In an Italian trial for a murder in which the victim was found in her bed with her throat slit a day after she wore a bloody vampire costume to a Halloween party, a prosecutor is arguing that a brutal slaying was inspired by a violent manga comic.

Manga also have been linked to a death in Belgium, in which a note found next to the victim’s mutilated body referred to a Japanese comic called Death Note.

Manga also have been connected with the murder of British teacher Lindsay Hawker after piles of pornographic comics were found at the suspect’s flat.

An let’s not forget that Taro Aso is a manga fan…

Full story here.

An imprint of DC comics intended to function as an American alternative to manga, has folded shop. On the surface, Minx seemed like a good idea; why not translate the manga medium for a more America audience, using cultural references that don’t necessarily leave parents scratching their heads? Japundits could have told publishers years ago that manga has a growing audience. To hear one of editor Shirley Bond tell it:

“I started to wonder what was going to happen in a few years when those readers would want something new,” she said at the MINX launch in February, 2007. “So I pitched this line as an alternative to manga, but also as an alternative to traditional fiction, because I thought that it was really about time that teenage readers had their own imprint and that they could experience a brand new visual reading experience.”

But it didn’t work.

One British reporter wonders why and has this to say:

just as British kids of my generation grew up watching so much Saved By the Bell and Sweet Valley High that we talk about “jocks” and “proms” even though these barely exist within our direct experience, tomorrow’s Americans will be looking around for the otaku and bishonen that are supposed to populate every school. It’s nice to see cultural colonialism happening in reverse, and of course teenagers love to plunge into an esoteric world that makes no sense to their parents, but at the same time it does seem a bit ridiculous that an American 16-year-old can’t pick up a comic that more closely reflects her own life.

At Japundit, we’ve observed for a while that popular culture isn’t necessarily flowing in the one, hegemonic direction that apologists always fear. But it does occur to me that part of the appeal of manga may be its very “foreign-ness” and its imaginative use of setting and character and design, and the narrative risks that writers in Japan take naturally. For audiences around the globe, this kind of story-telling is thrilling. Do

I’m curious to hear from the experts–this means you–on what it is about Japanese manga that is so compulsive for you and if you think its success could ever be duplicated in the west.

Japundit reader Colin Fletcher writes in to alert us to a report about a maid coffee shop that has newly opened in Culver City, California.

Sandra Westwood, who oversees the cafe, worked most recently at the restaurants Bread and Brown Cafe in Manhattan. Earlier in her career, as a fashion model in Japan and Paris, she discovered the finer points of serving tea, from a customer standpoint. Ms. Westwood spent nearly a year designing the Royal/T menu and training the staff with Danielle Kurtz, formerly of Simpatica Catering in Portland, and the chef Chris Cooke, a veteran of Izakaya in Tokyo and Megu in TriBeCa. “Most of the food at maid cafes in Japan comes out of the microwave, which we don’t use here,” Ms. Westwood said.

Royal/T, which opened in May for breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, also serves curry rice bowls, salads seasoned with yuzu and Japanese-influenced desserts. There are Yoko Moku butter cookies and a layered mousse cake with sesame and red bean paste. The heart-shape chocolate lollipops, from Roni-Sue’s Chocolates on the Lower East Side, can best be described as adorable. But then, cuteness is the whole point at a maid cafe.

The girl on the left of the above image is supposed to be Jesus Christ, who is is the object of the um. . . affections of the boy on the right.

A scanlation is can be downloaded here and here.

