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NEWS: Manga Artist Megumi Igarashi Appears in Court on Obscenity Charges


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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14746
PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 8:50 pm Reply with quote
No prob monsieur, no LBGT.


Fedora-san wrote:

Since Japanese products are made for Japanese people, they probably don't care if they offend Americans with America's portayal in Dimensional Sniper and lose out of American box-office money. On the other hand, I know Marvel changes their movies for certain countries like China because they don't want to lose out on their money at the box office.


Sometimes, we feel that Hollywood don't care if they offend Asians with some of the Asian portrayals. Heck, they even want to remake Akira with nary an Asian, complaints by people who care about social justice be damned. Directors should be free to choose their creative freedoms - if Asians aren't part of their creative ideas, then so be it.


MaxSouth wrote:
Fedora-san wrote:

Am I the only one who noticed how weird it is Japan changes from a country of sexually deviancy and obsession with perversion to a ultra conservative and sex fearing country depending on which articles are going on? It's weird.

To be fair, Japan was deviant and ultra-conservative at the same time for decades already. You can be fascinating Japan-only-brand of pervert there, but not in same sex way. And you can not undress much. Stupid Ignorant laws still violate human rights the those cases.


Every society has their own hypocrisies. That's just the real world.


Fedora-san wrote:
enurtsol wrote:

You're limiting yourself with just comics; there are a lot of female readers in America. Most females don't read comic books, but if ya haven't noticed lately, the most popular YA books are female-oriented - popular enough to be adapted to movies like Twilight, Hunger Games, The Book Thief, Fault In Our Stars, Divergent, If I Stay, etc. So the girls are reading regular books. Comic books for guys; books for girls (I know 'cause a niece and her girl friends ask for these gifts).


Saying girls have books, so they don't need to be in comics, video games, or other forms of media seems like it's missing the point of the complaints about lack of representation.


We were talking about female readership; now you're talking about representation? What's the jump? Nevertheless, readership doesn't necessarily correlate with representation. For example, despite the complaints about representation in Western video games, there are a lot more female gamers in the West than there are female gamers in Japan. That's because, while female gamers in Japan play pretty much only girl games, female gamers in the West play pretty much any game. So they'll make complaints about representation (and that's their right), but it won't stop them from playing games anyways (and that's fine too).


Fedora-san wrote:

But citing a few popular books doesn't mean there's an actual market, though. It just means those select books, which just so happen to have movie adaptions which no doubt has a factor in the equation, are popular. Readership in kids and teenagers have been declining for years. Studies showing most young adults only read "once or twice a year" pretty much indicates the only thing they read are those trendy big releases that get picked up for movies like Hunger Games or Twilight. Sure, people might check out the Hunger Games books after seeing the movie, but chances are that's going to be the only book most of them read.


You're underestimating the YA market:

  • To wit: 3,000 young adult novels were published in 1997. Twelve years later, that figure hit 30,000 titles--an increase of a full order of magnitude. In 2009, total sales exceeded $3 billion.

  • The Marketplace

    The number of Young Adult e-books published have exponentially exploded during the same period, due in part to genesis and growth of the digital book market itself of course. But the percentage growth in sales numbers for YA far exceeds the percentage growth in the adult e-book sales, which indicates a dramatic overall increase.

    In other words, the Young Adult book market is thriving.


The State of Publishing: Young People are Reading More than You

  • In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published a study titled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, reporting that the number of literature-reading young adults dropped 20 percent between 1982 and 2002—the greatest recorded loss of readership in the country’s history. The decline represented 20 million potential readers and Dana Gioia, NEA Chairman, called it a “national crisis.”

    Panic ensued and a flurry of reading incentive programs sprung up around the country, including NEA’s own The Big Read which now operates in all fifty states and even internationally. Then, in a 2009 report, Reading on the Rise, the NEA proudly reported a 21 percent increase in young adult readership which began in 2002 and has continued through 2008.

    As Motoko Rich wrote in a 2007 New York Times article “in a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture consciousness. The movies… heightened the fervor, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.”

    But ultimately, Rich was skeptical of the lasting effect of the Harry Potter phenomenon—the title of his article was “Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits.” But perhaps she was too quick to pass judgment. In the past seven years, the young adult genre has exploded with a number of new book series [See list below]. Between 1995 and 1997, the number of young adult titles published per year fell dramatically, dropping from 5,000 to just over 3,000, according to R.R. Bowker’s Publishers Weekly. In 2009, there were over 30,000.1 In a 2007 Seattle P-I article, Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart writes, “Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before… And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s… We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”

    Siobhan Reardon, President of the Free Library of Philadelphia says that young adult readership is “one of those areas that continues to expand, and a lot has to do with the significance of the graphic novel or the comic book… once you start dedicating a section of library specific to the materials of a teen’s life, you can see that the stuff will fly out the door, and we’re seeing that happen here… more and more around the country you’re seeing the libraries dedicate very specific, good sized spaces to teens, particularly away from the crowds that come in.”

