Japanese Comic Books Research Articles

Cavaleiros do Zodíaco: um mangá teopoético

It is an excerpt from a doctoral research that focuses on the manga Knights of the Zodiac (1985-1990), created by Masami Kurumada. Originally titled Saint Seiya, this Japanese comic book integrates Greek mythology as a structuring element of its narrative. The Greek mythology within the work is intersected by the combination of other themes - religion, astronomy, and astrology. Based on this amalgamation, Kurumada formulated a fundamental concept for the story: the cosmos, also known as the seventh sense. This is a complex and original idea that imparts a mystical and spiritual atmosphere to the manga. With that in mind, the objective of this article is to briefly explore the nature of the cosmos, conducting a theopoetic analysis of the work based on this concept. Therefore, the theoretical framework that underpins the study is primarily grounded in theopoetics (Kuschel, 1999; Ferraz, 2011; Bingemer; Villas Boas, 2020), which proposes comparative studies, initially between religion and literature, soon incorporating other artistic expressions - including comic books - into its research interests.

Mapping the Story of Manga: Graphic Novels and the Cultural Boom in Japan and World

Manga are circulated in graphic novel format as printed Japanese comic books. They are famous Japanese graphic novels or comic books. A popular form of literature, read by people of different age groups. They certainly provide visual as well as linguistic examples of Japanese culture. They deal with a number of genres like fantasy, romance, supernatural, erotica, action, psychological, science fiction and many more to include. This paper deals with manga-culture, its evolution and, cultural and global aspects attached to it. It highlights the educational element associated with manga. It further discusses about the prospects of manga being a form of cross-cultural literature and, how influential it is not only in Japan but also worldwide.

Learning English through Manga (Japanese Comic Books)

Learning English through Manga (Japanese Comic Books)

Traditional Art Portrayal in Modern Media: Nuances of Shodō Expression in Manga

The present article analyses how Japanese calligraphy (shodō) is portrayed in the media, particularly in the Japanese comic book (manga) Barakamon. Although it is an art strongly anchored in tradition, shodō has continuously found new ways to reinvent itself and to become an integral part of everyday life.

The Pragmatics of Stereotypical Speech. Loss of Identity Through Translation Compromise

"The Pragmatics of Stereotypical Speech. Loss of Identity through Translation Compromise. This article explores the possibility of translating stereotypical language markers, from Japanese (source language) into Romanian (target language). The case study is conducted on a Japanese comic book (manga) titled Rurōni Kenshin -Meiji Kenkaku Roman Tan-, analysed in terms of pragmatic sense conveyed through the translations of certain deictics and appellatives used to differentiate between the two identities assumed by the main character. The translation compromises oftentimes required due to the lack of pragmatic equivalence lead to loss of pragmatic meaning, blurring out the differences in the personalities of the main character. Keywords: stereotypical speech, multimodal text, pragmatics, linguistic politeness, deictics "

“The Power of Onomatopoeia in Manga,” an Essay by Natsume Fusanosuke with Translators' Introduction

Natsume Fusanosuke is one of the founding critics of manga that pioneered a style of formal analysis of manga in the 1990s. Natsume’s first important foray into his “theory of expression” (hyōgenron) was seen in the collaborate work, Manga no yomikata (How to read manga) in 1995. He later streamlined those ideas in a twelve-episode series Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono bunpō to hyōgen (Why is manga so interesting?: Its grammar and expression) for NHK television in 1996. The accompanying expanded book (1997) consists of well-ordered, individual essays on elements of manga such as line, character creation, and panels. In the present translated essay, the eighth chapter of part one, Natsume explores how hand-drawn onomatopoeia—or comic-book interjections—are quite nuanced, conveying additional information about time and space as a part of the larger narrative flow, which Natsume asserts is uniquely characteristic of Japanese comic books. This early essay, representing the beginning of Natsume’s scholarly arc, is important for its examination of how hand-drawn onomatopoeia are vital tools for the manga storyteller. Natsume argues that these graphic giongo, gitaigo, and other mimetic expressions also reveal how Japanese audiences are predisposed to reading and processing verbal information in both as words and as pictures. The translation and introduction make available in English for the first time a part of a key text in the history of manga studies in Japan.

