Category Archives: anime

Otakon 2012 Impossible Schedule

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Otakon 2012’s right around the corner, and that means frantically trying to figure out which panels and such to attend! Compared to other conventions, Otakon has more panel programming than anything else, so it’s always a matter of having too much desire and not enough time in the day for it. I’ve posted a tentative schedule below for things I’m interested in, but as you might notice a lot of the times conflict, so I’m basically going to be playing it by ear once I get there. I got a ton of autographs at Anime Expo, so I feel less inclined to get them this time around, but I’m going to aim for at least a couple.

Of particular note is the return of the Japanese Mahjong Panel, “Riichi: Japanese Mahjong, Anime, and You,” run by myself and Dave. It’s one of the first things you can do on Friday, so if you’re there that early I highly recommend you come in and check it out!

No fancy badge this year, but I’ll try to label myself accordingly.

See you there!

Friday
Riichi: Japanese Mahjong, Anime, and You, 10am-11am,Panel 4 (I’m on this panel!)
Hidetaka Tenjin Q&A – 11:15am-12:15pm, Panel 1
Gen Urobuchi Q&A  (Panel 3) OR The Chubby Characters of Anime and Manga (Panel 4) – 12:30pm-1:30pm, Panel 4
Opening Ceremonies – 1:45pm-2:45pm, Panel 3
Tetsuya Kakihara Q&A – 3pm-4pm, Panel 1
Gen Urobuchi Autograph – 3:30pm-4:30pm, Autograph 3
Tetsuya Kakihara Autograph – 4:30pm-5:30pm, Autograph 1
New Anime for Older Fans – 5:30pm-6:30pm, Panel 2
Sports Manga: Olympics Edition – 8:30pm-9:30pm, Panel 2
Genshiken: The Next Generation – 10pm-11pm, Panel 2 (Required)
Anime’s Craziest Deaths – 12:30am-1:30am, Panel 3

Saturday
Fandom & Criticism – 9am-10am, Panel 5
Ai Nonaka Q*A – 10:15am-11:15am, Panel 1
Anime and Manga Studies: Three Decades In – 10:30am-11:30am, Panel 6
Yuuka Nanri Q&A – 11am-12pm, Panel 1
Gen Urobuchi Autograph – 12pm-1pm, Autograph 3
Yuuka Nanri Autograph – 1pm-2pm, Autograph 2
Sexism in Anime – 1:45pm-2:45pm, Panel 4
Aya Hirano Q&A – 2pm-3pm, Panel 3
Hidetaka Tenjin Autograph – 2pm-3pm, Autograph 1
Maruyama & MAPPA Q&A – 3:15pm-4:15pm, Panel 4
Gundam Official Panel – 4:30pm-5:30pm, Panel 1
Unusual Manga Genres – 4:45pm-5:45pm, Panel 4
Dead Like Us: Death Lore and Japanese Media – 9pm-10pm, Panel 5
The “Art” of Fanservice – 11:30pm-12:30am, Panel 6
Navigating LGBT/Queer Identities within Japanese Media -1m-2am, Panel 1
Type Moon: Unlimited Panel Works – 1am-2am, Panel 2

Sunday
Ai Nonaka Autograph, 10:30am-11:30am, Autograph 2
Masao Maruyama, 10:30am-11:30am, Autograph 3
Sentai Filmworks Industry panel, 10:45am-11:45am, Panel 1
Kodansha Comics, 11:45am-12:45pm, Panel 5
Vertical 2012, 1pm-2pm, Panel 4

 

The Fujoshi Files 50: Yajima Mirei

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Name: Yajima, Mirei (矢島美怜)
Alias: Yajimacchi (やじまっち）
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture II

Information:
Yajima Mirei is a student at Tokyo’s Shiiou University, where she is a member of the club Genshiken, which in its most recent incarnation is primarily populated by women. Accustomed back home in Tochigi to being the “confident one” to compensate for the shyness of her friend Mimasaka, her situation is reversed in Genshiken where the combination of beauty and talent on display, especially coming from the male crossdresser Hato Kenjirou, in contrast to her own negligence when it comes to personal fashion, gives her something of an inferiority complex.

