welcome datacomp

After some twitter back-and-forths, I’ve decided to try to do a few posts where I introduce some of the stuff I picked up last Comic Market (C77), mostly just to prove to people that you can spend over $500 on interesting doujinshi and have basically none of it be pornographic. (Nozomu Tamaki pushed his ero book on me and who am I to deny that man a sale?)

Of course, to start off this series of posts, I’m going to basically mess up my entire theme by starting with a professionally published book from 2007. I did, however, purchase this book at C77, and it’s the closest one to my laptop, so I’m going to start with the first volume of Manga Ronso Boppatsu (マンガ論争勃発, “Manga Debate Eruption”, alternatively “The Manga Criticism War Erupts!”), authored and edited by Kaoru Nagayama, author of Eromanga Studies　(East Press), and the journalist Takashi Hiruma.

Manga Ronso Boppatsu is a collection of nearly fifty short (2-6 page) articles on a variety of topics, most of which center around a single expert or critic’s thoughts on the topic at hand. The authors of the book state that the idea behind the book is to listen to various positions on each of these hot topics, such as the globalization of manga, creators’ rights, and the limiting of free expression in manga, so that constructive discussion can start taking place rather than the mindless, polarized shouting matches that’re all too easy to fall into when debating these issues.

I ended up getting this book (and its sequel) thanks to a tip from Vertical’s Ed Chavez, who sent me off in the direction of the far-left corner of the Big Sight’s East-3 hall, where I found a rather large table staffed by just one guy, who I assume was one of the authors of the book. The placement of their booth was a bit odd to me, as it was down in one of the doujinshi-selling halls (as opposed to the upstairs industry hall), but up against the wall where non-doujinshi products like markers and corn dogs are sold.

This was actually a rather appropriate place to stick these guys, as while their book is released by a professional publisher (Micro Magazine), the subjects covered in the volume either deal directly with doujinshi events like Comiket, or are extremely relevant to the ideals embodied by these events themselves: Spreading manga culture and providing a space where individuals can distribute works of free expression. I’m not just making this stuff up, either–the Comic Market Preparation Committee and the National Doujinshi Event Liaison Group are both prominently given credit for cooperation right next to the authors.

I mentioned that Manga Ronso Boppatsu is the closest book to my laptop, and there’s actually a reason for that; it’s basically the only thing I’ve been turning to as of late when I feel like educating myself on manga. While I’m still working through it, the articles I’ve read so far are all very informative and provide thoughtful views on whatever topic is at hand. Of course, there is a trade-off to gathering the breadth of experts that the book jams into a little over 200 pages, and that is that a relative lack of depth in any given article. However, the articles are all excellent primers on their respective topics given by some of the most respected individuals in their fields. Since it’d be nearly impossible to give my thoughts on each individual article, I’m simply going to spend the rest of this post below the cut translating each article’s title and the primary individual consulted or interviewed (when applicable), and strongly suggest the volume (available for purchase at Amazon and bk1.jp, among other places) to anyone with an interest in a mix of solid journalism and on-the-ground, current commentary on the state of manga and doujinshi.

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On Saturday I took this picture:

I think that covers that.
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I totally bought Kannagi even though I didn’t watch it. $35 for 7 episodes :o
I also didn’t take notes, so I’d better write this down before I forget any of it…

Facts about Yamakan:

• He is cool
• He composed the Haruhi dance in his apartment while standing on his bed
• He recommends Summer Wars by possibly-acclaimed director Mamoru Hosoda
• He doesn’t actually hate slightly-more-acclaimed director Akiyuki Shinbo
• He probably shouldn’t have made three dancing anime in a row
• “If I said I didn’t like any other directors, people would yell at me on the Internet again”

Highlights of his panels included an Asian guy, possibly from a mysterious land known as “#denpa”, dancing the Kannagi OP.

Facts about Kikuko Inoue:

• She was a fish in a previous life.
• She “knows this”.
• She spent half of her panel asking Hidenori Matsubara to let her be in the next Eva movie. (He offered to let her be Pen-Pen)
• People in the audience thought Maikaze and games were recorded differently from anime, but they weren’t.
• She can remember how to sing the Ah My Goddess opening, but not Cruel Angel’s Thesis. But she did her best!
• Only girls can join her 17-year-old club, because it’s more bittersweet.

Tomorrow I’m going to do something other than sitting in guest Q&A panels, I hope. Like sitting in Surat’s panels.