Comicbook characters’ facial features and actions and movements as two sources of humour: the case of Fullmetal Alchemist

ABSTRACT This paper analyses images and texts from Fullmetal Alchemist, a 27-volume Japanese comicbook series, and aims to illustrate and discuss how comicbook characters’ facial features and active movements are used to visualise humour. As the ways that readers perceive humour while reading comics are influenced by many factors, both graphic and textual components are examined. The results show that various drawing skills and strategies are used to construct characters’ facial features and movements as two sources of humour. Our qualitative analysis further shows that halftone effects, suppletion, and micropanels can all be used to construct characters’ facial features in a funny manner. Furthermore, reduplication, macropanels, neo-amorphic panels, and mimetic words are used to humorously present characters’ actions and movements. This paper suggests that as comicbook humour is multimodally constructed, its perception requires a reader to parse both graphic and textual components.

Nerdy girls talking gross

This article examines how people view language use in manga (Japanese comic books and graphic novels) through an analysis of posts on a Japanese online bulletin board system. The analysis uncovers three central assumptions regarding texts understood as manga: they lack linguistic sophistication; their linguistic authenticity is problematic; and they negatively impact real-world speech. In the posts, language in manga is often assigned a vaguely negative influence on communication skills, and engagement with manga is foregrounded as a problematic social issue. Beliefs about language in manga parallel commonly held beliefs about language used by otaku ‘nerds/fans’, suggesting that metapragmatic stereotypes have expanded from media users to the media itself. Such criticism often targets women: although otaku are normatively viewed as male, women seen as encroaching masculine forms of engagement with manga may also receive criticism. The article thus contributes to an understanding of how perceptions of language and gender in media are formed.

Transmedia storytelling and transmediated bodies in Fullmetal Alchemist (2017)

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist) (2001, Hagaren in short) is a Japanese comic book franchise that not only expanded into a larger supersystem through its transmedia storytelling on multimedia platforms, but also through the global fandom of cosplay (the Japanese term for costume play), a form of popular culture that is heavily promoted by the Japanese government’s Cool Japan policy. Hagaren is set in an unidentifiable European landscape, a common depiction in many Japanese manga and anime, yet, in the 2017 live-action film that was globally distributed on Netflix, audiences witness a full Japanese cast performing European characters. This cross-racial performance, or yellow washing, challenges the border-crossing narrative and global viewership of the Hagaren’s manga and anime franchise. By examining how Hagaren’s supersystem developed out of the interplays of media industries, fan culture and broader governmental policies, this article aims to excavate the multifaceted politics of not only cross-border consumer identities, but also cross-racial performances propagated by the transmediation of Japanese popular culture on the global stage.

Building a Manga Dataset “Manga109” With Annotations for Multimedia Applications

Manga, or comics, which are a type of multimodal artwork, have been left behind in the recent trend of deep learning applications because of the lack of a proper dataset. Hence, we built Manga109, a dataset consisting of a variety of 109 Japanese comic books (94 authors and 21,142 pages) and made it publicly available by obtaining author permissions for academic use. We carefully annotated the frames, speech texts, character faces, and character bodies; the total number of annotations exceeds 500k. This dataset provides numerous manga images and annotations, which will be beneficial for use in machine learning algorithms and their evaluation. In addition to academic use, we obtained further permission for a subset of the dataset for industrial use. In this article, we describe the details of the dataset and present a few examples of multimedia processing applications (detection, retrieval, and generation) that apply existing deep learning methods and are made possible by the dataset.

