Group items tagged

                                  H-JAPAN                                April 5, 2009 From: David Slater <d-slater@sophia.ac.jp> Graduate Fieldwork Workshop April 18th, 2009 Sophia University (Yotsuya Campus) http://www.fla.sophia.ac.jp/about/location.html Bldg. #10, room 301 10 am-noon ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural distance to claim global leadership in comic book publishing. Julien Vig (Sociology MSc candidate at Hitotsubashi University and research student at the Institute of Innovation Research) ABSTRACT: Since the 1990s, the joint influences of nation branding efforts and the increasing globalization of the economic and technological contexts within which media organizations operate have brought upon an era where America's dominant position as an exporter of contents is becoming increasingly challenged by new entrants, often industrial consortia backed by state agencies. Serious contenders may include India's Bollywood movies, Brazil's telenovelas, or South Korea's array of dynamic entertainment industries. Yet beyond the cultural significance of the phenomenon, their actual export performance only qualifies them as cultural niches when compared to the incumbent transnational American corporations, whose distribution monopolies and market power make their economic control of global flows a reality that remains hardly escapable. Japan, however, distinguished itself by securing global leadership in no less than three content industries. In videogames, animation and comic books, it stands out a leading exporting country, boasting impressive trade surpluses with America and Europe. There is a solid, established interdisciplinary body of international literature dedicated to Japan's videogame industry, and the anime industry has been similarly attracting increasing attention in the past ten years. The comic book industry on the other hand, arguably because of its limited legitimacy and economic significance outside the $4bn+ Japanese domestic market, remains largely understudied except for comic book and popular culture scholars. An overlooked specificity of the comic book industry stems from the most peculiar pattern of globalization it has experienced. From the 1950s onwards, the United States, France and Japan each developed their own publishing paradigm and standard formats: *comic book*, *album* and *manga*. These path-dependent creative and industrial trajectories would hardly interact until the second half of the 1990s. After their late encounter, Japanese manga emerged as the undisputed winner, reaching shares of about 1/3 of total comic book sales in value in both France and America in 2007. This achievement has interesting theoretical implications. On the one hand, media scholars showed that the primary vehicles for the development of * contra-flows* (defined as non-Western media flows which counter the previously established one-way information flow from western to non-west countries) are geographic, cultural or linguistic regionalism; yet this framework cannot account for how Japanese manga could succeed in Western markets, as none of the above patterns seems to apply. On the other hand, management scholars, in the dominant models of firm- and industry-level internationalization, accept as a prerequisite that agents are actively and strategically trying to internationalize; yet Japanese manga publishers long maintained a passive attitude towards market expansion outside of Asia. Drawing upon fieldwork in France and Japan, international comparisons of industry data and evidence from a consumer survey conducted in France in December 2008, my research aims to uncover the economics at work behind the success of Japanese manga on the global comic book scene. What are the conditions for the emergence of sustainable contra-flows? The study of Japan's prominent success in exporting domestic contents may hold the answer to this question and provide a blueprint for later entrants in the global cultural market. -- David H. Slater, Ph.D. Faculty of Liberal Arts Sophia University, Tokyo The Sophia server rejects emails at times. Should your mail to me get returned, please resend to: dhslater@gmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

Don’t take everything that Satou Shuuhou is saying at face value, there definitely are people that are really poor even while having a regular serialization, but many of them are people who don’t know how to manage their finances properly and just work really slow. Manga can make a lot of money, so please don’t look at manga authors like they’re people that work a lot and get very little in return.

I felt there was something wrong with Shuuhou sensei’s choice to sell chapters that have been published on magazine through his personal website. Is Blackjack ni yoroshiku a manga that was created from the start to the end only by Satou Shuuhou (and his staff)? That is impossible. The magazine’s editors must have helped him somewhere along the line. Such as coming up with new ideas on what to write about, or helping to fix up any problems in the roughs.

The annonymous author Masuda had said that Blackjack ni yoroshiku would not have sold as much as it did if it didn’t run on Morning magazine. So just how many people would read an online manga which has had no publicity and is being distributed on a personal site? Being published on a magazine that is being circulated across the entire nation gives a lot of publicity.

For two Fridays in a row, researchers discussed the impact of popular Japanese culture on society and art in two separate, but related, symposia. Host of the March 6 symposium, Satoshi Ikeda (left) talks with Marc Steinberg, who spoke on anime figurines and art during the March 13 symposium. Currently a post-doc at McGill, Steinberg will join the Faculty of Fine Arts this summer. The March 6 event took a sociological perspective, while the March 13 event explored the impact of anime and manga on contemporary artistic practice.

At most, various sources mention one or two different conventions, but I couldn't find any extensive type of cataloging. (though, if anyone is aware of such a thing, please let me know)I started trying to make a cross-cultural list like this back when I used to have the forum, but that project seems to have stagnated. This is a research project just waiting for someone to take it up (like oh so many)...

