Ok, so I lied when I said I wasn’t going to update again until the 4th Wednesday of the month. I have a mini update to plug in before my next big article. Anime Central still has a little more content to pump out of it for the year. I’d like to take the time to draw some attention to the Virtual World Entertainment, MechCorps Entertainment LLC, and VGCorps groups involved in the touring BattleTech road show that regularly visit anime, gaming, and sci-fi conventions around the southern and mid-western United States.

The BattleTech: Fire Storm game is a multiplayer arcade game stemming from the same BattleTech franchise and affiliated fictional universe that spawned the MechWarrior series of PC and home console video games that were popular during the mid 90s and early 2000s. Firestorm is the second generation of BattleTech arcade simulators, following the 1990 BattleTech VR which ran on the original Tesla arcade pod. The 2009 released Firestorm game runs on the updated Tesla II arcade pod, each of which is outfitted with 5 different MFD(multi-function display) screens surrounding the main heads up display, as well as a sort of PFD(Primary flight display): that is a total of seven different monitors. Each MFD displays information and menus pertaining to specific functions of your mech: Navigation, Communications, Armor, Targeting, and Weapons (as you can see in the illustration flyer to the left/right) each with corresponding buttons with which to cycle through and select your various different available options. basic controls are split up between throttle(1 axis, 1 button), two foot pedals, and a joystick. (if I am remembering this correctly it has 3 buttons and 1 trigger)

The arcade pod itself has a very nice retro, industrial sci-fi look about it and the look and feel of being seated in the cockpit with the door shut and only the light of your 7 monitors to see by creates a genuinely unique experience. In spite of what sound like a complicated barrage of conflicting interfaces and controls, any giant robot fan with a little bit of genre savvy will appreciate the appropriately complicated detail. In reality though, it’s not as convoluted as it may look at first glance, really the somewhat daunting array of monitors just break down a standard HUD or game menu into an every present collection of status updates without the hassle and mood breaking process of pausing and navigating drop down menus, and with the added rush of excitement in adjusting and managing your mech’s weapons, armor, and equipment in the heat of battle.

The game itself is remarkably simplistic. As one of as many as 5 to 15 other pilots engaged in any given conflict, you have your choice of dozens of mechs, divided into various weight/mobility classes, and all with their own unique combination of weapons, equipment, and stats. Once gameplay starts you and the other mechs are deployed onto a fairly barebones 3D rendered battlefield and depending on whether you’re fighting in a free for all or on teams you have at it. When your mech gets trashed you’re briefly warped out of and then back onto the battle field and let back into the fray. Individual matches last something around 7 minutes, and a single match can cost either $5 or $4 if you pay for a $20 card with 5 game credits on it. While you and your friends play in the Tesla pods, the entire conflict is broadcast over any number of standards TV or computer monitors cycling through different camera angles of the overall battle field, and when you’re done you are even offered a full printout of your performance stats, and a summary of the entire conflict.

What I absolutely love about this concept is that it is the embodiment of a nearly 3 decade old dream of sci-fi geeks bearing just the earliest signs of fruit. With the original BattleTech franchise spanning back into the 80s and permeating almost every medium of fiction available on the company’s admittedly modest budget, the development of the Tesla pods and updated Tesla II pods is a hardware development that has sadly gone unnoticed, under appreciated, and holds an enormous amount of potential that remains altogether untapped.

I’ll spare you my usual ranting today in favor of just sort of fanboying in a somewhat organized manner: The first BattleTech center was opened in Chicago Illinois, USA in 1990 and later spread as far as Japan where it saw great success. While the American activities and expansion of the Virtual World Entertainment company have gone about over the past twenty years without much disruption to or by the rest of the game industry, the Japanese branch folded by the end of 2000 and has since gone without resurrection. But I personally don’t believe that this was due to any real lack of interest so much as financial complications in either trying to run and overseas outlet or maintain a foreign division of what was always a fairly small company and one that frequently saw a change of hands in ownership during the late 90s. Where as the American market for arcade games and the arcade scene in general fell prey to a violent crash and burn during the late 90s and early 2000s, Japan’s has always held a firmer grip on its place in urban Japanese culture and so I suspect that the domestic competition was just too steep.

Of course it could also be possible that the Japanese simply didn’t take to the BattleTech title as an unfamiliar franchise, considering that the Japanese revisited the base concept themselves in 2006 when Bandai Namco and game developers in Banpresto produced the Mobile Suit Gundam: Bonds of the Battlefield P.O.D. (Panoramic Optical Display) arcade machines. The beautifully designed machines offer a 180 degree screen, physical feedback, and online gameplay to allow for full 8vs8 matches ready to launch at all times. The game of course featured a wide selection of original Mobile Suit Gundam machines, both United Earth Federation and Zeon models, to pilot as well as a variety of different elaborate locations modeled straight off of the original 1979 anime TV series.

