Tokyo Scum Brigade

History of Akihabara: Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:31:00 +0000

Continuing from the demonization of otaku in Part 2, we now examine how the media swung the pendulum back in the other direction, changing the image of obsessed anime fans from creepy shut-in to that of the awkward-though-lovable kitsch of Akiba-kei. Increased interest in the city from both the public and politicians would bring about irreversible damage to the otaku’s fragile ecosystem, with tragic results.

The Roots of Akiba-Kei

Moe businesses would soon evolve the sensitive cat ears and resilient maid uniform that allowed it to crawl out of the primordial soup and onto land. In 1998, the balmy atmosphere inside otaku megastore Gamers made it a hotbed of nerd activity which gave rise to Dejiko, a seemingly innocuous mascot that provided the DNA for ensuing moe blobs. Serving as a visual template, she made otaku values into a tangible medium that could directly penetrate the brain of the viewer. Dejiko gave moe a voice, albeit that of a mentally stunted 10 year old girl.

Dejiko in the flesh. (Source)

Maid uniforms, speech impediments, and ridiculous hair accessories become the grammar of Akihabara much in the same way that glam fashion, emaciated boys, and gravity defying hair served as the iconography for visual kei. If the average person didn’t understand the meaning of these fetishes, they could at least recognize that they represented a specific set of values or lifestyle. And even if you don’t agree with what a subculture stands for, with prolonged exposure it can get under your skin and cook you from the inside like a microwave.

The following year, Broccoli, Gamers’ parent company, went prime time at Tokyo Game Show with their Welcome to Pia Carrot maid cafe. Pia Carrot is a series of visual novels where you attempt to bed your coworkers at the eponymous cafe over summer break. Needless to say, the concept hit a sweet spot with fans, leading to Cafe do Cospa setting up shop in Akihabara soon after. More focused on cosplay than maids, it catered to an already established sect of otaku while failing to attract fresh acolytes, but did succeed in setting up the bedrock for the coming exodus.

Like having your own private Anna Miller's.

Subsequent ventures innovated in transforming the venue from a simple cafe to an entertainment experience. Mary’s opened in 2002 and brought with it the now cliche greeting, irasshaimasse goshujin-sama—“Welcome home, master.” In 2004, a business savvy former office lady launched @Home Cafe which employed tricks from cabaret clubs to ensnare casual customers as repeat clientele. The popular image of a maid cafe where you interact with the staff through games, pictures, and custom food decorations was imported directly from the back streets of Kabukicho. Akihabara was learning how to hustle.

A key part of hustling is opportunism. Entire buildings were filled overnight with maid cafes catering to various sub-sects. Pash Cafe Nagomi for little sisters, Cos-Cha with its legendary riots on school bathing suit day, St. Grace Court for nuns. It wasn’t long before the cafe market became flooded, with the runoff spilling over into more mundane aspects of life. Moesham was there to cut your hair as an indulgent alternative to QB House. Maids became a self perpetuating myth, the rule as opposed to the exception.

The next innovation came in 2005 with Maifoot and maid reflexology. Their relaxation menu serves up a full course of aroma therapy, hand, foot, and eye massages, but clients don’t visit expecting results. The girls have no qualifications save for a willingness to dress up in costumes and rub stinky otaku feet. Their ineffectual finger-work is actually part of the appeal.

Like a junior idol whose moves and vocals lack professional polish, everything about the maid scene is driven by a wabi-sabi love of awkward amateurishness. If there is any efficiency to be found in the industry, it would be its ability to tirelessly manufacture an innocently careless charm, a ripening cherry waiting to be popped.

The burgeoning moe market was too big to have been supported from entirely within Akihabara alone. As mentioned previously, iconography such as Dejiko helped soften the brains of non-otaku, which were then reformed by Densha Otoko in 2005.This Trojan Horse snuck otaku culture into homes across the country under the guise of an underdog love story. Its positive portrayal of the lonely otaku painted over the bleak image left by the Miyazaki murders some fifteen years ago.

Densha Otoko oozes sympathetic charm like a three-legged dog.

The show, which began as a book based on a dubious thread on 2-chan, was the tail end of a media mix hurricane that included a movie, a play, and several manga spin-offs. If Miyazaki demonized otaku, then Densha Otoko Hello Ktty-ized them. The otaku had become a mascot, and mascots exist to be exploited for big cash money.

Oiling the Hype Machine

Now that otaku were sterilized in the public eye, curious citizens felt safe enough to flock into Akihabara to see these strange flannel-clad, fanny-pack toting creatures in their natural habitat. Through a mixture of ironic curiosity and honest interest, outsiders found themselves frequenting the locales that until recently were banned as social taboos. And let’s be honest—who doesn’t like being waited on by young, cute girls? Otaku may not be a desirable social caste, but they have enough good ideas to warrant playing one for the weekend.

Ironically, this PR boost marked the beginning of the end for a “pure” Akihabara. The Japan National Tourism Organization has since prepackaged the city as a festival of cosplayers and street performers, punctuated by friendly maids and cheery storefronts—all elements that betray the introverted otaku personality and cramped back alley shops. This portrayal of modern day Akihabara is either a mirage, or an affront on your culture, depending on how much time you spend on 2-Chan.

The media’s interference with post-Eva Akihabara is not unlike Western explorers who brought culture to lost tribes—invasive, profit-motivated, and destructive to the indigenous culture. When camera crews first barged on the scene looking for a scoop in 2003, you could count the number of maid cafes on one hand. Regardless, the setup was a producer’s dream. Weird guys and the girls who (at least pretend to) love them! Grown men unashamed to waste away in a childish fantasy! The more off-kilter and exploitative, the better.

Maid cafes became regular features on weekday variety shows, attracting weekend gawkers as a result. New stores opened to meet demand. The cottage industry had become a tourist industry, with increasingly fringe themes designed to edge out the competition and, more importantly, attract camera crews. What began as a secret base to sort out your loot in private was turning into the posh place to go to be seen.

If you were looking for your 15 minutes of fame, Akihabara was the place. Aspiring TV talent jumped on the bandwagon with otaku-inspired bits where they would play a nerd for laffs.
Hozuna Yoshimi gained notoriety for staging demonstrations dressed as Gundam’s Char Aznable. TBS set up amateur comedian Ishihara Hiroyuki to give 2-Chan-esque responses to man on the street interviews. Likewise, the weekend pedestrian paradise began to attract attention hogs whose extreme performances turned Center Street into a no-man’s land.

The "real" Char Aznable has little love from fans of his namesake. (Source)

Otaku weren’t going to sit on the sidelines and watch their city be usurped by popular culture. On June 30th, 2007, over 500 people rallied for the Free Akihabara demonstration where protesters marched to anime songs and branded hard-line slogans reminiscent of the student riots from the 70’s. Send Yodobashi back to Shinjuku! Otaku revolt! Spirit of moe!

Photographs of the event through the lens of Danny Cho: (Link)

The demonstration was doomed from the start. A spectacle by its very nature, it could only draw further media attention and exploitation—exactly the opposite of what otaku wanted. If Neros fiddled while Rome burned, then the demonstration provided Akihabara with a full string orchestra.

The following March 30th saw a group of cosplayers open fire with air soft guns in the middle of the Sunday crowds while police watched on uselessly. The pedestrian paradise came under greater scrutiny on April 20th when self-proclaimed 22-year old idol Sawamoto Asuka was arrested for public indecency, but not before forming a feeding frenzy of literal flash photography.

Want to shake her hand at the next Comiket? You can start stalking at her official blog.

The Man Finally Steps In

All these problems came to a head in the June 8th 2008 Akihabara massacre, where 25 year old temp worker Kato Tomohiro drove a rental truck into the crowd before assaulting on-lookers on foot with a dagger, killing seven and injuring ten persons total. The assailant wasn’t an otaku, but a former honors student ground into the dirt by the hyper-competitive education system. He wasn’t driven to kill by violent anime and video games, but because of the humiliation he suffered at the hands of his parents and peers at his unstable job.

The perpetrator had no links to the culture there, so why Akihabara? If his mission was to “kill anybody, it didn’t matter who” as he later testified, then why not a someplace more densely populated, like the Shibuya scramble?

Morikawa postulates that he was drawn to Akihabara the same way the media and performers were. The city represented something bigger than itself. If you wanted to go out with a bang, the pedestrian pavilion was a star studded stage. Forget going postal in Nagatocho or other areas housing the politicians responsible for the pressure cooker education system and revolving door temp worker laws that fueled his suicide attempt two years earlier. No, Kato wanted to defile the holy land of those who had trolled him on online forums, consequences be damned.

Kato got his wish, which was shared by some otaku as well. The pedestrian paradise was closed for safety reasons, and Akiba fever cooled off with it. Eventually things had calmed down enough to warrant its reopening on January 23rd, 2010, and while the crowds are still there, the vitality has yet to return. Police crackdowns on street performers are partially to blame, as is the general mood of nostalgic malaise that hangs over the area. While netizens may post wistfully about the good old days, there are groups who would have otaku eradicated as an inconvenience to their livelihood.

In 2001, the Tokyo government enacted the Urban Development Guidelines for the Akihabara Area. The ordinance aimed to rebrand the city as the IT capital of Japan with the academic firepower and business strageum to engage developing markets in China and Korea, with the Akihabara Crossfield construction project as its base of command, and the Tsukuba Express as the convoy to transport scientists from Tsukuba’s multitudes of research facilities. The proposal set the site at none other than the old farmer’s market.

After the stations dumps them out the Electronic Town Exit, most tourists bypass the hyper-modern UDX office building in favor of Chuo Doori, unknowingly bypassing the Tokyo Anime Center. (Source)

Its trio of high-rise behemoths included the 40-story mansion style apartment complex Tokyo Times Tower (completed September 2004), as well as Akihabara UDX (completed January 2006) and the Akihabara Daibiru Building (completed in March 2007), structures that, according to the official home page, are “expected to be a new focal point for the Akihabara district, holding areas for Industry-Academia collaboration, information networking, and attractions for visitors.”

While this may make great PR, they left out one important bullet point. “By producing Akihabara as the IT capital of Japan, we hope to wash away its otaku image and raise property value.”

The three Crossfield buildings all have something in common. They began their lives as construction projects fed to the Kajima Corporation by Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, two entities bonded by a checkered past of political scandals and open collusion. These ties were strengthened by a common enemy, the fly in the ointment that was bottlenecking sales.

Despite its proximity to the station, reasonable rent, and ample railway access, Tokyo Times Tower flopped. Polls revealed that all the amenities weren’t worth having to deal with otaku neighbors. In true Bond villain fashion, Ishihara responded though initiatives that simultaneously support otaku while undermining them in his plot to minimize their presence to maximize profits.

The governor may be cantankerous, but he’s no fool. He understands the value of anime as a cultural export and balances his love/hate relationship for the subject matter with policies that are pro-international and anti-domestic. The same man who enacted the reviled Bill 156, or Tokyo Manga Ban, is also the chairman and sponsor of the Tokyo International Anime Fair. Recently, however, his back-stabbing seems to have come home to roost.

At the end of 2010, the Comic 10 Society of major manga publishers threatened to boycott the 2011 Tokyo Anime Fair due to Ishihara’s involvement with Bill 156, a move which would have stripped the event of all legitimacy. Just when it seemed like the industry had pinned the governor into a corner, the 3/11 earthquake struck weeks before the event, giving the organizers a timely excuse to abort while saving face.

Once the cesium settled, everyone had the same question on their lips: Would publishers still be up in arms when the 2012 event rolls around, or even be in a position to turn their backs on it after the economic damage they suffered during the quake?

No, and no. The Comic 10 Society recently announced without so much a shred of their prior indignation that they are on board for next year's TAF. What their compliance entails for freedom of expression in the medium is yet to be seen. The only one who seems to have a clear endgame is Ishihara, and things are proceeding exactly to plan.

As the definition of “otaku” is muddled by the casual consumers drawn to the city through the media and government’s efforts, the hardcore are forced further underground along the dame vector. Old symbols of the city, from the Radio Hall to LaOx the Computer Kan, have recently been renovated and stripped of their history. Perhaps Akihabara has outlived its usefulness as a spawning bed for nerd culture.

But all is not lost. Even as news crews destroyed an intangible part of the city in their invasion, they took back with them the seeds of otaku culture to spread on the winds of media mix. Stay tuned for the next and final installment where we will explore the ongoing exchange of values between Akihabara and mainstream Japan, as well as what this implies for the future of the city.

Comiket 81: The High Cost of Fandom

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Mobs of young people lined up on train station platforms, carting their color-coordinated luggage behind them: It's a common sight when the New Year's holiday rolls around in Tokyo. While everyone is dead set on getting out of the metropolis, their destinations couldn't be more different.

One group is heading back to their hometowns, bags packed with sweets and souvenirs for relatives. These are the more orthodox and responsible ones—In Japan, New Year's is the holiday for family togetherness, with the same social obligations as Christmas in the west. Spending time with the folks and eating mom's osechi cooking while ingesting mind-numbing TV specials is the greatest form of filial piety that a child can show.

So where does this leave the other group, bound not for the countryside but Tokyo Big Site, luggage stuffed with cosplay outfits as opposed to presents? Each day at Comiket means one less with the family, suggesting that whatever gained from the dojinshi and camaraderie balances the offset.

Assuming that the event runs from December 28th to the 31st, in theory you could hit all three days and still be back to the inaka in time for the opening act of Kohaku Uta Gassen, or at the very least be there with the folks when Matsumoto and the boys from Gaki no Tsukai get clubbed like baby seals.

Summer Comiket is not so forgiving. The event will always overlap with the O-Bon holiday, where, once again, you're expected to return home, this time to pay tribute at your clan's ancestral grave site. Skirting your obligations here would be like skipping your grandmother's funeral to attend the San Daigo Comic Con. Comiket always draws heat for the graphic content of the goods on sale, but a more fundamental conservative activist would be up in arms about how the timing of the events themselves rebuke traditional family values.

