History of Art: MANGA, JAPANESE COMICS

The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste

Pin-Up Art

"The house of sleep" (Erotica in Art)

"The Second Temple of Beauty" (Nude in Art of the 20th century)

Fine Art Photography
Pin-Up Photography
Vintage Photography Gallery
Marilyn Monroe - American symbol

Fantastic Art

Kitsch, velvet painting, provocative art

Dreamland Japan. Writings on Modern Manga (by Frederik L. Schodt)
Manga! Japanese Comics. Antology of Modern Manga

Alchemy & Mysticism. The Hermetic Cabinet (by Alexander Roob)

Monalisamania
"Rubenesque" proportions

MANGA, JAPANESE COMICS

& GRAPHIC NOVELS

Dreamland Japan. Writings on Modern Manga

(by Frederik L. Schodt)

Dreamland Japan. Writings on Modern Manga

(by Frederik L. Schodt)

ENTER THE ID

In 1995, FORMER JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER KI1CHI MIYAZAWA began serializing a column of his opinions, not in a newspaper or newsmagazine, but in the manga magazine Big Comic Spirits. A respected seventy-five-year-old politician and thinker, Miyazawa probably rarely reads comics, but the reason he chose a manga magazine to air his views is clear. Big Comic Spirits is read by nearly 1.4 million young salarymen and potential voters each week. In today's Japan, manga magazines are one of the most effective ways to reach a mass audience and influence public opinion. Japan is the first nation in the world to accord "comic books"—originally a "humorous" form of entertainment mainly for young people—nearly the same social status as novels and films. Indeed, Japan is awash in manga. According to the Research Institute for Publications, of all the books and magazines actually sold in Japan in 1995 (minus returns, in other words), manga comprised nearly 40 percent of the total.

Such industry statistics are indeed impressive, even frightening, but they hardly represent the entire picture or the true number of manga being read in Japan. There were 2.3 billion manga books and magazines produced in 1995, and nearly 1.9 billion actually sold, or over 15 for every man, woman, and child in Japan. Given the wild currency fluctuations of that year, the value of all comics produced ranged from U.S.$7-9 billion (a sum twice the GDP of Iceland), while those actually sold were worth $6-7 billion—an annual expenditure of over $50 for every person in Japan. Yet this does not include the millions of dojinshi, or amateur manga publications, that do not circulate in regular distribution channels. Nor does it reflect the fact that non-manga magazines for adults, which used to be all text and pictures, now devote more and more pages to serialized manga stories. Finally, it does not take into account the popular practice of mawashi-yomi, of one manga being passed around and read by many people.

Statistics also do not indicate the huge influence manga have on Japanese society. Manga today are a type of "meta media" at the core of a giant fantasy machine. A production cycle typically begins with a story serialized in a weekly, biweekly, monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly magazine. The story, if successful, is then compiled into a series of paperbacks and deluxe hardback books, then produced as an animated series for television, and then made into a theatrical feature. For a particularly popular or long-running series, the cycle may be repeated several times. One manga story thus becomes fuel not just for the world' largest animation industry, but for a burgeoning business in manga-inspired music CDs, character-licensed toys, stationery, video games, operas, television dramas, live-action films, and even manga-inspired novels.

At Japan's largest and most prestigious publishers it is no secret that sales of manga magazines and books now subsidize a declining commitment to serious literature. Indeed, since manga are read by nearly all ages and classes of people today, references to them permeate Japanese intellectual life at the highest levels, and they are increasingly influencing serious art and literature. It is no exaggeration to say that one cannot understand modern Japan today without having some understanding of the role that manga play in society.

What Are Manga?

What are manga, exactly, and where did they come from? A LITTLE In a nutshell, the modern Japanese manga is a synthesis: BACKGROUND a long Japanese tradition of art that entertains has taken on a physical form imported from the West.

In late 1994 I accompanied several well-known American comics artists to Japan for discussions with their Japanese counterparts. Will Eisner, the pioneer and reigning dean of American comic books, was along, and he was clearly shocked and puzzled at how popular comics are in Japan. After all, he himself had struggled long and hard to gain more recognition for comics in his own country. Yet when he took a long look at a display of 19th-century illustrated humor books in the Edo-Tokyo Museum, his face lit up in a satori-like realization of why Japanese so love comics: They always have.

