"An Idiot's Guide to Tokyo's Harmful Books Legislation"

Rebellion and dissent are not usually associated with conflict-averse Japan, where wa, or group harmony, is king. But the stakes in the battle of the anime industry versus the Tokyo metropolitan government over Bill 156 have risen conspicuously over the past few weeks, and cooler heads are hard to find.

Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara’s successful passage last month of legislation targeting manga, anime and video games for vaguely defined “morally offensive” imagery has been recorded in this column, as has the strikingly vehement opposition to the bill on behalf of artists, publishers, producers, translators and fans, many of whom question Ishihara’s motives.

The bill does nothing to address the production or possession of live-action depictions of rape or child pornography. After failing to pass it last summer, Ishihara and his ilk rushed the vote in December without once asking industry leaders or artists to discuss or compromise on the issue.

Still, in the wake of Bill 156′s passage, the decision by 10 of the nation’s top manga publishers to boycott this year’s Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) came as something of a surprise. TAF’s executive committee is chaired by Ishihara, making the decision and its message understandable. But TAF is the single major showcase of new titles and licensing deals for an industry already struggling with declining revenues at home and abroad. Or at least, it was.

Last month, media companies Kadokawa Group Publishing and Animate jointly announced they were taking their toys away and hosting their own anime fair.

The Anime Contents Expo (ACE), as it was swiftly branded, will take place simultaneously with TAF, on March 26 and 27, but at the Makuhari Messe International Convention Complex in Chiba. This venue is actually closer to Narita Airport than the TAF location at Tokyo Big Sight in Koto Ward, and thus is more easily accessible to international licensors, media and fans.

Other participating companies in ACE 2011 include Aniplex, Geneon Universal Entertainment Japan, Marvelous Entertainment and Media Factory–owners of such mega-successful global properties as Naruto, Pokemon,Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Their absence from TAF this year has already prompted fans via blogs, Twitter and SNS feeds to rally around ACE and vow to skip Ishihara’s TAF entirely, to which the governor has reportedly replied with a shrug: Big deal.

Assuming all of this comes to pass, it’s hard not to imagine the ordinarily noisy and colorful aisles of this year’s TAF more closely resembling those of a looted department store, barren and eerily silent.

Meanwhile, fan artists and collectors in Japan piled on in their own fashion. December’s biannual Comiket dojinshi fan art convention saw the release of a bilingual (English and Japanese) publication cheekily titled An Idiot’s Guide to Tokyo’s Harmful Books Regulation, created and compiled by manga author Takeshi Nogami, anime producer Takaaki Suzuki and veteran translator and writer Dan Kanemitsu.

Already into its second printing and now available via amazon.co.jp, An Idiot’s Guide is a lighthearted parody in the vein of Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma’s Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga that seeks to explain in genre-oriented manga format the meanings and motivations behind Bill 156–and what fans can do to oppose it.

Other Japanese fan artists distributed similar titles at Comiket mocking Ishihara, the bill, or both, and angry reactions on the otaku-heavy Internet bulletin board 2channel have been vitriolic. All of this is occurring at a time of ongoing crisis in the anime and manga industries, whose sales are declining at home and overseas, and whose products are being digitally pirated at a dizzying rate.

Earlier this month, a major Japanese newspaper ran an article about anime creator Yutaka Yamamoto, the force behind hits including Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star. Yamamoto bemoans what he calls the “inward-looking” insularity of the anime industry, its reliance on cheap labor, outsourcing and a glut of similar series often in the moe (hyper-cute character) category aimed at hardcore otaku, and its failure to provide interactive human exchanges between and among creators and fans. Even in Japan, Yamamoto notes, “the bubble has burst” for the industry.

The 2011 anime convention and expo season is beginning to heat up here in the United States, where attendance records for such events are broken annually. Live-action film projects like Naruto and Akira have been joined by a recently announced reality TV series based on Pac-Man. (Don’t ask.) Even the Japanese live-action movie Gantz, based on a popular manga and anime series, received its world premiere in the United States this week.

Meanwhile back in Japan, it may be now-or-never for Japan’s pop culture creators to rehabilitate their industries and reach out to their audiences–even if they have to do so in Chiba.

Ishihara's big bill

Last Friday, after ramming through Bill 156—the so-called “non-existent youth bill” targeting manga and anime imagery while exempting live action photography and video, not to mention live human beings who actually possess child pornography—Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, the former taboo-busting novelist turned moralist politico, claimed in his monthly press conference that Japan had become “too uninhibited” compared with “Western societies,” and added that readers of offending manga had “warped DNA.”

The subsequent decision by ten top manga publishers to boycott next year’s Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF), slated for March 24-27, amounts to an unusual act of corporate protest in normally conflict-shy Japan, prompting Japan’s otherwise reticent Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, to post his first message under his own name, pleading for both sides to find a resolution.

TAF 2011: ripe for China?

No wonder: reports out of this year’s TAF were dominated by the arrival of several Chinese anime producers on the scene.  Next year, they may have the floor all to themselves.