I don’t mean to let Japanese big budget projects like Banpresto’s P.O.D. overshadow the Tesla II by any means however. (I vastly prefer the Tesla II’s mechanical appearance and performance to the P.O.D.’s) What I truly love about putting these two arcade machines side by side is showing just how much potential there really is for the Tesla pod series, for Virtual World Entertainment, and for the unique arcade experience in America as a whole. Think of what a system like the ones I’ve just described with not only a fully function mech simulator game available, but multiple different mech oriented games, with multiple game modes and map options in each would be like. Technically the Tesla pods have been used for just such an experiment, several Virtual World Entertainment centers around the US still feature both BattleTech games as well as a racing game called Red Planet on their Tesla pods.

Now imagine for a moment that the old 70s-80s arcade boom has somehow made a comeback. Imagine that you’re on your summer vacation, you and four friends are off to the mall, or the movie theater, or if you still have one in your local town, an actual arcade for the afternoon. You and your friends find a machine like the Tesla II or the P.O.D. and between the bench of you, you split the cost of a 5 match card. You sit inside and settle into your seat, lean forward to your main dashboard and swipe your card before passing it off to your friends in turn. You watch the cycling title and leader board screens fade away and you’re faced with a selection of games based off some of your favorite best selling sci-fi franchises: BattleTech, Gundam, StarWars, Zoids, Robotech, etc… as well as arcade original titles. You and your friends pick your game, your game mode, your machines, your weapons, your gamer tags, teams, and then server and open game. For the next 10 minutes you and your friends are rocked jolted and shaken in your chairs as you take on a team of 5 Japanese late night arcade crawlers in an explosive and fast paced team elimination game, or capture the flag, or territory capture, or race through well rendered well modeled set pieces from the show/ movie you’re familiar with or brand new ones that you can explore and master.

When I see the BattleTech road tour team at events like Anime Central, I don’t just see a cool arcade game with a unique gimmick, what I see is the potential inherent to the arcade scene: an immersive experience that you can’t get sitting in your room in your parents’ house or in a dorm in your boxers and a tee-shirt. The sort of mechanically awe inspiring and aesthetically and stylishly appropriate apparatus that makes your eyes light up, your heart skip a beat, and your inner child gasp and squeal with pure honest impulsive excitement: the sort of machine that you not only can’t afford but that isn’t going to fit in a house you’ll ever afford in the next 10-20 years. What I see is the future of competitive online gaming. (after all, let’s face it you’re never going to get a decent lag-free internet connection to game on living out of a ruddy little house/apartment/dorm, and why even pay the obscene prices for a better provider when an arcade owner can shell out for a silky smooth T3 connection?) Given the right financial and public support from enthusiastic gamers, sci-fi fans, and just geeks in general, a group like Virtual World Entertainment could rock the world with something like the Tesla pods line in the near future.

The future will just have to wait for now though. For the time being, I’m just happy to spread the word and give a little bit of recognition to a group that I admire for their ongoing efforts to bring a fantastically fun and unique gaming experience to nerds here in the US. For those interested, information on both current permanent BattleTech centers and of conventions on the road tour group’s schedule for the rest of this year can be found on the Virtual World Entertainment BattleTech Centers wiki and the Virtual World Entertainment LLC homepage, respectively. I hope you’ll take the time to check out this group if you’re in any of these areas at an appropriate time.

Welcome back to the Owl in the Rafters, where I, Tyto, your host, not only can’t think of a title for the week, but also desperately need to find a better way to open this article than saying “Welcome back” every week. In other news, information on the new 2012 Saint Seiya TV series due to air this April 1st has been causing a stir around the web. The new series will be titled Saint Seiya Omega, and has thus far been met with somewhat divided but generally energetic reception from fans world wide. The main point of controversy with older Saint Seiya fans is the change in art style, something that I’ll go into greater detail with just a little bit later. For now I want to start with a short overview on the original Saint Seiya‘s history.

In English some fans may be more familiar with the title Knights of the Zodiac which is a somewhat more self descriptive title. The franchise started, as so many do, as a standard serialized manga published in Shueisa’s Weekly Shounen Jump during the mid 80s and which continued into the early 90s. The author and artist, Masami Kurumada was actually already a fairly popular and successful manga artist by the time he started on Saint Seiya in 1986, but the series would prove to be his greatest success. (to date anyhow, the man is still alive after all) It would also cement his reputation for specializing in fight series starring pretty-boy heroes, a strong diversifying factor at the time that helped keep his series popular with both boys and girls.