Japanese people have had a long love affair with art (especially monochrome line drawings) that is fantastic, humorous, erotic, and sometimes violent. One of the most famous examples is the hilarious Chojugiga, or "Animal Scrolls," a 12th-century satire on the clergy and nobility, said to be by a Buddhist priest named Toba. Today's manga magazines and books, however, also have direct links to two types of entertaining picture books from the 18th and early 19th centuries—toba-e "Toba pictures," after the author of the "Animal Scrolls") and kibyoshi, or "yellow-jacket books." These were mass produced using woodblock printing and a division of labor not unlike the production system used by manga artists and their assistants today. Often issued in a series, again like today's manga, they were beloved by townspeople in cities such as Osaka and Edo (today's Tokyo). In a very real sense, they were the world's first comic books.

The physical form of modern manga—the sequential panels with word balloons arranged on a page to tell a story—came from the United States at the turn of the century, when American newspaper comic strips like George McManus's Bringing Up Father were imported. But unlike the United States, where slim magazines called "comic books" were first compiled in the 1930s from "comic strips" in newspapers, in prewar Japan the first real "comic books" for children were hardback books compiled from "comic strips" serialized in fat, illustrated monthly magazines for boys and girls. This pattern continues today in Japan; individual manga stories are usually first serialized along with many other stories in omnibus-style manga magazines and then compiled into their own paperback and hardback books.

The two predominant and most distinctive forms of comics in the world today are those of America and Japan; minor variations on both are found in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Although they have an essentially similar format, Japanese and American comics have developed into two very different art forms. Other than the fact that manga are read "backward" because of the way the Japanese language is written, the most striking difference is size. American comic books are usually between 30 and 50 pages long, contain one serialized story, and are published monthly But manga magazines, many of which are issued weekly, often have 400 pages and contain twenty serialized and concluding stories (some magazines have 1,000 pages and over forty stories); when an individual story is compiled into a series of paperbacks it may take up fifty or more volumes of over 250 pages each.

Prices of manga are also extraordinarily low, even given the dollar's gutted value versus the yen in late 1995. Where a typical 32-page U.S. comic book (with many ads) cost over $2, a 400-page manga magazine rarely cost more than $3-4. On a per-page basis, therefore, the manga was six times cheaper than the U.S. comic book, a miracle made possible by the economies of scale Japanese publishers enjoy and by the use of low-quality recycled paper and mainly monochrome printing.

Manga magazines are not intended to last long, or even to be kept. Most are tossed in the trash can after a quick read, or recycled. Stories that are popular, however, are preserved by being compiled into paperback and hardback editions; most of the best comics in Japan— even those from forty years ago—are available in such permanent editions at a very reasonable price. As a result, Japan has largely been free of the disease from which American comics suffer: speculation. Collectors dominate the American mainstream comics market, and they are more likely to poly-bag their purchases and place them in a drawer than read them, thus driving up the price of both old and new comics. In 1995, one collector paid $137,500 for a copy of Action Comics No. 1, which first introduced Superman. As Toren Smith, a packager of Japanese comics in the U.S., notes, alluding to a company that produces coins especially for the collectors market, "many American comic book publishers have become the equivalent of the Franklin mint."

Unlike mainstream American and European comics, which are richly colored, most manga are monochrome, except for the cover and a few inside pages. But this is no handicap when it comes to artistic expression. On the contrary, some manga artists have elevated line drawing to new aesthetic heights and developed new conventions to convey depth and speed with lines and shading. Using the "less-is-more" philosophy of traditional Japanese brush painting, many artists have learned to convey subtle emotions with a minimum of effort; an arched eyebrow, a downturned face, or a hand scratching the back of the head can all speak paragraphs. And since manga today are increasingly mass produced, artists can avail themselves of many new tools for quickly detailing monochrome backgrounds. The copy machine, for example, is often used by artists at high-contrast to incorporate photographs into backgrounds (in recent years some photographers have filed claims against artists for "appropriating" their images in this fashion). Another modern-day tool is "screen tones"—ready-to-use, commercially available patterned sheets that can be applied on a page to instantly create shadings and texture. Artists around the world use screen tones, but Japanese artists have access to such a variety that their overseas counterparts can only drool with envy. There are even screen tones for ready-made backgrounds of city- and seascapes. For those who prefer to draw by hand, there are special manga "background catalogs" with carefully rendered line drawings (available for copying) of the interiors of school classrooms, office rooms, train stations, restaurants, and other popular settings.