Yajima is a fan of Jump-esque shounen titles, notably Ten Piece and Menma. She enjoys drawing but is not terribly skilled at it. She is also not quite as eager to declare her love of yaoi and strike up conversation about it like her good friend Yoshitake. Though cynical and brusque to some degree, Yajima is at times also trusting and naive, such as when she initially expressed shock at the notion of drinking alcohol despite being underage.

Fujoshi Level:
Because Yajima prefers to remain reserved even when discussing yaoi, there are not clear indicators of the extent of her fondness for the subject except that she is undeniably a fujoshi. Rather, it is in her inaction that her firm status is revealed. When club chairman Ogiue shows her and the others doujinshi she drew of her actual boyfriend, Yajima does not refuse a copy.

Can You Watch Gundam AGE Without the First Half?

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As the final part of the generation-themed Gundam AGE begins, I’m reminded of the “Machete Order,” a way of watching the Star Wars movies which supposedly introduces all of its elements in the best ways while cutting away some of the excess. Specifically, “excess” means “Episode 1,” as the entire adventures of a very young Anakin were deemed unnecessary and even perhaps detrimental to enjoyment. While I don’t think any of the parts of Gundam AGE are awful, it does make me wonder if it’s actually possible to watch the third and fourth Gundam AGE arcs without having watched the prior two.

While it would be sad to lose characters like Woolf and young Emily, I feel like the third part introduces you enough to the returning characters that someone who got into the show right at that point wouldn’t take long to fully grasp the story, and perhaps because the ratings were so low they actually made it with this in mind. While you don’t get to see Flit go from idealistic young boy to supportive but crotchety old man, you also get to immediately see the differences between him, pirate Asemu, and noble Kio. Obviously as someone who’s already watched the previous parts I can’t simply use my own experience to judge the effectiveness of omitting the earlier parts, at least not without much scrutiny and testing on willing subjects, but I would be interested in hearing thoughts on this matter.

“Government-approved” “Cool” “Japan”

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I was thinking a little about the concept of “Cool Japan,” and why the idea has lost traction among various levels of fans and critics. One argument I hear occasionally is how, at the end of the day, people cosplaying and running around at conventions doesn’t give an image of “cool” or “cutting edge” but an image of regression or perhaps even immaturity. Essentially, people overestimated how “cool” Japan actually is. I don’t know how much this is really the case.

Another side is the way that Cool Japan was essentially government-backed. The idea of it was to use the media/fashion/image of Japan as “soft power” to influence the world. The problem, as far as I see it (and I think I’ve read similar arguments elsewhere), is that one of manga’s oft-touted strengths is its variety in terms of genres, ideas, philosophies, demographics, and even art styles. However, when it is being used by the Japanese government as one of its public faces, the manga and anime pushed out by the government becomes tacitly “government-approved.” If something is government-approved to be an image of the nation, then there is little chance that any government would willingly let their country’s image be tarnished by specific titles.

Essentially, what I’m thinking is that Cool Japan as a government-backed endeavor to some extent has to necessarily work against manga and anime as mediums of variety. I think the difference is between having something “government-approved” and “government-allowed.”

But I’m sure this topic has been talked to death. Probably at Neojaponisme.

The Fandom of Plenty, the Fandom of Scarcity

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In a previous post, I discussed what I believed to be one of the properties of moe as an industry to garner a fanbase: constant output of purchasable material to reinforce those feelings of devotion obsession. In this sense, moe can be thought of as a kind of “fandom of plenty,” a fandom whose existence is actively supported by an abundance of material easily obtained. Anime fandom in the United States over the past ten years has been characterized as such, where it’s so incredibly easy to watch a show and to move on to the next one without looking back that it becomes somewhat difficult to find something not to watch.