Interestingly, despite these factors (and the unbearable heat), Summer Comiket regularly attracts more visitors than Winter Comiket as you can see here.

While missing out on the occasional family function is probably a non-issue for progressive parents, the fact remains that over half of Tokyoites are originally from outside the megaregion.

To put this into perspective: America has Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's (as well as the Forth of July if you're willing to stretch the definition) earmarked for family gatherings. Conversely, Japan has local festivals throughout the year, but summer O-Bon and New Year's are the only holidays long enough for scattered relatives to realistically get together. It's one thing to forget a birthday or fall off the map for a while—To break tradition for the sake of your hobby is significantly more difficult to explain away.

Attending Comiket doesn't automatically make you a wayward son, but it adds another intangible cost to being an otaku and tests your dedication to the pursuit of leisure. We at TSB have no misgivings regarding our own position as outside observers and refrain from judging the hundreds of thousands who make the bi-annual pilgrimage. Rather, we hope to suggest the idea that there is more at stake here than merely braving the elements to get your hands on your favorite group's new dojinshi before they sell out.

But enough pontification: Check out the cosplay that kept us separated from our families this New Year's:

Gag

ZANGIEF WINS!

Just because Anno Hideaki died for your sins doesn't make it OK to masturbate to fourteen-year old damaged goods.

Crossplaying with a face mask is totally fair game in my book, but the fuzzy silk gloves cross the line.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter Gaiden?

ORIX Buffaloes mascot Buffalo Bell is here to prove that even professional sports are not beyond the lure of moeification.

This ingenuous Kuybey worked around the new "no sexy costume" rule. (Link NSFW.)

Daru was so in character that he rolled his shirt up over his gut before letting me snap him.

Chicken George was overjoyed to be recognized, much less be asked for a photo-op.

~~Moe~~ Loli Bancho.

Serious

We avoided Madoka cosplay this round to avoid redundancy, but we're willing to make an exception for Walpurgis Night.

Tiger Mask takes a break from his secret Santa activities to address an adoring public.

Dennis Rodman as Fire Emblem.

Stay golden, Crystal Boy.

Another victim falls to the horde of otaku paparazzi zombies.

Godzilla brought his pit crew of makeup guys with him.

Fate/Zero

Winter Comiket gave us a bumper crop of impressive Berserker costumes, and this takes the prize with a real set of metal armor!

Between Zangief, Wild Tiger, and Rider, fake facial hair was all the rage this season.

The Assassin guild strikes a fearsome pose, moments before being crushed into paste.

It's a shame that the the most boring characters in the show are it's main female protagonists, especially because it means that many more people cosplaying them.

These two never fail to crack me up. Caster's eyeballs are actually carved out of baby femurs, not ping-pong balls as one would expect.

Full album here!

And that's it! Reports of falling attendance numbers were greatly exaggerated as there was no shortage of perverts and gawkers this time around. Our limited coverage can be attributed to familial and work-related responsibilities. We'll do our best to straighten out our priorities before Summer Comiket rolls around.

History of Akihabara: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:31:00 +0000

The opening to our four part series on Akihabara revealed the city as a vibrant market driven by individual interests. Pre-war vendors tossed their fruit for vacuum tubes when radios hit, and the resulting home electronic market paved the way for consumer electronics. After the economy hiccuped, these in turn faltered to be supplemented by DIY computers and all its geeky friends. Part 2 seeks to answer the question: How did we go from microchips to moe?

  Morikawa Kaichiro is a researcher and lecturer at Japan’s top universities in the fields of design and architecture. He has published numerous works on otaku culture reflected through the lens of post modernism. Amongst these, his comprehensive look at the historic interplay between culture and personal space, Akihabara: The Birth of a Personapolis, was the inspiration for this series.   We'll start off with Morikawa’s theories on the defining characteristics of otaku to help us better understand the connection between consumers of electronics and anime before exploring how the media falsified a negative image of the subculture and the resulting impact this had on society and Akihabara.

What Makes Otaku Tick

Typical trappings for a 1980's otaku. (Source)

Morikawa explains the otaku mentality in terms of space. More specifically, the manner in which they attempt to control the space around them. As mentioned in Part 1, the first generation of true otaku were cultivated in their bedrooms. They filled their shelves with figures and manga, lined their walls with posters and gravure idols. The point wasn’t to merely fill space, but to populate it with carefully selected symbols that represent their personal taste.

Collecting was augmented with internalization—memorizing dialogue, raising pet theories, creating dojinshi fan-zines, and other activities that exerted influence over the shows they loved. Because the otaku self-image is defined by personal taste, restructuring elements of a show to match one’s preferences entails control over the very building blocks of one’s existence. In a sense, they were mining the moe database long before Azuma Hiroki made it a buzzword.

Simply put, preference defines the self. To master the object of your preferences is to master the self.

This innate desire to dominate and control the object of their desires is the missing link between anime and PC otaku. In the same way that dojinshi allow the artist authority over a character by dominating them with codified moe elements customized to their individual taste, a PC user (emphasis on personal) has complete control over the space within a machine, so long as they master the code.

Programming code itself is English-based, the language of “superior,” invasive Western culture. Rather than shut themselves off from or rebel against this outside force, otaku in the 80's instead embraced it by reappropriating items that fit their needs while jettisoning the rest, effectively neutralizing the attackers while turning their own weapons against them. Just as Japan has maintained indigenous Shinto beliefs while integrating modified versions of Buddhism and Christianity, otaku accepted foreign computer culture, subjugating the code to spit out images of anime girls.

The mysterious heroine of Zarth is on the run and only YOU can protect her. (Source)

The otaku’s terrifying ability to alter their environment and bend culture to their will was at first limited to their personal living space—their bedrooms. However, computer and dojinshi stores soon diffused throughout Akihabara like spores from a fungal bloom, thriving in poorly lit buildings and creeping into abandoned spaces where the warmth of home electronics still lingered. Over time this growth would spread to cover the entire city, a relentless invasive species that choked out the original inhabitants.

The city itself has become an extension of the otaku bedroom, Morikawa argues. Think back for a moment and imagine what it feels like to be in Akihabara:

With the walls and skyline filled, bishojo adverts spill over onto the floor to envelop visitors on all sides. (Source)

From the moment you step off the train, its obvious that something is off-kilter. Adverts featuring anime girls decorate the station like wall scrolls. Heroines from the latest light novel series smile up at you coqquetishly from ground murals. And no sooner do you exit through the Electric Town gate that you are accosted by off-key J-Pop from Sakura Gumi or some other third-string idol group. You look around in an attempt to orientate yourself, only to be assaulted by a dizzying panorama of rainbow-haired debutantes with interchangeable features, their over-sized eyes following your every movement like titan sentries.

This disorienting experience is not unlike stumbling into the lair of a hardcore otaku, shelves lined with moe figures and walls plastered with their favorite 2D pin-up girls or 3D idols attempting to be 2D.

Wicked City Dojinshi

Take note that the shift from electronics to moe occurred organically. Everything resulted from fans who were in turn consumers of their own product. But don’t mistake this as a grass roots movement—it wasn’t a movement at all, merely persons acting independently towards the same unspoken goal like a spontaneous public-space project, a fan-made city.

There was no Akihabara Instrumentality Project, no corporate backers looking to capitalize on moe economics. No, that would come later, from opportunistic mass media vultures and the scheming Tokyo governor Ishihara.

Passionate as fans may be, exerting influence over real world space requires real world resources. Otaku goods were slowly gaining ground over home electronics out of economic necessity, but anime and computers had a built-in market cap. Things would eventually hit a wall unless they could find a way to reach out to a wider audience.

Otaku were a truly underground subculture throughout the 80’s, largely unknown by the public and ignored when noticed. This ambivalence was shattered by a sensational string of murder-kidnappings in 1989, where Saitama resident Miyazaki Tsutomu was given the death penalty for murdering and molesting the corpses of four young girls aged between four and seven.

Tsutomu's living space. (Source)

The resulting media circus exposed Miyazaki as a tape collecting maniac, beaming into homes across the country images of piles of unwatched VHS cassettes stacked precariously to the ceiling of his dingy apartment. Miyazaki became the public’s first face-to-face encounter with what the news branded “otaku,” and the grim details of his crime and private life were damning.

His obsession with young girls, his catalogue of anime and violent films, his shut-in personality—all these elements came together in a perfect storm of negative publicity to cement the de facto image of otaku as pedophile bottom feeders who never ventured into the light of day, with anime guilty by association.

In 2005 it was revealed that many of the pornographic and lolita materials “discovered” in Miyazaki’s home were actually planted there by television crews to stir up ratings. Some theorize that it was all a setup by the media to attack the VHS market that was eating into their profits. More dubbed tapes and OVAs means that much lower ratings for the boob tube.

Regardless of the political motives for his branding, the results were the same. Sex, violence, and the resulting corruption of Japan’s youth became flashpoint issues.

Experience the thrill of 177 firsthand on Niko Niko Douga.

Pornographic computer games, or ero-ge, were already a public secret at the time. Pixalated underage rape/marriage simulator 177 stood before the House of Representatives for indecency back in 1996, and while legislation did ban certain titles that caught the public’s ire, DIY PCs were too far under the radar to wave the gavel at. This all changed in 1991 when a Kyoto middle school student was caught red-handed in his attempt to shoplift the ero-ge Saori: House of Beautiful Girls.

Box art for Saori. (Source)

The boy should have gotten off with a slap on the wrist and a father chaperoned trip to a soap land to set him straight. Instead, the incident made headlines for the game’s salacious content—not the uncensored naughty bits, for those were somewhat standard (and illegal, though ignored) at the time—but for the extreme scenario where a young girl is kidnapped and held against her will in a mansion where she experiences titillating visions of incest and scandalous teacher-student relations.

Parents screamed for blood, driving a squad of pitchfork and torch-wielding police to search the home of the president of Fairy Tale, the game’s publisher, where he was arrested under charges for the distribution of indecent materials. The Ethics Organization of Computer Software, or EOCS, a sort of ESRB for PC games, was established the following year to ensure that the monster stayed dead.

With the first shot fired, politicians wasted no time in declaring open season on ero-ge. The Prefectural Ordinance of Juvenile Protection was revised to include computer games under the umbrella of “Harmful Books” (有害図書), the same classification that attempted to blackball Nagai Go and Tezuka back in the 70’s for their “shocking” sexual imagery. This was another in a long line of scandals that funneled power of expression from creators to bureaucrats and PTAs. In this sense it could be argued that the Miyazaki incident helped set the stage for the recently passed Tokyo Manga Ban—where would Ishihara’s soapbox have been if the public hadn’t been preened to loathe otaku?

On the Coattails of the Apocalypse

With the world turned against them, their only hope for salvation was from the community itself. One of the kings of otaku, director Anno Hideaki, was about to provide us with a martyr to die for the sins of anime, changing the way the world consumed and viewed nerd culture in the process.

Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion first aired from October 1995 to March 1996. It was one of the last adult-oriented anime broadcast in a prime time slot, though following the precedent set by classic titles such as Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam, Eva wouldn’t hit its stride until midnight rebroadcasts. In fact, its abnormally high ratings were so impressive as to help create the current (and much maligned) model of late night anime.

Riding a wave of miasma released from the popped economic bubble and competing for ratings with ongoing coverage of the Aum Shinrikyo cult who perpetrated the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway earlier that year, Eva synchronized with the nihilistic zeitgeist and wormed it’s way into the hearts of a generation who, for the first time since the war, were uncertain about the future of their country.

A lack of communication in the so-called communication age, the coming Apocalypse made real, a potent cocktail of underage sex and wanton violence, totally sweet giant robots thrashing to classical music—whatever message was to be found in Eva, it resonated with the populace, and converted true believers into otaku neophytes.

The rebroadcast of Eva caused a literal Second Impact for otaku culture. Suddenly, media that had no business discussing anime was dedicating serious coverage to Evangelion. Gelget Shocking Center became the first of many radio programs to invite voice actors and producers into the studio to banter about the show.

Should the video go down, try searching for "

ゲルゲットショッキングセンター" on Youtube.

Shinji became the cover boy for Studio Voice, a pop culture mag dedicated to the cutting edge of cool. Even the high class cinema journal Kinema Junpo wasn’t above providing critical discourse on the End of Evangelion films.

When a dark horse property pulls in big bucks, people sit up and notice. Eva netted an estimated 30 billion yen, making it more than just a successful show. It was a cultural phenomenon whose resulting economic and cultural capital legitimized anime as a business and art form. For the time being, otaku had turned the tables, like the bullied kid in school who goes on to lord over his former tormentors as a successful CEO.

Despite its explosive success, Eva turned out to be a false prophet. While it made gobs of money and helped improve the public image of the otaku hobby, it wasn’t indicative of anime as a whole. Just because someone thought Rei was “totally hot for a cartoon chick” didn’t mean they were ready to leap head first into the moe quagmire that covered the medium.

And so the Eva bubble soon burst, taking the wind out of the anime industry’s sails along with any lingering hope of prime time broadcasts for original properties. This didn’t deter Akihabara. Its coffers were filled from the burgeoning character goods market, giving them a monopoly over the storefronts. The modern image of the city as an otaku holy land was taking form. “Moe” was gaining ground as a buzz word. All it needed now was a mascot, who we will introduce in the next installment.

History of Akihabara: Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:53:00 +0000

Akihabara has grown into something larger than itself. Obscured in the modern myth of "Cool Japan," we've lost sight of its raw essence.

We can only see the city for its nerd culture and new technology. In truth, for the past hundred years the area has been driven by bold entrepreneurs sensitive to evolving market trends, with otaku goods being only the most recent in a long line of services. In this series I hope to provide a fresh perspective to bring the hype more in line with the actuality, and a renewed appreciation for Akihabara along with it.

