If kawaii, or the aesthetic of cute, is
the longing for the freedom and innocence of youth, manifesting in the
junior and high school girl in uniform (Kinsella 1995), then moe is
the longing for the purity of characters pre-person, manifesting in
androgynous semi and demi human forms. This is called 'jingai,' or
outside human, and examples include robots, aliens, dolls and
anthropomorphized animals, all stock characters in the moe
pantheon. A specific example would be nekomimi, or cat-eared
characters. More generally, in order to achieve the desired affect, moe
characters are reduced to tiny deformed 'little girl' images with
emotive, pupil-less animal eyes
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shared by Ariane Beldi on 17 Feb 10
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Department of Alchemy - 2 views
doalchemy.org
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Moe and the Potential of Fantasy in Post-Millenial Japan - 2 views
www.japanesestudies.org.uk/...Bryce.html
academic manga anime moe fans characters romance sexuality games kawaii zoomorphism affect emotion visual_language boys_love dojinshi
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Moe is also used by fujoshi, zealous female fans of yaoi, a genre of manga featuring male homosexual romance. However, the word moe indicates a response to fantasy characters, not a specific style, character type or relational pattern. While some things are more likely than others to inspire moe, this paper will focus mainly on the response itself rather than the forms that inspire it.
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The moe character is a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and the response to its virtual potentials is affect.
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Massumi argues affect is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential (Massumi 2002). The experience, what he calls an 'intensity,' is outside of logical language and conscious control. Moe provides a word to express affect, or to identify a form that resonates and can trigger an intensity.
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It is for this reason that moe is consistently misunderstood as first and foremost images of young girls instead of a response to virtual potentials
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In the field interacting with otaku and fujoshi, I was constantly confronted by the concept of moe, and found it necessary to engage it.
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These are both men and their discourse centers on male otaku, but I will argue from them a more general theory, applied later in the paper to fujoshi structures of desire.
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the salient point is his judgment that a relationship with a mediated character or material representations of it is preferable to an interpersonal relationship.
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While recognizing the conservative nature of otaku sexuality, Azuma attempts to account for the schizophrenic presence of perversion in the moe image. For Azuma, otaku are postmodern subjects with multiple personalities engendered by their environment and enthusiastic media consumption
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To feel moe for all characters in all situations, the narrative connecting characters or moments in time is de-emphasized.
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response is unconnected with 'reality' and thus offers new potentials to construct and express affects.
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Moe is affect in response to fantasy forms that emerged from information-consumer culture in Japan in the late stages of capitalism.
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Such a space is disconnected from social and political concerns, and exists for the preservation of the individual.
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Manga scholar Itou Gou argues that since the end of the 1980s characters in anime, manga and videogames became so appealing that fans desired them even without stories (Itou 2005). Ito dubs such character types 'kyara,' distinct from characters (kyarakutaa) embedded in narratives.
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The doll-like and semi-human Ayanami became the single most popular and influential character in the history of otaku anime; fans still isolate parts of the character to amplify and rearticulate in fan-produced works to inspire moe.
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In works featuring these characters, the original work functions as a starting point, and the extended process of producing and consuming moe takes place among fans in online discussions and videos, fan-produced comics (doujinshi), costume roleplay (cosplay) and figures.
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That the moe form, the body without organs, is outside personal and social frames is precisely why it triggers affect.
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'moe otaku' a superficial fixation on surfaces and accelerated consumption of disposable moe kyara, impetus for him to declare this younger generation culturally 'dead'
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One man I spoke with said, 'Moe is a wish for compassionate human interaction. Moe is a reaction to characters that are more sincere and pure than human beings are today.' Similarly, another man described moe as 'the ultimate expression of male platonic love.' This, he said, was far more stable and rewarding than 'real' love could ever be. Manga artist Akamatsu Ken stresses that moe is the 'maternal love' (boseiai) latent in men,[xxi] and a 'pure love' (junsui na ai) unrelated to sex, the desire to be calmed when looking at a female infant (biyoujo wo mite nagomitai) (Akamatsu 2005). 'The moe target is dependent on us for security (a child, etc.) or won't betray us (a maid, etc.). Or we are raising it (like a pet)' (Akamatsu 2005). This desire to 'nurture' (ikusei) characters is extremely common among fans. Further, moe is about the moment of affect and resists changes ('betrayal') in the future, or what Akamatsu refers to as a 'moratorium' (moratoriamu). Moe media is approached as something of a sanctuary from society (Okada 2008), and as such is couched in a discourse of purity.
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I will now demonstrate how it is further possible to reduce people to characters, or to reduce reality to fantasy in pursuit of moe.
