{"id":1797,"date":"2011-04-17T11:31:37","date_gmt":"2011-04-17T16:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/?p=1797"},"modified":"2011-04-21T10:22:53","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T15:22:53","slug":"article-translation-the-exhaustive-debate-between-kentaro-takekuma-x-ken-akamatsu-%e2%80%9cthe-role-manga-editors-should-take-in-the-e-publishing-era%e2%80%9d-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/17\/article-translation-the-exhaustive-debate-between-kentaro-takekuma-x-ken-akamatsu-%e2%80%9cthe-role-manga-editors-should-take-in-the-e-publishing-era%e2%80%9d-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Article Translation: The Exhaustive Debate Between Kentaro Takekuma x Ken Akamatsu: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Role Manga Editors Should Take in the E-Publishing Era\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Translator&#8217;s introduction: In mid-February, the <a href=\"http:\/\/ebook.itmedia.co.jp\/\">eBook USER<\/a> segment of the Japanese IT portal site <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itmedia.co.jp\/\">ITmedia<\/a> ran a fascinating interview between two highly visible individuals in the Japanese manga world, Ken Akamatsu, and Kentaro Takekuma. Both men are avid Twitter users, and a casual back-and-forth the two men had over the service would lay the groundwork for a discussion that the two had a few days later, which would end up continuing for seven hours. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve received the gracious permission from both Masahiro Yamaguchi, the author of the 5-part article presenting the interview, as well as from ITmedia to post a personal translation here. In order to bring it to everyone as quickly as possible, I&#8217;ll be posting my translation in a similar 5-part format over the next week. I hope you enjoy the article, and if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let me know.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153<b><i>At this rate, the industry will collapse in a few years.<\/i><\/b>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d &#8212; Ken Akamatsu, a manga artist currently working on a weekly serialization, and Kentaro Takekuma, an editor known for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Even a Monkey can Draw Manga\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and other titles. The two explain the changes brought about by the e-publishing era from their differing standpoints as manga artist and manga editor.<\/p>\n<p><b>[Original Article: Masahiro Yamaguchi, ITmedia.<br \/>\nCopyright 2011 ITmedia Inc. All Rights Reserved.]<\/b><\/p>\n<p>On January 27th, a dialogue took place in Tokyo between Kentaro Takekuma, an editor known for titles including \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Even a Monkey can Draw Manga\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as well as a professor at Kyoto Seika University, and Ken Akamatsu, representative director and president of J-Comi and manga artist.<\/p>\n<p>The impetus for this talk on the role of manga editors in the e-publishing age was a conversation between the two on Twitter. (Details about how this talk came to fruition can be found on <a href=\"http:\/\/togetter.com\/li\/87474\">this Togetter summary<\/a> (Japanese), or in <a href=\"http:\/\/natalie.mu\/comic\/news\/44245\">this news article (Japanese)<\/a> by Mr. Karaki of Comic Natalie, who also sat in on the conversation.)<\/p>\n<p>Neither had met the other before until the day of the talk. The dialogue ended the next day, seven hours later, after covering a wide variety of topics, beginning with their exchange of opinions over the image of manga editors in the e-publishing era and going on to cover the present and future of J-Comi, Takekuma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s commentary on the industry as a university professor who teaches aspiring manga artists, and the story behind Mr. Takekuma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unfinished \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Saruman 2.0\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monkey Manga 2.0\u00e2\u20ac\u009d).<\/p>\n<p>Over the next five days, ITmedia eBook USER will bring you the details of this conversation jam-packed with both men\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thoughts. These are messages meant for the manga industry, the publishing industry, and all fans of manga in general.<\/p>\n<p>The Exhaustive Debate Between Kentaro Takekuma x Ken Akamatsu: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Role Manga Editors Should Take in the E-Publishing Era\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ebook.itmedia.co.jp\/ebook\/articles\/1102\/14\/news015.html\"><b>Part 1<\/b>:<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153People are Noticing the Possibilities of Viewers Featuring Dynamic Advertising\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Out of Print Titles Mean a Certain Standard of Quality and an Assurance of Not Being Too Erotic or Violent\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monkey Manga 2.0 was Planned to be a Media Mix\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/?p=1826\"><b>Part 2:<\/b><br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Oil Crisis Led to the Model Where Graphic Novels, Not Magazines, Make the Money\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153If the Function of Magazines Moves to E-Publishing, New Artists Won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Sell\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Places for New Artists to Debut and Editors to Practice Will Disappear\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/?p=1847\"><b>Part 3:<\/b><br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Freelance Editors Will Increase, and Their Success Will Depend on Skill\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153When Manga Artists with Producing Skills Fade Away, the Industry Will Snap\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Present-Day Japan Doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Have the Time or Money to Read Manga That Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Guaranteed to be Interesting\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/?p=1856\"><b>Part 4:<\/b><br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We Might Start Seeing More Manga Artists with Six-to-Eight Million Yen Salaries in the Future\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153As Long as an Artist Pays Their Own &#8216;Entertainment Fee,&#8217; They Won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Make Money\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Manga Artists Will Independently Hire Editors, as Lawyers or Accountants are Hired\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/?p=1862\"><b>Part 5:<\/b><br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I Want to Do Something that Amuses Others, Not Myself\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Our Job is to Provide a Place to Debut for Those with the Fundamentals Down\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Meet Again in Five Years. