Grey Exporting

Posted on August 19, 2013 by ixarette

His name was Supap Kirtsaeng and he made a few bucks on the side. While a studying in the USA, he realised that while his expensive college textbooks were also available in substantially cheaper editions in his native Thailand. So, he figured, why not buy a few and and sell them to his mates? Why not buy a dozen? A hundred?

John Wiley & Sons, a respectable academic press, took Kirtsaeng to court, claiming that his little sideline had already notched up lost sales of $1.2 million. And after appeal, Kitsaeng won in March of this year, with a Supreme Court ruling in his favour, stating that the First Sale Doctrine supported his little loophole. According to American law, in line with the laws of many other countries, once you buy an item for yourself, it’s your legal right to do whatever the hell you like with it, including selling it to someone else.

You may be wondering, what the hell does that have to do with you? Well… for starters, don’t be surprised if it’s a major contributor to the new X-Box policy on forcing people to rent access to their games instead of buying them outright. More importantly for the anime fan, it makes it unpleasantly clear to Japanese rights holders that if something sells cheaper, say, in the UK, than it does in Japan, then it is unlikely to be possible to argue someone can’t import it back into Japan. Take the argument to extremes, and it is a strong case for making all foreign fans pay the same high costs as Japanese fans, in order to protect the Japanese business.

Fast forward to June, and suddenly Macross Plus is released in Japan as a region-free blu-ray with English sub and dub. Great news for you if you want to drop £70 on it. But why on earth would a British distributor buy the rights, when they already know a substantial number of customers will have already bought it direct from Japan? The anime companies are now calling our bluffs. We said grey importing wasn’t worth worrying about. Okay, they’ve said, how do you feel about grey exporting…?

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #113, 2013.

Do It Like a Dude

Posted on August 12, 2013 by ixarette

The Game, by Neil Strauss, is a book about a tribe of colossal asshats who go around the world trying to get off with gullible women. It is absolutely outrageous, and I had to do a degree of Googling to determine that it wasn’t some cunning hoax by a radical feminist. If I were an eccentric millionaire, and if the film rights hadn’t already been sold, I would have totally optioned it, because it starts off as a bunch of scared little boys trying to pull girls, like something out of The Inbetweeners, and soon turns into an oddly homoerotic farce, as alpha chat-up artists fight over who gets to train their alleged wingmen. The accounts of their conquests are also oddly Brechtian, with fellow pick-up artists somehow able to communicate with the author while he is mid-conversation with some tart from Toledo, making me wonder if they aren’t a figment of his imagination.

Meanwhile, although there is a degree of human hacking and cod-psychology at work, their ideas for attracting women are absolutely bonkers, and seem to involve dressing up as WIZARDS, dripping with disposable costume jewellery (to give as “gifts”) and conversation-starting gewgaws, and carrying a man-bag full of Magic Circle paraphernalia in order to dazzle impressionable young dollymops. Forget the implied reader, I am more worried about the implied target — presumably an educationally sub-normal magpie who likes card tricks. By the end, despite supposedly being based on a true story, it turns into an obvious and deliberate pastiche of Fight Club, with the collected tools all living together in some awful Hollywood mansion with nothing but pillows on the floor and peanut butter in the fridge, fighting over women (and each other), and struggling with the realisation that they have become a bunch of “social robots”, obsessed with the appearance of being interesting, rather than actually being interesting for real. It’s like some massive, multi-venue, long-term Situationist art installation about being a total prick.

And the women? Largely fake-boobed, opinion-free gigglers, often with psyches plainly already on fire, daddy issues and baggage. I am amazed that the men found that many to chase, although they largely seem to score in strip clubs and casinos, so I guess you find what you’re looking for. If there were a chapter set in a bookshop, it might have had more practical application for me, but I like to think that the kind of women who lurk in bookshops wouldn’t be all that interested in a bald-headed man in a shiny shirt and four-inch platform boots, pretending to read minds and trying to give her a Ratners necklace.

It’s just as depressing as The Rules, but much more entertaining, and has successfully sold me another book by Strauss, a writer for Rolling Stone who truly seems game for a laugh.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, a biography of Finland’s ultimate pick-up artist.

Podcast #19

Posted on August 5, 2013 by ixarette

Expletives deleted on our 19th podcast

Jeremy Graves, Andrew Hewson and Jerome Mazandarani (with Jonathan Clements of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis joining from the interwebs) are on hand to discuss new releases, upcoming releases, behind-the-scenes gossip, and a whole bunch of topics from jobs in the anime business to Google glasses, available to download now.

