Most people who know anime know that there’s a lot of baseball anime.  But not everyone knows what baseball MEANS to the Japanese – a few movies have jokingly breached the topic (Mr. Baseball and Major League 2 come to mind), but few sources have explained the importance of Japanese baseball like You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting.  I’ll attempt to cover the more salient points here and how they apply to anime and manga.

First, you must understand that to the Japanese, baseball is the ultimate team sport.   Americans might consider that to be football, where a single misstep from one person out of eleven could lead to a complete breakdown, but the collectivist society of Japan picked up baseball early in the 20th century and the post-war era cemented its place as a national tradition.  To a rebuilding nation, baseball was both balm and symbol, giving the shattered nation a reason to gather and salvage some kind of pride in baseball.

In the past century, baseball has become a kind of martial art to the Japanese.  There is a defined ‘right’ way to play baseball that reflects their entire culture, from expressing the importance of the team over the self via the sacrifice bunt to the relentlessly Spartan drills that testify to the Japanese belief in hard work over talent.  You have to slide into first on a close play to show that you have guts and the will to lay it all on the line for the team (even if it doesn’t actually help you get on first base).  It’s quite a cultural divide, and often jarring to American audiences when they watch 16-year-old kids being driven to exhaustion day in and day out in the sweltering heat of an Asian summer.

Enough of the summary – how does this actually apply to anime and manga characters who play baseball?  For one thing, baseball players in anime are ridiculously dedicated and self-sacrificing.  Baseball culture expects them to arrive early for warm-up drills, practice until sundown, and thank their coach at the end of the day after they’ve tended to the grounds.  The extreme example of this is Gouda Jouji of my beloved Akane Maniax, who can’t do anything halfway.  Even in his post-baseball life, he dedicates his heart, soul, and body so unselfishly to his chosen cause (in this case, romance) that it’s both painful and incredibly amusing to watch him burn out. The other end of the spectrum is the weak-willed character who finds strength in his teammates, such as the wussy-ass pitcher from Oofuri or the timid catcher from Princess Nine.  There’s no concept of ego or selfishness in your average baseball character, and if there is a character with an ego, he or she is held up for mockery (Kine in H2 comes to mind as such a character – he blows a lot of hot air and mostly gets ignored).

By the same self-sacrificing token, don’t be surprised when you see scenes of these kids getting worked into the ground by their coaches.  It’s expected in Japanese culture, and it’s actually pretty useful if they’re any good at the game, because the high school tournament at Koushien is played in the worst summer heat I’ve ever experienced, and these kids have to be pretty darn tough in order to play under those conditions for 9 innings.

I’ll probably come back to the baseball topic sooner rather than later, but this should serve as a pretty good introduction to the culture of baseball over in Japan.  If you have any questions or things you want me to clarify, go ahead and ask in the comments.

It all started with Odagiri Joe. Before he played Kamen Rider Kuuga, the Kamen Rider series was almost dead in the water.  It hadn’t been on TV in years, and it was kept alive mostly by boys who wanted to grow up to be Kamen Rider and tokusatsu fans who had never really grown up.

With OdaJoe, the series discovered a third, even more profitable audience than young boys: the housewives who watch TV shows with their children.  The housewife crowd gobbled up OdaJoe’s wild good looks, calling him an ikemen (short for iketeru men, or “hot ‘n’ hunky dudes”) and throwing money at the Kamen Rider franchise.  Video sales, merchandise sales, even the ticket sales to the live shows went up thanks to Odagiri Joe’s primeval masculinity.

Always happy to squeeze extra money where they can, the production company went all-in on the ikemen hero.  Kamen Rider Agito featured not just one, but three sizzlingly hot kamen riders to draw in the ladies (reference pics available on the Toei site, like this picture of two smolderingly sexy Japanese men from ep 1 of Agito). Kamen Rider Ryuki in 2002 was probably the largest gathering of ikemen ever assembled outside of Johnny’s, as 12 (well, 13, but it’s a long story) smexy Kamen Riders were pitted against each other in a constant struggle to see who could make the poutiest faces at the camera and make the ladies swoon. Kamen Rider 555 (Fives/Phis) went one step further, turning even the monsters into adonises when they were in human form.

