Japanese popular culture arriving in the West to a Trojan horse through which the Rising Sun was conquering the young European generations (Cofano 1999). These declarations produced a good deal of hilarity in the Italian scholarly milieu, academic and otherwise (Pellitteri 2000). In fact, what is much more appropriate and theoretically useful is the concept of soft power, introduced by Joseph Nye (1989; 1990, 153-71; 2004) and used again by Jean-Marie Bouissou (2006a, 2006b). Nye defines soft power as the ability to obtain international consent not through coercion but by voluntary compli¬ ance with a model, thanks to the circulation of a nation’s own cultural prod¬ ucts and to a favorable public image. In the case of Japan’s image in Europe, soft power is incarnated in the change of European opinion about Japan, especially youth opinion. This change occurred thanks to the country of the Rising Sun being affirmed as a cool place that is trendy and that dictates what is trendy (McGray 2002). The difference with Nye’s definition is that this power has not necessarily been determined by a programmed wish to acquire it, and has not been used actively. That is, one can verify that it has been acquired automatically, due to unplanned historical-cultural processes, and that for a long time this power has not even been used at its full potential. In fact, other authors add that the influence of pop culture can extend itself up from below, from the fandom world, without any structured movement and even despite a deliberate indif¬ ference from Japan (Leonard 2005b, 282). Japan has eventually profited from these processes through its own cul¬ tural industry, particularly in the case of anime and manga. These products, with their power to involve audiences—a soft but also concrete power—have molded the imagination, tastes, and very often even the sensibility of many media users. Bouissou notes, “From a broader perspective, cultural commod¬ ities also enable the countries that dominate the market to propagate their value system” (Bouissou 2006b, 228). This means that manga and anime have brought with them—whether their authors and producers meant to or not—values and contents that are perceived to some degree as Japanese. This does not mean that the Japanese cultural circulation of manga and anime is comparable to the American cultural imperialism in countries such as Italy. Certainly the historical causes, dynamics of objectification, and, above all, social elements of these two types of cultural globalization are, as is known, very different. However, it deserves to be said that soft power has been very persuasive regarding opinions about Japan. One investigation pointed out that it is the country whose influence on the world has been judged to be the most positive most of the time.7

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EUROPEAN PERCEPTION OF J-CULTURE: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS As time passed, Japanese imagination became more assertive toward Western markets, which in the meantime have become partly Japanized (if I may say so) in trends and demand for videos, design, and products. For better or for worse, Japanese imagination and commodities first penetrated deeply into many Asian markets and then, between the 1970s to the 2000s, were able to thrust this cul¬ tural industry into new territories. True, so far it is been comics and animation more than anything else. On the one hand, J-pop music, for instance, is almost ignored in Europe, while in America it attracts only ethnic communities. On the other hand, Japanese traditional culture is seen as folklore or high art, and as a consequence is popular largely in institutional settings: public foundations, mu¬ seums, theatres, cinemas, and books. Yet the current trend points to a steadily increasing appreciation of Japanese pop culture in the younger age groups, and it must be recognized that the push phase or strategy mentioned above has bom fruit even as the Western demand (pull) for Japanese animation, bom in the 1970s and 1980s, has continued to grow in the 1990s and today. Building on the success of previous years in several Western countries and on the familiarity with the graphic languages of manga and anime by then in¬ ternalized by large audiences of children, teenagers, and young adults, Japanese production companies obtained great results when they began to offer their nar¬ ratives and goods more confidently, through more structured business moves on the international markets. The universal success of media phenomena such as Pokemon and, later, of new franchises of characters, narrative settings, and related toys, created international profits from rich product aggregates such as Dragon Ball and Hello Kitty—whose popularity in Europe had never disap¬ peared, but came back in vogue even more—and attention to Japanese animation and its contents that extended from large circles to an ever more general public. There are changes in the balance of power between geographical areas from which the most influential cultural industries propagate, with Japan playing an increasingly central role even during economic recession and political crisis. The patterns of multimedia development through which mass phenomena are presented to international audiences change, as well, and Pokemon's universe of commodities spearheaded the way, revealing, like it or not, different and more effective ways to market imagination. Finally, both this new balance of power and these new patterns of multimedia development are changing the contents of Western discussion about Japanese mass culture products, which every year become less profitable for European and American go-between companies that get in on the action.

JAPANESE NATIONALIST TENDENCIES IN FUTURE MANGA AND ANIME IN EUROPE? In the 1970s, the Japanese started to realize that what had been built up to then had been having effects internationally. This has resulted in two dynam-

Cultural Politics of J-Culture and “Soft Power”

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ics: the increasing demand for manga and anime in foreign markets, up to the boom seen in recent years, and the resurfacing, decades later, of a sleepy na¬ tionalist feeling, which had officially been set aside. This feeling has certainly come from composite political, military, and ideological bases, promulgated by people tied to an idea of a Japan reminiscent of the strategies of the early 20th century, aimed at the constitution of a pan-Asiatic area of prosperity. But today a tendency has arisen to use a consumerist framework, employing characters and products loved by million of young people around the world, to promote a national image that becomes the ambassador of a sham Japan. At this point of history, I believe that two very important changes inter¬ twine. They are about two trends: the entry into a new phase in the promotion of Japan, and the emergence of a new model of intermedia expansion after the one developed for Pokemon and other similar phenomena—a model that does not communicate real commodities any longer but an idea, presented as compact and unitary, of national culture. If in the 1970s and 1980s the tendency was of a pull type—Western vendors and middlemen asked for Japanese products that were innovative and priced competitively—and in the 1990s and 2000s a push dynamics emerged—Japanese producers and distributors, having realized that anime and manga are in great demand in foreign countries, began to propose them to the West in a more organized way—from the middle of the 2000s, the two dynamics were more and more clearly integrating into a dual push and pull process. In this most recent phase of marketing of the cool Japan through the world, several promotional approaches are in place. On the one hand, the politics of the Tokyo government push for international recognition of anime, manga, and videogames, but also for other J-culture sectors such as music and con¬ temporary art. The push follows strategies of cultural diplomacy that Taro Aso (Aso 2006, 1), former Foreign Minister and more recently former Prime Minister, brought forward following directives already expressed by previ¬ ous (2001-2005) Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi. On the other hand, the intoxicating charm of manga, anime, Sony and Nintendo videogame consoles with their software, and more recently J-pop music works strongly on three generations of multimedia users. This J-culture charm works on many adults who, in the 1980s, were children who became followers of the Japanese imagination.8 It works on the young and very young people who grew up later, marked by the boom of manga in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States, and by improvements in animation and in the spectacular cinema with syncretic graphic and thematic traits—including works such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pokemon, Animatrix, and Kill Bill. Finally, it works on today’s teenagers and children, who live on an imagination that mixes aspects of the Euro-American culture with Japanese themes and views, soon to be joined by themes and views from other growing cultural industries, such as that of South Korea.

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Since 2002, the Japanese government has formed committees to discuss what politics to adopt for fostering the already increasing success of J-culture in the Western world. The ferment has also seen the collaboration of Japanese universities, which started courses for professional creators after the interna¬ tional widening of Japanese pop culture, with participation from very famous authors such as Takeshi Kitano and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. On this politics that promotes culture as a national brand, Iwabuchi opportunely writes: Today ... it is the alliance of the national governments and private (trans¬ national) corporations that most powerfully uses “culture” in the establish¬ ment and export of national brand cultures such as media, tourism, fashion, food and so forth. (Iwabuchi 2007) Among these expansion politics of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there is also a project to donate money for amplification and technological updating of the broadcasting systems of the developing countries in Asia, with appro¬ priations coming from the Official Development Assistance (ODA) agency of Japan.9 This idea can be interpreted as following the American scheme of donating funds as a means of cultural colonialism, and as an exercise of soft power in a more or less explicit return to the 1977 peace-affirming Fukuda doctrine from Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda. As a matter of fact, one Japanese motivation for providing this industrial assistance is to encourage, in a later second phase, the television companies of these countries to purchase broadcast rights to Japanese programs—particularly anime and drama. Nation therefore becomes a commercial unity, a brand to be promoted. Nevertheless, it seems that until now these official (push) strategies have not been as ef¬ fective as the spontaneous (pull) expansion, not (purposefully) directed from above, of J-pop culture. This raises the question of the utility of measures for enhancing intentional diffusion of the soft power of a nation in comparison to its spontaneous flow. Regardless, government actions do not merely stimulate the introduction and spread of cultural products but, more deeply, also hide the political intent to increase admiration for Japan and, by doing so, attenuate memories and resentments about the violent Japanese colonial past, especially in China and Korea (Iwabuchi 2002, 2007; Kim 2007). And besides, from a cultural point of view, this tactic appears mono-dimensional, because it has above all the tendency to promote the most profitable, obvious, and mainstream manifesta¬ tions of Japanese culture, whereas instead the public organizations devoted to promoting Japanese culture across the world have always acted to support the various national cultural forms, from the more traditional arts to more contemporary ones. Central among these is the Japan Foundation, present in many countries and financed by the State and by several Japanese firms. As a matter of fact, promotion passes through many channels. In regards to comics and animation, suffice it to mention the first Japanese international

