Imagining Japan Symposium report

Those of you unfortunate enough to read my blog know that I can be a little verbose. So when I hide something behind a cut because it's too big, you should all be afraid. Still, if you're looking for some of that good old procrastination...

I took a series of notes while I sat in the Imagining Japan Symposium. I've never done a "convention report", but this is basically what this is. It's mostly a list of stuff that happened but the symposium was really good, so feel free to read on and cry about what you missed.

I got turned away from the symposium when I turned up - the usual insanity at registration that hits conventions hit the symposium, and, without change or a cashbox (and me without correct change) they turned me away.

Okay, it wasn't really that serious. I knew full well that they were still getting themselves organised.

Eventually they sorted themselves out (and I had James raid the manga library cashbox for change.) They had had pre-registraion open, so there were some people pre-reged. There was never much of a queue to get in, because the symposium was never really filled with anybody but the participants.

This is a little unfortunate, because the symposium was really fantastic. While it's a highly academic event, there is more than enough room for a more public promotion.

The venue was, of course, the Japanese Studies Centre's big room. They went all out - where when MACC runs its screenings, it simply uses the projector and whacks it on a table. Instead, the symposium had speakers, radio mics, cameras, and an art installation (which was most probably there to use the space behind the projection and camera set up, where you couldn't sit audience. I noticed the ubiquitous use of gaffa. All hail gaffa.

They'd hooked a laptop into the Monash Uni network - something that itself is pretty amazing. My experience of the Monsh uni network is that is something is plugged in where it's not expected, fricken sharks with fricken laser beams jump out and rampage.

Anyway (I'm going to say that a lot in this report, forgive me) the symposium was opened by Professor Mauer, who's the head cheese at the JSC. He basically just did a quick spiel about the JSC and the manga library, and setting up the symposium.

Professor Ito got up, and, in the English of a long time Japanese speaker, thanked the organisers of the symposium. He and his group are researchers from Osaka University are backed by the Japanese government and the department of education and they have been researching Japan's image, the worldwide diffusion of Japanese culture, and the Japanese reaction of this image.

This reminds me a little of that set of editorials that was going around recently, (you know, the kancho one) in which a American teacher spoke of the "public face" of Japan. Ever since I read that I've been much more conscious of the idea that Japan projects an image that doesn't really reflect their internal culture.

Anyway, the researchers were lucky to have the symposium, and the symposium was lucky to have them.

Dr Tokita welcomed everybody, including the guy next to me, Josh, who came from Pensivania in the US for the symposium. (The furthest anybody had come) Josh had rocked up to the MACC screening the previous Wednesday, and had been happy to report that the anime clubs are equally disorganised and chaotic here as they are there.

Dr Tokita then went on to outline the teaching of Japanese popular culture at Monash and a little about the students.

Getting into the real meet of the symposium, the first session began with Professor Ito presented a paper on Gender, Violence and War in Japanese popular culture, focusing on boys' Culture.

Aside from the fact that he presented in Japanese, and I had to read along with the paper (it's like subtitles) it was fantastic. He talked about the control of the image of death and violence in pop culture, and the representation of these themes over time. Beginning with an look at boys' manga and anime around the war and the way it preached an understanding of the imperialist enemy to a look at the change in the 80s in the way political opposition was eroded and boys anime and manga began to show death and violence in a more visceral way. He showed WW2 propaganda anime. He showed the part of Battle Royal where Nobu gets his head blown off.

Kenny, Avi and I did the motions of the Video Onee-san. Kono wa BOOM desu... The Japanese in the audience stayed pretty stoic at that moment. This is me being sceptical of an in built public face being presented by the Japanese.

The second presentation was by Masayoshi Manabe. (In English, thankfully) Masayoshi's paper was called The Decline of Rokyoku: 1960s as a turning point in the history of popular culture in Japan.

The presentation was brilliant fun, mostly because of the 60s era clips he'd dug up.