Given such dire prognostications, it may be better, or at least more fun, to look back at a few of 2010’s gift-worthy Japanese pop culture publications.

The folks at Kodansha International help us decode two of the most ubiquitous icons of Japanese pop imagery—schoolgirls and ninja—vis-à-vis two authoritative husband-and-wife teams. Wired magazine contributing editor Brian Ashcraft and his wife Shoko Ueda, based in Osaka, bring us Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential, a surprisingly capacious work that covers every permutation of the uniformed femmes in manga, anime and flesh and blood live action, fatale or not, even recording the history of the Sailor Moon-style uniform itself, imported from the US by a fast-militarizing Japan at the turn of the century.

Another conjugal pair, Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda, having already enlightened us about Japanese ghosts (Yokai Attack!) and everyday cartoon characters (Hello, Please!), turn their lucid lenses to the myths and realities behind Japan’s irresistible secret agents, spies and assassins in Ninja Attack!. Revealing what true ninja actually wore (not the sleek black uniforms and masks of popular rendering, of course, because they tried to blend into their surroundings—duh), ate, brandished and so on, the book admirably balances the seductions of ninja fiction with the astonishments of historical truth.  (Did you know, for example, that Matsuo Basho, Japan’s most renowned haiku master, may have served time amid his nomadic wanderings as a spy for the shogunate?)

Both books are tidy, lightweight and colorfully designed paperbacks with ample illustrations and photographs that won’t alienate or bore manga and anime enthusiasts keen for visual aids. Concise sidebar definitions, diagrams and cartoon bubbles keep the layout fresh and inventive, enabling readers to dip in and be edified at random.

"Western societies" go crazy for cosplay

At the other end of the scale is the substantial hardcover photography collection, Cosplay in America, by Ejen Chuang, featuring a plethora of schoolgirls, ninja, Super Marios and just about any other manga, anime and video game character imaginable—or at least a bunch of Americans dressed up to look like them.  If you’ve never attended one of the hundreds of manga and anime festivals and conventions held nearly every weekend across the United States, this voluminous bilingual (English and Japanese) tome offers a sneak peek at the variety and dedication of Japanese pop culture’s overseas fans, whose elaborate costumes are usually at least partly homemade, if not entirely stitched by the cosplayers themselves.

Perhaps someone should send a copy to Ishihara so he can see firsthand what those “Western societies” are really up to these days.

Cool Japan chilled

Earlier today here in Tokyo, the Metropolitan Assembly passed the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s revised bill to amend the Youth Healthy Development Ordinance–a piece of legislation otherwise known as the “non-existent youth” bill, whose story I wrote about late last month, and also last spring, when the revised bill was first submitted for approval.  By June, the legislation was flatly rejected, but not without a vow from Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara to revamp and try to push it through again this autumn.

The controversial Ishihara has his supporters and detractors. But like him or not, in this instance, there is no denying he is a man of his word.

Ishihara hates you

While restrictions on sexually stimulating and/or harmful depictions have long been in place in Japan, the new revisions specifically target “manga and anime,” while exempting real-life photography (explain that one), and focus on materials that may be “disrupting of social order”–much like Ishihara’s own decades’ old taboo-breaking novels and plays, and his more recent nationalist, racist and homophobic blather.

In objection, ten major manga publishers–Kadokawa Shoten, Shueisha, Kodansha, Akita Shoten, Hakusensha, Shogakukan, Shonen Gahousha, Shinchosa, Futubasha and LEED–have vowed to pull their wares from the 2011 Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF), whose executive committee is chaired by Ishihara himself. Rumors are emerging that the action could prompt a cancellation of next year’s TAF.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan is taking the news seriously enough to post the following commentary on his blog–the first time, I’m told, that the PM has posted in the first-person under his own name:

“There is another topic I would like to talk about concerning [the strength of] the Japanese brand. Currently, there are concerns over the possibility that the Tokyo International Animation Fair could be cancelled due to controversies related to the healthy development of youth issues. Healthy development of youth is an important issue. At the same time, it is important that Japanese animation is broadcast to a global audience. I urge all parties involved to try to work toward preventing a situation where an international animation fair cannot be held within Tokyo.” [transl. Dan Kanemitsu; ital. mine]

Now we have Version 2 of the non-existent youth bill, with its opaque language promising to monitor depictions of fictional characters government officials decide are too young to be engaging in the fictional activities government officials decide are too harmful to real youth that government officials decide are too youthful to view or read about them.  Meanwhile, it remains legal in Japan to possess child pornography, live-action or illustrated, rendering most attempts at enforcement toothless.

In other words: When the welfare of real children is at stake, the government turns the other cheek. But if you dare illustrate gay or trans-generational love, watch your back.  Watch what you draw is akin to watch what you think. Brave new world?

Ironies abound.

