AltJapan

"Stop or we'll cute!"

Meet Seyano Ajisai and Seyano Keyaki, the newest recruits to the ranks of Japan's many regional police department mascots. Unlike the usual vaguely-defined yuru kyara style working characters, they look like they stepped right out of the pages of a manga. But these aren't a joke, aren't some kind of dojinshi mash-up. They are 100% official designs of the suburban Yokohama based Seya Police Department, freshly unveiled just days ago. That makes them (in the words of a Seya P.D. spokesman) "the most cutting-edge police mascots in Japan." 

The comment echoes one by Takashi Murakami several years ago about mascots "representing the cutting edge of kawaii culture in Japan." Given the troubles the anime, manga, music, and film industries are suffering at the moment, one could make a strong case that mascot culture is the "healthiest" (or at least most dynamic) of Japan's subcultures right now. And nowhere is that more evident than in the merging of status-quo mascot design with moé, that fetishization of girlish naiveté and effeminate men.

You can read an article I wrote on the subject over at CNNgo, but the fact that a police department chose these particular designs for outreach purposes is yet another example of just how deeply moé has entrenched itself in the mainstream of Japanese society. While there's a joke to be made here about the people who are supposed to be protecting children using "lolicon" as a community-building tool, this isn't really about Seya's aesthetic choices. Mascots are like fuzzy little mirrors reflecting the tastes of the day -- and love it or hate it, moé, is here to stay.

3D Complex

Oldie but goodie from Japan's infamous 2ch boards: a handy guide to why the dating sim videogame Love Plus is better than any real-life relationship. No wonder that birth rate is declining!

Love Minus

Oh, those wacky Japanese! Now, no less a source than the Huffington Post is repeating reports of a Japanese-language Livedoor News poll alleging that a "majority" of Japanese women feel they can't compete with the girls in video games. “There’s no way I can beat that level of cuteness,” claims one of the women surveyed. Oh, the humanity.

The only problem? It's all based on a mistranslation. A very subtle one, but still one that leads to a misinterpretation.

When you read the original article, it becomes obvious that a majority of the respondents are actively repulsed by the idea of men who are obsessed with virtual characters. In fact, the very first survey question, which all of the foreign sites seem to leave out of their reports, is "How do you feel about men obsessed with dating simulators?" 

They're nuts: 15%.

They're kind of gross: 48%. 

I'd prefer they play other games: 15%

I don't really have a problem with it: 22%

"I don't really have a problem with it" = 別にいい, which hardly equates to strong support. But let's treat those women as supporters for the moment. That gives us 78% of Japanese female respondents who have a serious-to-minor problem with dating simulators. Seventy-eight. And more than half of those think men into dating sims are either nuts or gross!

Now check out the results to the second question, which is "But what if the man in question is your boyfriend?" 

I want him to stop: 45%

I don't want him playing them around me: 28%

I'd dump him: 7%

I don't really have a problem with it: 20%

The number of "I don't really have a problem with it" responses actually DROPS to 20%, giving us the information that eighty percent of Japanese women polled pretty much avoid men who play dating simulators.

So keeping that in mind, let's look at the final question, the one that the foreign sites are laser-focusing on, which is being translated as "could [you] win against a 2D game character [your] boyfriend was besotted with?"  It sounds pretty straightforward, but the actual translation of the line is below, with emphasis added:

"If your boyfriend were the sort to be obsessed with dating simulators, would you feel confident in being able to appeal to him more than the girls in the game?" In response to this totally loaded question, we get:

No: 53%

Yes: 47%

Now just think about the question for a second. It isn't asking Japanese women if they feel inadequate compared to virtual dating-sim girls. It's asking them if they think they can compete with virtual dating-sim girls in the mind of a person obsessed with dating sims. This is like asking a heterosexual woman what she thinks her chances are of being seduced in a gay bar. Does this speak to the "inadequacy" of Japanese women, or simply having the savvy to know when to choose their battles? You make the call.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

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Many foreign devotees of Japanese pop-culture treat the word "otaku" is a superlative rather than a pejorative. That's their first mistake. This often arises from a misconception of Tokyo as a glorious "nerd-vana" where otaku galavant and gambol twixt the figure-shops of Akiba and Ikebukuro and Nakano hand in harmonious hand. That's their second, as threads like this one on 2ch show.

Lest you get the mistaken impression that this "moderate" versus "die-hard" schism is a recent trend, allow me to remind you how many of the complaints about fanaticism, over-assertiveness, and general cluelessness echo points made decades earlier in that old pre-otaku-era pamphlet about "yappies." But generally speaking, old-school otaku were a quietly suffering lot who cast their collective sense of embarrassment over throwing their lives away on garage kits and anime artbooks as a sort of stoic heroism. In contrast, younger and more outgoing "kimotaku" ("gross/creepy otaku") wear their hobbies on their sleeves, even evangelizing them, public opinion be damned.

And now for sampling of the latest comments in a thread with an epically straightforward title:

Why "Kimotaku" are annoying as hell (2ch, Japanese language)

Because they treat being an otaku as a badge of honor.

Because they're mouth-breathers.

Stupid guys mistake their own greatness out of a lack of humility. Kimotaku have another layer of cluelessness on top of that, so they can't be saved.

So many kimotaku are overly self-assertive, which is annoying as hell.

You guys are basically describing nico-chu. (Note: obsessive users of Nico Nico Videos)

The thing that disturbs me about kimotaku is that they lack the masochism of their predecessors, using the name as a source of pride to argue its legitimacy.

They keep pressing their hobbies on everyone even after we tell them directly that we aren't interested.

What makes you think YOU aren't gross, huh?

Conjugal Relations

Translated from a recent Yomiuri Online advice forum:

My husband is an otaku and it is driving me crazy.