Rokyoku, as I had no idea until today, is a form of singing / theatre. The sound seems poloyphonic, and reminds me quite a bit of Tuvan throat singing. I wonder if there's a cultural common ancestor to the two, or if they evolved separately. I wonder if the Japanese would be pleased to know that rokyoku isn't a unique singing style.

Masayoshi showed a couple of clips of rokyoku singers who had taken a more "pop singer" approach to their art. To see performances of something so traditionally Japanese, infused with samurai influences, clash with the Japanese talent shows was pure Japanese insanity. I can't really describe it. Picture a stage with thousands of light bulbs, the band on stage and dancing girls. Then picture a guy in the middle, dressed in a formal yukata but pretending to be Dean Martin, but singing a a traditional Japanese drone of a song. It's all the most colourful parts of popular culture (the sixties, Japanese game shows) combined with ancient traditions.

This, Masayoshi explained, was the more serious of the two prongs of an evolutionary fork of rokyoku singing that happened in the post world war II economic boom in Japan. This was the pop singer fork. The other fork was a group of artists who took the singing and performed comedy acts. Sadly, this wasn't as funny, because, well, when you're trying to be, it's just not. Imagine three guys looking like the three stooges and singing some incomprehensible (to me, at least) song in a throaty drone. Sort of like Tripod, but in the sixties and with throat cancer.

Both of these forks were the Japanese appropriating its own culture and squishing it into something suitable for the miracle of colour television.

Annnnyway. The third presentation in the first session was more of a discussion panel and was split into three parts.

There was a really interesting (to me, anyway) discussion of the language by Satoshi Kinsui. Specifically what he termed "role language" In manga, as in any comic culture, there are strong links with both the lines spoken and the image of the character and their personality. There are certain, identifiable stereotypes / archetypes.

The first of these he discussed was what he called "senior / professor language". This is the language used in manga and anime by the old, generally the professor / doctor character. (Also magicians. Aparently this is the language type that Yoda uses in the Japanese version of Star Wars, by the way)

He ran through a couple of lines in straight Japanese and in "senior language". The differences, and forgive my lack of remembering, were things like "-nai" (standard negation of a verb) to "-n" ("senior language" negation of verb)

From the paper:

Standard: 私が博士だ Watashi ga hakase da. (I am a professor)
Senior: わしが博士じゃ Washi ga hakase ja (I am a professor)
Standard: 私は知らない Watashi ha Shiranai (I don't know)
Senior: わしはしらん Washi ha shiran (I don't know)

The senior language does not exist in "Tokyo Japanese". It does, however, trace its origins to the Kyoto / Osaka language of western Japan, where it was the dominant language until the end of the Edo period.

When Edo became the capital, a gradual increase in the desirability of being "Edoko" (an Edo person) caused the Edo language became the dominant and the Kyoto / Osaka language became a dialect. This is where the differences come from. The differences can be traced through kabuki plays and mass novels, into pre-war shounen manga.

I didn't know that the female Japanese has no imperatives ("Yamero!") - the female style is limited to only a strong request form ("Yamete!") I'm sure there are papers out there discussion the inherent patriarchy of any language ("womyn", anybody?) but a lack of imperatives in the Japanese language is a little harsh. I suppose it gives more scope for a girl to use either the allocated language or the masculine language for emphasis. There's nothing like rules giving you more freedom by giving you the option to break them.

Anyway (there's that word again) Satoshi then ran through a series of pictures and had that audience identify which would use "ore" and which would use "boku". (both the masculine first person pronoun) One pair was Yugi (from YuGiOh) in his two forms. I never really understood the reason YuGiOh employs such a blatant character change. Something a little more subtle seems to me like it'd have better effect, and would do less damage to the suspension of disbelief.

I'm off track. Did you know "boku" comes from the Chinese and literally means "servant"? I didn't. Word entomology is fun™.

As a case study, Satoshi pointed to Cyborg 009 (which I think is on cartoon network right now. Or it was a while ago.)