Fictional portrayals of nonexistent young characters continue to proliferate as the financially strapped manga and anime industries cater to their largely middle-aged and male otaku core demographic, making more “moe,” or soft-core porn imagery, in order to survive. Meanwhile, Japan’s real youth are thin on the ground: The nation’s notoriously declining birth rate is among the lowest in developed economies, and jobs for those youth who actually do exist in the form of university graduates have grown scarce. What’s more, government officials are not doing much to help them.

I phoned veteran manga translator and writer Dan Kanemitsu, a vocal opponent of the bill, in Tokyo. He is deeply concerned about the legislation’s stealthy, under-the-radar nature. “They did their best to not raise publicity,” Kanemitsu tells me. “And they did their best not to [let anyone] examine [the legislation]. I think it’s disingenuous, since it’s something that could possibly have a lot of impact.  The publishers and artists had little to no input, and the bill was rushed into law to ensure that.  That’s why the industry is so angry.

“What’s more,” he adds, “this is not a bill about pornography at all.  It’s about enforcing morality, some vague notion that has nothing to do with the real protection of real children.”

The domestic media have only abetted Ishihara’s strategy.  Japan’s corrupt society of “press clubs” give voice to the major players who support them. The government issues a statement, journalists dutifully record it, and all bask in the glow of a brutally efficient PR release, disguised as journalism. Democracy, as someone once said, is ‘messy.’ Japanese politicians and their docile toadies in the media don’t like messiness–and Ishihara clearly sees anyone gay, non-Japanese, black, poor and/or sexual, as messy.

Hence the latest step in government efforts to control what you see and read. “Under the pre-existing regulations, they could go after some types of cheesecake [mild hentai or pornographic] material,” says Kanemitsu, “but not yaoi [manga/anime aimed at women and featuring beautiful men who love other men] and shojo [girl’s manga/anime]. Adult material is regulated differently under obscenity standards. Japan’s current penal code just says that we’ll bust you if it’s obscene, but it doesn’t define what’s obscene.”

And there’s the rub: Who defines what’s “obscene,” and how does one define it?  It’s a worthy topic for debate.  Sadly, today’s bill in Tokyo was explicitly designed to circumvent discussion.  No wonder Tetsuya Chiba, veteran manga maestro and author of Tomorrow’s Joe, recalls the madness of pre-war Japan:

“The media, such as newspapers or broadcasters, may eventually get tied up little by little by law, and citizens may start becoming blind and deaf.  I have seen such terrifying examples in this country before the war and in nearby countries even now. That’s why I am opposing” the ordinance.

Any of you remember the ‘Comics Code’ in America, effectively shutting down the most creative comics artists in the US in the 1950s, as aptly recorded by David Hadju in The Ten Cent Plague?  For the sake of all of us, let’s hope it doesn’t happen in Japan.

Satoshi Kon.

I was soaking my bones in a riverside rotenburo in the hills of Tochigi last month when news of anime director Satoshi Kon’s death flashed across my cell phone via text message.  Must be a macabre joke, I thought at first glance, though the friend who sent it isn’t given to jabs of dark humor.

Maybe a promotional gambit for Kon’s next work? His films are characterized in part by multiple realities and unexpected shifts among them, so that just when you think something is really happening, perhaps it isn’t. After all, typing or even thinking about the phrase, “the late Satoshi Kon,” just didn’t feel right.

But after returning to Tokyo and now New York, I have been forced to confront the banal and humbling truth: Kon, one of the most gifted, innovative and searchingly intelligent artists working in the anime medium and the film world at large, died on the morning of August  24 from pancreatic cancer–at the age of 46.

Paprika's alternate worlds coexist.

As a director, Kon made four features–Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika–and was at work on his fifth, The Dreaming Machine. Eerily, he appeared to be especially active and lively in recent weeks, as the Internet buzzed with fans from East and West accusing American live-action director Christopher Nolan of plagiarizing ideas from Paprika for his Hollywood blockbuster, Inception.

Responding to the controversy on his blog, “Kon’s Tone”, last month, the anime director gently brushed aside fan complaints, noting that most artists are influenced by others and identifying examples in his own work–though he neglected to add that in his case, source materials have been openly acknowledged, in particular John Ford’s 1948 Western, 3 Godfathers, on which Kon loosely based Tokyo Godfathers.

Last autumn, I gave a talk at a symposium on anime hosted by the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Paprika was screened and discussed. Befittingly, my fellow panelists and I spoke of the film in language usually reserved for literature and other works of so-called “high art.” There was so much to see and ponder in a Kon film. I screened Paprika again this summer for students in an anime seminar at Temple University in Tokyo. Each time I watch it, I see more.

Feeling helpless in grief, I reached out to friends and authors worldwide to make sense of Kon’s legacy, and our loss.  Here’s what they had to say:

Helen McCarthy, author of nine books on anime, including the exhaustive and essential The Anime Encyclopedia: Japanese Animation Since 1917.