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Association with the two-dimensional world, and lack of depth or access in the three-dimensional world, makes a maid moe.[
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this arose in Japan in the late stages of capitalism as a result of shifts in consumer-information society
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aoi erases the female presence because fans say female-male or even female-female couples[xxxvi] are too 'raw' (namanamashii). Put another way, the reality of relationships is removed from yaoi to make the moe response possible.
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Many other fujoshi I spoke with dated men even as they imagined possibilities of coupling them as characters with other men.[xl] As Saitou points out, the reality of heterosexual relationships and virtual possibilities of homosexual couplings are separate and coexistent (Saitou 2007). Journalist Sugiura Yumiko explains this as the crucial difference between fujoshi and otaku, who approach fantasy as an alternative for things that they actually want but cannot realize in this world (Sugiura 2006).[xli] A fujoshi, for example, would not 'marry' a two-dimensional character the way some otaku advocate;
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Sugiura is importantly highlighting that fantasy and reality are separate and coexistent, but this is widespread in moe culture and not solely a female quality.[xlii] As much as male otaku boast of their two-dimensional wives, they often do so with levity as a self-conscious performance
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While it is true that men tend to feel moe for single characters that they can possess while women feel moe for relationships or character couplings, this broad difference is fast disappearing. In truth, the media popular among so-called 'moe otaku' in recent years has come to resemble yaoi aesthetics: multiple girls in a nostalgic or fantastic world with minimal male presence and heightened emphasis on relationships and emotions
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In all cases, the database (Azuma 2009) is present. The elements that constitute and indicate a certain type of top or bottom, for example glasses or hairstyle or height, are predetermined; any given top or bottom is a construct of defined character traits and behavior.
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One of the most recognizable features of the moe phenomenon is the anthropomorphization of objects into objects of desire. Otaku turn cats, war machines, household appliances and even men of historical significance into beautiful little girls to trigger moe. Reality is flattened, and from it emerge polymorphous forms of stimulation. Similarly, fujoshi can rearticulate anything into beautiful boys and sexualized yaoi relations. Moe characters can be based on a written description or drawn image, a physical person or even anthropomorphized animals, plants and objects.
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The erotic fantasy effectively re-mystified their world, adding a layer of potential to the mundane (the very ground under their feet!) and making the familiar queer and exciting. Latent potential so unlocked, the three friends replayed the moe relationship across other potential players such as shampoo and conditioner, knife and spoon, salt and pepper.
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More startling and subversive is 'moe politics' (seiji moe), where national histories, international relations and imposing world leaders are reduced to moe characters across which yaoi romance can be read.
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It should be noted that Hetaria was written by a man, and these sorts of stories are becoming increasingly popular among young men known as 'fudanshi' (rotten boys).
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it precisely because it is pure that it can give birth to such perverse and polymorphous possibilities.
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Call for Papers: Images of Women in Film and Media - 0 views
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Transformative Works and Cultures - 1 views
journal.transformativeworks.org/...twc
online journal english html textual image pdf academic scholar articles review essay social sciences media studies cultural studies reception community fandom transnationalism theory method
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"Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived; articles about media studies; and articles about the fan community. We invite papers in all areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, film, TV, anime, comic books, fan community, video games, and machinima. We encourage a variety of critical approaches, including feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, audience theory, reader-response theory, literary criticism, film studies, and posthumanism. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship; hyperlinked articles; or other forms that test the limits of the genre of academic writing."
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This online journal is opened to work on anime and manga fandom, so I thought this would be of interest to this group!
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Visualizing Asia Conference - Home - 0 views
www.visualizingasia.com
website english html textual academic scholar cfp event social sciences cultural studies media studies globalization asia
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About the Conference The Visualizing Cultures project and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University are pleased to announce an academic conference focused on the relationship between visual imagery and social change in modern Asia entitled, "Visualizing Global Asia at the Turn of the 20th Century." This will be one of the first academic conferences devoted to "image-driven scholarship" and teaching about Asia in the modern world. We have selected scholars of history, art history, history of photography, and history of technology specializing in China, Korea, Japan, United States, Europe and the Philippines to discuss how to integrate visual and textual media in research and teaching, using to the fullest the opportunities presented by the new technologies and the use of the internet as a publishing platform.
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Comic Market: How the World's Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dōji... - 0 views
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dōjinshi phenomenon did not start with Comic Market, Comike and dōjinshi are inextricably linked, having shaped each other's history for three decades.
