June 28, 2018
The publishing industry in Japan
In the course of my Internet research about publishing costs in Japan, I collected three white papers and a Robert Whiting interview (all were posted for download on non-gated websites). Also recommended is mangaka Shuho Sato's tell-all retrospective about his own profession.
The following are a live-action drama and three anime. Antiquarian Bookshop may be the coziest cozy mystery series ever. In the process, you'll learn a good deal about the used book trade in Japan. Shirobako is an "inside baseball" account about how an anime series is made.
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun and Bakuman feature teenagers who want to be professional mangaka when they grow up, a subject that constitutes its own genre. Bakuman in particular pays close attention to the technical details of the profession. It debuted on NHK Educational TV.
The Sakuga blog provides a good explanation of the "production committee."
"An Introduction to Publishing in Japan" by the Japan Book Publishers Association: JBPA.pdf
"The Field of Japanese Publishing" by Brian Moeran: BrianMoeran.pdf
"The Japanese Way! Relationships between Authors and Publishers in the Context of Developing Works into Diverse Forms" by Tetsuro Daiki: TetsuroDaiki.pdf
"You've Gotta Have Wa If You Want to Get Published" by Robert Whiting: RobertWhiting.pdf
Manga Poverty by Shuho Sato (translated by Dan Luffey): ebook
The following are a live-action drama and three anime. Antiquarian Bookshop may be the coziest cozy mystery series ever. In the process, you'll learn a good deal about the used book trade in Japan. Shirobako is an "inside baseball" account about how an anime series is made.
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun and Bakuman feature teenagers who want to be professional mangaka when they grow up, a subject that constitutes its own genre. Bakuman in particular pays close attention to the technical details of the profession. It debuted on NHK Educational TV.
The Sakuga blog provides a good explanation of the "production committee."
Related posts
The proof is in the printing
The actual value of the written word
Labels: anime, business, japan, japanese tv, publishing, thinking about writing, whiting
March 29, 2018
Detective Bureau 2-3
At the time, Hollywood produced some fine films in and about Japan too. Shot on location, a movie like House of Bamboo (with Robert Stack) captures the Tokyo cityscape before modernity swept that sepia-colored world away.
Equally deserving of attention are those entertainment vehicles that won little in the way of high-culture respect (and even less in terms of international attention), and yet created the tropes and types of popular culture that still resonate today.
Unlike the works of Yasujiro Ozu or Akira Kurosawa (such as High and Low, his 1963 police procedural), these movies have little value as artistic or as historical documents that strove for verisimilitude.
But they have great value as records of how the general public perceived the world around them, the ways in which they were willing to suspend their disbelief in order to imagine that social change in entertaining ways (still true of manga and anime today).
A great example of this is the clumsily titled (in English) Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! released by Nikkatsu Studios in January 1963.
The bad boy of the post-war Japanese movie business, Nikkatsu Studio avoided historical dramas and concentrated on low-budget comedies, teen melodramas, and actioners. Losing ground to television in the 1970s, Nikkatsu became synonymous with the "pink" genre.
But in 1963, though chock-a-block with armies of gun-wielding yakuza and a sky-high body count, Detective Bureau 2-3 (the "2-3" refers to protagonist's office number) isn't any more violent or explicit than Hollywood westerns of the 1950s.
Director Seijun Suzuki gives the film the look of a classic noir thriller. Joe Shishido (who appeared in six of Suzuki's films) is perfectly cast as a debonair detective who infiltrates the yakuza to expose a gun-running operation.
Featuring a sports car (that looks cool today), beautiful women, and heavies that could pass for Edward G. Robinson's cousins, plus the inventive use of what were then high-tech devices, Detective Bureau 2-3 had Miami Vice and Don Johnson beat by two decades.
Speaking of which, Miami Vice did an episode about the yakuza that wasn't half bad. But Don Johnson never wriggled out of tight situation with a song-and-dance routine that Fred Astaire could have choreographed.
Suzuki later got himself fired from Nikkatsu for making films that were so surreal and absurdist that they alienated Nikkatsu's core audience. When you're in the crowd-pleasing business, you do have to please the crowds.
In Detective Bureau 2-3 Suzuki and Shishido get the mix just right. Sporting a plot worthy of Chandler, it skirts the nihilism that came to typify the yakuza genre and supplies an upbeat ending. More upbeat than how the real world was dealing with the issue.
Robert Whiting recalls of the years leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the Japan Times (his fascinating five-part account starts here),
House theft was rampant, narcotics use was endemic, and it was considered too dangerous to walk in public parks at night. Moreover, yakuza were everywhere, their numbers at an all-time high. There were also twice as many places to eat as New York and more bars per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world.
The 1964 Olympics initiated a crackdown that was more of an accommodation. It essentially decriminalized the yakuza. Unlike American gangsters, the big yakuza organizations are legal corporations, and the police prefer to regulate them as such.