In contrast to the “fandom of plenty,” then, might be the  “fandom of scarcity.” The image of the anime fandom of yesteryear, from the tape-trading era and back, is one where each episode, each scrap of merchandise was so precious that being a fan was not only about watching as much as you can, but also about the lengths you’d go to in order to obtain that material, as well as the degree to which those small bits of treasure could be explored and scrutinized.

When I compare my experiences in both the former and the latter, I have to wonder to what extent it changes my own experiences as a fan. I am both the person who found Spring 2012 season to have so many worthwhile shows that I had to place some on the backburner in the hopes that I could reach them later, as well as the person who watched his VHS tape of some episodes of the middle of Nadesico over and over again just because there was nothing else quite like it for me. Are these ideas of abundance and rarity simply in the mind of the beholder? Certain the level of access I had in that Nadesico era was much greater than many, but it still felt like every tape was precious.

I also have to wonder to what extent these environments shape fandom itself. Just how much does scarcity shape an unofficial canonical list of works among fans? Is it possible for another Voltron, that is to say a show which was largely unremarkable in Japan which is considered seminal abroad, to exist? What shows would’ve been more popular and beloved had they not been shoved by the torrential downpour of a season of anime? How do these different environments influence what we value and why?

How Much Does “Japanese-ness” Matter to Anime and Manga Fans?

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The stereotypical image of the non-Japanese anime fan is someone who is in love with Japan. He goes by many names, mostly given by others but also self-referenced: otaku, wapanese, japanophile, weeaboo. This anime fan believes that at least part of what makes anime great is that it comes from Japan, and this imbues a certain degree of specialness or at least difference to it.

But I have to wonder, just how much is it even true that Japanese-ness is that vital component for so many anime and manga fans?

This is not to say that it definitely does not matter for people or that at the end of the day fans are better off judging things from some imagined objective stance of mighty neutrality, but rather is just me asking about where that desire for Japan may or may not exist.

Let’s talk about fans of dub voice actors, the kind who line up to get their autographs every time they appear at a convention and who vastly prefer them over their original Japanese counterparts. You can say something about how those are the voices they’re familiar with, and that they were exposed to those voices through a more accessible medium like television, but what I think is that, at the end of the day, even if Japanese-ness might be present in other areas of the anime they like, be it the character designs or the settings of the stories, “Japanese-ness of speech” itself is not as much of a factor. Having the comprehensibility and perhaps even understanding of nuance of English (or whatever language) is more important than having the characters speaking in Japanese.

Once I attended a cherry blossom festival in New York, where I saw a black girl dressed in a kimono. If it wasn’t clear that she was an anime fan, she was also surrounded by friends cosplaying Naruto characters. What was interesting about the way she wore her kimono though was that it clearly wasn’t the correct way to put one on nor the correct way to walk in one but it was obvious that she didn’t care. I got the impression that even if she knew, it wouldn’t really have mattered. While the coolness and I would even dare to say the Japanese-ness of the kimono itself was important, it was also important for her to assert her own attitude, to conform the kimono to herself rather than the other way around.

A simple hypothesis would be that a fan prefers just enough Japanese-ness for their anime and manga to seem special or different, but not so much that it becomes utterly alien or unapproachable. However, I think that would be a flawed statement for a number of reasons. First, an appeal of Japanese-ness might not necessarily equate to exoticism or Orientalism (though in many cases it probably would), and second, there is a dynamic of what people do and don’t want to be, how much they expect things to conform to their own values rather than the other way around, and so “alien” for some may be preferable. Maybe I’ll think of something better eventually.

Family Re- Union, Go! Aquarion Evol… Review Podcast!!

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I was a guest recently over at the The Veef Show, where its illustrious host VF5SS and I reviewed Aquarion Evol.

