Japan 2009
It’s a little odd, but I think of going to Japan for the sake of some live performances, shopping and hanging out with friends just like what I do at an anime convention. I might or might not bring my camera; I might or might not go to a maid cafe; I might or might not see cosplayers; I might or might not care about any of that.
However, I will definitely try to eat my way around. I guess that part is something unique to international traveling. Food culture is something integral to the human life experience. It’s diverse, nourishing, and a great way to appreciate culture using most of the sensory perception methods you have. It’s one place where America is on equal grounds with Japan, that both incorporates foreign culinary concepts and spin them into strange, delicious but nonetheless interesting eats. While I can’t really say who does it better, but this is one free market exercise that make us all winners.
Putting 2 and 2 together we get…Japanese food con in America? Seems like a good idea to me! Someone’s done this already, right?
Breaking bread among friends is one of the larger guilty pleasure I share, even if they’re just random guys from the internets! Over Anime Expo this weekend I hope those who are going will take that opportunity as well. People looking to replicate the same thing at Otakon? Looks like the Anime Diet guys are trying to do something. At least one of them anyways.
If there’s a point to this post, it is that if for some reason you read an Evangelion 2.0 review on this blog, you’d know it was because I was somewhere out of town catching a film of said thing. Same with going to a certain concert. Or maybe even this other one… And (more likely?) if you don’t see anything, you know what’s going on.
Romance Is Code for Limited Bromance; Hatsukoi LLP Closed for Business
Yes, a it is a Hatsukoi Limited wrap-up post. I actually was writing a longer, more theory-type thing, so maybe that’ll come later.
Girl’s Side: Bad Luck Party plays the Takemoto card.
Guy’s Side: RIUVA fires back, saying there’s a Takemoto card to be played. And girls to play said card.
[But actually I think TJ was the earlier of the two, so whatever.]
My side:
Hatsukoi Limited is definitely a great visual treat for the male mind. If you can get over that you’re drooling on 14-year olds, that is. I mean, it’s kind of unfair isn’t it? What kind of 14yo is a knockout like Kei? The other four girls, sure, they are reasonable approximation of reality. And 14yo can have boobs, too. Big ones. But the complete package like Kei? That’s just “lol animu lolicon” nonsense.
Yamamoto is indeed a bombshell, and I think while she’s fine and all, the problem with her is that the source material left her out to dry. Or rather I should say Rie Tanaka’s performance was wanting, and the source material didn’t get into Yuuji Arihara. You can’t have a romance without revealing the other guy’s schtik, so her story was stillborn. Too bad! And as much as I hate to say it, Tanaka tried for the noutenki kuudere and it just didn’t work with the story for me. It is probably caused by the lack of source material, but it made the Yamamoto part of the story a little boring.
Still, the anime went above and beyond the manga in some cases. One example of that came to me in the last episode. I might have missed it earlier on, but while Yuuji is the “sisucon” archetype, he played it like a normal, righteous manly sisucon type. It’s like the stereotypical overprotective American dad that chills on the porch, late at night, to supervise the teenage daughter’s boyfriend’s behavior. Usually with a shotgun or a Louisville slugger. I guess it’s A-OK if you’re dad, but the 3-year-older brother probably qualifies to some extent. Ayumi is still just 14 after all. Anyways, what drew that point home was how he was relatively resolute about the ordeal between Ayumi and Monster-kun. Contrary to his initial attitude from the first episode, Yuuji realizes what was going on and took a stand against the gentle beast in the final episode.
Heck, the middle school trio is a parallel of the high school trio that found themselves on the train, carrying out their duties as older brothers. [And all it needed was Yuu Enomoto…]
I mentioned earlier about the gender role reversal that’s at the heart of this thought experiment. I think it’s partly why this show is so attractive to me in concept, that it’s ultimately about girls doing constructive things to catch their fleeting first loves, like what the guys are also doing (oddly enough).
