History of Art: MANGA, JAPANESE COMICS

MANGA, JAPANESE COMICS

& GRAPHIC NOVELS

Dreamland Japan. Writings on Modern Manga

(by Frederik L. Schodt)

THE MANGA MAGAZINE SCENE

THE JAPANESE WORD FOR "MAGAZINE" IS ZASSHI. WRITTEN with $i zatsu ("rough," "rude," "coarse," and "miscellaneous"), and &£ shi ("record," "document," or "magazine"), the word has a rather harsh sound to Japanese ears.

Manga magazines reflect the nuances of the word zasshi in more ways than one. They are extremely inexpensive and except for a few full color glossy pages at the beginning are usually printed on rough recycled paper (which may be tinted to hide traces of ink left over from a former incarnation). They consist of a miscellany of seri-alized and concluding stories. And they are eminently disposable, often abandoned in a trash can after a cursory read during the train ride home from work. In 1994, writing in the media magazine Tsukuru, manga critic Eiji Otsuka posed the question, "Why were manga able to surpass, even overwhelm, other media in postwar Japanese culture?" His answer: "Ultimately, the main reason must surely have been their utterly, almost hopelessly 'cheap' quality."

This "cheapness" is an outgrowth of the explosion in demand for inexpensive entertainment that occurred at the end of World War II, after years of deprivation. Children in particular craved manga, and publishers vied to satisfy them by increasing the number of pages devoted to comics in their magazines. In 1959, manga magazines finally assumed their modern format when one of Japan's largest publishers, Kodansha, issued Shiikan Shorten Magazine ("Weekly Boy's Magazine"). The first of several all-manga omnibus magazines for boys, it quickly achieved a circulation of 1 million and a page count of nearly 300.

Today, manga magazines can be divided into two types: those that are folded and stapled, and those that have glued and squared backs. Beyond that, most have at least 200 pages, and some have 1,000. The vast majority use paper in the B5 (7" x 10") or A5 (5.8" x 8.2") size. Almost all target either males or females, but rarely both. The only magazines that consistently sell well to both genders are aimed at very small children, where gender differences are least emphasized in society. One of the main differences between manga magazines for adults and those for children is that the children's magazines have what is a godsend for foreigners learning Japanese—the rubi. or little pronunciation keys next to all the difficult kanji characters that children are still struggling to learn.

There were 265 manga magazines regularly published in 1995, in quarterly, monthly, bimonthly, biweekly, or weekly format, with circulations ranging from a few thousand to over 6 million per week. Three publishers— Sh Geisha. Kodansha, and Shogakukan control the bulk of the market; the rest is fought over by dozens of other companies, many of whom appear and disappear along with their magazines.

The magazines introduced in this section have been chosen to illustrate the variety and scope of the Japanese manga industry. Some are typical and others are not. All, however, reflect the grassroots power of manga as a medium of expression, for it is in manga that artists first create the stories that go on to become books and fuel the giant industries of animation and merchandising.

CoroCoro Comic

To enter popular discount electronics stores in Japan is to experience sensory overload—neon-colored price placards hang everywhere, dissonant music blares from every direction, and dozens of video games play simultaneously on scores of computers. Reading the monthly manga magazine CoroCoro produces a similar sensation, especially if one is a middle-aged adult.

CoroCoro, published by the giant Shogakukan, is designed for very young boys. It is as nearly as hyper as they are. Covers are a psychedelic explosion of assorted popular characters. Inside, page layouts convey an impression of unbounded energy (although it takes considerable energy to read them all). "Thick, inexpensive, and interesting!" (as CoroCoro sometimes bills itself), a typical issue retails for the bargain price of ¥400 yet contains 600-700 pages. Still, CoroCoro fits into little hands better than most manga magazines, for it is one of the first for boys printed in the A5 (5.8" x 8.2") "flattened brick" (as opposed to "telephone book") format. It can thus serve as a firm pillow or a relatively soft projectile; and unlike its name—an onomatopoeic word for "rolling"—it will definitely stay wherever it is put.

According to Kazuhiko Kurokawa, the editor-in-chief of CoroCoro when I spoke with him in 1994, readers range from third to sixth graders, with a smattering of junior high school boys. There are manga-like magazines in Japan for even younger readers, such as the popular and heavily illustrated semi-educational gakunenshi, or "school year magazines" (with titles like "First Grader," "Second Grader," etc.), and Terebi ("TV") publications. But these are like manga with "training wheels." Most young boys start reading true manga in either CoroCoro or its primary competitor, Kodansha's BonBon. And CoroCoro reflects this in far more ways than its hyperkinetic design.