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prize devoted to manga, a contest announced in 2007 by the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Aso. The resonant proclamation announcing the award makes one understand how much the politics of Japanese cultural diplomacy is pushing national comics and animation as avant-garde for an ever more global diffu¬ sion of J-pop culture, destined to be the standard bearer of a Japan known for its cool and friendly aura.10 It is somehow puzzling to think that Aso, former head of a Ministry whose duties include sending abroad the best possible picture of Japan, is on the one hand a great fan of manga and anime and wanted to increase the export and promotion of Japanese culture throughout the world, and on the other hand is a rightwing outspoken conservative who shares the aggressive politi¬ cal program of a party that minimizes past Japanese war crimes and wants to increase military expenses and equip the nation with offensive forces free to act, thanks to a possible (but, for the moment, more unlikely than not) consti¬ tutional change. I think that these trends and events are related to the wave of hyper¬ nationalist manga, some of which are openly revisionist, that today circulate in Japan, such as those by Yoshinori Kobayashi and Sharin Yamano (see Penney’s chapter 9 in this volume). The image of Japanese comics has very often been that of stories in which liberty and tolerance were values promulgated with a certain pedagogic consideration. This has been especially true in coun¬ tries such as Italy, France, Spain, and Germany—and above all among manga readers in these countries. If in the not too distant future the promotion of manga in the world has to be combined with the conservative or openly na¬ tionalistic ideas of politicians like Abe and Aso, it is possible that Japanese comics will no longer only be a vehicle of the balanced and pacifist ideas of authors such as Leiji Matsumoto, Hayao Miyazaki, JiroTaniguchi, and others, but also of reactionaries. There is a paradox here, given that the same Aso, in his quoted talk, says that Japan in the world enjoys a pacific image, not at all aggressive, and that this image can be empowered thanks to manga (As5 2006,4). According to Aso (and not just to him), the diplomacy to be put into action should make Japan emerge with an effective brand image (Aso 2006,5). For Aso, Japan has a “weak” image and needs to be strengthened in this sense, through various means including the expansion of Japanese media throughout the world: not only manga and anime, but also dramas and television shows that would air on Japanese channels and be launched in extra-national territories, as has already been done in various Asian countries and in the United States. Aso’s mission, as it was conceived when he was at the Foreign Ministry, is clear from these words: We are now at the point where culture made in Japan—whether anime and manga or sumo or Japanese food culture—is . . . able to nourish people of the world, particularly the younger generations. We would be remiss not to utilize these to the fullest. (Aso 2006, 6)

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According to Aso, to reach this goal involves a desirable synergy of politics with private citizens and with the large entertainment companies (Aso 2006, 7). The aim is to increase the group of people around the world who think positively about Japan (Aso 2006, 8). The measures outlined are not only those related to manga but also initiatives aimed at anime. In these initiatives, animators are to be seen as real cultural ambassadors, whose works, shown to the international public in special exhibitions in embassies and consulates, play their part in this sensitization agenda (Aso 2006, 9). On this very topic, an article on the Wall Street Journal highlights the thin line that separates cultural promotion from political propaganda in this unscrupulous and, according to many observers, unnatural use of manga as government tools (Bosker 2007). In conclusion, it has to be said that Aso, being a diplomatic expert, during his office at the Foreign Ministry has been able to dissolve the heat that can be generated by a strategy of this type, especially among foreign observers. This is shown by the wisecracks made in response to the journalists who asked him to comment on the fact that the socialist candidate for the 2007 elections in France, Segolene Royal, in 1989 had published a book in which she complained about anime and about their alleged negative effects on children. “She should read more manga” was his answer (Yoshida 2007). This attitude perhaps should be¬ come more systematic, since the enthusiasm of the Japanese diplomats for the cultural power of anime and manga as tool for promoting the Japan brand is in sharp contrast to the hands-off modalities that most producers and large compa¬ nies have used for promulgating J-pop culture (above all anime)—to propose, sell, and serenely leave to their own fate their own products in their destination countries. In fact, in these cases they did not exert any pressure on their foreign clients to maintain the integrity and cultural identity of their anime/manga. However, in an age when transnational circulation of cultural industries is becoming the dominant practice, based on the reprocessing of external contents to advantage local demands, it is perhaps contradictory to impose a national odor from above, instead of leaving the cultural flows to proceed following their “natural” paths. In any case, one can only wait to see which direction this tendency will take: if it consolidates in a real strategy, defined by tactics and precise objectives as the old Fukuda doctrine would suggest, or if it is just an episode of Japanese cultural diplomacy that will not go anywhere. What is certain is that the signals launched from the Japanese right wing sug¬ gest an organic politics: Masahiko Komura, the Foreign Minister in charge before the new, leftwing government was installed, in March 2008 promoted Doraemon as the “anime ambassador” to the world, in continuity with his pre¬ decessor. We now await further developments coming from the left.

CONCLUSIONS Perceptions of an (often stereotypical) Japan suspended between past and present, between reality and fantasy, opened in the West through anime. Per-

Cultural Politics of J-Culture and “Soft Power”

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ceptions then expanded through manga and the recent explosion of J-pop cul¬ ture among fans old and new, now grown up and gathered in communities and subcultures. And in a more recent phase what is currently growing is an even more in-depth interest, which could be a passing fad, but in the medium and long term could lead to very interesting developments in many areas such as cultural tourism and diplomatic trade. In fact, several scholars of cultural flow from Japan to the West—including this writer—have been wondering in recent years whether and how Japanese in¬ stitutions intend to use this allegedly ascending Japanese cultural soft power— which, when Joseph Nye coined the concept in the late 1980s, he opposed to hard power, identified mainly with military/political power. In the 1980s, Nye was addressing his countrymen and the American government, worried that the economic rise of Japan was bad for the American way of life and for the in¬ ternational geopolitical balance. Nye reassured them, indicating that—despite the economic crisis of those years at a time when the Cold War was coming to an end, of course, but not yet in a totally defined way—the United States still held, and was going to hold firmly and for a long time, a type of power that no other nation could ever match. This power is the ability to influence ideas and opinions with pop culture and the appeal of its lifestyle and of the grandiose promises that the American way of life entails. So, for the United States the possession of a cultural power able to influence the attitudes of other countries has had the goal of keeping at bay ideologies inimical to democratic ideals and to the capitalist economic system. The ques¬ tion is, then, in the case of Japan: soft power to what end? What is it that Japan should maintain or must (re?)win? Even Nye a few years ago, in talking again about the rise of Japan in the transnational flow of mass culture, implied that the country would produce “stocks,” allow me the expression, of soft power: Japanese manufacturers rule the roost in home videogames. Japanese im¬ ages dominated children’s dreams quite handily over the last five years with their mix of cuteness and power. ... Its style has spilled over into American design trends as well. Japan’s popular culture was still producing potential soft power resources even after its economy slowed down. (Nye 2004, 86) Is this a soft power actually aimed toward some purpose not immediately obvious? Or has this Japanese soft power (as here it is suggested) emerged unexpectedly and the governmental institutions of the country have not yet understood whether and how to take advantage of it? Taro Aso, in his afore¬ mentioned speech (2006), claims that not to use fully the emerging charm of Japanese culture in this historical moment would be a pity. But so far it is not clear what Japan is driving at in the medium or long term, with the way in which it appeals to so many young people across the world. Whatever the answer, an element that will drive the analysis will certainly be, among oth¬ ers, the evolution—which will take place in coming years—of the internal

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discussion in Japan on the role of the nation and on its alleged, self-perceived identity both in Asia and in its relations with the West. We will just have to wait and see what happens.

NOTES 1. Foucault’s reference is in Althusser 1965, 168. 2. Kobayashi has made corrosive manga since his “ ‘Arrogantism’ declaration” in 1991 (Schodt 1996, 224-28; see also Bouissou 2006c, 2006d; Pellitteri 2007). Manga of patri¬ otic and traditionalist spirit—but not necessarily nationalist—have a long history. 3. Kidd senshi Gundam, animated series ideated and directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, 43 episodes, Nippon Sunrise, 1979, and a manga published in the same year from Akita Shoten by Tomino (story) with Yasuhiko Yoshikazu (drawings). Blood+, animated series produced by Production I.G in 2005-2006, 50 episodes directed by Jun’ichi Fujisaku, which derives from the half-length fdm Blood: The Last Vampire, also produced by I.G and directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 2000. 4. Alps no shojo Heidi, directed by Isao Takahata, 52 episodes, produced by Zuiyo/ BetaFilm/Taurus Film, 1974; Akage no An, by Isao Takahata and Yoshifumi Kondo, 50 episodes, produced by Nippon Animation, 1979. 5. Wakusei Robo DanguardAce, 56 episodes, Toei Doga, 1977; Getter Robo G, 39 epi¬ sodes, Toei Doga, 1975; Ufa Robo Grendizer, 74 episodes, Toei Doga, 1977; Daikumaryu Gaiking, 44 episodes, Toei Doga, 1976; Starzinger, 64 episodes, Toei Doga, 1978. 6. Although in a different context, Sean Leonard too has used the expression pull to point out an international public that has become attracted to anime and then manga from below, that is, from the world of fandom (Leonard 2005b, 282). 7. Japan has been said to have a positive influence on the world in 31 of the 33 nations where this survey has been conducted, placing itself in second place behind Europe (which, however, is not a single nation). The search was carried out between October of 2005 and January of 2006 by the BBC World Service and the University of Maryland, on a sample of 40,000 people (Aso2006, 5; BBC 2006; Bouissou 2006a). At least here in note, it has to be added that the concepts of soft power applied to the influence of Japanese pop culture in Western context, and of “cool Japan”—which has become since 2002 a too-easy label— need to be revised in light of recent scholarship and actual developments. 8. An interest that often feels like nostalgia (on which cf. Pellitteri 1999; Filippi and Di Tullio 2002; Maurizi 2005). 9. The ODA gives funds to developing countries. Cf. Mofa.go.jp/policy/oda and Euroact.co.jp/oda-japan/index.html. Among ODA actions are promotional efforts to favor the image of Japan: for instance, since 2006 Japanese forces in Iraq in the Al-Muthanna province provided humanitarian assistance and aid reconstruction and used water supply vehicles that exhibited on the sides large images of the comics and television series char¬ acter Captain Tsubasa, there much loved as Captain Majed (Aso2006, 10). Japan, through the Japan Foundation, has also given for free the airing rights to the third season of the aforementioned animated series, dubbed into Arabic, for a total of 52 episodes to the main public network of Iraq (Aso2006). Japan had already been in Iraq in 2004, dispatching 600 personnel to Samawa, for peacekeeping and humanitarian help. 10. Cf. mofa.go.jp/policy/culture/manga/index.html.

