#like talking about media literacy but only views THE JAPANESE MEDIA MADE BY A JAPANESE MAN

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James Somerton's new video on AoT isnt nazi propaganda well yeah we know... its japanese imperialist apology propaganda. Lol. idiot

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Can Sports Manga Really Break Through in North America?

Here we are in the summer of 2020 and it’s usually San Diego Comic-Con time. And with it comes discussion of how manga is doing in 2020. There was a Manga Publishing Industry Roundtable discussion at Comic-Con with representatives from almost all of the U.S. manga publishers (which you can watch here) about what’s happening in the U.S. side of things. While manga sales have dropped due to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have rebounded back in some ways. A great thing about this is that it’s not just mainstream titles that are selling; it’s also series that are from other genres like slice-of-life and horror.

Which now leads into the title of this post because at the end of the discussion, publishers were asked about what they would like to see in the future. Erik Ko, chief of operations at UDON Comics, said something that really piqued my interest. He said that he wants to see if sports manga can truly break out in North America (i.e. reach levels of sales and popularity a la My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, etc.). Erik mentioned how his daughter loves Haikyu!! on Crunchyroll and watched all 3 seasons multiple times (It’s also mentioned that Haikyu!! sold well during the pandemic for its U.S. publisher Viz Media).

While the manga has officially ended as of this writing, Haikyu!! will last for a while as the anime will have a 4th season and possibly more. However, while Haikyu!! is loved by a lot of anime/manga fans, it’s not exactly a series that has gotten EVERY shonen fan or manga reader talking. With the many sports manga licenses that manga publishers have gotten over the past few years, it doesn’t sound like there’s significant traction.

This does beg the question of what will it take for sports manga to really catch the eyes of manga readers here in the United States.

For starters, I’ll discuss a bit about the history of sports anime here in the United States. It’s been noted that a lot of sports anime do not tend to sell well over here. There was an Answerman article on Anime News Network answering “Why Do Sports Anime Bomb in North America?” that really goes into this. While it’s noted in the article that Yuri!! on Ice and Free! are indeed sports anime and have sold well, almost all discussion about those series revolves around the relationships between the male characters. Sports play second fiddle to the relationships compared to series like Haikyu!!, Slam Dunk, and Captain Tsubasa (where the sports aspect is still preached a lot).

Speaking of Captain Tsubasa, if you don’t know about this series, this is the one sports anime/manga that generated a lot of love overseas in countries that worship football/soccer. In the Manga: The Citi Exhibition book, there was an article on the promotion of Captain Tsubasa in Baghdad, Iraq by the Japan Self-Defense Force. The series was promoted via pictures on water distribution tanks in Iraq in the mid-2000s’ as a way to make Iraqi children smile. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Japan would later work with Iraqi media channels to show programming that would help encourage the country. One of these shows happened to be Captain Tsubasa, which was dubbed in Arabic. The series’ fandom took off from there and more places in the Middle East (like Saudi Arabia) even got in on the action using hacked satellites to watch. 

I wonder if this is what Erik Ko wants to see - something like Captain Tsubasa that not only gets fans gushing about the story and characters, but also inspires kids to become professional athletes or at least become more physically active in their own lives.

A big problem that gets in the way of this happening in the U.S. is how sports culture is like over here. How do I explain this? I’ll use a quote from a 2016 article in the Milwaukee Independent about Anime Milwaukee.

“While the Anime Milwaukee convention does not collect statistical data about those who attend, walking around the convention provided empirical confirmation of how Anime speaks to multi-generational and multi-cultural people. 

Anime itself will not solve the very real problems faced by disadvantaged residents in Milwaukee. 

But unlike the adversarial escapism offered by sports teams and the nature of competitive games, the appeal of Anime is with its positive messages. Where as sports is an unrealistic role model for struggling youth, for the most part Anime offers socially beneficial and moral examples.”