Via Topless Robot.

in what is one of the more disturbing trends in contemporary japan, the maid cafes and other perverted male otaku hang outs have spawned a new branch of cafes for female otaku, ones based one gay comic book porn. that’s right, women who want to indulge their childhood fantasy of young effeminate men dressed in high school uniforms flirting with each other, engaging in oral sex, or brutally anal raping each other finally have an outlet for their fetish.

now if you’re anything like me, your fist reaction to this article might be, oh say, wtf? but apparently in japan’s never ending quest to cater to every possible kink, they have stumbled across a sizable subset of female otaku that just can’t get enough of yoai manga and doujinshi. as a consequence proprietors sensing an opportunity for profit have created bars and restaurants much like the one featured in this article. run by a woman by the name of emiko sakamaki, the place goes by the name of edlestein (named after a yoai comic set in a german high school) and features a staff of young cosmetically enhanced men. according to her and others the market is driven by the atmosphere of female indulgence that has been of which japan has, until this time, been bereft of, combined with the popularity of anime and manga, complicated by the desire for relationships which transcend traditional gender roles, all united by a sample population of young to middle aged single women who appreciate the unparalleled beauty of a fragile young teenager being raped by other men (preferably in groups).

The Tokyo District Court recently ordered two homepage owners and two Internet companies to pay 11 manga artists a total of 20.32 million yen for unauthorized uploading of the artists’ works.

According to the ruling, the two homepage maintainers scanned volumes of 45 titles, including [Tetsuya] Chiba’s Ashita no Joe, [Takehiko] Inoue’s Slam Dunk, [Hiroshi] Motomiya’s Salaryman Kintaro, [Go] Nagai’s Devilman, and [Takao] Saito’s Golgo 13, and uploaded them onto the Internet without authorization from September of 2005 to January of 2006.
The ruling calculated the compensation by taking 35% of the average 300-yen (US$2.60) price of the volumes’ e-book versions and multiplying that by the number of times the files were browsed for a total of 18.8 million yen (US$165,000). Ten of the plaintiffs were awarded an additional 200,000 yen (US$2,000) each for costs, and the 11th plaintiff was awarded an additional 320,000 yen (US$2,800) for costs.

Negima Live Action from the creator of Love Hina, Ken Akamatsu. It will start in 2007-10-03

Opening Theme:
“Pink Generation” by Class 3-A of Mahora akademy
Ending Theme:
“Tsuyoku Naaare” by Wakatsuki Sara

The latest indications from the Japanese stock market seem to be that the country may be getting ready to go manga.

According to Nikko Cordial Securities, manga, anime and video game-related stocks have risen noticably following Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s resignation announcment. They say this may be attributable to expectations that Taro Aso, an unabashed manga and anime fan, will succeed Abe as prime minister.

Among the stocks that rose on Wednesday is the Tokyo-based card game company “Broccoli,” whose stocks went up from 92 yen to 157 yen, a 71% rise. Major manga retailer Mandarake saw a 13% rise, while video game retailer Koei Net went up by 15%. Toei Animation, one of Japan’s largest animation studios, and Kadokawa Group Holdings, a manga publisher, both rose 3%.

Aso Taro’s interest for manga is well-known, and claimed in a 2003 interview that he read some 10-20 manga publications a week. Taro also established the International Manga Prize in 2007, for non-Japanese manga authors. He received some headlines ahead of the French presidential election this year for recommending Segolene Royal to read more manga, after she had criticized it for being violent and pornographic.

Another indication that Japan may be on the way to becoming MangaLand is a report that Nissan has come out with a new concept car with a design inspired by manga art.

The bi-lingual manga Ello Bello is going strong over at Rising Sun of Nihon, with Installment #8 posted recently. Go here to see all eight installments.

Bill Belew of Rising Sun of Nihon writes to tell us of a new manga feature on his blog.

Three times a week he will be publishing a manga by Kan Shinoy called Ello Bello, with the dialog presented in both Japanese and English.

Go here to find out more.

“Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is…There is no conclusion yet.” — Tezuka Osamu, 1969

David Pescovitz notes in Boing Boing that San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has a huge retrospective on Tezuka Osamu, the pioneering master of manga who created Astro Boy and so, so much more.