The series was an immediate success; it took eight months of weekly publications before the first collected volume of manga hit shelves and only one month after that the anime started airing on TV Asahi. Apart from being a Jump flagship title during the late 80s Saint Seiya also saw unexpectedly huge success overseas starting in France as Les Chevaliers du Zodiaque and swiftly followed by Italy, Spain, and South America; Latin American countries took to the series particularly well and it is still a classic title, considered a cornerstone to many anime fans’ childhoods, right along side the likes of shows like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Card Captor Sakura. In fact, as it stands France and Brazil have both already arranged to simulcast the new Saint Seiya Omega when it airs in April.

Other than the original 114 episode anime and this new Omega series there have been three OVAs, five feature length films, and a long line of internationally sold toys. Now, I mentioned that there has been a change in art style and I have also mentioned that there is a well established fan-base for this franchise; I assume you can put two and two together and know how poorly devoted fans tend to adapt to change, this is no exception. However, I would like to offer some reassurance and justification to the changes that have been made and shed some light on the history of the man responsible for the bulk of those changes. That man is Yoshihiko Umakoshi.

If the name isn’t terribly familiar to you it might be because Umakoshi is best known as a character designer and animation director, both roles that don’t see a lot of the limelight, what with attentions more often focused on overall project directors, writers, musical composers, and actors. Despite being a fairly unheard of name outside of Japan he is not a new face to the industry, as relative obscurity might normally suggest; Umakoshi has been animating since the mid 90s and has had a hand as Key Animator in dozens of popular and successful titles since then.

Like I already mentioned, Umakoshi has a long list of titles under his belt as a professional but I have no intention of going over all of them, even just in passing. Instead I’d like to focus solely on the titles in which he acted as both Character Designer and Chief Animation Director, effectively cropping out all the titles in which he either didn’t work on character designs, didn’t work as animation director, or only worked as animation director on a few episodes of a series. I will point out that, to his credit as a man well known for dynamic animation, he has directed Opening and Ending credit animation sequences for all of the following shows: Gokinjo Monogatari/ Neighborhood Story, Ashita no Nadja, Jubei-chan: The Ninja Girl 2, Otogi Zoushi, Zipang, and in more recent years Mawaru Penguindrum and Toriko.

One of Umakoshi’s first major dual roles as animation director and character designer was on the 1994 Grappler Baki: The Ultimate Fighter OVA, based on the Baki the Grappler manga, known and sold solely on its fight scenes and a largely well received series over all. The art style held closely to its source material so the character design aspect of the job was less subject to Umakoshi’s personal flare, but the job was done with a wonderful amount of finesse. Even with his obligations to the original manga’s art and design for his framework, he manages to inject every fight scene with an incredible amount of unique style. I am actually at a real lack of words to define that one thing that sets him apart, but if I were to describe it in relative terms, it just feels like compared to other shows that have aired around the same time as his work, Umakoshi simply gives off a vibe that suggests he was the only animator working in the industry that season who know what he was doing.

Umakoshi’s attention to detail in certain fight scenes in Grappler Baki is part of what really makes his animation shine. The very fight is alive and dynamic, rather than a boring flinging of stiff limbs and prolonged dashes across four foot long distances. At no point does Umakoshi really ever avoid adding detail simply because the detail isn’t necessary and more often than not the usual “short cuts” of animation like blurred or vanishing action-line limbs is actually used to convey a real sense of speed rather than to dodge having to draw more details. What I think I’m trying to get at here is that Umakoshi is a true master of his art as an animator, and he understands how to make his animation interesting without falling pray to self-indulgence or cheap crowd pleasers. Of all Umakoshi’s work that I’ll be going over here, I can honestly say that for any fighting anime fans, Grappler Baki is an absolute must see.

Umakoshi was also the character designer and one of just two animation directors behind the 1999 Street Fighter Alpha movie. (aka. Street Fighter Zero) While not a fantastic movie by any means, the fights are what I’m really most concerned with and the animation in that area of the film was fantastic. Also worth noting is that while Umakoshi may have had a little more freedom with the character designs this time around, as there was no single art style for him to stick to, he made a clear point of keeping the character designs very much in the spirit of the look and feel of the games. While the film has very little merit as far as stories go, the the fights are worth watching for.

Interestingly one of the most glaring issues with the character designs in this film is the awkwardly small and wide size and setting of the eyes, creating a feeling of unusually large heads and faces. This is somewhat ironic, considering Umakoshi’s later developed personal art style is often criticized for having enormous close set eyes, just the opposite of the Street Fighter Alpha movie models. The approach to special moves also marks a prime example of Umakoshi’s approach to special effect type powers in a fight animation, something that hadn’t come up in Baki The Grappler.