Sports in the United States are very much “us versus them.” In Japan, sports focuses on healthy competition between players. At least, that’s what Japanese sports stories try to focus on. While healthy competition between players does happen over here, it either doesn’t get shown as much in U.S. sports media or that competition becomes toxic to the point it hurts innocent people. In the U.S., you’re supposed to win and get recognized in order to move ahead in your respective sport via whatever means necessary. A good example is college basketball over here and how competitive schools have been involved in recruiting scandals over the best high school players. Another example is the psychological trauma faced by the number of young female athletes who were sexually abused/harassed and forced to believe that it was all part of the process to get ahead in their respective sport. I want to note that sports programs in the U.S. are often heavily underfunded, which adds to the pressure that faces any youth going through sports programs.

There’s also this tendency to view athletes over here as all-knowing celebrity gods (i.e. athletes who say awful things with confidence on social media) or people that only know how to play their respective sport (ie. the “shut up and dribble” comment to outspoken basketball players on social issues). There’s no in-between where we get to see the complete humanity of the athlete.

This does tie into how sports fans and anime/manga fans may not get along. You usually learn more about the nuanced aspects of life from outside sports than within. Sports over here preach some questionable values that anime/manga fans sometimes don’t believe in. Add the fact that sports is shoved down Americans’ throats so much and you can see why not everyone over watches sports. I do want to note that there are U.S. pro athletes showcasing their love for anime. While this is nice to see, almost all the titles they grew up watching are mainstream shonen/shojo. I’m curious if athletes would watch series like Haikyu!!, Kuroko’s Basketball, Eyeshield 21, etc., but then I wonder if they would keep watching as they can only handle so much sports drama as it’s part of their everyday reality.

So what will it take for a sports manga to break through in a big way? Viz Media tried to promote Slam Dunk here using the NBA to promote literacy in 2008. I also found out that Tokyopop tried to do something with the NBA via its Cine-Manga initiative in the mid-2000s’ and it only lasted from 2004-2007. So to that extent, there probably has to some kind of manga that’s similar to the now-famous The Last Dance documentary, which chronicled Michael Jordan’s last championship run with the Chicago Bulls in the 1997-1998 NBA season. 

Though honestly, it’s gonna take a mangaka who’s really interested in all aspects of American sports culture to come up with that kind of story. What might be better is that the story heavily criticizes the culture in a compelling and sometimes humorous way. I think that’s what will really get all U.S. manga fans and comic fans interested, especially those who are sick of commercialized sports exposure wherever they go. I do think over time as anime/manga continue to be accepted in the geek ecosystem, we can see this kind of story take off. 

Until then, if you happen to be someone who likes both sports and anime/manga in a level-headed manner like me, you’re doing alright. It’s hard to occupy both spaces when you’re supposed to choose a side. Although I liked physical education during my school days, I can understand why anyone whose hobbies lie more towards the artistic and creative side disliked physical education possibly due to the structure in how it’s taught. I know sports anime lovers that dislike watching real sports in general and I get why.

Hearing Erik’s comments made me wonder about the beauty of sports manga. Now that I think hard about it, sports anime/manga are a intersection of both the “nerd” and “jock” in a way that helps everyone. To be honest, that intersection is what really bridges gaps that makes people better. It’s what truly completes a person. I’ll use this example - you can’t have mental health without physical health and vice versa. Some kind of exercise can help the mind while learning how your mind works can help you do better in physical activities that connect people together.

Maybe more importantly, what sports manga tends to preach is that winning shouldn’t be everything. Right now, everyone is encouraged to win at something just for a taste of meaningless status and we’re seeing how that mentality can ruin someone. Sports, with all of its benefits freed from corporate influence, are supposed to teach us (like all great manga stories do) that there’s no “us versus them,” there’s only “us” in the end.

And that kind of story deserves to hit a home run that rounds all the bases to reach a celebratory and meaningful win for the world.

[correspondencearchive]

5. Naomi Kawanishi Reis & Alex Paik

Naomi Reis and Alex Paik discuss childhood survival mechanisms manifesting in their work, in-between-ness, their labor-intensive practices, and Naomi’s recent body of work which was shown at Transmitter (Brooklyn, NY).

