I’ve recently begun a new article series over at Apartment 507 where I review Japan-only manga apps. This time I’m looking at the Detective Conan app, which (surprise!) is dedicated to Detective Conan manga.
If you’re a fan of Detective Conan, check it out. You can buy Japanese iTunes cards at Apartment 507, which will help you make purchases through the app.
I realized that I’ve been giving the wrong name for the main guy. It’s Hayato, not Shuuto, and I somehow missed that despite it being written clearly in the very beginning of Chapter 1. Sorry about that.
I’ve since gone back and changed the previous chapter review. I hope this hasn’t impacted your enjoyment of this series or my reviews!
Also, a better translation of this title might be Thou Shalt Not xxx. It’s the same structure used in Yosano Akiko’s “Thou Shalt Not Die” power in Bungou Stray Dogs. Maybe I’ll call it that from now on, maybe not. What do you think?
Summary
In Chapter 1 we got to see the world from Hayato’s point of view, and Chapter 2 was a Nobuko’s-eye view. This time, it’s primarily from their other close friend that we’ve seen in previous chapters, Natsumi.
Chapter 3 mainly takes place in the past, when Hayato and Natsumi were classmates in elementary school. They’re putting on a play about a prince (Hayato) and multiple princesses, but Natsumi gets picked on by the other girls for being poor and not very “princess-like.” Hayato, being the naturally good guy, defends Natsumi, including being wiling to not participate in the play. Natsumi develops a crush on Hayato, and is inspired to start acting thanks to him, but learns the painful truth from day 1 that his heart belongs to Nobuko.
Back in the present of the main narrative, it’s revealed that this chapter takes place between Chapters 1 and 2, after Hayato first confessed to Nobuko. Natsumi quietly asks if Hayato’s feelings could possibly be love, given how young he was at the time. However, Natsumi senses her younger self telling her something important: Natsumi was only a kid when she first noticed Hayato, and she knows those emotions are genuine.
A Slowly Expanding Cast
I wondered last month to what extent Kimi Nakare would begin to fill in its side characters, and the process has already begun. What I perhaps didn’t expect (though in hindsight maybe I should have) is that there would be a love triangle. I guess it’s maybe technically not a triangle depending on how you define it (Hayato only has eyes for Nobuko), though it’s also looking not to be as much about the exclusive world between Hayato and Nobuko as I first thought. I am a little apprehensive because I know how heavy and meandering love triangle manga can get, but I have faith in the creator Ohachimachi Hato’s ability to weave an interesting tale with endearing characters.
Who Will You Kiss? Me or That Girl?
Nevertheless, the chain of emotions is established, but one interesting wrinkle to this tried-and-true formula is that Natsumi is clearly the more attractive of the two girls. Whether she’s supposed to be relatively plain in the mold of the typical shoujo protagonist, or she’s supposed to be extremely beautiful isn’t entirely clear (were the girls who picked on her jealous or just snotty brats?), but she has all the features typically desired in a girl in manga. Natsumi is quiet, has a good heart, and just comes across as “better girlfriend” material. And yet, she’s the one on the backfoot, because Hayato is just enraptured with Nobuko.
It’s not unusual for the third girl in the love triangle to be at a disadvantage because of personality or because there’s some kind of charisma that the main girl possesses, but it’s also usually not to this extent. There might be some similarities to Kimi ni Todoke, but Natsumi is no Kurumizawa Ume, and Nobuko is two steps beyond the eccentricities of Kuronouma Sawako. Just the fact that Nobuko’s only appearance in this chapter is in the form of a comical rendering just pushes home the idea that Natsumi is competing with a force perhaps unlike any other in romance manga.
Last Thoughts
This is definitely not the Chapter 3 I was expecting. While I worry about love triangles a bit, I’m also looking forward to where the manga goes from here.
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In many big anime/manga stores in Japan, there are signed images from notable manga authors. Often times, you’re not allowed to photograph them, so they can’t really be shared with the rest of the world. One notable exception is Wonderland in Osaka’s Den Den Town (sort of the Kansai equivalent of Akihabara), where employees gave me free rein.
This gallery includes a number of highlights from Wonderland, so see if you can spot your favorites. However, it doesn’t show all of the ones at the store. If you have the chance, go there in person to see the rest!