00:00 Jeremy’s usual hello, and an announcement of Sword Art Online, coming in December.

03:00 Thoughts on the Manchester Comic Con.

04:20 Jonathan’s hottest events — probably Finland.

06:00 How does someone get into the translation business? Is there any way to talk them out of it? What advantage do students from Edinburgh have? Spotting references in Japanese films and whether or not you should dedicate your entire efforts to nothing but anime translation. Another hymn to the glories of Bethan Jones. The politics of running a blog for promotional purposes.

15:00 The trouble that anime fans have finding work in the anime business

20:00 Delay to Deadman Wonderland. The Panasonic play issue with Un-go.

21:00 Last Exile, Fam the Silver Wing, pushed back to December.

22:00 Blue Exorcist definitive edition.

23:00 Streetfighter II the Anime — WTF is going on with the English dub?

25:50 The history of fifteening, and the unexpected role of Mrs Doubtfire.

28:00 Jerome’s journey to a sweary alternate universe. Quite a few bleeps in this section.

30:30 Jerome’s stomach grumbling grab-bag competition.

33:00 How to insult someone in Japanese.

37:00 12th August: Naruto Shippuden Movie 3: The Will Of Fire on DVD & BD; Naruto Shippuden Movie Triple Pack on DVD and BD; Hellsing: The Complete Original Series on DVD. Plus details of the Naruto tweetalong event on 15th August at 7pm.

45:00 Ask Manga UK. What are the chances of rereleasing 1990s classics? For example: Fist of the North Star.

50:00 The origins of New Fist of the North Star.

52:00 Will Black Rock Shooter lead to more subs-only releases?

53:00 Do you acquire TV rights?

56:00 Shifts in meaning of the term “TV show”.

58:00 The effects of production committees.

60:00 Kotobukiya at San Diego.

64:00 Chances for getting Darker Than Black sequels on Blu-ray?

66:00 19th August: Space Battleship Yamato, the live-action film coming on Blu-ray.

68:00 What does the kanji mean in the Manga logo?

71:00 Somehow, we get onto time-travelling steampunk foxes.

72:00 Chances of releasing A Certain Scientific Railgun?

73:00 More in-house authoring coming up?

77:00 Chances of releasing Yamato 2199 if the movie is successful?

79:00 Favourite sweets or chocolate? And we’re out.

The Podcast is available to download now HERE, or find it and an archive of previous shows at our iTunes page. For a detailed contents listing of previous podcasts, check out our Podcasts page.

Ryutaro Nakamura 1955-2013

Posted on August 1, 2013 by ixarette

For those who missed it last week on the Manga UK blog, my obituary for Ryutaro Nakamura, the director of Serial Experiments Lain.

The Blurb I Wish I’d Had

Posted on June 24, 2013 by ixarette

In the year 4341, invaders ransacked the Celestial Empire and placed a child on the Dragon Throne. The last remnants of the Dynasty of Brightness swore to fight them to the death. Their allies were alien creatures with the noses of eagles and the eyes of cats, and giant black-skinned devils from beyond the sea. Their soldiers were former smugglers and pirates, led by the Master of the Seas. His son would burn his scholar’s robes and cast aside his own name to become the embodiment of loyalty. He also became a god. Twice.

This is a true story.

Premises, Premises

Posted on June 17, 2013 by ixarette

Right, I said, I see that you are writing an article about why anime has disappeared from TV screens. Great to have attention from the mainstream press, and yes, I will happily help you out. After all, there’s no such publicity as bad publicity, right…? However, I am not sure that you are asking the right questions. I am not sure that I accept your premises.

Firstly, is anime really not on television any more? I’ve just flicked around and I’ve found Pokémon and Dragon King airing right now. I’ve found a rack of Studio Ghibli movies airing on Channel Four. I’ve found an obscure cable channel pumping out Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

I think there is a story here, but I think you’re looking in the wrong place. The story appears to be not that anime is in trouble, but that anime is doing fine, while television itself is in trouble. If anime fans are early adopters, and one in ten UK residents are torrenting, doesn’t that tell you a whole lot about how fans are accessing this material? Particularly when we consider that so many anime television shows in Japan are aired in the graveyard slot when nobody is watching. So if nobody is watching them in Japan, why do we expect them to be on in primetime here?