Alex Paik (AP): You’ve been thinking about camouflage in an ongoing series of your work, and it strikes me that this idea of hiding and/or being invisible is central to your work. Now that I think of it, even your work in grad school, which was about these sort of hybrid utopic (or dystopic) architectures had this silence in them. There were no figures and no real record of anyone having lived or living in those imagined spaces, like they were erased or hidden. When you started talking about camouflage in recent years it really was an a-ha moment for me in understanding your work. I’d love to hear your thoughts more on the invisibility of Asians in general in the art world and the ways in which that feeling might be a part of your work.

Naomi Kawanishi Reis (NR): Camouflage was something I started using about eight years ago, in a series called Borrowed Landscape. The series was based on photographs I took in the tropical biomes of conservatory gardens, a take on landscape painting where the “nature” being depicted was a highly curated by-product of Western colonialism. Plants that were highly useful/exploitable/profitable/exotic and beautiful, collected in a place that existed outside of time, secreted away from the effects of weather and death. I translated those photographs onto printed wallpaper, upon which was placed a framed mixed-media painting that replicated a portion of the wallpaper behind it.

Naomi Reis, Borrowed Landscape II (Tropics of Africa, Asia and the Amazon via Brooklyn), 2013. Digital print on vinyl and handcut washi and mylar cutouts in maple frame, 13.5 x 14 feet. Installation view at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY in “American Beauty,” curated by William Villalongo. Photograph by Jason Mandella.

NR: I was thinking about how landscape has been used in image-making throughout history to depict idealized places—like Pure Land paradise in Buddhist mandalas, the Taoist spiritualism of Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings, and the glorification of nature found in Romantic landscape paintings.

The title “Borrowed Landscape” comes from a 7th-century Chinese garden design concept (shakkei=借景,  a technique of “borrowing” the view of a distant scenic element, like a mountain or lake, into the design of the garden), which felt like a fitting title for where we find ourselves today in relation to landscape. Living on borrowed time, on stolen land: ignoring the reality of our responsibilities to the land, the indigenous people it was stolen from, and the debt owed to stolen Black bodies and labor in service of white supremacy. The handmade framed painting, I suppose, is a stand-in for us as immigrant settlers on this land here in America; we’ve camouflaged ourselves into our surroundings to fit in, to survive. The land we are attempting to fit into, is itself “borrowed” (aka stolen).  

These choices weren’t made consciously when I started the series; it’s only now eight years in that I’m beginning to understand the why, and finding the words to explain it. As a diasporic, racialized person both in America as well as in Japan, I’ve needed to navigate complex social and racial situations. My father’s side of the family is white and doesn’t speak Japanese, so as a kid I knew that in order to survive and be “liked” by that side, or maybe even just to be understood, I needed to downplay my otherness and be as “normal,” aka white English-speaking, to them as possible. Conversely, my mom’s side of the family is Japanese and doesn’t speak English, so to them I needed to be as Japanese as possible. Of course as a kid you get a pass to a degree and are loved anyways, but I do remember this feeling of anxiousness, that my survival and ability to be loved and cared for depended on this ability to code-switch.

Being the oldest in a family of three siblings, and because my experience was so different from my parents’ monocultural upbringing (Japanese in rural Japan for my mom, white American in suburban NJ for my dad), code-switching was an essential survival tool. Kids instinctively figure out how to protect themselves at a very young age, even before they learn how to express themselves verbally. Immigrants adapt similar survival tactics, the art of blending in. Though “blending in” is a way to survive, it also is an act of self erasure. How to survive, while not annihilating yourself in the process? You camouflage.