Just as a warning, the podcast is super spoilery with little to no warning, and we sometimes go off on odd tangents.

Have a listen.

Exploring Thoughts in “Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Mine Fujiko”

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This post contains spoilers from Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Mine Fujiko

Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Mine Fujiko came and went, and I think it brought with it an intriguing sort of depth and character study that differentiates it from most anime out there.

The way in which the series explores the psychology of the character Fujiko really felt like women were in charge of this show, which they were. It had not only a female writer in Okada Mari, but also a female director in Yamamoto Sayo. I think I get this impression because while Fujiko is an unpredictable character of many mysteries, the way it’s portrayed doesn’t invoke “mysterious woman” as some kind of unsolvable rubik’s cube or distant creature like I think often happens when men write about exploring a female character’s psyche. There is less peeling back the layers and more starting from the assumption that the way thinking happens on the part of Fujiko is normal.

There’s an interesting twist which happens at the end of the series where up until that final episode we think we’re learning about Fujiko’s past and that finally we get to know what makes her tick, but it turns out that all of those memories have been falsely implanted in her. That false past shown is one of rape and sexual abuse, and it created this sense that Fujiko’s life of crime and hypersexual activity is in response to that. As I was watching, I wondered how this would transform the identity of the character of Fujiko, and even whether this extreme past would make it incompatible with the rest of the Lupin the Third franchise before it’s revealed to be false information.

If the circumstances were different, the fact that we were basically fed lies perhaps might have felt like a cop-out, but I don’t see it that way at all. By subverting it at the very end I feel like that whole train of thought, the very act of considering the consequences, became a meaningful thought exercise.

Anime and Idealized Figures

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When it comes to figure drawing in the western art tradition, the standard human is marked at about 7-7.5 heads tall. Increasing those proportions will result in a more idealized figure, to the point where if you want to make a figure look heroic you make him 9 heads tall. However, based on information I’ve learned from the manga drawing workshop at Anime Expo 2012 (and backed up by the Wikipedia entry on body proportions), it turns out that manga and anime much prefer a 6.5-head-tall character as its baseline, and in some cases as an ideal.

The Wiki entry gives moe as an example of where those proportions change, but even putting aside moe girls and going straight into masculine tough guy territory, what I find particularly interesting is that even some of the majestic figures in anime and manga are about 6.5 heads tall.

Reinhard von Lohengramm (right) is a genius tactician and a brilliant leader beloved by all who serve under him, someone who’s not just heroic but legendarilygalactic heroic, and yet he himself is only 6.5 heads tall, maybe 7 heads at best.

Kinnikuman is a super powered wrestler with muscles rivaling even the greatest of American comics superheroes, and yet he too ranks in at about 6.5 heads tall. The same even applies to that most recognizable of anime superheroes, Goku.

Obviously not all anime and manga characters are 6.5 heads tall, and there are plenty of tall, svelte characters who go into fashion model territory, but I have to wonder how this might affect people’s perceptions of characters both male and female. For example, are anime characters viewed as more child-like or less powerful when viewed by someone unaccustomed to manga for these reasons?

Not the X-Games: Anime Expo 2012

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Anime Expo 2012 was my first Anime Expo and my first west coast convention. While I’m not one of those really thorough con veterans, I still found some interesting differences between it and the conventions I’ve been to before, both when compared to the bigger cons as well as the smaller ones. Located in Los Angeles, it uses its position to its fullest.

Industry

In a change of pace of sorts, I  somewhat foolishly attended fewer industry panels than I normally would at a convention. I say somewhat only because of the fact that, for so many of them, they largely amount to announcements (which appear within a minute on Twitter) and they have Q&A sessions which lack teeth. Sometimes you can get a good one, and I try hard to ask good questions when I can, but the more “official” it is, the less chance you’ll get a decent answer. The foolish part is the fact that I was accustomed to Otakon, where one must generally choose between autographs and panels, an only later found out that AX works on a system of giving people “skip the line” tickets for attending guest panels. Lesson learned for (hopefully) next time.