By the way, the image above is by Nihonbashi Yoko, who I recently discovered through the manga Shoujo Fight. What a coincidence!
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I’m trying to do lists my way! My latest post on Apartment 507 features five pieces of seemingly generic but I think useful advice for those who want to get more into anime/manga (or want to revive their lost interest) but feel lost doing so. Tell me what you think, and even throw in some tips yourself because this certainly isn’t a closed list.
I recently attended “Love Live! Sukufesu Kanshasai 2016″ in Japan, and I managed to get an extra bag of freebies. Now, I want to give it away to my readers.
All you have to do is show why your favorite Love Live! character and why they’re your favorite. Write an essay, take a photo, draw fanart, make videos, I’m leaving it up to you to express your love! They don’t even have to be a main character; moms and alpacas are valid too! And no, picking Hanayo won’t give you a higher chance either. I want to see and feel your passion, not just agree with my tastes.
Submissions can be emailed to ogimaniax at gmail dot com, and are due by July 9, 2016 11:59pm EST.
However, as thanks for being my patrons (and many of you have been with me since the beginning), I am prioritizing my Patreon supporters. If you’re one of my patrons, you will have a much higher chance of winning the prize; however, it’s not impossible to get it otherwise.
I want to emphasize that this is not an attempt to get more Patreon supporters. I merely want to thank my patrons for supporting me. If you’ve been thinking about joining the Ogiue Maniax Patreon for other reasons (perhaps you enjoy my writing), then by all means go ahead. Also, pledging more does not give you a higher chance of winning. You can be pledging at 1 cent or 1 million dollars and you would have the same chance as every other patron.
By the way, one of the items in the swag bag is an unopened card from the Love Live! Card Game. I’ve already opened mine, and it’s a Maki card. I know a lot of people are Maki fans, so if you want that one instead just tell me and I can switch them no problem.
Good luck, and may the Loveliest, Liveliest fan win!
In my most recent trip to Japan, I attended two different Love Live! events in one day. The first was “Bokura no Love Live! 12,” a doujin event. The second was “Love Live! Sukufesu Kanshasai 2016″ (School Idol Festival Thanksgiving 2016) in Ikebukuro, an official event held in celebration of the School Idol Festival game. The contrast between an event that revels in fan expression and one that presents everything in an official capacity is interesting to me, because I think it shows both the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to fandom.
Though I had the opportunity to take a look at both, a question occurred to me as I was traveling from one to the other: if I could only go to one, which one would I choose? I took this from the perspective of a Koizumi Hanayo fan. At the doujin event, I could buy Hanayo-dedicated fan comics from people I knew were fans of Hanayo as much as I am (if not more!). I found a bunch of amazing comics and parody works, and I even got a couple of amazing tote bags that might be my favorite purchases of my entire Japan trip. There’s sort of an interesting magic to buying things in person that get lose with just ordering online, and it’s enhanced when you know the person behind the table put their heart and soul into it. Overall, it was one of the best highlights of my trip to Japan.
However, doujinshi are, of course, not official portrayals of the characters. This is in many ways the advantage of fanart, fanfiction, etc., but what’s also clear is that the fan material feeds off of the official presentation. Much for the art at “Bokura no Love Live! 12” was clearly inspired by the images found in magazines, the mobile game, and everywhere else. There is a kind of power to official merchandise because it presents the characters at their best, but it’s also limiting because they can’t stray too far off from what is deemed “okay.”
For example, the shirts being sold at “Thanksgiving 2016” were all prints of existing art that could be found in lots of places, while the merchandise sold at “Bokura no Love Live! 12” felt a little more unique because they weren’t officially sanctioned images slapped onto clothing. That’s not to say official Love Live! merchandise has to look blunt and straightforward (I actually also got a swank Love Live! polo shirt just the day before these events), but they seem to lean in that direction.
Another instance of the difference between events has to do with yuri and pairings. Love Live! encourages yuri to a certain degree, but has to keep it implicit because it’s supposed to appeal to all sorts of people (and indeed I saw everything from little girls to businessmen at Thanksgiving 2016). A doujin event, on the other hand, can go as explicit as possible in more ways than one, and can even merge the innocent with the racy and have them all exist in one place. Characters can be drawn to fit the whims of the artists to a greater degree with the doujinshi, but they necessarily must feed off the source material at least to a certain extent. Nico/Maki doujinshi can go the distance, but the dynamic between them is rendered through the anime, the game, and other canon resources.