The reason for the absence of figures in my work probably comes from feeling absent from my own narrative, feeling a bit unmoored from belonging to any one culture. I didn't see myself being reflected in the context of mainstream Japan or in America or anywhere except for maybe sci-fi or fantasy. Growing up I often felt like a ghost, like I didn’t exist in the real world. While I had learned how to integrate enough to survive, as I was getting up to speed with my fluency and literacy in English and Japanese while going back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, I often felt I was on the sidelines watching other people live their lives and not feeling comfortable enough to fully participate. When my family moved from Ithaca, NY to Kyoto in the ’80s when I was 9 for my dad’s teaching job at a Japanese university, I was often called 外人=outside person by strangers on the street. As a sensitive kid, I internalized that othering a lot.

The architectural work I was making in grad school was a kind of perverse take on modernist architecture, multiplying and ornamenting the hell out of the piloti and flat roofs of the International Style, a style that aimed to strip all ornamentation and color to become a “pure” architecture. The absence of figures became like the blank-slate of a dollhouse, a place I could imagine roaming around in.

Naomi Reis, Vertical Garden (weeds), 2007. Hand-cut ink and acrylic drawings on mylar, 53 x 45 inches. Photograph by Etienne Frossard.

AP: I can relate so much to this, being the first-born child of immigrants. It is interesting to think about these survival mechanisms in relationship to our work. I have been reflecting recently on my site-responsive installations, how they adapt and change depending on the size, time, and location of the piece, and how this is a metaphor for how one can rearrange the parts of the self depending on the social context. Code-switching would be one aspect of this. One of the feelings I remember most from childhood, perhaps because of moving a lot as a kid, perhaps because of being Korean-American and not quite feeling Korean or American, is that of constantly feeling like I need to assess the room and adapt to it. So while you are drawn to the idea of hiding/camouflage in your work, I am drawn to the idea of constantly adapting and rearranging the different components of the self. Two sides of the same coin I guess.

NR: Ah that’s interesting. Your strategy is to go on defense, which maybe is connected to your training in martial arts, and your attraction to building communities like TSA, whereas mine is an introvert’s tendency to self-isolate, to find a way to take up space while remaining hidden—yang vs yin.

To return to your question about why work made by Asian artists seems hidden behind some kind of invisibility cloak: that’s a reflection of where we’re at culturally in America generally. Asian stories remain largely unknown; they are insufficiently featured in mainstream media and curricula, so Asians have largely remained the consummate “other” whose experience is hidden and therefore not relatable to many Americans on a heart, gut level. White America tends to project an expectation of whiteness onto others, so when your actions or motives aren't matched in a way that’s relatable to a white audience, you confuse expectations and can be seen as an unknowable other that’s doing things wrong or badly. When you are seen as an other, it makes you vulnerable to either being too too visible—a target that needs to be taken down for taking up space that we don’t deserve, as we’ve seen play out recently in the attacks against Asians in America—or not relatable/relevant and therefore invisible, an easy target for cultural appropriation or the butt of a joke.

American culture likes extremes. Black or white, good or bad, democrat or republican, man or woman. Personally I feel most comfortable in the in-between, where everything is still in the process of forming, and reforming. Queer spaces. Because they encompass, in theory, all shades of ambiguity. Going back to the idea of binary space, people tend to be attracted to things that either remind them of themselves, or on the opposite extreme, that provide a projected escape into the exotic “other.” In movies you often see Asian-ness as an alienating backdrop to heighten tension for the central white characters you are meant to identify with: Asian bodies as embodiment of a dystopian future (both Bladerunner movies, Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report); as nonsensical foreigners in their own country (Lost in Translation); as hapless natives who need saving (Last Samurai).

AP: What aspects of your work do you see as talking about the in-between?

NR: My work is maybe less aiming to talk “about” the in-between, and more just wanting to “be” in the in-between. The process of making “it,” whatever “it” ends up being—is itself what creates the space and time to occupy an in-between—a wordless space that exists for the interval while engaged in the act of making.  The 間 space: a Japanese word that refers to the in-between, both spatially and temporally. This is the space in which all artists work, falling into that pocket of space-time where things are in flux.