The exhibition features 200 works, including original art, covers, posters, anime, adult manga, and film screenings. A lot more information about Tezuka and the exhibition is available on an impressive dedicated website.

Artist, writer, and entrepreneur Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989) is regarded in Japan as the “god of comics,” and revered worldwide as an artistic master. He was the driving force behind the international phenomenon of manga-Japanese comics-and their offspring anime, Japanese animation. Creating over 700 manga titles-and drawing more than 150,000 pages-during his lifetime, Tezuka is best known in the West for Tetsuwan Atom (Mighty Atom or Astro Boy) and Jungeru Taitei (Jungle Emperor or Kimba the White Lion), both of which originated from his manga, and were serialized internationally for television in the 1960s. Today, Tezuka’s work is acclaimed for its complexity, originality,
and a powerful dynamism.

Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga, which took nine years of complicated negotiations to organize, is the first major exhibition of Tezuka’s art outside of Japan.

The exhibition was organized by Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in association with Tezuka Productions. Curator Philip Brophy said:

Tezuka is venerated as a driving force of the manga and anime industries in Japan. This exhibition will reveal the striking originality of his manga; its technical inventiveness, extraordinary dynamic range, and its close relationship to his anime. From the people who remember Astro Boy on TV when they were kids to the late teens of today-who are in tune with Japanese pop culture-this exhibition will appeal to a wide audience to whom the bold and sharp sensibilities of the comic form are exciting and relevant.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is a public institution whose mission is to lead a diverse global audience in discovering the unique material, aesthetic, and intellectual achievements of Asian art and culture.

Holding nearly 16,000 Asian art treasures spanning 6,000 years of history, the museum is one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian art.

Continuing our travels with U.S. cartoonist Bill Griffith, who writes and draws “Zippy” in hundreds of newspapers around the world, including the Taipei Times and the Japan Times, a recent panel titled “Pacific Rim Shot” depicts a Taiwan-owned airlines called EVA AIRLINES, owned by the Evergreen Corporation, and famous for putting Hello Kitty on the side of the plane as it flies the skies between Japan and Taiwan, among other routes.

Griffith, who has always had a fascination with Asia, often places his cartoon characters in Japan or Taiwan, and in this recent panel, we can see the EVA Airlines plane and Zippy’s “dream,” as the cartoonist puts it.

Taro Aso seems to be really serious about his “subculture democracy”, as he set up an International Manga Award destined to notable foreign manga cartoonists.

“I want to make the award something like the Nobel Prize for manga creators. Not as much money will be given as for the Nobel Prize, but we’d like to invite the winners to Japan.”

The article on The Japan Times follows up..

No prize money will be given, but winners will be invited to Tokyo for about 10 days, with expenses paid by the ministry. Meetings with Japanese manga artists and publishers will also be arranged for them, the officials said.

Well, while you are at it, why not take it a little bit more seriously and give real prizes to the aspiring Manga artists?

Or so says some sections of the UK press:

It’s no surprise that both police and press are desperate for an angle. What’s more interesting is the spotlight of blame swinging towards such an obscure cranny of the cultural stage. Perhaps manga’s time has come.

What do you think?

We’ve heard a number of times that people around the world just can’t seem to get enough of Japanese anime and manga, and for many people these are their only sources of information about Japan.

That’s great, but it seems that like anything else, a love for anime and manga can become such an obsession that. . .

Via Same Hat! Same Hat!

“Manga and anime are now Japan’s new ambassadors” or so claims Japan Times 25th March editorial. This write-up would have been just another rehash of what we have been hearing for a decade if the author didn’t go a step further in his reflection by trying to highlight some larger ramifications of this “mixed blessing diplomatic representation“. It is true that pop culture “has the power to form a picture of a country in the minds of  other nation’s people”, but as the author conveys, a lack of a broader knowledge about a culture may lead to serious misunderstandings and stereotypes.  Looking at Japan from the outside through Anime and Manga may give a distorted image of the country  to your average non-Japanese Otaku who spends hours in front of his screen ,especially if we take into account the fact that violence and sex are the two prevalent elements in most mainstream exported anime and manga works, and which do not correspond precisely to the daily life in Japan (unless you can prove the opposite!) . 

