Japan Pulse

Trending-setting high school girls are at it again. The latest extracurricular craze is call Makankosappo, which is the name of the move that killed the main character Goku in the popular anime.  In homage to Dragon Ball Z, these clever high school girls, through the magic of photography and careful timing, are staging scenes in which they blast away their classmates with powerful ki (気), or “special beam cannons.”

The creative variations on the Makankosappo theme keep coming, and so far the the love shown on Twitter has resulted in more than 20,000 retweets. Can’t say we’re surprised. They’ve got special power that forces you to smile.

First spotted on Livedoor News 

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Playing with a loaded gun

If you go down to the Boys’ Love section of Animate in Otome Road in Ikebukuro today, you’ll most likely see, alongside the crowds of fujoshi (“rotten girls”) browsing the stacks for a fix of sugar sweet boy-on-boy romance, the occasional guy checking out the mildly titillating depictions of young gay love. Yes, Fudanshi are boys who like manga written by girls for a female audience about boys who like boys, and, according to J-Cast, they’re on the rise.

Though Boys’ Love — yaoi — is a niche genre that’s been going strong for some time, with a fervid if furtive following of female fans, up until recently it was thought that men had little or no interest in the scene. Indeed, with their own, far more explicit “bara” (or Mens’ Love) titles, gay men have generally scorned the rather treacly voyeuristic erotic fantasies of female Boys’ Love authors.

Now, however, more and more fudanshi are coming out of the woodwork. J-Cast reports a lot of fudanshi activity on Twitter. Tweets tend to be imagined romances between pop idols or favorite anime characters, as well as discussions between those who share the same interests. A 2chan fudanshi thread has also attracted a lot of traffic. One 2chan user explained how he got into the genre: “My eyes were opened thanks to the influence of my sister.”

The influence of older sisters, a fondness for shōjo manga (young girls’ manga) or mistakenly buying a boy’s love dōjinshi (amateur manga title) featuring a well loved character from a favorite manga or anime, were all reasons cited for stirring up a passion for boy’s love in male hearts.

Taimatsu Yoshimoto,  a self-described fudanshi who does research into the history of the otaku, agrees that fudanshi appear to have increased lately. He’s quoted by J-cast as saying, “It’s a hidden hobby, but around ’05 to ’06 society began to be a lot less censorious of fujoshi, that is, those who’d previously hidden it would introduce themselves as fujoshi. On Mixi and Twitter men calling themselves fudanshi started to appear.”

Fudanshi can, of course, be gay, but they are also bisexual or even straight. “Fudanshi Nante Yomu no?” is a blog by Tamaki, a self-confessed Boys’ Love manga fan. In his profile he describes his sexuality this way: “If you had to sum it up in one word, I’m gay. I’m not interested in any other guys apart from my boyfriend, but because I like women I guess you could say I’m bi.”

It’s hard to say just how many fudanshi there are out there as Boys’ Love continues to be a secret passion even among female fans. However, we were interested to note that the Japanese Wikipedia page on Otome Road states that fudanshi have been spotted shopping for Boys’ Love in the area.

Photo courtesy of Jamiecat.

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From enthusiastic train spotters to history buffs, young women are getting into hobbies that have been traditionally thought of in Japan as being mostly for men. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly down to changing attitudes towards gender roles, but both of these trends were in part due to the popularity of manga that presented these hobbies in an appealing light to a female audience. With manga so popular with young adults these days, it’s more than likely that the next big hobby trend amongst women could well be fueled or even ignited by a popular manga title. Indeed, according to Nikkei Entertainment, the next male hobbies to be embraced by the fairer sex will be shogi, rakugo and mah-jongg.

”March Comes in Like a Lion” might inspire a trend among women for shogi

Manga and anime for adults has been increasingly popular since the 1990s. “Tetsuko no Tabi,” for instance, was serialized in the weekly manga magazine Big Comic from 2002-2006 and adapted into an anime in 2007. It tells the true story of female illustrator Naoe Kikuchi accompanying travel writer and train freak Hirohiko Yokomi on a tour of Japan’s railways. Soon tetsu-ko or tetsu-chan (female train-spotters) could be seen at railway stations checking out the rolling stock.

Similarly, reki-jo (female history buffs) caught the bug after being inspired by titles such as “Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Swordsman Romantic Story.”

So what’s next? Well, it seems like shogi, which is known as Japanese chess, is already attracting an increasing number of female spectators at professional matches and this could well lead to increasing numbers of female players.

Two popular shogi titles —  “Hachi-one Diver” and “Hirake Goma!” — have been going for a while, but the title that’s particularly drawing in the ladies is “March Comes in Like a Lion,” which combines both romance and game play in its storyline. Winning the Annual Manga Taisho in 2011 and the Kodansha Manga Award in the same year, the series has been a huge hit.

Rakugo, a stylized Japanese form of storytelling, is already enjoying a renaissance, especially among women, who now make up about 50 percent of rakugo audiences. This has only been strengthened by the serialization of “Jyoraku” in 2009, a manga about a female rakugo storyteller. Hopefully this will inspire more women to to perform themselves in this traditionally male-dominated field.

The popularity of the manga “Saki” might inspire a mah-jongg trend. First serialized in 2006, the manga tells the story of a bunch of high school girls getting into mah-jongg. Now that a third anime adaptation of the title is in production, perhaps high school girls will soon be clamoring to play the game, in just the same way that female high school students were inspired to pick up the guitar and form bands after the phenomenal success of the K-On series.