Still, many manga are quite poorly drawn by American and European standards. At the meetings held in 1994 between several noted American and Japanese comics artists, the Japanese boasted of the superiority of their form of comics—until it came to artwork, at which point they all looked rather sheepish and unanimously agreed that they could never match the draftsmanship of their Western counterparts.

The real hallmark of manga is storytelling and character development. After World War II, a single artist— Osamu Tezuka—helped revolutionize the art of comics in Japan by decompressing story lines. Influenced by American animation in particular, instead of using ten or twenty pages to tell a story as had been common before, Tezuka began drawing novelistic manga that were hundreds, even thousands of pages long, and he incorporated different perspectives and visual effects—what came to be called "cinematic techniques." Other artists in America, such as Will Eisner, had employed cameralike effects a decade earlier, but combining this technique with the decompression of story lines was new.

The result was a form of comics that has far fewer words than its American or European counterpart and that uses far more frames and pages to depict an action or a thought. If an American comic book might use a single panel with word balloons and narration to show how Superman once rescued Lois Lane in the past, the Japanese version might use ten pages and no words. (Of course, the monochrome printing, cheap paper, and the enormous economies of scale enjoyed by Japanese industry also make it economically possible for artists to do this.)

Many American artists have been heavily influenced by Japanese manga in recent years, so that some of the differences between the two art forms have begun to erode. But if one were to make a gross generalization, it be that until recently many mainstream American comics still resembled illustrated narratives, whereas Japanese manga were a visualized narrative with a few words tossed in for effect.

The cinematic style enables manga artists to develop their story lines and characters with more complexity and psychological and emotional depth. Like good film directors, they can focus reader attention on the minutia of daily life—on scenes of leaves falling from a tree, or steam rising from a bowl of hot noodles, or even the pregnant pauses in a conversation—and evoke associations and memories that are deeply moving. Japanese comics are perhaps unique in the world in that it is not unusual to hear fans talk about weeping over favorite scenes.

The cinematic style also allows manga to be far more iconographic than comics in America and Europe. Individual illustrations don't have to be particularly well-executed as long as they fulfill their basic role of conveying enough information to maintain the flow of the story. And why should they be? A young American or European fan of comics may spend minutes admiring the artwork on each page of his or her favorite comic, but not the Japanese manga fan. As I wrote in 1983, to the amazement of many in the U.S. comics industry, a 320-page manga magazine is often read in twenty minutes, at a speed of 3.75 seconds per page. In this context, manga are merely another "language," and the panels and pages are but another type of "words" adhering to a unique grammar. Japanese say that reading manga is almost like reading Japanese itself. This makes sense, for manga pictures are not entirely unlike Japanese ideograms, which are themselves sometimes a type of "cartoon," or a streamlined visual representation of reality.

Japanese manga offer far more visual diversity than mainstream American comics, which are still shackled by the Greek tradition of depicting the human form and still reveal an obsession with muscled males and full-figured females. Only in American "underground comics" or "independents" can one find anything approaching the eccentricity of art styles that exists in Japan—where humans may be depicted in both realistic and nonrealistic styles in the same story, with both "cartoony" and "serious" backgrounds.

The diversity of manga extends to subject matter. American and European comics long ago began dealing with very serious themes, thus making the word "comic book" a gross misnomer {leading some to use the term "graphic novel" instead). Nonetheless, despite many fine experiments, the bulk of American material is still for young males and of the superhero ilk. In Japan, however, there are stories about nearly every imaginable subject.

There are manga that rival the best in literature. There are soft-core and hard-core porn tales for both men and , women. There are stories about the problems of hierarchical relationships in boring office jobs or about the spiritual rewards of selling discount cameras in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. A true mass medium, manga provide something for both genders, for nearly every age group, and for nearly any taste.

Ultimately, however, the real triumph of Japanese manga lies in their celebration of the ordinary. As American comic artist Brian Stelfreeze once commented to me, "Comics in the United States have become such a caricature. You have to have incredible people doing incredible things, but in Japan it seems like the most popular comics are the comics of normal people doing normal things."

Yet along with this celebration of the ordinary is the bone-crushing reality that the vast majority of manga border on trash. Even the good stories tend to run out of energy after a while. The pressures of mass production on artists, and the greed of publishers who wish to milk their cash cows dry, often result in watered-down stories being serialized far too long.