Over the next 4 posts, we will delve into the history of Akihabara to discover the circumstances that enabled it to evolve from black market to electronic town, and from otaku Mecca to media cash cow and beyond. A majority of the information comes from Akiba Confidential and Learning from Akihabara: The Birth of a Personapolis, as well as personal research and observations made while living in central Tokyo.

In Part 1 we’ll look into the first developments of the area before it was even known as “Akihabara,” as well as set up the key pieces for the mid-90’s anime boom to later knock down in Part 2.

Humble Beginnings

The first important thing Akihabara did was burn down.

In 1869, a blaze tore through the land between Kanda and Ueno, reducing the settlements to a smoldering heap while creating a welcome windfall for the newly established Meiji government. Edo, rechristened as Tokyo the previous year, remained a densely populated tinderbox just waiting for stray sparks, arson, or hungry flames from neighboring districts to spread uncontrollably throughout the city. The bean counters decreed it more prudent to use the now barren area as a fire-proof doorstep than gamble with their resources in rebuilding a region that could literally backfire on them.

It wouldn’t stay a wasteland for long. The following year, the government erected a small Shinto shrine named Chinka-Sha, or “The Extinguisher Shine,” on the site of old Edo Castle as a ward against potential flames. Apparently this decree never made its way to the town folk, for citizens mistakenly assumed that the structure enshrined Akiba, a renowned fire-quelling deity. This misconception became fact as the land around the site picked up the nickname Akiba no Hara, or “The Land of Akiba.”

The modern history of Akihabara begins with it as Tokyo’s doormat, but fortunes would soon reverse. The area’s location on the Kanda River connected it to Tokyo Bay, making it a prime trading zone for international cargo. In 1890 the area was connected to Ueno via the Tohoku Main Line, which then further extended to Tokyo in 1925, opening the freight-exclusive station to public transport for the first time to drum up tourism as part of rebuilding projects following 1923's Great Kanto Earthqauke.

Akihabara Station in 1925. (Source)

Somewhere along the way, a careless typo changed the neighborhood’s name from Akibahara (あきばはら) to Akihabara (あきはばら)—a totally reasonable misreading of the original misnomer considering that the readings of Kanji for proper nouns are as arbitrary as the local dialects that muddle them.

Wholesale market before the war. (Source)

Distributors, wholesalers, you name it—everyone canny enough to swindle extra scratch descended upon the area which, by 1935, was officially designated as a fruit and vegetable market. Meanwhile, lumber merchants and shippers began settling down in tenements along the river. The infrastructure brought in people and capital. The technology brought in the first otaku in the form of obsessive train enthusiasts.

Inside of freight shipping station circa 1945 (Source)

Electric railways were on the cutting edge, and with its myriad of major and minor stations, the Kanda ward served as the beating heart that all steel arteries ran from. Tetsudo Otoko, or Train Men as they would eventually come to be disregarded as, found solidarity when the Tokyo Transport Museum opened to great fanfare in 1936. With train mania at its zenith, none could have guessed that there were already proto-otaku among them, tilling the soil for the eventual seeds of moe as we’ll discuss in future installments.

In 1936, the Transportation Museum was relocated from around Tokyo Station to a building refurbished after the Great Kanto Earthquake inside the recently defunct Manseibashi Station along the Kanda River. The exhibitions were again moved in 2007 to Saitama as the Railway Museum.

The Influence of International Conflict and Domestic Price Wars

The market shifted from vegetables to vacuum tubes the following year after the Sino-Japanese War broke out, diverting the country’s appetite from wholesale produce to wireless communication for military purposes. In the early 40s, bulk electronic parts became the product du jour and started to muscle the fruit stands out of business. Akihabara, a city-wide swap meet of raw electronic ingredients, kept the high-tech war machine fed. This taste for radios would last far after Japan’s defeat at the hands of Allied forces.

Following World War II, the country was decimated, ashamed, and impoverished. But life goes on, especially for those crafty enough to game the system. To a starving populace, rice was a precious commodity worth more than life itself. Even so, it was outclassed by the radio. Engineering students from the nearby Tokyo Denki Univeristy would saddle up their rucksacks and scour the markets for the best deals. If the going rate for a vacuum tube was 4 pounds (1 sho, or 1.8 liters), then a completed radio could go for as much as forty pounds! Not too shabby for a starving college student amongst an already starving population.

Luxury taxes in addition to a prohibitively expensive price point helped DIY radio culture flourish. (Source)

The black market gravy train wouldn’t go on for long. MacArthur and his boys at the GHQ brought down their boot heels on unregulated trade by outlawing open air vendors in 1949. Ostensibly, it was part of a larger infrastructure reform project to widen roads and regulate commerce. Pragmatically, it stripped the citizens of their right to assembly in a power play to stomp out any embers of Communism before they developed into an anti-American blaze.

Stall owners wouldn’t take this lying down. The Vendors Union lobbied the government, and the municipality of Tokyo and Japanese National Railways responded by providing merchants alternative land on Akihabara station grounds. Merchants skirted the ordinance by pooling their resources into building brick and mortar stores. Sato Musen, Ishimaru Denki and other major players started here, standing strong as huge conglomerates in comparison to the fly by night vendor stalls.

The seven story Radio Kaikan, or Radio Hall, would become the most successful and iconic of these. Completed in 1962, tracing trends through the stores it housed over the years reveals the history of the city like layers of sediment. For now, it dealt exclusively in electronics, though it would later serve as a barometer for the encroaching popularity of otaku goods.

Radio Kaikan as it opened for business in 1962. (Source)

These electronic retailers were now organized and ready to capitalize on the post-war economic miracle. Through the 60, radios, along with white goods such as washing machines and fridges, formed the holy trinity of home electronics. The public ironically referred to these products as Mikusa no Kamudakara, or the Three Sacred Treasures, a title normally reserved for the sword, pearl, and mirror from Shinto myth that serve as symbols for the emperor. These goods revolutionized people’s lives, only to further evolve in the next trifecta of color TVs, freezers, and stereos.

"Ishimaru Denki IS Akihabara"

The hope placed in electronics perfectly encapsulated people’s bright outlook for the future. This worship of electronics and technology empowered the current generation, only to gut the next. The dazzling future promised by the Space Age literally ran out of fuel throughout the duel oil shocks of the 70’s, allowing the vapid consumer reality of present environmental and social problems to overtake it.

Children who grew up with the lunar landing and Ultraman’s kaiju-busting Science Patrol were finding out the hard way that the final frontier was closer than they thought—Most likely behind a stifling office desk.

Their dreams dashed, youth were struck with a sense of loss and betrayal akin to the war-torn nation receiving the news that their Emperor was not, as they had been taught their entire lives, descended from the Gods. Post-war Japan was able to compensate for this loss by focusing on rebuilding the country and reaping the material spoils of industry. Children of the 70’s didn’t have this luxury—or rather, they had too much luxury.

Pampered and proud, father’s salary allowed them their own private bedrooms and the disposable income to fill this space with toys, games, and gadgets. True, the economic miracle had transformed Japan from purgatory to paradise in three short decades. But this financial freedom also allowed for extreme self-indulgence, and with it, the first generation of true otaku.

Fold up this notion and stick it in your pocket for later. As far as every one’s concerned at the moment, electronics could do no wrong.

Akihabara’s electronic market had accumulated enough momentum that even the dual oil shocks were mere bumps along the road toward total dominance. The true threat would come from domestic, not international factors. Businesses had forgotten a key component in their strategy to monopolize the home and consumer markets: Parking lots.

Yamada Denki, Sakuraya, Bic Camera, and other chain stores began cropping up in the suburbs, offering lower prices and a more family-friendly shopping experience. Papa would be allowed to drive his shiny new car and play head of the household for a day. Bargain-hunting Mama was always happy to pinch pennies even as salaries soared. As these sensible purchasing patterns diverted sales from the city to the suburbs, it created a consumer vacuum in Akihabara waiting to be filled.

From Family-Friendly to Otaku Paradise

My-Com map published by Sharp in October 1982 as part of their advertising campaign for the MZ-2000 (Source)

DIY computers, or My-Com, used this moment of weakness to get their foot in the door. In 1976, one year before Apple launched, NEC Bit Inn opened on the 7th floor of the Radio Kaikan where it served as the front-runner for the coming PC revolution. Major players like Sato Musen began carrying computer parts in 1982, and the subsequent emergence of games featuring lo-fi anime art drew a new breed of nerd into the fold.

The demographic was steadily shifting from families with children to young males toting backpacks, not unlike the previous generation of radio scavengers. Slowly but surely PC stores trickled down from the top floor of the Radio Hall, pushing electronic shops out the door. LaOX the Computer Kan launched in 1990 as a seven-story behemoth housing computers, consumer electronics, and cell phones.

Plaque that was once displayed at the historic site of NEC Bit-INN (Source)

By 1994, PC sales overtook home electronics, and the hotly anticipated midnight launch of Windows 95—a cultural event as much as a consumer one—hammered the final nail in the coffin of old Akiba.

Stage 1 of Akihabara’s transformation into the otaku holy land was complete. Granted, while hardcore PC users had strong otaku tendencies, not all otaku were into PCs. If the city was to increase its nerd population, it would have to lower its barriers of entry through goods with a high market penetration that also maintained enough fringe elements to nurture a robust subculture.

As it turns out, this was the one natural resource that Japan was wealthy in. Video games and manga provided the perfect building blocks to bridge the gap between micro processors and moe.

In 1994, an employee of the computer mega store Sofmap opened Tora no Ana, a used dojinshi shop out of a shoebox apartment, unaware that he was setting up a chain of events that would permanently warp the cityscape.

Japan experienced an anime revival of sorts between 1995 and 1997 with hits such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sakura Taisen, and Sailor Moon, creating demand for ancillary products that pushed this tiny shop to branch out into character goods, thus solidifying otaku paraphernalia as a viable market. Seemingly overnight, Tora no Ana went from a hole in the wall dojinshi bodega to a nationwide chain that currently commands twin seven floor flagship stores in the heart of Akihabara.

A certain otaku magnetism was drawing nerd culture to the city. Dojinshi compatriot K-Books expanded from their niche in Ikebukuro to help fill a growing demand. Osaka-based figure maker Kaiyodo had branched out to Shibuya and Kichijoji with varying levels of success, but also found themselves pulled to the neon capital in the east. Both would go on to setup shop in the Radio Hall during the late 90’s, pushing the last vestiges of electronic shops out the door.

The rout of home electronics was a long time coming and surprised no-one, but it begged the question: Why otaku? To understand how Akihabara went from being merely socially awkward to flying totally off the social radar, we need to explore the controlling nature of otaku, as well as the profound effect Evangelion had on the population.

Creamy Mami x Galaxxxy

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:48:00 +0000

When I set out to visit the shop, I got halfway to the station before realizing I forgot the box of Oreos I planned to eat on the train and went back home to grab them. Unfortunately I didn't notice that I'd also forgotten my camera, so you'll have to make due with cell phone photos this time around.

Shibuya clothing brand Galaxxxy is running a Creamy Mami shop/gallery through the end of November. Lots of concept sketches, animation cells and vintage collectables are on display, along with original goods ranging from jackets to keyboards. Details here.

Umezu Carnival 2011

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

If it feels like there hasn’t been much Umezu Kazuo news lately, it’s because the mad manga-ka has cloistered himself in his recording lab over the past year making the final modifications to his latest musical experiment, Yami no Album 2, a sequel to the original 1975 oddity.

Sample the tracks here.

This year’s Umezu Carnival capped off the Kichijoji Animation Wonderland and served as a testing ground for his latest creation. Normally the annual talk show and concert are held separately, but Kazz’s band didn’t have time to prep for the new material, leaving him free to hog the spotlight and rock it karaoke-style.

The focus here isn't Kazz's grand entrance, but rather his shirt featuring Makoto-Chan using his sister Mika as a human toilet. That pretty much set the mood for the rest of the night.

Kazz serenades the crowd with Shinjuku Crows, his throwback to wandering pub minstrels from the early post-war days. Obviously he's playing the femme fatale.

It's not ironic if it's authentic! Rocker Kazz dusted the mothballs of his 70's digs to prove that he's had this prima donna thing down cold before most of the audience was even born.

For the talk show portion, Demerin played Ran-Maru, the geriatric rock star from Makoto-Chan who hides his potbelly, male pattern baldness, and erectile dysfunction with prosthetics. He's the most family-friendly character in the series, all things considered.

Kazz has always dreamed of becoming a pirate. Not because of the high-sailing adventure (he gets seasick), but because of the red-white stripe uniform! Though he admits that his Peter Pan complex might have something to do with it as well.

The lovely mustached crew of the Gwashi Dancers try out their sea legs as they perform Pirate Rock, the hot new cut from Yami no Album 2.

Momo-Chan, the little girl up front, memorized the choreography through repeat viewings of the DVDs and was rewarded with a spot as an honorary Gwash Dancer. Things are looking up for the future of the Umezu empire.

Though it's probably a good idea to leave the kids at home with perverts like this running loose. Voidmare (left) is in his award-winning white haired witch costume while Gokicchi (right) is looking to administer a savage tickling as Miira Sensei, or the Mummy Teacher.

Find out more about the Nakayoshi reprints here.

Between the release of his first new album in over three decades and a focus on reprints of rare, early Shojo material, 2011 has been a throwback year for Kazz. If everything goes according to plan, next year he'll have the band back together with new arrangements, new antics, and new ways to gross us out!

Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below: Shinkai Is Not Miyazaki

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:04:00 +0000

I’m here to talk about how Shinkai Makoto is derivative. Just not in the way that everyone thinks he is.

The obvious criticism levied against him is that he borrows too heavily from Miyazaki. Which in his latest film, Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below, is somewhat true, but also short sighted. For Miyazaki himself is not innocent of drawing a bit too deeply from the wellspring of our collected aesthetic consciousness.

Like any other ambitious animator, Miyazaki started as a lowly grunt and worked his way up from thankless in-betweens, to key frame animation, character designer, and beyond. Along the way his aesthetic sense would be massaged by the senior staff and house style of the studio.