And what is up with people looking down at the guys in Hatsukoi Limited? I think there is one generalization I’m willing to pin my name on, and that is far majority of popular anime and shows worth watching earn their badge through strong, careful characterization. And the guys in Hatsukoi Limited exactly that–carefully crafted, strong characters. Strong meaning they are distinctive; they may stand in as generic archetypes; they may even be kind of shallow (like some real 14 year olds), but they are each standing on their own. In fact, this is why you can play the Takemoto card at all! Alpha or omega, neither applies in these relationships to the extent that some may exaggerate.
Here is a revised theory: a guy’s “romance” for anime is like an Ernest Hemingway novel. It’s not one about melodramatic Korean idols; it’s one about solitude, the sea (hopefully involving fishing) and the wild, about the subtle, unmentioned internals and not so much the external. It’s a little Zen Buddhist, maybe. On the other hand, this is just about never the case for any anime written for girls. How can you do it with a running internal monologue? Using techniques from both genre categories, Hatsukoi Limited takes a balanced approach; Chikura’s story is probably the most exemplary instance of Hatsukoi Limited’s philosophical stance on explaining things, despite being an outlier from the group. The story explains the relational subtlety and the wrinkles in Chikura’s emotions pretty clearly, yet managed to be pointed and concise. It holds its own notion of mono no aware, so the term goes.
And what’s a more suitable topic for that than that feeling for first love?
To contrast Chikura’s episode with a Makoto Shinkai narrative probably does well to show just how much more verbose (perhaps even too verbose) and illustrative Hatsukoi Limited is, but that is a necessary thing for its target audience.
And that is what I don’t quite get. What is its audience? Dumb guys like me? Sure. But why do girls like it too?
For the tl;dr, I think of it like this: Shallow male characters will always fail, where as shallow female characters will only sometimes. Ultimately, I think the anime for Hatsukoi Limited gambled on the latter and it surpassed the manga in creating believable, romanticized (if flat) male characters. Is that it?
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The Whole Eroge Nonsense
This post is about reading casually and rambling casually in regards to the whole eroge thing that is going on. If 2009 continues the way it is, it will turn out to be a landmark year with some big public policy/legal rights issues regarding this fandom that come to the fore. This kind of crap always lurk in the background regardless of what we are doing, so it’s good to pay attention since it can impact the future in drastic ways. Besides, I’m tired to chopping on copyright at least for now.
But just because it can doesn’t mean it definitely will. It’s good to be hopeful about the future, I think.
First off, why are people reading their word on this from Sankaku Complex? It’s not where you want your serious news from. Go to Zepy’s and learn to love Canned Dogs. I should qualify here, though, that it’s okay to get your news wherever you get it as long as you put on your critical hat and think for yourself. And I think Artefact is doing a fine job, whatever that is. (I am talking about the two types of web press, also, because I think where I get my news shapes the opinion I form.)
Second, it’s not a right to freedom of expression or a free speech issue for the most part. The only place that I read or even see actual law on this is on the translated meeting notes from a research group that met to talk about the proposed censorship in progress. I’m in no way qualified to give good opinion on Japanese law, but it seems that Japan has two framework or sets of case law that governs government limitation on restricting adult content. One is on the basis of individual work and another is on the basis of class of work? The actual law is not important; what is important is that the EOCS guys don’t even want to get there. They do not want a law on the books that bans (or otherwise regulate) their goods in a way that addresses them specifically. I’m not even sure if they care about the principle of the thing.
Of course, the principle of the thing is important, but principles don’t put food on the table, nor does it particularly save face. Anyways, Japan is not a litigious place like America, so people often fight for their rights in different ways.
It’s also important to know that EOCS is made up of industry leaders that ultimately serves as a legal cushion and severs liability between the companies they work with and the general public. Zepy explains this better in fewer words, but we need to remember their purpose is to lower liability and promote their products. It must be super bad to see EOCS banning entire types of games for the sake to appease the (imaginary?) press, domestic or foreign, because their goal is also to promote the games (and $$$). However while I instinctively think that EOCS is overreacting, maybe it is done with good reasons? Are they really that close to see a law on the books banning the whole deal? Is a law on the book coming soon?