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236

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Pellitteri, Marco. 2010. The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination—A European Perspective. Translated by Roberto Branca with Christie Lee Barber. Latina, Italy: Tunue. (Originally published as II drago e la saetta. Modelli, strategic e identita dell’immaginario giapponese. 2008. Latina, Italy: Tunue.) Royal, Segolene. 1989. Le ras-le-bol des bebes zappeurs [The dissatisfaction of the chan¬ nel-flipping generation]. Paris: Robert Laffont. Sabre, Clothilde. 2006. Le neo-japonisme en France. Passion des mangas et images du Japon [Neo-Japonism in France: Passion for manga and images of Japan], Master’s thesis. University Lille 1: Sciences and Technology, France. Schodt, Frederik L. 1996. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Giovanna Bettini, trans. 2001. Sentirsi a casa nel mondo. La cultura come bene globale. Milan: Feltrinelli.) Trisciuzzi, Leonardo, Simonetta Ulivieri, and Franco Cambi. 1993. II bambino televisivo. Infanzia e TV tra apprendimento e condizionamento [The television child: Childhood and TV between learning and conditioning]. Teramo, Italy: Lisciani and Giunti. Vanhee, Olivier. 2004. Lire un manga: Les principes de legitimite en jeu dans les represen¬ tations de la lecture et dans les manieres de lire [Reading a manga: The principles of legitimation at play in the representations of reading and in the reading practices]. The¬ sis submitted for DEA [Diplome d’etudes approfondies]. University Lyon II, France. Wilkinson, Endymion. 1981 .Misunderstanding: Europe vs. Japan. Tokyo: ChuoKoron-sha. Yoshida, Reiji. 2007. “Aso Urges French Presidential Candidate to Read ‘Manga.’” The Japan Times (April 21). http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070421a9.html. Yui, Kiyomitsu. 2004. “Japanese Animation: A Post-Modern Entertainment in Global Con¬ text.” Lecture, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Italy. November 29. Yui, Kiyomitsu. 2006. “A Theoretical Framework for the Research on Manga and Anime: Text and Context.” Paper presented at the First International Manga Study Network Meeting, CERI (Centre d’Etudes et Recherches Internationales), Paris, May 12. Zaccagnino, Marcella, and Sebastiano Contrari. 2007. “Manga: II Giappone alia conquista del mondo” [Manga: Japan to conquer the world]. Limes, rivista italiana di geopolitica. Limesonline.com (October 31). http://limes.espresso.repubblica.it/2007/10/31/ manga-il-giappone-alla-conquista-del-mondo/?p=313.

Afterword: It Isn’t the Kansai Anymore, Either TIMOTHY PERPER AND MARTHA CORNOG

So are we still in the Kansai? We left Kansas a long time ago, when Dorothy’s cyclone picked her up, plus her house and dog, and dropped her into a world that L. Frank Baum could imagine but, when he wrote The Wizard, of Oz in 1900, could not exhibit except through a few charming illustrations by Wil¬ liam Wallace Denslow. Well, Buck Rogers did better than that in 1929, and did it in a medium that elicited critical disdain: the comics. (We’re not counting Gilbert Seldes’s 1922 praise for Krazy Kat). Enthusiasm for manga and anime has shifted the underlying tectonics of comics once again, as we have seen amply illustrated in the preceding essays. Glance over once again, if you will, the territory covered by these essays. Explicit sex drawn by women artists; male-male romance and eroticism; mind-bending cosplay; intense realism admixed with transcendent fantasy; nuclear war and despair; politics right and left; and—above all—a worldwide array of fanships and marketing, the pull and push described by Marco Pellitteri in chapter 12. So, no, we are no longer even in the Kansai. In fact, we left Japan a while ago. Manga and anime have become international. So we will conclude with a suggestion: the effect on art and aesthetics will ultimately be as great as it was when Japanese art first touched Europe in the 19th century. The effect has certainly been felt by comics in the United States, which have undergone a considerable rebirth since manga and anime reached North America (Brenner 2007, 19-20; Gravett 2005, 184). But, still, not many academic aestheticians pay any attention to the comics, with occasional exceptions such as David Carrier (2000), Aaron Meskin (2009), and Josef Steiff and his co-workers (2010). Otherwise, academic aestheticians seem to prefer their own inwardly turned debates—for example, the question of whether or not dual-content theories of the putative twofoldness of seeing are valid, and if not, why not. It isn’t simple to explain what a dual-content theory might be, and even harder

Afterword

238

to explain why it matters (but see Abell and Bantinaki 2010 for an attempt). In all likelihood, manga and anime will have no effect on theories that, like these, seem so hopelessly disconnected from the world. Unlike such academic hyperspecialization, manga and anime have returned the eyes of the world to more significant issues: to the nature of beauty; to honor, loyalty, and allegiance to duty; and to love, romance, and sexuality. It is as if the eyes of the world have grown tired of abstract art and of aesthetic metaphysics, and have shifted their attention back to stories and pictures, fas¬ cinatingly interwoven: “Then what happened?” we ask, as we watch Lord Sesshomaru start to attack the half-demon Naraku (from vol. 56 of Rumiko Takahashi’s InuYasha). Aesthetic philosophers may adore dual-content aes¬ thetic metaphysics, but who cares? The evil Shikon jewel has devoured the heroine Kagome! (Also from vol. 56 of InuYasha.f We defer to no one in our admiration for the subtle issues of dual-content aesthetic metaphysics, but we doubt if those issues hold a candle to the tecton¬ ics of manga and anime. Kagome is much more interesting and much, much more courageous. You see, she’s out to kill that Shikon thing, with a bow and arrow, no less. Beware, o ye metaphysical aestheticians! The power of the sheer story of InuYasha may capture your hearts as easily as it has captured millions of other readers everywhere its 56 volumes have been translated. So, yes, we have left the Kansai. By now, manga and anime have worldwide influence and appeal. It’s not hard, not really, to explain why—they contain some of the finest storytelling and most beautiful artwork in the modem world.

NOTE 1. We won’t tell you what happens. Start with volume 1 and read it: it’s worth the trip.

REFERENCES Abell, Catharine, and Ekaterina Bantinaki, eds. 2010. Philosophical Perspectives on De¬ piction. New York: Oxford University Press. Brenner, Robin E. 2007. Understanding Manga and Anime. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Carrier, David. 2000. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gravett, Paul. 2005. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: Collins Design. Meskin, Aaron. 2009. “Comics as Literature?” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (3): 219-39. Seldes, Gilbert. 1922. “Golla, Golla, the Comic Strips Art!” Vanity Fair 71. http://www. oldmagazinearticles.com/pdf/ART%20krazy%20kat.pdf. Steiff, Josef, and Adam Barkman. 2010. Manga and Philosophy. Peterborough, NH: Open Court. Steiff, Josef, and Tristan D. Tamplin. 2010. Anime and Philosophy. Peterborough, NH: Open Court.

Index “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” (“Tokyo no ubasuteyama,” Tatsumi), 21, 29-31

Arakawa, Hiromu, Fullmetal Alchemist, 136, 144

Abjection, 76—77, 84-85. See also Cosplay Action-to-action transition, 24 Adolf (Tezuka), 174

“Arashi no kyotan” (Storm of stray bullets, Horiuchi), 29 Archie Comics, 94 Asahi Graph, 43

Adventures of Rock (Tezuka), 173-74 African Americans: interviews with about manga/anime, 140-41, 141-42; in manga/ anime, 142 Aggression, 179-81 Akabon (rental books), 26 Akane, Kazuki, Vision of Escaflowne, 62 Akatsuka, Neal, 124-25 Alakazam the Great! (Tezuka), 143 Alcohol, Shirt and Kiss (Kuwabara), 96 ALC Publishing, Yuri Monogatari anthologies, 115 Amagi (production company), 12 Ambassador of Peace (Astro Boy), 183-87 American fandom, 136-47; African American women (interviews), 140-41, 141-42; Caucasian man (author), 143; Chinese college student (interview), 141; Japanese themes, 143-46; preferences of, 137-40. See also Cosplay (costume-play); Survey of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning manga readers in the U.S. Anime, in U.S./other countries, 135-47 Anime Explosion (Drazen), 139 Anno, Hideaki, Shinseiki Evangelion (Neon genesis Evangelion), 137 Apollo’s Song (Tezuka), 177-78, 187 Appleseed, 66n.2