Ganba's Adventure (1975)

Nishimura Takayo, character designer and 2D animation director for Children, trained under Kabashima Yoshio, a contemporary of Miyazaki during his time at Toei Animation. Through the 70’s both men would be influenced by World Masterpiece Theater series, which adapted classic tales as family-oriented anime. Kobashima countered what he felt were stale retreads with original stories such as Ganba’s Adventure; Miyazaki would work on the Japanese retelling of Anne of Greene Gables before leaving Nippon Animation.

Anne of Green Gables (1979)

  Shinkai has stated that the style of Children aims to emulate World Masterpiece Theater (fitting, given the 70’s setting), meaning that if the results look like Miyazaki, it’s because they’re drawing from the same inspirations. The same talent pool, as well. Many of the artists on the film, including background matte painters, have a history with Studio Ghibli. When you’re enlisting the same cooks with the same ingredients, it's inevitable that tastes blend. It all boils down to how your house tweaks the recipe.

Miyazaki built his career on parables of man vs. nature, progress vs. tradition, haves vs. have-nots. In contrast to this bevy of social messages, Shinkai comes off as introverted to the point of self-centeredness. Shinkai is primarily concerned with the distance between people, either the physical or mental, and the drama created in closing that gap. At the end of the day he doesn’t care if you’re a proletariat or bourgeoisie, so long as you’ve learned to love yourself.

Magical gemstones, luddite nostalgism, a young girl protagonist thrown out of her element in a fantastic world—All tropes Miyazaki has claimed a monopoly over out of repetition. Let’s be realistic—Even Miyazaki is aping his own style by this point.

Still, Shinkai declares his love for Laputa, perhaps a bit too loudly. But this is to overcompensate for his first nerd-crush that inspired him to join the industry: The PC-88 intro to Falcom’s action RPG, Y’s II.

Y's II Eternal (2001)

Here we see overlapping themes—Girl meets boy from another world, high fantasy and flying islands, mystical necklaces. Years later Shinkai would be given the opportunity to create the cinematics for the Windows remake where we see his lo-fi upbringing pushed to its artistic limits.

Speaking of borrowing from what you love, steampunk didn’t exactly originate in Japan, and girls were adventuring in Wonderland long before Chihiro. If you want to say that Shinkai’s films sprouted from Miyazaki’s, I’ll give you that. But you have to realize that Miyazaki’s world is firmly rooted in the works of another, the manga artist Morohoshi Daijiro.

Morohoshi Daijiro's Yokai Hunter (1974)

Without any titles available on English, Morohoshi’s presence may not be obvious to western audiences. Following his 1970 debut in COM he quickly became the poster boy for manga connoisseurs, lauded by critics but only mildly successful in commercial magazines. Miyazaki is on record stating that Morohoshi's detailed yet lumpy line work inspired the sketchy penciling in the Nausicca manga. Dig deeper into Morohoshi’s themes and it becomes apparent that the director cribbed more than just his style. 

Morohoshi Daijiro's Mud Men (1979)

Mud Men, based around creation myths of the eponymous tribe from Papa New Guinea and what happens when greedy outsiders anger the indigenous forest spirits, plays out like a gender-flopped version of Princess Mononoke.

Morohoshi is famous for weaving folklore into the every day, another technique unfairly attributed as a Miyazaki-ism. This influence is clearly present in Children as well. With Agartha, Shinkai attempts to tie world mythology together with a common thread that runs through underworld legends, while at the same time verifying them through the pseudo-science hollow earth theory.

At an earlier point down the same narrative vector, we have Morohoshi’s Dark Legend of Confucius, which connects the Brahmins of India, five element theory of China, and the historic first peoples of Japan through Ying-Yang dualism as a universal binary code that can be deciphered by analyzing the Analects of, you guessed it—Confucius.

Miyazaki builds new worlds of high fantasy from low technology. Shinkai and Morohoshi build upon existing worlds with high theological concepts.

I can't find my copy of Dark Legend to scan, so here's a clay model of the Jomon guardian spirit. (Source)

There’s also the striking visuals of Agartha. The terracotta structures populating the underground world are adorned with organic line work reminiscent of motifs from Japan’s pre-historic Jomon period. Once again, Morohoshi beat him to the punch by several decades with Ankoku Shinwa, or Dark Legend (no relation to Confucius this time), where Haniwa sculptures with Jomon patterns serve as the key to opening the forbidden lands underneath Kofun burial mounds. Not a glowing gemstone per se, though still a McGuffin cut from the same bedrock.   

Nightgaunt by Rob Thomas

Traveling through an underground gate with a mythical key to usurp forbidden knowledge from the center of creation, all the while being pursued by faceless demons once the sun sets—Suddenly, Children sounds less like Laputa and more like Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Just swap in Randolph Carter, the silver key, Nightgaunts, and the Plateau of Leng! You've already got the guardian cats and moon barges.

  You can draw an unbroken line of influence from Shinkai to Miyazaki to Morohoshi to Lovecraft, and continue it onward to Lord Dunsany’s dream fiction and beyond should you be ambitious enough.   My point—I don’t want to see Miyazaki become to anime what Tezuka is to manga: Omnipresent, over quoted, and unchallenged. Both artists are geniuses, but their image has grown to such titanic proportions that we overlook the giants whose shoulders they stand on.

If you want to criticize Children for being derivative, you should, because it is, but please keep in mind that the source material is also derivative in its own ways. The film has more pressing issues, such as the motiveless protagonist, visually striking though otherwise unmotivated journey across Agartha, and ending theme that is horrifically sincere in a way that only singer-songwriters can manage.

Despite some whiffs in the characterization and pacing, Children is still worth seeing, if just to track the growth of one of anime’s most interesting talents. Just leave your Ghibli bias at the door, as counter-intuitive it may feel at first.

Comiket 80: Through the Looking Glass

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:12:00 +0000

Imagine: You are the mighty hunter, gear slung heavy over your shoulder like a gizmotic eye of god. Clammy hands dripping with sweat, nose burning from the fetid press of a thousand unwashed maniacs baking in the sun.

 But none of that fazes in you. In this moment, all that exists is you and your quarry. Everything else is a distraction.

Squinting through the viewfinder, your doe-eyed target wanders into the crosshairs.
 You take a deep breath. Hold it, gingerly squeeze the trigger. 

And…  BOOM! Panty shot!

Tokyo Scum Brigade brings you the world’s very first otaku third person shooter. Living vicariously through sexy cosplay photos on other sites lacks verisimilitude! Now YOU can be the guy taking the pictures that everyone else oogles over. Our augmented version of an already virtual reality brings you within breathing distance of the true Comiket experience.

Take the plunge and discover what otaku have known for years—3D girls are best enjoyed through a 2D screen.

More photos on our Flickr

Atlus' Catherine: Long Inverview with Creator Hashino Katsura

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:59:00 +0000

Catherine, Atlus’ hotly anticipated quasi-spin-off to the Persona series, has finally hit Western shores with all its naughty bits intact despite the initial hullabaloo over potential censorship. Reviews have been glowing—Finally, a “mature” game that lives up to the moniker without defaulting to insular prepubescent fantasies of sex and violence.

Producer/Director Hashino Katsura steps up to the mic on behalf of all men making plans for their impending midlife crises and explains how dangerously stable girlfriends, a night out with the guys, and Nintendo Hard design sensibilities found themselves joined in holy matrimony to create one of the most unique next-gen gaming experiences ever.

(Interview originally featured in the April 2011 issue of Dengeki Gamers Monthly.)

Games for adults ‘gotta cut to the chase.

-Generally speaking, Japanese games use young protagonists while foreign games feature adults. Any insight?

Hashino (H):The Japanese view adulthood as some sort of bogus trick, all smoke and mirrors. I guess being an adult is pretty bogus when you get down to it (laughs). But on the flip side, this makes us idolize our youthful "glory days."

At the risk of going off topic, those of us in the Famicom Generation grew up with video games there to provide us dreams, and many of us still pick up the controller seeking entertainment. I think this group of 30-40 year olds came out on top in life. I mean, we’ve got all these awesome games waiting for us as we grow old (laughs). Of course, things will be more virtual by that time, and communication tools will be leaps and bounds beyond today’s standards. So while most current games feature youth protagonists, as the Famicom Generation starts aging into its 40’s and 50’s, I think we’ll see more games catering to them over the next 10 years.

-When creating entertainment for adults there’s always the issue of self-censorship of expression.

(H): We wanted to base Catherine around the disconnect between the title’s worldview/characters and erotic elements, with this disconnect as the selling point. This brings up all manner of self-censorship issues, but in the case of Catherine, the characters are old enough that this isn’t a problem, and we’re able to use eroticism as a means of expression. The visuals themselves aren’t erotic… Well OK, maybe they are a bit erotic (laughs).

It’s tough to make the call between erotic and pornographic,but you're not supposed to go into the game looking for that. If anything, I want the player to get pumped up thinking about the unique experience waiting for them in the puzzle segments. It’s better to let your imagination run wild about the other stuff. I mean, we're all adults here.

The common ground adults all share: Love and marriage.

-How did love become one of Catherine’s dominant themes?

(H): The initial scenario called for soldiers on the battlefront sharing a communal nightmare between skirmishes. But then I thought, soldiers? Really? How many people have combat experience?

On the flip side, everyone can relate to the framework provided by a high school setting. It offers these “that’s totally me!” moments. But with 30 to 40 year olds, everyone has different jobs and lifestyles. There’s no catch-all framework. The only common experience that rings true is dealing with relationships.

For adults, romance and marriage creep into all aspects of our life, some more than others. It’s a reoccurring theme of TV shows, but there’s never been a game that tackled it head-on. I knew I was on to something.

-Talking about games and romance calls to mind dating simulations and their ilk. How is Catherine different?

(H): Dating simulations are all about wooing the girl of your choice. Catherine cuts out the smooth talking. You and the heroine are dating from the start. If anything, this time she’s putting the squeeze on you. (laughs) We’re telling the story of what happens after you jump through the hoops and win the girl.

-I’m curious as to how women feel about the game.

(H): We factored that into the equation as well. When we had our female staff sit down with it, the littlest things Vincent did would set them off. “I hate the way he’s always talking down to me!” and so on. After their critique, I’d ask them if they could forgive Vincent for having an affair, to which they responded, “A one night stand means he’s out the door!” (laughs)

We massaged Vincent to be more amiable over the course of development, but apparently not amiable enough to get away with sleeping around.

-Did the female staff help come up with the selectable e-mail responses you send to your girlfriend and mistress?

(H): To some degree, yes. But at their heart, the e-mails are structured like a guy’s mind. (laughs) Even so, our female staff had a blast playing these segments. Telling you girlfriend “I’m at work” when you’re really drinking at the bar with your mistress opened up a portal to another world. It gave them a rush.

-Naturally males and females have different reactions to the game, but what about the married man and the single guy? I can imagine much of it hitting home, and perhaps even below the belt for the former. How would the latter take it?

(H): While every one’s take on the game is different, there’s always a certain element that draws them in. No one’s immune to love sickness, so even though the content may be questionable (laughs), the barrier to entry is low.

-Judging from reviews and feedback online, a segment of gamers feel repelled by titles with romantic elements. They want their games to be straight fantasy, almost as if they’re afraid that otherwise it’ll come back and bite them in the real world.

(H): That’s precisely why the protagonist doesn’t follow the Persona model—He’s Vincent. Not you. Making the player a spectator helps lessen the blow. And although you mentioned that some fans don’t want their games to be serious business, I don’t think that’s the case. Catherine's story isn’t totally grounded in reality. It’s more of a dreamlike vignette that ties up neatly at the end. Even without the romantic element, the game still stands on its own merits.

-Your decisions over the course of the game dictate your ending. I can see how the player’s bias towards love and the opposite sex could shape their destiny.

(H): That’s one of the interesting things we tried to do with Catherine. Be you married or single, people flock towards romance aptitude tests. (laughs) You hear people joke, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” A better question would be, “What’s your ending?” At the very least it’s great bar talk.

Jerks get all the chicks

-Let’s talk about the characters. Vincent isn’t your standard hero by any stretch of the imagination. Why make a dopey dude the protagonist?

(H): We were aiming for a “sexy loser” kind of vibe. The sort of guy whose wishy-washy and can’t commit, but eventually does deal with his problems, albeit in his own roundabout away. It’s easier for the players to project themselves.

One thing I was adamant about: He needed to be a snappy dresser. If he looked like a shlub I figured no one would buy the game. (laughs)

-That sounds just like Vincent Gallo’s character from Buffalo ’66.

(H): Gallo was the model for our Vincent. He’s the perfect example of a guy whose actions back up his cool posturing.

-Who was the girlfriend Katherine based on?

(H): Stop me if you've heard this before: A guy's been dating his girlfriend for so long that he can’t remember how or why they started, but she’s beautiful, and everyone’s jealous of him for snatching her up. She’s a straight shooter with a respectable job. Other people say “Dude, she’s hot, what’s stopping you from marrying her?” But once they hear about what goes on behind closed doors, they clap you on the back and sigh “Man, that’s rough.” Katherine is a reflection of this.

-How about your mistress Catherine?

(H): There’s no tiptoeing around it—Young girls are attractive. Not only is Catherine sexy, she knows exactly what to say to us “young old men” in their 30’s-40’s, making her an ideal catch. She’s a day dream come true. Imagine what it would be like for this sweet young thing to make a pass at you. Just to give you a peek into my creative process (laughs).

-Vincent’s friends are quirky and unique. Did you pattern them after adult male archetypes?

(H): There was a resurgence of weddings right when we started work on Catherine. Prior to that, the dominant philosophy was “Men don’t want to marry.” Then all of a sudden it shifted to “Everyone get married!” This clashed with the theme of the game so I hoped it would all quickly blow over. (laughs)

Reading books and magazines during this period, I found examples of men who either couldn’t take the plunge or be bothered to marry. These guys form Vincent’s entourage. The four of them spend their time shooting shit at the bar. I couldn’t help but think to myself during production, “If these were the protagonists from Persona 4 they’d have something more upbeat to say.” (laughs)

-You mentioned that Vincent and his crew get together at the bar Stray Sheep. Where did the idea to base the game around a watering hole come from?