After all even I know none of this happens in a vacuum. Japan has been getting tougher on child porn and that kind of seedy stuff the past years and that’s all just domestic pressure brewing. Looking at the headlines at ANN says as much. Getting pissed off minori’s figurative bird-flipping to non-JP (and non-PH) IPs is great, knee-jerked fun, but we all have to remember (and minori’s ban affirms this, actually) that this is all just nonsense. Western influences on Japanese domestic industry that they invented for themselves is as much as trying to sell fuel-efficient Americans cars in Tokyo. LOL. In other words, we don’t really affect them compared to the effects of their own actions. Because, really, what does Equality Now stand to gain from all of this? Omo is linking to their site? 2ch vitriol? Oh boy I’m dying to have a bunch of angry Japanese anons at my doorsteps! Don’t kid yourself; all of this is just your usual game of “I troll you for my own benefit, you troll someone else as a result” down the food chain.
And if you’re pissed by all of this, it just means you’re two levels below angry, culturally maladjusted femnazis!
That aside, however, there is a valid cry for alarm in terms of the lock down on freedom of speech. Again, minori is the best example. Their website have been updated with something more constructive since the initial region lock; and indeed, how would you feel about a game like ef being banned, because it has some edgy relationships? I loved the anime that spawned from the ef game, and I do think if the censorship rules discourage games that are just a tad too edgy from either being made in the first place or makes it difficult reaching commercial success (and subsequent cross media marketing), well, that would be terrible.
Then again, this is only because the eroge market expanded and diversified over the past 10 or so years, almost unchecked; games like ef has little in common with the majority of crap you see on a site like Getchu (NSFW). Or at least, these games have no more in common than flour and salt have in common–we all consume both to some extent, for different purposes, although sometimes they’re used together and you might find them stocked close to each other at the same supermarket. In other words, out of many games affected, only a small breed of games with appeal outside of their pornographic nature are truly the victim. If the whole point of the self-censorship is to change the type of porno that gets made, then it is a reasonable adjustment.
Yes, people, eroge is mostly just porn (in a semi-broad sense–since a lot of them is about recreating an imaginary experience via music, images, writing, and obviously the reader’s imagination). Even if it’s Kana: Little Sister, folks!
But I guess people can’t tell the difference between a yaruge and nakige [like me lol?], let alone distinguish a pretty okay game like Kana from the legion of bad strip mahjong games? How many people outraged at the EOCS proposed changes actually know about what’s truly out there in the wild? (I CAN HAS STATS-BURGER?) How many crappy click-click-porn games are born for each Fate/stay nights or whatever that gets made? Or how many future Kanons are going to be banned versus future Rapelays? Is this really censorship when a private, industry club decide to not stamp your game for approval? Is it the end of the eroge genre as we know it when major otaku stores stop stocking them? I mean let’s not even talk about CSA here. (In reality they probably will more or less follow EOCS once the situation becomes more stable, I would guess.)
I remember reading about Rapelay in Roland Kelts’ book. He basically called it, and how can you not call it once you found out about a game like that? But I think that is the problem–there’s so much about Japan that no one outside Japan knows. Its insular, layered cultural construct is part of its charm and an open discourse, no matter if it’s on the legal or industry or even pop-cultural exchange level, will change it sometimes for the worse. Or better. And that depends only on your perspective.
Going full circle, this is why a good news site that frames the issue accurately goes a long way, I guess.
The Vocal Internet Anime Effect Via Googlefighting
I have done almost no research on this topic, but it’s definitely the case that some loud, vocal minority tend to speak for a quiet but much larger group of people. On the internet, however, is this the case?