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A reference to Doraemon’s internal nuclear power plant has been erased for the Big Doraemon Dictionary

Japan’s antinuclear movement is still going strong, but when the news came out  that Doraemon, everyone’s favorite robot cat, had lost his nuclear power source, fans were not impressed.

@FUKUBLOG, a sharp-eyed Twitter user, posted a photograph of the Big Doraemon Dictionary, in which the reference to a power source for Doraemon has been erased from the page. The original version shows that Doraemon is powered by his own nuclear reactor which, rather than plutonium or uranium, runs on anything he eats. Indeed, built with future technologies, Doraemon has so far been able to run around and fly in the sky without triggering an internal meltdown.

The reason for this omission is more than likely related to the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Doraemon fans, however, are not reacting well to this PC makeover. “So how on earth is Doraemon powered then?” tweeted one.  “A non-nuclear Doraemon isn’t Doraemon,” wrote another.

When the story was reported in Byokan Sunday, 2chan users reactions included: “So what should we do after this change? He moves by solar-powered battery or something?” and “This kind of deletion is not necessary.”

Many others were worried about the future fate of Atom Boy and his rather unfortunately named younger sister Uran-chan (Uranium girl). Will they be switched to alternative energy sources?

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Picture the scene: A blushing girl is dashing off somewhere when all of a sudden a tall handsome guy slams his hand against the wall in front of her, she’s flustered, there’s nowhere to hide, their eyes meet and . . .  If you’re a fan of shōjo manga (manga aimed at teenage girls), you’ve no doubt seen this scene countless times and maybe even groaned a bit as the hackneyed plot device is once again wheeled out. The situation has been nicknamed “kabe-don” by manga fans, as “don” is an onomatopoeic word for thunderous sound, in this case created by a hand slamming into a kabe (wall).

This month a spate of parodies that turn the situation on its head have been produced by playful Twitter users, giving rise to the “semi-don,” and the “ten-don,” among others.

A whole new vocabulary has been born: There’s the “standard” don where a boy blocks a girl’s escape with one arm and the “slightly wild” don in which her escape is blocked by a leg. But the most popular parody by far has been the semi-don (cicada don) that, according to J-Cast, was first posted by a Twitter user on Oct. 13 as a panel of four drawings riffing on the kabe-don idea. The final panel shows a girl being completely cornered by a boy who is blocking her exit not just with both hands, but both legs too, like an insect clinging to a wall. The tweet was retweeted more than 20,000 times and lead to a number of people posting tribute photographs of themselves performing this difficult feat.

Following on from the cicada don we’ve now had the “ten-don,” in which a girl is cornered by a giant bowl of tempura and rice, the Pteranano-don, in which the flying dinosaur traps its prey in a corner and most successful of all with more than 10,000 retweets the “neko-don” featuring a pile of cats in a corner, presumably on top of their victim. Because “don” could also refer to a drum beat, it’s also common to see kabe-don parodies featuring WadaDon from Namko’s “Taiko: Drum Master” game taking the role of the “ore sama” (guy who’s a bit full of himself) lead.

Twitter is the perfect medium to disseminate this kind wordplay coupled with a one-shot visual gag, and it seems like manga fans both young and not so young are having a ball creating and re-tweeting kabe-don parodies. When it all dies down, we’re wondering which manga cliché will next receive an online dressing down. We vote for the one where a guy trips over a girl and lands on top of her, inadvertently touches a boob and receives a slap.

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Ahahaha! Is that your salad laughing at you?

These manga-inspired plates are making it fun to play with your food again. Award-winning product designer Mika Tsutai created these plates (or zara) to look like frames straight out of a Japanese comic. They are designed so that when food is carefully positioned just right, it will seem to jump into a story. Always felt like you could hear your salad roaring with laughter? Or wanted to underline the satisfying thwack of your knife chopping up a tonkatsu? These plates bring the illusion to life and product website Comicalu has a list of their specifications. Dishes in the collection are priced at ¥2980 a piece and can be purchased at the Tsutaya entertainment chain in Japan.

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Doraemon, as most people reading this blog will probably know, is the loveable robot cat hero of the popular manga/anime series. Sparking the imaginations of children since 1969, the popular cartoon character has been featured in 1,344 stories and almost 2,000 TV anime episodes.

In the lore of the series, Doraemon is born on Sept. 3, 2112, and sent back to the present with an inexhaustible pocketful of tricks and tools from the future to keep Nobita, his lazy and unlucky fourth grade co-star, out of trouble.

With  a video tribute that celebrates the blue earless cat’s “minus 100th birthday,” Google Japan seems to be suggesting that the corporate monolith can bring us closer to the future and Doraemon’s time-saving capabilities. Real-life versions of Doraemon’s “bamboo helicopter” and cloak of invisibility — or at least people’s best attempts at them — are only a Google search away.  Via Streetview, Google itself virtually whisks us around the world much like Doraemon’s “anywhere door.” These experiences are no longer just the stuff of cartoons, and the company has cleverly tapped into the popularity of the cat to show the parallels.

And with just the click of a magical hyperlink, you too can find out how the city of Kawasaki is celebrating the minus birthday of its most famous time traveler.

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Here are the latest Pulsations, links to fresh stories and visuals about Japan, shout-outs to fellow bloggers, and highly clickable stuff that we think you might enjoy.

In no particular order, they are . . .

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