In the marketplace manga are treated almost the same as any other medium in Japan, but artistically they still carry the stigma of having once been an inexpensive form of entertainment for children. They are not taken quite as seriously. Some manga artists embark on their creative journeys with hopes of becoming the Tolstoy or Kawabata of manga, but most don't. Most start out wishing merely to entertain their audiences, and themselves, and possibly become rich. In the process they face far less scrutiny than serious novelists or filmmakers—"artists" in other media. (There are manga critics in Japan, but perhaps because the public still thinks of manga as a disposable commodity, nearly all of the critics support themselves with other jobs.) Lack of scrutiny has led to relentless pandering to the lowbrow tastes of readers and a more than occasional glorification of sex and violence. Another result, however, is an unselfconscious freedom of expression and a refreshing creativity.

Manga are much easier to create than other forms of entertainment. Writers usually need education along with language skills. Filmmakers need social skills, enormous amounts of money, and a small army of production people. Successful manga artists may form a company and hire over a dozen assistants, a manager, a photographer, and a chauffeur, but the entry-level requirements for the profession consist mainly of good ideas, a certain degree of physical and intellectual stamina, and pens, pencils, and paper. It isn't necessary to be a particularly good artist.

As a medium of expression, manga thus exist in a niche somewhere between film, records, novels, and television. Manga are usually low-calorie, light entertainment—something to read in a free moment before work or cracking the books to prepare for an exam, or while riding a train home, getting a permanent at the beauty parlor, slurping a bowl of noodles, or waiting for a friend in a coffee shop. They are highly portable, and—not to be overlooked in today's crowded Japan—they provide a silent activity that doesn't bother others.

Why Read Manga?

For a translator, or an interpreter, or any nonnative speaker who aspires to true fluency in spoken Japanese, reading manga is one of the best ways to keep up with the many changes that are constantly occurring in the Japanese language. The language in manga is alive and closer to the "street" than one finds in other printed media, and it is a source of many new expressions. Because of their visual nature, manga can also be an excellent language-learning resource for beginning students of Japanese. In what is surely one of the most interesting experiments in American publishing in recent years, in 1990 VaughanSimmons, an American in Atlanta, Georgia, took this idea to its logical conclusion and began publishing Mangajin, a magazine that uses manga with English explanations to teach Japanese language and culture; when readers tire of struggling with unfamiliar kanji characters, they can relax and enjoy the English explanations or the pictures.

But there is an even more important reason to read manga. One of the most confusing aspects of Japanese society for foreigners is the dichotomy that exists in public discourse between tatemae, or "surface images and intentions," and honne, or "true feelings and intentions." This custom of tailoring one's statements or actions to the situation exists in nearly all societies, but in ultra-crowded Japan, especially, it helps people harmonize with others and compartmentalize their public and private selves. It is also one of the main reasons Japanese people constantly feel they are "misunderstood" by foreigners, and—conversely—that foreigners often find Japanese people somewhat "inscrutable."

Reading manga does not necessarily make Japan more "scrutable," but it definitely takes the lid off many otherwise opaque aspects of its society. In the beginning, most non-Japanese (and even the few Japanese who don't normally read comics) find manga confusing. No matter how well translated, many are still very "Japanese" in story, visual style, and pacing. Pictures are intrinsically linked with verbal jokes and even puns. Sometimes characters seem to have nothing but dots in their word balloons, or to be gazing incessantly at horizons or making poignant gestures. Lecherous male characters suddenly develop nosebleeds. Plots seem to proceed in a rather roundabout way. Why don't they just get to the point? The answer, of course, is that manga are written and drawn by artists thinking in Japanese, not English, so it can take a non-Japanese a little more work and a little more patience to read them, even in translated form. A new visual and written vocabulary must be learned. Besides, manga are hardly a direct representation of reality. Most stories-even if they depict normal people doing normal things, or impart hard information on history or the tax code—at their core are pure, often outrageous fantasy.

But once the new "vocabulary" and "grammar" have been learned, it soon becomes clear that manga represent an extremely unfiltered view of the inner workings of their creators' minds. This is because manga are relatively free of the massive editing and "committee"-style production used in other media like film, magazines, and television. Even in American mainstream comics, the norm is to have a stable of artists, Ietterers, inkers, and scenario writers all under the control of the publisher. In Japan, a single artist might employ many assistants and act as a sort of "director," but he of she is usually at the core of the production process and retains control over the rights to the material created. That artists are not necessarily highly educated and deal frequently in plain subject matter only heightens the sense that manga offer the reader an extremely raw and personal view of the world.