(H): Going back to the romance angle: What place do all adults have in common? More ambitious people might be active after work, or go experience nature on the weekend, but most end up simply going out for drinks. I decided on your run-of-the-mill corner bar, the kind of place you drop by because going back home is such a drag.

-Now that you mention it, although the setting is outside of Japan, it feels somehow familiar.

(H): Whatever impetus there was to make the cast non-Japanese was so trifling that even I can’t remember why. I must have had Vincent Galo on the brain. That reminds me—When I first decided to make the protagonist a cool adult, I faltered between either Vincent Galo or Paul Newman. But Paul Newman’s pretty far up their in years, so I gave that part to Boss, the barkeep.

His friends are named after Hollywood heart throbs—Jonathan is Johnny Depp, Orlando is Orlando Bloom, and Tobias is Toby Maguire. (laughs)

The “Nintendo Hard” of next-gen gaming

-When Vincent falls into a nightmare, the game transforms into an action/puzzler. How did you hit upon this unique mix?

(H): The Persona Team messes around with their own pet projects once the latest game is in the can. A climbing box puzzler was one of them. Originally created five years ago, it was shelved because machine specs at the time couldn’t support it in true 3D and it was too simplistic without a story to back it up.

When production on Catherine began, I got the idea to create a world based upon the logic of this mini-game. Struggling hand over fist in your climb upwards—It gelled with the story.

-Why did you include adventure elements, rather than leave it a simple action/puzzler?

(H): I thought that by capitalizing on our storytelling skills in a genre outside of RPGs we could broaden our range as game makers, which is part of the reason we took a crack at an action title.

-Catherine is different than anything you’ve done before. Did you have trouble balancing the difficulty?

(H): People that get it, get it, and people that don’t never well—We don't run into this situation when crafting RPGs, which made things crazy hard.

During the first incarnation, block placement was random, meaning no prescribed solution. The player would have to stumble their way through with what they had and gradually make their way upward without fully realizing how they did it. And while this trial-and-error style game play was satisfying in its own right, we found out that it just didn’t click with some people, hence the decision to create stages with defined solutions.

By the way, the Japanese trial version uses randomly placed blocks, so it’s closer to the true spirit of the game. It was so wicked that the only way to see the ending is to look it up on Youtube. (laughs)

Let me put it this way—We had 20 debuggers testing the final stage, and only one of them cleared it. And only two of our highly trained developers were able to clear it, myself not included!

-At first it seems impossible, but each session brings you closer to that breakthrough. The sense of satisfaction from getting better the more you play reminds me of games from the Famicom era. I think that’s another turn-on for adult gamers.

(H): During the first play, you’ll get flummoxed wondering why you can’t figure it out. Then as you progress, the in-game hints show you new ways to approach the puzzles, only to let you hit another plateau later on. And another after that. And another after that… That trial-and-error process is a lot of fun. It’s like gnawing on a bone to get to the marrow.

The puzzles aren’t all about reflexes and skill. You need strategy, serendipitous luck, and instincts. There’s no single solution to a stage, and finding your own way is half the fun!

With thanks to Dengeki Games Monthly for running the original Japanese interview.

Wonder Festival 2011 (Summer)

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:24:00 +0000

Wonder Festival is Japan's largest and semi-annual garage kit market sponsored by Osaka-based figure giant Kaiyodo (the geniuses behind Revoltech, to say the least).

Naturally we don't go there for the limited-edition toys or salacious sculpts. No, the ever-morphing market and unpredictable nature of the crowd alone is well worth the price of admission.

This year’s pamphlet followed the 3/11 zeitgeist and featured its mascots sewing sequins and hot-gluing ceremonial rocks onto a catfish. You see, folklore holds catfish as the harbingers of quakes whose appetite for destruction can only be pacified with the stone of their patron god, Kaname, because... well, it beats me, but the folks at Pink Tentacle are elbow-deep in this stuff if you’ve got a hankerin’ for knowledge.

The rhinestones were presumably added to get more gyaru into noodling this season.

General Observations

-It goes without saying that the Madoka crew made the biggest showing of the day, with the scale tipped inordinately in favor of Mami over Miki. It also provided a loophole for a bumper crop of guys aching to dress up like girls without being transvestites. The crossplay scene is always split between guys letting it all shamelessly hang out and the more conservative full-bodysuit zentai, though they both seem to have been driven out of the woodwork in droves this year. Perhaps the recent otoko no ko trend is blossoming into a full blown boom?

-On the indy side of things, Vocaloid and Toho (or at, least things I can identify as Toho) were pushed out of the pit to make room for the girls of Black Rock Shooter, not surprising considering that the eponymous character is essentially a Player 2 palette swap of Hatsune Miku, complete with an exposed midriff, jet black hair, and firearms instead of leeks.

-The heat and recent double catastrophe didn’t do much to dispel attendees, though there was an obvious disparity in independent booths with a massive gap in the middle of the indy hall.

Enough talk, have at the photos!

Madoka Cosplay

Hey kid, you wanna I give you my grief seed?

QB is the new Pedo Bear it would seem.

Best Homura of the day, hands down.

It's totally not cross dressing if it's cosplay. Too bad the sweat was making their makeup run.

Tiger & Bunny Cosplay

Tiger adopts Ika Musume, who looks to be someone's actual kid. It's times like this where we ask ourselves as a nation, "Where were the parents!?"

Crossplayers like this will make you into a fujoshi whether you like it or not.

Both women and men had to paint on Tiger's facial hair.

Blue Rose goes semi-Ganguro.

Lethally Awesome Cosplay

Acguy with functioning grabby hands and scanball cyclops eye. Notice the little dude riding in the chest!

Tomino and Anno take their shitty garage band from their mom's basement to the streets.

PINCHER HOLD! Pretty tame finishing move as far as perverts go.

Third string Chojin hamming it up.

This respectable lady is like a Masamune Shirow character come to life but I'm drawing a blank. Any ideas?

Captain Harlock doing his own damn thang.

How the mighty have fallen! Long-term and clinically obsessive readers will recognize this gent as the champion of the Famicon underground series from 2010's Famimode.

Creamy Mami is the one magical girl who never sells out, snitches, or goes out of style. Pre-transformation even!

Cosplayers Just Hanging Out

"How many cosplayers does it take to fasten a Kamen Rider helmet...?"

For the first time in his life, Wild Tiger is asked for his autograph.

Pictures of Guys Taking Pictures

And this was the size of the crowd before she started masturbating on the concrete.

Broken ankles are a small price to pay for the money shot.

Wearing a schoolgirl uniform to a convention is like cutting your wrists in shark-infested waters.

This print coming soon to a museum of modern art near you.

Guy taking a picture of us taking a picture of him taking a picture of us taking a picture of him taking a picture of us taking a picture of him taking a picture of us taking a picture of him..

Toys

Totally nutso Rat Finks.

Japanese Gaga fans work fast. This meme only hit the interwebs earlier this month when she visited the talk show host Testuko.

Obama in his natural element, surrounded by whores and the pigs who buy them.

Which is stupider: Black Rock curry or the fact it sold out?

Moshzilla.

Z-movie magazine Trash-Up!! recently staged a Frankenstein Monster- Sanda VS Gaira (AKA War of the Gargantuans) revival at their Bakuon Movie Fest. Here's hoping that Frankenstein VS Baragon is next.

Zombie head sculpts are the only thing keeping a moe-crazed nation sane.

"Ghost of Godzilla" could be retro-fitted to an anti-anti nuclear parable, as in THE SKIN WILL MELT FROM YOUR BONES WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING THIS SUMMER you goddamn hippies.

Bush goes Over the Top and takes us home.

That's all of the productivity-sapping gruel we have to serve up until the Comiket season, which is coming up on us sooner than I like to think about.

Full Wonder Festival 2011 album here

Our far more ambitions coverage of Wonder Festival 2010 (Summer) can be found here:
Figures
Cosplay

Girls of Tokusatsu Week

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:14:00 +0000

For those of you asleep at the wheel, the TSB Tumblr has been blowing up with sparklers, spandex, and space-age chicks with our Girls of Tokusatsu week. This theme has run its course, but don't fret—There's plenty more retro gals from the future (and monsters) waiting to be exploited!

Head over to the Tumblr to see what you've been missing, and remember: It's not cheating if she's an alien.

Scummy Manga Reviews #6: Naruman

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:30:00 +0000

Title: Naruman: What if a High School Girl Decided to Become a Manga-Ka Amidst the Publishing Slump? (なる☆まん：もし出版不況の中女子高生はマンガ家をめざしたら)
Published by:Tatsumi Mook, May 2011
Art and story by: Yamano Sharin (山野車輪)
Genre: Academic Essay Manga

What it's about:

Naruman has lifesaving advice for all aspiring professional manga-ka:

Don’t.

Just.

Don’t.

The publishing industry is caught in a negative spiral and manga is no exception. Sales of serials have fallen to nearly half of the mid-90’s bubble with no sign of recovery. Wages are low and competition fierce. Market shares are being devoured by an ever-broadening field of alternate entertainment options. Modern manga has one foot in the grave.

But why? What insidious force dried up the one time wellspring of the country’s mojo, the often imitated but never replicated hype beast that made Japan Cool an international buzz-word?

In true manga fashion, we have a gaggle of schoolgirls to hold our hand as we trek through the dark economic reality and hack through otherwise impassable white papers. The protagonist is a returnee who, after growing up with a distorted perspective of manga through the cracked prism of America, is shocked to find that the streets of her motherland do not overflow with narutards and cosplayers.

This doesn’t dissuade her from enlisting her closet manga otaku classmates in a bid to live the dream and become a real professional manga-ka! Yet her plucky optimism soon gives way to detached disbelief as the true nature of the industry unfolds itself before her. There is no Santa Claus. God is dead. Greedo shot first.

And from this destructive revelation, the hope for a more mature tomorrow.

Why it's awesome:

Each topic covered in the manga is intriguing enough to expand into it’s own full-blown treatise. What factors led to the advent of the media mix? Why did anime in the 80’s polarize into private market OVAs and public market children’s shows, and how did this effect manga? How does digital publishing factor into the future of anime? Yamano paints a cohesive whole of the history, economics, and social trends that shaped the manga industry with broad though vivid strokes. It is not intended as the final word on the subject, but rather as a fire starter that lays out the ground rules for future discussion.

And boy, does he give the reader a lot to chew over.

The rise and fall of manga, Yamano explains, is inexorably linked to the baby boomers. This sudden crescendo of post-war births led to a tidal wave of children all waiting to be entertained. Manga piggy-backed on this need with spectacular results. The medium grew from Shonen, to Seinen, and beyond together with the boomers who formed its core market.

The baby boomers produced another sizable crop of potential consumers with the junior boomers (1970-1974), a sort of Japanese Generation-X defined by unprecedented levels of wealth and economic freedom. Anime tie-ins began to emerge as a viable market model, with TV adaptations drawing a new audience to the original manga in a positive feedback loop.

Business was booming, and it seemed like manga had hit upon a successful and sustainable formula of cross-media pollonization. But with every boom comes a bust.

In 1995, Dragonball finished its 10-year run of record-breaking popularity. When it left the pages of Shonen Jump, it took with it a loyal readership that had only stuck around to see how their favorite series would play out. This phenomenon became an epidemic as long-running serials began to wind down across the board. The baby boomers and their offspring had begun their mass exodus from manga magazines. Who would step in to fill the void?

As you can see from the data above, no one.

When readership plummeted, publishers attempted to stem the bleeding by extending long-running serials in a desperate attempt to hold onto the remaining regular readers. They became increasingly conservative and shortsighted, focusing solely on maintaining the status quo without considering the road to long-term recovery.

This strategy proved to be flawed in that it raised barriers of entry, both for consumers and artists. Readers can’t be expected to jump in the middle of a ten-year story. If you think it’s daunting to start reading a title like One Piece with a 60+ volume backlog, imagine what it’s like for elementary students buying comics with their milk money. Between Mixi, Niko-Niko Video, and video games, kids these days have enough alternative means to fulfill their need for instant gratification that don’t involve struggling through convoluted settings and a telephone book worth of characters.

Despite the “Shonen” moniker bandied by the three major publishers, the overwhelming economic voting power of the junior boomers made them the target audience du jour. This prevents children from developing the habit and literacy needed to enjoy manga, thus eliminating an entire generation of consumers. Of course, the current low birth rate society isn’t pumping out enough kids as it is, and in the age of the Internet and free entertainment, one can’t expect them to pay to play.

Children aren’t the only ones being cut out of the equation. Magazine page space is limited, and a large percentage of pulpy real estate is sectioned off to the old boys with long-running serializations. Problem number one is squeezing your way through the door with five people on the other side pushing it shut. Assuming a budding artist beats the odds and makes their professional debut, they can’t stand on even footing with the veterans, hence problem number two. Experience, technique, budget, and assistants—Normally an artist would build up these resources through on-the-job training. The current cutthroat model doesn’t allow that luxury. Manga has tied its own noose by raising quality and subsequent expectations above a level achievable by incumbent artists.

Long-running serials have become rotting support beams holding up an exclusivist industry. The grand collusion between publishers and veteran artists has muscled out both aspiring manga-ka and potential readers. Rapidly declining sales suggest that manga as we know it is on the verge of collapse.

But is that really such a bad thing?

Yamano argues that this is the perfect opportunity to introduce a new business model that puts the manga-ka at the head of a multi-media enterprise. Why stop at merely drawing manga? Character goods, light novels, theme songs, voice actors, animation—The potential for tie-ins is unlimited.

I’m sure that raised a few eyebrows. Are we talking about manga or anime here?