I was never impressed by Cyborg 009. I'm still not, though now I realise at least that the imagery of each race (charater) has its origins in the work of Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901). (He's the guy on the 10,000¥ bill, by the way) Fukuzawa distinguished five main races in the world. White (European), Yellow (Asian), Red (American), Black (African) and Brown (Islander).

The best teams come in five in anime, but Cyborg 009 bucks this trend, and creates ten. To emphasise the difference between these characters, (other than that they're all different nationalities) the language differences are used.

Dr Gilmore, of course, speaks the typical professor language.
009, the main character, uses "boku" and a very individual language. He also uses "boku" because he's in love. (with 003). Love aparently makes you use "boku"
001 is a telephathic baby, and uses a very robotic language.
005 is a big native American guy, but he's taciturn.
008, African, uses a Japanese "hic" language to accentuate the remoteness of his origin.
003, being the only woman, speaks pretty typical feminine Japanese. In different plot points, she uses different types of the female language.
The most unique language is used by the Chinese 006. He speaks a pidgin.

The second part of this presentation was on the visual representations of the characters in manga, again using Cyborg 009 as a case study. Unfortunately, it was in Japanese, and I didn't seem to have the paper. So I sat there bored out of my brain for that part.

Then, of course, I found the paper.

The presenter, Kazuma Yoshimura, had been analysing the more visual aspect of the language. In his introduction, he presented some interesting statistics:

Shonen Jump publishes about 4 million copies per issue (and it's released weekly). According to the Publication Science Study Centre, 2002 saw about 15.9 billion volumes of manga sold into circulation. Presumably this is 15,900,000,000 here (American billions), which comes out to an average of 125 manga for every man woman and child in Japan.

2002's figure were down about 2.1% from the previous year. It comes out to 5.23 billion yen (again, American billions presumably) 2.63 million copies of Eiichirou Oda's One Piece were sold. Other manga that got over the 1 million mark included Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond (1.8 million copies) Gosho Aoyama's Meitanei Conan (1.4 million copies) and Yoko Kamio's Hanayori Dango (Flower Boys) (1.17 million copies).

It was Kazuma that introduced the race concept in the discussion, and detailed Yukihi Fukuzawa's work. Cyborg 009, it was explained, depends on the reader's inbuilt concepts of the differences between people of different races to separate the characters. Further, Kazuma pointed to the link between the race of the character and the super power they have.

"Nationality" (as different to race) was introduced as topic. Kazuma's conclusion was that race and nationality play an extremely important part in "the grammar of manga".

Kazuma then moved onto the roes played by the characters 009 and 003. 009 is the hero and 003 the heroine. We know that 003 and 009 are destined to be together because 003 and 009 are the white characters. Kazuma went further by saying that we not only know that they'll fall in love, but that another cyborg will come along and fall in love with 003. He then went on to the way 009's emotional conflict in the plot is mirrored by his half Japanese, half unknown nationality.

He quotes the creator of Cyborg 009, Shotaro Ishinomori:

The hero: the leading character of the story. Usually a strong and handsome man.
The heroine: the leading female character of the story. Usually a pretty, warm hearted young woman.

Before I became a manga writer, when I was just a manga fan, whatever manga I saw, the hero was handsome and the heroine beautiful, having a strong sense of justice... Therefore, I decided that if I became a manga writer I would have an unattractive hero and heroine. However, when I became a manga writer and took that first step, the editors scanned my work and in the end my determination fell through. - An Introduction to Writing Manga for Young People Akita Shoten, 1965

This leads me to two digressions. (okay, so some of this isn't actually a symposium report, but me ranting)

The first is that there's a very well known occurrence of this "hero = handsome" convention being bucked. Stan Lee, when he created the X-men, specifically made the leader of the group (Professor Xavier) physically weak. This was a reaction to the vista of comic superheroes at the time. Further, he made the character Beast the most intelligent as a nose-thumbing at the image that finds its archetype in The Hulk - intelligence is inversely proportional to strength.