I do hate to list two pretty much indisputably bad titles back to back, for fear of losing steam but working chronologically the next big Umakoshi job we run into is the 2003 TV series, Air Master. I’ll start by saying that the original Air Master manga drawn by Shibata Yokusaru was about as unattractively drawn as any manga has ever been. While the anime was in fact bad, mostly on account of the story, it could still be considered a great improvement over the manga because of Umakoshi’s work on animation. It was actually quite fortunate that Umakoshi found work on such a bizarre title because it left him artistic liberty over everything but the most basic character features and basic plot.

With the task of reworking the characters from scratch in his hands, Umakoshi began to show signs of his personal style. While the basic proportions and models were basically just cleaner more practical updates of the manga’s art style, the most noticeable difference was in the eyes. The Air Master designs showed early signs of Umakoshi’s now iconic looking eyes, which are given particular emphasis in displaying shock, fear, or occasionally various degrees of insanity.

Also worth noting is that the fights in Air Master were actually really well done despite the show’s otherwise erratic quality, drawing heavily on Umakoshi’s firm grasp of animating martial arts fights to compensate for where Yokusaru’s manga fell short on detail. The downside to the show was really just that the story and characters weren’t terribly interesting, the over all plot was outrageously nonsensical, the series got cut short and was given a last minute filler ending, and even the abundant fan-service was somehow awkward and unappealing. To be totally fair however it is fun enough to watch through once, but I wouldn’t expect to ever find it on anyone’s top ten favorites list.

In an unusual and somewhat rare change of pace, Umakoshi worked as character designer and chief animation director over a staff of more than a dozen other animators on the 2005 supernatural mystery series/drama series, Mushishi. Some of Umakoshi’s lower profile jobs both in his early career and in recent years have leaned away from the martial-arts and combat angle and turned his talents toward special effects in shows with elements of magic and/or the supernatural; typically these jobs involve magical girl series, or other shows that utilize magic and the supernatural in action scenes, but Mushishi was a special case. The original manga by Urushibara Yuki featured a very rough and sketchy but beautifully detailed art style that made the somewhat slow pace of the story feel comforting and natural. Umakoshi’s character designs were once again reserved for cleaning up and smoothing over the original art style into a more consistent, and his direction over the animation team did a fantastic job of bringing the surreal and supernatural elements to life.

So, here is where things get more interesting. In 2008 Umakoshi stepped on board a fairly big project for the animation company named Tatsunoko: Casshern SINS. As a little bit of background on Tatsunoko itself, the company is probably most recognized by a modern Western audience for the fighting game, Tatsunoko VS Capcom that was inexplicably released in the US for the Wii in 2009. I say inexplicably because Tatsunoko’s name and some of its biggest titles are virtually unknown to a Western audience, least of all a younger one, so the choice to localize the game at all seemed a poor marketing move.

Perhaps the only major Tatsunoko titles known in the US would be the classic Science Ninja Team Gatchaman aka Battle of the Planets aka G-Force: Guardians of Space aka Eagle Riders, Mach Go Go Go best known as Speed Racer, Tekkaman Blade aka Teknoman, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Mospeada, and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross the three series used to create the American Robotech, Cat Ninja Legend Teyandee best known as Samurai Pizza Cats, The SoulTaker and its spinoff series Nurse Witch Komugi, the two Karas films. Save the Karas films, The Soul Taker, and technically Samurai Pizza Cats, these are all classic 70s and 80s shows that you probably wouldn’t expect kids today to be familiar with.

In any case the Tatsunoko company is a classic staple of the anime industry and the name behind some of the bigger classics of the 70s, and among those 70s classics is the original Shinzou Ningen Kyashaan. (Lit. “New-Human Casshern”) The original 1973 TV series was about a super powered android fighting to liberate the world from the tyranny of rampaging super robots with the help of his robotic dog companion, Friender. It is worth noting that this series is also the core inspiration to the original Rockman/Megaman games.

When the Casshern SINS series was made the story was a darker approach to the original story, similar in tone to the live-action Casshern film that had been released in 2004. Unlike all his previous character design work, Umakoshi took the opportunity to utilize his own unique art style, reworking the original designs drastically. Like with the current upcoming Saint Seiya reboot, the change of art style rattled some cages with older fans. It is true that Umakoshi’s highly stylized art can take some getting used to, especially when it is applied to a franchise with an existing image, but while its appropriateness for certain franchises is a matter of taste, his art is by no means “bad.” As I’ve been pushing the real emphasis in Umakoshi’s art and animation is, of course, in his fight scenes, which in Casshern SINS are totally original and gorgeously done with the kind of artistic flare that a lot of anime tends to lack.