Consider this—In terms of marketing, manga has always played second fiddle to anime. Character goods aren’t produced for the manga, but for the anime based on the manga. Anime uses the name recognition of popular voice actors and directors to draw in an audience. Each of these areas is handled by a group of specialists, be they figure makers, animation studios, or talent agencies. Division of labor ensures a high quality product.

What does that leave the manga to compete with? Merely a story, and art, all handled by one person struggling to meet deadlines for a publisher who views them as nothing more than another cog in the stuttering economic machine.

To hell with the publishers! Cut out the middleman and become president of your own brand! Why outsource your intellectual property to third parties? Oversee everything yourself and reap the benefits of greater creative control and increased profits!

The manga-ka of the future will be more manager than artist, not because of a lack of artistic vision, but because our age of free entertainment and declining paper publications demands it.

His vision isn’t as far-fetched as it first sounds. Consider the success of Comiket, the gargantuan self-published flea market that boasts yearly attendance records of over one million. All sales return to the author as pure profit. Contrast this with the 10% royalties a professional receives for Tankobon (trade paperback), and suddenly the amateur is making scratch equivalent to the professional with 1/10th of the sales.

Granted this ignores page rates, but it’s an even tradeoff in terms of volume. Which requires more effort—200+ pages for a commercial Tankobon or 30 pages for a Dojinshi? You can understand why some pros continue to write Dojinshi even after their pro debut. They don’t even need to come up with original works!

Here is the crux of Yamano’s argument. Parody Dojinshi form lines around the building; Original Dojinshi line birdcages. Will entrepreneurial manga-ka be able to create an intellectual property worth a damn?

The When They Cry series, Toho Project, Voices of a Distant Star, and most recently Black Rock Shooter are all independent franchises born from a single seed that germinated across multiple medias. Black Rock Shooter is particularly impressive for starting as a single illustration on Pixiv (the Japanese deviantART) that inspired a Vocaloid song and accompanying music video followed by an OVA and PSP game.

Obviously it can be done. But not without help.

All developing talent needs an agent to help it reach its full potential, and manga-ka are no exception. This is why editors will always have work even if the current publishing model fails. If the manga-ka is to function as franchise chief, then the editor would need to evolve to take on greater responsibility and management duties in addition to providing artistic feedback and upholding deadlines. They’ll need not only impeccable aesthetic sense, but business sense as well.

And what of distribution? Digital publishing, which manga commands an 80% market share in Japan, will be fertile ground to till, in addition to established means such as Comiket and Dojinshi specialty stores. In theory, the current failing bookstore model could be saved by expanding to deal in Dojinshi and related character goods, making it more akin to a convenience store. Upstart musicians, voice actors, and artisans would create the product to stock the shelves. Given enough time, the network would legitimize itself.

According to Yamano and his research, in any case. But whether you accept this as a legitimate model or decry it as pie-in-the-sky idealism, it’s clear that something must be done to rejuvenate the industry. Naruman offers a clear road map and reasonable end game backed up by raw data and views that overlap with established creators. Personally, I’m more afraid of the implications of him being wrong than of him being spot on.

What it won't come out in English:

Tokyopop! No, seriously. Tokyopop compressed a 50 year boom-bust cycle into a mere 10. They duplicated two of the major factors that setup the Japanese industry to self-destruct, namely: Establishing an unsustainablly low price point and inundating the market with too many titles.

When serials first hit the market, publishers never counted on a demand for trade paperback collections, so they licensed the distribution rights to third parties. Imagine their embarrassment when Tankobon took off in a big way! Over time they wrestled back the rights and funneled the windfall directly into their own coffers, but the damage had already been done. Early Tankobon were aimed at children, with a rock-bottom price point to match. There was no looking back.

For the longest time Tankobon sales served merely to supplement sales of magazines, until as recently as 2006 when sales of Tankobon exceeded magazines for the first time in the history of the industry. The existing magazine model is proving to be unsustainable, with Tankobon rising to enslave its former master. But with the market as segmented as it is, can you really blame the consumer for focusing on titles they want to read, as opposed to the old model of throwing down cash for magazines filled with authors they couldn't care less about?

Tokyopop certainly went off the rails and began licensing every third-rate title they could get their hands on, but this was in part due to the inexhaustible source of said trite back in Japan. While manga’s market share has remained largely unaffected despite the fall of the Big Three shonen magazines, the number of titles in circulation has doubled over the past ten years.

Meaning, the same pie now has to feed twice as many mouths. And with an increasingly fractured market, it’s more difficult to produce major hits with cross-demographic appeal. One Piece alone can’t put food on the table for everyone.

So now publishers on both side of the Pacific have become conservative, and rightly so. How many people would be interested in reading about the history of manga economics in Japan, in comic book form or otherwise? Probably not enough to warrant a major release. And it’s not ero-guro or artsy enough for the connoisseurs to pick it up. A shame, considering how thought-provoking and relevant it is.

Why, you’d almost have to... Publish it independently, or use digital distribution.

But that’s just crazy talk.

TSB on Tumblr

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 13:52:00 +0000

TSB is about to perform a tracheotomy on your eyes and force-feed visual stimulation straight down your optical food tube. That’s right, our Tumbler account is officially open for business! But don’t shove—there’s enough slop to go around, with seconds for you gluttons with a taste for pop culture long past its shelf date. We can’t speak for the freshness, but we do guarantee to be unique and robust.

Click through to dig in:

Tiger & Bunny: Criminally Bad CG or Heroic Effort?

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Tiger and Bunny is generating a lot of buzz this season for its uniquely Japanese spin on
the superhero genre that we’ve all but grown to take for granted in the west, as well as the schizophrenic condemnation and approval of consumer culture. But there’s something else more garish than the Soft Bank logo splayed across the eponymous protagonist’s chest. Amidst the heated conversation we’re ignoring the cell-shaded elephant in the living room. Because let’s face it, for everything it does right, Tiger and Bunny’s CG parts stand out like, well, a guy in an a cheap CG mecha suit.

  Not everyone can pull this look off, especially not Wild Tiger.

But I’m not here to knock on an otherwise entertaining show for aesthetic compromises made to compensate for shrinking budgets and shrinking talent pools. Rather, this post will use Tiger and Bunny as a case study to explore exactly why it is that CG in 2D anime produces such a knee-jerk reaction, even when done well.

To spoil the ending, it’s a problem of integration. For reasons I'll expand on below, 2D and 3D elements have a hell of a time doing the dance without stepping on each other’s feet. When handled correctly, the results are a masterful mix indiscernible by the untrained eye. Yet slip up for even a single frame, and your brain snaps back to reality, awoken from the spellbinding suspension of disbelief the artist slaved to create.

Problem 1: CG Animation is Too Smooth

From the opening sequence of the first episode, I was already scratching my head trying to figure out why CG characters such as Rock Bison and Fire Emblem didn’t sit right.

Fire Emblem makes me feel funny on so many levels.

Something about their movement was off in comparison to the rest of the cast—Was it too smooth?  My gut reaction was that these heroes were being animated on 1’s while the 2D parts were animated on 2’s. Clicking through the action frame-by-frame, I found out I was wrong characters are also done on 2’s (for the most part).  

Woah, back up for a second—1’s and 2’s?

Anime is created at 24 frames per second. This means that for every second of footage, there are 24 frames, or animation cells. The question of smoothness is then answered by how many unique drawings are contained within this second, with more drawings creating the illusion of lifelike, flowing movement.

Example of a walk on 1's (From The Animator's Survival Kit)

If each drawing within a second of footage is unique, that’s animating on 1’s—24 drawings per second (also known as full frame). The next step down would be animating on 2’s, for 1 unique drawing every 2 frames, or 12 drawings per second (also known as half frame). You can further subdivide from 24, leading to animating on 3’s for 8 drawings per second, and so on.

The same walk on 2's (From The Animator's Survival Kit)

Televised anime is done on 2’s at best, or still frames at worst. Your brain fills in the gaps and never misses those other 12 frames, making action on the 2’s believable, though not technically perfect. More importantly for studios, being able to halve the amount of drawings without noticeably affecting quality allows productions to stay solvent.

This is a holdover from the limited animation workflow of animating on 3’s introduced by Tezuka back in the 60’s, a herky-jerky ghetto that divided the industry between artists like Gundam’s Tomino who just wanted to tell a good story regardless of the quality, and realism junkies like Miyazaki who pushed for greater immersion though lifelike (and expensive) animation.

But that’s a story for another day.

What does it matter to CG animation if its 2D counterpart is going number 1 or number 2? Like I alluded to earlier, the two are trying to dance, and need to keep on the same beat.

By default, CG animation is all on 1s. Once you set your key frames and breakdown, the computer extrapolates the in-betweens. This is an overly simplified explanation of the process, (and I don't mean to suggest that the computer does the animator's job for them), but my point is full frame animation commands no additional cost in CG. In fact, while 2D anime cheats costs by using long (non-animated) holds on characters, dropping frames like this in full CG is artistic suicide, as the character reverts to a lifeless puppet the instant they stop moving.

So, in theory, we’d end up with the 3D parts on silky smooth 1s, while the 2D is done on comparatively choppy 2s, 3s, or lower. The result: A jarring mismatch of objects moving at different speeds, like walking in a stationary train as the tram across from you begins moving in the opposite direction. Your brain might not miss those extra frames, but it sure notices when certain objects on screen have them while others don’t.

Of course, this is all Animation 101. CG elements in 2D shows are generally done on 2’s in an attempt to synch up to the paper drawings. But knowing is half the battle. It took the industry years of trial and error to make the leap from pencil and paper to stylus and tablet. For a CG specialist, going back over the divide to purposefully create “jerky” animation requires similar mental gymnastics.

Meaning: Even with 2D and 3D dancing to the same beat, they still feel off. Why is that?

Problem 2: Data Overload

It comes down to an information gap and the issue of clashing animation styles. The former plays into the latter, so let’s start there.

In terms of the amount of information contained within a single image, CG lords over 2D, no contest. But don’t discount 2D too quickly. It’s information is hidden beneath the surface, implied between the lines. This visual shorthand acts as a sort of secret aesthetic message that our brains decode. With 2D, less can be more.

The Temple of Seven Golden Camels explains better than I can how simple and complex elements can either complement or hinder one another.

This lack of raw materials means that a 2D artist needs to stretch each resource to its limits. In other words, no wasted poses, no superfluous movements, but with spartan color treatments and simple two-tone shadows.

And on the other side of the wasteland, languishing high up on a throne of abundance, CG blows the Horn of Plenty without a care in the world. Therein lies the problem. Remember that we’re trying to unify two competing visual elements. CG needs to pull a Siddhartha and cast its worldly opulence behind in order to move down below the information poverty line and square off with 2D. The reverse, frankly, would be impossible.

Easier said than done.

The lack of a proper outline from the Toon Shader is another dead giveaway, but too technical to go into specifics right now.

As you can see in the image above, Rock Bison sticks out like sore thumb against the other simplified characters drawn in visual shorthand. He's got too much detail, too many lines, too complicated of shadows.

This problem is persistent on all the CG characters.The gradients on Fire Emblem’s jock strap from 20 feet away have the same effect as David Bowie’s monstrous cod piece in Labyrinth. You can’t stop staring! Too much information.

On the other hand, Lunatic is nearly seamless. There are a number of scenes where it’s tricky to pin him down as being either 2D or CG, and that’s amazing! The audience shouldn't be in a position to ask this question in the first place. They’re supposed to shut up and enjoy the fireworks, and Lunatic’s design allows us to do exactly that. His suit is simple enough to work in either style. His face mask means no awkward “cell in a suit” hybrid animation like with Wild Tiger and Barnaby. Conceptually, he transcends hero and villain. In execution, he transcends 2D and CG.

Of course, this applies to still frames. What happens when the characters start to move?

Before we answer that, let’s think about the process behind drawing the cells themselves.

Anime techniques have their roots in western animation. Hanna Barbera in particular developed a cost-saving cheat that changed the face of production forever. Their trick was a type of limited animation where they separated a character into a number of layers, each animated separately. So if you have a character speaking and gesticulating, an animator only needs to draw the moving arm, mouth, and chin, while the rest of his body remains static, thus recycling the cell.

First we discovered that we can cut drawings in half by animating on the 2’s. Then we figured out how to optimize the drawings on a cell, dropping costs, realism, and information even lower.

Easy with the finger curls there, buddy.

Anime doesn’t have the budget to always redraw the entire character for each movement, so they’ve adopted this cheat with great aplomb. And while this works great in 2D, it clashes with the CG. Flame Emblem, Rock Bison, and the power suits have a tendency to overact, either through too many poses, vaudeville hand gestures, or moving body parts that would otherwise be static on a hand-drawn image. This makes them appear much too busy, and when placed alongside their taciturn 2D counterparts, like a spastic child that can’t sit still.

Problem 3: Perfect Scaling

As we can see, 3D does certain things too well for its own good. Full frame animation and image information are fairly obvious, though there is a more subliminal element working to pull us out of the action as well.

CG allows for perfectly calculated perspective. This comes off feeling cold and robotic next to a show’s inherently wonky hand-drawn elements. It’s somehow fitting that CG elements tend to be equally lifeless mecha and vehicles. Keeping these rigid objects in proper perspective as they drive away towards the vanishing point or zoom around in dizzying space battles is difficult enough to make a traditional animator want to snap their pencil in half.

CG solves the problem by providing models that, by default, create perfect perspective regardless of the movement or camera angle. However, this perfection makes the image appear sterile in relation to the the slightly janky drawings around them.

A smart animator will work around this limitation by purposefully distorting every few frames to give the impression of hand-drawn wonkyness that keeps the image alive. To bring up Lunatic again, this close-up shot from the end of Episode 8 illustrates how effective “messing up” a drawing can be.

There's devilry at work here!