Official events also have resources on their side. One of the highlights of “Sukufesu Kanshasai 2016” was a live School Idol Festival game where nine different people played simultaneously, each one commanding one of the buttons by stepping on them. The cards being used where all nine of the μ’s girls, but with special outfits for the event, and they were surrounded in a mall by throngs of fans dancing and singing along. A doujin event really couldn’t pull that off to the same capacity, nor could they be the place to get official Love Live! Final μ’s Concert shirts, which were a popular item at both events that granted legitimacy to the wearer’s fandom.
The division between official and unofficial events can be rather gray because of how the two feed into each other. The output of fans, albeit more often in the form of monetary purchases, informs the official companies responsible for Love Live! just what the fans are into. The fans, as mentioned, take inspiration from the official material, and convert it, thus spreading the joy of Love Live! further.
It’s hard to choose between the two when both have so much merit, but ultimately I think I would have gone for the doujin event just so I could have that experience of walking around and buying fan-made works. It’s sort of the difference between attending fan panels and official panels at conventions. The official panels are where you can meet the creators, but many times they’re curated and micromanaged heavily, whereas doujinshi and fan panels can stray from the “company line” so to speak. This makes them, in my opinion, overall more interesting, but I’m well aware that all of the Hanayo rice memes required the source material to emphasize it in the most amusing ways.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is actually a little card found in the bag of freebies from Thanksgiving 2016 which is a drawing of some of the School Idol Festival-original girls. Unlike The iDOLM@STER, there is a clear stratification between the main girls (be they μ’s or their successors, the new group Aqours), who are considered “Rare Cards,” as opposed to the “Normal Card” girls that are basically fodder for the former. Here, even at this official event was a small token of appreciation for the lesser idols, and a part of me wishes that someone, be they official creators or doujinshi creators, would take the next step and flesh them out. The result would be different on either side, but both would provide value in their own ways.
PS: I mentioned a freebie bag for “Love Live! Sukufesu Kanshasai 2016,” and I happen to have an extra one. I’ll be holding a contest soon to determine the winner, so stay tuned!
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There’s a new Cardcaptor Sakura manga in town—Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Saga—and I practically tripped over myself in excitement to get it. The series is one of my favorite anime and manga of all time, and its charming characters, light yet dramatic story, and cute aesthetic make it a classic of the magical girl genre. But it’s been a long time since we last saw Kinomoto Sakura and the rest of the cast proper (meaning no weird Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle alternates!), and CLAMP, the creators of Cardcaptor Sakura, have also changed a lot since the late 90s when the original manga debuted.
Thus, while reading I had two questions in mind: in what ways does this new iteration try to capture the old CCS charm, and to what extent does it reflect a more contemporary sensibility?
The Story of Cardcaptor Sakura
The original Cardcaptor Sakura follows Kinomoto Sakura, a 10-year-old girl who is tasked with collecting mystical cards known as Clow Cards. As she retrieves them, the cards give her magical abilities such as flight, and command over the elements. Eventually obtaining all of them, Sakura soon discovers that she must also transform them into her very own “Sakura Cards” and become their new master. After much hardship (and a developing romance between her and Chinese rival/friend Li Shaoran), she succeeds, leaving her to be quite possibly the most powerful magician on Earth.
The Clear Card Saga takes place during the same timeframe as the epilogue of the original manga, when Sakura is in middle school and reunites with Shaoran, who has transferred back from Hong Kong so they could attend school together. In this chapter, we see many familiar faces, including Sakura’s family, her best friend (in fact the best friend in all of anime and manga) Tomoyo, and her magical guardians, Kero and Yukito. The first chapter is mainly there to re-introduce the cast and to set up a reason for Sakura to take up her magic wand once more, and in that respect it is a welcome homecoming.
