A warning and a Wikipedia entry.
Mar. 25th, 2010 03:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpHi to all the people who have friended me and commented! Thank you all so much! I love you all and you are awesome, and making awesome observations all over the place!
But: I should warn you that I totally don't usually post such a high density of serious stuff. I do complain about manga, but it's not always coherent! I mean, sometimes I just edit pictures of Hitsugaya so he talks funny, or make wild claims to the effect that I am going to marry Olivia Armstrong. (Hint: I am not going to do this. Olivia Armstrong is not real.) And sometimes I don't talk about manga. A not-insignificant number of my posts are about, like... sandwiches. I'm basically lazy.
(This is why I'm totally behind on comments? I'm sorry, I'm working on it!)
And now, having established that I am usually lazy - I just spent all night trying to kill myself reading Japanese Wikipedia entries about the Magnificent 49ers. I've translated this one.
Ooizumi Salon
Ooizumi Salon is the name given to the apartment shared by artists Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio, where many members of the group of manga artists known as the Magnificent 49ers (in Japanese, the 24-nen-gumi or Year-24 Group) would gather.
Yasuko Sakata christened the apartment for its location in Ooizumi, in Tokyo's Nerimaku ward. [citation needed] Takemiya's friend Norie Masuyama (a novelist who has acted as Takemiya's producer and collaborator) had come up with the idea of establishing a "women's version of Tokiwa-sō," a famous apartment building inhabited at various times by mangaka like Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, and both halves of the duo comprising Fujiko Fujio. Under her influence, Takemiya and Hagio moved into a row-house across the road opposite Masuyama's home. According to Masuyama, though Hagio and Takemiya were enthusiastic about manga, they had almost no knowledge about books and movies, and the knowledge Masuyama would introduce them to many new works. The theme of "shounen-ai" that would appear in both artists' work was also apparently due to Masuyama's influence and instruction.
Over the next several years, many young female manga artists, all born around the year 1949, would congregate at this apartment. These include Ryouko Yamagishi (born 1947), Mineko Yamada (1949), Nanaeko Sasaya (1950), Itou Aiko (1952), Shio Satou (1952), Misako Nachi (birthdate unknown), Sakata Yasuko (1953), and Yukiko Kai (1954). These women would come to the salon to meet, talk, draw their own manga, help others with theirs, and then return home again. Many of the women who participated in the salon would one day become the leaders of the shoujo manga world.
The Salon's most active years were the period between 1970 and 1973. In that time they produced the zine "Mahoutsukai," worked together on various projects, and debated the future of shoujo manga at all hours, according to Takemiya. [I'm not sure about that sentence.] Even after the Salon's dissolution, many of the artists involved have maintained close ties.
-
The stuff about Masuyama sounds strange in English in part because - I think, at least - it's strange in Japanese. The author of this section was trying to handle all references to Masuyama and her influence over Takemiya and Hagio very delicately. It could be that sie's just not sure of the details, but I'm wondering if there might be some stickiness regarding credit here. The entry on Hagio says that Masuyama influenced her, but doesn't mention the bit about the salon being her "idea." There's no entry for Masuyama herself.
Because I'm cynical, my immediate impulse here is to wonder if there's some drama in Japanese fandom surrounding Masuyama's status as the apparent ur-fujoshi who got both Takemiya and Hagio into shounen-ai. There's always the whole guilt thing surrounding the sexual nature of the genre, where women are always on guard for other women enjoying it too much, so they can shame them for it. The shaming part comes through pretty clearly in, say, Fujoshi Rumi, Ouran High School Host Club, and Please Save My Earth, which try to have their cake and eat it, too, with apparently-gay relationships between guys intended simultaneously to titillate their female readers and to shame their female characters.
I'm tempted to say that Hagio even does this a little in the big Comics Journal interview with Matt Thorn. She positions herself very firmly on the side of the shounen-ai fence with the people who say the genre's attraction is a "purity" that's not there with a girl-boy story, because the lack of a female viewpoint character renders the story a fantasy to a female reader. This is in opposition to the side for whom the attraction is primarily a carnal interest in the male body - that being the side to which Hagio assigns Masuyama.
(I just googled around, and there are a few pages (all just apparently quoting each other) saying that Masuyama was Kaoru Kurimoto; if so, then the woman wrote over eighty friggin' books. This is hardcore. Vertical's translated some of them already. But I have yet to try and confirm this via Japanese-language sites.)