But then I wonder why western mainstream audiences embrace mainly violent and lewd works that tend to give images based solely on the fantasies of their authors, or as the Japan Times Editor-in-chief puts it “the artistry of a Kurosawa film or the richness of a Tanizaki novel feels missing from most of the story exports these days. Yet, maybe the very best of any culture can never be exported on a grand scale but remains reserved for a smaller interest group”. This leads us to think about the hand behind the appointment of these ambassadors. Putting aside  the  not-so-legal ways of media sharing such as internet , which caters mostly to the smaller interest groups cited above, the process of exporting Anime and Manga  goes through monopolistic giant western Publishers, read Viz Media, who publish only what would sell, regardless of other factors. Yet it’d be inappropriate to say that these publishers are the ones to decide about what to import, since they would never sell what the crowds won’t buy, simple marketing logic.

My point is that the majority of Anime and Manga exportations  are ,far from being ambassadors, just entertainment mediums that depict Japan as western audiences want to see it. People who consume such exports have their own image of Japan that is, based on my observations,light years far from the real thing. It is true that these works are produced domestically for Japanese audiences, but hey, the purpose they serve in Japan is way different: they are more of a relief valve from real life, a short trip to the realm of fantasy, often rich with exaggerations and stereotypes that Japanese have about their own culture. I prefer not to delve into other considerations, such the huge loss of the intrinsic “cultural and artistic value” during the process of translation… Luckily, as the author points out, this Anime and Manga craze seems to be  already encouraging Japanese language study in many places around the world.

I agree that Anime and Manga could be a good way to introduce Japan to the uninitiated, but no further than that. Culture can never be explored through subculture.

Have your say in the comments section if you disagree/agree!

Proving it’s not all misguided marketing campaigns that get kawaii wrong, footage of a recent J-Pop event in London:

Ninomiya Tomoko got inspiration for a popular manga in Japan from a photograph of a piano in a messy room, according to the Mainichi Daily News. The piano belonged to a women named Noda Megume and the author and her inspiration still talk to each other from to this day. The photo and its taker inspired a 16 volume, manga series.

I read recently that the social skills of young people in Japan have become stunted because the Internet allows them to obtain autoerotic gratification without the need to go out and come into direct contact with other human beings.

Apparently in an attempt to take this trend one step further, here is a virtual pole dance scene from an Xbox 360 game called Dead or Alive Xtreme 2.

The game allows you to choose from among four DOAX girls named Lei Fang (above), Hitomi, Kasumi, and Kokoro.

Via Asian Sirens

It’s fun to live in Japan. You get to enjoy many good things, like the warm feeling of hot canned coffee on a cold train platform, or the thrill of finding a girl’s phone number scrawled on the back of a chopstick wrapper after a night at an izakaya bar.

Just as a Hemmingway aficionado might get a thrill out of retracing the road from Paris to Pamplona, it can be fun for those gaijin of the otaku persuasion to visit some of the locations in their favorite anime series. Tokyo’s a good place for this, since the images of the city are well-represented in anime and manga, from Tokyo Tower (a regular fixation of the CLAMP artists) to the famous “Scramble Intersection” to iconic buildings like Shibuya 109 or the inverted pyramid at Tokyo Big Sight.

I remember my first trip to Tokyo back in 1991, when I stood before the famous Studio Alta giant TV (giant for 1991, anyway), realizing I had finally arrived in Japan for real.

The other day, weekend I went with a friend up to Karuizawa, a nice mountain town that happens to be the setting for the outstanding series “Please, Twins!” It was a lot of fun, roaming around the town and seeing what places from the anime series we happened to come across.