Actually, I didn’t go to Anime Boston; kransom did.
I boycotted Anime Boston for reasons described in my previous post.
He did a “Twitter” from Anime Boston, but just one, which goes as follows:

Events and sec at ab is kidna bimyou

The meaning of this is that despite the promises of excitement and fun made for the weekend, in reality it had bimyou-ish panels and events, and the “sec” was also bimyou.
I would venture that this entire gathering was a physical form of chu-mail: the hand flapping of a thousand aspies wearing their Sonichu medallions and courageous but awkwardly attempting to express their love for anime.
Let us be thankful that their failure was mostly contained within a single convention center and the hazukashii news did not reach the glorious nation of Japan.
So, it’s sort of understandable that no post was written here, on this blog, about the anime event he attended.
I wish to recommend you instead a blog made by a GNU/Linux doujin guy.
He went to Kinko’s and printed up 50 copies of the Ubunchu doujin!
If everyone in attendance did this, we would have kopibon at the convention and it would become a doujin fair.
My friends, if we want to return creativity to our great nation and ban the bomb, anything which makes America more like Japan must be accepted without question.
Let a thousand flowers bloom. Flowers of GNU/Linux.

Yunakiti reports on the 2ch thread where otaku realize that Geisai 12 took place right next to Reitaisai, in East hall 1. Guests there included Yamakan, Ozoku band (Tissue Princess and other Nico Allstars), and Zombies, the ultimate anison dance group.

I kind of feel bad about not knowing about this, but on the other hand it looks like if I went I’d be giving money to Takashi Murakami, and he doesn’t really need any more money than he already has. Not to mention that I honestly believe that Reitaisai is a more significant event of the two in basically every way! Well, except for no yamakan.

As many of you may know, Reitaisai moved from the West-4 hall at Tokyo Big Sight last year, where from all reports the event was crowded and ridiculous and chaotic beyond anyone’s imagination, to the larger East 4/5/6 halls this year.

What was not announced was that the Reitaisai organizers also rented the East 3 hall, for the purpose of line control. Yes, they rented a 3.5 million yen/day hall for the purpose of making the event less of a living hell by lining up the first x thousand people to show up inside the event hall. Upon discovering this hall, I felt a little less bad about having to spend $19 on an only-event catalog. I took it somewhat easy, getting up at around 6 and arriving at the hall at a little past 7, and just barely made it in the nice climate controlled room where many thousands of other Touhou fans were, many of whom probably were hanging around the Big Sight all night.

As at all doujin events, there is a page in the Reitaisai catalog and all related materials that states that you SHOULD NOT line up overnight, or even get there really early in the morning, suggesting that you instead arrive at an hour when normal people will be awake, in other words, when you won’t bother them. Of course, a lot of people don’t actually follow this rule, creating tensions between the rule-breaking overnighters (徹夜組), the on-the-fence first trainers (始発組), and the rest of us plebes who more or less follow the rules and wish grave harm upon the first group and mild harm to the second.

Most conventions state that there will be some sort of vague penalties for showing up early. I’m fairly sure Comiket isn’t actually able to follow through with this threat, and they’re already pretty well equipped to deal with the crowd. Reitaisai last year, on the other hand, didn’t hand out any penalties, and the event was pretty chaotic. Sunshine Creation was fairly well known for actually dealing these out, moving some people to the back of the line, or I believe in one case making the overnight folks shovel snow if they wanted to keep their place in line. Of course, this can always backfire, as apparently at last Comic1, the 100 or so nerds who were cordoned off as a penalty by 5 staff members decided that their collective inertia could not be stopped by these 5 staff members if they all moved together, and basically just plowed into the event hall. tsk tsk.

Back to Retaisai, though. Like I said, I just barely made it in east-3, and I could hear people around me mumuring about penalties and whatnot, some calling the building we were in a ペナルティほいほい, “Penalty Hoihoi”, a play on the Japanese for “roach motel”, “Gokiburi hoihoi.”

Well, it turns out they were right! At 9:45, 15 minutes before the event started, the periodic announcement by the cheerful female announcer reminding us to please buy a catalog if we hadn’t yet was replaced by another announcer, this one male, and much less cheerful. He informed us folks in the hall that we all probably knew that lining up early was expressly forbidden. In classic Japanese chewing-out style, he let us know how much of an annoyance we must have been, partying outside all night when there’s a hospital with a giant cancer ward just next door, and that we should probably feel bad about ourselves. Oh, and there would be some changes made to the line.

Without even a “have a nice day”, the PA clicked, and everyone went from being dead silent to excitedly talking to their friends. The guys around me seemed half-scared but half-thrilled, because we sort of followed the rules by showing up after the first train, and even if we did get hit by a penalty, we had already showed up late enough that it wouldn’t reaaally make much of a difference.