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll See Then Who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Laughing and Who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Crying\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>As a note, statements by the author of this article, Mr. Karaki, and Mr. Nishio of the eBook USER editorial department will be denoted by a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153<b>&#8212;<\/b>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d   <\/p>\n<p><b>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153People are Noticing the Possibilities of Viewers Featuring Dynamic Advertising\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Akamatsu)<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Mr. Akamatsu, I read something on your blog saying that you first had the idea for J-Comi three years ago. It was also right around three years ago that I started to hear talk of the major publishers facing a crisis, and it seems like artists have been looking into e-publishing ever since then.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. Only, three years ago, the iPad and the Kindle didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exist yet. At the time, I thought it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be fine to wait on it until \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Negima!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d ended, and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make any moves until 2010.<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8212;<\/b> What made you start thinking about J-Comi?<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: Half of it was me wanting to read lots of old manga, and the other half was as a way to fight piracy. Winny was at the peak of its popularity at that time, and while publishers would take legal action for titles they were still printing, like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153One Piece,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the publishers didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have the right to sue on behalf of artists whose books were out of print.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Yep, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. The only rights that publishers are given are publishing rights. If they put a book out of print, those rights lapse, and then the only person with rights to the work is the author.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: Since Japanese copyright infringement law requires the victim of piracy to make a formal complaint before a case is prosecuted, it makes it tough for authors. The other day, someone sharing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Negima!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on Share was arrested, but the police had to contact me first, and ask me if it was okay to arrest them. But before that happened, the publisher had to make a report to the police about a manga being serialized in one of their magazines being pirated. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t involved in that process at all, and if the title was out of print, I would have had to go to the police myself in order for anything to happen. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why so many artists just think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hopeless and give up.<\/p>\n<p>Another thing that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unforgivable is how erotic doujinshi gets uploaded to the internet the day it goes on sale at Comiket. For example, there was one <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ore_no_Im%C5%8Dto_ga_Konna_ni_Kawaii_Wake_ga_Nai\">Oreimo<\/a> doujinshi that was recently uploaded to a bunch of different sites, and the doujin artist who drew that couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do a thing. If he were to work together with the creator of Oreimo to press charges, he could, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a very realistic situation. Wonder Festival uses one-day licenses in order to work out copyright issues, but Comiket doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, which leads to situations like these.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: When I first saw J-Comi announced, I thought that it was ground-breaking. I mean, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a free ad-supported model that allows readers to copy the files as they please. I previously had vague ideas about a similar model, but didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how to make it into a reality.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d thought that someone must have done it before me, but when I talked to an advertising agency, they told me that no one had yet. There might have been others thinking about it, but I was lucky enough to also have fame and business abilities along with the idea.<\/p>\n<p>The reason that the publishers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do this is that the majors like Kodansha and Shogakukan don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that putting ads on and distributing the manga that they receive from artists is the type of business that publishers are supposed to do. I think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why they won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go into this field in the future, either.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: So, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because publishers assume from the start that their business is distributing and selling physical, printed books?<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also that they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think about giving things away for free. TV stations do it, but not publishers. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because they think that their business is a culture-oriented business.<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8212;<\/b> For example, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the free newspaper \u00e2\u20ac\u0153R25\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that Recruit prints, but despite its huge circulation, you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear people in publishing talk about it very often.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: A lot of people in publishing consider free newspapers as just another kind of flier, not as a real publication.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a similar attitude towards e-publishing, and when you make your product free on top of that, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no interest there.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: But that just means that this is a big opportunity. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just manga artists, but also fiction authors (for example, Ryu Murakami, though he just started his own G2010) who can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t escape the model of selling their data for money. From that perspective, J-Comi, which has the advantage of being the only site on an advertising model, seems to me like it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll succeed.