“Looking at his overall achievements as a director, writer and artist, Kon was working on the same level as Hayao Miyazaki at his peak. If Miyazaki had died at 46, we wouldn’t have My Neighbor Totoro. At 46, Tezuka hadn’t published Black Jack, or MW, or created some of his greatest short films. At 46, Hitchcock hadn’t even got as far as Stage Fright. Just think what we might have had from Satoshi Kon at 50, or 60.

“The painter Pablo Picasso once said ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.’ For me, the uniqueness of his art is that, as well as the child remaining an artist, the artist remained a child.

“That places Kon very high among his peers. At the moment, Japanese animation, and Japanese film in general, has quite a few interesting directors who have reached the mid-point in their careers with solid achievement and huge potential, but Kon had moved beyond that. He was on the level of Rintaro, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. Looking at his overall achievements as a director, writer and artist, judging him solely on his merits, Kon was working on the same level as Hayao Miyazaki at his peak. Looking outside anime, he was as sure of his own vision and method as Hitchcock or Cocteau. Not many people actually merit the term ‘auteur,’ but Kon did.

“Kon doesn’t pass judgment or lecture, he simply shows us the best and worst in the city and its people. He laughs at them, pokes fun at them, shakes his head in amazement at them. He allows them to be completely real, and in so doing, he opens the door for anything to happen. Anything is possible in a Kon film, because Kon is open to every possibility. When he misdirects or distracts us, it’s the mischief of a clever child having a bit of fun – we’re welcome to join in the game and try to outguess him, or we can just sit back and watch until everything becomes clear.”

American animation historian, critic and author Charles Solomon highlights Kon’s unique technical skills as a craftsperson.

“Kon stands out as a creator of unsettling originality. Many directors use flashbacks and dream sequences, but few could match Kon’s skill at integrating those elements into the narrative. He often  kept the audience off-balance, undercutting assumptions and calling what seemed to be the facts of the story into question. Watch the opening scenes of Paprika, when the heroine shifts from a sign on a building to the logo on a passing truck and so forth–the flow of visuals appears effortless, but would have been extremely difficult to do. Similarly, in Millenium Actress–my personal favorite of his films–the viewer moves from reality into the main character’s memories and films with a grace and fluidity only a major talent could create. Kon also used color with exceptional skill–the grey-blue palette of Tokyo Godfathers and the early sections of Millenium Actress make the viewer feel the winter cold the characters are experiencing. Kon was one of the most interesting and talented directors working in animation–not just in Japan, but in the world.”

Millenium Actress

The world beyond Japan had begun slowly waking to Kon’s genius–too slowly, according to many. Tokyo Godfathers was submitted for an Oscar nomination in 2003 and Paprika garnered some awards and praise in Europe, but nothing commensurate with Kon’s impact on Western artists.

“It may have been fortuitous, but Kon’s works tended to be very accessible to Westerners,” says Andrew Osmond, author of Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, the only English-language book about the director. “He also educated foreigners about Japan. He told me that when Tokyo Godfathers premiered in New York, he was shocked that people were surprised to learn that Tokyo had a homeless problem. [The Kon-directed TV series] Paranoia Agent shows a Japan terrified of its younger generation, and Millennium Actress telescopes centuries of Japanese history, from the Heian era to World War II and beyond.”

Tufts University professor and author Susan J. Napier cites Kon’s humanism and empathy as transcendent features in his work.

“Kon should be considered not simply as a master animator but also as the descendant of an impressive line of postwar Japanese humanists, ranging from Akira Kurosawa to Kenzaburo Oe and certainly including Hayao Miyazaki. Like these other humanists, Kon shared a concern for social issues, the problems of being an outsider, and the ultimate fate of modern Japan. But his work was never heavy or tragic. Although he leaves behind a tragically truncated body of work, his playful, ebullient and visually stunning art is a lasting legacy of poignant delight.”

“His films were always at the top of my list,” adds Frederik L. Schodt, manga authority, translator and author of the classics, Manga, Manga, and Dreamland Japan.  “More than almost any other animator in Japan, [Kon] had truly liberated himself from what anime was supposed to be.  He didn’t envision his audience to be mainly young children or adolescents, and he shied away from creating stories laden with robots, cute sexy girls, and inane, formulaic, feel-good plots.  As a result, he was able to create works that stand up well to the best in serious live-action film making.

“But he was also able to exploit the strengths of hand-drawn animation, and to utilize its potential for infinite deformation and flexibility, while still retaining a special human warmth. In the process, he created something uniquely powerful, a blend of the reality we live in, with the borderless imagination of his own mind.”

Try it again: “The late Satoshi Kon.”

Nope. Still doesn’t feel right. Not at all.

TinierMe CEO Masaru Ohnogi in Tokyo. TinierMe hit half-a-million U.S.-based users this week.