Thus, of the more than 2 billion manga produced each year, the vast majority have a dreamlike quality. They speak to people's hopes, and fears. They are where stressed-out modern urbanites daily work out their neuroses and their frustrations. Viewed in their totality, the phenomenal number of stories produced is like the constant chatter of the collective unconscious—an articulation of the dream world. Reading manga is like peering into the unvarnished, unretouched reality of the Japanese mind.

Those who think that seeing beyond the surface or tatemae level of Japanese culture has relevance only to Japanophiles or language students probably don't realize just how much influence Japan is exerting over our daily lives today, or how deep that influence goes. Manga and anime, in particular, have permeated into the bastion of American civilization known as "pop culture" and have slowly wormed their way into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world. Subtle and not-so-subtle references to both manga and anime appear with increasing frequency in major Hollywood films, in rock music videos, and in the work of artists. They may even be affecting our taste in colors. As the New York Times noted in an October 3, 1995 article, prominent fashion designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier are increasingly incorporating new, exotic tones such as those found on manga magazine covers. Our children, for that matter, are growing up watching more and more of what we think is domestically produced TV animation but which is actually repackaged Japanese anime with manga roots. Whether in the Americas, Europe, Asia, or Australia, it would behoove us all. therefore, to learn more about the thought processes behind these works. Why was Astro Boy so different from other shows on television in the 1960s? What was the hidden nationalistic theme in Star Blazers'? Who thought up the transforming robot idea? Why did the female characters in the 1995 Sailor Moon series have such big eyes? Learning about manga, and Japanese culture through manga, can provide the answers.

For those who love comics, there is also another reason to read manga, and that is simply to see what can be done with the medium. Japan is the first nation to give the "comic book" format such legitimacy and to test its potential on such a grand scale. Manga are an experiment in progress, and for anyone who has the slightest interest in comics, in new media, in new ways of transmitting information, and in literacy, Japan is a fascinating case study. How far will Japan be able to go in using manga to transmit hard information? How easily will this new medium, once mainly for children, coexist with other forms of information? Will manga replace text-based communication? At this point, only time will tell.

Finally, the best reason of all to read manga is the simplest, and it has nothing to do with learning about Japan or its language or any other sociological gobbledy-gook. Manga are fabulous entertainment!

MODERN MANGA

AT THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM

IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY IT WAS FASHIONABLE FOR WESTERNERS to visit Japan and remark on what an "'odd" place it was. Percival Lowell, who later became a famous astronomer and propagandist for the idea of life on Mars, did just this in an 1888 book called The Soul of the Far East, noting that "we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,—a mirror that shows us our own familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out." Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), Lowell didn't have manga to examine. Like many things in Japanese culture, comics in Japan are both utterly similar to and utterly different from their counterparts in the West. Yet it is precisely where the vectors of "similar" and "different" intersect that there is so much to learn.

What's in a Word?

Almost everyone in Japan refers to comics as "manga," YOU SAY but the English-derived word komikkusu (and even MANGA, "comics" itself) is frequently used in magazine titles and I SAY by industry and media people trying to sound sophisticat-KOMIKKUSU ed. A representative of the Research Institute for Publications, which tracks data on the publishing world in Japan and which always uses komikkusu instead of "manga" in its publications, told me that "manga" had long had a somewhat "unrefined" or "unsophisticated" image and had thus fallen out of favor. But in the near future, he predicted, it would probably become popular again, for magazine editors were already beginning to think that perhaps there had been nothing wrong with it after all.

So, just like their counterparts in the English-speaking world, Japanese people have floundered about trying to find the right term to describe the sequential picture-panels that tell a story. In America, words used include "cartoons," "comic books," "funny books," and "graphic novels," but most people just say "comics"—a true misnomer for an oft-serious medium and a word also used for people who tell jokes for a living. In Japan, simple cartoons have in the past variously been referred to as toba-e ("Toba pictures," named after the monk Toba, who reportedly drew some of the earliest humorous scrolls), giga ("playful pictures"), and ponchi-e ("punch" pictures, after the British "Punch and Judy" and after Punch magazine). The word "manga" was coined in 1814 by the woodblock artist Hokusai, apparently to mean something like "whimsical sketches," but it did not come into wide use to describe sequential art and what we now think of as "comics" until the 20th century. Even then it seems to have been applied quite arbitrarily. It was originally written with the two kanji characters man (which means "involuntary" or "in spite of oneself," with a secondary nuance of "morally corrupt") and ga (which means "pictures"). Technically, "manga" can today mean "caricature," "cartoon," "comic strip," "comic book," and sometimes even "animation," although younger generations invariably use "anime" for the last in the list.