There are some interesting pieces of fallout to the Kamen Rider series’ discovery of a new audience to draw in.  First, the tokusatsu shows are fascinating sociological studies these days, as you can usually find a few kids who want to go home because it’s too hot out or they’re bored, but their parents keep them put because they want to see that cute hero come on stage.  Second, all of the other tokusatsu shows, from the annual X-ranger sentai shows to Ultraman, have taken the lesson and enlisted their own casts of good-looking people.  Gravure idols often fill out the pink ranger suit these days, while Ultraman… well, just take a look at Ultraman Dina’s blog.

And, for tonight’s final brain-breaking note on how the tokusatsu genre has changed to attract more diverse audiences, here’s the Mahou Sentai Magiranger (AKA Power Rangers: Mystic Force) ending sequence. Note that this was on the air a full year before the Haruhi dance thrust otagei into the spotlight…

If you follow anime fandom, you probably heard about the Kannagi brouhaha – the revelation of thousand-year-old Nagi’s previous romantic history set off a storm of otaku protests at having a 中古 (”used”) wife.  While the countless nico videos and pictures of burnt, torn, or otherwise destroyed manga and Kannagi goods are mostly behind us, I’d like to take this opportunity to look at how the 2D-marrying crowd thinks.

You might be surprised, but the Kannagi firestorm was not an isolated incident of fan backlash: back in 2004, well-known ero-game maker Elf released Kakyuusei 2 (Link not safe for work).  However, shortly after the game’s release, there was a huge wave of fan outrage over the main heroine, Tamaki.  You see, before the player could do the digital nasty with the childhood friend, there was a plot revelation that Tamaki was not a virgin.  And so there was fury on the Internet – pictures were posted on 2ch of Kakyuusei 2 game CDs being burned, stomped, scratched, and otherwise mutilated.  Many of these CDs were sent back to Elf in protest -which seems strange to many spectators. Who cares if a PC game character is a virgin, since she’s almost certainly going to lose that virginity by the time the credits roll?

This is the madonna/whore dichotomy at its finest: many of the repressed souls who escape into the 2D world of these games cling to the image of the “pure and chaste” virgin as the feminine ideal. Some even go so far as to proclaim  these fictional women to be superior to all “real” women, who they find to be distant and hard to understand. However, due to the constraints of the PC game media, where the reality is that sex sells, no matter what the fantasy is, the girls must also be whores for the men whose fantasies they fulfill.

For this reason, the standard progression for a character in an ero-game is madonna -> first sexual encounter -> whore (but YOUR whore, so she’s still okay!).  It’s a very repressed way of looking at relationships, but it’s the reality for many of these fans, and without that madonna stage, their fantasy concept of the world shatters, leading to the two great “she’s NOT a virgin?!”backlashes mentioned above.

In the case of Nagi from Kannagi, the pure, virginal image was even more important to the fans because in the non-adult manga format, there is no opportunity for that transformational, self-insertable sexual event. In the meantime, they could – and did! – create their own fantasies of making Nagi their own personal sexual object, pure of the corrupting touch of another.  This kind of thinking is pretty explicitly encouraged by the people who make money off of these fans, and you can take a look at the Kannagi pillow (also NS4W) and see it all laid out there.

What are your thoughts on the Kannagi and Kakyuusei kerfuffles?  Sad reflection of a repressed subsociety, product of exploitation, or something else?

Hello again, folks, and welcome back to the weekly moe report.  I’ll be taking Thursdays again, and if I miss any Thursdays, the tastefully named Richard Kim will tastefully take a baseball bat to my knees.  Hurray for deadlines! This week, I’d like to talk about memory loss and anime – specifically, how you forget a lot of anime these days as soon as you’re done watching.