Pay attention to how his eyes distort as he pulls his head back. They wobble, and the screen right iris even disappears for a frame, giving him Macross googly eyes. Based on previous shots, I want to believe that this is CG, but the actual image has all the tells of a traditional cell. Perhaps they switched over to 2D for certain shots? In any case, congratulations Sunrise. I take my hat off to you.

To recap, integrating CG with 2D raises the following problems:

1) CG animation needs to drop its frame rate to match 2D.
2) CG designs need to be simplified to match codified 2D drawings.
3) CG needs to purposely distort models to counteract otherwise “too perfect” perspective and scaling.

That’s one hell of a series of flaming hoops to jump through. Why even bother?

The answer would be an entire post in itself, so I’ll just sum up the situation as I understand it.

1) Lack of skilled animators domestically.

To rephrase Mutant Frog’s translated article on how the industry is hollowing itself out, by outsourcing in-between drawings to other countries, Japan has lost a training ground for new talent that would eventually graduate to become key animators. A true ouroboros. CG animation has since stepped in to fill the void.

2) Designs are complicated. (Related to Problem 1.)

Assuming there is still a small pool of talented artists in Japan, their aren’t enough to go around. Once again, CG is there to bring complicated mecha and monsters to life so the remaining animators can focus on other elements, such as characters and acting.

To give a recent example, Gundam 00 breaks out the big guns with 2D drawings for the hero's mobile suits, then falls back on disposable CG for background mecha and spaceships.

3) You have to stay on the cutting edge.

CG may never replace the raw emotion and exaggerated poses that are 2D’s bread and butter, but it can supplement it in other areas. It allows directors and artists to explore new means of expression and rewrite the rules of the medium. So long as there are new toys, people will want to play with them.

Whew, we've barely scratched the surface and already this post is too long for its own good. This covers what I've noticed to be the most jarring elements of CG in 2D anime. There's plenty more to discuss, such as the Toon Shader's pros and cons, backgrounds, and camera movement, but I wanted to shoot close to the hip and keep to more the fundamentals of animation than dig through backend processes.

Despite the flaws and odd design decisions, Tiger & Bunny is relatively well done, which makes it all that more fun to pick apart. There's no denying that persistent ear flick you feel at times, but at least now you have a better sense of what causes it. And with that understanding and enough time, you may even learn to ignore it.

EA Resident Evil Shooting Bar

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:01:00 +0000

The CDC’s recent article on surviving a zombie apocalypse is essential reading for anyone who hopes to live through the coming rapture, though it leaves out one critical element—weapon training! In particular, close range shooting with small firearms. Every bullet counts when you’re facing down an undead horde, and if you go into it unprepared you’ll wish you had saved the last one for yourself.

Don’t despair! EA Shooting Bar and Capcom have teamed up for the 15th Anniversary of Resident Evil and upcoming release of The Mercenaries on 3DS to bring you an armory full of artillery just waiting to dismember the franchise’s most iconic monsters and catch your weapon skill up to survival speed.

Though Japanese law bans the right to bear arms, restriction has bred innovation in the form of true-to-life model guns indistinguishable from the real thing. The Kichijoji based EA Shooting Bar lets you get hands-on with their awe-inspiring equipment. You don’t need to be a gun freak to get your rocks off, though the experience might turn you into one.

Decisions, decisions. Do you head straight for the firing range, or do you loosen up your trigger finger with Resident Evil-themed cocktails first?

Green, blue, and red flavor-dip won't actually cure a zombie bite, but the Mixed Herb Cocktail can help you forget.

Inoculate yourself against the plague with T-Virus and G-Virus vaccines.

Shotgun shell shots go straight to your head.

Umbrella-brand painkillers are there to help nurse your hangover the morning after.

(Courtesy of our partner in grime from I Live on Another Planet.)

Sorry buddy, the kitchen's fresh out of braaaaaaains... But there are overpriced novelty appetizers!

The “Itchy Tasty Brains” shrimp risotto lived up to its name, though it may have been my shellfish allergy acting up.

Sadly, there's no Jill Sandwich, but there is a Tofu Survivor.

Pio-Hazard was a delicious, meat-filled pun. (Resident Pastry to Western audiences.)

This R.P.D. cosplayer posing with Leon's custom Desert Eagle brought out every camera in the house and new meaning to the term "shooting gallery."

To be clear, this guy isn't one of the staff. He just parades around like this for kicks when he's not lighting people up with Airsoft BBs in the field.

Resident Evil: The Shooting will continue through June 19th. If you find yourself along the Chuo Line it's well worth your time to poke your head in, if just to take in the ambiance and neuter some bloodthirsty cultists. Boom, "head" shot!

Kamen Rider the Diner

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Sun, 08 May 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Those dastardly Shockers are back with another heinous scheme to undermine Japan. This time they're plotting to swindle milk money from innocent children . Backed by the Pasela Group, the very same masterminds behind the Dragon Quest tavern in Roppongi, Kamen Rider the Diner is poised to serve up a steaming plate of nostalgia laced with mind control serum.

Today, themed restaurants.
Tomorrow, the world!

Reservations need to be through the website in advance or the staff will show you the door.

The interior is ostensibly decorated as a secret Shocker hideout, though the Third Reich eagle motif clashes with the walls adorned with rider action figures and glamor shots of the heroes.

Past riders are encased in vacuum sealed glass coffins for future generations.

There were two display cases featuring every rider belt ever.

Having a rider belt embossed shirt is the Japanese version of those novelty tees with a tie printed down the front.

Naturally you're not paying for the food itself, but rather the ambiance and right to take sweet pictures to brag to your friends. It takes a truly insidious organization to make you feel good about blowing 800 yen on a plate of cheese and rice.

Cheese Condora Risotto.

Amazon Salad.

Amazon Green Tea Float.

Stronger Strawberry Hot Cake.

X Riders's Gateau Chocolate Scarf.

X Rider Cocoa.

Apollo Geist Killer Spicy Shrimp Chili.

Rider Ichi-Go Melon Soda Float.

Some of the items are more of a stretch then others and require a high level of mental gymnastics to justify their existence. Half the fun is seeing how desperate the menu can get; the other half is returning to a child-like state of mind that can see rider helmets in green ice cream and kaiju in pan-fried shrimp.

Despite the slightly dodgy menu, this is intended as a somewhat classy dining experience for friends and couples looking to play grown-ups by dishing our major bank for a meal. Never mind that it's a living museum dedicated to a children's show about spandex-clad grasshoppers beating up guys in rubber suits. The restaurant feels no shame in reveling in the source material, and honestly, why should they? Kamen Rider the Diner helps us remember that in the real world sincerity beats out irony, one overpriced novelty dish at a time.

Go Nagai Wonderland Museum

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Sun, 08 May 2011 00:29:00 +0000

Not to be outdone by Voidmare's visit to knock-off heaven Korea, I returned to Ishikawa prefecture over Golden Week to bring back some official bootlegs from the Go Nagai Wonderland Museum.

Go Nagai, famous worldwide for his puerile power fantasies driven by cheesecake and cartooney ultraviolence, was born in the city of Wajima, a small town overlooking the Sea of Japan near the top of the Noto Pinnensula. His father's job took the family to Tokyo and Nagai never looked back until a few years ago when the tourism board of Wajima decided to cash in on the six years the author spent there by establishing the Go Nagai Wonderland Museum.

Sadly photography was prohibited, and with the staff hovering around like shit hawks you'll have to make do with a written account of the highlights, which include:

-A two meter Mazinger-Z statue shooting a rocket punch.
-Comprehensive timeline of all known works. (Surprisingly he was serialized in Shojo magazines as well during the beginning of his career.)
-E-book library of works through the mid-70's.
-Carved stone statue of his super deformed self-portrait.
-Original pages from Devilman, Dorodoro Enma-Kun and others.
-Print club featuring backdrops from tankobon covers.

The museum wouldn't be a true tourist trap without a selection of kitschy souvenirs.

Manga pages are made of pulp, which are then recycled into toilet paper. These Devilman and Cutey Honey toilet paper rolls bridge the gap between TP and manga, thus completing the circle of nature.

Individually wrapped, nondescript cookies are a must for appeasing co-workers, and the kleenex serves in a pinch when there's no Devilman toilet paper on hand.

The Mazinger-Z labeled local sake is possibly the worst offender in a long line of branded products that have nothing to do with the source material.

Wajima is famous for its lacquerware, making these Devilman chopsticks almost legit.

However I draw the line at a $300 drink tumbler, even if it does use gold leafing.

More curious than the museum itself, across the street stands a suit store operated by the Nagai family. The owner is the son of Nagai Go's father's cousin, making his connection to the author's legacy as strained as everything else in the city. This doesn't stop them from dealing in glitter-embossed T-shirts.

Get your Wajima exclusives right here.

The storefront also serves as a power spot for fans. After making the arderous pilgrimage to the museum, they leave offerings of toys and posters that the owner displays out of a sense of obligation

In fact, the whole town is rabid with Nagai Go fever. There isn't a bookstore without a sun faded window display of his manga. Renditions of Mazinger-Z and Cutey Honey adorn maps and tourist information completely unrelated to the museum.

Don't get me wrong. The shameless opportunism adds to the town's charm and makes the two hour bus ride from Kanazawa worthwhile. Like most shita-machi visits, its something to do on a lazy Sunday, rather than a must-see weekend destination. And if you time it right, you might show up in the middle of a black sabbath when the fan club makes their regular pilgrimage.

Seoul Searching

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:17:00 +0000

Full Seoul golden week vacation Flickr set organized by love hotel pics, bootleg toys, street snapshots and food HERE!!

"Coffee Break" room at R Hotel, a love hotel in Singil. They let us change our room every night, though sadly we couldn't get the Hello Kitty suite.

Bought all of these in the shop! The couple running the place got into a fight and the husband stormed out because he didn't want to sell them. The wife gave them to me for 2 bucks a piece!

Markets were so saturated with Transformers bootlegs that I eventually got sick of taking pictures of them

The same goes for Gundam...

Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Jango Fett and Luke Skywalker- powers combine to form Space Warrior

Awesome Rocky punching puppet card- puppets not included

Ultraman Lady?

Kinoko no Yama ripoffs at 7-11

If you ever find yourself in Seoul, you need to eat here

Silkworm street vendor. The odor was absolutely putrid, nothing like Uchiyama-san's cooking

Returning to Tokyo at 5AM

Full Seoul golden week vacation Flickr set organized by love hotel pics, bootleg toys, street snapshots and food HERE!!

Happy Kinnikuman Day

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Before getting yelled at by security at the 6th annual Kinnikuman Day Muscle Museum, I managed to snap a few shots of original artwork:

Mask Hunting poster illustration

Jump Comics volume 23 cover illustration

Torn from the pages of Yudetamago's high school notebook!

Reportedly the first manga inspired kimono ever made.

For just 3813.07USD you can own your very own life-sized ethnic Kinnikuman, limited to 5 pieces!

Magical Mosh Misfits' take on Warsman

I waited in line with a full bladder for over three hours to get a ticket which allowed me to wait in line another hour and a half to get this. A small price to pay as Nakai-sensei rarely does signings these days, especially as a duo with Shimada-sensei.

View the entire Flickr set here.

Madoka Magica: Growing from Chara to Character and Beyond

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 02:07:00 +0000

Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the anime event of the decade, has come and gone. Speculation regarding the finale will rage on far longer than the show's compact broadcast period, and the next generation of creators will hold its influence close to their hearts. Will it prove to surpass Evangelion, as frenzied fans had clamored?

As Kyubey promised Madoka as he persuaded her to form a pact, "You have the power to change the rules." But before we understand the potential impact caused by Madoka, we need to understand where the rules stand, and to do that we'll explore the concept of chara and character.

A chara exists as an icon composed of visual shortcuts. The success of a chara lies in their moe value, or lovability. Chara represents marketability. Hello Kitty is the ideal chara—A simple yet instantly recognizable design, cute as a button, and with no context outside of the fact that she is Hello Kitty.

In contrast, a character can exist independently of their context. They develop a sense of presence and verisimilitude through their actions that allows them to continue on after the text concludes. A strong character has a clear worldview and personality.

Shinji Ikari, despite his flaws, or rather precisely because of them, is a solid character. He may not give the audience what they want, but the fact that his ambivalence is frustrating to us shows an emotional attachment. We want to see him succeed, do well, and overcome himself. The drama of the series rides on the personal investment we make. If we don’t care about the character, the plot falls flat.  

With his ten-dollar haircut and reserved personality, Shinji was designed to be an everyman. And while this helps us project ourselves onto him and form the necessary emotional bond, it hurts his marketability. He has no chara. He’s got no zazz, no visual punch. Shinji’s got no moe.   Which brings me to my next point:

It does not follow that a strong character be a strong chara. Fully developed characters may lack the elegance that makes a chara compelling enough for a consumer to purchase their goods. Likewise, a chara may have no redeeming features as a character, but be iconic enough to move a product based solely in their design.

Pokemon stands at the pinnacle of chara recognition. What they lack in personality they make up in moe factor. You’d have to make a concerted effort not to like them. The "Who’s That Pokemon?" segment that bookends commercials proves their primal appeal. We can pick them out by silhouette alone, a useful skill when navigating the toy isle filled with products jockeying for our attention.

Superheroes possess this same recognizability. Their costumes, from color schemes to logos, provide a visual feast of bite-sized iconography. This in turn is enriched by decades of back-story and character development, which is then digested into a compact symbol that represents a whole greater than its parts.   

Take Superman’s S as an example. Its iconography suggests truth, justice, and the American way; leaping tall buildings in a single bound; secret identities, the last surviving son of an extinct planet. All coiled up in a single striking S. The S stands for "super moe."

This is a good time as any to mention what is known by critics as the “moe database,” or a library of visual shorthand that has grown to also encompass personality traits. Imagine you have two columns—Symbols in Column A (glasses, pig tails, maid uniforms), and archetypes in Column B (tsun-dere, Goth lolita, little sister). From here you can mix-and-match a chara from any number of presets, like building an avatar for an online game.   These established cues can make a chara an instant success with the target audience.