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Comike convention has shaped the most important trends defining the development of dōjinshi in Japan today
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In 1975, a woman who had made critical remarks about the Manga Taikai was excluded from that convention, and [End Page 234] subsequently a firestorm of anger among fans produced a movement against the Manga Taikai led by the famous circle Meikyū (Labyrinth), which resulted in the conception of a new alternative convention. On December 21, 1975, the first Comic Market—"a fan event from fans for fans"—was held in Tokyo.6
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Comike's underlying vision was of an open and unrestricted dōjinshi fair, offering a marketplace without limitations on content or access.
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With the advent of these fan-consumers (as opposed to fan-creators), dōjinshi became demand-driven publications. Greater competition gradually fostered rising standards of quality, which in turn attracted more circles and buyers. Higher sales shrank production costs and boosted profits, which could then be reinvested in the dōjinshi themselves. Small printing companies, many of which had begun in the minikomi (microcommunication) boom of the early 1970s, were able to use the profits derived from greater demand for their services to modernize their equipment, lowering production costs further and enabling them to construct their production schedules around each Comike.8 Additionally, lower printing costs freed smaller groups from the dependence on bigger groups, which often had strict rules on content and style to avoid conflict among their many members. Having lost their raison d'être, these big clubs and circles gradually faded away, leaving dōjinshi creators to produce stories they liked, in the manner they liked.9
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aniparo parodied popular anime series, and in doing so, attracted a new type of fan to Comike, beyond its core group of 2000 or so attendees. These were female fans, mostly middle and high school students strongly influenced by the 1970s florescence of shōjo manga. They began to create and consume dōjinshi in which the (bishōnen or "pretty boy") male protagonists of popular anime and manga were transposed into a very particular sort of erotic story typified by the phrase: "without tension" (yama nashi), "without punchline" (ochi nashi), and "without meaning" (imi nashi)—and hence the contemporary genre title, yaoi.10
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The eleventh Comic Market in spring 1979 saw the popularity of the cute and pure bishōjo or "pretty girl" (strongly influenced by 1970s shōjo manga) skyrocket among men's dōjinshi circles, attracting many new male participants.
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The Comic Market was dominated by women from the beginning (90 percent of its first participants were female), but in 1981, thanks to lolicon, male participants numbered the same as female participants for the first time in Comike's history.13
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Internal conflicts on the Comike planning committee underlay some of these developments: they marked the ascendancy of the faction led by Yonezawa Yoshihiro, who favored Comike's unlimited expansion.15 Though he was criticized for purportedly selling dōjinshi out to commercialism, Yonezawa couched his plans for Comike in terms of a collective organization of the convention by all participants, including staff, circles, and visitors.16 Whatever the underlying reality, these public principles remain little changed today.17
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Faced with this loss of identity, talent, and space, every other large fan convention except Comike dissolved. Yaoi Boom But in the middle of the decade, one manga and its anime not only saved dōjinshi fandom from near extinction but was responsible for its biggest boom yet. Takahashi Yōichi's Captain Tsubasa (1981–88, Kyaputen tsubasa),
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New dōjinshi conventions appeared, and manga shops began selling dōjinshi on commission. Comparatively lush, custom-made, oversized dōjinshi with more than one hundred pages became common, and popular circles could now live on their fanworks' profits
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Despite the self-censorship brought on by the mass media's criticism, Comike nevertheless continued to thrive. Young men tired of new, tighter restrictions on professional manga turned to Comike, and attendance once again swelled to 230,000 in the summer of 1990.23 Hardcore lolicon was now passé, and erotic dōjinshi for men had greatly changed. New genres were introduced with such aspects as fetishism and a new style of softcore eroticism enjoyed by men and women alike; in particular, yuri (lily), or lesbian stories, emerged.24Dōjinshi also became smaller and shorter due to professional publishers recruiting talented dōjinshi creators en masse: the bulk of dōjinshi were the works of the less talented creators left behind.25
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Other factors contributing to the increased interest in dōjinshi and in fanworks were the development of fixed otaku landmarks and the spread of computers. Almost everyone could now afford to make digital dōjinshi as well as audiovisual or even interactive dōjinshi (i.e. dōjin music and dōjin games).
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The personal technology revolution meant [End Page 239] simplification of fanworks' production processes as well as completely new possibilities for communication and new digital genres. With the growth of dōjinshi in other media, the term "dōjin products" (dōjin seihin) has gradually come into use to describe fanworks of all genres.
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Further, the conversion of Tokyo's Akihabara "Electric Town" into a district full of shops selling otaku-related goods, as well as the nationwide expansion of otaku-goods retailers and the establishment of Internet communities and message boards in the late 1990s, enabled otaku to live out their interests and to communicate nonstop with like-minded people everywhere. Their interests and culture were easily shared, and consequently information on Comic Market and dōjin culture spread around the world.