    In January 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation published a comprehensive study of the media habits of more than 2,000 eight to eighteen year-old American children. The study found that the average time spent reading books for pleasure in a typical day rose from 21 minutes in 1999 to 23 minutes in 2004, and finally to 25 minutes in 2010. The rise of screen-based media has not melted children’s brains, despite ardent warnings otherwise: “It does not appear that time spent using screen media (TV, video games and computers) displaces time spent with print media,” the report stated. Teens are not only reading more books, they’re involved in communities of like-minded book lovers. The Story Siren, a young adult online book review authored by an Indiana graduate student gets 3,500-4,000 unique page views a day.

    In 2009, Gioia called the rise of young adult readership “startling” and noted that it was not even a school-based trend but “a broader, community-wide phenomenon” that was likely a result of national reading incentive programs. He did not, however, mention the quality of young adult literature or its growing availability via the internet.

    In 2004, in the introduction to the Reading at Risk report, Gioia claimed that the study “documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted—our society’s massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information.” He was implying that the dramatic decline in young adult readership was somehow related to the electronic media shift. This is no unfamiliar claim. However, the 2010 Kids & Family Reading Report found that one-third of kids, ages 9-17, said that they would read more books for fun if they had access to eBooks, including kids who read five to seven days per week and those who read less than once per week.

    Harry Potter revealed what NEA statistics previously doubted: there is a young adult market for literature. In 2007, when the final book in the series was released, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it sold 11 million copies worldwide in the first 24 hours it was available. The seven-book, 4,125-page series has sold over 48 million copies in the United States and over 400 million copies worldwide since the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in London in 1997 and have been translated into 67 different languages.

    Half of the 9-11 year-olds surveyed by Scholastic said they read books to “help you figure out who you are and who you could become.” What began with Harry Potter, an undoubtedly captivating and even inspiring work, is now commonplace. The Twilight Saga, a four book series by Stephanie Meyer, has sold over 28.5 million copies in the U.S. in the five years since the first book, Twilight was released in 2005. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, released in 2008, is the first book in Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy and has already sold over 540,000 copies in the U.S. There are many new young adult series and kids line up at midnight to get their hands on the first available copies. This is a sign of avid, even voracious, readership, not, as the NEA reported in 2004, “a diminished role of voluntary reading in American life.”

    What is surprising about this shift is page numbers: young adults now devour books the size of Russian novels in months (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, is six pages longer than Anna Karenina). Series previously thought to be an impossible number of pages are suddenly not so long: The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (1949), are mere fractions of the length of Harry Potter. After reading only five different book series (the seven-book Harry Potter series, the four from The Twilight Saga, The Lord of the Rings trilogy plus The Hobbit, the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia, and the thirteen-book, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket) the young adult has read at least 13,500 pages for pleasure.


Furthermore, realize that the YA market is more than just about teens, y'know:



As ya can see, it skews female. As Japan females read shoujo and josei, Western females read YA books. Even if they have to go the electronic route. Indeed, 30% of respondents reported they were reading works in the Hunger Games series, but the remaining 70% of readers reported a vast variety of titles (over 220), only two of which commanded more than five percent of overall sales.


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walw6pK4Alo



Joined: 12 Mar 2008
Posts: 9322
PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 9:04 pm Reply with quote
For AKIRA, I would imagine at least some Japanese identity has to play into it, what with the bombs and everything. I know it's dumb to bring up Japan's feelings about WWII into discussions about most modern anime, and some dumb critics even try to force it where it doesn't belong with like Shingeki; but AKIRA makes no bones about its allusions.

On pages read, yeah, 13k pages of less text per page than most novels.
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gloverrandal



Joined: 20 May 2014
Posts: 406
Location: Oita
PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2015 1:58 am Reply with quote
enurtsol wrote:
For example, despite the complaints about representation in Western video games, there are a lot more female gamers in the West than there are female gamers in Japan. That's because, while female gamers in Japan play pretty much only girl games, female gamers in the West play pretty much any game. So they'll make complaints about representation (and that's their right), but it won't stop them from playing games anyways (and that's fine too).