Underlying message: Graphic systems are not universal

one graphic system can influence another one

He also did some eye-tracking studies comparing the eye movements of an "expert" versus a "non-frequent" manga reader. The "non-expert" fixated far more on word balloons than images and had higher reading times. On the other hand, the "expert" reader made "fewer useless eye movements" that were smoother, in addition to a higher rate of skipping over more panels and balloons. However, the expert also had higher story comprehension recall than the non-expert, despite reading faster and skipping elements.

frequent reading of manga correlated to achievement in language arts (particularly sentence comprehension) and a liking of social sciences, though "not significantly with liking for art class." Several studies also indicated a higher comprehension for learning from manga than from pure textual "novelized" writing.

we're looking at a definite trend of live-action anime adaptations, the first of which to hit screens being Dragonball Evolution, which also features white actors playing roles originally created, written, directed, animated, and performed by Japanese people.

According to Edward Said, one of the principles of Orientalism is a belief that Asia cannot speak for herself, and that the West must do it for her, constantly re-interpreting and clarifying the "mysteries of the Orient" for Western audiences, regurgitating the complexities of other cultures into an easily-digestible whole

There's an argument to be made that the purpose of live-action adaptations isn't to appeal to anime fans (although such adaptations doubtless intend on capitalizing on them), but rather to introduce mainstream viewers to anime via the otherwise-familiar milieu of flesh-and-blood cinema.

The official website of the Hetalia anime confirms the television run's cancellation, but indicates that the anime will still be distributed over the Mobile Animate service for mobile phones and over the Animate.tv service for broadband web users.

Robot géant : de l'instrumentalisation à la fusion Image: Gundam Seed WebL'histoire de la science-fiction manifeste le désir immarcescible de modifier l'homme. Aujourd'hui la science semble permettre une telle évolution et l'on peut désormais espérer accéder à un autre niveau de vie grâce au développement de la génétique, de la cybernétique ou de l'informatique. On désigne désormais par les termes d'« homme augmenté »1 les multiples possibilités d'amélioration de l'humain par l'artificiel. La culture de masse reflète et innerve ces aspirations à une transformation de l'homme. Aux Etats-Unis, ce rêve d'un « surhomme » se manifeste à travers la bande dessinée et les dessins animés populaires, qui ont durant longtemps propagé l'image d'un « super-héros » comme Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-men. Au Japon, il semble que cette figure surhumaine soit remplacée par celle de « supers robots ». L'importance de ces machines dans les manga et les anime Japonais est liée à un genre et à un contexte socioculturel particulier. Connu en France par le biais de la diffusion de Goldorak, le robotto anime (dessin animé de robots) a longtemps servi d'image d'Epinal pour désigner les productions nippones. Ce genre spécifique à la science-fiction Japonaise cultive un imaginaire des rapports entre l'homme et la machine qui se répand dans les pays où ces séries sont diffusées. Certains auteurs en viennent même à parler de diffusion d'un techno-orientalisme2.

Like Classic Comics decades earlier, the Manga Editions of Shakespeare suffer two fatal flaws inherent in most edutainment: one concerning the content and the other the medium. Regarding content, the Manga Editions do not simply adapt great works of literature to a modern form; they devastate them in the process. The result is an illustrated version of CliffsNotes

However, there is one major difference contained within the Manga Editions of Shakespeare. Whereas Baz Luhrmann’s modernized film Romeo + Juliet is designed to entertain, the Manga Editions aim to educate, or at least substitute for education.

The second overarching flaw of the Manga Editions concerns the medium. This I discovered via an informal focus group of ten manga scholars: students in the manga club at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in New York City. These high schoolers are not mere manga fans; they are devoted researchers of the genre. They read, discuss, and debate manga in school, out of school, and in their sleep, I imagine. Moreover, they create their own manga and share their work with peers, just like Japanese youths thousands of miles away. Their first impression of the Manga Editions was voiced in unison: “It’s NOT manga!”

First, doujinshi are not commercial products, and this is one of the most important distinctions that allows its very existence. 

Many doujinshi conventions (Comiket included) require doujin circles to provide print run information, and enforces a cap.  Quite simply, there aren’t enough books to export en mass. 

This is also why doujinshi has continued to grow while other media like manga, anime, and music have suffered with the advent of peer to peer trading on the internet…the doujinshi market is a collector’s market, where the physical book itself is highly valued

digital manga...? I have mixed feelings about how well this will work out. Unlike anime, the format of reading a book doesn't translate as neatly as the format of watching a show on a screen. Manga sales haven't lagged as much as DVD sales partially because many people still prefer holding a physical book in their hands as opposed to reading on a computer screen (the other reason might be because they're cheaper).

I'm not sure if scanlations have as much an impact on manga sales as fansubs do on DVD sales though. Various experiments conducted by both fiction and nonfiction authors suggest that the availability of an e-book actually boosts real book sales.

The pricing model Digital Manga is using is kind of interesting. It's cheaper than buying the physical thing by more than 50%. The experiment I mentioned above had the people release their e-books free, which spurred their real book sales.