Drawing on Politics - 0 views
Manga museum draws derision - 0 views
Gundam statue draws attention to environment - 0 views
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"Gundam as the symbol of Tokyo's revival as a green city will send a strong message of 'Green Tokyo' and world peace to children who play a main role in Tokyo's future and the next generation," the event organizer said on its Web site. Gundam was chosen for the project in part because of parallels between environmental problems facing the world and the plot of the TV series, according to the Web site.
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""Gundam as the symbol of Tokyo's revival as a green city will send a strong message of 'Green Tokyo' and world peace to children who play a main role in Tokyo's future and the next generation," the event organizer said on its Web site. Gundam was chosen for the project in part because of parallels between environmental problems facing the world and the plot of the TV series, according to the Web site."
Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural dista... - 0 views
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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.
Down the Slippery Slope - The Crime of Viewing Manga - 0 views
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Given all the qualifying facts in the Whorley case, one might ask, why should anyone care? Setting aside questions of fundamental justice for the moment, the answer is: because cartoons and drawings aren't child pornography and should not be treated as such under the law.
Thought Police Can't Protect Real Children - 2 views
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would have established the catagory of "nonexistent youth"
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The banning of fictional depictions of child abuse would likely be as meaningless as the banning of fictional depictions of car chasing with the aim toward reducing motor vehicle accidents in real life.
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If content alone was the issue, war footage and horror films should be banned as well.
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Are we on the verge of the new digital world of iManga? - 1 views
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What excited him most, however, was not access or audience or fluidity. Size matters, he said. He'd always dreamed of a way to enlarge his drawings so that readers could appreciate each and every detail in his work. "Costs a lot physically, but if you can just touch the screen and enlarge an illustration? Wow." A few days later, a writer friend at a dinner party in Manhattan told me of an older author he knew who was reading more now--mainly because of her new e-reader'sfont-size enlarger. Ed Chavez, Marketing Director for Vertical, Inc., publishers of Japan-related books and manga, agrees that screen size counts a lot. "The iPad takes care of the limited screen of the iPhone, which adds an element most have not considered in Japan: a new platform for manga distribution."
Twins, 20, jailed for child porn manga - 2 views
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NEW GLASGOW - Twin brothers were sentenced in provincial court Wednesday to three months in jail for possessing child pornography.
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This is an interesting issue that concerns particularly anime and manga, although not only, because pornography and child pornography constitute such a high percentage of the total production (apprently, close to 50%). Here, we have a typical case where something legal in one country is illegal in many others. Moreover, there is also the issue of freedom of expression, since drawing (like writing, actually) are only expression of fantasies, but not necessarily their implementations, unless the it is about a story that actually took place. Does that mean one should forbid such fantasies to be expressed, whether from a commercial point of view or from an artistic perspective? Of course, many will state firmly that such fantasies can never become art, but that doesn't settle the debate once and for all, in my opinion. On the contrary, I think it remains quite an open-ended issue and one should keep an eye out for its development, as pornography in all its forms and expressions are often used as pretext to resteain freedom of speech and artistic expressions that don't fit a specific politically correct model.
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