Despite those limitations, AX2012 was by far my most autograph-heavy convention experience I’ve ever had, which is a reflection of one of Anime Expo’s greatest strengths: the sheer amount of guests, particularly Japanese ones. I managed to get stuff signed by the staff from Madhouse, Animetal USA, Kajiura Yuki + FictionJunction, a limited autographed image from manga artist Toume Kei (who wasn’t attending but offered the images as part of a gallery), and probably the biggest one for me: an OVA of Legend of the Galactic Heroes signed by Horikawa Ryo, voice of Reinhard von Lohengramm. I happened to take a fantastic picture of him.

I did manage to go to a few panels as well. I went to the Animetal USA Q&A just to see that bit of spectacle (it was calmer than I had expected), and attended the panel for GoFA, or Gallery of Fantastic Art. GoFA can be described as an organization dedicated to taking anime and manga and giving it a sense of realism by creating products and opening galleries based on those works. The panelists showed off actual products such as glasses and watches based on the designs of anime and manga creators, and mentioned that artists such as Hoshino Lily (Mawaru Penguindrum character designer) and Fukumoto Nobuyuki (Kaiji, Akagi manga creator) have or will have gallery exhibitions in Japan. Apparently they’ve been a part of AX for a long time now, but this was their first time running a panel, a privilege they received because they’re actually producing a stop motion animation based on the artwork of Toume Kei (Sing Yesterday for Me). We got to see a very short preview, about which not much can be said because it lasted less than two minutes.

Another panel of interest was a manga workshop run by an actual manga artist whose name I sadly did not catch (though Peepo Choo’s Felipe Smith was helping to translate). I was unable to stay for the entire thing, but what I saw focused a good deal on anatomy, working from the idea that a solid foundation in realism is needed in order to deviate from it. While I don’t entirely agree with that assessment, I think it is nevertheless an excellent skill to foster and definitely a legitimate way to begin to create art and comics. I do wish that manga workshop panels and the like could move more towards paneling and page layout, but I get the feeling that character design is much more immediate has much more impact for the vast majority of people.

Concerts

I went to all three of the concerts—Animetal USA, FictionJunction, and LiSA—in some capacity, though could only stay for a small portion of the FictionJunction concert due to some scheduling conflicts (more on that later). Animetal USA had by far the smallest crowd, but an enthusiastic one nonetheless, and it was great to hear their take on classic anime songs from shows like Gatchaman, Mazinger Z, and Saint Seiya. I’ll admit, I’m not a fan of heavy metal (though that’s not to say I don’t enjoy it), but I’m glad I went. Later at their signing, the most impressive thing was that there was a real Animetal USA cosplayer, a girl dressed as guitarist “Speed-King” (aka Chris Impellitteri). What little I heard of FictionJunction was definitely excellent. I definitely wish I could’ve seen it all.

The LiSA concert is one of the highlights of AX2012 for me, because I went in only knowing her as the singer of the Fate/Zero opening but not particularly interested, and came out of it as a fan. Not only were all of her songs really good, but her practically-headbanging enthusiasm just filled the concert venue. Impressively, she managed to do the emceeing for her own concert almost entirely in English. I’m not sure how much of it was from actual fluency and how much was practiced and scripted, but she pulled it off regardless. She gave us the benefit of singing the opening to a new summer anime (that wasn’t even out yet), Sword Art Online, and the concert actually made me want to check it out despite only having a passing interest in it prior.

Non-Industry Panels

If AX’s main strength is its industry presence, its main weakness is a lack of interesting fan panels. While fan panels can always vary in quality, they tend to follow along the same basic goals of bringing fans together in order to share in a topic or to convey new ways of seeing the things we love, hat’s not to say that the fan panels at AX weren’t or couldn’t be interesting, but that the sheer amount of “official” panels somewhat limited the overall presence of fan panels. On top of that, many were workshops or something similar, but personally speaking I generally don’t go to conventions for workshops.