In context of, say, “what is a popular anime” question, I think the internet is probably overall a reliable marker. To use a random metric, Google estimated hit counts for example, Naruto and Bleach both are in the tens of millions of results. Given the similarity of their titles and the way they are marketed in English, plus some other factors, it seems like a comparable result. In detail, Naruto has twice as many hits on Google as Bleach on the internet, and that seems to reflect my own experience as exposed to fans and marketing to both shows in terms of how frequent I run into that. However inaccurate googling “bleach” is, sharing a name with a common household chemical.
Googlefighting only goes so far, of course; the complex methodology of search makes it a tricky metric to do serious study. For example, Higashi no Eden gives you a strange set of results; query based on the English title “Eden of the East” will include largely “East of Eden” hits, bumping probably a good half to one and a half million relevant hits to somewhere around 20-30 million. You know this 20-30 mil number is impossible, when a more popular TV show, Gintama, only scores in the 2-3 million range. Gintama also is a simple keyword so you know it probably includes most if not all English language hits. Just for fun, a cursory search of “ippo” yields about 2-3 million hits; Basquash yields just over half a million; Fullmetal Alchemist gives over five, where as Full Metal Alchemist gives over eight big ones, a 3 million increase for inserting a single space. I can’t even really google “K-ON” since that just breaks the search. Let’s not even get me started on having ‘ in the title. (FYI, ハルヒ is over 11 million in comparison to Haruhi’s paltry 4 to 5, but obviously it’s not exactly an unique name.)
How do we determine what is popular on the internet? Oricon daily sales rank for singles? Font size on a tag cloud off anano? Weekly Nicovideo ranking? Or taking a step back, how do we divide up the internet to manage search in a sensible way? Language? Then what’s next?
Is there a point to this exercise? Yeah–internet metrics are tricky. JP is big on regional counts for torrent tracker stats, for example (although that is something you could account for), so that’s one example where some pretty solid indication of popularity can be seriously misinterpreted. But how do we identify the different signals (through a bunch of tubes) on the internet and figure out which group of people is saying what? Perhaps one way is to self-authenticate your own opinions? Identify who you are along with what you want? Seems like a sound technique to get your point across in general.
I wonder if there are other studies like this, no matter how informal. The interplay between the different layers of anime fans and how international voices bleed together, sometimes across language barriers, is pretty complicated but also interesting.
Yui’s Fine Whine, or Why Mio Is More Than What Meets the Eyes
Azusa is a bullfrog. She’s a good friend of mine?
I have a lot to say about K-ON, but there’s not a lot of impetus for me to write them down. In fact the only thing out there that nags me is the ongoing debate about people’s expectation of what K-ON is suppose to be. Generally that’s fandumb material and I make a conscious effort to avoid it. Still I guess I’ve reached a point where that information need a home outside my brain, so I’ll try to focus it on K-ON and less on the reactions.
However I think the fan reactions make a good starting point to say about a lot of things about K-ON. For starters, it’s a Kyoto Animation work that has gotten a lot of attention because it has a similar feel as with their last few products. People are flocking to it for reasons that are mostly tangential and superficial to the show itself–the aesthetics, the OP/ED, and the brand name. We just tend to forget at first that K-ON is still just a show about a few high school girls, forming a band in the guise of a “light music” club. High school girls, forming a band in the guise of a K-ON club. High school club. Girls. Music.
I repeated this because that is the ultimate context in which we find our protagonists in their mode of operation. I think this is why people namedrop to Lucky Star or slice of life or whatever seemingly analogous concepts they can get their hands on. And when they do not enjoy what they see either via comparative failure of priming the right expectations against reality, or they were victims of misinformation, or simply overrated all that Kyoto Animation tie-ins as cued by its staple animation style, that’s really only because they forgot the thing I just repeated up there. Or worse, they don’t have a clue what it means.
Let’s take a step back. How many of us joined a K-ON club? How many of us were in high school? How many of us…were girls? And in Japan, all during the 21st century? Do we even have a clue what life is like for people fitting those descriptions? In a band, anyone? In a band that is also a club?