My second digressionary thought is that some of our most traditional stories do not use this beautiful heroine image in the same way. Cinderella is a very plain girl until the night of the ball. The Hunchback of Notre Dame preaches a sympathy for Quasimodo. (Primarily in its film versions, though - the books are more concerned with gothic architecture, passion and religion.) Disney is big on this "internal beauty" theme - Alladin is a "diamond in the rough", Beauty and the Beast's Beast is a gentleman et cetera. This idea of counterpointing the external physical appearance with internal character is quite common in western pop culture and has been for a very long time. Perhaps it is not as prevalent in Japanese pop culture.

Kazuma then ran through a bit of a discussion of the difference in the image of the western and Japanese body types in manga imagery.

There are a couple of theories as to why anime characters are drawn with such huge eyes. One is that it is simply a tool that made it easier to express emotion. Another theory is that the style comes from early influences of Disney work on manga artists. Before the start of the 1960s, the "affluence of American consumerism" was desirable (especially when the Japanese were eaking out an existence on post WW2 rations) but around the 1960s, with the Japanese economic boom, much of the American influence was discarded. The drawing style in manga and anime remained, however.

A third theory, and the one Kazuma purported, is similar to the second. The whole character of the hero / heroine is western. This theory says that the western character (big eyes, outrageous hair) is desirable because socially it is more acceptable for westerners to do insane things than for the buttoned down Japanese to do so. The escapism of anime and manga requires the characters to be equally outlandish. Kazuma here said that the typical hero / heroine has large eyes, blond hair, long legs et cetera out of a view that the western / European body is idealised.

He then talked about the way that, because this is standard in the gammar of manga, it's not considered at all odd by the Japanese. The current generations have grown up reading so much manga that it's just situation normal for the most of the characters to be western.

Pointing again to the Chinese character in Cyborg 009, 006, Kazuma spoke of a self-image that the Japanese have of themselves. Short, glasses, bucked teeth. This came from a prejudice the Japanese had / have toward other Asian races. Kazuma identified people like George Bigot and Charles Wirgman as the source of this imagery. This prejudice was then turned inward, and the imagery became used by the Japanese to represent all Asian people, not just the non-Japanese.

Kazuma's conclusion is that the the archetypes in manga that connect the visual image of the character and the character's personality (for better or for worse) are cemented in the "grammar of manga." Manga readers have been exposed to this visual language for so long and so consistently that it is extremely difficult to break these characterisations. In his introduction he speaks of kids generally being able to guess from just the manga's title its genre, style and even the plot tendency of the work.

The third part of the session had Kenny Chan (of OzTAKU fame) and a Japanese artist, Mika Sato, who is the leading artist in her school (by what method of grading I don't know) get up and draw an "American" character (or a character that would use "ore"), and a "Japanese" character. (or character that would use "boku") This was done as an demonstration of the images that were being talked about.

The differences were were things like the size of the eyes, the line of the chin, the hair.

Then, of course, they drew Australians. Kenny described his Australian image, as a blokey, beer drinking and laid back. I hope somebody took pictures. Mika made her American characters Australian by adding freckles to one, and sunglasses and a beard on her American character that was doing the thumbs up. (It's all about the beard, folks)

Then, the Japanese ("boku") character was turned into a Chinese character imply by changing the eyes to lines. That was then made a Korean character by adding < and > to the side of the face, to represent the cheekbone structure.

Next, Mika made a American / Australian character Russian by giving it a really Tezuku - like nose. This was the only one I didn't feel was anything like what it was meant to be. It didn't look at all Russian.

The link here is the discussion of race and nationality in the imagery. There is a clear difference between the western and eastern characters in the drawing style - dramatically so. While obviously there is an actual visual physical difference between western and eastern people, in manga and anime, this is closely tied to the personality of the character. These differences, perhaps through the way caricature is used to accentuate differences, are a long way out of proportion to how different different people really are.