Most manga magazines in Japan have a loose slogan that reflects their editorial stance, and at CoroCoro it is yuki ("bravery"), yujo ("friendship"), and toshi ("fighting spirit"), as well as what Kurokawa refers to as tokoton-shugi, which loosely translates as a "go for broke" attitude. Like most manga magazines, CoroCoro has a mix of serialized and concluding stories, including many sports stories. But as Kurokawa notes, one of the most important themes is humor. Thus nearly 60 percent of the stories are "gag" strips. Young elementary school boys, he also explains, still find it difficult to read the longer and more serious serialized manga (perhaps partly because their attention span is too short), and regular reader surveys consistently show they want their comics to be funny.

One of the magazine's mainstays is Doraemon, Fujiko F. Fujio's comical story of a robot cat who lives with a bumbling young elementary school boy. Practically an icon of Japanese popular culture at this point, Doraemon, a lowkey and sweet story, was the original raison d'etre for CoroCoro. It first appeared over twenty-five years ago in one of Shogakukan's "school-year" magazines but proved so popular that it was featured in a separate quarterly, then bimonthly, and finally a monthly magazine that became CoroCoro. Anything with Doraemon on the cover still helps sell the magazine, especially when the annual Doraemon animated feature film is released each spring vacation.

Most stories in CoroCoro are far wilder than Doraemon. Gag stories, in particular, are filled with silly third-grader humor. In 1994, for example, Shinbo Nomura's Babu Akachin (which loosely translates to "Baboo Baby Wee-wee") starred a young tyke who could perform all sorts of stellar feats with his little penis. But there were also some gag stories with bite that even adults could enjoy, such as Obotchama-kun (roughly, "Little Lord Fauntleroy"), by Yoshinori Kobayashi, famous in more mature manga circles for his biting satires on Japanese society.

The most striking aspect of CoroCoro is not the quality of its stories; it is the number of tieins with other industries. As is common in the manga world, popular stories are compiled into paperback books, made into animated series, and heavily merchandised. Yet in CoroCoro—an indication of the degree to which TV and Nintendo video-game culture has saturated young Japanese minds—perhaps over 30 percent of the stories and characters are not original, but derived from animation and video games or from tie-ins with toy companies. In 1995 Capcom's popular Street Fighter II video game appeared as a gag strip (along with ads for the animation film) and so did Nintendo's Donkey Kong. Other tie-in stories impart information on how to play the video games. In fact, to read CoroCoro requires considerable video game vocabulary; Street Fighter II and Dragon Quest are affectionately truncated as Suto II and Dora Kue respectively. English acronyms such as RPG ("Role-Playing Games") are sprinkled liberally throughout the text.

CoroCoro also has far more ads than other manga magazines. Most are for video games and toys and other Shogakukan publications, but on the inside back cover, reminiscent of American comic books of forty years ago, there are even ads for boxing gloves, "Rambo-style knives," and military-style toy pellet guns. Reflecting the boom in soccer and the heavily commercialized J-League in Japan (which CoroCoro helps support), in 1994 and 1995 soccer-related merchandise was also heavily hawked. At one point the magazine even ran gag strips starring Ruy Ramos, the Brazilian star of the Kawasaki Verdy soccer team.

Publishing manga magazines for the younger set is not easy in Japan today. CoroCoro is one of the best sellers in its category, with a circulation many publishers would envy, but sales in 1994 were around 750,000 per month, down from a peak of 1.5 million. One of the biggest problems, Kurokawa notes, is finding good manga artists with staying power. Many artists feel intimidated by the small children's genre, believing they are too restricted in content and sophistication. Besides, few artists can create classics like Doraemon. Noting how high budgets in the movie industry attract some of the best creative minds in the United States, Kurokawa also laments, "Manga used to be a road to riches, but for this genre the video game market has become so big it is starting to siphon off the most talented people as scenario writers and designers."

Another problem is the modern lifestyles of little children. "Kids in today's Japan are far too busy," Kurokawa says, highly critical of his country's rat-race education system. "Between the after-school cram courses they have to attend and their other activities, it's hard for them to find time to read our magazine. . . . We know that we have to do something new as we approach the 21 st century, and that if we stay the same we'll just get old."

Like other manga magazines in Japan, CoroCoro now fights back by adding furoku, or "freebie-supplements," and by occasionally boosting the number of pages. One September 1994 issue came with a writing pad with a J-league theme and a special Doraemon insert, yielding a total page count of 980. But such moves clearly aren't enough.

What seems like shameless commercialization—the large number of tieins with game and toy companies—is thus part of a survival strategy. Young children in Japan in the CoroCoro reader age group are spending more and more time playing video games and watching animation, and reportedly reading fewer manga. CoroCoro forms the first line of defense against this trend. What better way to combat the enemy than to join it?