My theory about this phenomenon points squarely at the writers, who have taken to building popular character archetypes and merchandising them rather than crafting charaters you can empathize with as they grow and change.  Part of this comes from episode counts – it’s difficult to build a cast of likeable characters from scratch when you only have twelve or thirteen episodes to work with, when the “classic” anime romances like Maison Ikkoku (96 episodes) and Kimagure Orange Road (48 episodes) had plenty of time to develop their leads from weak-willed do-nothings into the kind of people you really could fall in love with.

The greatest example of this is Tatsuya from Touch (101 episodes), who starts off the series as a young man so lazy and unmotivated that you just can’t see what Minami, the female lead who matures far more quickly than Tatsuya, sees in him. But, after “Tacchan” spends dozens of episodes rebuilding himself from the ground up into an ace pitcher, a dedicated teammate, and a reliable friend, you can finally see what Minami has seen all along.  I still sniffle every time that picture of his brother falls out of his pants as he slides into first, even though sliding into first doesn’t make much baseball sense.  His character becomes so strong and so memorable that Japanese TV still plays the clip of his plain, heartfelt confession to Minami – “Uesugi Tatsuya loves Asakura Minami… more than anyone else in the world.” That’s how you build a believeable romance.

Compare that kind of development to today’s milquetoast protagonists.  Are we supposed to believe that the main character of Shuffle! is a sexy piece of man-meat because he said a few nice things when he was five? Or that the boilerplate whatshisnames from Akikan or Sekirei have any worthwhile qualities whatsoever?  No – the focuses for those shows are on how sprouting-moe the girls are.  You’re supposed to like the girl, buy her merchandise (for the low, low price of 9900 yen, you can buy your favorite tsundere on a body-sized pillow!) and move on to the next character after twelve or thirteen weeks have passed.

All that said, there are still a few recent shows that stick out to me because they have  main characters you can believe in.  The foremost example in my mind is Clannad and its After Story, which have the luxury of 48 episodes to transform Tomoya from a misanthropic punk into a decent human being.  It helps that he’s pretty likeable though worthless to begin with, but it’s very, very easy to root for him as he changes himself into the kind of romantic lead you can get behind.

What about the rest of you romance fans out there?  Do you think that the anime romance landscape is as dire as I do, or do you think that there are a few recent gems that I’ve missed that could join the Pantheon?

Today, a friend of mine asked me “Hey, is Tears to Tiara any good?  I saw one of the figures from that game and was curious.”  It was all I could do to hold back the flow of bile in my throat as I explained, as calmly as I could, that Tears to Tiara was a flaming piece of crap when it came out for the PC, and in its shiny new PS3 version, is a good-looking piece of crap.

I could spend hours talking about the many flaws of Tears to Tiara, but that would be ignoring the larger issue at hand here: using moe to push the merchandise of a crappy product on people.  Tears to Tiara is but the latest example of this. Shining Tears and Shining Wind have also lured friends of mine into playing execrable games with drool-inducing character designs and exquisitely crafted merchandise.  It’s a tale of woe often repeated in fan circles: “I started watching [X series] because [Y image] was really cute, but I might as well have stabbed myself in the eyes with a cattle prod and saved myself some pain.”

The phenomenon extends to music, too.  With the boom in seiyuu fan clubs these days, companies know they can make their money back if they attach a popular voice actor/actress to the project and pump out some halfway decent singles.  Mizuki Nana (a wonderful, wonderful lady whose voice can pierce the heavens) and Hirano Aya (who belches her way through songs and really needs to take a few years off so she can learn how to sing) exemplify the moe music industry, releasing hit single after hit single to the delight of everyone who rakes in the royalties.  Companies will use any excuse possible to try and attach these two ladies to their projects so they can write music and guarantee sales.