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The rise of the Internet also meant that Comike lost its monopoly as the center of otaku and dōjinshi culture. Nevertheless, Comike remained the most important event for Japanese fans, especially after companies with otaku-related products started to exploit it.28 Firms had been interested in Comic Market for decades as a never-ending pool of promising new talent and as a place to exploit them commercially, and they were willing to pay much money for direct access to these masses of otaku.29 Starting with NEC in the summer of 1995, companies were granted exhibition space to market or to sell their newest products. This was the birth of the dealer booth at Comike, and, as with dōjinshi circles, the number of applicant companies was much higher than that of available spaces: a self-sustaining event with such high attendance was too important for any related company to ignore.30 Companies accepted the existence of unlicensed parody dōjinshi using copyrighted material (albeit in a transformative and thus arguably fair-use manner) since they could now sell exclusive goods at Comike (Figure 3) or use it as a marketing place, attracting to the convention people who were not interested in dōjinshi.
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In the summer of 2004, 5 percent of all circles participating in Comike were headed by a professional mangaka or illustrator, while another 10 percent had some professional experience.
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Despite its relative newness, Higurashi became one of Japan's biggest media phenomena, and at the seventy-sixth Comic Market in summer 2009, Tōhō Project became the first dōjin title ever to receive the honor of being considered its own genre.
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It seems that dōjinshi circles are not switching entirely to the Internet but rather are using it as an informational and marketing platform for themselves and their creations, spreading the knowledge of and fascination with Comic Market to new spheres.
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With high attendance, positive media attention, and industry support, Comike's position seems invulnerable. Even the deaths of important figures such as Iwata Tsuguo in 2004 and Yonezawa Yoshihiro—who was the face of Comike for decades—in 2006 did not harm its position. But unresolved problems, such as the use of copyrighted material in parody dōjinshi and the child pornography questions inherent in lolicon and shotakon, remain.
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Comike was neither the first nor the biggest dōjinshi fair when it was established; its main purpose was to provide the freest market possible, and that freedom has come at a price. The dream of a Comic Market open to every one and everything was never realized, as there were too many physical, financial, and legal restrictions. Even today, the Comic Market suffers from a lack of space, a lack of money, and a lack of legal security. Only two-thirds of applicant circles can participate due to constraints, since, as a small independent operator Comike's financial resources are limited and most of the work is done by volunteers.
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s the center of attention, with its size and its links to the industry, it is undeniable that Comike possesses the power and the means to influence social, market, and even political developments. In [End Page 244]
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recent years it has not been reluctant to use this power. Whether through conferences on copyright issues or on the establishment of a "National dōjinshi fair liaison group" (Zenkoku dōjinshi sokubaikai renrakukai) in 2000, it has taken on the responsibility of representing and of regulating Japanese dōjinshi culture.
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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR/ FACULTY FELLOW IN JAPAN STUDIES - 0 views
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The Department of East Asian Studies at New York University invites applications for a full-time, non-tenure track appointment as an Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow in modern Japan studies. The appointment will be for one year beginning September 1, 2011, pending budgetary and administrative approval. Candidates must have received a Ph.D. within five years of the date of appointment and have a strong commitment to teaching. Fields of expertise sought include literature, new media studies, and Japanese intellectual history, but we encourage all applicants engaged with critical and methodological issues connected to Japan and East Asian Studies. Applications must include a letter of application, curriculum vitae, a 20-30 page writing sample, sample syllabi for both undergraduate and graduate courses, and 3 letters of recommendation. The deadline is January 4, 2011, but we will continue to accept applications until the position is filled.
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マスメディアにおける女性表現の単一次元性 : 雑誌メディアにおけるマンガとグラビアの分析 - Unidimensional expression of f... - 0 views
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収録誌 社会心理学研究 Research in social psychology Vol.8, No.1(19930122) pp. 1-8 日本社会心理学会 ISSN:09161503 書誌情報 マスメディアにおける女性表現の単一次元性 : 雑誌メディアにおけるマンガとグラビアの分析 Unidimensional expression of female figures in mass media : The analysis of comics and gravures in magazines 豊田 秀樹 1 福富 護 2 西田 智男 3 TOYODA Hideki 1 FUKUTOMI Mamoru 2 NISHIDA Tomoo 3 1大学入試センター研究開発部 2東京学芸大学教育学部 3東京学芸大学教育学研究科 1Research Division National Center for University Entrance Examination 2Department of Educational Psychology, Tokyo Gakugei University 3Graduate School of Education, Tokyo Gakugei University キーワード 性的次元 マンガ グラビア 数量化III類 人物描写 sexual dimension comic gravure Quantification Type III,expression of figure 抄録 The purpose of this study is to show the existence of sexual unidimension of female expressions in comics and gravures in the magazines. 1221 comics and 6861 gravures in 332 magazines published in June, 1989 were collected. The numbers of figures which can be categolized with sex and certain conditions of expression were counted. The frequency tables were analyzed by Quantification type III. The major findings were: (1) most of the expression of female figures in magazines can be explained by an unidimensional scale, named Degree of Exposure. (2) The degree of female expression tends to be more unidimensional in gravures than in comics.
