Tag: pornography

Dōjinshi (Part Two)

Kathryn11 Comments

I would like to begin by examining two dōjinshi based on Studio Ghibli’s film Spirited Away. The first work, Yuya sōshi (油屋草子), focuses on the romantic relationship between Haku and Chihiro in three short stories. In the first story, Chihiro goes outside on a snowy night to deliver blankets to her parents in the pig barn. She passes out from the effects of the cold wind and is rescued by Haku. The events of the second and third stories take place after the end of the film. In the second story, an older Chihiro follows her baby brother through a familiar tunnel and returns to a world she had forgotten. She and her brother are rescued by Haku, who tells Chihiro that she must not look at him lest she remain in his world forever. After making sure that her brother is able to return home safely, Chihiro turns to look at Haku, thus sealing her fate. The third story, an alternate possibility, involves Haku making a decision of his own to journey to the human world to visit Chihiro. Throughout this dōjinshi, the characters are drawn in the Studio Ghibli house style, and a great deal of care is given to maintaining the tone and worldview of the original film.

In Senya ichiya (千夜一夜), a darker interpretation of Spirited Away is presented to the reader. The artist of this dōjinshi associates Yubaba’s bath house with traditional Japanese hot spring inns, which generally employed or were associated with female entertainers who would attend guests privately after dark. In this dōjinshi, Yubaba arranges for the young serving maid Rin to attend to the private needs of one of the bath house customers, a strange, hoary creature with many tentacles. At the last moment, Haku appears and offers himself in Rin’s place, ordering her to flee as he submits to the god. This dōjinshi thus explores the relationship of the characters before the arrival of Chihiro, as well as the more disturbing implications of a bath house for the gods staffed by people who are effectively slaves to its owner. Although the art of this dōjinshi is clearly influenced by the Studio Ghibli style, it takes on more lush and erotic tones, as is appropriate to its subject matter.

Many of the dōjinshi based on Howl’s Moving Castle deal with the continuation and outcome of the romantic relationship that develops between Howl and Sophie during the course of the film. These dōjinshi contain many confessions of love and many first kisses. Other dōjinshi emphasize the sexual tension between the two characters, which is notably absent in the film. Since Sophie is a shy girl who turns into an old woman whenever she becomes overly embarrassed or loses her self confidence, dōjinshi artists have speculated that Howl might have some trouble getting her into bed for the first time. These artists turn to scenarios suggestive of rape, which capitalize on the characterization and appeal of Howl as someone who loses control of himself in moments of intense emotion and stress. Other artists merrily suggest that Sophie hides all manner of illicit desires under her seemingly retiring exterior.

Finally, a piece titled Honogurai umi no soko kara (仄暗い海の底から), which is based on Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea, is an example of what is called a “gag” (ギャグ) dōjinshi, which eschews any sort of sustained narrative in order to make jokes about and poke fun at the original work. This particular dōjinshi is centered around the comic figure of Fujimoto, the scatterbrained wizard who is Ponyo’s “father.” It is drawn in a style that references the Studio Ghibli house style but exaggerates the comedic aspects of the characters and their interactions with one another. These interactions mainly involve the attempts of the awkward and socially inept Fujimoto to act as some sort of father figure to the now human Ponyo, who continues to be as willful and energetic as always. Other jokes lightly suggest sexual undertones completely absent from the original film. One short story interprets the intense private conversation shared between Sōsuke’s mom Lisa and the sea goddess as being about the deliciousness of ham. Fujimoto, seeing the hungry look in the ladies’ eyes, misinterprets their conversation in a humorous way.

Part One
Part Three

Dōjinshi (Part One)

Kathryn4 Comments

In a short series of essays, I would like to discuss Japanese dōjinshi (hereafter unitalicized) based on the work of Japanese director Miyazaki Hayao. I would also like to examine the relationship between fan works and the concept of auteurship. First I will give a brief explanation of what dōjinshi are and the place they occupy in Japanese subculture. Second, I will provide examples of several dōjinshi based on Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), Howl’s Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城), and Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea (崖の上のポニョ). Finally, I will explore the hermeneutical relationship between these dōjinshi and the original texts on which they are based, as well as the relationship between auteurs and fan creators.

Dōjinshi (同人誌), a word that might be glossed as “fan works,” or “fan manga,” are self-published, small-scale publications written by fans and for fans of a particular work (be it a movie, a book, a television series, or a video game) or of a particular romantic pairing possible within that work. For example, there are many dōjinshi based on J.K. Rowling’s young adult fantasy series Harry Potter, and many of these Harry Potter dōjinshi focus on a specific romantic couple, such as that formed by Harry’s two friends Ron and Hermione. As in the realm of American fan fiction, many dōjinshi explore the possibility of an alternate outcome of the events in the story of the original work. This leads, for example, to dōjinshi dealing with the formation of a romantic relationship between Harry and Hermione, or perhaps between Harry and his male rival Draco. Unlike American fan fiction, however, the vast majority of Japanese dōjinshi employ both the form and the conventions of manga. In the rare case that fan fiction is published as a dōjinshi, it is often accompanied by illustrations that are either drawn by the writer or by an artist commissioned by the writer.

Since the production of manga is a labor-intensive process, most dōjinshi artists operate within what are called “circles” (サークル), or groups. Although there are a number of “individual (個人) circles” consisting of only one person, most circles are made up of two or more people. The division of labor takes different forms within different circles. In some cases, the work of two or more artists operating separately from each other will appear in the same publication, while in some cases, secondary artists will help the primary artist with things like background detail and the application of screen tone. In many other cases, different teams of artists will publish different dōjinshi under the same circle name. In any case, a dōjinshi is just as likely to be attributed to a circle as it is to be attributed to a specific artist. On the back cover of this dōjinshi, we can see both the circle name and the names of the two artists who contributed to this particular work.