Aspect-to-aspect transition, 24-35. See also Cinematism in manga (gekiga); Gekiga Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, Tezuka), 49-50, 143, 173, 183-87 Atomic bomb manga, 47, 145, 191-207 Austen, Jane, 143 Australian Aboriginal storytelling, 58-59 Authority, The (Ellis), 93 Awkward and Definition (Schrag), 92 Bara (male-male romance), 90, 98, 119 Barazoku (Ito), 95 Barefoot Gen (Nakazawa), 191-207; biopolitics and trauma, 193-98; cartoon and mechanical projection, 202-5; history and manga expression, 192-93; the plastic line, 198-202 Baum, L. Frank, Wizard of Oz, The, 237 Beagle, Peter, Last Unicorn, The, 143 BeBeautiful imprint, 100 BE-BOY (magazine), 99, 121 BE-BOYGOLD (magazine), 99, 121, 124 Bechdel, Alison, Dykes to Watch Out For, 92 Behind the Mask (Buruma), 144-45 BE LOVE (magazine), 3 Beowulf, 62 Big Comic Original, 162

Index

240 Bi-gendered individuals, 50

29-31; aspect-to-aspect transitions, 24-35;

Big Sight convention center (Tokyo), 121

cinematic narrative in manga, 25-26;

Binary gender system, 128

films on paper, 33-35; gekiga defined,

Biopolitics, 193-98

21; history of gekiga, 26-28; Lone Wolf and Cub (written by Koike and illustrated

Birdman Anthology (Tezuka), 174 Bishojo senshi Sailor Moon (Takeuchi), 137-38

Bishdnen (beautiful boy), 90, 98, 119, 121 Bishonen (bishies), 125-26

by Kojima), 31, 33; pillow shots, 21-24; “Waiting for the Rains” (Kojima), 32-33

Close the Last Door (Yamada), 97 Cohn, Neil, 25

Bishounen Auction, 125-26

Collectivity, 84

BL. See Boys’ love

Comics: mainstream superhero comics, 92-93;

Black and white, 136

U.S. GLBTQ representation in, 92-94

Blacker, Carmen, 58-59

Comiket (Comic Market), 78, 121, 123-24

Black Jack (Tezuka), 142, 181-83 Books, Alyson, Fun Home, 92

Coralville Convention Center (Iowa), 78

Bourdieu, Pierre, 199

Cosplay (costume-play), 72-88; abjection

Boys’ love (BL), 11, 90, 96-98, 119-33; beginnings of manga, 122-23; Foucault’s

Condry, Ian, 211-12

and, 76-77; camp, 81-82; Comiket, 78; crossplay and cross-dressing, 79; drag,

epistemological break and, 128; identity

80-82; emergence of, 71-77; gender play,

formation and, 127; indistinctness and,

75-82; Hall Contest, 78-79, 81; identity

125- 26; opposition to, 123-25; presence of

and, 85-86; Masquerade, 78; origin of

manga, 121-22; ungendering masculinity,

term, 72; otaku culture, 76, 80, 83-84;

126- 28 Buck Rogers, 237

performativity, 78-85; shojo profile, 73-74; transversality, 82-84; voguing, 78, 82-83

Buddha (Tezuka), 26, 183

Costume-play. See Cosplay

Buddhism, 94, 175, 185-87

Crary, Jonathan, 34

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon), 93

Critic as Artist, The (Wilde), 71

Bunko, Hinomaru, 27

Cross-dressing, 79-80. See also Cosplay

Burch, Noel, 22-23

Crossplay, 79-80. See also Cosplay

Burke, Kenneth, “Literature as Equipment for

Cruse, Howard, Gay Comix, 92

Living,” 39

Burst Angel, 83

Cultural politics, 209-36

Cut (Kawai), 96

Buruma, lan, Behind the Mask, 144-45 Butler, Judith, 80, 126

Dark Horse, 92, 93

Daughter of the Samuri, A (Sugimoto), 146 Cameron, James, Titanic, 139

David, Peter, 93

Camp, 81-82

Davis, Natalie Zemon, 154

Cappa, John, 35n

DC Comics, 92, 93

Captain Ken (Tezuka), 174 Captain Tsubasa, 123 Cardcaptor Sakura, 138

Dear+ (magazine), 99

Carey, Peter, 217-18 Cartoon Network, 123

Desire (Kazumi & Honami), 96 Detective Comics (DC Comics), 93

Cavalcade of Boys, Young Bottoms in Love

deviant ART, 121

(Fish), 92

Denson, Abby, Tough Love: High School

Confidential, 92

Digimon: Digital Monsters, 138

Cell phones, manga on, 4

Digital manga, 4, 100

Central Park Media, 100

Digital Manga Publications, 115-16

Chanbara (action featuring sword-fighting), 24

DiMassa, Diane, Hothead Paisan: Homicidal

Child pornography, 124

Lesbian Terrorist, 92

China, economic rise of, 151

Discrimination, 50

Choisir (magazine), 124

Disney, 202

Cinematism in manga (gekiga), 21-36;

Dojinshi (fan-produced manga), 90, 119, 120,

“Abandon the Old in Tokyo” (Tatsumi),

121-24

Index Dojinshika (creator of fan-produced manga), 90, 120

241 Femslash, 91, 100 Fetish practices, 77

Dollers, 79, 80

Feudal Japan, 55

Doseiai (homogender), 75

Film noir, 27, 29

Drag, 77, 80-82

Films on paper, 27, 33-35. See also

Dragon Ball, 142, 143, 226

Cinematism in manga (gekiga)

DragonballZ, 142 Drap (magazine), 99

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, 78, 86 Fire! (Mizuno), 122

Drazen, Patrick, 135-47; Anime Explosion,

Fish, Tim: Cavalcade of Boys, Young Bottoms

139

in Ixtve, 92; Nation X, 94

Dual-content theories, 237-38

Flynn, Thomas, 128

Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel), 92

Folkloric fantasy, 61-66 Foucault, Michel, 85, 128, 210-11

Eddison, E.R., 62

Fox Kids Network, 138

Eden of the East (Kamiyama), 55

Freud, Sigmund, 72, 75, 94

Edo period, 123

Frontier line (in fantasy), 55-56

Eiga-teki shuho (cinematism), 25

“Frontiers of Utopia, The” (Marin), 56-57

Eisenstein, Sergei, 199-201

Fujioka, Nobukatsu, Manga kyokasho ga

Ellis, Warren, Authority, The, 93

Emaki (picture scrolls), 33 eManga site, 115-16

Embracing Love (Nitta), 97 em, est, Red Blinds the Foolish, 98 Erotica, in ladies’ magazines, 12-13

oshienai rekishi (Manga history not taught by the textbooks), 152-58

Fujoshi kanojo (My Girlfriend’s a Geek), 121 Fullmetal Alchemist (Arakawa), 136, 144 Fun Home (Books), 92 Futabasha (publisher), 11

Eureka 7,142

Future Lovers (Kunieda), 97

European perspective, 209-36; cultural agency

Fuwa, Shinri, Gentlemen's Kiss, A, 97

and, 222-25; cultural odor, 215-22; Ian Condry, 211; Japanese nationalism and, 226-30; Kiyomitsu Yui, 211; Michel

Gakuen (Schoolhouse, kashibon anthology), 29

Foucault, 210-11; proximities and

Gall Force: Earth, Part /, 145

commonalities, 213-15; transnationalism

Gay and lesbian publications, 91-100

and nationalism, 212-13; Ulf Hannerz,

Gay Comix (Cruse), 92

211

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Roundtable (American Librarian

Facebook, 121 Facial features, 10, 219, 221

FAKE (Matoh), 96, 99 Family Mystery (magazine), 3, 7 Fandom. See American fandom; Cosplay

Association), 89 Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (GLBTQ), 89-118; representation in U.S. comics, 92-94; same-sex desire in Japanese manga, 94-99;

(costume-play); Dojinshi (fan-produced

survey of, 100-116. See also Survey of

manga); Survey of gay, lesbian, bisexual,

gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and

transgender, and questioning manga readers in the U.S.

questioning manga readers in the U.S.