Do you a source for this? This is the first time I've heard of it and wondering how you know women in Japan only play girl games. All the stuff I've read suggest the opposite, like most conventions in Japan being dominated by females, like Tales of Festival. And when you compare Japan to the west"do you mean every country that is not Japan? Because that sounds like a really unfair comparison if so. It sounds like you'd have to do a per capita comparison if you're going to do that. I've always heard Japan has a much better environment for women when it comes to video games in both production and as consumers, to the point where most DS owners were female. This is the first time I've ever seen someone say the opposite,
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14746
PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2015 5:39 am Reply with quote
gloverrandal wrote:
enurtsol wrote:

For example, despite the complaints about representation in Western video games, there are a lot more female gamers in the West than there are female gamers in Japan. That's because, while female gamers in Japan play pretty much only girl games, female gamers in the West play pretty much any game. So they'll make complaints about representation (and that's their right), but it won't stop them from playing games anyways (and that's fine too).

Do you a source for this? This is the first time I've heard of it and wondering how you know women in Japan only play girl games. All the stuff I've read suggest the opposite, like most conventions in Japan being dominated by females, like Tales of Festival. And when you compare Japan to the west"do you mean every country that is not Japan? Because that sounds like a really unfair comparison if so. It sounds like you'd have to do a per capita comparison if you're going to do that. I've always heard Japan has a much better environment for women when it comes to video games in both production and as consumers, to the point where most DS owners were female. This is the first time I've ever seen someone say the opposite,


Per capita would be more insightful. Let's see what we can calculate........

Just using the US for now, since by itself, it's about a quarter of the $63B global market in 2012 (with most recent reliable numbers):



With 157M active players and 47% female, that's 73.79M female gamers. With ~312M US 2012 population, that's 0.24 per capita female gamers (about a quarter of population).

Japan's a bit harder to find 2012 numbers:



According to CESA, Japan gamers decreased from 31.4M in 2012 to 29.1M in 2013. With 44% female of 31.4M being 13.82M out of ~127M Japan population, that's 0.11 per capita female gamers (about a ninth of the population).

Here's a few more interesting things we found - it's well-known that J-gamers prefer handhelds since they can take it with them during their frequent commutes, but most portable gaming time actually happen in their rooms!



You're right though that a majority of DS owners are female:


And the changing Japanese perception of foreign video games, even back then 2011:


Action top, RPG 4th in US 2013:


Action top Japan 2010, Top 2 corner 2/3rds of the market:
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residentgrigo



Joined: 23 Dec 2007
Posts: 2404
Location: Germany
PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2015 7:31 am Reply with quote
Japanese games censorship cool: The japanes games market is a weird one because you aren´t supposed to brag about your kill streaks on twitter and so on when you become a salary man. Enough adults play them but it is the teen market they are going after.
MGS Portable Ops was censored in japan only to be Cero: C so they could sell it to teens Kojima admitted. It is also the one with a high school(not really) girl who was heavily featured in the marketing and story and alos has a "photo mode" for the women in the game.
If anything japan was very good with female leads in games way earlier then the west but now are falling behind to please the teen market. RE:1 Jill design. Awesome. RE:3. Ok not crazy about it(she is a cop in a Zombie Apocalypse) but still wearing clothes. RE:5. Looks like a stripper. Still not a bad character but we are loosing the plot here. This is a horror game of some sort.
MGS: V Quite was designed with the figure market in mind and look at her reception. If she(can turn invisible) was naked the whole time i wouldn't dislike that like in let´s say Terraformars(manga only) but with the design they have now i have to shake my head. Why is it so impossible to have nudity in a D to Z rated game today. Snatcher had nudity but then suddenly the Berserk PS2 game was not even allowed to have nipples but had had exploding heads. ?!?
In the west Rockstar had male nudity since Manhunt but japanese censorship practices will kill you in that regard. The band aids bikinis in these new "fighting" gamas is just the crazies thing ever but they are Cero D. Be at least honest and make them naked but wiki says that the characters are 13 at times'Rolling Eyes' so maybe not ?
Fighting for diversity has a reception problem anywhere btw. Look at the comments section on Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan) or Spider-man(Miles Morales) on the non-comic news sites they were unveiled. You haven´t seen rage until you read some of Mile´s reception after only a few panels in an event comic.
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MaxSouth



Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Posts: 1363
PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2015 5:58 pm Reply with quote
(To Anothony K.: one last time, I promise:)
Fedora-san wrote:
MaxSouth wrote:
You can be fascinating Japan-only-brand of pervert there, but not in same sex way.


Are we talking about the country that has made entire industries on the concept of same-sex pairings like yaoi and yuri?


Yaoi and yuri are small niche markets about mostly imaginary type of relationships, not about real homosexual relationships. It is totally different from accepting homosexuals by society in general and the state in terms of law. In this regard, it is the same as with obscenity laws Igarashi has faced: nonsensical and insulting to human dignity.
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