Jumping ahead some more, in 2010 the ongoing magical girl franchise, Pretty Cure brought Umakoshi on board as character designer and animation director of Heartcatch Pretty Cure. The overall franchise started with Futari wa Pretty Cure in 2004 and has pumped out a new series every year since, like clockwork. The series follows fairly typical magical girl format from front to back, with the one difference being that the fights have been notably more physical, avoiding the usual sole reliance on magical trinkets and special moves in every fight. The signature moves and magical tools are still there of course, as finishing moves, but a good deal of the regular fights actually turn into punch and kick brawls between the magical girls and monsters more often than not, and that has become the franchise’s calling card.

I did mention that Umakoshi had done work in both design and animation with other magical girl titles, not the least of which was the long running Ojamajo Doremi franchise, so his mixture of experience with both fight scenes and magical special effects finally had a real excuse to walk hand in hand. Most notable is that the fights not only consisted of actually hand to hand combat on top of magical spells, special techniques, and weapons, but of totally original animation, as opposed to the more typical and cost effective recycling of stock footage. Umakoshi’s work on Heartcatch Pretty Cure has since made it one of the more notable fan favorites and a sort of gateway series into the franchise.

Now, this bring us back to 2012 and this April 1st when Saint Seiya Omega debuts. When it comes to Saint Seiya there are perhaps three major concerns about the integrity of the original series. The first concern is the action, which as a fighting series is of course first and foremost. I think it should go without saying by now that this is the one category that Umakoshi has safely covered without any room for argument, no matter what finicky Saint Seiya fanboys may have to say about it. Having Umakoshi on staff is a dream come true for a reboot of any action series.

So then the rest of the concerns come down to aspects of design. The show and its original author, Masami Kurumada, are both known for prettyboy heroes and again, given Umakoshi’s particular art style, no matter how different it may happen to be from Masami’s that core element is unchanged. There is of course plenty of room for personal taste and liking Masami’s art style and liking Umakoshi’s are totally independent things, but when you really boil down all the personal issues between the two, the heroes are still as slender and boyish as ever; Umakoshi hasn’t changed that.

So, finally this just leaves the alterations on the classic “cloth” designs. In the story the heroes and villains all wear “cloths” which are magical suits of armor, each uniquely themed after the image of a constellation, the hero being the bearer of the pegasus cloak. This is the one area where I do see some problems. While still entirely a matter of taste and in no way a objective fault on Umakoshi’s part, the cloths were an iconic feature of the original manga and anime, so much so that they were naturally the centerpiece of the internationally successful toy line. While the changes may have been minor the very idea of changing the look and feel of the iconic armor is something that has not sat well with fans, and I can’t really blame them. Umakoshi’s designs are sleek and streamlined but lack the bulk and weight of the original suits of armor, it gives off the feeling that the armor is flimsier and more fashion than function. However, I do like Umakoshi’s art style and his designs, even if they are admittedly an odd change in certain regards.

“Everything having been said in regards to Umakoshi’s history, I really hope you will all look forward to seeing this new Saint Seiya Omega series once it comes out, and when you find the time, go back over some of Yoshiko Umakoshi’s other work, and keep an eye out for his name involved with future projects.” is what I would normally say, but I also need to stop ending my articles with hoping you’ll be interested or having hoped you enjoyed things, so I won’t say that. Instead I’ll say this: Watch the Saint Seiya Omega series once it comes out this April, and when you find the time, go back over some of Yoshiko Umakoshi’s other work, and keep an eye out for his name involved with future projects! Do it! Do it because I said so!

I feel bad that this has taken me so long to get to, but more than a month ago now I attended Otakon 2011 in Baltimore, Maryland. As one of the premier anime conventions in North America and the largest on the East Coat, Otakon is often proud to boast a large selection of panels, industry guests, and musicians from both Japan and America. Among the guests these year however was a guest with his hand in a little bit of everything: Japanese-American fiction writer, journalist, musician, college professor and lecturer both in America and Japan, and of course anime fan, Roland Nozomu Kelts.

As the author of the 2006 publication, Japanamerica: How Japanese Culture has Invaded the U.S., Roland Kelts appeared at Otakon this year not only to sign autograph and book signing sessions but also as the host of 4 different panels (Japanamerica and Japan’s Apocalyptic Imagination in Anime, Manga, and Art on Friday, Pop Culture From a Multipolar Japan on Saturday, and Japan’s IP Problem on Sunday) over the course of the weekend covering various aspects of his book, Japanamerica, and the research that went into it.

During opening ceremonies, Kelts was introduced as an “academic guest” –though Kelts himself complained it made him sound a little boring– and as such did a marvelous job in his panels touching upon some of the major academic approaches central to analyzing anime and the subculture surrounding it: art history, art theory, film study, anthropology, cultural studies, and business.