Weekly Boys' Jump

Of all the manga magazines in Japan, Shukan Shonenjump ("Weekly Boys' Jump") is the hardest to ignore. Huge stacks of it are piled in front of newsstands and kiosks for sale every Tuesday, and from there they are transported by hand to schools, offices, factories, coffeeshops, and homes throughout the land. On crowded commuter trains, it's not unusual to see a twelve-year-old elementary school student standing next to a thirty-year-old salary man—both reading their own copies. There are advertisements for Jump on train station posters, on television, and on full pages of major newspapers. After Tuesday, copies of it can be found left on subway overhead racks, stuffed in trash cans, or piled up outside houses waiting to be collected for recycling.

Weekly Boys'Jump is not just the best-selling manga magazine in Japan; with a weekly circulation between 5 and 6 million, it is one of the best-selling weekly magazines of any type in the world (in the United States, with a population twice that of Japan, Time magazine's circulation is only around 4 million). But it is not just the circulation of Jump that is big. Jump is the size and shape of a large city's telephone book. Square-backed and bound with both staples and glue, it usually has around 428 pages.

In size and format, Jump is identical to other major weekly boys' manga magazines such as Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday. The typical cover is a full-color explosion of popular characters, names of artists, and titles of stories—a design only a tad less hyperactive and garish in mood than that of CoroCoro magazine. Inside, there are eight full-color slick-paper pages devoted to the opening section of the lead story and to ads for video games and muscle-building equipment. Then there are around thirty-two pages of the lead story and more ads, printed on rough recycled white paper with black and red ink to create an illusion of color. The rest of the magazine, which contains between seventeen and eighteen serialized or concluding stories, is all recycled rough paper printed in monochrome, with stories visually distinguished by different colored inks and paper tinted in different shades.

Until recently Jump put its competitors to shame: it vastly outsold them and had a return rate of around only 2 percent. Designed originally for late elementary and junior high school boys, Jump achieved a publishing miracle by selling to children as well as middle-aged businessmen, thus becoming the Godzilla of Japan's publishing world.

What was the secret of Jump's success? The fat, weekly boys' manga format was pioneered by Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday in 1959; Jump did not appear until 1968. Shueisha, however, became Japan's largest magazine publisher (issuing over 50 million manga and non-manga magazines per month, or more than one for every Japanese family), so it seems to have known what it was doing. Unable to attract some of the most popular manga artists, the company instead located newer, younger ones, helped them develop their own identity, and contracted with them so they would continue with the magazine, even if they later became successful. In effect, the magazine became their agent, also handling their licensing and merchandising.

In addition,Weekly Boys' Jump established a firm editorial policy that continues to this day. First, it conducted a survey of young readers, asking them to name (1) the word that warmed their hearts most. (2) the thing they felt most important, and (3) the thing that made them the happiest. The answers were yujo (friendship). doryoku (effort, or perseverance), and short (winning, or victory). These three words then became the criteria for selecting the stories, whether adventures or gags. As the editor-in-chief, Hiroyuki Got5, commented in a June 12, 1990 article in the newsmagazine Aera, "Children know they're equal in terms of rights, but not ability. Out of ten children, perhaps one will excel in both sports and study, and one will have no interest in either. The remaining eight just want to do better in study or sports. . . . They are the ones we're targeting, and the three words reflect their positive, optimistic outlook. At Shorten Jump we don't believe in the esthetics of defeat."

This has proved a phenomenally successful formula. A steady stream of hits—such as Dr. Slump, Cat's Eye. Kinnikuman ("Muscle Man"), Slam Dunk, and Dragon Ball—has poured forth from the magazine over the years, triggering national fads and generating millions of dollars in profit. The weekly Jump retails for an inexpensive ¥190 and probably just breaks even; the real profits are made from sales of paperback compilations of the serialized stories, animation rights, licensing of toys, and so on.

Stories serialized in Jump run the gamut from school campus love comedies to SF-violence-action thrillers, basketball adventures, baseball comedies, soccer tales, and assorted fantasy and gag strips. Occasionally, out of a sense of duty perhaps, the magazine even runs what is usually the kiss of death in comics—educational material; in the early 1990s it published a series of illustrated stories about scientists around the world who had won Nobel prizes.

The wide variety of stories helps ensureyump's popularity among a readership varied in both age and taste. Each issue, however, contains a reader-response card surveying preferences in stories, artists, and characters. If a story is not popular for ten weeks in a row, it is usually dropped. If successful, however, it may run for a very long time. Osamu Akimoto's enormously popular light comedy about a neighborhood cop, Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Koen-mae Hashutsujo ("This is the Police Station in Front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward"), began serialization in 1976. By the end of 1995 it was approaching its 1,000th episode and had been compiled into more than 92 paperback volumes, for a total of over 18,000 pages.