I mean, really, I am not saying anything about unable to do XYZ if you do not have experience ABC. I am none of those (except maybe I’m in a band), and I imagine many of you are none of those. You can enjoy baseball manga just fine if you’ve never fielded a popup in your life. Still, it is doubtless that your life experience, and thus perspective, is likely to be different than someone who did; let alone someone who does it as a major hobby or for a living.
Beyond the context of human adolescent females engaging in recreational activities as an optional part of a mandatory education as portrayed in Japanese television animation, that is. This context is the foundation in which K-ON converses with its audience. And this is why Yui still walks and breathes and does not fart rainbows and sparkles; and this is why people think about anime with this kind of a pace and narrative focus, that slice of life stuff.
For what it is worth I can probably enjoy a version of K-ON where Yui does fart rainbows and sparkles, where Mio has wings and hunts Johnnies for subsistence, where Tsumugi will lose her family fortune if her father discovers her anime addiction, where Ritsu is actually Ui’s mother, and where Suwako-sensei is actually the second coming of Genghis Khan. That is, if they can keep the one thing that still bears the K-ON name. (Well, besides the fact that they’re an organization that is operating under that name.) Do people realize how crazy a story BECK is? And how unrealistic it is? I guess not. But it is also a story about a band, right?
So what’s that one thing? Girls. High school club. Music. If I was a mage like Yume Kikuchi I might write a story along the lines of Someday’s Dreamer, and that would be a story that is otherwise titled “魔法遣いに大切なこと” or as ANN says “Things That Are Important to Magic Users.” I think it’s a wonderful title because it tells you what the hell the show is about. Same with K-ON.
Of course, if it was “COSPLAY ROCK BAND” instead, or “This is Spinal Moe,” we might expect something different. But I think all this fandumb that I’ve been reading come from people not realizing what K-ON is. We got people who got confused with what Yui thought as the dominion of Krauser the II, with “light music.” And even if we know what K-ON is, do we really know what it means, say, in the context of (eg.) Linda Linda Linda? Or something even less dramatized?
I don’t mean to say people are wrong or whatever, but I thought K-ON was a lot more fun once I realized the show is about band chemistry. Sure, it took me 2-3 episodes to realize this, so I can imagine some people might have taken much longer to get it, if at all. It was not obvious. What is obvious is that the pace of the anime is very relaxed…but most people just haven’t made the connection that sometimes it is like just that in a band.
I started to look at the thing in K-ON from the point of view of band life. It’s sort of a no-brainer if you knew anything about this kind of bands, I think. Did you actually cringe when you witness the abuse of Yui’s Gibson classic? I did. I also have friends who “date” their boyfriends because theirs were about as much as Yui’s. Dressing up your expensive yet badass guitar is not beyond the imagination, so to speak. Nor is sleeping with it–of course the humor comes in where Yui doesn’t know a thing about the worth and the need for care for those instruments… and how that interacts with an audience who may know too well.
I can go farther–the whole “belonging” sense is also a common theme in K-ON-type stories where a bunch of school kids make a band and carve into the hearts of their bandmates (mutually) a place where they belong. That’s fun and fine and people get it, but where K-ON does well is showing the the how. And I’m not sure if most people are even looking for that. It’s like having a real life friend who acts just like Osaka, and then you find Azumanga Daioh’s strange cast much more meaningful to you than it really does to most people.
This is also why Mio is more than what meets the eyes. I’m sure this is just a personal anecdote, but ever meet anyone in real life that behaves kind of like her? I know this guy who’s exactly like Mio; and this guy’s role in the band, the way he interacts with the others in the band…is more or less the same. I think obviously Mio (and everyone else in the show) is an exaggeration to some degree, but it captures the same feeling for a bystander (or someone who is just like Ritsu…).
Of course, sometimes, some people just laugh because it’s funny, and that is that. “You’re missing out!” “You don’t get it!” Whatever wasted breath is just that, but that’s fun, too.