Look, I said. Why don’t you talk to Joe Bloggs from well-known Anime Channel? Here’s his email address. He will tell you about the anime channel that he set up, and give you precise reasons why it shut down. And while you’re at it, why don’t you talk to John Smith at Anime Company? Here’s his email address. He will tell you that his company is now bypassing TV entirely and offering direct anime broadcasts to X-boxes, downloads from iTunes and free try-before-you-buy streaming from his own website. Let me put it like this, your premise is that more anime should be on television. I suggest that anime is finding another way to reach fandom, and that television doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it any more. That is sure to be an interesting thing for your tech-savvy readers to think about over their cornflakes.

Alternatively, if that doesn’t sound good to you, why don’t you just pick someone at random in a comics shop, ask them for their opinion, and fill up a quarter of your article with whatever they say? I am sure that the readership of your newspaper won’t mind. It certainly won’t get me into trouble when I am the only person from the anime industry quoted in your article. If anyone complains, you can say that you “didn’t have enough time” to interview everyone worth interviewing. That is sure to impress everyone (er… me) who gave freely of their own time to help you out before you collected the money for writing your article. And yes, that might be why I so often get an awful sinking feeling when approached by mainstream journalists who want to talk about anime, when I realise that I don’t merely have to provide answers, but also the questions. And even then, it’s no guarantee they’ll talk sense.

This article first appeared in NEO #76, 2010. Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

Indian Spin

Posted on June 10, 2013 by ixarette

Suraj is a poor boy growing up in Mumbai, under the watchful eye of his sister Shanti and widowed father Shyam. Dad was once a promising cricketer, and is obsessed with turning his son into a world-class player with a harsh training regime. Inexplicably fair-haired rich kid Vikram is an ace batsman from a family of wealth and privilege, who fears the potential of his slumdog rival, and determines to thwart him at every turn as they fight their way through the ranks of Indian cricket, hoping to qualify for the national team.

Suraj the Rising Star is not Japanese, but although it’s made in India for the Colors network, it is based firmly on the classic anime series Star of the Giants. Repurposing the original’s baseball story with wickets and stumps, Suraj allows Japanese investors to capitalise on a tried and tested formula in a new territory, without having to meet any of the standards required of “real” anime.

Story-wise at least, the tropes and scenes in Suraj have been hammered out and refined over several TV serials and many imitators. But Suraj has very little of the dizzying animation techniques of the 1968 original, and often features sequences in which the characters barely move. Backgrounds smudge all too often into impressionistic blurs when Suraj runs jerkily to bowl or catch, and the imagery often drifts perilously close to something someone might have knocked up on Microsoft Paint. But this is precisely the sort of criticism levelled against early anime in Japan, while young fans lapped up the new storytelling medium.

One is swiftly drawn away from the clunky animation to peripheral areas of studied difference – the subcontinental twang of the music, and the casual contrast of glittering modernity with ramshackle slums. Suraj is openly aspirational towards middle-class affluence, signified in repeated product-placement shots of All Nippon Airlines planes soaring above the slums, new-fangled Nissin cup noodles, Daikin aircon units and Maruti Suzuki cars that motor past swish Maruti Suzuki showrooms. Yes, it’s pretty easy to tell who the sponsors are. Suraj is still Japanese where it counts.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #111, 2013.

UPDATE (12th June 2013): Now they’re trying to sell an Astro Boy remake to Nigeria.

To Lands Beyond Time

Posted on June 4, 2013 by ixarette

The Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, plays host on Sundays to free concerts and recitals, and 9th June sees the Triocca ensemble’s triple whammy of Bax’s “Elegiac Trio”, Ravel’s “Tombeur de Couperin” and the world premiere of John Buckley‘s “To Lands Beyond Time”, six short movements inspired by Japanese poetry, specifically that to be found in my collection of translations Moon in the Pines (a.k.a. Zen Haiku). Good luck Ríona (flute), Nancy (viola) and Geraldine (harp).

Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys…

Posted on May 27, 2013 by ixarette

There is a great deal of cogent sense and thoughtful sensibilities to be found over at Kathryn Hemmann’s long piece about “Boys’ Love” manga, singling out something I wrote last August for NEO 107 for “articulating a common sentiment extraordinarily well,” although she doesn’t necessarily mean that in a good way. WARNING: the words “Not Safe For Work” do not come close to describing some of the pictures accompanying the article, so do not click unless you are ready for an eyeful. Or possibly a fistful.