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Thoughts on moe - 0 views
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This is a really good example of why Socratic inquiry really works. Because the first step in analysing any media product is to look at things like age and gender and race, but the second step is to examine the underlining factors that create our biases about those very things.
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Mimi Ito - Weblog - 0 views
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British firm scores hit with manga Shakespeare - 0 views
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The books have managed to interest a wide audience, with teachers integrating them into their curriculum.Seven works were released in 2007 as part of the "Manga Shakespeare" series -- "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet", "The Tempest", "Richard III", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Macbeth" and "Julius Caesar".Adaptations of "Othello" and the comedy "As You Like It" are due out in autumn of this year.The books have been a roaring success in Britain, where a new print-run was ordered after the first ran out in six months, while also flying off the shelf in Japan, said Metro Media marketing director Doug Wallace.
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The books have managed to interest a wide audience, with teachers integrating them into their curriculum. Seven works were released in 2007 as part of the "Manga Shakespeare" series -- "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet", "The Tempest", "Richard III", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Macbeth" and "Julius Caesar". Adaptations of "Othello" and the comedy "As You Like It" are due out in autumn of this year. The books have been a roaring success in Britain, where a new print-run was ordered after the first ran out in six months, while also flying off the shelf in Japan, said Metro Media marketing director Doug Wallace.
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Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex - 0 views
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Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.
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Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade.
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Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster.
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The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force
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Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.
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About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works.
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"This is something that satisfies the fans," Ichikawa said. "The publishers understand that this does not diminish the sales of the original product but may increase them.
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As recently as a decade ago, he told me, creators of popular commercial works sometimes cracked down on their dojinshi counterparts at Super Comic City. "But these days," he said, "you don't really hear about that many publishers stopping them."
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"The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors.
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They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.
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He opened Mandarake 27 years ago, well before the dojinshi markets began growing more popular — in part to provide another sales channel for the work coming out of them. At first, publishers were none too pleased with his new venture. "You think I didn't hear from them?" he tells me in a company conference room. But in the past five years, he says, as the scale and reach of the markets has expanded, the publishers' attitude "has changed 180 degrees." It's all a matter of business, he says.
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triangle. "You have the authors up there at this tiny little tip at the top. And at the bottom," he says, drawing a line just above the widening base of the triangle, "you have the readers. The dojin artists are the ones connecting them in the middle."
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the copyright winds in the US have been blowing in the opposite direction — toward longer and stricter protections. It is hard to imagine Hollywood, Nashville, and New York agreeing to scale back legal protection in order to release the creative impulses of super-empowered fans, when the gains from doing so are for now only theoretical.
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mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism.
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Everybody's Fujoshi Girlfriend - 0 views
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As a result, when media attention eventually turned to actual fujoshi, the elevator pitch — “They’re otaku, except girls!” — was more or less accurate (granting a broad reading of “otaku”), but the implications were misunderstood. If fujoshi were girl otaku, they must be the girls usually appearing alongside otaku in those TV specials and magazine articles, right? You know — the maids. But no.
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Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural dista... - 0 views
www.diigo.com/...005094623173c0e5e5be75b8d9ebad
academic presentations manga anime comics international manga_industry france
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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.
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ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, CULTURE AND SOCIETY - 1 views
www.gse.au.edu/index.php
website archive english html textual image pdf academic scholar article review asia social sciences humanities method theory online archive
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ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, CULTURE AND SOCIETY is an international peer-reviewed academic periodical which provides a forum for interdisciplinary discussion of issues related to East, South and Southeast Asian arts, cultures and societies, inviting contributions from the disciplines of literature, literary/art criticism, language, philosophy, anthropology, social studies, cultural studies, semiotics, gender studies, film, media and communication arts, architecture and design, and contemporary critical theory. The journal publishes original research articles concerned with Asian texts and contexts, as well as a variety of creative forms of writing, while its interview/event/review section offers an analysis of related recent literature and a commentary on relevant cultural events.