Amusingly enough, an upcoming anime called White Album, based on a 10-year-old visual novel from the same company that made Tears to Tiara, casts Mizuki and Hirano as the idol singing heroines.  It’s guaranteed to make oodles of cash from whatever CD singles are released, no matter how good or bad the show is.  The funny part is, it’s from the same company that produced Tears to Tiara.  Draw your own conclusions on remake milking.

So anyway, the point of this little Statement of the Obvious is: Be Careful.  The moe industry is ready and willing to sink its claws into your wallet through any avenue it can, and if you want to avoid wasting your time, you need to start being a smarter consumer.  Read reviews.  Ask your friends.  Use them as cat’s paws (God knows I use the tastefully named Richard Kim to gauge the relative quality of products often enough).

And above all, remember that you can enjoy the merchandise without feeling obligated to waste your time and money!   You can save yourself a lot of grief if you can learn to say “hey, that’s a nice toy” without attaching an “I wonder if the source material is any good” to it all the time.

Honey, I’m home! The gig at PiQ magazine didn’t end up working out, so it’s time to come back to the gig I love – dissecting the sprouting and burning of the anime/game/manga world.

This week’s topic is one that bridges the burning and sprouting worlds. As Gainax co-founder and master of bounce Yamaga Hiroyuki told a Fanime panel introducing a fresh Guren Lagann, “Boys love drills.”

It’s true, too – going all the way back to Getter 2 with Drill Missile and up to Guren Lagann on the burning side. Some time in the last few decades of anime, drills became a staple of the sprouting side of anime, too – attached not to robots, but to hair. It’s a fascinating crossover phenomenon that appeals to both sides of a growing young Japanese boy.

Drills on robots are relatively easy to explain – they were easy to animate in the old days. Draw a few frames of a drill spinning, and you’re set for the next 26 episodes. It’s also very dramatic to see a drill kicking up a storm of sparks against the armor of an enemy robot. Plus, it’s a surrogate penis, and boys love those things.

Drills on girls, on the other hand, take a bit more explaining. For example, take a look at a couple of girls with different forms of iconic drill hair: Houjou Reika from Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun (whose hair isn’t nearly as drill-heavy as that of others, but is important for the sake of discussion later), Karin from Street Fighter Alpha, and the Archer from Disgaea (who is so identified with her drill hair that in Disgaea 3, she actually says “Doriru!” as one of her combat noises).

Aside from being visually interesting and physically impossible short of wigs wrapped around foam, drill hair has three major features that lends itself to frequent use in character designs. First, it implies that the character spends a hell of a lot of time working on her hair in the morning, implying certain levels of leisure time combined with vanity. Second, the pointed nature of a drill and its resemblance to colonial European wigs adds to a general look of sharpness and nobility to a character design. Third, the standard drill is an upgraded cousin of the Twin Tail hairstyle, which has long been associated with tsundere. Add these three together and you have an easy route to the ojou-sama character archetype, the haughty character who looks and acts like a queen.

Pretty much every drill-haired girl will fall into this character type, from the above-mentioned Reika and Karin to Yurika from Project Justice and Char from Shuraki. Drill hair is character design shorthand at this point, giving you a bunch of character information in just a character’s hair and a little flag for ojou-sama or tsundere fans just like glasses are a giant flag for the tastefully named Richard Kim.

As a random note, Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun also included a highly amusing bit about how anime drill hair is made – Reika wakes up late one morning, and has to manually drill up her hair by sticking her finger in her tails and spinning it at about the speed of an egg whisk. It’s more than a little silly, and wholly hilarious.

Are you a fan of the drills? Do you wish I’d talked about something else? Didja miss me (or not miss me?) Let me know in the comments!

All things that burn must turn to ash some day, and it is with a measure of regret that I tell you loyal Spwug readers that I will no longer be able to keep up a weekly schedule writing for this blog.

