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Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex

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6:01 pm, Nov 2 2007
Posts: 325


Link I found on net

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-11/ff_manga


By Daniel H. Pink Email 10.22.07 | 6:00 PM

When the chimes sound at 10:30 am, the young men pour through the doors. First a few dozen. Then a few hundred. Then, in a matter of minutes, a few thousand. Mobile phones pressed to their ears, empty backpacks flapping on their skinny shoulders, they tear across the floor of the Tokyo Big Sight convention center as if pursued by demons.

"Hashiranaide!" cry the blue-shirted security officials. "Hashiranaide!" Don't run! But it's no use. The collective force of so many men fed on a combo platter of anticipation and desire is unstoppable. Call it the running of the otaku. For what has stoked their fires isn't flesh or cash but stack upon precious stack of manga.

As you may have noticed, Japanese comics have gripped the global imagination. Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years. Titles like Fruits Basket, Naruto, and Death Note have become fixtures on American best-seller lists. Walk into your local bookstore this afternoon and chances are the manga section is bigger than the science fiction collection. Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.

Yet in Japan, its birthplace and epicenter, manga's fortunes are sagging. Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade. Young people are turning their attention away from the printed page and toward the tiny screens on their mobile phones.

Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster. Pervading the nation's $4.2 billion-a-year industry is a sense that its best days have passed.



FOLLOW LINK FOR THE REST

Last edited by mellowmut at 6:09 pm, Nov 2 2007

________________
why back in the day we didn't 'download', we had to swim to japan if we wanted fresh anime and that was only if...

I dream of a better tomorrow... where chickens can cross roads and not have their motives questioned.
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