Recently I’ve been writing a lot in this space and elsewhere about the critical roles played by interactivity and participation in the appeal of Japanese popular culture both in and outside of Japan. I devoted an entire chapter to the topic in my book, Japanamerica, because it seemed so revealing: “The draw of DIY (Do It Yourself)” addresses in part the participatory nature of Japanese comics and animation aesthetics, with their generally minimalist, 2D designs inviting the visual engagement of viewers’ own imaginations.

But the main reason the DIY chapter garners attention from readers, critics and students today is that it examines otaku, or über-fan-oriented pursuits such as cosplay (costume play), the role-playing activity that has fast emerged as one of the principal drivers of global anime fandom.  Cosplaying fans at conventions and expos across the country are the most visible and vibrant sign of a fully engaged community.

Problem is: Japanese animation studios make neither pennies nor yen from cosplay, however popular it becomes, because they remain mired in the DVD-sales-marketing doldrums.

Enter the gaming scramble.

Last spring in New York, I got wind of an enterprising new virtual reality game called TinierMe. The principal developer, the Japanese gaming company GCrest, a division of CyberAgent Inc., had opened an office in San Francisco in 2009 for the U.S. launch of its virtual reality portal, featuring decidedly anime -style characters and visuals.

This summer, the site announced that it has surpassed the one-million user milestone, and today boasts over 1,175,000 distinct users.  But this week, an even more significant number hits the streets and screens: over half a million of TinierMe’s current users worldwide are based in the United States, suggesting that the American audience for Japanese-made and -styled characters and environments continues to expand, even in a decidedly lackluster consumer market.

TinierMe welcomes you.

Having just launched in October of last year, TinierMe hasn’t even celebrated its first birthday.  “As a point of comparison,” says Sarah McNally from GCrest’s Tokyo office, “the Japanese version of TinierMe, [called] ‘AtGames,’ which has been in business for about four years, has about two million users.”

Imagine Second Life with anime-character avatars designed by a team of Japanese artists, giving American and other English-speaking fans a chance to cosplay virtually, to create their own anime-inspired avatars anytime they want, rather than waiting for the next area anime convention. Amid the seeming paradox of declining anime DVD sales and escalating numbers of overseas fans attending conventions and expos, entrepreneurs are beginning to see opportunity: Reach the fans via new networks of accessibility, and you just might survive, or even thrive.

“Our goal is to become a virtual Disneyland,” Masaru Ohnogi, head of GCrest America, told me when we met in the parent company’s Tokyo headquarters. “We want to entertain people all over the world, with music, games, anime…everything.  Most people have compared us to Gaia online, which has an American version of anime characters,” he adds, citing the California-based enterprise. “But that look remains foreign to us. It doesn’t really look like anime, Japanese-style.  So we’re taking a uniquely Japanese approach.”

That approach involves playing a bit of insider baseball with U.S.-based fans of a capacious anime playground.  In the spring, TinierMe rolled out the hipster Japanese character “Gloomy Bear,” a kind of grotesque twist on so-called ‘kawaii’ or super-cute iconography.  And this summer, an avatar (called a “Selfy,” in TinierMe-speak) of Hatsune Miku, the virtual celebrity pop-singing idol who has achieved superstar status, especially in Japan’s otaku community, entered the game.

Gloomy cool: "Gloomy Bear" avatar

“Most of our users know a lot about Japan,” adds McNally.  “They even use Japanese names for their avatars, like Keiko.  There are even users whose names are based upon [Miku’s nickname] ‘Hatsumiku.’  I just looked up ‘Hatsune’ in nicknames and found 300 users, like Hatsune-san, Hatsunemik-10.”  She assures me that more Miku releases will come later this month.

Ohnogi’s enthusiasm and knowledge are exceptional: Few Japanese content companies seem to possess the confidence and ambition necessary for reaching out to overseas fans–or to even bother finding out who they are–at a time when most are vacating their U.S. offices in 2010, cutting back on expenses, turning inward just as their Asian competitors may be usurping them.

Indeed, much of the gaming scramble is moving in the opposite direction, with American companies muscling into Japan’s estimated $2 billion market. U.S.-based Zygna’s (“Farmville”) heralded $150 million alliance with Japan’s Softbank this summer was followed late last month by CrowdStar’s tie-up with Japanese game studio Drecom.

But Ohnogi proffers an alternative approach: Instead of attacking overseas fans for their seemingly limitless and illegal access to anime visuals, why not get to know them?

“Over 70 percent of social networkers are under 20 years old,” he says, pointing to a page of colorful statistics and graphs on his netbook. “Around 63 percent of them are female. You have to know your audience in order to reach them.

More Miku on the way.

“We take down the site for maintenance twice a week, because part of what we’re selling is Japanese-style quality. I believe that you can sell to American fans who trust the quality of the Japanese product. We give them both free access and paid options. Lots of choices. You really need to understand both cultures to make it work.”

Traversing the cultural divide and making it work is never an easy proposition.  But paying attention to the character and demands of your audience at least gives you a shot at capitalizing on them.