In its vagueness, manga is therefore similar to the English "cartoon." In its implication of something humorous or less than serious, it is similar to "comics." Understandably, many people would rather refer to their favorite medium with a more precise word, one that might also confer more legitimacy on it. One substitute occasionally encountered in Japan today is thus gekiga ("dramatic pictures," equivalent to "graphic novels"). The other is the abovementioned komikkusu, an example of how foreign and especially English words are often used in Japan in place of perfectly good native ones, if for no other reason than that they tend to convey an air of newness and sophistication; often their very opacity provides an additional cachet. That the use of komikkusu creates an international Moebius strip of semantic confusion goes entirely unnoticed. Worse yet, in many circles in Japan. komikkusu specifically means manga books, and not magazines, which are called komikku-shi or manga-zasshi.

Even among industry people in Japan who might use the term komikkusu to sound sophisticated, when talk turns to comics overseas they will frequently revert to saying "manga" to differentiate the Japanese species from its American counterpart. American comics are referred to simply as komikkusu, or ame-komi, a catchy contraction for Amerikan komikkusu. Meanwhile, in the English-speaking world, after a smooth initial introduction, confusion around the word "manga" has been amplified. In the mid-nineties, the London-based firm Manga Entertainment was widely perceived to have attempted to trademark the word "manga" along with its logo, and it persisted in using "manga" to refer to the translated Japanese animation videos it marketed (to differentiate its animation videos from its translated Japanese comics, it referred to the latter in publicity brochures using the awkward redundancy "manga comics"). As of 1995, many fans in Europe were therefore using the word "manga" to refer to Japanese animation, while fans in the Americas used it exclusively to refer to Japanese comics.

For all its flaws and imperfections, the word "manga" will continue to offer many design benefits to illustrators and typesetters. The beautiful complexity of the Japanese writing system makes it possible to write it horizontally from left to right (right to left before World War II) or vertically. In addition to being presented as MM using Sino-Japanese ideograms (kanji), it can be rendered as with a lovely cursive phonetic script called hiragana, as 7Vtl with an angular phonetic script called katakana (usually reserved for foreign words or special effects), and as "MANGA," using the roman alphabet.

The Dojinshi World

I felt like Alice going through the looking glass when I SUPER experienced my first manga fan convention in the spring COMIC CITY of 1994. The trappings of American comic book conventions were there—hordes of fans, booths with people selling comics, and occasional costumes—but nearly everything else was topsy-turvy.

The convention was called Super Comic City 3, and it was held at Tokyo's huge Harumi Trade Center on April 4 and 5. The Tokyo fair is the biggest of a series of Comic City conventions that the sponsor—a for-profit event planning and publishing firm—stages in major Japanese cities throughout the year. It took up five giant exhibition halls and lasted two days. 1 might have become lost if it hadn't been for my able guides, Kan Miyoshi and Mary Kennard, editors from a Japanese publisher and experts on the world of manga conventions.

American comic book conventions are overwhelmingly attended by males, many middle-aged and some potbellied and tattooed. At Super Comic City, however, I had the slightly disorienting but by no means unpleasant experience of being surrounded by tens of thousands of virginal females in their late teens and early twenties. They appeared to make up at least 90 percent of the attendees; most were well-dressed, some even wearing frills and fragrances. But appearances can be deceiving. In the recent past, some of these conventions have been targeted by the police and the media due to the presence on site of some rather racy material; later in 1994, for example, a Comic City convention was shut down after a warning by the police. Fans, understandably, are a little sensitive. Mr. Miyoshi cautioned me about taking close-up photographs. "Many of the kids," he said, "don't want their parents or teachers to know they're here. ..."

A large American comic book convention might have scores of dealers' booths, but inside the vast halls of Harumi there were nearly 18,000 booths. The U.S. comic book market is dominated by male collectors, and dealers usually sell back issues of commercial comics of the male superhero variety. The real buyers (who are mostly adults) often treat their purchases as investments and, rather than read the comics, carefully slip them into plastic bags, hoping they will one day appreciate and be worth thousands of dollars. At Super Comic City conventions, however, the comics being sold are all dojinshi, or "fanzines," created by fans for fans and designed to be read, not collected. The creators are usually members of what are called saakuru, or "circles"—groups of like-minded amateurs who collaborate to create and publish their works. There are said to be over 50,000 manga circles in Japan today.

