Nele Noppe's List: presentatie VUB

• Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.
• • The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media.
   
   
   
  • This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment.
   
   
   
  • “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications.
   
   
   
  • Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases.
   
   
   
  • Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order.
   
   
   
  • Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download.
   
   
   
  • Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.
• new class of semi-pro and professional creators
• an increasingly large class of professional creators uses doujin sales as a substantial segment of their income, acting as freelance illustrators, mangaka, and designers when they’re not doing doujin work (and vice versa).
• Perhaps the biggest issue raised by the emergence of this group of professional and semi-pro doujinka is that of intellectual property rights and copyright infringement.
• in many instances the people producing the doujinshi are the same as those producing the original works being parodied. The doujin scene is so interbred with that of professional anime, manga, and game creators that it would be impractical for all but the largest IP holders to crack down on the parody doujin scene.
• soft circles
• Lilith’s business model is the culmination of doujinshi as commerce - small, versatile, ubiquitous, and high quality.
• The doujin world now spans works from the rank amateur to the polished professional and everything in between,

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• held twice a year in August and December at the Tokyo Big Sight in Tokyo, Japan, and attracts over 450,000 participants over its three day run.
• primary focus of the event is the buying and selling of doujinshi
• Comiket is also known colloquially as the birthplace of cosplay and thousands of visitors come dressed as their favorite anime, manga and game characters as well.
• establishment of an official industry presence in the form of an industry booth dealers’ section
• alternate media such as software, music, and character goods.
• doujin circle (同人サークル). A doujin circle is an individual or group of creators who collaborate as a discreet entity to produce doujin items for sale;
• Recently the so-called “kojin circle” (個人サークル, personal circle) composed of a single member has been increasing, as individuals take on all aspects of doujin production from the application process, illustration, post-production, printing, and staffing of the table space allotted at the event.
• Step 1
   Purchase an application packet.
• Step 2
   File the application correctly and on time.
• Comiket is an all genre event, meaning literally anything goes
• Step 3
   Wait for the election results.
• Step 4
   Produce a doujin.
• Also, copyright considerations that apply to other events such as Wonder Festival are in effect here when it comes to certain types of character goods (no unauthorized figures), and while most IP is considered fair game for parody in the doujin community, a few exceptions such as Disney stand out as taboo.

  • This is interesting- dojinshi using copyrighted characters may be sold, but no unauthorized figures of said characters? Is this because figures cost just a little too much for copyright holders to be comfortable with letting fans produce them? I'm not surprised about the Disney exception, non-Japanese companies with little experience with the dojin economy are probably a lot more likely to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone selling things based on their copyrighted characters.
  Add Sticky Note
• Step 5
   Coordinate replication.
• Step 6
   Make final preparations.
• This broadening of distribution means that it’s no longer necessary to attend events in person to obtain many professionally produced books at a reasonable price. While they’re still cheaper at Comiket, many circles have recognized the need to provide something more to encourage fans to attend (or just to show gratitude to those who do show up), and that’s where the copy book comes in.
• Step 7
   Show up and sell!
• At some point before 9:30 an event staff member will visit you at your table where your participation will be officially registered. You must provide both a sworn statement that you’re not selling anything illegal and copies of the books you’ll be releasing that day to the staff, and then you’re clear to go.

  • I wonder if the staff sometimes takes away merchandise or closes entire boots at the last minute because they've found something objectionable in the advance copies provided to them (apparently only hours or minutes before the opening of the event)?

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• Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.
• 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.
• 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.

  • malaise in commerciële industrie
• 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.

  • belang zelfexpressie, vrijheid in dojinshi
• The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force
• future business model of music, movies, and media of every kind.
• Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.
• Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system.
• About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works.
• Japanese copyright law is just as restrictive as its American cousin, if not more so.
• known as "circles" even if they have only one member
• by day's end, some 300,000 books sold in cash transactions totaling more than $1 million
• "This is something that satisfies the fans," Ichikawa said. "The publishers understand that this does not diminish the sales of the original product but may increase them.
• As recently as a decade ago, he told me, creators of popular commercial works sometimes cracked down on their dojinshi counterparts at Super Comic City. "But these days," he said, "you don't really hear about that many publishers stopping them."
• "unspoken, implicit agreement."
• "The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors.
• They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.
• It's also a business model

• He opened Mandarake 27 years ago, well before the dojinshi markets began growing more popular — in part to provide another sales channel for the work coming out of them.

   

  At first, publishers were none too pleased with his new venture. "You think I didn't hear from them?" he tells me in a company conference room. But in the past five years, he says, as the scale and reach of the markets has expanded, the publishers' attitude "has changed 180 degrees." It's all a matter of business, he says.
• triangle. "You have the authors up there at this tiny little tip at the top. And at the bottom," he says, drawing a line just above the widening base of the triangle, "you have the readers. The dojin artists are the ones connecting them in the middle."
• The dojinshi devotees are manga's fiercest fans.
• provides publishers with extremely cheap market research
• the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.
• Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture.
• the copyright winds in the US have been blowing in the opposite direction — toward longer and stricter protections. It is hard to imagine Hollywood, Nashville, and New York agreeing to scale back legal protection in order to release the creative impulses of super-empowered fans, when the gains from doing so are for now only theoretical.
• mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism.

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• he will pay an undisclosed amount of money for the settlement based on the sales generated by the doujins
• Many doujinshi creators have criticized Shogakukan for taking legal actions and generally making a big deal out of one doujinshi.
• The doujinshi was sold at a doujin shop in Akihabara and via internet for around 500 yen, and managed to sell over over 13,000 copies before being stopped by Shogakukan.