PERANCANGAN BUKU KOMIK CERITA TRADISIONAL INDONESIA UNTUK REMAJA MODERN YANG TERBIASA DENGAN KOMIK JEPANG

“The Legends” is a traditional comic book based on local fairytale and folklore in Indonesia. This research is done to create a comic book that will not only preserve the traditional Indonesian folklore, but also suit teenagers’ taste, especially female teenagers, that are already accustomed to reading Japanese comic books. In “The Legends” comic, the dress styles, characters’ names, architectures and some other aspects have been adapted to suit the taste of young readers that are accustomed to reading Japanese comic books. However, the moral and values will still be conveyed in the story to introduce Indonesian cultural values and moral to the readers. “The Legends” will be advertised through social media, which is one of the most effective ways to promote a product because it is accessible to visitors without time or distance constraints. Also, community events will be a suitable place to promote a product such as traditional comic book to target modern teen readers that are used to reading Japanese comic books.

Znaczenie i wpływ języka postaci (yakuwarigo) na kształtowanie kompetencji językowych studentów japonistyki w Polsce

Cel badań
 Podstawowym celem badawczym niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie zjawiska japońskiego języka postaci (jap. yakuwarigo, ang. role language), określanego mianem języka fikcyjnego, z perspektywy nauczania języka japońskiego na polskiej japonistyce. Wpływ japońskich komiksów manga oraz animacji anime na rozwijanie kompetencji językowych studentów japonistyki, a także obecność języka postaci w dialogach występujących w podręcznikach do nauki współczesnej japońszczyzny stanowią interesujący punkt odniesienia do analizy aktualnych zdolności językowych i komunikacyjnych studentów.
 
 Metoda badań
 Główną metodą badawczą jest sondaż przeprowadzony wśród studentów pierwszego, drugiego i trzeciego roku studiów licencjackich japonistyki Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. W badaniu uczestniczyło pięćdziesięciu siedmiu studentów. Naukowe zaplecze dla niniejszych badań stanowiły japońsko i angielskojęzyczne opracowania poświęcone zjawisku stylizacji językowej, przede wszystkim prace Satoshiego Kinsuiego, którego uznaje się za twórcę konceptu yakuwarigo.
 
 Wyniki badań
 Pierwsze dwa pytania ankiety dotyczyły ogólnego zainteresowania studentów językiem japońskim, a także formami popkultury takimi jak komiksy, gry i animacje. Przeważająca większość studentów zadeklarowała zainteresowanie japońską mangą i anime. Celem drugiego pytania było zbadanie, którymi japońskimi zaimkami pierwszej i drugiej osoby studenci posługują się najczęściej podczas zajęć oraz poza zajęciami. W toku badania okazało się, iż wybory studentów są często dyktowane stylizacją językową proponowaną przez japońskie podręczniki, komiksy i ulubione animacje. W trzecim pytaniu studenci mogli wykazać się wiedzą dotyczącą różnych form języka postaci dopasowując podane wyrażenie do określonej roli. Zadanie to nie sprawiło im większych trudności. Celem ostatniego pytania było zbadanie ogólnej wiedzy i świadomości językowej studentów w zakresie opracowywanych materiałów, dokonanie oceny podręczników oraz wyrażenie swojego stosunku do wprowadzenia fragmentów japońskich komiksów i animacji do materiałów dydaktycznych. Studenci otwarcie skrytykowali nienaturalność tekstów zawartych w japońskich podręczników, a także wyrazili pozytywny stosunek do niestandardowych metod nauczania japońszczyzny.
 
 Wnioski
 Wyniki badania wskazują, iż język postaci w zasadniczym stopniu zostaje odzwierciedlony w mowie studentów japonistyki. W pozytywny i negatywny sposób wpływa na ich zdolności językowe. Z jednej strony, studenci, którzy interesują się japońskimi formami popkultury mają bogatszy zasób leksykalny i przewyższają kolegów pod względem kompetencji słuchowo-konwersacyjnych. Z drugiej strony niejednokrotnie popełniają błędy językowe i socjolingwistyczne, gdyż w rezultacie naśladowania postaci, nieświadomie ignorują ograniczenia wywołane przynależnością i charakterystyką bohatera. Co więcej, język postaci opierając się na cechach wyrazistych i często przerysowanych w widocznym stopniu promuje myślenie stereotypowe, które zagraża obiektywnemu oglądowi i ocenie kultury japońskiej.
 Niezwykle istotna staje się zatem osoba nauczyciela, który korzystając z materiałów dostarczanych przez teksty popkultury ma za zadanie uzupełnić te informacje rzetelną i popartą faktami wiedzą językowo-kulturową. W związku z powyższym zasadniczą kwestią jest wprowadzenie fragmentów mangi i anime do edukacji językowej jako materiałów uzupełniających.