It’s a way to give yourself permission to inhabit space—”to be” without having to translate that state of being into a binary (English/not-English; American/not American; male/female; young/old). Even now, writing this out, and to you, Alex, I am inhabiting my English-speaking self who is translating the self into a form that is legible to an English-speaker. Talking to my mom, I am inhabiting my Japanese-speaking self and all the historical cultural gendered background that goes into being that particular self. Talking to my siblings or bilingual friends, fluidly switching between English and Japanese, is a way to occupy the in-between for that interval of time, then returning to the binary world of everyday life. Didactically speaking, I suppose my work is “in-between'' in that it is kind of painting, kind of drawing, kind of collage, kind of abstract, kind of representational, kind of naive, kind of sophisticated. Kind of American? Kind of Japanese? Kind of good? Kind of bad? A physical thing that takes up space, and that space can encompass all the ambiguous in-between mushy-ness.

I didn’t feel able to pursue being an artist until I was in my mid-20s. I had a lot of shame about not being good enough, of not deserving to do it. Still do. I hadn’t gone to art school, and wasn’t encouraged to be a creative person by society or parentally. It was something I wasn’t open about, I drew and painted alone in the privacy of my room. So by the time I was in my mid-20s and realized working a normal job was killing me (I was a human resources representative at the NY office of a Japanese printing company), and that I really had to give artmaking a go, I didn’t know what I was doing.

At the time, I was fascinated by architecture. The idea that you could take a philosophy, a belief system, and turn it into a permanent structure that’s inhabitable, that can last for centuries. Maybe that fascination came from growing up in Kyoto around buildings that had been around for 1,200+ years. So when I started in the MFA program at Penn Design and was making architectural sketches in 3D-modeling programs, it came from a feeling of: if I can imagine an inhabitable place within which I can exist, I can open up a non-binary space to work within. Anytime I can overcome my inner demons or lack of talent or confidence or imposter syndrome, etc. long enough to crack open some space and just make the work, that’s a victory. Generally, in the year ahead I want to make work that comes from a place of joy. Worrying less about how my work fits in, and just focussing on creating the conditions within which I can feel more exuberant, and free. When you allow those conditions for yourself, I think you can do the same for others.  

AP: Another exciting thing about your work is how it is busting out of the rectangle more! Obviously I am all about that :) Can you talk more about how that happened and how you are thinking about it?

NR: Ha! I think it comes from a desire to to be more joyful, bust out of the seams, take up more space. Allow for messiness, draw outside the lines. I want to make more space for weirdness. It must come from a desire to push against the narrowly-defined rules for acceptable female behavior that I grew up with in Japan, and the kind of bubbling rage I felt for the myriad of ways women and their bodies are policed, undermined, silenced, and funneled into serving a capitalist nationalist patriarchal system, where the myth of ethnic/racial purity is perpetuated through the education system. Harm and denial begets harm and denial, and I wanted to get out and find a different way.

AP: I love the idea of the work taking up more space than it is given. It goes back to the idea you talked about earlier of becoming an artist to create a space that didn’t exist for you previously, and of pushing against/beyond essentialist and reductive readings of art based on identity.

NR: How about you, Alex? I’ve always sensed there’s a reticence in you to talk more directly about what your work is about, to not allow yourself that level of vulnerability. For example, sometimes you refer to your time in the studio as being boring repetitive labor, and I was wondering if there might be a connection there between the type of labor involved with the work your parent’s did as owners of a dry-cleaning business. Can aspects of your work be seen as a kind of penance, or perhaps tribute, to the kind of labor that was available to Asian immigrants when you were growing up? You are the artist, so you get to dictate the terms. Why limit yourself to a mode of making that you say is repetitive and boring? Maybe there’s something important there in that repetition and boredom that you are committed to, and I want to know what it is, and why. What do you want and dream about for your work?