I attended the Bloggers and Podcasters Town Hall, not knowing quite what to expect, especially given the use of the term “Town Hall,” but it ended up actually being fairly accurate. Moderated by the Benjamin “Benu” Lopez of the long-running Anime Genesis podcast, the audience (including myself) discussed various topics, including the move to include blogging into a podcast and vice versa, as well as ways to break up the factionalism and cliques which often appear around groups of bloggers/podcasters. It was a fruitful discussion, and I got to meet a number of people I’d only read/heard previously, though I do kind of wish that we didn’t just talk about reaching out but also ways to refine and improve our existing work. As I said at the panel, I do believe that content is king.

Given that I’ve been a part of academia for a while now, I went with the purpose of attending as many of the academic panels as I could. At times, this caused conflict as I had to sacrifice seeing a certain guest in order to see what other researchers were working on, but I think it was well worth it. Even though other events clearly overshadowed the attendance of the academic track, there was something distinctly different about having it as part of a general convention instead of simply being a stand-alone academic conference. Mainly, I felt like presenters had prepared for a mix of academic and non-academic audiences, and it made the presentations a little more fun than what would normally happen.

The highlights of the academic track were the keynote address, where Professor Jeffrey Dym of UC Sacramento discussed his “History of Manga” class, and the “We Make Manga” panel run by Northrop Davis of the University of South Carolina. In both cases, the speakers really knew what they were talking about, and described the challenges they faced in creating their classes, how they designed their curricula, and what sources they used as the foundations for their classes. For Dym’s panel, the things that stood out to me the most were his lament that Ishinomori Shoutarou did not have more work out in English despite his legendary status and the fact that he hesitated on including sports manga in his class because of how little of the really groundbreaking series (Star of the Giants for instance) exist in English. For Davis’s panel, it was definitely the fact that he mentioned his class as being designed to somewhat mimic the editor system used by manga publishers in Japan, especially given the degree to which endeavors such as Tokyopop’s old OEL material lacked in that very area.

I think the attendance could have been stronger if the academic panels hadn’t been added so late. The large color guide didn’t even have those panels, and it was clear that despite the giant screens showing the updated schedules that many attendees ignored it. When I presented at my own panel (which ended up overlapping with the FictionJunction concert due to a 40 minute delay, thus eliminating my chance of doing both), it was to a rather sparsely populated room, which I honestly think could have been made more lively if only people knew about it (and if the concert didn’t start and end when it did). Overall, I think I did an all right job (I did a visual analysis of the manga 7 Billion Needles), I just wish more of you could’ve attended it!

Cosplay

I think I’ll say it: AX2012 was possibly the best convention I’ve ever attended in terms of cosplay. Not only were many of the costumes excellent, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much variety. Popular cosplay topics such as Homestuck and Hetalia!, while still very present, didn’t even come close to dominating the visual landscape of the con, and cosplays I had resigned myself to possibly never seeing appeared in numbers. Whereas previously I had seen zero Dragon Kid cosplays from Tiger & Bunny, this time I saw five.

I remember being the only person to clap for Dragon Kid at Otakon 2011’s Sunrise panel, so this was a pleasant change.

In addition, I thought I’d never see a Precure cosplay at an American con, but I was gladly proven wrong. Have you watched Heartcatch yet? It’s really good.

Anyway, I’ll let the rest of the cosplay speak for itself, though keep in mind that this certainly isn’t an accurate representation of all of the cosplay at AX2012, merely what I photographed.

Final Thoughts

So there went my first Anime Expo. If I had to do it over again, I probably would’ve found a better medium between panels and autographs, and I would’ve definitely tried to see more faces. Also, the Kinokuniya in LA is definitely better than the one in NYC.