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: While (SHINJU) Mayu-sensei\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Houkago Wedding,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which was distributed for free as J-Comi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Beta 2 test, brought in 525,000 yen for her, it looks like another Beta 2 title, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Koutsuujiko Kanteinin Tamaki Rinichiro,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d though I don&#8217;t know if it will have the same click rate as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Houkago Wedding,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is going to make even more. If you consider that these are out of print books, if one volume makes over a million yen, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really impressive.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m also working together with Google to create a web viewer that will feature dynamic advertising. If you think about the project in the long run, this might be even more important.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: When\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that being released?<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: By the end of February. Honestly, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be happy to see a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of yen a month from one volume. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking about out of print titles, so getting that much per month per title is pretty significant. What shocked me the most is when we announced that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Houkago Wedding\u00e2\u20ac\u009d made 525,000 yen, some people replied back with comments like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Maybe they think that these are new titles?<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8212;<\/b> There were definitely some people comparing the revenue to per-page manuscript payments for new manga.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d see things like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the big names make 20-30,000 a page, you know,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and think that these people just don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get it. Even 50,000 yen a volume would be something to celebrate. I feel like this is one area where that J-Comi needs to work on its PR.<\/p>\n<p>When I say PR, I also mean PR toward J-Comi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sponsors. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s great about J-Comi ads is that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re basically for five, even ten years. You can still read the same PDF 10 years later, after all. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why J-Comi doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t match very well with cheap, short-term advertising for periods like just a week.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Advertising sponsors always want to sell something new, after all. In that regard, things might be harder for you in the future.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. But on the other hand, if we have a viewer that can insert dynamic ads, we can be constantly showing the latest ads, and, for example, show American ads to American readers. If we do that, then American advertisers will be interested, too.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quite impressive. So, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be putting out translated versions of J-Comi in the future?<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: We will. You can view text, like dialogue or reader comments, on the screen in the viewer, kind of like film subtitles. Of course, you can turn them off, too. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be able to switch this text into lots of different languages, like Chinese and Japanese. What I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m the most interested in is the Japanese dialogue subtitles. If the text has been entered, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to search, so if I wanted to see how many times the word for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153life\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153death\u00e2\u20ac\u009d showed up in a Tezuka manga, for example, I could do that. Personally, I think this is the most exciting part of the system.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: It sounds interesting.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: I really would like to do it using OCR, but OCR doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work at all with manga. That means that it has to be done by volunteers, who manually input the text from each page. Once that happens, then those comments will be searchable. Also, those lines of text can be used to target ads. For example, we did the text entry for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Houkago Wedding\u00e2\u20ac\u009d ourselves, but it was a very quick process, since we just had to type in the text.<\/p>\n<p><b>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Out of Print Titles Mean a Certain Standard of Quality and an Assurance of Not Being Too Erotic or Violent\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Akamatsu)<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Is J-Comi limited to just out of print titles?<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure that there will be some people who will see the results we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re getting with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Houkago Wedding\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and want to put new titles on J-Comi. After all, the revenue from J-Comi is equivalent to page rates at a publisher.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Of course, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the possibility that the number of clicks it got was due to the fact that Ms. Shinju is who she is. It might be tougher for debuting authors.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: Yes. If you want to know why we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve limited J-Comi titles to out of print titles, it was because of two advantages to them. First, since they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been serialized in the past in a commercial magazine, we can be assured of at least a certain minimum of quality. The other is that since they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been published in a commercial magazine, we can be assured that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not overly erotic or violent.<\/p>\n<p>If we were to take new artists at J-Comi, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to look at their content, and we might have to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153this is a little too erotic,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you should change this part to be more like this,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and then the artists would come back with a fixed edition which we could then approve. If we do that, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just doing what editorial departments do, you see.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: So if you began to take new artists, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to start hiring editors.<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8212;<\/b> At that point, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re basically a publisher.