To change the subject: The interview's all online now, and I just reread to confirm some stuff on the Hagio article, which I'm still working on translating. I assume I read the whole interview (and most of the issue) when I was working on my senior research, but I may well have been teetering on the brink of essaypocalypse at the time, because there's a lot of interesting stuff in there that I don't remember at all. Some excerpts that I thought were neat:
Hagio: Doing “November Gymnasium” made me want to keep drawing boys. So I came up with the “boy version” of my vampire idea. And that became The Poe Clan. It’s interesting you can have a girl and a boy say the same line, but though the girl sounds so cheeky when she says it, the boy can sound so cool. [Laughter.]
Joh: That’s because the readers are girls. They’re ruthless in judging female characters, but they forgive male characters for just about anything.
[Laughter.]
Hagio: That’s true. So when I started making The Poe Clan, I found that the boy characters could say what I wanted to say so easily. They were standing in for me. It went very smoothly. It was so easy to make Poe. But once I had done that, I found that when I created a female character, I would put myself into her, and I was told that I was imposing my own notions of what a woman is on the character. I thought, “Ouch!” I was surprised at myself. [Laughter.]
They're even talking about the shaming stuff themselves!
Thorn: In the old girls’ comics, back in the 1950s, the artist would sometimes use, say, the left one-third or so of a page for a head-to-toe portrait of a character that had nothing to do with the scene on the page. What’s the word for that?
Hagio: It was a sort of picture for the reader to color in if she wanted to, I think.
I did not know that that's what those were for! I probably would have figured it out immediately when I was six.
Thorn: I also became interested in sci-fi in junior high school, and I particularly liked Robert Heinlein. But then in high school, I began to understand Heinlein’s political perspective, and I got to the point where I couldn’t read him any more. [Laughter.]
Hagio: There is that about Heinlein. It’s when you have no idea what he’s talking about that you can enjoy him the most. [Laughs.]
Conversations about Heinlein! They're the same all the world over!
And this footnote:
Okazaki was close to finishing this disturbing fantasy of cosmetic surgery (Helter Skelter) when she was struck by a drunk driver in 1995 and left a quadriplegic, unable even to speak. In 2003, Okazaki’s former assistant, Moyoko Anno (who had gone on to be a bestselling cartoonist herself) finished the story by working with Okazaki’s roughs and painstakingly consulting with Okazaki. The book was awarded the 2004 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, nearly 10 years after Okazaki had been forced to abandon it.
Wow. I had no idea about that.
But: I should warn you that I totally don't usually post such a high density of serious stuff. I do complain about manga, but it's not always coherent! I mean, sometimes I just edit pictures of Hitsugaya so he talks funny, or make wild claims to the effect that I am going to marry Olivia Armstrong. (Hint: I am not going to do this. Olivia Armstrong is not real.) And sometimes I don't talk about manga. A not-insignificant number of my posts are about, like... sandwiches. I'm basically lazy.
(This is why I'm totally behind on comments? I'm sorry, I'm working on it!)
And now, having established that I am usually lazy - I just spent all night trying to kill myself reading Japanese Wikipedia entries about the Magnificent 49ers. I've translated this one.
Ooizumi Salon
Ooizumi Salon is the name given to the apartment shared by artists Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio, where many members of the group of manga artists known as the Magnificent 49ers (in Japanese, the 24-nen-gumi or Year-24 Group) would gather.
Yasuko Sakata christened the apartment for its location in Ooizumi, in Tokyo's Nerimaku ward. [citation needed] Takemiya's friend Norie Masuyama (a novelist who has acted as Takemiya's producer and collaborator) had come up with the idea of establishing a "women's version of Tokiwa-sō," a famous apartment building inhabited at various times by mangaka like Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, and both halves of the duo comprising Fujiko Fujio. Under her influence, Takemiya and Hagio moved into a row-house across the road opposite Masuyama's home. According to Masuyama, though Hagio and Takemiya were enthusiastic about manga, they had almost no knowledge about books and movies, and the knowledge Masuyama would introduce them to many new works. The theme of "shounen-ai" that would appear in both artists' work was also apparently due to Masuyama's influence and instruction.
Over the next several years, many young female manga artists, all born around the year 1949, would congregate at this apartment. These include Ryouko Yamagishi (born 1947), Mineko Yamada (1949), Nanaeko Sasaya (1950), Itou Aiko (1952), Shio Satou (1952), Misako Nachi (birthdate unknown), Sakata Yasuko (1953), and Yukiko Kai (1954). These women would come to the salon to meet, talk, draw their own manga, help others with theirs, and then return home again. Many of the women who participated in the salon would one day become the leaders of the shoujo manga world.