No Pasta
One of the most immediately notable aspects of the new series is that it lacks any signs of current CLAMP’s “noodle people” style that has permeated their works over the past decade and change, wherein characters have unusually long and distended-looking proportions. All aspects of the series seem to be geared towards reviving the original Cardcaptor Sakura look, albeit refined with many more years of experience.
One Card Girl
In one scene, Sakura mentions that she hasn’t had to use magic in a long time, and I find it to be a striking moment for a couple of reasons. First, while it’s impossible forget that Sakura is indeed a magical girl series, I almost didn’t notice that there was little mention of magic prior to her staring fondly at her old wand. Cardcaptor Sakura is well grounded not just in its fantastic elements but also its human relationships (both platonic and otherwise), and the series draws much of its strength from them. Second, while she doesn’t state it herself, she can indeed be argued to be the strongest magician there is, but she still behaves like an innocent young girl with a heart full of love and energy. Would it be strange to compare her to Saitama from One Punch Man?
Tomoyo: Return of the Queen
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that, as fond as I am of Sakura herself, Daidouji Tomoyo is the one I’ve been most looking forward to seeing again. For years, she was my favorite anime and manga character, and it actually wasn’t until I discovered Ogiue that this changed. Even so, Tomoyo is still my #2 because of her warm heart, support of Sakura, and series of minor eccentricities. Her grand return is nothing short of spectacular, and I look forward to seeing more of her and her ridiculous wealth (and bodyguards).
Her role in this first chapter is mainly to get Sakura to blush profusely as she takes candid video of Sakura reuniting with Shaoran. Tomoyo is the kind of person who wouldn’t mind just recording Sakura in her daily life, but I’m confident that she’s going to be the most excited of all that Sakura’s going to have to sling some magic again. I can just picture the inevitable stars in her eyes in the coming chapters.
Another interesting point concerning Tomoyo is that she’s no longer in the same class as Sakura. While most of the old Tomoeda Elementary crew has gone on to Tomoeda Middle School, many of them have been split up into different classes. It’s actually a common technique to try and mix things up in a number of series that take place in school.
This means that Tomoyo will possibly be interacting much more with other characters. While it’s not like Tomoyo only ever showed up when Sakura was around, or didn’t talk to other characters on her own, it’s still a significant shift in the dynamics of interaction in Cardcaptor Sakura.
A Premonition for the Future
I want to mention that I probably won’t be chapter reviewing this new Cardcaptor Sakura just because I’m already doing two different series now (Genshiken and Kimi Nakare), and I think three series starts to be a bit too much. However, I might make a post every month or two as a way to look in and see how everything’s going.
Thus far, it’s a great start, and even if this chapter mostly treads familiar territory it does so in a way that gives me faith that the series will turn out well.
As a final side note, there’s a character poll at the beginning of this issue of Nakayoshi, to vote for who should appear on the cover, and Sakura is #2. While there’s no indication that placement equals popularity, I have to wonder, or perhaps hope. After all, #3 is Momoka, the morally bankrupt protagonist from Sabagebu!
If the young readers of Nakayoshi are fans of Momoka, I am both looking forward to and dreading the future. Sakura might be a safer bet overall, though I wonder if she is still as timeless as she seems.
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To celebrate its 25th anniversary, a new Super Robot Wars game is coming out in 2017. As is tradition, a number of new series are debuting, including Brave Express Might Gaine, Cross Ange, and what looks to be more Full Metal Panic! now based on either the new upcoming anime or its light novel source material. However, the biggest surprise of all has to be the debut of Space Battleship Yamato into the storied giant robot crossover video game series.
The main surprise, of course, is that Space Battleship Yamato 2199 isn’t a giant robot series. While other entries have in the past stretched the definition of giant robots, from Heroman to Juushin Liger, and others have source material in games other other media (notably the Hatsune Miku Fei-Yen), Yamato is the first to just flat out not be a robot series.
While this is the sort of exception that can get fans in a tizzy (“Is nothing sacred?!”), I think Yamato more or less gets a free pass as one of the most influential science fiction anime of all time. Its original staff was comprised of some of the luminaries of mecha anime (Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, Ishiguro Noboru, and more), and the idea of the “space opera” has had a long reach throughout Japanese pop culture history.