Ironically, in 1995, the manga industry in Japan was abuzz with rumors about Jump's slide from its exalted position in the industry hierarchy. Rival Shonen Magazine was expanding, and for the first time in years Jump's announced sales figures for its August special edition failed to increase; popular series such as Dragon Ball had ended, and competitors even whispered that actual sales had dropped from 6.3 million to 5.5 million. Jump responded by reducing its price from ¥200 to ¥190. But ultimately, all the speculation really revealed was that public expectations had become unrealistic—how can any magazine grow forever?

Once you find a winning formula, it's important to exploit it. Weekly Boys' Jump is now accompanied by Young Jump, a biweekly targeting an older audience of males; Business Jump, a biweekly "For Business Boys"; Super Jump, a biweekly for young adults; Gekkan Shonen Jump ("Monthly Boys' Jump"), a 650-page monster magazine that has serialized, among other things, a manga version of Magic Johnson and the L.A. Lakers story, authorized by the NBA; and V-Jump, which targets the video game market. Finally, perhaps out of a sense of guilt over the way it has helped saturate young Japanese male minds with manga, in 1991 Shueisha began publishing Jump Novels, a biannual manga-magazine-style publication featuring mainly text-based, manga-inspired stories, illustrated by manga artists.

Nakayoshi

Publishing manga magazines is a cutthroat business. THE MEDIA-MIX Profit margins are razor thin, competition is fierce, and it takes constant innovation to survive. Nowhere is this more true than in the high-volume children's manga market. Nakayoshi, a monthly for elementary and junior high school girls, uses a "media-mix" strategy.

One of the oldest and most famous manga magazines for young girls in japan, Nakayoshi was first published by one of Japan's largest book publishers, Kodansha, in 1954. It originally contained serialized novels, articles, and illustrated pieces, but in the postwar manga boom it soon became all-manga. As of 1995 it retailed for ¥400 yen and contained the usual mix of twelve or fifteen serializing and concluding manga stories, ranging from fantasy-adventure to romance and gag pieces. Some immensely popular works have been serialized in it over the years, including Ribon no Kishi ("Princess Knight") by Osamu Tezuka and Candy Candy by Yumiko Iigarashi. One of the big hits in the mid-nineties was Naoko Takeuchi's Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon ("Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon"). Circulations go up and down, but in 1995 Nakayoshi claimed a figure of nearly 2 million per month.

Yoshio Irie, the editor-in-chief, assumed his position in 1990 at the young age of thirty-four. A soft-spoken man with an aggressive vision, he felt the magazine was overemphasizing the stock girl-meets-boy/first-love type of stories and failing to exploit the real strengths of manga. He thus tried to introduce more fantasy-oriented stories, an example being the wildly popular Sailor Moon, which stars five young women who were warriors in previous lives. Irie's ultimate goal is to make Nakayoshi the largest-selling magazine in the young girls' genre and to overtake rival Shogakukan's magazine Ribbon, which leads the pack.

"Our media-mix strategy" he told me, "includes utilizing not only the magazine, but television animation, character merchandising, and events." Traditionally, he explained, a manga story would be animated for television quite a while after it appeared in a magazine, and then merchandise would be created based on the characters. For Sailor Moon, however, the basic story was determined in editorial meetings nearly a year before publication, and a coordinated media offensive was developed. The animated series started up after the second episode of the written story. "Animation and toys usually have very different production schedules," Irie says, "with at least three or four months lead time required for television and six months for toys. Because we discussed schedules in advance, we were able to carefully coordinate them."

Peak sales seasons in this genre are February (new year), April (new school year), and September (summer vacation), so the Sailor Moon plot was designed to have exciting episodes hit at just these times, along with new characters or warriors and surprising revelations. The television animation show, furthermore, lagged the magazine story by only a month or two, and care was taken to make sure it did not overtake it. Merchandising was also coordinated, with sales of important items targeting summer vacation and Christmas.

Irie also used other techniques to expand market share, including targeting the dojinshi, the huge amateur manga market that had previously been thought to offer only limited opportunities. One of the most popular stories running in Nakayoshi in 1995 was Maho Kishi Ray Earth ("Magic Knight Rayearth"), by the enigmatic CLAMP, a team of four women who have a near-fanatical following in the dojinshi market. "Our use of CLAMP for a story was a big shock to the industry, but it has helped us a great deal," Irie says.