In Japanamerica, Roland Kelts tackles his broad subject in 9 different chapters, each with a different approach to looking at the anime/manga subculture in both America and Japan, and of course how the two interrelate. The first of these addresses the history of American localization and just what it was about early anime shows like Battle of the Planets that made them so appealing to American audiences. The differences in Japanese and American societies at the time called for a different kind of psychological fulfillment. In simpler terms; in an industry of children’s entertainment over-saturated with like-minded productions, anime presented American children with fresh new, different, and meaningful ideas.

*That is the English cover on the left of the above image, and the Japanese cover on the right with cover art by who I am assuming is NisiOisin (original creator of Katanagatari, Bakemonogatari, and Kizumonogatari) although I can’t confirm that and it could just as easily have been by one of the Katanagatari anime art staff mimicking his art style.

After tracing the appeal points of anime to Americans, Kelts takes the next logical step back in chapter two and examines just what it was about Japanese culture that produced such edgy mediathat was so drastically different from its American counterparts at the time. He points chiefly to Japan’s long history of cultural trauma, both from the multitude of natural disasters centered around Japan’s geographical location and of course Japan’s military history and relationship with America, from Admiral Perry, to WWII, to the Vietnam War. He points to the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 as America’s first real experience with social trauma that directly threatens the public and not just the government.

He draws parallels to the firebombings in Japan during WWII, in which American war tactics favored indiscriminate bombing of all buildings, not just military installations, where the Japanese civilians were not so fearful of losing the war as they were fearful for their lives. This kind of vulnerability affects a population and calls for a certain kind of shift in popular trends towards national empowerment. In the case of Japan’s casualties in WWII as well as the usual natural disasters it calls for subtle themes of technological power and man-vs-nature. He also suggests that the relative comfort and lack of trauma in modern Japanese creators(prior to the earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown) as a possible cause for the recent change in themes over the years.

A later chapter also addresses the appeal to branch groups within the anime subculture like collectors and cosplayers. The real hook of anime and manga could really be argued to be less in product itself and more in the fandom, which is not always a comforting thought, personally. Not to undermine this section in particular, but my own interest falls outside of the category so I’ll just set it aside, out of harm’s way, and move on.

Another chapter addresses Japan’s interrelated approach to producing and marketing toys and other collectable products like card games along side hit anime titles. The need to make a vast multitude of toys in Japan is tied to Japanese business practice, which is somewhat infamous world wide for being strictly number driven and at one point almost ruthlessly efficient. What this means is that Japanese businesses put a great deal of value on quality and productivity above all else and the emphasis on physical product is in part meant to counteract the instability of the anime market.

Perhaps you’ve never thought of it in regards to business, so I’d like to try my hand at putting a little bit of this into perspective: Think of every infomercial or every dollar store, super market, Target, or Wal-mart you’ve been to I’m sure you can recall all sorts of silly products that you laughed at, thinking, “What idiot thought this up?” Well consider for a moment that those idiots don’t just happen to own factories ready made to mass produce their terrible ideas. No, every one of those idiots has a backer of some sort who throws money at the necessary people to get their stupid product off the ground. Why are people so willing to pour money into these kinds of seemingly stupid projects? Because they’re banking on the venture to pay off, of course.

This idea of investment and projected returns is simple enough, but this is a point over which American and Japanese business can sometimes differ. In general, Americans tend to be remarkably open to the idea of throwing all their money down on preposterous gambles on uncertain products or ideas, especially when compared to the rest of the world; the Japanese however are just the opposite. Japanese businesses much prefer to produce only when they have some measurable sense of how well a product will do, and for stylistic and highly subjective ideas with no physical numbers -things like anime- making that leap of faith needed to throw down the money to make a product is difficult. One clear sign of this mentality is that once upon a time an anime would be contracted for a year long run at a time with between 49-52 episodes. In the 2000s that suddenly got cut in half to 2 season/6 month contracts with 24-26 episodes. And if you keep up with anime at all now’days you’ll realize that an average show will run just a meager single season of as little as 11-13 episodes.

In what some call a dying industry, the long term commitment to a project that may flop in three months, or even succeed but go stale after six months, the Japanese simply aren’t willing to trust their investments to any one series. As a result a sort of brand loyalty to trends has also become almost crippling in that many of the manga being adapted into anime are all similar in plot, story, and character types.

How can an industry be dying if they still produce so many new anime? you may ask. Well, in two other chapters Kelts goes on to explain how the entertainment businesses responsible for hit games like Pacman, as well as big name animation studios, are all remarkably small outfits with incomes significantly smaller than what many fans seem to imagine. A good deal of this is traced back to the early rise of anime in Japan, which Kelts addresses. The godfather of anime, Osamu Tezuka, while a great pioneer of animation in Japan is also one of the chief causes of the industry’s shortcomings, including the unreasonably low wages of animators in Japan.