The Salon's most active years were the period between 1970 and 1973. In that time they produced the zine "Mahoutsukai," worked together on various projects, and debated the future of shoujo manga at all hours, according to Takemiya. [I'm not sure about that sentence.] Even after the Salon's dissolution, many of the artists involved have maintained close ties.
-
The stuff about Masuyama sounds strange in English in part because - I think, at least - it's strange in Japanese. The author of this section was trying to handle all references to Masuyama and her influence over Takemiya and Hagio very delicately. It could be that sie's just not sure of the details, but I'm wondering if there might be some stickiness regarding credit here. The entry on Hagio says that Masuyama influenced her, but doesn't mention the bit about the salon being her "idea." There's no entry for Masuyama herself.
Because I'm cynical, my immediate impulse here is to wonder if there's some drama in Japanese fandom surrounding Masuyama's status as the apparent ur-fujoshi who got both Takemiya and Hagio into shounen-ai. There's always the whole guilt thing surrounding the sexual nature of the genre, where women are always on guard for other women enjoying it too much, so they can shame them for it. The shaming part comes through pretty clearly in, say, Fujoshi Rumi, Ouran High School Host Club, and Please Save My Earth, which try to have their cake and eat it, too, with apparently-gay relationships between guys intended simultaneously to titillate their female readers and to shame their female characters.
I'm tempted to say that Hagio even does this a little in the big Comics Journal interview with Matt Thorn. She positions herself very firmly on the side of the shounen-ai fence with the people who say the genre's attraction is a "purity" that's not there with a girl-boy story, because the lack of a female viewpoint character renders the story a fantasy to a female reader. This is in opposition to the side for whom the attraction is primarily a carnal interest in the male body - that being the side to which Hagio assigns Masuyama.
(I just googled around, and there are a few pages (all just apparently quoting each other) saying that Masuyama was Kaoru Kurimoto; if so, then the woman wrote over eighty friggin' books. This is hardcore. Vertical's translated some of them already. But I have yet to try and confirm this via Japanese-language sites.)
To change the subject: The interview's all online now, and I just reread to confirm some stuff on the Hagio article, which I'm still working on translating. I assume I read the whole interview (and most of the issue) when I was working on my senior research, but I may well have been teetering on the brink of essaypocalypse at the time, because there's a lot of interesting stuff in there that I don't remember at all. Some excerpts that I thought were neat:
Hagio: Doing “November Gymnasium” made me want to keep drawing boys. So I came up with the “boy version” of my vampire idea. And that became The Poe Clan. It’s interesting you can have a girl and a boy say the same line, but though the girl sounds so cheeky when she says it, the boy can sound so cool. [Laughter.]
Joh: That’s because the readers are girls. They’re ruthless in judging female characters, but they forgive male characters for just about anything.
[Laughter.]
Hagio: That’s true. So when I started making The Poe Clan, I found that the boy characters could say what I wanted to say so easily. They were standing in for me. It went very smoothly. It was so easy to make Poe. But once I had done that, I found that when I created a female character, I would put myself into her, and I was told that I was imposing my own notions of what a woman is on the character. I thought, “Ouch!” I was surprised at myself. [Laughter.]
They're even talking about the shaming stuff themselves!
Thorn: In the old girls’ comics, back in the 1950s, the artist would sometimes use, say, the left one-third or so of a page for a head-to-toe portrait of a character that had nothing to do with the scene on the page. What’s the word for that?
Hagio: It was a sort of picture for the reader to color in if she wanted to, I think.
I did not know that that's what those were for! I probably would have figured it out immediately when I was six.
Thorn: I also became interested in sci-fi in junior high school, and I particularly liked Robert Heinlein. But then in high school, I began to understand Heinlein’s political perspective, and I got to the point where I couldn’t read him any more. [Laughter.]
Hagio: There is that about Heinlein. It’s when you have no idea what he’s talking about that you can enjoy him the most. [Laughs.]
Conversations about Heinlein! They're the same all the world over!
And this footnote:
Okazaki was close to finishing this disturbing fantasy of cosmetic surgery (Helter Skelter) when she was struck by a drunk driver in 1995 and left a quadriplegic, unable even to speak. In 2003, Okazaki’s former assistant, Moyoko Anno (who had gone on to be a bestselling cartoonist herself) finished the story by working with Okazaki’s roughs and painstakingly consulting with Okazaki. The book was awarded the 2004 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, nearly 10 years after Okazaki had been forced to abandon it.
Wow. I had no idea about that.
The only manga rant I can do
Date: 2010-03-25 09:02 pm (UTC)