TheOASG’s March and April Lab Reports

From the quality of the animation, to his writing, to his awe-inspiring editing, Kon’s films have been remembered and revered for nearly a decade since his death by both anime fans, and more mainstream film savants. While his body of work can (and deserves to) be looked at for his various skills as an animator, I’m discussing his films here because he ended up being the master of the concept of imaginarium when it comes to showing it on film, since he regularly played with the idea of undefinable reality. A dreamscape that pushes and eventually bends reality to the point where it’s unrecognizable. A past that ends up reshaping the here and now. 

There are a few manga folks that feel readers have to be exposed more to other legal manga sources besides Jump. I have to agree with those people.

Just because it’s the prevalent option doesn’t mean it will satisfy everyone’s needs. Not everyone likes material from Shonen Jump or shonen in general. There’s other services that don’t get as much attention due to lack of promotional resources. I also realize that certain notable manga services are terrible (Crunchyroll Manga being one of them).

Why is it that people talk about the US edition Shonen Jump like that’s the best option to read cheap legal manga when it may not exactly be the case? I think I’ll discuss this by talking about how cognitive biases play a role.

Nen’s mechanics extend beyond “it’s a type of life energy that can be used for energy attacks,” though. All nen users also fall into one of six categories, from enhancers, who are able to enhance the strength of their own bodies through nen power, to conjurers, who can summon objects out of nen entirely. These six categories are framed in a hexagonal grid formation, and the grid pattern actually matters—those who fall in a given nen category will have the least trouble producing abilities from their end of the grid, but great difficulty mastering abilities from the far end. And this system of power tradeoffs extends to individual abilities, as well—the greater the effect of a given nen ability, the more restrictions, preconditions, or consequences for its usage.

Through the nen system, Hunter x Hunter is able to provide a sense of balance and structure to its fights, letting the overall “power levels” of its characters rise up dramatically without ever losing a sense of strategic solidity and point-counterpoint back-and-forth in its fight scenes. The six categories of nen specialists act as natural indicators of “combat specialization,” but with the added significance of physically defining your combat limits. If an opponent appears who’s a terrific enhancer, we instinctively know the solution is likely not to take them face-on; and if the opponent is a manipulator, we know to watch for any traps that might put us under their sway.

If asked what Children of the Sea is about, the single most condensed answer would be the mysticism of nature. As such when going through this story -whether in manga or anime form-, one should leave logic behind and let their senses take over. Daisuke Igarashi urges naturalism throughout most of his works and presents our (re)connection with nature both as healing and something to be reckoned. But above all as something fundamental to and inside of us. That’s both the experience and the message of Children of the Sea.

A girl who expresses herself physically and is rejected by the sports club at the beginning of the summer holidays; her parents who have failed their relationship; two boys whose mother was a dugong; the scientists who care about the boys and the company that’s interested in them; spotted sea species disappearing from aquariums worldwide and deep sea creatures getting stranded- all of them swirl around a festival of birth and the mundane coexists along the grandiose. And thus the mystery unfolds.

The golem tries to care for Somali and eventually finds someone in town who can make medicine for her. While the golem watches over the sickly, sleeping child, Kokilia asks them how they’re holding up. The golem blames themself for Somali getting sick. They feel fully at fault as though they should have been monitoring everything Somali was doing.

Kokilia then turns to the golem and says, “Mr. Golem…there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. I make mistakes of my own from time to time. Sometimes I let my anger get the best of me. Sometimes I leave him [Kikila] bawling his eyes out, but whenever I mess up, I always take him in my arms and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I make sure he knows I care about him. It’s how both parent and child grow. It’s what the relationship is about.”

Despite being an emotionless, created thing, the golem takes some comfort in these words. So do I.

CL: It was a high school classmate who introduced me to Yuri. We were casually talking about anime, and when I asked her if she knows what Yaoi is, she said, “Yuri is better!”

I had no idea what Yuri was, so she told me that I should look it up online.