The Manga Snapshot column is just about to reach its 100th chapter, marking more than seven years rifling through the magazine shelves of the Japanese comics business, picking out a different magazine anthology every month. Over the years, I have covered manga for boys, manga for girls, manga for girls who like boys who like boys, manga for old men, manga for old men who wish they were boys again, manga for boys who like boys dressed as girls, manga for boys who like girls, manga for boys who think they probably would like girls but haven’t actually talked to one and hence regard them with all the realism of glow-in-the-dark unicorns, manga for women who are ridiculously obsessed with their cats, manga for housewives who love their husbands, manga for housewives who love other people’s husbands, and coming up in NEO 113 (which I just finished writing last week), manga for women who are quite miserable, but love hearing about women who are even more miserable.

I always try to follow a formalist perspective, teasing out suggestions of the implied readerships, not only from the manga themselves, but also from the peripheral content — the editorial asides, the letters pages, the horoscopes, and the adverts. Where available, I also use reader statistics from the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association, which often supplies illuminating data about who actually reads a title — as noted in my essay, “Living Happily Never After in Women’s Manga” (find it here), such details can often be intriguingly counter-intuitive. Sadly, in the relatively small niche of “Boys’ Love” publishing, such statistics are less freely available — I would suggest, at least in part, this is in order to allow the magazines to hide financially counter-productive data regarding the size or composition of their readerships. This, in turn, allows certain sectors of the readership to perpetuate “the stories they tell themselves about themselves,” for good or ill.

Every time the Amazon Japan order thunks onto the doormat, I think that’s it, there can’t possibly be any more titles left to cover. But there’s always another few lurking in the shadows. I have yet to get to the in-law appeasement sub-genre, and I’m still poking around in search of a legendary title for military housewives. Only a tiny handful of early Manga Snapshots were reprinted in Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, so the other 150,000 words or so can only be accessed by buying Neo magazine. There’s very rarely any evidence, at least in the postbag, that anybody reads the Manga Snapshot at all, which is why it was so pleasing to read such a considered and assiduous appraisal.

Cans of Worms

Posted on May 20, 2013 by ixarette

It’s panda-monium on our 18th podcast

Available to download now, Jeremy Graves is joined by Manga Entertainment’s Head of Acquisitions Jerome Mazandarani, and Schoolgirl Milky Crisis author Jonathan Clements to discuss the dramatic potential of a Pamela Andersen zombie, the perils of PAL, and the likely cost benefits of restarting the Manga Club.

00:00 Jeremy Graves intro regarding MCM Comicon and the coming live podcast panels: Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th May, both at 1130, on the main stage.

01:30 The befuddling patois of Panda Go Panda.

04:00 And so we begin Jeremy’s “fairly fast-paced, quick, packed show.” Trying saying that fast, it’s harder than saying Princess Jellyfist. Slight delay for the Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood collection blu-ray. Bakuman now back to 17th June. Naruto Shippuden Box Set 13 also delayed till 24th June.

12:00 London Comicon coming up, where there will be a live podcast recording with special guests, plus details of the convention-specific One Piece goodies that will be on sale.

19:00 Drifters of the Dead and its various incarnations described as a “fan service perve-o-rama.” Jerome’s pitch for Baywatch Zombiewatch, unlikely to be coming to a TV near you.

23:00 Corrections from the last podcast, in the interests of editorial integrity, as if we ever had any, before moving on to your questions in Ask Manga UK.

27:30 Are there any plans to re-release old shows on Blu-ray? 1500 units as a notional break-even point for a Blu-ray release.

31:00 Any chance of Gosick? Are the boxes depicted on Amazon indicative of the final artwork? The problems of getting the artwork for all anime.

37:00 How are combo packs performing?

40:30 What are your thoughts on the upcoming site Daisuki? And a link here, as promised, to the blog review of Ramon Lobato’s book on informal media economies.

52:00 Is reverse importing a Blu-ray-only problem? And there goes the can of worms, wriggling all over the podcast like an earthquake in a noodle factory.

59:00 The issue of grey importing, and the pitfalls of countering it through a loophole for grey exporting. What are the chances of a discount for foreign licensors on Macross Plus or Ghost in the Shell: Arise?

71:00 When you release a series in parts, is that your decision or a request from the licensor themselves?

73:30 What are the chances of shojo or josei shows coming to the UK?

76:00 Whatever happened to the Manga Club, and will it ever come back? Tweeters to tweet #bringbackclubmanga

84:30 We’re out, and the bamboo was great.