japanamerica

Back from the cleansing rivers and hills of northern Honshu for another Tokyo story. I encountered and interviewed Rikimaru Toho beneath the railway bridge at Shimokitazawa station while he was preparing for a night of performances. Toho-san is a street performer who theatrically, and sometimes with frightening urgency, performs scenes of manga titles selected by passersby. During his performances, crowds accrue, their faces going slack in absorption, wide with surprise, and sometimes softening into pathos and laughter. Kamishibai , or Japanese 'paper theater/drama,' is an oft-mentioned precursor of modern manga, together with emakimono (scroll paintings/narratives) and ukiyo-e (woodblock prints often featuring images of the pleasure quarters/red-light districts). Amid our rapid and quasi-hysterical embrace of digital media, Toho-san is an apt reminder of the power of storytelling and the magnetism of paper. If you live in or have visited Tokyo recently, you know how rar...

Had and took a chance to update, expand upon and upgrade (I hope) my porn, piracy and manga summer review essay for The Comics Journal . Special thanks to Shiina-san--and to my editors for issuing and incorporating clarifications of her comments.

For my latest column in The Daily Yomiuri and 3:AM magazine , I interviewed Yukari Shiina of World Manga, an agency specializing in connecting international artists with the domestic manga publishing industry. The following insights and comments by Shiina-san, an agent and industry consultant, survived the final edit: Shiina believes the depressed economy and exaggerated expectations (i.e., oversaturation of the market) are key factors behind collapsing sales. But she doesn't ignore the digital elephant in the room. "I'm not sure exactly how much it is contributing to the declines, but scanlations are a problem," Shiina says, referring to the unauthorized posting and translation of manga titles on the Internet. "I don't buy scanlation groups' argument that they promote manga in general. It might be true with some obscure titles, but it can't be with hits such as Naruto." What may not be clear to some readers is that in the passage above, Shiina...

SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Porn, piracy, summer of manga Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri In the annals of manga, a medium roughly 60 years old and a primary driver of Japan's pop culture juggernaut, the summer of 2010 has been revolutionary--though the season la unched long before last month's brutal humidity simultaneously smothered my two hometowns, Tokyo and New York. As reported earlier in this column, the sentencing in February of American manga collector Christopher Handley to six months in prison for possession of obscene materials (an Iowa court cited seven manga titles) sent ripples of anxiety through fans of Japanese pop culture worldwide. Shortly thereafter, the Tokyo metropolitan government announced its proposal of legislation that would protect the welfare of children from violent or sexualized depictions of what it called "nonexistent youth" (read: drawings). The legislation sought to amend child welfare protection laws already in place in Tok...

TokyoPop hits the highway to save manga in America Posted by Roland Kelts on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:01 AM [Translate] TokyoPop will find you The first time I met Stuart Levy, Founder, CEO and CCO of 12-year-old distributor, producer and proselytizer of Japanese comics and animation, TokyoPop, he was dauntingly sanguine. At the time I was conducting research and interviews for my book, Japanamerica , and Levy garrulously held forth in TokyoPop’s Tokyo headquarters about new movies, new TV outlets, Internet options and America’s mania for manga. That was then, as they say. TokyoPop slashed its workforce two years ago, shrewdly trimming overhead before the industry crash hit hardest in ’09 and ’10, seeing peers like Viz Media hemorrhage profits and jobs, and others, like ADV and Central Park Media, disappear entirely. Despite the setbacks, Levy remains as madcap passionate as humanly possible about his struggling business. Instead of griping behind corporate walls, he has hit the road t...