Before we got married, he didn't exhibit much of this kind of behavior but I've really been noticing it lately. He collects these pathetic dolls. They're called "Chogokin" robots or something, I don't know. He seems to have been collecting them since he was a kid, and he filled like four cardboard boxes with them. Sometimes he'd take them out and gaze at them lovingly. It really grossed me out. So one day when he was at work I threw them all out.

When he came home, we got into a big fight. Getting angry about dolls... it's so childish! How can I get him to admit he was wrong? Please give me some advice.

Konya wa Hurricane

Somewhere in Kichijoji circa 1989, a pair of young voice actresses are shanghaied into a photo shoot for an anime artbook. Oh, that Eighties hair-and-hardsuit look... 

(Images courtesy the Bubblegum Crisis Live Only 1989 book)

 

 

Above, "Priss" voice actress Kinuko Omori models a hardsuit designed by Fuyuki Shinada. Actually, the two shots seem to have been taken on the pedestrian overpass on the west side of Shinjuku station.

 

Now here's some hot and heavy Kichijoji action. Akiko Hiramatsu, voice actress of Nene, posing alongside her virtual namesake as built by Ryosuke Takagi. This appears to have been taken on the roof of the old Artmic building.

K-Off!

The more astute followers of Japanese subcultural trends have long realized that there is an ever-widening schism between old-school "otaku" and new-school "moé" devotees. But what does it mean for modern moé when even a pro degenerate -- and lolicon pioneer -- like manga artist Hideo Azuma has this to say about it? You'd have expected that if anyone could bridge the eras, it would be someone like him, but no dice. (For those not in the know, Azuma is something like Japan's R. Crumb, only without the ability to catch a break and actually get himself laid.)

"I watched [moé staple anime] 'K-On!' It was empty. It was nothing. The jokes made no sense. It didn't even have any eroticism, any grotesquerie. Just the mildest, faintest hint of fetishism. Are the people who made it and the people who watch it that unable to cope with reality? It just feels gross -- kind of like maid cafes, now that I think of it."

Quoted from one of the semi-regular manga diaries posted on Azuma's official site.

Eat, Sleep, NEET

 Currently in heavy rotation on Japanese blogs: a shot from Japanese TV, purporting to show the schedule of a "normal" person (left) versus that of a "NEET" (right). NEET is a British acronym for someone who is Not Employed, in Education, or Training; in Japan, it's a less offensive way of calling someone an "otaku." Translation after the jump. How's YOUR schedule measure up?

The Manga Gap

In a recent diary entry, manga-ka Ken Akamatsu (of "Love Hina" fame, among others) waxes philosophical about the state of the comic book industry in Japan today. It's one of an increasing number of reports from the trenches confirming a phenomenon that became obvious last year: the famous titles sell, everything else doesn't.

As discussed previously, if you are the average manga-ka, you make your real money not off the weekly serialization of your work but rather the tankobon, standard-sized collections of your work that are released for sale at fixed intervals. The problem is, as Akamatsu notes, that 2008 tankobon sales were off 4.9 percent as compared to the previous year, and the trend is expected to continue.

"As source material for TV dramas, films, and anime, and as a standalone product, the tankobon is here to stay," remarks Akamatsu. "The tankobon that do sell, sell in incredible volumes. But this means that the ones that don't, slide into obscurity."

Akamatsu ties the problem directly to the sagging fortunes of Japan's ubiquitous comic magazines. "In the past, the major comic magazines had a 'multiplier effect' in which the standout titles would also in turn increase the visibility of lesser-known ones... But this effect is on the wane. In short, the chances to get to know lesser-known manga are disappearing."

But the big issue (and one left unexplored by Akamatsu) is: do fans WANT to get to know lesser-known manga in the first place? The interesting thing is how this dovetails with comments by Toshio Okada and other old-schoolers, who  -- despite increasingly sounding like your granddad telling you he had to walk uphill both ways to school -- complain of younger fans' tendency to "ghettoize" themselves into tiny bubble-like individual worlds rather than seeking out new experiences. 

Which leads to the real questions: if tastes have truly changed this significantly, how much does complaining about it really help? And what are Japanese creators and media outlets going to change to address the situation?

Fantasy and Football

Yahoo News: An Unexpected Breakthrough in the Bias Against Foreign Games (Japanese language)

Tales of woe are nothing new in Japan's domestic game industry. Once a force to be reckoned with worldwide, now its key players struggle to compete with increasingly successful foreign developers. This editorial about the surprise success of Electronic Arts' FIFA 10 soccer game in the Japanese marketplace could just as easily apply to the industry as a whole. Here's the critical section:

"There is a big difference in the way emotion is handled in Japan and abroad," says the article. "Abroad, hero characters tend to be portrayed as powerful males, but in Japan squashed and cute little boys are the norm. The Japanese preference for see small-statured pretty-boys wielding big swords seems to be greeted abroad with a resounding 'no way.'" 

The one exception is the genre of sports games, because the field (no pun intended) is so much narrower with regards to choices the designers can make; in the case of licensed sports games based on actual athletes, there basically isn't any choice but to portray the characters in a photo-realistic manner. So the content isn't weighed down by as much cultural baggage, and becomes (in the words of the editorial) a "healthier" competition based purely on merit.

The unnamed author of the piece concludes with a plea for domestic game-makers who toil in an industry charitably described as "insular" (as EA's Peter Moore put it in a recent interview) to study FIFA 10's success as a key to cracking foreign game markets. I don't think anyone really wants to see the Japanese erase the essential "Japanese-ness" from their products, but it is definite food for thought. There's no question that the endless parade of underage prettyboys and Lolitas that populate Japanese fantasies of the moment are a hard sell to mainstream audiences abroad.