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• Sales of fanzines had never really caused big problems so long as they were done only at one-day fanzine exhibitions. However, some fanzines now sell in the thousands or tens of thousands of copies due to an increase in the number of bookstores selling them and the popularity of Internet shopping.
• Even after the man had stopped selling it by himself, his fanzine carrying Doraemon’s “final” episode continued to be sold at Internet auctions, sometimes going for tens of thousands of yen.
• Yet the series remains unfinished due to Fujiko’s death in 1996.
• We also cannot overlook the number of copies sold – 13,000 was too many.”
• But we don’t categorically reject fanzines in general (as a base of manga culture) as long as they remain within reasonable bounds.
• “If publishers basically approve the existence of such fanzines, the creation of a new rule should be studied, which would require fanzines selling more than a certain number of copies to pay part of their profits to copyright holders,” said Yukari Fujimoto, a social critic.

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• Pokemon doujinshi case, in which a female doujin creator was arrested for being suspected of copyright violation

• Japanese doujinshika---at least at this sort of amateur level---are often very leery of publicity. This might be a reaction to the arrests of several doujinshika in apparently random, token copyright enforcement cases in recent years (such as the infamous Pokemon doujinshika incident), or it might simply be a sign of how negatively "fringe" behavior is viewed in Japanese society
• Snape is gorgeous---or at least that's what the djka at this show seemed to believe.
• Doujinshika are infamous for "prettifying" real-life (or real-text) actors/characters, and who can blame them?
• it's how Snape is depicted emotionally that's most telling on a cross-cultural level.
• None of the doujinshi that I saw on the Snape side of the event depicted Angsty!Snape. Or Traumatized!Snape, or for that matter Unhappy!Snape. Instead, almost all of the books showed variations on the same thing: Cranky!Snape.
• I've been told repeatedly that Japan just doesn't do psychology---certainly not to the same dogged degree as the West.
• Western Fanfic Snape is physically attractive but brooding, miserable, and emotionally damaged. Japanese Doujinshi Snape is physically attractive and cranky because he's surrounded by horny goofballs.
• Still, it was interesting to see so many similarities of concept and characterization between Japanese writers and Westerners Sirius/Remus 'shippers.
• The only real difference I can see between the Japanese depictions and the Western is that sense of ominousness I mentioned. The majority of Western Sirius/Remus 'fics I've read have been hopeful/positive in tone.

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• First, doujinshi are not commercial products, and this is one of the most important distinctions that allows its very existence. 
• Many doujinshi conventions (Comiket included) require doujin circles to provide print run information, and enforces a cap.  Quite simply, there aren’t enough books to export en mass. 
• This is also why doujinshi has continued to grow while other media like manga, anime, and music have suffered with the advent of peer to peer trading on the internet…the doujinshi market is a collector’s market, where the physical book itself is highly valued
• that’s not to say that doujinshi isn’t profitable…a few artists never “go pro” because they make quite a healthy living on their doujinshi,
• The much better road for the American manga industry and fans to take is not to import doujinshi, but to import the doujinshi ideal and ethics, and foster a domestic doujinshi community of our own.  This road is beset by its own share of hurdles, though, and they have very deep roots.
• While fanzines and fanfiction have been around in the U.S., we have nothing even close to the doujinshi scene in Japan, because of American corporate mentality which values “perpetual properties” instead of new creations, and these properties are guarded visciously.
• in America properties are created and owned by the corporation.
• They simply have no reason to support budding artists in such a way, when their raison detre are still characters created decades ago.  Fan comics are not seen as extending the life of a property, but as competition. 
• The truth is a significant portion of Japanese doujinshi are erotic works, many based on children’s shows.  It isn’t hard to imagine the kind of moral outrage most doujinshi would illicit. 
• American manga companies need to take a hard look at doujinshi in Japan and understand its benefits, and readers and artists should take a stand because this is an opportunity for the status of the creator to take precedence over the corporation.

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• She identifies Pokémon as a media form that has defined the current framework, laying the groundwork for peer-to-peer communication and creation of media. While the current generation has outgrown Pokémon, the game franchise shaped how global youth think about culture and gaming. It linked analog and digital media, she proposes, by creating an electronic game that later manifested as a collectible card game, manga, anime, toys and other media. It put portability at the center of the media mix, and helped establish Japanese media content as a transnational source of cultural capital
• She sees a generation of kids engaging in a set of cultural practices - cutting, pasting, linking and forwarding in spaces like MySpace
• Individual identity is no longer consumer or producer - there’s a middle ground that includes connoisseur and amateur.
• Networks are no longer mass media or purely personal communication - there are community networks that allow communication about niche interests to a large population
• The work done by the fan community is of impressively high quality and speed - fan substitles are usually distributed to new episodes within 24 hours of their release,
• Media companies aren’t unaware of this obsessive fandom - their release cycles and their localization of content into different languages often reflects producers watching fan behavior.
• The Matrix itself is something of a remix, an American film that borrows heavily from the cliches of Japanese and Chinese action films

• Mimi sees three trends taking place:

   

  - a ping-pong back and forth between US and Japanese culture, informing the mass communication aesthetic

   

  - a mainstreaming of the otaku aesthetic, a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds (think of the popularity of the absurdly detailed universe of Harry Potter, for instance)

   

  - remix as a method of localizing and “talking back” to mainstream media.

  • a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds -love this line!!
• So here’s a question - does participation in these international joint projects turn into a more generalized form of xenophilia? Do American fans of anime develop a generalized fascination with Japan, which somehow expands from watching Naruto to watching global politics?

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• Doujinshi arrests are based on three major dimensions: copyright, taxation and obscene expression.