The dojinshi sold at the conventions consist of a variety of genres, including orijinaru (original works), ani-paro (parodies of popular animation shows), ju-ne mono (serious stories of love between gay males, of the sort pioneered by Ju-ne magazine), and ya-o-i (from the phrase YAma-nashi, Ochi-nashi, Imi-nashi, meaning "no climax, no punchline, no meaning"; playful stories of a nonsensical sort, often taking male characters from popular animation series and depicting them in gay relationships). For males the most popular genres are probably bishojo ("beautiful young girls") and rorikon ("Lolita complex"). Some of the latter material would be regarded as kiddie porn in North America. Most dojinshi are manga, but not all. Some are novels with manga-Iike themes. There are also circles at conventions that market manga-style video games.

The level of organization at Super Comic City 3 was awe-inspiring, illustrating that the dojinshi subculture has become an industry unto itself. Amateurs pool their funds and issue small printruns of their books (ranging from 100 to 6,000 copies) at a level of quality that rivals the mainstream manga industry. Hardbound books with lavish color covers and offset printing are not uncommon. There are thus a wide variety of businesses present at the conventions that specifically support the dojinshi market, including representatives of printing companies and art supply firms. For tired fans with an armload of purchases, delivery companies have trucks and employees standing by outside the halls, waiting to package up the books and deliver them to your home.

To help fans find specific artists and their works more easily in the vastness of Harumi's halls, the convention sponsors issue a 380-page catalog. In addition to maps and ads for suppliers and printers, it is filled with postage-stamp-sized illustrations of the work done by each of the thousands of circles. Since printruns are limited, dojinshi manga sell on a first come, first served basis. Popular ones are quickly snapped up, so fans wait patiently in long lines to purchase books by leading artists. If the lines are too long and snake so far around the halls that it is difficult to see which artist they lead to, the last person in line is expected to hold a placard indicating where it goes, Waiting in lines is time-consuming, so savvy attendees like Mary Kennard—who is one of the few Americans working in this industry in Japan and often buys samples of the best dojinshi for her company—go to the show with a group of friends; before entering the halls they formulate a plan of attack that allows them to cover as many booths as possible in the shortest possible time.

As I wandered around the floors of the convention halls, I was struck by the general mood—it seemed so feminine and genteel. But here and there were pockets of people of a noticeably different disposition. In front of the booths of popular artists of the provocative Lolita-complex genre, noisy crowds of young males rudely jostled each other in line, their sweaty bodies steaming up the air. Elsewhere, males roamed the halls in organized high-tech purchasing gangs. Like packs of predators, they coordinated their movements with wireless headsets and microphones.

Super Comic City is but one of many large manga conventions held throughout the year in Japan today. A single convention may draw over 200,000 fans, making it a sort of manga Woodstock. A world unto itself, the manga convention has become a forum for direct, unself-conscious communication between readers and creators, free from the constraints and pressures of commercialism.

The mother of all manga conventions in Japan is not KOMIKETTO Super Comic City, but an event with the more prosaic name of "Komike" or "Komiketto," short for "Comic Market." Held twice a year in Tokyo in December and August, Komiketto is a nonprofit event organized by fans for fans. Unlike Super Comic City, which was formed in the mid-eighties and has a heavy concentration of female fans of the ya-o-i genre, Komiketto has been around since December 1975 and has an attendance that is about 40 percent male.

According to Yoshihiro Yonezawa, president of the Komiketto organization and one of its founding fathers, Komiketto grew out of science-fiction fandom that for its part had been heavily influenced by sci-fi fandom and conventions in the United States. Now a noted manga critic, Yonezawa says that in the early seventies there were far fewer manga magazines in Japan and it was much harder to get anything other than very mainstream works published. In hopes of expanding and developing the medium to its full potential, he and some colleagues formed a coterie magazine of manga criticism. "To carry out the changes we wanted to see in the real world," he notes, "we started Komiketto."