Gei (gay), 98

Fan! (magazine), 11

Geki (theater), 28 Gekidan (magazine), 98

Fantastic-marvelous, 55

Gekiga: “Abandon the Old in Tokyo”

FanFiction.net, 121

Fantastic-uncanny, 55, 65 Fantasy, 53-67; Australian Aborigines and,

(Tatsumi), 29-31; aspect-to-aspect transition in, 28-35; defining, 22, 28;

58-59; fantastic frontiers and sub-genres,

deriving the term, 27; development of, 27;

55-58; folkloric fantasy vs. genre fantasy,

films on paper, 33-35; “Gekiga Manifesto”

61-66; utopia and, 56-57. See also

(Tatsumi), 27-28; history of, 26-28;

Guardian of the Spirit

Lone Wolf and Cub (written by Koike and

Feel (magazine), 12

illustrated by Kojima), 31, 33; “Waiting

Index

242 for the Rains” (Kojima), 32-33. See also

Gundam (Tezuki), 50

Cinematism in manga (gekiga)

Gundam (War story), 123 Gundam Wing, 123 GUSH (magazine), 99

Gekiga bakatachi!! (Matsumoto), 27 Gekiga hydryu (Tatsumi), 27, 28 “Gekiga Manifesto” (Tatsumi), 27-28 Gekiga Workshop, 27, 28 Gender, bi-gendered individuals, 50 Gender identity, 126-28

Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa), 145 Hagio, Moto, 123; Jiachigatsu no gimunajiumu

Gender play, 75-86

(November gymnasium), 122; Turna no

Gender themes, 144

shinzo (Thomas’s heart), 122

Genocide, 173-76, 178, 183-84, 191

Hakamada, Mera, Last Uniform, The, 99

Genosko, Gary, 84-85

Hall Contest, 78-79, 81

Genre fantasy, 61-66

Hannerz, Ulf, 211

Genso to kaiki (Roman and fantastique,

“Hate Crime” (Winick), 93

magazine), 61

Gentlemen’s Kiss, A (Fuwa), 97 Geopolitical identity, 39-40

Ghost Hound (Shirow), 66n.2 Ghost Hunt (Inada & Ono), 137, 143 Ghost in the Shell fdms, 55, 66n.2 Ginga Tetsudo 999 (Galaxy express 999, Matsumoto), 138, 139, 143 Girls’ comics: Chikae Ide in, 7-10; early, 7-10,

11-12 Girls’ facial features, 10 “GLBT Graphic Novels and Comics” (American Librarian Association), 89 GLBTQ. See Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning Global yaoi manga (Yaoi Press), 115 Glossary, 90-91, 119-20 “God of Manga” (Osamu Tezuka), 158

Gojira (Godzilla), 140, 185 Gorgeous Carat (Higuri), 96 Gotham Central (Rucka), 93 Grave of the Fireflies, 141 Gravitation (Murakami), 99 Great Teacher Onizuka, 142 Green Latern (Winick), 93

Hate crimes, 93 Hayano, Teppei, “Ujimushi yaro” (Low-down no good rat), 29 Hello Kitty, 76, 135,217, 226 Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert, Love and

Rockets, 92 Higa, Susumu, Kajimunugatai (Told by the wind: The Battle of Okinawa), 166-69 Higuri, You, Gorgeous Carat, 96

Hi izuru tokoro no tenshi (Heaven’s son of the land of the rising sun, Yamagishi), 123

Hikaru no Go, 143 Hirohito, Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, 37 Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 191-207 Historical manga, 151-71; denialist polemic:

Sensoron (On war, Kobayashi), 152; instructional fiction: Munakata kyoju denkiko (Professor Munakata’s reflection on the strange and fantastic, Hoshino), 164-166; intersection of manga and academic history, 159-62; left/progressive:

Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon (A manga book for understanding Japanese history, Owada), 160-62; left/

Grief and loss, in Tezuka’s works, 47-49

progressive: Nihon no rekishi (History

Gross National Cool, 135-36

of Japan, Ishinomori), 158-60; martial

Guardian of the Darkness ( Yami no moribito,

arts fictionalized stories for boys: Ron

Uehashi), 66

Guardian of the God (Kami no moribito, Uehashi), 66

Guardian of the Spirit (Seirei no moribito,

(Dragon, Murakami), 162-64; Okinawa historical fiction: Kajimunugatai (Told by the wind: The Battle of Okinawa, Higa), 166-69; revisionist (neo-nationalism):

novel Uehashi, anime series Kamiyama),

Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi

53-66; fantastic frontiers and, 55-58; as

(Manga history not taught by the textbooks,

folkloric fantasy, 58-66; introduction, 53-55. See also Fantasy Guattari, Felix, 82

Fujioka), 152-58 Hollywood cinema, 23

Guin Saga, The (Kurimoto), 61

Homer, Odyssey, 138 Homo, 98

Gulf War (1991), 151

Homophobia, 124-25

Index Hontoniatta shufu no taiken (The real experience of housewives, magazine), 3 Horiuchi, Kei, “Arashi no kyotan” (Storm of stray bullets), 29

243 Juichigatsu no gimunajiumu (November gymnasium, Hagio), 122 JUMP, 140 June Manga (publisher), 100

Hoshino, Lily, Mr. Flower Bride, 97

Junjo Romantica (Nakamura), 97

Hoshino, Yukinobu, Munakata kyoju denkiko

Ju-On (The grudge), 140

(Professor Munakata’s reflection on the strange and fantastic) 164-166 Hosoda, Mamoru, Toki-o kakeru shojo (film. The girl who leapt through time), 135 Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (DiMassa), 92 Humans, varieties of in Tezuka’s works, 44-46

Kabuki troupes, 94 Kadoka, Kazuma, Kizuna, 97 Kadokawa Publishing Company, 135 Kage (kashibon anthology), 28, 29 Kajimunugatai (Told by the wind: The Battle of Okinawa, Higa), 166-69 Kami (spiritual beings of Shinto worship),

I Can't Stop Loving You (Takakura), 97

58-59, 63

Ichigenme (Yoshinaga), 97

Kami shibai (paper theater), 26-27

Ide, Chikae, 3-19; early days, 6-8; family life

Kamiyama, Kenji, 54-55, 60; Eden of the East,

of, 10-11; girls’ comics, 7-12; girls’ manga

55; Guardian of the Spirit anime series,

eyes, 10; healthy lifestyle of, 17-18; ladies’

54; MiniPato, director, 55; Stand Alone

comics, 11-17; magazines appearing in, 3,

Complex, director, 55

8; Oryo, the woman Ryoma Sakamoto

Kamo, Nabako, Selfish Mr Mermaid, 97

loved, 4; photograph of, 4; pseudonyms

Kamuiden (Shirato), 28

for, 4; Rasetsu no ie (House of Demons),

Kano, Shiuko, Yakuza in Love, 96

15-17; subject content, 4, 5-6, 7; Viva!

Karma, 175-76, 184

Volleyball, 9-10; workday/studio/living

Kashibon (rental books), 26

quarters, 5; Yakko no Shindobaddo (Yakko’s

Katsudo eiga, 27

Sindbad), 7-8

Katsudoga, 27

Ide, Kayono, 11

Katsuga, 27

Identity, 85-86

Kawai, Toko, Cut, 96

Identity barriers, 127

Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the

Identity formation, 127 Imperial Japan, end of, 37-38 Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War (Hirohito), 37 Inada, Shiho & Ono, Fuyumi, Ghost Hunt, 137, 143

valley of the wind, Miyazaki), 138, 139, 143, 145 Kaze to ki no uta (Song of wind and trees, Takemiya), 122-23 Kazumi, Maki & Honami, Yukine, Desire, 96 Kim, June, 72 Days, 92

Inter-acting, 82

Kinsella, Sharon, 76

International Manga Museum (Kyoto), 35n

Kizuna (Kadoka), 97

Inu mo arukeba: Falling love (Takashima),

Kobayashi, Yoshinori, Sensoron (On war), 152

126-27 InuYasha (Takahashi), 238 Ishikawa, Fumiyasu, 27 Ishinomori, Shotaro, 26, 151; Nihon no rekishi (History of Japan), 158-60 Ito, Bungaku: Barazoku, 95, 98; “Yurizoku no heya,” 95 Ito, Yu, 35

Kodansha (publisher), 8 Koike, Kazuo and Kojima, Goseki, Lone Wolf And Cub (Kozure okami), 31, 33 Kojiki, 145 Kojima, Goseki; Lone Wolf and Cub illustrator, 31, 33; “Waiting for the Rains,” 32-33 “Koko no uchi” (House of moss, Obara), 29 Komikku (comic books), 3 Konjaku monogatari (Tales of ancient times),

Japan, demise of the Empire of Japan, 37-38

61

Japanese cultural themes, 143-46

Konno, Keiko, Star, 97

Japanese-ness, 139, 141, 143

Kon, Satoshi, Tokyo Godfathers, 142

Jem, 140

Korean conquest, 163

Jidaigeki (historical dramas), 24, 31, 33

Kosu-pure, 71

Index

244 Kotaku Webstie, 124

and, 8; same-sex desire in Japanese manga,

Kotani, Mari, 71

94-99; in U.S./other countries, 135—47.

Kotobuki, Tarako, Love Pistols, 97

See also Cinematism in manga (gekiga);

Kristeva, Julia, 76

Historical manga; Survey of gay, lesbian,

Kunieda, Saika, Future Lovers, 97

bisexual, transgender, and questioning

Kurimoto, Kaoru, Guin Saga, The, 61

manga readers in the U.S.