More traditional methods were also used. Each Nakayoshi issue has a furoku—a supplement or "free-bie"—attached, making the already huge monthly even more physically impressive. The June 1994 issue, for example, came with a Sailor Moon bag, a cardboard cutout carrying box with a Rayearth motif, a board game, a plastic umbrella cover for rainy days, and a decorative little plastic bag in which to put a gift for "papa." Readers who send in coupons are also entitled to unique little prizes, and since they need coupons from two consecutive magazines, they are enticed into buying the magazine regularly. This helps reduce the perennial problem (for publishers) of mawashi-yomi, wherein one purchaser shares the magazine with many friends. "With our prize system," Irie notes with satisfaction, "even two sisters will each buy their own copy of Nakayoshi. Sometimes we give out as many 700,000 prizes for free."

The media-mix strategy for manga marketing has paid off handsomely. Nakayoshis circulation increased over 1 million in the year 1992/93. At the end of 1995, thirteen paperback volumes compiled from the Sailor Moon series had sold nearly 1 million copies each; twenty volumes compiled from the animation series of Sailor Moon had sold around 300,000 each; and there were over ten types of video games on the market, each having sold between 200,000 and 300,000. In five years, total revenues from character merchandising exceeded ¥300 billion. By the end of 1995 the Sailor Moon manga books and the animation series had been exported to over twenty-three countries, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, most of Europe, and North America. A truly global market had been opened up.

Another sign of success: among its 448+ pages, save for a few pages devoted to character-related merchandise, fake jewelry, and sanitary napkins. Nakayoshi has almost no ads. Nearly 100 percent of the magazine's revenues comes from actual sales. "And at ¥400 per copy," Irie adds, "we can afford few returns. Luckily, sales have usually been above 90 percent. In one period, we even reached 98 percent."

Irie will still have to struggle to reach the top of the manga heap, given the glut in manga magazines. "Recently." he says, "we've begun advertising Nakayoshi on television, to announce when the magazine will come out and to augment our media-mix policy."

Big Comics

Manga magazines in Japan are often divided into four or YOU SAY MANGA, five categories: shorten ("boys"), shojo ("girls"), redisu ("la-I SAY KOMIKKUSU dies"), seijin ("adult" as in "erotic manga for men"), and seinen ("young men"). Seinen, despite its youthful connotation, is a wonderfully vague term that can refer to males between the ages of fifteen and forty, but as the readership of manga ages it is being increasingly abused. Of the scores of what are often referred to as seinen magazines, some of the biggest sellers are titled, appropriately. Big— the name of a family of high-quality magazines published by the giant Shogakukan and designed to appeal to a broad range of ages. There are currently five titles: Big Comic, Big Comic Original, Big Comic Spirits, Big Comic Superior, and Big Gold.

In the manga industry, if a monthly magazine sells well, it is normally turned into a semimonthly, then a biweekly, and finally a weekly in order to capture an ever larger readership. The Shogakukan Big strategy has been to differentiate magazines by targeting increasingly narrow age groups. The plan has worked very well and has helped counter a problem that manga magazine publishers face; as readers mature, so do their tastes, and either the magazines have to mature with them or new magazines have to be created. Here's the lowdown on the Big family.

The grand-daddy of the Big family. Big Comic serializes works by big-gun artists. Long-running stories have included the famous Golgo 13, by Takao Saito, about a Zen-like professional assassin who always gets his mark; Hotel, by Shotaro Ishinomori, about the inner workings of hotel life; and the gag strip Akabe-ei, by Hiroshi Kurogane. Don't look for sex and titillation here, though. This is serious stuff, written mainly by men over fifty and read by a faithful but aging male readership mostly over thirty. Some stories, like Golgo 13, have been serialized for twenty-five years. Ads are scarce and are mainly for cars, marriage services, energy drinks, hair tonics, hair pieces, and so forth.

The sister magazine to Big Comic, Big Comic Original targets a very similar readership. Like Big Comic, it serializes many long-running, popular works by older and famous artists, including Fujiko Fujio, Koh Kojima, and Joji Akiyama. One of its most popular stories in 1993 was "Master Keaton," by Hokusei Katsushika and Naoki Urasawa, about a half-Japanese, half-English veteran of the Falklands War who works as both a lecturer on archaeology and an insurance investigator. Original, like Big Comic, has few ads. The biggest difference, in addition to the fact that it goes on sale in weeks when Big doesn't, is that it always has amusing airbrushed paintings of animals on the cover. Big Comic always has caricatures of famous people drawn with enormous heads.