The first Komiketto began with around 600 participants. In 1995 the three-day summer event drew nearly 300,000 people to the Harumi Trade Center grounds and featured over 60,000 sellers of dojinshi. Traditionally two days long, in 1995 an extra day was added to cope with demand. The first day focused on anime-related, primarily female works; the second day featured original works, science fiction, music, etc.; and the last day was devoted mainly to male-oriented works and games. The so-called Planning and Preparation Committee was made up of a registered staff of 1,200 volunteers—among them Christopher Swett, a manga-loving officer in the U.S. Navy stationed in Japan. A fan of Japanese manga and animation ever since he saw Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy on American television, Swett had in the past put together his own dojinshi and sold it at Komiketto. His first book was around 100 pages long and contained the work of nearly twenty artist friends; he printed 300 copies, priced them at $5.00 each, and sold 178 copies at Komiketto in six hours, for a loss.

Why are dojinshi and dojinshi conventions so popular in Japan? When I asked this of Yonezawa and his wife, Eiko, in the fall of 1994, she stressed, above all, that the conventions are fun and that there is a secret thrill of attending a convention and knowing one's favorite manga magazines and books are sold only there. Mr. Yonezawa stressed the ease and the fun of creation. "Dojinshi are something even amateurs can do," he said, "and they don't require much in the way of professional technique. It's maybe like rock and roll in the United States, because it doesn't require education and it's something young people can easily do on their own with just paper and pens. Dojinshi also give instant results, unlike filmmaking, or even drawing commercial manga."

Both Yonezawa and his wife began drawing cartoons in the first grade by imitating their favorite characters. Today their children are following in their footsteps. So many young Japanese are equipped to create dojinshi these days that by third grade they may bind their drawings into little books with staples and compete with their friends. Manga study clubs are common in elementary schools, as well as in junior high and high schools and universities. One reason so many people draw manga in Japan may have to do with the exam-oriented, academic pressure-cooker environment of modern Japan. "Manga," Yonezawa says, "are one of the few things young people aren't forced to do by their teachers, so it's a genre of expression they actively want to participate in."

Why are there so many more young women than men creating dojinshi and attending conventions? The academic environment may again be a factor. "Most of the males," Yonezawa says, "tend to be older and are college students, because in the Japanese system, after being under extraordinary pressure for years to study for their entrance exams, this is when they finally have some free time." Females—apparently not under the same pressures as their male counterparts—start participating in the dojinshi scene as teens in junior high and high school. "That's when they are the most 'free,'" Yonezawa explains, also noting that "Girls tend to avoid going to the conventions alone, and usually drag along two or three friends, even if the friends really aren't that into it."

One factor in dojinshi popularity is probably not exportable. As Mary Kennard notes, "The proliferation of dojinshi owes a lot to the rather relaxed ideas of copyright in Japan. In the States, some fanzines (notably those based on the Star Wars universe) were threatened with extreme penalties if they continued to publish."

Chris Swett further explains: "There's something that fans get out of reading books written by other fans that they don't get from their regular, weekly manga. [With parodies.] they can take their favorite characters and put them in ridiculous situations, bend stories around, and do things that the original artists don't have the freedom to do. Considering how much more freedom Japanese artists have than American artists, that's saying something. ... In America we don't have a gray area in our copyright laws that allows this sort of fan art. It's not the way the copyright laws are written, but the way they're enforced. Copyright holders in the United States have to protect their trademark or it becomes public domain. That's not the case in Japan, so artists and publishers can afford to tolerate these homages. It doesn't mean they like it, but they don't want to do anything to alienate their customer base. The manga publishers benefit from happy fans, and some even send scouts to dojin-shi markets to find aspiring artists."

The overwhelming size of the dojinshi market has caused the border between it and the commercial manga market to blur. At Komiketto, to preserve the amateur, fan-oriented nature of the conventions, businesses and companies are not allowed to participate, and the sponsors are set up as a nonprofit organization. But since a few dojinshi manga artists can sell up to 6.000 copies of a book at over ¥600 each, there are nonetheless some "professionals " in the so-called amateur markets. Also, several of today's popular mainstream stars, such as Rumiko Takahashi, Hisaichi Ishii, or the women's group CLAMP, either once worked in, or emerged from, the dojinshi market.

It would be hard for mainstream publishers—who are businesses, after all—not to notice the dojinshi phenomenon. The amount of money that changes hands in two days at a convention is awe-inspiring. In the September 3, 1991 issue of Japan's Aera magazine, reporters estimated that at the Komiketto convention that year fans spent over ¥3 billion ($30 million) in forty-eight hours. And that doesn't even take into account the admission fees of $10 paid by more than 200,000 people.

Otaku