Japan The Strange World of Manga and Other Comics

Back to the Beginning Tokyo — Higashi-Ueno District The Strange World of Manga Tokyo — Kiyomizu Kannon-dō Temple and Ueno-Kōen Park Tokyo — Benzaiten Temple Tokyo — Rinnō-ji Temple Nikkō — Tochigi Prefecture Logistics, what I was doing there, Russian MW radio stations audible in Japan, and maps

So you're in Japan at the train station or the corner mini-mart and you see a big rack of magazines.

Or, if you're outside the train station, you probably see several waist-high stacks of magazines.

Hmmm.

Interesting.

Some of these are comic books.

Actually, most of these are comic books.

The comics might be relatively easier for the clueless gaijin to figure out, easier than news magazines. Let's see.

Ah yes, a big rack indeed. Most of these are manga.

Some of them are the dirty ones.

Well, OK, a lot of them are.

Not so much the ones you see here, but a lot of what's sold at the mini-mart and the train station.

Manga can be generally followed by the clueless gaijin. At least there are pictures. A common plot, such as it goes, may be:

• There's this young girl, generally very young, and generally wearing some sort of uniform (schoolgirl, nurse, maid, policewoman, nuclear reactor operator).
• She is afraid, she gets chased, and she gradually loses all her clothing.
• There is sex, and visible sweating, and a lot of grimacing, and what I think is meant to indicate shouting.

There's something about a girl in a uniform....

These are scans of relatively tame pages.

But don't worry, the naughty parts are always vaguely rendered as per Japanese law.

So it's all on the up-and-up (and read right-to-left). The panels in those two pages with the nervous naked nurse would be read in this order:

Manga are sold in huge stacks outside the train stations in the evenings so the salarymen have something to read on the trains.

I had some that were more obviously of the Dirty Schoolgirl theme but I shipped those to a couple of friends. Both of whom told me to quit doing that.

There's a mind boggling variety of manga paraphilia, with detailed terminology and entire Wikipedia articles dedicated to sorting out the many and varied genres and sub-genres including incontinence anxiety arousal (omorashi), train-car groping (chikan), and even tentacle erotica (shokushu goukan). Really. Tentacles!

All at once the Cartoon Girls That I Wanna Nail page doesn't look so odd....

Manga was the precursor to anime, or stylized Japanese animation. They share some distinctive features.

One is the exaggerated physical characteristics of relatively large head and very enlarged eyes, small sharp nose, and relatively small and gracile mandible.

Classic Kopf craniofacial proportion sequence, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness

The resulting appearance is child-like. Child-like appearance in adults is technically known as neoteny, juvenilization, or pedomorphosis.

The paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in the journal Natural History that Mickey Mouse was originally drawn with adult characteristics, but over time has been drawn increasingly child-like in facial proportions. This essay also appears in his book The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History and a version is available online complete with its discussion of cartoon cranial morphometrics.

The juvenilized appearance of stereotypical manga makes it unclear if the characters are meant to be juvenile or if they just look that way. Either way, it can be kind of creepy.

If you are into comics, you might want to see my page with comic art murals in Brussels, but if you are interested in the uniquely Japanese forms of manga and anime, see my pictures from the Otakon conference in Baltimore.

OK, back to the tourism:

Japan

Back to the Beginning Tokyo — Higashi-Ueno District The Strange World of Manga Next — Tokyo — Kiyomizu Kannon-dō Temple and Ueno-Kōen Park Tokyo — Benzaiten Temple Tokyo — Rinnō-ji Temple Nikkō — Tochigi Prefecture Logistics, what I was doing there, Russian MW radio stations audible in Japan, and maps

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