Unlike its two older siblings, Big Comic Spirits is a weekly, and it is aimed at young salarymen between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. The story selection reflects this. There is a greater emphasis on sports, gags, and guy-gal interaction, and opening pages often have photographs of attractive young women in bathing suits. Huge hits such as Oishinbo ("The Gourmet"), which triggered a boom in comics for males about cooking, have appeared here. Unlike any American comic book, there are ads for cigarettes and whiskey. In June 1993 the newsmagazine Aera commented that the seinen genre of manga magazines was suffering from lack of direction in the wake of a general crackdown on eroticism in manga. Spirits was particularly hard hit and circulations declined; to boost sales, in 1995 it was priced ¥10 less than Big and Original, despite having more pages. The typical reader is said to be a twenty-eight-year-old company employee or "salaryman," a systems engineer who works at a finance company, likes to eat at ramen noodle shops, and is starting to look seriously at ads for matchmaking services. Cover designs always feature characters with heads made of vegetables or fruit.

There is a tiny gap in the ages targeted by Big, Original, and Spirits—those between twenty-five and thirty—and Superior fills it. Popular works it serialized in the early nineties included Sanctuary, an exciting tale of Japanese gangs and politics by Sh5 Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami, and a comedy titled Bow by Terry Yamamoto, featuring a silly dog reminiscent of the Budweiser mascot of a few years back. (Sanctuary is published in English by Shogakukan's subsidiary in San Francisco, Viz Communications.)

Big Gold is the newest addition to the Big family and the BIG GOLD biggest in size, price, and sophistication. Square-backed and glued instead of folded and stapled, it showcases now-graying male and female industry legends such as Mitsuteru Yokoyama; Leiji Matsumoto and his wife, Miyako Maki; Shigeru Mizuki; and Machiko Satonaka—all creators of the golden age of manga in the early seventies. According to Sadao Otomo, an editor at Big Gold, readers range in age from the twenties to late forties, with 45 percent company employees, 12 percent public employees, 11 percent housewives, and 6 percent students. Twenty percent are women, very high for a nominally "male" magazine. Most readers, Otomo says, have read manga all their lives, and intend to keep doing so.

With a readership that clearly goes beyond the normal definition of seinen, or "youths," Big Gold hints at a future that more and more manga publishers are beginning to salivate over. A drop in the birthrate has given Japan one of the most rapidly aging societies on earth. In the near future, members of this huge well-heeled, leisured, and "silver" population (as it is called) will certainly all be reading their own manga magazines. The cover illustrations for Gold have a lyrical and relaxed European flavor to them, and they are usually drawn by Shigeru Tamura, a renowned illustrator and manga artist (who was also one of the first people in the industry to do his work on a Macintosh).

Morning

Manga magazines often have a short life because readers
are fickle and competition is fierce. But one magazine that is here to stay is Kodansha's Morning. First published in
1982, it has already made quite a mark on the industry. Morning is a weekly with a circulation of around 1.3

million. Physically, it is fairly typical for its category. It is immediately identifiable as being mainly for adult males by its advertisements that, while few in number, hawk cars, cigarettes, beer, music albums, bodybuilding equipment, antibalding remedies, and, occasionally, body hair remover (for those who want the now fashionable silky-smooth look). Also, the text in the comic balloons doesn't have any rubi, the little pronunciation keys supplied next to kanji characters in children's magazines. But unlike many other adult manga. Morning is a serious magazine: it carries no ads for porno videos, and it uses hardly any erotic or violent images.

Many manga in Japan have clearly defined editorial policies—such as the "friendship," "perseverance," and "victory" of all-time bestseller Weekly Boys'Jump. Morning does not. According to Yoshiyuki Kurihara, the editor-in-chief. Morning's main policy is summarized by the slogan that has graced its cover since 1982: Yomu togenki ni naru, which literally means "You'll feel great if you read it" but which Kurihara prefers to translate as "Manga Energy."

Morning thus has a greater diversity of stories and art styles than most mainstream manga magazines. Each week around seventeen or eighteen serialized and concluding stories are featured (along with shorter gag strips). Some have become quite famous. Kenshi Hirokane's enormously popular salaryman tale, Kacho, Shima Kosaku ("Section Chief Shima Kosaku"), emerged from Morning (a personal favorite of one-time Tokyo-based Washington Post correspondent T. R. Reid, it was often mentioned in the U.S.-media and was made into a live-action film in Japan). Kaiji Kawaguchi's long-running Chinmoku no Kantai ("Silent Service"), a tale about a renegade Japanese submarine that continues to humiliate the U.S. Navy, stirred debate among the media and politicians about defense policy with its deliberately provocative theme. Tochi Ueyama's Kukkingu Papa ("Cooking Papa"), a light-hearted tale of a man who loves to cook for his family, includes actual recipes in each story. It has been compiled into over forty paperback volumes and broadcast as a weekly animated series on television.