Kelts also goes over Japan and the anime industry’s desperate struggle to get up to date with intellectual property(IP) laws. As it stands, Japanese artists have very little control over their intellectual property and yet the companies that do have little to no sense of how to effectively regulate or distribute said IP in the ever expanding and quickening sea of digital media. This idea of what Intellectual Property is and how it can/should be handled professionally, as well as Japan’s struggle with learning to adapt to American business practice concerning it, was the subject of one of Kelts’s Otakon 2011 panels: Japan’s IP Problem.

This concept of addressing intellectual property via the legal system is all fairly new even in America. Western comic book fans and generally current event aware geeks may be familiar with the dispute over the ownership of the Captain America character, spotlighted in lieu of the recent film. The Japanese generally don’t have these kinds of debates, as their legal system is not as prone to nitpicking the minor implications and specificities of legal contracts. As far as the Japanese tend to be concerned, when they sign a contract with a company the contract acts exactly as stated, with no room for abstract interpretations or semantics. America of course has made an entire business of finding and abusing any and all holes in legal documents in order to wiggle in and out freely of nearly any dispute. It is because of this lack of finesse in business law that many Japanese companies do not have adequate means to protect their own IP.

At this point I could probably go over most of the points I found interesting in the book in detail, but I feel that defeats the purpose. So then, I’ll move away from the heavier subjects and just wrap things up with my feelings about the book.

What I love most about books like this in general, but specifically with Kelts’s personal approach, is that it puts the remarkably narrow vision of American anime fans into a comprehensive academic context. Too often American fans leave the real history, business, and cultural context of how the anime business and culture works in its native setting up to their imaginations. To be fair of course, they often have little to no way to really put things into context themselves, short of traveling to Japan and spending a few years to adjust, absorb, and then really examine the culture there. American anime fans are often even below the level of a normal hobbyist if only because, for all the time they dedicate to anime and manga, they have no real understanding of the artistic, literary, or business aspects of anime. This is part of what propagates bogus propaganda like “buy the official English release of your favorite series and help support the original creators!”

It really should go without saying but businesses DO NOT work via some kind of convoluted piecemeal system where every dollar you spend gets split up between the store you bought it from, the store’s franchise owner, the publisher/distributor, the translators/writers/localization team/dubbers, the Japanese mother company, the Japanese animation team, and then somehow at the end of the day the original artist/author. I hate to sound like the cynic (Oh who am I kidding? I love it.) but buying the English dubs, DVDs, and manga does nothing to support the industry abroad.

I could really go on and on about this but anything I say you could just as easily read about in Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop-Culture Has Invaded the U.S.. So, moving away from what may be a depressing or confusing subject for some, I’d like to point out that Japanamerica also covers many of the facets of Anime’s appeal in America in a clear comprehensive way -without being bogged down with arbitrary geek terminology- that makes it a decent starting place for people not acquainted with anime at all, as well as a real eye-opening experience for fans.

The book itself is not very long (less than 300 pages) and despite taking an academic approach to studying anime the writing style is not oppressively heavy and each chapter is broken into various smaller segments, so the book is remarkably convenient for picking up and putting down on the fly on top of being easy to read and process.

Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. is available in both hardback and paperback both online and in most major book retailers at prices starting as low as 10.00 USD new -even less used if you dig around a bit for good bargains online- and really, at those prices, there’s no reason not to pick up a copy and read through it.

I would have ended the article right there, but I’m just going to say it to get this off my chest: My favorite part of Otakon weekend was easily Roland Kelts’s Japan’s IP Problem panel on Sunday afternoon. I took a certain almost sadistic pleasure in hearing the horrified gasps of a room full of mortified anime geeks when Kelts began pointing out that not only do Japanese animators and comic artists/authors make a truly pathetic pittance for their work (especially when compared with American counterparts) but the American market shares none of its profits with the original Japanese companies, let alone any of the actual creators. In fact, more often than not, American licensing deals will shortchange their Japanese business partners, paying only a tiny fraction of the eventual profits in a flat rate payment up front after which point the Japanese see none of the American sales profit.

I know not many of you are probably not terribly savvy when it comes to basic business, so try and think of it this way: Imagine for example you sell a friend an old saucepan that you figure you’ve gotten your use out of for $10; then imagine that your friend uses that saucepan to cook spaghetti that he/she sells to other people for $5 a plate. In a few short days your friend is now sitting on $100 and still making a profit (now more than 10x what you got out of the deal) that came from your saucepan and he isn’t about to share. The sale was legit and by all means fair -what he does with it is his business now, he paid for it- and he’s not obligated to share, but you certainly can’t help but feel like you’ve been cheated.

before I let you go, I want to make clear that I really don’t intend to paint American anime companies as some kind of swindlers or villains here. Buying English releases will of course help support the companies that need your money to pay for bringing more of what you love from Japan to you here in the states, and it really is money well spent that supports to community you love. Just remember that the people you’re helping are the American companies, and that your money in no direct way affects the profits of the Japanese. No one wants to hear or see misguided and misinformed crusaders fighting piracy in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. The More You Know!