With this news, a new hashtag has appeared on Japanese Twitter:
It’s resulted in some iinteresting entries.
https://twitter.com/penguin897/status/739077171944165376
https://twitter.com/Nazo_no_Otaku/status/739049936243687424
The other big surprise is that Super Robot Wars V will come with subtitles in Chinese, Korean, and English. However, due to licensing, the chance of a true English release is kind of slim.
What do you think should be in Super Robot Wars? How far can the definition of mecha be stretched?
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NOTE: This is the second of my paid posts, where I have been asked to discuss the use of anime character mascots to promote a certain service, company, or idea. As stated in my previous entry, I have not used the products in question, and can neither endorse or turn people away from them. Rather, I am writing to go in depth on the use of anime mascots, and to help spotlight the idea of their usage in general.
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11 years ago, I made my first trip to Japan to study abroad. As I walked through the downtown area of my city for the first time, I noticed a branch of Mizuho Bank, the oldest bank in Japan. However, it wasn’t anything lofty like history that made Mizuho Bank stand out to me. Rather, it was the simple fact that it shared a name with Kazami Mizuho, the teacher from Onegai Teacher.
Because I was merely an exchange student, I didn’t open up a Japanese bank account, but I know I would have entertained the notion of going with Mizuho Bank just because of that tenuous anime connection. As an aside, it’s that sort of thinking that made me realize that I was most certainly an “otaku” by even the strictest of definitions.
Are enough people of a similar mind? Would they base their financial choices on a love of anime and its characters beyond simply spending money on merchandise? The creation of Card Loan Girls, a site dedicated to introducing different types of credit card loans in the form of anime girls, contends that this is more than a mere possibility.
While Hikkoshi More goes with a simpler and less flashy design for its mascots, Card Loan Girls is straight up “anime as hell.” The girls emphasize cute elements with character designs that wouldn’t be out of place in a light novel or visual novel, and are knee-deep in their emphasis on kyara: a focus on character design that tries to convey a sense of liveliness purely through visual presentation.
Orix Bank’s Orihara Komugi
What’s notable about the Card Loan Girls is that they all represent real banks. From Orix (sponsor of the Orix Buffaloes baseball team) to Mobit, actual companies are behind this. Sure enough, Mizuho Bank is there too. Despite my expectations, its mascot is not an attractive teacher but instead a petite student named Kingami Eira who looks something like a cat girl or fox spirit.
Mizuho Bank’s Kingami Eira
I believe that Eira’s design is supposed to invoke some kind of old spirit to go in line with the fact that Mizuho Bank is Japan’s oldest bank, and in that respect it certainly got my attention. I mean, I didn’t even know that factoid about Mizuho until I clicked on Eira’s profile page. There are many other bits of trivia throughout the site, and it potentially inspires people to learn about these banks in a manner similar to how Hetalia fans really delve deep into history. In many cases, these sorts of cute girls-as-things media franchises/campaigns try to incorporate and interpret as much actual detail into the characters’ designs (like larger guns equaling larger chests in Kantai Collection), but I simply don’t know enough about Japanese banks to actually figure that out.
Mobit’s Hino Saori
As for the credit card loan information itself, Card Loan Girls doesn’t appear to be pushing any one bank over the others. Each girl is accompanied with a long list of important information, such as who can borrow and what the interest rates are. While Mobit’s Hino Saori is the most popular according to the site, I can’t say for sure why that’s the case. Are people voting for her because they think Mobit offers the best loans, or are they attracted to her tomboy design? Given the strength of anime mascot marketing in Japan, I think it’s probably more the latter, but the fact that Saori represents an online-only loan company that seems perfect for today’s modern otaku might mean it’s actually a mix of the two worlds.
I’d like to end with a couple of questions. For those living in Japan, would you pick your credit card loan based on Card Loan Girls? For those living elsewhere, what do you think of the idea of having something as far from entertainment as possible as a loan being anthropomorphized into cute young girls? Is it the kind of marketing you can get behind, or is it perhaps a step too far?
For my seventh Love Live! Character Spotlight series I’ve written about its central heroine, Kousaka Honoka.
That means there are only two more left: Toujou Nozomi, and of course Koizumi Hanayo.
In this one, I compare Honoka to John Cena, which I think is pretty appropriate.
OGIUE MANIAX 