In the early nineties Morning also carried the obligatory sports stories, such as a boxing drama, Aishite Iru ("I Love You"), by manga veteran Shin Morimura; a sumo adventure, Aa Harimanada by Sadayasu Kei; and the baseball drama Reggie, by Guy Jeans and Hiramitsu Minoru—a delightful tale of a black U.S. major league player who joins up with the Japanese team called Gentlemen and struggles to adapt to Japanese baseball customs. Reggie predated the Hollywood movie Mr. Baseball and was drawn in a completely original semi realistic, semide-formed style.

Other stories in Morning have more unusual themes. In the early nineties Akira Ose's nostalgic drama Boku no Mura no Hanashi ("A Story of My Village") depicted the conflicts that occurred between farmers, students, and riot police when Narita International Airport was built in the Chiba area east of Tokyo. Masashi Tanaka's Gon was a beautifully drawn, totally original, and implausible story with no words at all about a baby dinosaur surviving among mammals (ideal for export, it is issued in book form by the Belgian publisher Casterman). Yuji Aoki's award-winning Naniwa Kin'yudo ("The Old Osaka Way of Finance") told the story of loansharks in the Osaka area and was drawn in a detailed, blocky style, complete with dialogue in the Osaka dialect.

In addition to the originality of many of its stories, what sets Morning apart from its competitors is its use of foreign artists and writers. Japanese manga borrowed heavily from U.S. comic books and animation for their format after the war, but the manga market has been like much of Japan's market for imported manufactured goods—if not closed, then extraordinarily difficult to enter. U.S. comics like Spider-man and Superman, when introduced, have usually bombed.

To their credit, rather than pandering to readers' established tastes, editors at Morning have deliberately sought out novel material and encouraged submissions by foreigners. In California, Morning has run ads in local newspapers soliciting comics writers and artists. Thus far, according to the editors,. Morning has featured artists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Taiwan, China, and Korea. The greatest number of artists have come from France, Spain, and the U.S., but by far the most popular and commercially successful artists are from Taiwan and Korea. The work of Cheng-wen, from Taiwan, has been compiled into three paperback volumes; despite a larger format and a price higher than usual, they have sold over 200,000 copies. One thing discouraging established foreign artists, however, is that they are required to draw with Japanese conventions of pacing and a right-to-left (as opposed to the English left-to-right) layout. Sometimes the foreigners are writers, not artists, in which case such problems are irrelevant. Robert Whiting, the author of some of the best books on Japanese baseball and, by extension, U.S.-Japanese cultural differences (You Gotta Have "Wa" and The Chrysanthemum and the Bat), was the writer for the popular baseball series Reggie. "Guy Jeans," his manga pen name, is a pun on the word gaijin, or "foreigner."

Like nearly all Japanese manga magazines today, Morning has established a feedback system with its readers to tell it whether a story is popular or not. In addition to the standard response card, readers can provide comments and news with a twenty-four-hour fax hot line. Readers' comments are featured in the letters to the editor section and in sidebars on the comic pages themselves—words of encouragement to a favorite hero or heroine are common. Faithful (and lucky) readers can also win presents.

If a story the editors like doesn't fit into Morning, there's probably room for it in its sister publication, Afternoon. Afternoon features similar stories for a slightly younger audience and at ¥500 for 1,000 pages gives readers even more bang for the buck. It weighs over 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds).

Take Shobo and Mahjong Manga

I'm not a mahjong player I hate smoking cigarettes and staying up all night—which is what most mahjong players seem to do. Yet I've often felt left out when Japanese friends get together to play mahjong because the game is such an integral part of student and salaryman culture, and because it is so essential for "male bonding." Luckily, there's a way for me to experience mahjong culture without the smoke and red eyes, and that's by reading mahjong comics such as those from publisher Take Shobo.

Take Shobo began publishing in 1972 with a monthly magazine titled Kindai Majan ("Modern Mahjong"). The magazine was mainly text, but a few years later clever editors transformed it into Japan's first dedicated manga mahjong magazine—Kindai Majan Orijinaru, or "Modern Mahjong Original." Today, this is one of Take Shobo's three mahjong manga magazines; the other two are Bessatsu Kindai Majan ("Modern Mahjong Supplement," known among fans as "Bekkin"), and Kindai Majan Gold ("Modern Mahjong Gold"). All claim circulations between 180,000 and 200,000 per month.

The three magazines look identical. Bold kanji characters for "MODERN MAHJONG" form the titles on the covers, and crown illustrations of handsome-but-serious-looking males holding winning mahjong tiles. Inside are a series of serialized and concluding manga stories—comedy, love, or science fiction, but all with an exciting mahjong game at their core—as well as an assortment of information-intensive articles and features.

