This is an excerpt of a chapter I contributed to an anthology titled Fanning the Flames: Fandoms and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan (William W. Kelly, ed., State University of New York Press, 2004).
Of all the productions of Japanese popular culture in the second half of the twentieth-century, perhaps the most well-developed and commercially important has been comic art: manga magazines and books, and the closely related anime film, video, and digital animations. It is hard to exaggerate their commercial success and influence. Manga magazines and books represent more than one-third of unit sales (and nearly a quarter of gross revenues) of all publications in Japan. In 2001, more than 1.9 billion manga magazines and books were sold, with gross revenues totaling more than 531 billion yen. Many of those sold were shôjo manga ("girls' comics") or so-called "ladies' comics" (intended specifically for adult women)."[1]
According to one recent survey, 42% of Japanese women between the ages of 20 and 49, and 81% of teen girls report reading manga with some regularity.[2] At any time, there are more than 100 manga magazines in circulation targeting female readers of many different age brackets and specific tastes. The best selling of these, Ribbon (published by Shueisha), has a monthly circulation of well over one million copies. Nearly all the artists who create shôjo manga are women, and the most successful of them, such as Sailor Moon creator Takeuchi Naoko, are multimillionaires.
The subject of Japanese comic art has drawn a number of studies, and I myself have extensively studied commercial shôjo and women's manga, [3] but my attention here is directed to a further, equally remarkable development of the manga world in Japan, which is the proliferation of what are known as dôjinshi. These are self-published manga by amateur fan-artists, working either alone or in groups, producing what are inspired by, tributes to, and take-offs from popular commercial manga series. This chapter focuses on this creative outpouring by female manga fans, and especially to the venues in which they are displayed and circulated.
In this world of self-publication, artists and writers find—or rather create—avenues of expression beyond those offered by mainstream, commercial publishing. This may sound like a modest undertaking, but as it happens there are a great many people who do in fact care to buy such wares, and they do so at events known formally as dôjinshii sokubai kai (literally, a market of self-published magazines), though participants tend to simply refer to them as ibento ("events"). Simply put, these are enormous public gatherings of amateur artists and writers selling the comic books, fiction, illustrations, etc. they have created to anyone who comes to buy them.
These gatherings can indeed be huge "events." The largest by far is the Tokyo Komikku Maaketto, or "Comic Market" (http://www.comiket.co.jp/), a semiannual, multi-day convention attended by an estimated 400,000 people. But even the smaller, one-day events held in cities throughout Japan are attended by thousands and even tens of thousands. Those who flock to these events—to buy what the artists create or simply to revel in the happening—find alternatives to mainstream publications and also find—or rather create—a powerful, if sometimes fragmented, experience of community.
Most strikingly—at least it was to me when I first encountered this community—is that the majority of participants are women and girls. These fanzine conventions, from the awesome Tokyo Comic Market to the smallest local events, are in many ways about gender and sexuality, both in what one finds in the pages of the books offered for sale and in what goes on between and within the convention participants themselves. This chapter explores some of the gender politics—both personal and public, abstract and concrete, artistic and pragmatic—in this community that has grown so large that "counterculture" seems an inappropriate label.
If
you'd like to read the whole article, check out Fanning
the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan, edited
by William W. Kelly and
published by SUNY Press. For more info, see
the SUNY
Press web site.Kinsella, Sharon
2000 Adult Manga: Culture And Power In Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.
Schodt, Frederik L.
1986 Manga! Manga! The World Of Japanese Comics. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International.
1996 Dreamland Japan: Writings On Modern Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.
Thorn, Matt
2001 Shôjo Manga: Something for Girls. Japan Quarterly 48 (3 (July-September)):43-50.
Zenkoku shuppan kyôkai/Shuppan kagaku kenkyuusho (The All Japan Magazine and Book Publisher's and Editor's Association/The Research Institute for Publications)
2002 2002 Shuppan shihyou nenpou ("Annual Report of Publishing Indices 2002"). Tokyo: Zenkoku shuppan kyôkai/Shuppan kagaku kenkyuusho.
[1] Precisely how much is not easy to say, because while figures for sales of manga magazines by genre are available, there are no publicly available figures for sales of manga books by genre. Manga magazines for girls and women account for 9% and 7%, respectively, of all manga magazine sales. Since women tend to prefer buying books over magazines more so than men, it seems to reasonable to assume that those percentages would be somewhat higher for sales of manga books, but I have no data to back that assumption. These figures and the other figures in this first paragraph come from the 2002 edition of Shuppan shihou nenpyou ("Annual Report of Publishing Indexes"). RETURN TO TEXT
[2] Mainichi shinbun dokusho yoron chousa (Mainichi Newspaper Survey of Reading Habits). Tokyo: 2001. The survey was conducted September 1-3, 2000. There were 3232 respondents, all 16 years of age or older. 1681 (52%) of respondents were female.RETURN TO TEXT
[3] For further English-language information on shôjo manga and the manga industry in general, see Thorn 2001, Kinsella 2000, Schodt 1986, 1996. Additional articles and resources can be found at my web site, http://matt-thorn.com.RETURN TO TEXT
©Matt Thorn 2004