Kurofubuki (Black Blizzard, Tatsumi), 28

Manga anthology magazines, 99

Kurosawa, Akira, Shichinin no samurai, 27

“Manga film,” 200

Kuwabara, Yuko, Alcohol, Shirt and Kiss, 96

Mangaka (manga artists), 122

Kyoku (aspect), 25

Manga kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi (Manga history not taught by the textbooks,

Ladies’ comics, 11-17 Last Unicom, The (Beagle), 143

Fujioka), 152-58 Manga Nihon no rekishi ga wakaru hon (A

Last Uniform, The (Hakamada), 99

manga book for understanding Japanese

Laugh Under the Sun (Yamada), 96

history, Owada), 160-62

Left/progressive historical manga, 158-62

Man ydshu (poetry collection), 22

Leitmotif, 32, 33

Marin, Louis, “Frontiers of Utopia, The,”

Les amities particulieres (Special friendships, Peyrefitte), 123 Lesbian publications, 91-100. See also Yuri

56-57,61,65 Martial arts stories for boys, 162-64 Marvel Comics, 92, 93-94

Levi, Antonia, 123

Masquerade, 78, 81

Liefield, Rob, 93

Matoh, Sanami, FAKE, 96, 99

Liminality, 60

Matsumoto, Reiji, Ginga Tetsudo 999 (Galaxy

“Literature as Equipment for Living” (Burke), 39 Lithography, 34

express 999), 138, 139, 143 Matsumoto, Tumohiko: Gekiga bakatachi!!, 27; “Shoko” (Proof), 29

LiveJoumal, 121

MAY (magazine), 3

Living for Tomorrow (Zaou), 97

McClintock, Anne, 77

Lolicon titles, 112

McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics,

Lone Wolf And Cub (Kozure okami, written

24-25, 33

by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Goseki

Mecha design, 202-3

Kojima), 31, 33

Mechanical projection, 203-4

Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 62

Men’s love, 98

Loss, in Tezuka’s works, 47-49

Merchandise, manga and, 8

Lost World (Tezuka), 38-50. See also Tezuka,

Metropolis (Tezuka), 26, 38-50. See also

Osamu, Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld motifs Love and Rockets (Hernandez & Hernandez), 92

Tezuka, Osamu, Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld motifs Mezon Ikkoku (Takahashi), 143, 145 Militarism, 152, 153

Love Pistols (Kotobuki), 97

Military sexual slavery, 191

Love Round (Takanaga), 96

MiniPato (Kamiyama, director), 55

Lucas, George, Star Wars, 137

Miyazaki, Hayao, 54; Kaze no Tani no

Lunsing, Wim, 124

Naushika, 138, 139, 143, 145; Princess Mononoke, 62—65, 139-40; Spirited Away,

Machi (kashibon anthology), 28, 29 Magaretto (Margaret, magazine), 8

56-57 Mizuki, Shigeru, 25, 151

Mainstream superhero comics, 92-93

Mizuno, Hideko, 8; Fire!, 122

Maki, Miyako, 8

Moment-to-moment transition, 24

Makura kotoba (pillow word), 22, 23

Moopies, 178-79, 181

Manga: allure of yaoi and yuri manga, 98-99;

Moore, Terry, Strangers in Paradise, 92

definition of, 18; as employment, 4-5;

More, Thomas, Utopia, 56

girls’ facia] features in, 10; intersection with

Moribito (Guardian) series, 53. See also

academic history, 159—62; merchandise

Fantasy; Guardian of the Spirit

Index

245

Morimura, Seiichi, 7

Ogami Itto (Japanese name order), 31-32

Moso shojo otaku-kei, 121

Ojamajo DoReMi (Little witch-girl DoReMi),

Motomitsu, K., 27; “Taikutsu na yoru” (A dull evening), 29 Mr Flower Bride (Hoshino), 97 Munakata kyoju denkiko (Professor Munakata’s

145-46 Okinawa historical fiction: Kajimunugatai (Told by the wind: The Battle of Okinawa, Higa), 166-69

reflection on the strange and fantastic,

O’Malley, Terry, 138

Hoshino), 164-166

Online publications, 115-16

Murakami, Maki, Gravitation, 99 Murakami, Motoka; Musashi no ken

Onna kansatsui (A female medical examiner),

3

(Musashi’s sword), 162; Ron (Dragon),

Ontological issues, 40-41

162-64

Ootsuka, Eiji, 202-4

Musashi no ken (Musashi’s sword, Murakami), 162 Mushi Production, 11

Ore ga mita (I saw it, Nakazawa), 145 Oryo, the woman Ryoma Sakamoto loved (Ide),

4

Mushi-Shi (TV series), 62-65

Oshii, Mamoru, Patlabor, 55

Mutants, 47

Osmond, Andrew, 57

My Friend Frankenstein (Wada), 143

Otaku culture, 76, 80-81, 83-86

Mystery JOUR (magazine), 3, 7

Otherness, 139, 143

Mystery la comic (magazine), 3, 7

Other to the West, 23 Otome Road bookstores, 121

Nakahara, Jun’ichi, 73-74

Ouran High School Host Club, 143

Nakamura, Shungiku, Junjo Romantica, 97

Owada, Tetsuo, Manga Nihon no rekishi

Nakayoshi (Good friends, magazine), 8 Nakazawa, Keiji; Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), 145; Ore ga mita (I saw it), 145

ga wakaru hon (A manga book for understanding Japanese history), 160-62 Ozu, Yasujiro, 22, 23, 27

Napier, Susan, 139 National identity crisis, 151-54

Pacifism, 145

Nationalism, 212-13, 226-30

Papiyon (magazine), 11

Nation X (Marvel), 94

Parade of creatures motif (Tezuka), 43-44

Negima, 143

Paris (Watson), 92

Nelvana Studios (Canada), 138

Patlabor (Oshii), 55

Neo-nationalist publishing, 151-58. See also

Patten, Fred, 136

Historical manga

“Peace Constitution,” 151, 153

NetComics, 115

Penney, Matthew, 145, 151-71

New Types (Tezuka), 50

Performativity, 78-85

Nextworld (Tezuka), 38-50, 173. See also

Pessimism, of Osamu Tezuka, 173-90

Tezuka, Osamu, Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld Nihon no rekishi (History of Japan, Ishinomori), 158-60 Nitta, Youka, Embracing Love, 97 Nomori, Satoe, (pseudonym of Chikae Ide), 4

Pet Shop of Horrors, 142 Phoenix series (Tezuka), 175-87 Pillow shots (cinematic technique), 21-26, 30, 33. See also Aspect-to-aspect transition; Cinematism in manga (gekiga) Pillow word (makura kotoba), 22, 23

Non-sequitur transition, 24

Plastic line, 198-205

Nostalgia, 179-81, 184

Pokemon, 141, 226

Nye, Joseph, 231

Pornography, 12, 13, 17, 95, 100, 108, 124

Nygren, Scott, 23

Posing, 82 Potential (Schrag), 92

Obara, Sachiko, “Koko no uchi” (House of moss), 29 Object a, 84 Odagiri, Hotaru, Time Lag, 96 Odyssey (Homer), 138

Primordial scene motif (Tezuka), 41-43 “Prince of Manga” (Shotaro Ishinomori), 158 Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki), 62-65, 139-40

Index

246 Production I.G., 54-55, 66n.2 Prose magazines, 94-95 Push-pull dynamics, 224-28, 237

Schrag, Ariel: Awkward and Definition, 92; Potential, 92 Science fiction stories, 38. See also Tezuka, Osamu, Lost World, Metropolis, and

Radiation, 46-47 Raito noberu kenkyu josetsu (An introduction to research on light novels, Sato), 155

Nextworld motifs Seinen (young men), 162 Sekien, Toriyama, 60

Rape, 112

Selfish Mr. Mermaid (Kamo), 97

Rappori yaoi tokushu gou (Rapport Special

Seme (aggressive partner), 90, 96-97, 120,

yaoi issue), 123 Rasetsu no ie (House of Demons, Ide), 3,11, 14, 15-17

126-27 Sensoron (On war, Kobayashi), 152 Sexual features, in girls’ manga, 10

Red Blinds the Foolish (em), 98

Sexual identity, 120-21, 125

Reincarnation, 175, 177

Shaman King (Takei), 143, 144

Revisionist history, 151-58,212

Shamoon, Deborah, 74-75

Ribon (Ribbon, girls’ comic magazine), 3, 8,

Sheppard, Simon, 124

9, 11, 17 Ribon no kishi (Princess knight, Tezuka), 50, 123

Shichinin no samurai (Kurosawa), 27 Shinseiki Evangelion (Neon genesis Evangelion, Anno), 137

Ricoeur, Paul, 128

Shintoism, 94, 140

Right to left translation into left to right,

Shinto mythology, 55, 58-59, 66n.2, 145-46

136-37 Rightwing nationalistic manga, 145

Shirato, Sanpei, Kamuiden, 28 Shirow, Masamune, Ghost Hound, 66n.2

Ring, The (Verbinski), 140

Shogakukan (publisher), 8

Ringu (The rings), 140

Shdjo (adolescent girls), 121

Robotech, Battle of the Planets, 142

Shojo (girls) anime genre, 137

Robots, 49-50, 183-85

Shojo-ai (girls’ love), 95

Ron (Dragon, Murakami), 162-64

Shdjo bunka, 73

Ronin (samurai without a master), 31, 35

Shdjo furendo (Girls’ friends, magazine), 8

Rosenstone, Robert, 154

Shdjo kai (Girls’ World), 72

Rucka, Greg, Gotham Central, 93

Shdjo komikku (Girls’ comic), 8

Runaways (Marvel), 93

Shdjo or josei manga, 72, 99-100, 104, 122

Running Press, 100

Shdjo style, 72-77 Shdjo subject, 85-86

Sailor Moon, 81, 138, 141, 142

“Shoko” (Proof, Matsumoto), 29

Sailor Scouts, 81

Shonen-ai (boy-boy romance), 79-80, 90,

Sailor Uranus, 81 Saint Seiya, 123, 141

96-98 Shonen Jump (magazine), 99

Saito, Takao, 27

Shonen manga, 99-100, 119, 120

Saiyuki, 143

Shonen sunday, 162

Sakuragi, Yaya, Tea for Two, 96

Shota titles, 112

Sakurai, Shoichi, 27

Shudo, 94

Samuri culture, 94

Shueisha (publisher), 8, 11

Samuri Pizza Cats, 142

Shufu-to-Seikatsusha (publisher), 15, 16

Sato, Chihiro, Raito noberu kenkyu josetsu (An

Shukan josei (Weekly women), 3, 15, 16

introduction to research on light novels), 155

Shukan manga TIMES (Weekly manga times), 3

Sato, Masaaki, 27, 124

Shukan sebuntlin (Weekly seventeen), 11,12

Save Our Sailors Campaign (1996-2004), 138

Shurayukihime (Lady Snowblood), 24

Scanlations, 107, 136

Slam Dunk, 142

Scenario (magazine), 27

Slash cosplay, 80, 82

Scene-to-scene transition, 24

Slash or slash fiction, 91, 100, 120

Schodt, Frederik, 37-38

Sobchack, Vivian, 34

Index Social networking, 84 Social protest, 28 Society for Film and Media Studies Conference (March 2010), 35n Soft power, 135, 209-36