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: If we did that, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be competing with Kodansha and Shogakukan. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way too difficult. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve personally gone to board members at Kodansha and told them that I have no intention of doing something like that and competing with them.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: When I look at J-Comi, I think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unique about your plan. You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to fight with publishers. Instead, you want to co-exist with them.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: For J-Comi, all we have to do is scan the books and upload them, then next thing you know readers have access. The readers access the files, and J-Comi puts in the ads. All the authors have to do is give us permission to run their manga. That, and set up a bank account.<\/p>\n<p><b>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monkey Manga 2.0 was Planned to be a Media Mix\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Takekuma)<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: The series \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monkey Manga 2.0\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I was working on was ended (suspended) before we even got to the main part of the series. The people who decided to stop it were the authors, myself and Koji Aihara.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: Is it more or less due to the reasons that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in the Wikipedia article?<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Basically for those reasons. The two authors in Monkey Manga 2.0 (fictional versions of Aihara and Takekuma) decide to try to make a media mix series, with an anime, video game, goods, and so on, all related to their manga series. Aihara wanted to do that in real life too, but once the serialization started, he realized that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a manga artist at heart, and just wanted to focus on drawing manga.<\/p>\n<p>Besides that, a new slipcase edition of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monkey Manga\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was released right before I had a stroke. That thing sold. That sold 3000 copies just through Amazon affiliate links put on my own blog. Before that, it was out of stock everywhere for over ten years. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d actually asked Shogakukan to put it officially out of print so that it could be published by someone else. Other companies had actually come to me, asking if I wanted to publish the title with them.<\/p>\n<p><b>Akamatsu<\/b>: What was Shogakukan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reply when you did that?<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: When I told my contact at Shogakukan that it had been ten years since the last printing of the latest edition of the book and asked if they could put it officially out of print so that I could have it printed at another publisher, I was told to wait for a bit, since he would go talk to the people above him. Next thing I knew, they decided they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d do a reprint. They suddenly got serious as soon as I talked about other publishers. (Laughter)<\/p>\n<p>For that edition, we decided to add some new bonus material on how to draw moe manga. About a year before that, I made a post on my blog saying that Koji Aihara and I were old and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand moe, and asked my readers to help us out. As part of the post, Aihara drew an intentionally crummy un-moe girl, which I posted and asked readers to correct, and we got an incredible response. That post acted as good marketing just on its own. Another thing we did was to ask for almost a year for people to submit catchphrases to put on the packaging of the new edition. Shogakukan didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that the new printing would sell, since it was a twenty-year-old title, so the first printing was only 9000 copies. One volume was 1680 yen, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really expensive for a manga volume, and 3360 yen for both volumes. Thanks to the publicity the blog posts got, though, it managed to sell enough to warrant another print run.<\/p>\n<p>Right after that, I was hospitalized due to my stroke, but without asking or anything, Amazon sent me a case of mineral water as a get well present. After that, someone from Amazon went to Shogakukan and asked them if they were going to put out a part 2 for Monkey Manga. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how we got started talking about a sequel.<\/p>\n<p>At that time, we thought that if we were going to do a sequel, that we should do it in tandem with an official website. After that, we started talking about doing a media mix, and seriously considered making an anime. I was talking about getting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kaeruotoko.com\/\">Kaeru Otoko<\/a> to help out, too. Aside from that, we were thinking of having voice actress auditions for moe characters that users online could vote for. Of course, everything would be done tongue-in-cheek. That way, if the whole project failed, then that failure could be used as a gag, too. Then, it just ended up not happening at all.<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8212;<\/b> What did your supervising editor think about all of that?<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Since the media mix project seemed like a sham, he probably didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize that we were actually thinking of doing it. If he did, he probably wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have approved it.<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8212;<\/b> Editors don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tend to like their manga artists working much outside of manga very much. Even if it they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re told it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something that would benefit their manga or bring in money for the magazine, they seem to think that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not what manga artists should be focusing their time on.<\/p>\n<p><b>Takekuma<\/b>: Well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in some ways a very natural thing to think. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that editors need to baby their artists to the point of telling them that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Translator&#8217;s introduction: In mid-February, the eBook USER segment of the Japanese IT portal site ITmedia ran a fascinating interview between two highly visible individuals in the Japanese manga world, Ken Akamatsu, and Kentaro Takekuma. Both men are avid Twitter users, and a casual back-and-forth the two men had over the service would lay the groundwork [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,10,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-manga","category-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1797"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1824,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}