…And so, I did. What turned up in the search results stunned me! Girls liking girls? That hits close to home. I was so perturbed by my discovery that I had dreamt of Yuri that night. When I woke up, I knew I was already hooked. LOL

My first Yuri was Kannazuki no Miko. I relied on what’s available in Youtube for my Yuri fix. Strawberry Panic was also there, but I preferred KnM for its action and fantasy elements. I grew up watching Shounen anime with my brothers, so it’s what had appealed to me.

At that time, I had never imagined that I’d end up drawing Yuri for a living. I’ve always aspired to be a manga artist, but I didn’t give much thought as to what genre I’d focus on. I just wanted to create something “cool” that’d be a huge hit, like Naruto and other Shonen Jump titles. When my fascination for Yuri grew however, I did want to draw Yuri— but I was held back by my fear of being outed as a lesbian.

In 2013, Black Ink Comics, a local publisher, wanted some manga-style romance. I saw this as the opportunity to be the first to publish a Boys’ Love manga in my country (it had less of a risk of me being outed than Girls’ Love), but when I asked if they accept same-sex romance stories, they said they weren’t ready for those. The year after that, Black Ink released their first BL comic, which was a shock, to say the least. While I was upset that the chance to publish BL had slipped past me, it also dawned on me that they’d probably accept GL stories as well. I was still scared of being outed, but I went through with it anyway and that’s how World Canvas, my first Yuri comic, came to be.

I came out a few months after my book did, and the support I’ve gotten is absolutely heartwarming. I’m able to create what I love now and looking back at what I did, I’m happy.

What’s an interesting tidbit you would like to share concerning AniPlaylist?

I have tried to personally contact labels & artists! In early 2019, I tried to send messages personally to labels and artists to ask them if they could add some of their songs on Spotify. The task was really tiresome, finding ways to contact labels/artists was not easy, and all messages needed to be written in Japanese so I had to ask the help of a Japanese speaking friend.

I sent more than a hundred messages, and 90% of them were left unanswered. Sometimes I didn’t get an answer and songs were still added. Honestly, I can’t even be sure it was thanks to my message, but I wrote a post about it on Medium last year.

The remaining 10% were mainly negative answers telling me to ask some label I couldn’t contact or just that they couldn’t do anything about it.

Fun fact: I sent an e-mail to the composer of a movie to ask if the soundtrack would ever be available on Spotify. I would have never expected the response I received–they sent me a WeTransfer with the complete soundtrack of the movie!

I will probably try to send messages again in the near future. With the help of the website and some search statistics, it might be easier to convince labels to release their songs on music platforms!

Amid these uncertain times, a strange success story involving one of my current favorite manga artists has emerged over the past few weeks. 

Ootake Toshimoto, author of Mogusa-san and Teasobi, has been drawing a comic series titled 1 Iine 1 Yen de Bangohan o Taberu Harapeko Joshi, or in English, Hungry Girl Eats Dinner Where 1 Like Equals 1 Yen. The premise: Minori Mogusa, the perpetually hungry heroine of Mogusa-san, is in a situation where she gets 1 yen for every Twitter like. Then, she’s supposed to use the amount earned in each comic on her next dinner. In the first strip above, she has 0 yen, so she’s “air-eating.” 

But while the expectation was that she’d get maybe a few hundred likes, and could build a meal based off of that, reality panned out very differently.

The first comic received 70,155 likes.

The very first OVA to come out was DALLOS II published in December 1983, and we could say that the direction OVA would take was almost decided within the first two years, until November 1985. DALLOS got a start on video series by appointing popular staff (Director Mamoru Oshii, who was at his popularity peak with Urusei Yatsura, as well as Studio Pierrot). BIRTH, in 1984, proved the efficiency of promoting the work using events involving staff and voice actors. The pillars of the OVA industry – manga adaptations and anime spinoffs – were in place, and works such as Genmu Senki Reda, Tatakae!! Ikser I, as well as Megazone 23, were already out, so the Bishoujo mecha approach original to OVA was also established. Even if it did not become a major approach, experimental music videos like Machikado no Meruhen had also been done in 1984.