Kenny and the Mika were asked to draw a woman who wins love, and a woman who loses love. A noted difference in the drawing styles was where the two artists started. Kenny began with the eyes. Miska began always with the outline of the face.

The most notable difference was the hair style - the winner of love had big, flowing hair. The loser had straight hair. I suppose this goes to show that Japan seems to be stuck two decades behind the west in terms of fashion, but is somehow doing it remarkably cooler than the west was. I don't think I need to explain to people in this community how much cooler Japanese goth is now than punk was in the eighties, though I think that there are identifiable links there.

That said, what obviously identifiable fashion trends were there in the nineties? Going by my "Japan is two decades back" hypothesis, what part of the western nineties will we see churned up and spat back at us ever so much cooler in the coming decade?

But here I am digressing into my own thoughts. The second session ended at 1:15 for a lunch break.

Dr Tokita made a logistical error here. Lunch was scheduled to be 1:00 to 2:00. I understand that the panels went long, and that's actually nice in one way (there's no boring breaks between panels) but lunch should be a flexible time. Dr Tokita said we'd start again at 2:15. It should have been starting again at 2:00. Instead, even lunch ran long, and we began again at 2:30.

Dr Craig Norris, the chief architect of the symposium was up as the first presenter of the third session. This was just a quick presentation. His focus was the image of masculinty presented in pop culture. (or, more accurately, the perception of these things in the fans' minds)

He began by defining the typical Australian image of masculinity - Crocodile Dundee and Steve Erwin. This hyper-masculine, frontiersman and perhaps threatening image was compared to the bishonen of Japanese pop culture. The bishonen archetype of masculinity in Japanese pop culture, he argued, presents itself to anime and manga fans and is perhaps one of the reasons for manga / anime appeal among its western fans.

I had to run off to a lecture at 3:00, which is a real pity, as I was really enjoying the symposium. I snuck out just as Josh, the visiting American was setting up.

Josh's presentation, according to the programme, was called The Otaku Sub Culture in America. Sadly, there is no accompanying paper for the presentation. I should see if I can get the presentation file off him before he returns to the US. I think it would have been very interesting to see how anime clubs and fans perceive themselves in the US, and how they're different from Australian anime fans.

The third part of the third session was Larissa Hjorth, presenting Mobile Phones and Diversity in the Spread of Japanese 'Cute Culture' in the Asia-Pacific. I don't have a paper in my pile for this one, so maybe there wasn't one. Crap.

After I came back from the lecture, the last session was just about to start. It appears that they'd got back on schedule. Good for them.

There were technical difficulties, (which were all James's fault) so we jumped to Queenie Chan. (http://www.queeniechan.com, but more relevantly to this community queeniechan) Queenie explained the anime and manga scene in Hong Kong (as she saw it).

Manga is big in Hong Kong. It seems that the more popular ones are those with the more realistic art style.

She spoke of the native Hong Kong comics, and the styles. Really only niche comics and Hong Kong manga that imitate the Japanese art get anywhere. The local Hong Kong artistry has caught up to the quality of Japanese art, so Queenie suggests that the content is what's letting the Hong Kong manga down.

There are also the issues of the anime, cosplay and basically the culture around authentic Japanese manga that the Hong Kong manga artists can't compete with. Merchandising is easy to bring across to the Hong Kong market from Japan.

Queenie comes to this topic from the point of view of someone who tries to produce her own work. A general desire to produce work the reflects her own culture, and a commercial need to differentiate herself from Japanese manga has been influencing her. There are also things like her mother's background as a Chinese Opera singer that feed into her work. [image]

She showed a manga she submitteed to TokyoPop with speciifically Australian themes called TwinSide. TokyoPop didn't pick it up, but they did eventually accept a manga called The Dreaming (again, with strong Australian themes - it's about a boarding school out in the bush that kids are disappearing from.) TokyoPop has recently been encouraging themes and things that aren't at all in manga, and encouraging the new and fresh.