One of the main reasons why artists who create dōjinshi continue to operate within the circle system despite the prevalence of labor-saving digital artistic tools like Photoshop and individual-centered communication networks like deviantART is the continuing popularity of conventions like Comiket (コミケット), short for “comic market,” a three day event held biannually at Tokyo Big Sight. The first Comiket was held in 1975; and, since then, attendance at each event has risen from several thousand to several hundred thousand. Comiket is primarily an event for the purchase and selling of dōjinshi. Since there is a limited amount of space for dealers, many fledgling artists participate in events like Comiket as members of a circle, which gives them a greater chance of acquiring a dealer’s table. Although Comiket is the largest convention of its kind, numerous dōjinshi conventions occur throughout the year all over Japan. A notable example is the Comic City convention in Osaka.

Aside from these conventions, dōjinshi may be acquired year-round at chain stores specializing in used manga (such as Mandarake) and dōjinshi specialty stores, which tend to be located in major urban shopping districts, like Ikebukuro and Akihabara in Tokyo and Den Den Town in Osaka.

Dōjinshi specialty stores like K-Books tend to fall into two divisions, which reflect the preferences of the two main demographic groups of dōjinshi consumers. These two divisions are “meant for boys” (男性向け) and “meant for girls” (女性向け). Dōjinshi meant for boys are typically heavily pornographic in nature, and dōjinshi meant for girls generally focus on homosexual romantic relationships between male characters. This genre of dōjinshi (and, increasingly, mass market manga) is known as “B.L.,” which is an acronym for “boys’ love.” The line dividing “meant for boys” and “meant for girls” is not sharply drawn, however, are there does exist a large category of general audience dōjinshi that does not expressly cater to the conventions of either category.

Part Two
Part Three

The Flash of Capital

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The Flash of Capital

Title: The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan
Author: Eric Cazdyn
Publication Year: 2002
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages: 316

For all of the back-breaking piles of academic books I read, I sure don’t get around to reviewing many. I suppose this is because I spend so much of what passes for my real life writing about them that I don’t have many nice things to say at the end of the day. The Flash of Capital is an exception. Perhaps I feel this way because I was inspired to read every word of the book – and Cazdyn’s book is not easy to read. Interesting and thought-provoking, yes, original, yes, lots of fun, yes, but not easy to read. If you are at all interested in Japan, film, or even Japanese film, though, it’s worth the trouble.

Cazdyn’s basic thesis is that the major trends of Japanese film correspond with the major developments of capitalism in Japan, which is only natural, considering that both movies and modern capitalism came to Japan at roughly the same time. The first five of the six chapters explore these intersections by examining certain key questions of film studies. For example, the second chapter is concerned with film historiography and how the discourses surrounding the Japanese state have shaped the way that critics and scholars have talked and written about film. The fourth chapter discusses how economic development, especially as it has engendered interest in socialism, has affected the agency of the actor. It also touches on the politically utopian and dystopian implications of the professionalism or amateur status of the actor. And the fifth chapter, which focuses on pornography, completely changed the way I think about the meaning of visual representation in film. The sixth chapter takes the various concepts presented in these five chapters and uses them to give new, interesting, and politically significant readings to the canonical films of canonical directors, like Kurosawa Akira’s Rashōmon, Ozu Yasujirō’s Late Spring, and Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell.

My favorite part of the book, however, was not the theoretical acrobatics or the micro-analysis of non-mainstream films and directors, but rather the information regarding the cultural context surrounding each topic. For example, the first chapter, which concerns the relationship between actors, spectators, and the medium of film, begins with a discussion of kabuki, which is linked to a discussion of the wanted posters for the members of the Aum Shinri-kyō cult (responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks). And the discussion of the pornography industry in Japan in the fifth chapter is beyond fascinating.

Unfortunately, the valuable ideas and information presented by Cazdyn occasionally become mired in the language of post-structuralist theory. Some of his sentences derailed me for days at a time. I will give an example:

The problem, instead, lies in the way Iwasaki works through the problematics, which ultimately betrays (the dialectical implications of) his work’s title and resembles a teleological history more than a relational one, with the telos being the birth of the proletarian film or even a later moment of actually existing socialism.

Excuse me, what? I’m feeling a little stupid and uneducated here. Also, as you might be able to tell from the above passage, Cazdyn is a bit of a Marxist. Although he vehemently denies such an affiliation, his ideology comes on fairly strong at points, such as at the close of the fourth chapter:

What Ogawa’s Sundial Carved by a Thousand Years of Notches (and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival that it inspired) suggests is that new transnational networks must be built, no matter how unprofessional and utopian, in order to wrest at least some of the power away from the core of brokers whose monopoly on world power grows increasingly consolidated by the day.

To be honest, though, I find Cazdyn’s occasional ideological outbreaks inspiring. Even if they are sometimes uncomfortably Marxist, they make me think that Cazdyn is one of the good guys, and that simply by watching movies and thinking and writing we can make a difference and triumph over the evils of the world. Even if you’re not entirely convinced that this is true, it’s still fun to read The Flash of Capital solely for the thrill of encountering new ideas and tackling big intellectual concepts. And did I mention the awesome chapter on porn? In any case, this book isn’t for the casual reader, but if you think you’re interested, you definitely want to read this book. Go for it.