Rynek mangi w Polsce – oferta wydawnicza w latach 1996−2015

The intention of the article is to discuss the evolution of Japanese comics in Poland since 1996, when it appears in the publishing offer, until 2015. It presents the beginning of the creation of the manga and briefly characterizes all its transformations. The article focuses on the characteristics of this comic, emphasizing its differences from similar texts. The basic consideration is the publishing offer available in Poland, which consists of the number of publishing houses specializing in publishing Japanese comic books and the number of titles published by them. The whole text shows the analysis of statistical data, indicating the interest in manga among Polish customers.

On the problem of defining manga: A study about the influence of Taoism and Zen Buddhism on manga aesthetics

Since the expansion of Japanese comic books throughout western countries, the so-called “manga style” has get attention from audiences and theorists. But how can we identify such Japaneseness? Trying to fulfill readers` interests, books have been published under the how-to-draw-manga label, usually highlighting the visual composition of characters, from clothes to facial expressions to hairstyle. From the academic perspective, particularities of page layout have been also considered since Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle`s idea of tabularity. Such structuralist perspective is also echoed by contemporary scholars such as Benoît Peeters and Thierry Groensteen. Investigations on what is called the “grammar of mangas” were also proposed by Neil Cohn or Scott McCloud (or at least based on his contributions). But what are they referring to by “manga”? Artists from all around the world translate mangas into transnational experiences. This study proposes a wider understanding of the manga narrative style and its particular aesthetic influence on readers. The study focuses on the Asian philosophies of Tao and Buddhism, identifying how their ideals are articulated to promote reader’s immersion in the narrative. The article investigates the visual representations of the Taoist idea of vacuum and the Zen idea of trivia, which characterize the visual and narrative fluidity of manga – especially those whose stories are based on everyday life.

Three Adaptations of the Japanese Comic Book Boys Over Flowers in the Asian Cultural Community: Analyzing Fidelity and Modification from the Perspective of Globalization and Glocalization

A wide variety of cultural products have been adapted into a brand new text in the process of globalization. The three adaptations of the Japanese cartoon, Boys over Flower, in the following countries: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have very similar storylines. The three storylines, although similar, have several modifications due to the differing audiences and goals of each series. Based on the idea of globalization; fidelity in the adaptation can be understood as emphasizing the shared values and community spirit between cultures while modifications can be interpreted as organizational gatekeeping. This study analyzes how the narratives in the three adapted texts show fidelity and modification. In conclusion, fidelity could be interpreted as presenting the glocalized cultural values or socio-cultural popular memory in the Asian context while modification could be considered as being reflective of a wide variety of different socio-cultural contexts where the series were created.

Did manga conquer America? Implications for the cultural policy of ‘Cool Japan’

This paper explores the efficacy of an international cultural policy based upon the export of a nation’s popular culture through the case study of Japanese comic books, called manga, in the USA. I begin by exploring the origin of the historical and theoretical underpinnings of ‘Cool Japan’ and providing a concise account of the Japanese cultural policies in this vein. Then, drawing upon participant observation and seventy in-depth, semi-structured interviews from informants in and around the American manga publishing industry, I discuss in detail what is actually involved in publishing Japanese comic books in the USA post-2007. Arguing that what they do is first and foremost to make manga American, I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the likely fortunes of ‘Cool Japan’ and any other cultural policy premised upon exporting popular culture.