AP: I am becoming more comfortable with it recently. While I hesitate to draw a direct connection between the type of menial labor that my parents did and the type of work I am making, I do think that my upbringing shaped my personality and interests for sure. Seeing them work so hard and feeling the pressures of being the first-born (pressures stemming from my parents, from Korean culture, my own guilt in wanting to honor their work, my own internalized capitalism) definitely has instilled an appreciation for labor. I have always been drawn to things that require discipline and repetition—classical music, martial arts, cutting strips of paper over and over again.

I was thinking about my work through a very narrow lens for a long time, trying to keep it in the lane and lineage of the art history I was taught. Once I opened up my thinking about my work as an extension of the totality of my life experience and interests including but not limited to my Korean-American identity, it allowed me to see things in my work and myself that I hadn’t been willing to explore. That being said, I am hesitant to make my work only or primarily about my racial identity. I feel a lot of external and internal pressure that I am supposed to be making work about my racial identity.

Your work is also very labor intensive. Can you talk about how you think about that in your studio practice?

NR: I think it goes back to the in-between space, to the relief I get when I release into the labor of work; there I am temporarily free from the anxiety of not-belonging. So the more labor intensive it is, the more I get to be free. In the past several years I also have been spending more time trying to heal: learning how to meditate, and in various forms of therapy like EMDR and somatic experiencing. A healer I’ve worked with who specializes in somatic experiencing mentioned that a lot of people who’ve experienced trauma engage in repetitive labor, that there is release and relief, a self-soothing, in that labor. It makes me nervous to think that the labor-intensive nature of my work can be explained away as a form of self-medication, but on some level the creative impulse always comes from some kind of unnameable necessity.

AP: It’s such a gift to been friends with you for over 15 years and also to have  seen your work grow for that long. It’s exciting to see a lot of these ideas coming together in your most recent body of work that you showed at Transmitter. Can you tell me more about this recent series?

Naomi Reis, 71229 (9:17), 2021. Acrylic on washi paper and mylar cutouts, 93H x 55W inches. Photograph by Carl Gunhouse

NR: In my most recent work, I worked off of photographs my mom has been sharing of her flower arrangements on our family group chat, which is the primary way we all keep in touch (my mom, brother, and his family are in Japan, and me and my sister and her family are in NY). My siblings post photos of their young kids, I post photos of my work, and my mom posts photos of her cooking and flower arrangements. Photos of the domestic realm. This new series is an attempt to bridge the ruptures that distance can bring: geographical, generational, and cultural/philosophical. There’s definitely a lot of tension in our different ways of thinking about gender roles, so the thought was to translate those gaps of expectation into a form that heals and transforms, through the labor and care that goes into the process of making. Maybe this work is my version of a quilt or weaving piece—a labor-intensive process that is meditative, with all the analogies and histories of weaving, knitting together, mending—embedded within.

Naomi Reis, 111119 (90˚W), 2021. Acrylic on washi paper and mylar cutouts, 48H x 37W inches. Photograph by Paul Takeuchi

Born in Shiga, Japan, Naomi Kawanishi Reis makes mixed-media paintings and wall pieces that focus on idealized spaces such as utopian architecture, conservatory gardens, and still life. She has had solo exhibitions at Youkobo Art Space, (Tokyo) and Mixed Greens, NY; she has also exhibited at Brooklyn Academy of Music and Wave Hill. In 2018 she received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and in 2015 was a NYFA Finalist in Painting. Residencies that have supported her work include Yaddo and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Reis also is a Japanese to English translator; recent publications include the chef's monograph “monk: Light and Shadow along the Philosopher’s Path” (Phaidon Press, 2021). She received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Transcultural Identity from Hamilton College.

www.naomireis.com @naomikawanishireis

Alex Paik is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His modular, paper-based wall installations explore perception, interdependence, and improvisation within structure while engaging with the complexities of social dynamics. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, with notable solo projects at Praxis New York, Art on Paper 2016, and Gallery Joe. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at BravinLee Projects, Lesley Heller Workspace, and MONO Practice, among others.

Paik is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and serves on the Advisory Board at Trestle Gallery, where he formerly worked as Gallery Director.

www.alexpaik.com @alexpaik