But a mishmash of personality quirks doesn’t make a character worthy of investing emotional capital. Characters are built on the internal consistency and believability of their actions.

We open our wallets to chara, and open our hearts to characters. Icons who possess both tend to stand the test of time.

Rei Ayanami is a modern representation of the harmonious union of chara and character. Her mysterious character draws the audience in, building up expectations only to betray them to great effect when she shows rare glimpses of emotion. On the other hand, her trademark red eyes and bob cut form the core of a chara that powers the Gainax marketing giant. But even after you take away these visual shortcuts, you’re still left with a solid, interesting character.

How do the magical girls of Madoka Magika perform under a similar stress test?

A cursory glance over the color-coded cast reveals a lineup of tired stereotypes transplanted thoughtlessly from any generic magical girl or moe anime.

There’s the irrationally exuberant best friend Miki, the busty older-sister Mami, the bratty candy-chomping kid sister Kyoko, the taciturn tsun-tsun Homura, and the ditzy heroine Madoka destined for great things by mere virtue of her status as the main character.

No one could blame you for closing your browser in disgust after the first episode. Hell, after the first ten minutes!

But then you’d miss the greatest slight of hand ever attempted in anime. Once they make their initial impression on the audience, these genre tropes are sided out for a deck of ironic punishments dealt out with wickedness and pathos not seen since the Divine Comedy.

Miki plunges from the height of hope to self-destructive despair; Mami’s role as a mentor meets a Faust-like end after achieving true happiness; Kyoko’s snacking cements her fate as human cattle chewing it's cud; Homura’s detached nature stems from the trauma of watching her friends die agonizing deaths ad nausea as reward for attempting to save them; Madoka is erased from existence, her memory as forgotten as her impact during life.

The inherit limits of their chara give way to relatable characters. You stare in awe as the dull chrysalis splits into a dazzling butterfly. Will it survive to take flight, or be crushed on the stalk as it waits helplessly for its newfound wings to harden? The death of a character hits twice as hard, weighted with the impact of lost potential. There is a romanticism in that—You mourn what the character could have been, and never lament the failure they became.

A show like Madoka wouldn’t have been possible twenty, or even ten years ago. Not due to a lack of creative vision or technology, but because the infrastructure wasn’t there—No moe database means no pre-fabricated chara, which means no expectations to betray, no twist of the knife, and no subsequent drama.   

Madoka is the end result of everything that has come before her, all the reiterations of the same settings, all the repeated players acting out their lives in slightly divergent ways.

  Now ask yourself: For the length of this article, have I been referring to Madoka the heroine, or Madoka the TV series?

Both. I argue that the series and character are one and the same, and should be viewed as such. Allow me to explain.

One of Madoka’s central themes is karma, the idea that all past actions (causes) define our present self (effect). A great miracle will result in equally great despair. The life of the universe expands itself into dead entropy. All sums cash out at zero. Madoka’s god-like powers were further augmented each time Homura spun the wheel of Samsara—the Buddhist cycle of life, death, and reincarnation—before eventually burning out into nothingness.

In the same way, the artistic impact of the show itself is amplified by everything that’s come before it—years and years of magical girl nonsense and moe tripe. The karma of the industry. How is it that Madoka exploded like a supernova when it should have collapsed under its own weight like a black hole?  

Recall what Madoka’s mother said in Episode six in reference to Miki—make your best mistakes when you’re young and still have the energy to bounce back from them. And more importantly, if I may add—when you can still learn from them. Past errors pave the way to future greatness. Suffering under the yoke of moe was a burden necessary to till the soil for Madoka to bud forth. Ten years spent enduring hellfire in the crucible of Akiba-Kei anime proved to be well worth the suffering. The industry still has a bright future ahead of it, if we’re willing to pay the price.

Does this make her, and by association the anime, a martyr? Not a chance. Especially because her noble sacrifice, the so-called Deus ex Madoka that has the interwebs clamoring with speculation, was not a sacrifice at all.

Step back and consider for a moment exactly what quality it was that Homura’s time warps brought out in Madoka. It wasn’t some ill-defined strength or gimmicky super power. It was her inherent love, her compassion that could relieve the suffering of all sentient beings in the universe. When I said that Homura spun the wheel of Samsara I was not being figurative. Homura didn’t reset anything—remember that all sums are equal to zero—she merely carried everything equal steps backwards, the karma of each character weighed only heavier on their shoulders with each reincarnation, resulting in an increasingly tragic scenario with each go.

Madoka did not die for your sins. Rather, she literally escaped from underneath the Karmatic wheel of death and reincarnation to transcend into Buddhahood. Forget Jesus—a more apt celestial comparison would be Amida (or Amitabah), the Buddha of comprehensive love who appears before the dying and escorts them to the Pure Land. Madoka sheds her tears for you, not the other way around.  

This notion can help us find solace in the otherwise heart-wrenching scene at the end of the series between Homura and Madoka’s would-be-family. The mother quips, “Madoka? Is that some anime character?” This line could as easily either make your bottom lip quiver or be dismissed as a 4th-wall breaking throw away gag that production house Shaft is infamous for. Yet there’s so much more to it.

The mother and son are stand-ins for the audience. People in the real world are having this exact same conversation as you read this. “You don't know Madoka? You need to see it!” Five years from now critics will be saying, “That's so Madoka.”

  Madoka has transcended chara and character. She is a now a key word, free from the limitations of the medium and liberated to spill over into our word. A true God. The question is, did her advent save the industry, or damn it to another generation of derivative works? The wheel of Samsara continues to turn. All I can say for sure is this—I’ll gladly wait another decade for her second coming.

Killer Snake Wreacks Havoc in Harajuku

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:51:00 +0000

As if it wasn't congested enough, megaphone toting police had to be brought in for crowd control as all of Harajuku looked on in terror while this snake slithered up and down the station street sign this afternoon. Imagine my glee every time it threatened to slink down the pole, sending goth lolis and drag queens running and screaming in all directions!

Banned in the Name of Good Taste

noreply@blogger.com (DrSenbei) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Banning a product is a risky gamble by the powers that be. They always run the risk of garnering negative publicity for the thing they hoped to burn with the trash, a lesson exemplified by the surge of interest in the otherwise niche woman stalking simulation Rape Lay after the British Parliment rallied to smite it from Amazon.com.

As Oscar Wilde once said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about," and indeed sometimes the ban hammer has the desired effect and obliterates its quarry from the public conscious. Lucky for the reader, we're here to open up old wounds and maybe add a dash of salt in the process. Never forget!

Dakko-Chan

If this toy makes you uncomfortable, it's because it reminds you how racist you are.

From kogals with loose socks to Shibuya gyaru with fearsome fake nails and blinged-out rhinestone cell phones, high school girls have always been the front runners of obnoxious fashion trends. The post war generation was no exception and jumped out of the gates in 1960 with Kinobori Winky, an inflatable vinyl doll that hung on you arm and winked at passersby with its lenticular eyes.

Lovingly referred to by the media as Dakko-Chan (Huggy Baby), this innocent tar baby rode the arms of schoolgirls across the nation to define a generation. The hottest thing to hit that summer, it was an overnight success and demand far outstripped supply. Storefronts were hammered by waves of customers waiting to buy redemption tickets, which gave them the privilege to line up again later for a chance to buy the actual doll. Nearly 2.5 million units were moved in just six months—Everyone was in love with Dakko-Chan.  

Well, not everyone. Detractors criticized the hugging mechanism as undermining the moral fiber of society, and the winking gimmick as downright poppycock. Not to mention attacks from human rights groups who, in the 1988 anime and manga reforms, called out the toy’s black skin, swollen lips, and bushman skirt as racially insensitive.

This was all directed at a country who doesn’t know a golliwog from Mister Popo or Pokemon's Jynx. The maker Takara Tomi caved in and eventually released variant colors sans the outrageous lips, setting the stage for Bobby Ologun to take his rightful place as the average citizen’s first exposure to an African stereotype. Ironically, with all the effort put into making Dakko-Chan politically correct, nothing has been done to subdue the spread of Japanese hip-hop and reggae, something truly offensive to persons of good conscious the world over.

Everyone’s Ta-Bo 

Spot the extra chromosome.

 With his eyes fused shut in bliss and a chronic case of slack jaw, Ta-Bo was Sanrio’s answer to the motivational posters loved by high school guidance counselors. Go to bed early and get up earlier! Smile and the world smiles with you! This positive propaganda machine was born in 1984 but slowly faded from greeting cards and stationary as we moved into a cynical 21st century.

Reasoning follows that the character was cycled out due to a lack of popularity, but it’s easy to connect the dots leading to a sinister, though equally rational conclusion—Mouth breathing space case Ta-Bo was seen as an offensive caricature of mentally handicapped children and was pushed off the market by irate parent groups.   Ta-Bo’s profile is still up on the official Sanrio site, leading the author to believe that they’ve made his disappearance a public secret to avoid further inquiry. Hang in there, baby!  

King Piccolo

How many fingers am I holding up?

Reverse racism in the form of initiatives such as Affirmative Action can be viewed as the White Man finally coughing up back taxes for a nation’s history worth of winnings from the social lottery. The plight of the privileged makes itself known in Japan as well, for their homogeneous society beguiles a legacy of class-based discrimination whose reparations are being paid for even today. I’m talking about the untouchable caste, the invisible Buraku.  

The pre-Meiji system was one of rigid castes decided at birth with little hope for upward mobility. The upper crust composed of rich samurai and aristocrats sailed by on the sweaty backs of the peasants who tended their fields. But below even the proletariat was another group who took on the tasks deemed uncleanly by Buddhist scriptures—Most notably butchering livestock and tanning their hides.  Damned by the Gods and shunned by their fellow man, these Buraku were exiled to ghettos on the outskirts of the village.

Though the Meiji administration banned the caste system in 1869, it was difficult for ex-Buraku to wash away their social stigma, especially when their outcast roots could be easily traced back to the hamlet of their birth. There was even a secret gesture to call people out inconspicuously: Tuck in your thumb and show a palm of four fingers, representing the four-legged animals the Buraku tended to.

You can bet the special interest groups were not pleased with the original incarnation of Dragon Ball’s King Piccolo.

  The studios were in a tizzy. How were they going to broadcast an anime where the main villain was perpetually giving Buraku the finger, so to speak? Lucky for them, author Toriyama Akira flubbed up in Volume 13 and drew Piccolo counting down from five—on five fingers! Executives jumped on this snafu and the version of the iconic character we know today was born. If anyone has info on four finger Piccolo merchandise send it my way!

If you want to learn more about Buraku and Japan's meat industry, check out our visit to the Shinagawa Central Wholesale Meat Market.

ZELDA

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:05:00 +0000

I'll bet you didn't know that the Guinness record holder for longest running girl band of all time belonged to Japanese new wave pioneers (and later awful reggae unit) ZELDA until just now. You're welcome!

Exploring Japan's Yokai with Shonen Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:59:00 +0000

Chimera-like Nue versus the Monkey God.

Parents are always looking for new ways to trick their children into leaving the house and experiencing the world. The most recent ruse is train station stamp rallies where you get your card stamped at various towns to be redeemed for a prize upon completion. Two words: BO-RING!

Everyone knows that kids love monsters, so what better way to send them outside to skin their knees and fall out of trees then with a Yokai hunt? Magazines these days only advertise video games and toys, but the grandpappy of Kaiju, Ohtomo Shoji, and his boys at Shonen Magazine were there to provide dreams to a post-war generation brimming with imagination but short on cash.

Behold, the Yokai Hunter's guide to Japan divided by region and complete with maps detailing where these bizarre beasties are said to roam!

Hokkaido and Tohoku Regions:

The child-thieving giant Kamasu offers a sharp contrast to the squat Ainu witch doctor in the upper right. If we're counting indigenous people as Yokai, is it PC to include Pygmies as well?

Kanto Region:

The Seven Wonders of Honjo (modern day Sumida) presented here are mostly harmless, as exemplified by the giant stinky foot that demands to be washed every night. What you really need to watch out for is the Kama-Itachi, or Sickle Weasel, that rides on the wind to lop off your extremities with its scythe hands.

Chubu Region:

These bone eating foxes prowl crematorium grounds and suck the marrow from discarded skeletons. The Guzu in the lower left is a demonic transformation of the Sculpin, an actual amphibious fish that resembles a mud skipper more than the prehistoric beast in the illustration.

Kinki Region:

History shows that encountering giant spiders is usually fatal and the fire-breathing Kumon-Bi eliminates any chance of survival.

Chugoku Region:

The Western seas are not safe! Lurking between the flotillas of garbage from Korea are some of the most utterly unfair monsters imaginable. Take the snake woman Nure Onna in the lower left for example. When you walk by, she thrusts what appears to be a bundled baby into your arms. Your immediate instinct is to say screw the baby and fling it away in a mad dash to safety, but doing so causes it to lay heavy on your body like the weight of your sin, thus making escape impossible. And if you make the noble choice and flee with the child cradled close to your chest, the Nure Onna's tail snakes back around the length of three towns--you were doomed from the start.

Shikoku Region:

From Daruma to lacquerware, every region of Japan credits themselves as being famous for something, with Shikoku's main export being Tanuki. The island's been lousy with these over-sized raccoons and their even bigger testicles ever since Kobo Daishi, founder of the Shingon Buddhist sect, chased out the previous mythical animal, the trickster Kitsune foxes, after he found them too arrogant for his liking.

Kyushu Region:

According to legend, a vampiress appeared before a castle on the brink of collapse, and to repay the blood she had sucked from its samurai, she transformed into the giant turtle Bakegame and rebuilt the edifice upon her shell to act as a mobile fortress during battle.

If you liked this article, you can see more of Ohtomo Shoji's projects with Edogawa Rampo's World of Grotesque Beauty and Robot Empire.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties......

noreply@blogger.com (voidmare) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:33:00 +0000