TV steers Japanese cinema

TOKYO (TR) – A scan of Japan’s recent year-end box office charts reveals a familiar recurring theme: Storylines for top films are typically based on a hit television series or drawn from a popular manga comic.

With ad revenue falling, the major nets are partnering with Toho and other major distributors in an effort to fill that gap with features based on material with which local audiences are already widely familiar.

“Japan is under a unique circumstance in which terrestrial TV programming is of high quality and remains the most powerful media outlet,” says Naoki Suganuma, deputy manager within the film business division of Nippon Television Network (NTV). “And not only kids but also adults read manga in their daily lives. So it’s a natural thing for these kinds of titles to become the basis of movies.”

The result is a consolidation of power in the biz — and Hollywood, with the exception of an occasional “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Avatar,” is increasingly losing clout. Read more

Punchy posters encourage Tokyo subway etiquette

TOKYO – It doesn’t take a genius to realize that public spaces in Japan are filled with numerous audible and visual reminders about the importance of maintaining personal decorum. Over the past year, some of the catchiest have been the “manner posters,” by graphic artist Bunpei Yorifuji, that appear in the stations and carriages that serve the nine lines of the Tokyo Metro subway system.

Since April of last year, the 35-year-old designer has produced a simple yellow-and-black image each month urging subway travelers to refrain from such generally discomfiting activities as applying makeup, falling down drunk, talking on mobile phones, occupying priority seats for the elderly, infirm or pregnant women or rushing to board as the doors are closing.

“People move at a fast pace through the subway system,” explains Yorifuji as he puffs on a cigarette and reclines on a sofa at Bunpei Ginza, a nine-person operation occupying a fifth-floor office near the Kabuki-za theater in Chuo Ward. “So for the poster to be effective, it needs to have a catchy title, one that can be understood in a second, and contain an illustration that is easy to recognize.” Read more

Taking manga to the masses

KUMAMOTO (TR) – The recent popularity of English versions of Japanese manga overseas is not news. Yet for many artists and fans, the selections made available have generally not breached the mainstream, rendering the output to be far from cutting-edge.

That might change somewhat with publisher Top Shelf’s release later this year of AX Collection, a compilation of works taken from the small but influential Japanese bimonthly of the same name. “It will be a unique book that extends the range of manga available in English into more mature themes, experimental art styles and highly original stories,” explains the collection’s co-editor, Sean Michael Wilson. “This is very much needed, as the vast majority of the manga that’s available so far is of a relatively narrow range of styles and subjects.” Read more

Love hotels becoming the last refuge of a temp-help worker

For the past several years, the term nanmin (refugee) has increasingly been applied as a suffix to the temporary habitats of young people down on their luck. First there were the net cafe nanmin, who occupy tiny two-mat rooms in Internet cafes; next came manki nanmin, who sleep in cubicles provided by all-night manga kissa (coffee shops with comic books for rent). There are even makku nanmin, who doze with their heads on the counters or tables of McDonald’s fast-food outlets.

And now it seems there are “love hotel nanmin.” Actually for some time already, runaway girls in their teens could be seen loitering on the streets around love hotels in search of a man to provide them with accommodations for the night. But more recently, Nikkan Gendai (Jan. 31) reports, a new phenomenon has developed in which the runaway teens have been joined by women from their mid-20s to mid-30s. Read more

Hentai manga to take the world

TOKYO – Toshio Maeda is doing some touch-up work on a drawing of a female athlete possessing muscular arms and perky breasts that bulge from around her tight-fitting blue bikini. He begins on her face and scrolls down his 2-in-1 computer screen and digital drawing tablet, making small additions to her already highly detailed form.

Just before he advances the drawing stylus down to work on her lower half, the bespectacled 49-year old explains that most of his fans don’t like looking at simply a muscled woman. He then grins and taps the stylus once more. The screen regenerates with a large phallic protrusion from her crotch area. “So I like doing something different,” he says. Read more

Raunchy wife, flaky husband revel in kinky togetherness

“We’ve been married a long time, and it’s been quite a while since my husband and I engaged in any ‘night life,’” writes a woman who goes by the handle “Sha-mail.” (“Sha” is the character meaning to shoot — and also to ejaculate.)

Shukan Bunshun’s weekly column, “Shukujo no Zasshi kara” (from ladies’ magazines), features this gem, excerpted from the November issue of Ai no Taiken Special Deluxe.

“One day, I was taking a shower,” she relates. “And while directing the shower head on myself down there, I started feeling really good. Suddenly, I sensed someone was behind me and when I turned around, I saw my husband, watching me masturbate! And what’s more, he wasn’t just watching, but was shooting my picture with a cell phone camera. Read more

Toshio Maeda: hentai pioneer

Toshio Maeda’s groundbreaking manga series “Urotsuki Doji” from 1986 firmly placed him in the history books as the pioneer of the genre known as hentai, or perverted. The work featured violent and graphic images of shapely young women being probed, felt, and fondled by the tentacles, elongated tongues, and miscellaneous extensions of creatures. The world of manga would never be the same again.

From that auspicious beginning, Maeda’s work blossomed over next two decades, one tentacle at a time. Subsequent work included the six-volume “Trap of Blood” and the very successful tentacle-rape opus “La Blue Girl.” Though a recent traffic accident has left him with limited drawing abilities, next year – fresh on the heels of the worldwide success of his recent “La Blue Girl” animation series – he plans on releasing a new anime feature and contributing to the women’s hentai manga magazine Amour. In preparation for the latter, he is being forced to change gears; much to his chagrin, he is poring over scripts for such TV shows as Ally McBeal to “understand women’s feelings.” This is in the hopes of creating a hentai piece that will satisfy the demands of females. Read more

Takeshi Oshima: adult manga artist

Takeshi Oshima’s home in west Tokyo seems very ordinary: His wife opens the door with a warm greeting, and soon after his son appears, tugging on her apron. But things change on the stairs that lead to the basement.

Large stacks of dusty manga comic books are on the edge of each step. Upon reaching the basement, more multi-colored volumes can be seen running half-way to the ceiling. A cluttered desk holds five mugs of pens and an inkwell. Just below are a drawing board and color pictures of bikini-clad young girls beneath heavy see-through plastic shields. These ladies are used as drawing guides for Oshima, who is a manga artist specializing in adult comics.

Oshima does not consider his comics to be pure hentai manga, whose focus is on the molestation of women through the use of elongated tongues, tentacles, or other long, thin probes. Though he has dabbled in the hentai genre, his 25-year career has mainly featured women simply enjoying sex. Read more

Shochiku adds animation

TOKYO – Readying more robots for battle.

Japanese film giants Toei and Toho probably cast nervous looks over their backs in September, when film-distribution and kabuki-theater conglomerate Shochiku established an animation division to increase its share of Japan’s $18 billion annual animation market.

“We now have the ability to expand our animation business,” says division general manager Ichiro Seki.

Shochiku, which has animation experience with the “Gundam” robots and “Ultraman,” will now have the increased flexibility needed to commission a larger selection of features and provide unique marketing options. Read more

Stake house: Telcos place their bets

TOKYO – The pot has been raised in Japan’s telecommunications poker game.

Very recently, Japan’s largest mobile phone company, NTT DoCoMo, took a 3% stake in Nippon Television, a play that further strengthens a relationship that began early last year with the seven-year, $83 million limited liability venture D.N. Dream Partners (DNDP).

The move, which follows DoCoMo’s purchase of 2.6% of Fuji Television Network shares in January 2006, is the latest gamble linking a broadcaster and a telecom giant in a bid to boost services to customers, and represents another step toward a union within the two media sectors. Read more

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