Close inspection reveals slight differences in the magazines. Publication dates are staggered to cover the month. Bekkin uses a slightly more modern kanji font for the title on the cover. And each magazine has a different slogan. Bekkin stresses (in English) "Attractive Mahjong," Gold stresses "Comics for Mahjong Enthusiast," and Original emphasizes "Pleasant Gambling." Michiyuki Miyaji, one of the editors, explains that the magazines are put together by separate editorial staffs, and each has its own emphasis, artist line-up, and readership. Bekkin and Original readers range in age from sixteen to twenty-two, but the average age for Gold is around twenty-five and increasing.

"Mahjong's most interesting after you've been playing it two or three years," Miyaji notes. "Our readers are actually more interested in the mahjong than the manga, so the manga stories are really a vehicle to learn about mahjong." Bekkin, he adds, is active in popularizing mahjong and in promoting tie-ins with other media, so it often has "guest appearances" by celebrities like the eccentric avant-garde manga artist and TV star Yoshikazu Ebisu, who demonstrated his style of play in a June 1994 comic strip. Gold, for its part, heavily promotes Shoichi Sakurai, one of the top mahjong experts in Japan who is also a famous former ura, or "underground," mahjong professional.

Most gambling in Japan—with the exception of such state-sanctioned ventures as the lottery and horse, bicycle, and boat racing—is illegal, but millions of people, including off-duty police, bet on mahjong games. Nonetheless, flagrant abuse of the law is frowned upon, so true "professionals" work underground. Sakurai, who reportedly earned millions of dollars during his long career, is a "retired professional," which thus enables him to operate publicly. In Gold he has been elevated to hero status and is featured not only in photo articles illustrating mahjong technique, but in manga stories based on his life. Video films produced by Take Shobo glamorizing Sakurai's life are heavily advertised in all three of its mahjong manga magazines.

Like real-life mahjong players, the vast majority of mahjong manga magazine readers are males, a fact evidenced by the ads rather than the stories, which are fairly straightforward and sex-free. After the small ads for mahjong parlors, the most common ads are for telephone sex outfits merchandising masturbatory fantasies; back covers often hawk depilatories for hairy men anxious to achieve the fashionable "smooth, and body-hairless look."

Women readers are nonetheless increasing in number. Miyaji attributes this partly to the popularity of a gag mahjong comic strip called Super Zugan, by Masayuki Katayama, which was shown as an animated series on late-night television, where it won many female fans. One of the most popular artists in Gold in 1994/95, Miyaji notes, is a woman—Rieko Saibara—whose short essay-manga gag strips became one of Take Shobo's best-selling works when compiled into paperback. Both Original and Bekkin are aggressively trying to increase female readers by holding women's mahjong tournaments and mahjong dating forums.

Publishing mahjong manga magazines can be a tough business—a real gamble—because the popularity of the magazines depends on the popularity of the game itself. Take Shobo. luckily, is an aggressive company, and it has diversified beyond mahjong into a wide variety of publications, including what was in 1993-94 a highly

lucrative market for hea nudo ("hair nudes")—deluxe photo collections of nude young women that sold like hotcakes after the Japanese government lifted its ban on any works that showed or depicted pubic hair.

In the mid-eighties there were over ten mahjong manga magazines, but recession and a subsequent industry shake-out took a heavy toll; by the end of 1995 Miyaji reported that Take Shobo had the field all to itself. "During the late-eighties period of Japan's go-go 'bubble' economy," Miyaji says, "mahjong had a depressing image, and the number of mahjong parlors dropped dramatically. The industry has made a comeback recently, however, with more fashionable mahjong parlors equipped with waiters, free drinks, and hot face towels." He attributes Take Shobo's survival at least in part to the enormous popularity of a beautifully illustrated series titled Naki no Ryu ("Weeping Dragon"), by Jun'ichi Noj5. Nojo later moved on to drawing shogi, or Japanese chess, manga in Shogakukan's Big Spirits, a much more mainstream manga magazine.

Mahjong manga magazines rely heavily on technical information, but they also contain some very sophisticated artwork. In addition to being a good way to improve one's mahjong skills, they are an entertaining introduction into a very different world.

Pachinko Manga Magazines

In the early 1990s, the already overflowing magazine racks in Japan had a new addition—manga magazines devoted to pachinko.

What is pachinko? To the uninitiated, it is best described as a vertical variant of American pinball, with the added thrill of illicit gambling. Legally, customers at pachinko parlors can only trade the silver balls the machines disgorge for prizes like toothbrushes, lighters, and chocolate, but nearly everyone goes around the cor