At 9:55, our line, 6 wide and 90 deep, and only our line, started to move. We all started freaking out, wondering if we actually were going to be the first regular attendees in. They lined us up right in front of the entryway to the event, and held us there for a little bit, telling us that we shouldn’t run under any circumstances, that we should have our catalogs out, and that we should have our shoelaces tied. When 10 came around, everyone started clapping, as you normally do at these events.

Oh, except for the people who had stayed overnight at the Big Sight. Apparently they weren’t too thrilled about the entry order to the event of East 3 being completely reversed.

as they say on 2ch, 徹夜ざまあ wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Anyway, I ought to go now. Need to install my Seirensen demo!

I’m really tired so this is going to be really short:

Zun showed up at the very end of FN2009, and the MC asked him if he could give any information about Touhou Seirensen: Undefined Fantastic Object. After dodging the question for a few seconds with “get the demo on Sunday, you can find out then,” he let slip that

“It’ll be better than Chireiden”.

Thanks, 神主. Of course, this was a few hours after an audience poll of “what’s your favorite Touhou game” where about the same number of people raised their hands for Chireiden as they did for Bunkachou (StB), which is to say very few. Other interesting facts learned from the audience surveys: the vast majority of people play on gamepads, and maybe 30-40% of the crowd was in their teens. damn kids in my fandoms.

He also mentioned that the game will be very “pop”, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the demo to find out exactly what that means.

All the bands were great, but some were more great than others. Also, the Makuhari Messe apparently uses a Bosendorfer as their in-house piano?? wtf

Livejournal-style post cause SPRING BREAK, WOOOO

• The Eizo Onsen Geisha screening #16 was excellent. Mix of self-produced live action films,　animation, and stage acts, mostly by a small core group of no-goodniks. The majority of the films were self-labeled “baka eiga”, which meant they were ridiculously funny if you enjoy puns and technical incompetence. I’m really hoping for a dvd release of Jigokusei, the hour-long main event of the 4-hour screening, featuring a main character named Kudryavka who was way cooler than the Little Busters character. Not as cool as the dog, though. Strongly recommending this to anyone who speaks a decent bit of Japanese and can enjoy some self-indulgence in others’ films.
• Went to Hobby Complex GK 01 today, hung out with some cool guys, saw some resin kits that I’ll never buy, also saw weird steampunk dudes wearing some killer bowlers selling fake wood cellphone faceplates. akibahobby has real coverage with pictures here.
• Also dropped by the last 10 minutes of Wonder Hobby 9.5. Saw the Billy Revoltech up close and personal, as well as the exquisitely sculpted BRS figure. Probably going to get the latter cause I’m lowest common denominator like that. Also saw those Touhou plushes with the ridiculous second-hand markup, are they going to start actually mass-producing those once and for all?
• Saw Try Tower’s Moonwalker cabinet. They’ve also got an old-school 4-player Captain Commando cab set up. Now if they could only set IIDX down to 100y/play, it’d be my go-to daily arcade.
• Took a peek in the newly opened Comic ZIN. Pretty decent selection of manga, including slightly more niche stuff, doujin section was a bit lacking though, though they get a thumbs up for one of their FEATURED CIRCLES being Rebis ww. The point card is 500y/stamp, 40 stamps/500y off, so ~2% cash back, which isn’t terrible. It’s pretty easy to find, right off of Chuo-dori, and is worth checking out at least once.
• In other manga store news, Mandarake Complex’s small size is really obnoxious because that means they don’t stock nearly enough old magazines. I really need to get my hands on a copy of Garo 1994/5 :(
• Ichigo Mashimaro vol 6 just came out and it is barely over 150 pages and is a collection of works starting in mid-2007. Barasui :argh:
• Finally, GoFA is running a Tetsuo Hara exhibit until the 8th. I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

Hey, reader, this doesn’t have much to do with the rest of this blog, but hear me out for a second.
The other day, I went to a doujin fair; you know, like Comiket?
Well anyways, there were an insane number of people there acting fairly normal.
Then I looked in the guidebook, and it said “no cosplay” in the rules.
What is this? How could this be?
Why would you come to an “anime convention” if there’s no cosplay?
It’s 700 yen, 7-0-0 YEN for crying out loud.
There are even entire families here. A family of four, coming to a doujin fair?
That’s when it hit me: this was not an “anime convention”.
In fact, there is nothing in Japan remotely resembling an “anime convention”.
Panels? Screenings? Aren’t these things really just a waste of time?
Maybe some people have no computers and spent their last $30 to watch some Mazinger-Z and listen to fat women talk about yaoi.
Maybe some of the congoers have no access to YouTube or Hulu, and are unable download podcasts.
But I’m betting most people come to meet other anime fans whom they already know.
I’m betting most people are doing something that they could do in private, but are doing it in public instead. (more…)