Until that point, for an OVA, we were talking about a budget of 10 million yen per 10 minutes, which meant 60 million for a 60 minutes work. This was a far higher production value than TV anime, and the situation made the creation of productions with high degrees of accomplishment easier. Unlike TV or feature films, projects emerging from the staff’s side were also more likely to realize, which was also appealing.

As such, the OVA industry was expected to flourish, but instead, it quickly started to stagnate from 1986. The number of works produced grew steadily, from about 50 in 1986 to 72 in 1987 and 90 in 1988. But without a significant growth of the demand, that excess of supply inevitably caused a drop in sales. Without sales, budgets got cut, and original projects were less likely to get approved. The staff for whom most of the work revolved around a handful of popular OVAs were also overworked.

Tezuka also established with Mushi Production the standard for anime production that still exists today; that is, bottom-tier animators working 50+ hour weeks for subpar wages and with no labor protections of any kind. Do you know if Tezuka ever regretted this? Do you see this labor practice changing for the better as production moves overseas?

Schodt: This is one of Miyazaki’s criticisms of Tezuka, in his autobiographies, Starting Point and Turning Point (which I translated with Beth Cary and which were published by VIZ Media). I am sure Tezuka would have loved to pay his animators more. But it is important to remember that Mushi Production went bankrupt, and it caused Tezuka (and the people who worked for him) enormous grief.

Without this cut-rate production style, however, Japanese animation would probably never have assumed the stature that it does today. I think that working conditions for animators in Japan are still awful, and I don’t see them improving because productions are moving overseas. It’s not just an issue of long hours and low pay. Even the ergonomics and spatial constraints are appalling. I don’t know how young people can physically stand it.

1. Beer Me 

So you want to know about A-Kon 8? Let me tell you about A-Kon 8. First off we were an hour late even getting started on our 12-hour road trip. Every year the number willing to make this hellish journey shrinks. We’re down to two cars. Pretty soon it’ll be one guy on a motorcycle and the rest of us will get brains and fly. Anyway, 12 hours, bad food, lots of pee breaks, and four state lines later, we arrived in Dallas, checked in, met pals Ed, Neil, Anna, Max, etc., and proceeded to split for buffalo fajitas at a nearby upscale Mexican restaurant. Had the first beer of the con, a Corona. More to follow. The hotel is jammed with people checking in, looking lost, asking where the heck other people are. 

Friday morning we get up late, trundle some crap downstairs to set up our fan table, split with Ed to buy liquor and food and get his cooler from his house in Euless (a solid 20 miles away), pet his pets, and return. The dealers room is kinda average and most of the dealers are pissed off because A-Kon decided not to allow SM CDs, which are some sort of Taiwanese-Korean-HK-Malay knockoff pirate brand that come ten bucks cheaper than the genuine article. Most of the day’s liquor run consists of Lone Star, Corona, and some Molson as a nod to our Canadian guests, who don’t drink anyway. Lone Star is one of those beers that respectable beer drinkers (meaning, “snobs”) turn their noses up at. Well, screw ‘em, that means more for me. Plus, shove a lime wedge down the longneck and it ain’t half bad. The prize of the day is Sailor Moon party plates and napkins found at the local Wal-Mart. This gives you an idea of what kind of con this was – I remember more about the liquor stores and the Wal-Mart than I do about the con itself. The fan table work was slow… not many people are interested in fanzines and comics when they can buy lesbian furry zines and anime character cheesecake pin-ups. I know sex sells, but here it seems sex is all that sells. 

It was around five years ago. Homosexuality is a fairly common theme among Japanese manga and novels, particularly in Boys-Love works that are aimed at women. I knew that there was a genre for same-sex relationships, but as far as entertainment in general goes, I had my reservations about how it’s often portrayed. You see, in live-action television, love between men is treated as comedy. It’s a similar case overseas as well, like in America or Europe, and I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about it. I always thought there was something wrong about it.

