Let's Manga

It's been a few years, but otaku hunting (or "otaku gari" as it's known in Japanese) is back in the headlines. This time, a pair of men attacked the victims in the Nihonbashi section of Osaka, an area similar to Tokyo's Akihabara.

The reason? Same as it ever was: "Otaku are weak, they give over the money and they don't talk back."

Tokyo, June 11, 2009 - (JCN Newswire) - NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today that its wholly-owned European subsidiary DOCOMO Netherlands B.V. will launch Europe's first mobile-phone service for downloading Japanese comics, better known as manga, beginning today in France.

 In response to the Japanese Consulate General's call for establishing such a body, Brazilian student groups launched the Instituto Japao Pop Br, or the J-pop Brazil association, with support from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a Brazilian government-backed research institute.

It is about the spread of ideas, Mr Lu said. A comic does not need to be anti-government to be restricted from being printed; it simply needs to offer ideas that could be interpreted as being so. In essence, the world’s next super power is not keen on super heroes.The first Chinese comics were used as propaganda during the Japanese occupation as a way to build resentment. During Mao’s 10-year Cultural Revolution, manga was used to teach communist ideals to the largely illiterate masses. “We want to export our own culture,” said Zheng Jun, the rock star turned writer behind the comic Tibetan Rock Dog, which is gaining interest from the Japanese animation company Mad House towards turning it into a movie.As China continues to export its own culture, it could be used as part of the nation’s soft power, Mr Douglas said.

However, Hiroyuki is vowing that all the manga creators in Comic Gear will be working together in the same studio everyday. Hiroyuki hopes that this work environment will encourage more collaboration between fellow manga creators so they can trade tips on techniques and share their knowledge. Hiroyuki also hopes that this environment will foster new talent by having more experienced creators mentor previously unpublished creators "from morning to night" about developing story and characters.

The defining characteristic of boys’ love, I’d argue, is that it is a narrative about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that has been created with the intention of appealing to a female audience.

This broad definition of boys’ love has the advantage, to academics, of expanding it beyond its traditional application to Japanese or other Asian media (usually manga and anime) to encompass non-Asian genres such as slash and to permit the analysis of books about male/male relationships written by women that have otherwise been left out of such categorization

Subgenres within boys’ love, then, would include those various categories based on setting, source material, age of characters, status of presentation, plot type, and the like.