Sort of the same argument for decriminalizing drugs: stay away from the hard stuff and don't shoot civilians and we won't look too closely at where the hard cash is really coming from.
Capturing the yakuza sub-culture at its apex, Detective Bureau 2-3 makes hanging with the bad guys look cool. And the bad guys look cruel but cool. As with the glamour of the Miami Vice underworld, this comic book view of the yakuza persists to this day.
Labels: japan, japanese movie reviews, law, movies, politics, social studies, sports, whiting
December 24, 2012
Japan's Bond legacy
Kaori Shoji recently reminisced in The Japan Times about James Bond's one and only adventure in Japan way back in 1967 (perhaps not coincidentally on the heels of the 1966 Cary Grant comedy, Walk, Don't Run, which takes place during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics):
You Only Live Twice was also the movie, along with Go for Broke (1951), that got me interested in all things Japanese. As I have Thackeray recount in Tokyo South,
As a vehicle for communicating Japanese culture to a worldwide audience, You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. The Japanese, though, were delighted with the whole thing. Just as Americans are the world's biggest "Occidentalists" (we're all "cowboys"), Japanese are the world's biggest Orientalists.
Manga and anime would soon embrace the silliness and fashion from it an unique pop culture movement. The latest incarnation of the anime series 009-1, in particular, is a great homage to the Bond oeuvre, with a female android in the title role.
You Only Live Twice certainly isn't any dumber than dreck like Ridley Scott's Black Rain (1989) and Rising Sun (1993). A notable exception from that era is the grossly under-appreciated Mr. Baseball (1992), a sort-of film version of Robert Whiting's witty analysis of Japanese baseball, You Gotta Have Wa (1990).
The Last Samurai (2003) may be the best-looking Hollywood movie made about Japan, but it tries so hard not to recycle the recent stereotypes that it ends up recycling all the old ones, getting the historical context completely backwards and upside down. The campier Shogun (1980) is a far more accurate romanticization of history.
In that light, what I find more intriguing is that a decade before Bond's arrival in 1967, no doubt due to the interest engendered by the American Occupation and the Korean War, the 1950s produced some of the best Hollywood movies filmed on location in Japan, and with big-name stars. Such as:
If nothing else, these films are time machines back to before Japan became a first-world nation and an economic powerhouse. And here is where contemporary directors like Sofia Coppola and Edward Zwick fail miserably. Their time machines keep on going. As Kiku Day bitterly observes about Lost in Translation (2003):
Perhaps because the stereotypes hadn't yet become part of the zeitgeist, Hollywood directors in the 1950s simply filmed what they saw looking through the lens. There is certainly far more truth and wonder to be found in the wide eyes of seven-year-old Jon Provost in Escapade in Japan than in the jaded, postmodern gaze of Bill Murray.
The gentleman spy came to Tokyo and Fukuoka, saw some sumo, consorted with ninja and got intimate with two homegrown Bond girls. Directed by Lewis Gilbert, You Only Live Twice goes down in Japan's collective memory as the one and only time 007 made it to these shores.
You Only Live Twice was also the movie, along with Go for Broke (1951), that got me interested in all things Japanese. As I have Thackeray recount in Tokyo South,
"I think the first time I thought about going to Japan was after I saw that James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice. What kind of a reason is that?"
As a vehicle for communicating Japanese culture to a worldwide audience, You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. The Japanese, though, were delighted with the whole thing. Just as Americans are the world's biggest "Occidentalists" (we're all "cowboys"), Japanese are the world's biggest Orientalists.
Manga and anime would soon embrace the silliness and fashion from it an unique pop culture movement. The latest incarnation of the anime series 009-1, in particular, is a great homage to the Bond oeuvre, with a female android in the title role.
You Only Live Twice certainly isn't any dumber than dreck like Ridley Scott's Black Rain (1989) and Rising Sun (1993). A notable exception from that era is the grossly under-appreciated Mr. Baseball (1992), a sort-of film version of Robert Whiting's witty analysis of Japanese baseball, You Gotta Have Wa (1990).
The Last Samurai (2003) may be the best-looking Hollywood movie made about Japan, but it tries so hard not to recycle the recent stereotypes that it ends up recycling all the old ones, getting the historical context completely backwards and upside down. The campier Shogun (1980) is a far more accurate romanticization of history.
In that light, what I find more intriguing is that a decade before Bond's arrival in 1967, no doubt due to the interest engendered by the American Occupation and the Korean War, the 1950s produced some of the best Hollywood movies filmed on location in Japan, and with big-name stars. Such as:
• House of Bamboo (1955, with Robert Ryan and Robert Stack)
• Teahouse of the August Moon (1956, with Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert, and Harry Morgan)
• Sayonara (1957, with Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Red Buttons and Ricardo Montalban!)