In the annals of manga, the print-based comics medium that is now roughly 60 years old and a primary driver of Japan’s pop culture juggernaut, the summer of 2010 has been revolutionary, though the season launched long before last month’s brutal humidity simultaneously smothered my two hometowns, Tokyo and New York.

As reported earlier in this column, the sentencing in February of American manga collector Christopher Handley to six months in prison for possession of obscene materials (an Iowa court cited seven manga titles) sent ripples of anxiety through fans of Japanese pop culture worldwide.

Shortly thereafter, the Tokyo metropolitan government announced its proposal of legislation that would protect the welfare of children from violent or erotic depictions of what it called “nonexistent youth” (read: drawings). The proposal sought to amend child welfare protection laws already in place in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan.

Whether the events in Iowa and Tokyo were related remains debatable, but the Tokyo proposal was met by an unprecedented formal protest. A lengthy roster of otherwise reserved or even reclusive manga artists, including veterans Tetsuya Chiba, Fujiko Fujio A, Moto Hagio and Rumiko Takahashi, gathered for a press conference to deliver a petition and declare their opposition to the bill. This was followed by opposition from corporate IT heavyweights like Google, Yahoo and Rakuten, and members of the Japan P.E.N. Club, part of an international association of authors.

Manga artists protest porn law in Tokyo

With suspicions rising about the political motivations behind the proposal and its vague language and goals, its eventual rejection in June was hardly a surprise. Controversial arch-conservative Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, a supporter of the bill (also a former novelist who in the past explored such taboo topics as incest and rape in his fiction and plays), wondered aloud if the term “nonexistent youth” made people think the legislation was aimed at prohibiting ghosts.

Ishihara has vowed to redraft and resubmit the law as early as next month. And while many in the manga industry publicly breathed a sigh of relief when the bill was shot down, a number of artists, editors and translators later confided to me off the record that some sort of action must be taken to curtail the burgeoning number of erotic manga, especially those featuring very young-looking characters.

Late last month, Sweden and Canada joined the chorus of moralists suddenly appalled by the libertarianism of Japan’s popular arts.  A translator in Sweden was harshly fined for possessing 51 manga drawings deemed to be child pornography in the Swedish courts, and a young manga fan in the Great White Northern district of Ottawa was sentenced to 90 days in jail with three months’ probation–and a compulsory sex-offender registration lasting 20 years–for downloading manga images on his personal computer.

As I suggest in my book, Japanamerica: the Western world may eventually frown upon Japanese creativity, in part because–broadly speaking, of course–Western culture often appears to struggle more strenuously to balance freedom with civility.

Meanwhile, and perversely, much more ominous news darkened the manga industry this past spring: Print manga sales are in a downward spiral, both in Japan and overseas.

North American sales fell by 17 percent from 2007 to 2008, then dropped a further 20 percent from 2008 to 2009, for a total loss of one-third.

Yukari Shiina of World-Manga.com, an agency that brings the work of international artists to Japanese publishers, tells me that overall manga sales in Japan dipped 6.6 percent in 2009, with manga magazine sales sinking 9.4 percent. Research suggests the proliferation of manga cafes, where readers may peruse without purchasing as many manga as they like for roughly five dollars an hour, and the dearth of hit series in recent years may be hurting Japanese sales.

In the North American market, Shiina believes the depressed economy and exaggerated expectations (i.e., oversaturation) are key factors behind collapsing sales. But she doesn’t ignore the digital elephant in the room.

Scanlations: help or hindrance?

“I’m not sure exactly how much [they are] contributing to the declines, but scanlations are a problem,” Shiina says, referring to the unauthorized posting and translation of manga titles on the Internet. “I don’t buy scanlation groups’ argument that they promote manga in general. It might be true with some obscure titles, but it can’t be with hits such as Naruto.”

Over dinner in Tokyo, a Kodansha editor suggested that the real damage posed by scanlations over the past three to four years was the direct result of manga uploads spiking in Japan. “Before, it was mostly non-Japanese kids in the US, China, Korea and Russia posting and translating manga. But the kids in Japan finally caught on, and now all kinds of manga are available for free as soon as they hit the shelves [in Japan],” he said.

A week later, the 36-member Japanese Digital Comics Association, with Japanese publishing giants Shogakukan, Shueisha and, yes, Kodansha on board, announced it would be teaming up with U.S. counterparts Viz Media, TokyoPop and Yen Press (part of the mighty Hachette Book Group) to form an international coalition seeking legal action against scanlators and aggregator sites.

“It’s definitely necessary,” says U.S. distributor TokyoPop’s CEO and founder, Stuart Levy. “Piracy plagues the industry. The industry has to offer a reasonable alternative to fans as well, but without the support of our Japanese licensors, we’re stuck. Things [in America] will collapse.”

Suddenly, news broke here in Japan that a 14-year-old boy had been arrested for allegedly posting manga on YouTube, with local police wildly estimating the damage he caused at 22 million dollars.