In Stars Align, there’s a plot where the boys dress as girls so that they can gather intel on a rival school. When I was writing it, I heard that people who question their sexuality and gender exist. So I actually gathered information about it. Someone I know introduced me to a person who presents as male, but the family registry says he’s a woman. Through talking with him, I understood that this kind of plot shouldn’t be mere comedy. When he told me that he’d been questioning his gender ever since he was a child, it made me think about the struggle we all have to reconcile our identities and where we belong in the world.

The scene in the anime is not just about same-sex relationships but about finding our place in the world. It’s about all kinds of things. Gender identity is a part of that as well. Finding that purpose in your own being is something that everyone who participates in society has to do in some form or another. I wanted to make use of that in my story, or rather have it as one of the themes.

You don’t really see much of this kind of thing in anime, do you? I mentioned before that it’s presented as comedy, and I think that’s awfully insensitive. Questioning your gender is a perfectly valid thing to do. I think that anyone who has ever questioned their place or reason for being should be able to empathize in some way.

Japanese people have an old-fashioned way of thinking when it comes to these things, so there’s not yet a widespread understanding of LGBTQ+ and X-gender. There are Japanese words like “okama” and “onee”. I think we really ought to change the way we talk about such people. Young people should be able to understand, so I wanted to try putting this message into an anime. Even in Japan, young people have a better reaction regarding LGBTQ+ than older people do. Older people tend to panic. (laughs)

But, you know, I was really surprised by the amount of reaction the episode got from overseas on Twitter and so on. When episode 8 came out, there was a flood of reactions from people happy about the message about LGBTQ+ and empathizing with others.

The dancing scene is particularly impressive. What reference material did you use to make this scene perfect?

I watched tons of videos of professional dancers. However, none of them quite fitted what I was going for. The dance I wanted Haru and Legoshi to do was not the consummate work of a professional. When I watched a video of two people doing their first dance at a western wedding ceremony, it suddenly clicked. It needed something more amateurish and above all, it needed “love.” I added in the basic steps of a jive to the dance.

The biggest thing about P.A.WORKS is that it has a relatively large in-house staff. A lot of anime studios in Japan make use of freelancers, but P.A.WORKS’s Toyama studio has a large number of in-house animators. It’s nice to have that consistency; it makes production feel relatively stable. It’s also nice that the staff is so tight-knit because it makes it easy to relay instructions to everyone.

Toyama Prefecture is quite far away, so we connect online and hold video conferences in real time. My work is in Tokyo, so when I do the checks, the people in Toyama have to show me everything they’re doing through a screen and we talk about it. I never had problems with communication, and the distance between Toyama and Tokyo never felt significant.

So was there anything that you felt was challenging when creating APPARE-RANMAN!?

The hardest part was compiling the ideas and deciding on the plan to go through with at the start. Every time I went back to the drawing board, there was a lot of work to do. But once we worked out how we were going to proceed to a certain degree, things were relatively smooth. There are always difficulties that come up in the middle of production, but on the other hand, I had even more fun making this anime because I was making something I really wanted to make.

Taiyō no Tō depicts the everyday Kyoto of a student living in Sakyo Ward.

It’s not the so-called “Kyoto-esque Kyoto,” or the sort of Kyoto you see in the travel mysteries you might find in Kayō suspense gekijō [Tuesday suspense theater, a two-hour drama format that used to run on NTV]. I knew I couldn’t write that kind of Kyoto, but I felt like if it was this sort of shabby Kyoto from the perspective of a university student’s daily life, then maybe I could.

I feel like there weren’t really novels before yours depicting the type of student you’d find in Kyoto. It was so fresh.

To me, I wasn’t writing Kyoto so much as I was writing the things I fantasized about in the context of my daily life. And since Taiyō no Tō, I’ve continued to write with that base of Kyoto through the eyes of a student, adding new elements as I go.

It actually wasn’t until after that first book came out that I realized Kyoto was such a great setting for my novels. More people read Yojōhan Shinwa Taikei (The Tatami Galaxy, 2004) and The Night is Short Walk On, Girl (2006; [English 2019]) than I could have imagined. It shocked me, like, “There’s really this much demand?!” It was like I’d struck oil with the combination of Kyoto, students, and mysterious fantasy.