Anyhow, enough of my rambling. Once again Japanamerica: How Japanese Culture has Invaded the U.S. is available in both hardback and paperback, both online and in most major book retailers, at prices starting as low as 10.00 USD. So, go check it out!

At Otakon 2011 Bargain Gamer had the chance to sit down with industry legend Tony Oliver. Hit the jump to see his interview with one of the great anime voices.

To stalk Tony Oliver head on over to his official website.

I know, I know: I just wrote an article on how the localization of anime is probably a good thing even though it’s easy to fall back on “Americanization iz evul.” And, hard as it is to change my opinion after so many years suffering through bad, bad, bad dubs, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a large number of shows that have benefitted from a more American-friendly script (Fruits Basket, Fullmetal Alchemist, Axis Power Hetalia and a lot of other really good FUNimation projects). I WISH FUNimation was paying me to say all this, but instead I pay them in order to watch their shows.

So it goes.

This company owns my soul

Recently, I listened to a Russian version of Hatsune Miku’s song “Love is War.” After listening to it approximately 30 times, I realized I’d become obsessed with it, and thus had to do the only logical thing: learn the English version of it.

I was disappointed to find that the lyrics were neither bloody nor filled with war analogies. Also, the lyrics were so painfully close to the original translation that the words didn’t fit in very well with the music in any of the versions I listened to.

A chibi Miku figure with her Love is War megaphone

I sat down to write my own take on the lyrics and beef them up with something tragic and violent. That’s when it hit me – I was taking someone else’s art and making something new and personal out of it. Was it stealing? Was it even still the same song at the end of the day? And is this what it feels like to localize anime?

I changed the meaning of every line and my first draft didn’t pay any heed to the original lyrics. It wasn’t until the second draft that I finally tried to incorporate the main idea of the words.

It reminds me of shows like Robotech, where the company took the bright, flashy animation, cut everything they wanted to from it, rewrote the script and re-dubbed it entirely without a passing thought for the original content. “LOOK! Shiny, big robots. Kids will LOVE this and buy all our toys!”

All this in the name of selling cool Robotech action figures

Admittedly, dubbing companies in the past cut down the violent content to make something more kid-friendly for a country as tight-lipped about its own morals that broadcast stations don’t even know the rules of censorship. And it took a good many years for American companies to get the hang of matching voices to lip-flaps, which, according to voice actors, is as easy as jumping through hoops on a trapeze while on fire.

My rendition of “Love is War” isn’t trying to match lip-movements, though it is trying to fit better with the tune of the song. A message that can take twenty syllables to say in Japanese can come out as five syllables in English, which makes it impossible to do exact translations. It’s the frustration of every translator and script-writer, and probably why anime rarely have just one writer in the dubbing staff.

To make matters worse, Japanese doesn’t translate easily into English in any way, shape or form. Japanese is a language laden with concepts and very few concrete ideas in comparison to English. In Japanese, one word can have twenty meanings and can be used differently depending on where it sits in a sentence and what words surround it.

Direct translations like this one are laughable in English

The opening lines in “Love is War” start as “mou yukiba ga nai wa” which literally translates to “this place has not is.”* The translator wrote the phrase as “I have no place to go.”

Imagine having to translate an entire song – nay, an entire series – when the only words are loose concepts that can have twelve different meanings. When “Lonely in Gorgeous” by TommyFebruary6 first came out, I read two completely different translations of the song, with completely different meanings, but both stayed relatively true to the Japanese lyrics. Then there were English lines that got so mixed up and confused that one version called the narrator a “scholar” while the other referred to the “scarf” she was wearing (“suca-rufu” is actually the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “scarf,” but it sounds pretty close to “scholar” as well).

It’s for this reason that we can find totally different translations when we watch something fansubbed versus watching something that has been officially subtitled and released by a company. Then the words have to be adapted into English with a meaning that actually registers as interesting in American minds. Back in the olden days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and anime was carved out of stone, I remember watching some subtitled shows that were so technical with their translations that my eyes glazed over out of boredom.

Top: fansubbed anime, bottom: official subtitles

Nowadays, American dubbing companies seem to have a good feel for their audiences, and the Japanese companies are releasing content that appeals to fans. I don’t know if this from working together or a happy coincidence, but I do know that the anime fanbase is growing. And that’s a very good thing considering the anime industry nearly collapsed just a few years ago.

*Don’t kill me if I didn’t get the translation 100% correct. I have no formal Japanese training – just years of obsession with subtitled anime and J-pop.