While I was able to juggle a weekly column, review responsibilities for the now-defunct NewType USA and my full-time day job relatively well, PiQ magazine has asked me to write an extensive monthly column that will eat up a much larger chunk of my time than the old reviews for NTUSA. So, while I’ll still work on the occasional Burning and Sprouting column, I won’t be able to do it with the same regularity I did before.

I just wanted to let you know that this is my last regular column, and to thank you – it’s been a lot of fun, and I’ll still be around, but it’s time to move on.

As of now, most of my electronics are in a box waiting for transit on Saturday – that’s the day a U-Haul truck comes by and I toss my essentials into the back, and then it’s off to the new digs! As you can probably tell, this makes writing a bit sticky.

Sorry that things are a bit busy – I’ll be back next week for sure.

Just like the Round Table of Camelot, the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history evokes images of a time when the world was simple and magical: Men were Men, Heroes were Heroes, and Great Beauties were Great Beauties.

The Three Kingdoms period has been kept fresh in the minds of the Japanese by a great many re-imaginings and retellings, from manga adaptations to the mega-popular Dynasty Warriors game series, in which Men are Great Beauties, Heroes are Men, and Great Beauties are Heroes.

So, of course, with Japan being Japan and money being money, there have been a great many Sproutifications of the Three Kingdoms characters, the most prominent being Ikki Tousen (Battle Vixens here in the states). Ikki Tousen and its constant mix of action and fan service picked up the bakunyuu (爆乳, lit. “bursting boobs”) title from Tenjo Tenge, which lost fans with its endless stream of rambling crap (no, I’m not bitter about TenTen, why do you ask?) and used characters from the Three Kingdoms era to provide an excuse for big-titted teens to rip each other’s clothes off.

But the liberties Ikki Tousen and the Dynasty Warriors series take with the seminal epic of Chinese culture pale compared to a couple of recent travesties, which have made my Chinese friends weep at how horribly their history has been raped in the name of making money. First up, you have Tsukisase! Ryofuko-chan, which turns the mighty warrior Lu Bu into a little magical girl (hey, at least Red Hare is still badass) designed to tickle the fancy of fanboys with Lolita complexes.

That one’s pretty bad, and has melted the minds of several friends of mine, but what really takes the cake is Koihime Musou, which started out as an H game (link for those who aren’t at work) and, because the Japanese have no taste, became popular enough to be converted to a PS2 game. In Koihime Musou, the main character is thrust into an alternate version of the Three Kingdoms period, where the Men are Great Beauties, the Heroes are Great Beauties, and the Great Beauties are gay men (voiced by Wakamoto Norio, which is awesome on at least six levels).

You don’t even need to know Japanese to see how wrong these are – just poke around the sites and marvel at just how far moe peddlers will go in their quest to make money. It’s pretty impressive.

By the way, don’t click on this link unless you’re secure in your sexuality and libido: here’s the Koihime Musou version of Diao Chan.

You’re welcome!

I’ve gone into my Anime Wayback Machine and pulled the wondrous Giant Robo off of my shelf, and I can’t tell you how great this show was back in the ’90s. Not only did this show have old-school giant robot action, but it was full of wire fu and went so far over the top that it shot straight past Fun right to Glorious. Magic, martial arts, boxing, drinking contests, Giant Robo was full of Manly Men and Awesome Women. Come on, it has the Experts of Justice fighting against Big Fire, how can you hate that?
Of course, it was incredibly frustrating to follow, too – 3 years passed between the release of episodes 6 and 7. I wasn’t one of the people who had to wait for it (I got into Giant Robo late, long after the suffering), but people who followed The Pretender for a while can probably sympathize with those who had to wait years before seeing any kind of ending to their favorite series.

Anyway, try watching Giant Robo some time – you can find it on NetFlix pretty easily, and it’s a fast watch. Hell, if you’re willing to listen to the recommendation of a grumbly old-timer like me, you should be able to find the whole thing (including the wonderfully hilarious GinRei specials) for $40 or less.

It’s worth it. Trust me. Action, passion, comedy, and Robots! All the things that are best in life.