The message hasn’t been lost on scanlation purveyors in the United States and elsewhere. Two of the largest scanlation aggregators, MangaFox and OneManga, responded in short order, with the former pulling hundreds of manga titles from the site and the latter closing down completely at the end of last month.

Fan reaction has been immediate and varied, though rarely dispassionate. And while it remains to be seen if manga publishers can resurrect sales at home or abroad amid rapidly transforming digital media and publishing markets, it’s a safe bet that for publishers, fans and distributors, these are not merely evolutionary steps, but revolutionary salvos. In 2010, as the sun shines more fiercely into the corners and crevices of Japanese pop culture, summer keeps getting hotter.

TokyoPop will find you

The first time I met Stuart Levy, Founder, CEO and CCO of 12-year-old distributor, producer and proselytizer of Japanese comics and animation, TokyoPop, he was dauntingly sanguine. At the time I was conducting research and interviews for my book, Japanamerica, and Levy garrulously held forth in TokyoPop’s Tokyo headquarters about new movies, new TV outlets, Internet options and America’s mania for manga.

That was then, as they say. TokyoPop slashed its workforce two years ago, shrewdly trimming overhead before the industry crash hit hardest in ’09 and ’10, seeing peers like Viz Media hemorrhage profits and jobs, and others, like ADV and Central Park Media, disappear entirely.

Despite the setbacks, Levy remains as madcap passionate as humanly possible about his struggling business. Instead of griping behind corporate walls, he has hit the road this summer to meet and greet the audience, whose numbers continue to swell at conventions and expos across the US, and try to rescue his industry.

Levy’s self-branded “TokyoPop Tour” launched in early July at Los Angeles’s Anime Expo. When it finally winds down in Chicago at the end of August, he and his crew will have hit 28 cities in 54 days — all to get face time with fans.

For me, the move is rich with irony: the heavily Internet-invested manga/anime producer and retailer I first encountered five years ago is now using online social networking to turn back into old-fashioned traveling salespeople.

“I decided we should take the plunge this year and make it happen,” Levy tells me from his tour bus. “The goals are simple: To reach out to fans nationwide to meet them and see how ‘otaku culture’ in America has evolved.”

Levy has plenty of gimmicks to help sell the jaunt. Six college students selected via audition are accompanying him, and an ongoing quest and contest to find “America’s Greatest Otaku” (the nation’s most obsessive fan of Japanese pop culture) sustains suspense. The entire tour is being filmed for a later video incarnation, and clips, pics and updates are posted constantly on the tour’s web site and via social networking outlets like Facebook and Twitter. There are freebies and promotional giveaways, too.

“I typically think up ideas on my own,” says Levy, “letting concepts gestate until they become a very clear vision. Sometimes I start to plan while that vision is still coming together in my head. A lot of this has to do with branding, design and aesthetic. “The TOKYOPOP Tour has combined all those elements – and the vision crystallized for me as the planning stage progressed. My decision to attempt production on a show while on tour was the critical one – along with my decision to personally join the entire tour hands-on.”

Levy’s approach is not merely admirable, but necessary.  The gap between American fandom and the producers and purveyors of Japanese pop culture has widened into a chasm in the years since he and I first met in Tokyo.  Manga sales have plummeted by a third in North America in the past two years.  And even in the domestic market, manga is losing ground to digital media and scanlation offerings.  The last year alone in Japan saw a 6.6% drop in overall manga sales, and a dizzying 9.4% fall in the manga magazine market.

This June, the 36-member Japanese Digital Comics Association, which includes Japanese publishing giants such as Shogakukan, Shueisha and Kodansha, announced that they would be teaming up with their US counterparts Viz Media, TokyoPop and Yen Press (part of the mighty Hachette Book Group) to form an international coalition seeking legal action again scanlators and scanlation aggregator sites.

Shortly thereafter, a 14 year-old Japanese middle-schooler was arrested in Nagoya on charges that he illegally uploaded hundreds of manga onto YouTube.  And two of the largest English-language scanlation aggregators, MangaFox and OneManga, responded in short order, with the former pulling hundreds of manga titles from its site and the latter announcing it would close completely at the end of last month.

Levy’s support of these actions is unequivocal. “It’s definitely necessary,” he tells me from his latest stop on the East Coast. “Piracy plagues the industry, but the industry has to offer a reasonable alternative to fans as well.  Still, without the support of our Japanese licensors, we’re stuck.  Things [in America] will collapse.”

TokyoPop founder Stuart Levy in Baltimore for Otakon

Like others in the beleaguered manga and anime industries outside of Japan, Levy is betting on fandom, the sheer enthusiasm of millions of cosplayers, convention attendees and passionate enthusiasts to prop up the Japanese pop culture phenomenon.

“As far as DVD and manga sales go, [the problem] is a combination of less interesting stories and piracy.  But every city in America has passionate fans. The passion is everywhere.  And cosplay itself is a significant trend which contributes to the success of anime conventions. I’d say over 50% of attendees are cosplaying now.”

