Across The Pond: From Ukiyoe to Yakuza with golf in between

News

Hi from the land where the Nintendo DS never ever stops.
I`m writing to you from a Japanese loungeroom where the noise of New Super Mario Bros is steadily burning itself into my mind for all eternity (I gave my son a Nintento DS for Christmas). Other images in my brain include the Atami Adult Museum, a museum of naughtiness in a small seaside resort town. The museum, in case you`d like to know, has the world`s greatest collection of penis-resembling bits of wood, a lot of naughty Ukiyoe prints and some very lame porno movies. Still, there`s not much else to do in this town except eat and take a bath, so there you are. As for how the museum was, I can do no better than to quote from an excellent website

“And trifling doubt of a point is blown off by an appearance of a huge man device somewhere. If it is sexual and is happy, thus Adult Museum is good. “

– and you can`t say better than that.
It might be deduced from the above and from the fact that I shared a room with six of my Japanese relatives last night, that my mind is NOT in the state of zen-calm required to give my anxious readers an update on the world of Japanese comics. For that, I would need skills I don`t have, like the ability to read comics Japanese, and time I don’t have. However, I`ve been back in the oldish country for almost a month now, so here are some comics highlights.

Highlight One: Golf
I read my first (and probably last) golf comic standing up at a railway station kiosk. It achieves the feat of making golf seem much more exciting than it actually is…if only the real game had “whoosh” type sound effects and little lines showing how powerful the hero’s drive was. As far as I could work out, the plot hinged on one crucial game which would enable the hero to clear his repuation at the company he worked for, foil the jealous golf-crazed older manager and marry the pure office lady who was cheering him on from the sidelines. Of course that’s just my guess – for all I know the office lady could be about to do a nude golfing calendar in the next issue. The golfing tips looked very serious.
Unlike the English comic ‘Striker’, which manages to make soccer as interesting as ‘Neighbours’ on a slow day, there were no pin ups, drawn or otherwise.

Highlight Two: OL
…which stands for Office Lady, the usual term for women who do secretarial work in Japanese offices (photocopying, pouring green tea for executives, giving the guys somebody to marry). This comic, in translation, was given to my by my wife who had sort of lived the life during the bubble period. It’s a charming newspaper strip comic, using the same format as peanuts or blondie, but running from top to bottom rather than left to right. The books are fun even if you don’t know much about the OL lifestyle. Most of the characters are ‘parasite singles’, who had the best of both worlds. On the traditional side, they lived at home with the folks, paying no rent and doing no cooking, while on the modern side, they earned enough for trips to Guam or Hawaii and didn’t have to get married at 25 (a lot of the stories are about their mothers pressuring them to get married and about their desire to not have children).

(warning, the most amazing pictures turn up when you’re doing an image search for ‘office lady’)

Highlight Three: Judge Dredd Megazine and the bumber 2000AD
– both of which arrived just in time for me to leave Australia. You can buy 2000 AD in Japan, but it costs a fortune and is months late, so it was good to have two extra large products of the House of Tharg to read during the break. The good news is that Pat Mills’ “ABC Warriors” are back for more robot bonkersness. All else is good except for a gigantic article in the Megazine, which takes seven pages to have a snit about movie makers not respecting comics as much as the writer does.

(big stompy robots do their stuff in a comic I have to wait three weeks to read)

Highlight Four: Karaoke Comics
Well that’s what I call them. Back in the less-prosperous sixties, the Japanese rented a lot of their comic books from private libraries, the way you do your DVDs. ‘Occulto’ comics were very popular then, these being ghost stories in which the characters had huge eyes (like everybody else in Japanese comics) with spooky black edges to show how frightened they were. A comedian reprinted some of these and wrote funny comments on the margins, thus causing my Japanese wife to laugh more than she has at anything apart from Sean Connery’s Japanese accent. Much like the ‘superdickery.com’ website.

Highlight Four: Rumiko Takahashi
Unfortunately the genius creator of ‘Urusay Yatsura’ and ‘Ranma 1/2’ has been pretty quiet of late, but the good news is that a live-action version of her Maison Ikoku is coming out next year and is apparently crash-hot stuff.

(Rumiko Takahashi looking different to Akane Tendo)

The quietness is relative, at one stage in the 1980s she was drawing and writing two series at the same time. Now she’s just working on Inuyasha (Dog like demons, schoolgirls, you know, that kind of thing).

(the heroine of Maison Ikkoku looking different to Rumiko Takahashi)

Highlight Five: Ikebukuro

I include this partly because I’m out of comics-related highlights and partly because I managed to confirm two stereotypes in one night. After a late night at a pub, I had a wander around this somewhat sleazy part of Tokyo. I saw vast numbers of the junior gangsters called ‘chimpira’ (literally ‘little pricks’) and I wound up sleeping in a capsule hotel. To be honest the gangsters weren’t much of a treat – I’ve seen these ratbags before, but the capsule hotel felt well futuristic. Japan feels like an old future, the future we were all looking forward to in the 80s and 90s, when it seemed that Japan would own the future. Now that the future will be either environmental devastation and/or Chinese ownership of the planet, the Japanese version seems kind of comfortable and retro, like ray guns and flying cars.

yours orientally,

Floyd