Detection of exact and similar partial copies for copyright protection of manga

Manga, a kind of Japanese comic book, is an important genre in the realm of image publications requiring copyright protection. To copy manga, illegal users generally focus on certain interesting parts from which to make partial copies to apply in their own drawings. With respect to their sources, copying of manga can be divided into two types: (1) exact copies, which duplicate specific contents of manga, such as scanned manga publications (printed copies) and traced outlines of manga (hand-drawn copies), and (2) similar partial copies, which infringe the copyright of manga characters based on their features. In this paper, we propose applying content-based image retrieval methods to detect both exact and similar copies based on two kinds of regions of interest (ROIs): generic ROIs and face ROIs. The method is able not only to locate the partial copies from images with complex backgrounds, but also to report the corresponding copied parts of copyrighted manga pages for exact copy detection and copied manga characters for similar copy detection. The experimental results prove high performance of the proposed method for detecting printed partial copies. In addition, 85 % of hand-drawn and 77 % of similar partial copies were detected with relatively high precision using a database containing more than $$10{,}000$$ manga pages.

Fashioning the Fantastical Self: An Examination of the Cosplay Dress-up Phenomenon in Southeast Asia

This article will examine the practice of Cosplay—the trend for young adults in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to dress up in themed costumes assuming the personae of characters from Japanese comic books (manga) and animated cartoons (anime), video games, and pop music bands—as a means of exploring the motivations behind this activity. Social interaction theory and approaches to performativity and dramatism will be used to closely examine the complexities that construct this rapidly globalizing phenomenon from the player's own perspectives. In doing so, it will question why dress is used as a catalyst for escaping the boundaries of self and acquiring multiple identities.The article will discuss the outcomes of an ethnographic study where interviews were conducted with a selection of Cosplayers in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo who regularly dress in a range of costumes in public places and at organized themed events. Research questions included: what it means for Cosplay participants to assume another persona; what motivates them to dress up; how they decide to choose a particular character; whether it is a form of creative expression, rebellion, or secret or overt expressions of self; why and how they employ dress to pursue a particular fantasy; and the role of gender socialization in this type of costuming.Findings suggest that dressing up as a Cosplayer is multi-vocal experience representing varying motivations including the reaffirmation of identity, the escape from a known reality—in an attempt to recapture a “cute” childhood innocence, and the visible, often mediated, adherence to a defined and reassuring subcultural collective in the Asian context.

Baśnie i bajki w japońskich komiksach

Manga is a fascinating product of contemporary Japanese culture. Strongly rooted in tradition, inferred from art, associated with literature, it has become an inexhaustible source for researchers who wants to explore the achievement of sequential art. Everything is interesting about manga, starting from the artists themselves, ending with the transition from idea to effect. Japanese artists creating comics draw a lot of inspiration from literature and world art. Much comes from myths, legends, fables and fairy tales, both domestic and from around the world. They can be found in the text layer, but mainly in the iconic layer. Among them three main groups can be distinguished: one dealing with the scenario, the second and third will focus on the image, while the third will provide a single borrowed illustration from a particular theme or in a convention. The aim of this paper is to outline the issues relating to Japanese comic books on selected examples, including: trying to determine the potential audience of manga, which were based or only used themes from fairytales, trying to define the role of the artist as a modern-day equivalent fabulist, and pointing out an indication of the most popular topics and methods of presentation.

Framing attention in Japanese and american comics: cross-cultural differences in attentional structure.

Research on visual attention has shown that Americans tend to focus more on focal objects of a scene while Asians attend to the surrounding environment. The panels of comic books – the narrative frames in sequential images – highlight aspects of a scene comparably to how attention becomes focused on parts of a spatial array. Thus, we compared panels from American and Japanese comics to explore cross-cultural cognition beyond behavioral experimentation by looking at the expressive mediums produced by individuals from these cultures. This study compared the panels of two genres of American comics (Independent and Mainstream comics) with mainstream Japanese “manga” to examine how different cultures and genres direct attention through the framing of figures and scenes in comic panels. Both genres of American comics focused on whole scenes as much as individual characters, while Japanese manga individuated characters and parts of scenes. We argue that this framing of space from American and Japanese comic books simulate a viewer’s integration of a visual scene, and is consistent with the research showing cross-cultural differences in the direction of attention.