247 Takemiya, Keiko, 123; Kaze to ki no uta (Song of wind and trees), 122 Takeno, Kentaro, 25 Takeuchi, Naoko, Bishojo senshi Sailor Moon, 137-38

Sontag, Susan, 82

Takeuchi, Osamu, 164

Sound effects, 137

Takkyubin (overnight delivery companies), 6

Spirited Away (Miyazaki), 56-57, 64

Tale of Genji, 94

Stand Alone Complex (Kamiyama, director),

Tama (spirits of the dead), 58-59

55 Star (Konno), 97

Tama no koshi (hypergamy), 16 Tanaka, Yoshiki, 164

Star Trek, 71,91, 100

Tankobon, 136, 143

Star Wars (Lucas), 137

Tateno, Makoto, Yellow, 97

Stereotypes, 110, 142

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro: “Abandon the Old in

Stonewall Riots (1969), 75

Tokyo” (“Tokyo no ubasuteyama”), 21,

Storl manga (story comics), 18

29-31; Gekiga hyoryii, 27; “Gekiga

Strangers in Paradise (Moore), 92

Manifesto,” 27-28; Kurofubuki (Black

Strawberry Shortcake, 140 Student protest movement, 28

Blizzard, Tatsumi), 28 Tea for Two (Sakuragi), 96

Studio Fuga, 54

Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy, Tezuka), 49-50

Studio Ghibli (Japan), 143

Tezuka, Osamu, 151, 173-90\ Adolf, 174;

Studio Topcraft (Japan), 143

Adventures of Rock, 173-74; aggression

Subject-to-subject transition, 24

and nostalgia, 179-81; Alakazam the

Sugimoto, Etsu, Daughter of the Samuri, A,

Great!, 143; “Ambassador of Peace” (Astro

146

Boy), 183-87, Apollo’s Song, 177-78;

Supokon manga (sports spirit manga), 10

Birdman Anthology, 174; Black Jack, 142,

Survey of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,

181-83; Buddha, 26, 183; Captain Ken,

and questioning manga readers in the U.S.,

174; cinematic style in manga and, 25-26;

100-116; dislikes, 110-12; likes, 108-9;

karma and, 175-76; the Moopies, 178-79;

methodology, 101; overall assessment,

Mushi Production, 11; Phoenix series,

113-15; respondents, 101-3; yaoi and

175-87; rebellion and acceptance, 181-83;

yuri reading habits, 101-5; yaoi story

Ribon no kishi (Princess knight), 50, 123;

preferences, 104, 105-6; yuri story

timeline of major works, 174-75; war and

preferences, 105, 106-7

genocide themes, 176-78; Wonder Three,

Sutekina shufutachi (Wonderful housewives, magazine), 3 Symbolism: of aspectual transitions, 25, 32-33; of pillow shots, 23-24

174; Zero Man, 173 Tezuka, Osamu, Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld motifs, 26, 38-50; Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) and, 49-50, 143; grief and loss in, 38-39, 47-49;

Taiiho (counterpoint), 25

Japan’s geopolitical identity and, 39-40;

“Taikutsu na yoru” (A dull evening,

ontological issues, 40-41; parade of

Yamamori), 29

creatures, 43-44; primordial scene, 41-43;

Takahashi, Akihiko, 25, 34

radiation and artifice in the building of

Takahashi, Nov, 71

worlds, 46-47; varieties of the human in,

Takahashi, Rumiko: InuYasha, 238; Mezon Ikkoku, 143, 145

44-46 Time Lag (Odagiri), 96

Takakura, Row, / Can't Stop Loving You, 97

Titanic (Cameron), 139

Takanaga, Hinako: Love Round, 96; You Will

Todorov, Tzvetan, 55-57, 61,65

Fall in Love, 96 Takashima, Kazusa, Inu mo arukeba: Falling love, 126-27 Takehisa, Yumeji, 73 Takei, Hiroyuki, Shaman King, 143, 144

Toki-o kakeru shojo (The girl who leapt through time, Hosoda, film), 135 Toki-o kakeru shojo (The girl who leapt through time, Tsutsui, book), 135 Tokugawa Shogun Iemitsu, 4

Index

248 Tokyo Godfathers (Kon), 142

Wada, Shinji, My Friend Frankenstein, 143

TOKYOPOP (publisher), 92, 99-100, 104

“Waiting for the Rains” (Kojima), 32-33

Tolkien, J.R.R., 61-62, 66; Lord of the Rings, The, 62; “On Fairy Stories,” 54

Warriors of the Wind, 138 War themes, 145

Toma no shinzo (Thomas’s heart, Hagio), 122

Watanabe, Masako, 8

Totalitarianism, 152

Watanabe, Tomoko, 35n

Tough Love: High School Confidential

Watson, Andi, Paris, 92

(Denson), 92 Transition types, 24. See also Aspect-to-aspect transition; Cinematism in manga (gekiga)

Weekly shonen jump (magazine) Western art, 33-34 Whedon, Joss, Puffy the Vampire Slayer, 93

Translations, 136-37; in other countries, 138

Whitehead, Stephen, 127

Transnationalism, 212-13

Wilde, Oscar, Critic as Artist, The, 71

Transversal theory, 82-83

Williams, Alan, 125

Trauma, 193-98

Wimmin ’s Comix, 92

Travel narratives, 56. See also Utopia

Winick, Judd: Green Latent, 93; “Hate Crime,”

Tsuge, Yoshiharu, 25 Tsutsui, Yasutaka, Toki-o kakeru shojo (The girl who leapt through time, book), 135 Turner, Victor, 60

93 Wizard ofOz, The (Baum), 237 Women comic artists, number of, 8 Wonder Three (Tezuka), 174

12 Days (Kim), 92 X-Factor, 93 “Ubasuteyama” (Granny-abandoning-

xxxHolic, 143

mountain), 29 Uehashi, Nahoko: Guardian of the Darkness (Yami no moribito), 66; Guardian of the God (Kami no moribito), 66; Guardian

Yakko no Shindobaddo (Yakko’s Sind bad, Ide), 7-8 Yakoo tribes (Australian Aborigines), 58-59

of the Spirit (Seirei no moribito), 53-66;

Yakuza in Love (Kano), 96

Kemono no souja (Beast player), 66

Yamada, Yugi: Close the Last Door, 97; Laugh

“Ujimushi yard” (Low-down no good rat, Hayano), 29 Uke (submissive partner), 91,97, 120 Umezu, Kazuo, 25

Under the Sun, 96 Yamagishi, Ryoko, Hi izuru tokoro no tenshi (Heaven’s son of the land of the rising sun), 123

Underground comix scene (U.S.), 92

Yamamori, Susumu, 27, 29

Understanding Comics (McCloud), 24-25, 33

Yama-nashi, ochi-nashi, imi-nashi (yaoi, boy-

Unicoi, 140 Unnatural creatures, 46-47

boy romance), 123 Yaoi (boy-boy romance), 91,96-99, 119-33;

U.S. comics, GLBTQ representation in, 92-94

survey of reading habits in U.S., 101-5;

Utopia, 56-57, 65

survey of story preferences in U.S.,

Utopia (More), 56

105-16; top 20 creators/titles, 104 Yaoi911 .com, 115

VAL (magazine), 12

Yaoi-Con, 124-26

Vampire Hunter D, 141

Yaoi Press, global yaoi manga, 115

Verbinski, Gor, Ring, The, 140

Yellow (Tateno), 97

Verrsen Werks, 79

Yokai (monsters), 55, 58, 60

Vision of Escaflowne (Akane), 62

Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki, 26, 34

Visual kei pop bands, 121

Yomota, Inuhiko, 34

Visual narration, 34. See also Cinematism in manga (gekiga) Viva! Volleyball (Ide), 9-10, 12

Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 23 Yoshinaga, Fumi, Ichigenme, 97 Young Avengers (Marvel), 93

Voguing, 78, 82-83

You Will Fall in Love (Takanaga), 96

Voltron, 142

Yui, Kiyomitsu, 211, 218-19

Index Yuki, Michiru (pseudonym of Chikae Ide), 4,

12 Yuri (female-female romance), 91,95-96, 98-99, 120; survey of reading habits in

249 Yuri hime S (magazine), 99 Yuri Monogatari anthologies (ALC Publishing), 115 “Yurizoku no heya” (Lily tribe’s room, Ito), 95

U.S., 101-5; survey of story preferences in U.S., 106-16; top 20 creators/titles, 105 Yuri hime (magazine), 99

Zaou, Taishi, Living for Tomorrow, 97 Zero Man (Tezuka), 173

.