• Escapade in Japan (1957, with Jon Provost of Lassie fame)
If nothing else, these films are time machines back to before Japan became a first-world nation and an economic powerhouse. And here is where contemporary directors like Sofia Coppola and Edward Zwick fail miserably. Their time machines keep on going. As Kiku Day bitterly observes about Lost in Translation (2003):
[Ancient Japan] is depicted approvingly, though ancient traditions have very little to do with the contemporary Japanese. The "good Japan," according to [Coppola (and Zwick )], is [samurai,] Buddhist monks chanting, ancient temples, flower arrangement; meanwhile she portrays the contemporary Japanese as ridiculous people who have lost contact with their own culture.
Perhaps because the stereotypes hadn't yet become part of the zeitgeist, Hollywood directors in the 1950s simply filmed what they saw looking through the lens. There is certainly far more truth and wonder to be found in the wide eyes of seven-year-old Jon Provost in Escapade in Japan than in the jaded, postmodern gaze of Bill Murray.
Related posts
Dances with Samurai
Lost on location
The Pacific War on screen
Labels: history, japan, movie reviews, movies, movies about japan, pop culture, shogun, whiting
December 15, 2008
The actual value of the written word
The Dear Author blog documents an attempt by a major New York publisher (Macmillan) to suppress trends in ebook pricing by charging exorbitant amounts (hardcover prices) for ebook versions.
When Georges Santayana said, "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it," he was referring to history, not stuff that happened last week. The lessons learned by the music industry--if they've been learned at all--are apparently too fresh to be heeded.
I believe that at the heart of the music piracy problem was the realization among the first of the "wired" baby boomers that they'd been paying over and over for the same products. I'm old enough to have owned exactly the same tracks on vinyl, cassette, CD, and MP3.
All legitimately paid for, I should add. But once you instill in your customer base the belief that they're being ripped off--literally sold the same bill of goods over and over--the guilt-free impulse to rip you off in turn increases and spreads exponentially.
Publishers would rather complain about piracy than address a lousy business model. For example, despite Japan's inefficient retail sector and higher fixed costs, paperbacks printed and sold in Japan are often cheaper than in the U.S., with better binding quality.
Long before ebooks, something was seriously out of whack with the U.S. book business.
Take the problem of returns. In Japan, the author doesn't get an advance but is paid a royalty on the number of books printed. Think about how that one difference would affect the whole economic thinking of authors, agents and publishers.
(Robert Whiting's comments on getting published in the U.S. and Japan can be found in the August 2006 issue of Number One Shimbun, the newsletter of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.)
The digital revolution forces publishers to come to terms with the actual value of the written word or recorded note. The music industry made a ton of money thanks to a flurry of format shifts--not new ideas--and now Hollywood is doing the same thing.
And like real estate speculators riding a bubble, they thought the ride would never end. Seth Godin sums up the problem succinctly:
Because "the rules of this new business didn't match the rules of the existing business," publishers still think they're in the paper products business, not in the storytelling and information business. Until they realize otherwise, the situation isn't likely to change.
When Georges Santayana said, "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it," he was referring to history, not stuff that happened last week. The lessons learned by the music industry--if they've been learned at all--are apparently too fresh to be heeded.
I believe that at the heart of the music piracy problem was the realization among the first of the "wired" baby boomers that they'd been paying over and over for the same products. I'm old enough to have owned exactly the same tracks on vinyl, cassette, CD, and MP3.
All legitimately paid for, I should add. But once you instill in your customer base the belief that they're being ripped off--literally sold the same bill of goods over and over--the guilt-free impulse to rip you off in turn increases and spreads exponentially.
Publishers would rather complain about piracy than address a lousy business model. For example, despite Japan's inefficient retail sector and higher fixed costs, paperbacks printed and sold in Japan are often cheaper than in the U.S., with better binding quality.
Long before ebooks, something was seriously out of whack with the U.S. book business.
Take the problem of returns. In Japan, the author doesn't get an advance but is paid a royalty on the number of books printed. Think about how that one difference would affect the whole economic thinking of authors, agents and publishers.
(Robert Whiting's comments on getting published in the U.S. and Japan can be found in the August 2006 issue of Number One Shimbun, the newsletter of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.)
The digital revolution forces publishers to come to terms with the actual value of the written word or recorded note. The music industry made a ton of money thanks to a flurry of format shifts--not new ideas--and now Hollywood is doing the same thing.
And like real estate speculators riding a bubble, they thought the ride would never end. Seth Godin sums up the problem succinctly:
Businesses live in ecosystems. A series of rules and assumptions that, taken together, make a thriving mechanism . . . We get stuck because we believe that the rules of our ecosystem are permanent and transferable. In fact, they are almost always temporary and rarely transferable.
Because "the rules of this new business didn't match the rules of the existing business," publishers still think they're in the paper products business, not in the storytelling and information business. Until they realize otherwise, the situation isn't likely to change.
Labels: business, ebooks, japan, publishing, technology, whiting