Queenie puts this down to manga being so damn broard. (It's a medium, not a genre) She says that due to this all-encompassing broardness, anything you try to do in manga will probably have already been done. (Like thats's ever stopped anybody from producing anything...)

She got a little nasty (as she should) about the manga companies that bought up the rights to manga just to stop others from releasing it.

Craig asked a question about where Queenie had submitted her work, and she answered that only TokyoPopo was really interested in taking submissions from non-Japanese artists.

Also, Craig asked if there's much social support for this sort of work. Queenie pointed to LiveJournal. She said that there was a "mushrooming" online community of artists working in manga, specifically TokyoPop submitters.

She was asked if any of her work had ever come under editorial control. It has only happened once, and only in a vague sort of way. She had used the defence that it's Australian culture. More specifically, she's been able to push for English spelling, instead of American spelling in her work.

Dr Tokita asked if any of the Hong Kong artists are working in English, and would that make it easier to get published in America? Queenie didn't really know of any, though she assumes that there would be artists' websites in English.

James Rampant, having fixed his problems was up as the second presenter of the fourth session. James is the 2005 president of MACC, and has been running the manga translation workshops and the Lost in Scanlation Project.

The workshops started as an activity for visiting exchange students. Having a lot of fun, the group decided that it was worth making into a Project. While originally the project was going to be translation of the stuff in the manga library, it evolved to take advantages of the wonders of teh interweb, it became more.

James explained that the workflow of the translation workshops is a little different from a traditional scanlation group - the workshops have everybody working together, so that the editors can argue with the translators. This is much less linear than the usual (online) scanlation process.

James divided scanlation into the categories - Commercial, Online and Magajin. Mangajin was a magazine in the USA that was available worldwide. It had the kaji / kana, romaji and English. In comparison, the general scanlations are distributed in a single language (the target language for the audience) The Lost in Scanlation project sees itself as having a more education - oriented goal than simple scanlations, and as such, publishes in the Mangajin style. (however, it seems that only some of the stuff they've put up so far has the romaji and English.

James touched only a tiny bit on the legality of the scanlation process, which I think is a little sad. I'd have liked to see more. IP law is an area that affects every western anime and manga fan quite directly - from blatantly ignoring the illegality of fansubs and scanlation, to the health of the Japanese industry that produces the stuff we love.

James instead jumped straight to the cultural aspects that required special treatment. He showed some Ranma 1/2 stuff that introduced new words into the English language, because it had seemingly been decided that the translator didn't want to bother and so just wrote out the romaji. Also, James illustrated the problem of onomatopoeic words (like *snore* or *slurp*) Fans of the scanlations seemed to prefer that a straight romaji version of the Japanese is used in these cases.

Other problems included things like Osaka Dialect, puns, and statements with ambiguous meanings. He showed a scene that they had recently tried to translate where on character says "Kitte!" (Listen!) and another replies "Hello Kitty".

He then talked aobut the Lost In Scanlation website. He mentioned that the scanlations are the translations are bi-lingual. Due to legal limitations, they only put up 10% of the manga. He showed how some of the scanlations work with Jim Breen's online Japanese dictionary. Then came some pimping for the various other parts of the site. I'm sure you're all big kids who can got check it out for yourself.

James spoke of a project they're working with the JSC to form a textbook that builds on the translation work to put context to learning Japanese. There have been textbooks that use manga / comic imagery in teaching Japanese, but they're pretty daggy.

A question to Queenie and James asked what the future of manga was; online or hardcopy.

Queenie jumped on the answer as she's done some work for Wirepop, which is a project to sell manga online, but so far people don't want to part with their money. She hinted that this might be due to a fear of online payment, but the issue wasn't really explored.

James was asked how they actually dealt with the problems that arose from translating the onomatopoeia? James said he generally left it up to the groups. This is one of the reasons the group work style of the workshops has been as successful as it has been.

The last presentation of the day was by Kenny Chan. Kenny spoke about the development of the manga scene in Singapore.