About the Editors and Contributors editors TIMOTHY PERPER, PhD (City University of New York, 1969), and MAR¬ THA CORNOG, MA, MLS (Brown University, 1968; Drexel University, 1971), were for six years review and commentary editors for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts. For the past decade, they have been publishing scholarly work about courtship and love in manga and anime, and have written reviews of manga and anime in a variety of peri¬ odicals. Their edited collection, Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics, was pub¬ lished in 2009 by ABC-CLIO/Libraries Unlimited. By training a biologist, Tim is an independent scholar and writer and for more than three decades has written extensively about human courtship and romance. Martha has been writing the graphic novel column for Library Journal since 2006. She is a three-decades reviewer for Library Journal and has published several award¬ winning books, one given an Eli M. Oboler Award for Intellectual Freedom by the American Library Association. Tim and Martha are married and share their house with a large collection of manga, anime, and graphic novels.

CONTRIBUTORS WILLIAM L. BENZON, PhD (SUNY, Buffalo), is an independent scholar and critic and has published extensively on literature and cultural evolution. He is the author of Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001, with translations into Chinese and Japanese), and is currently working on a book on naturalistic poetics. He has contributed a number of reviews to Mech¬ ademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts. He also plays the jazz trumpet.

252

About the Editors and Contributors

ROBIN E. BRENNER, MLS (University of Illinois), is teen librarian at the Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts. She has chaired the American Li¬ brary Association Great Graphic Novels for Teens Selection List Committee, was a judge for the 2007 Eisner awards, and blogs for Earlyword.com and for Good Comics for Kids at SchoolLibraryJoumal.com. She regularly gives lectures and workshops on graphic novels, manga, and anime at comics con¬ ventions, including New York and San Diego comic-cons, and at the Ameri¬ can Library Association’s conferences. Her guide, Understanding Manga and Anime (Libraries Unlimited, 2007), was nominated for a 2008 Eisner Award. PATRICK DRAZEN, MA (communications. Southern Illinois University Carbondale), is a prolific writer and commentator about manga and anime. His award-winning Anime Explosion: The What? Why? And Wow! Of Japa¬ nese Animation (2002) has been translated into Chinese. He is a member of the editorial board of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts and has contributed articles and reviews to Mechademia, to other scholarly journals, and to popular magazines. KINKO ITO, PhD (Ohio State University), is a professor of sociology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her undergraduate training was at Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. She has written a few books in Japanese and has just published A Sociology of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: Images of the Life, Loves, and Sexual Fantasies of Adult Japanese Women (2010). She has published extensively about the manga culture of Japan, men’s and women’s comics, political manga, and manga and socialization. She has also written biographical essays about women manga artists. Her work has appeared in International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Popular Culture, and Japan Studies Review. PAUL JACKSON, BA (2006; film studies. First Class Honors, Falmouth Col¬ lege of Arts/University College Falmouth), is a writer and student from En¬ gland. He has written for Senses of Cinema, the online magazine Midnight Eye, and has contributed to four consecutive volumes of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts. He is currently studying for his MA in Film Studies. THOMAS LaMARRE, PhD (University of Chicago), teaches in East Asian studies and art history and communications studies at McGill University. His books include Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (2000), Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Junichiro on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics (2005), and The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009). His research interests include Japanese literature, com¬ parative philosophy and cultural theory, media and mass culture, and cultural and intellectual history. He is also an associate editor of Mechademia: An An¬ nual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts. His Website is: web.me.com/ lamarre mediaken.

About the Editors and Contributors

253

FRENCHY LUNNING, PhD (University of Minnesota), is professor of lib¬ eral arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). She is editorin-chief of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts and co-founder of SGMS: Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits: Culture and Cre¬ ation in Manga and Anime, an annual weekend workshop at MCAD. She is also a producer for Moving Walkway Productions. She is currently working on books about costume play, shojo culture, and subcultural fetish costumes. MARK McHARRY is an independent scholar. With Antonia Levi and Dru Pagliassotti, he edited a collection of essays, Boys’Love Manga (2010). He has contributed to books, scholarly journals, and critical popular publications, in¬ cluding LGBT Identity and Online New Media; Queer Popular Culture: Liter¬ ature, Media, Film, and Television; Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature; Journal of Homosexuality; Z Magazine; and Gay Community News. He has presented at conferences in the United States and Europe, including the Modem Language Association, the Popular Culture Association, Ecritures du corps (Universite Paris 13 Nord), and Textual Echoes (Umea Universitet, Sweden). He is re¬ searching the life of Edo-period author/inventor Hiraga Gennai. ADA PALMER, PhD (Harvard University), is an assistant professor in the Texas A&M University history department where she teaches European in¬ tellectual history, specializing in the history of science, religion, atheism, and freethought, and the Renaissance reception of classical philosophy. Her manga research focuses on the “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka, especially his Star System and treatments of Buddhism. She also works on broader manga and anime treatments of religion, history, folklore, and gender, plus cosplay and otaku culture. She founded TezukaInEnglish.com and has helped many companies, including Tezuka Productions, with coordinating, releasing, and promoting Tezuka’s works to English-speaking audiences. MARCO PET ,1 TTTERT (PhD, sociology and social research. University of Trento, Italy), is currently an honorary research fellow at the London Metro¬ politan University and part of the research team “Manga Network,” coordi¬ nated by the CERI at Sciences-Po, Paris. His research interests are in cultural sociology, mass media, and cultural globalization, specializing in visual lan¬ guages. He is author of five books and scholarly papers published in several countries. His new book, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination (2010), published in English with grants from the Japan Foundation, is a broad sociological study of Japanese pop cul¬ ture in Europe and the West. MATTHEW PENNEY, PhD (University of Auckland), is an assistant profes¬ sor at the Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal. His re¬ search area is Japanese war memory and popular culture, and he has published a number of articles on manga and related media, including “Nationalism and Anti-Americanism in Japan—Manga Wars, Aso, Tamogami, and Progressive

254

About the Editors and Contributors

Alternatives” in The Asia-Pacific Journal (April, 2009) and “Right Angles— Examining Accounts of Japanese Neo-nationalism” (with Bryce Wakefield) in Pacific Affairs (Winter, 2008). DEBORAH SHAMOON, PhD (Japanese literature and film. University of California, Berkeley), is assistant professor in the department of East Asian languages and cultures, University of Notre Dame. Her scholarly papers about shojo manga have appeared in Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts and in the anthology Visual Culture Japan, edited by Mark MacWilliams. Her book on the history of shojo manga. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan, is forthcoming. SNOW WILDSMITH, MLIS (University of South Carolina), is a writer and book reviewer living in Mooresville, North Carolina. A former librarian, she has served on committees for the American Library Association/Young Adult Library Services Association, including the 2010 ALA/YALSA Michael L. Printz Award Committee, the 2009 and 2008 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults Committee, and the 2007 Great Graphic Novels for Teens Commit¬ tee. She reviews graphic novels for Booklist, ICv2.com, Good Comics for Kids (http://blog.schoollibraryjoumal.com/goodcomicsforkids), and Robin Brenner’s No Flying No Tights (http://noflyingnotights.com/blog), and also writes book-talks and creates recommended reading lists for Ebsco’s NoveList database. Her first books for teens—a nonfiction series on joining the military—are forthcoming.

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/VVangatopia Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World While Japanese manga and anime began to make inroads in Western culture about three decades ago, these art forms remained a subcultural phenomenon until the mid-1990s, when the increased distribution of translated manga and anime brought them into the mainstream. In 2007, U.S. sales of manga reached $210 million—evidence of a voracious and enthusiastic fan base. Today, anime and manga are extremely popular in the United States. Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modem World provides a sophisticated anthology of varied commentary from authors well versed in both formats. These essays provide insights unavailable on the Internet, giving the interested general reader in-depth information well beyond the basic, “Japanese Comics 101" level, and providing those who teach and write about manga and anime valuable knowledge to further expand their expertise. The topics addressed range widely across various artists and art styles, media methodology and theory, reception of manga and anime in different cultural markets, and fan behavior. Specific subjects covered include sexually explicit manga drawn and read by women; the roots of manga in Japanese and world film; the complexity of fan activities,

including “cosplay,” tan-drawn manga, and fans’ highly specific predilections; right-wing manga; and manga about Hiroshima and despair following World War II. The book closes with an examination of the international appeal of manga and anime. Timothy Perper, PhD, was a review and commentary editor for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts for six years, His published work includes Libraries Unlimited's Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics: Insights and Issues for Libraries, a collection he coedited with Martha Cornog. A biologist by training, Perper is an independent scholar and writer who has written extensively about human courtship and romance for more than 30 years. Martha Cornog, MA, MLS, was a review and commentary editor for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts for six years. She has written the graphic novel column for Library Journal since 2006 and has been a reviewer for Library Journal for three decades. Cornog won the American Library Association's Eli M. Oboler Award for Intellectual Freedom, and her published work includes Libraries Unlimited's Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics: Insights and Issues for Libraries.

Visit www.abc-clio.com for a complete list of our titles.

Cover design by Silverander Communications Cover photos: World map. (Nikmerkulov/Dreamstime.com); The kanji for “manga” from Seasonal Passersby, 1798. by Santo Kyoden and Kitao Shigemasa. (Kern, Adam L. 2006 Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Figure 3.3, page 141.) ISBN 978-1-59158-908-2

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