TokyoPop is seeking to connect the dots of Japanamerican fandom–cosplay, conventions and consumerism–in order to create a coherent whole that works for fans and producers on both sides of the planet.  It’s an ambitious agenda, executed via one big and amply illustrated bus.

But will it work?  ”I don’t think we will know until the America’s Greatest Otaku show is complete and broadcast on Hulu later this year,” says Levy. “This show memorializes our search for otaku culture and everything we’ve done this summer.”

Here come your traveling salesfolk, eager to meet you where you live and deliver Japan’s best to your doorstep, with all hands on deck.  Don’t miss them.

anime conventions are packed while sales slip

American journalist Douglas McGray’s 2002 Foreign Policy essay, “Gross National Cool,” crystallized not only evidence that contemporary Japan had become hip and attractive, but also a nifty phrase to go with it. From Boston to Australia, “cool Japan” subsequently appeared in the titles of academic conferences, essays and articles addressing everything from Japan’s anime-and-manga imagery to fashion, style, pop music and even food. It signified a national brand that packed a lot of soft power—the appeal of a culture’s sensibility and products.

But that was eight years ago. And like most bits of journalistic shorthand, the phrase “cool Japan” is as convenient as it is vague. Is it just about manga and anime fandom, or does it refer to an aspect of the national or ethnic character that is fundamentally cool? Is it Japan’s capacity to absorb and reinvent a range of outside influences that makes it so au courant in our mashup 21st century? And, perhaps most pressing: If Japan is cool now, can it possibly stay that way?

These questions resurface every time I make a round of appearances at anime conventions and university campuses in the United States, as I did this spring. Audiences are large, sometimes massive, and very colorful. They are knowledgeable, too, at least about the manga and anime titles and characters they love—so much so that they are often costumed and made up to look exactly like those characters.

But there remains an unsettling gap between the American fans of cool Japan and the Japanese who actually make what’s cool. While the faces of popular anime and manga characters elicit oohs and aahs and sometimes squeals of recognition when they flash on projection screens or parade past in cosplay events, the industry that creates them—producers, publishers, artists and animators—continues to be virtually faceless outside of Japan.

I’ve taken to calling this Japan’s pop culture branding gap. While cool Japan has amassed a vast audience overseas in the past decade, very few of its fans know anything about the brands behind it. Industry stalwarts such as Studio Pierrot, Madhouse, Production IG, Shogakukan and Shueisha barely register at U.S. anime conventions, where fans passionately recite and reenact their creations. You might hear the words Ghibli (usually mispronounced), Toei and Bandai batted about in conversation among older generations of American fans, but with scant enthusiasm.

Look up these companies online and visit their websites, and you won’t be surprised: If you find any information in English, it will likely be provided by the enterprising folks at the Anime News Network, an English-language news portal site, some posters on Wikipedia or ardent fans in their blogs. Quite a few industry producers and publishers still maintain Japanese-only Web presences, but that hardly matters. In either language, most of the industry’s online offerings are amateurish, hard to navigate, and worst of all, dull—just the opposite of their vaunted products.

This antiquated, inward-looking and provincial approach to brand marketing may have sufficed when Japan’s domestic market was still breeding successive generations of native otaku. But today, with a shrinking youth demographic, imperiled economy and new competition from their Asian neighbors, Japan’s producers of pop culture can no longer afford to ignore the overseas market.

Unfortunately, they may be too late.

According to a recent industry white paper, manga sales dropped in North America for the second straight year in 2009, from a peak in 2007. The slip means that North American publishers will release the lowest number of new manga titles this year since 2004. The brutal cuts two years ago at TokyoPop, one of the United States’ most active promoters of cool Japan products, were followed last month by layoffs at Viz Media, the veteran San Francisco-based distributor formed by five Japanese publishers in the late 1980s.

About the only bright spot in the recent spate of reports is news from Crunchyroll, the former anime fansite—by and for fans, with pirated streaming content—that went legit via licensing deals with Japanese producers in 2008. Vu Nguyen, the site’s co-founder and Vice President of Business and Development and Strategy, told me then: “The fans genuinely want to support creators and the industry. They just haven’t been educated on how the industry works. We’re doing our best to inform them.”

Last month, Crunchyroll announced a 250 percent growth spurt in the first quarter of 2010 over the past five quarters, with 5.5 million unique visitors per month. “What we’ve really figured out in the last two years is how to integrate the community experience with the professional content experience,” says Chase Wang, Director of Publicity and Marketing. Wang cites the company’s iPhone and iPad applications—and one for Naruto on Facebook—as examples of Crunchyroll’s commercially successful community outreach. “We generated over 1.5 million installs in under four months, while providing a double digit lift on video views of [Naruto].”

“Creating an Internet presence is about cultivating a two-way relationship with the user,” adds Vince Shortino, Representative Director of Crunchyroll’s Japan office. “The old model of neglecting content on one-way video sites has become less and less effective.”

One-way content delivery is over. Tell that to cool Japan. Fast.