Singapore has been getting imports of Japanese popular culture since the 80s. Due to old prejudices, in many cases the Japanese origin of the items is concealed. Macross, for example, had its theme song replaced, and credits were removed. In many anime, the credits were replaced by a big blue screen with "To be continued..." or simply cut.

Despite this there were certain Japanese department stores in Singapore, with import toys (like Transformers)

This trend continues today - Japanese import toys are generally sectioned off in department stores (if they are there at all)

As to anime on TV there was a very split up audience. The official language of Singapore is Malay, business is generally done in English, but ~70% of people speak Chinese. Most anime shown are the American dubs.

Manga was highly censored and was crappy quality, but it was bog cheap. ($2 / vol) That's changing a little now. Kenny had an old copy of the first volume of the Dragon Ball Z manga. It looks photocopy quality, with censorship leaving panels and whole pages just blank.

Kenny explained that the censorship system in Singapore works in a moronic way. If nobody complains, it's fine. Newtype USA, for example, has been banned while Fist of The North Star is available at Kinyokunya. Generally this is because nobody reads Japanese. In the Dragon Ball Z manga, they had added boxers to a scene where a character is fishing nude. One episode of Ranma, when aired in the 90s was cut to just 10 minutes (including opening and closing credits and ads).

Japanese popular culture was only imported into Singapore piece by piece. There was no real interest in Japanese culture as a whole or as a brand, just interest of specific series until the mid-ninties.

Heaven's Coins was broadcast in 1994 and this was the first step of a boom in Japanese culture imports into Singapore. There were, however, no leagal anime videos available. It was all pirated stuff, sold in department stores.

The Heaven's Coins VCD set, for example, had, in Japanese "Original Soundtrack" on the label. Somebody had obviously just ripped the image off the sound track CD. Bootlegging is still a big problem in Singapore. Kenny saw a dodgy VCD of Howl's Moving Castle in a department store last time he was there, for example.

In terms of a fan community, Kenny said that there really was nothing in Singapore before the mid 90s. The first official anime club was the MewKey anime club, (I may have got this wrong) and this was the first time the clubs started to interact with each other.

Singapore is stange in that there are no anime conventions as such, but there are usually three cosplay events a year. The first was held at a community centre in 1999. In 2000 the event moved to a hall out the back of a shopping centre. There were about 200-300 people in attendance.

Then the media and sponsorship got involved. One of the camera companies arranged a photo shoot involving cosplayers getting on public transport and taking photos of each other. Newspaper feedback regarding cosplay and these events, however, was actually pretty negative and mocking.

The so called "first generation" of anime fans (80s and 90s) are now adult. Some of them are starting to move into the industry or related industries.

There isn't a doujishi market, but there is a fanart market in Singapore. Kenny jumped on the great wide interweb thing are showed a couple of sites.

As an example of art for sale by Singaporean artists, he showed: http://www.wings-symphonia.com/

Some fans also sell costumes: http://cosplay.funny-face.com, http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home2000/s78006881/ This one shows costumes including an Escaflowne that really transforms to the dragon type. (Hrmmm. Neither of those links work. I must have written them down incorrectly.)

Dr Tokita encouraged everybody to send their papers to James for the Lost in Scanlation website, so hopefully the papers might be up there eventually. I wouldn't hold your breath, though.

MACC started running its marathon screening at about 5:30, and I dropped off some drinks and left to go to the second part of the Manifest treasury workgroups meeting.

It's hard to separate the presentations from the event itself in this sort of thing. And the presentations were absolutely fantastic.

The symposium had its share of technical difficulties and over time problems, but they got themselves sorted and back on time soon enough. The venue was well set up.

Most credit goes to the organisers for attracting such prestigious presentations. The symposium absolutely wiped the floor with Manfiest's panels. I deeply egret I could only attend the Friday, and will definitely be back next year.

Whoa. 5700 words. It's probably a good thing I didn't go Saturday.

Edited 2005-03-07: I should proof-read things...