What is Anime / Manga?

Manga is a Japanese word that literally means “comic.” Many manga are serialised weekly in Japanese magazines etc, still more are released seperately as small books.

Yes, Western comics generally are. The standard “flawless superhero saves the world” stuff, anyway. But that doesn’t make all comics for boys, or even for children.

One of the major things that’s different about the comic market in Japan is the sheer range of /genres/ available in comics. You do get superhero comics, but most are nowhere near as “impersonal” as their American counterparts. The “superheros” almost always have some horrible flaws.

Generally, Japanese comics have a much larger focus on characters than they have on events, and because of that, there’s a much broader range of subjects that have been made into manga.

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• Where can I get Manga?

Anime is not a native Japanese word. It’s generally taken to mean “animation”, although in anime circles it’s often used only refer to animation from Japan. Animated series are a much bigger thing in Japan than they are in the west - while it’s true that much of the market is young boys, there’s a large proportion of titles available for young girls and also the older generation, including a good many films. Animated series and films are much cheaper to make than live action films, since you don’t have to pay for sets, and actors are only required to act with their voices - which means less mistakes.

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• Where can I get Anime?

• Giant robots are probably the most famous. Examples include the many Gundam series, Martian Successor Nadesico, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Vandread, Bubblegum Crisis, RahXephon, and many, many more.
• Fighting. There’s a good selection of serious about one person’s quest to be the ultimate fighter, or them using their powers to help people. This ties very strongly into the next section. Typical examples based on fighting are Dragonball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, ...
• Epics. These are generally about one person or a group of people, and their journey through some strange new world, the past, or one of many other locations. Think “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” maybe. Examples include Naruto, Slayers, Fushigi Yuugi, Inu Yasha, ...
• Love stories. Almost every series has some sort of love interest. A lot have that and very little else - examples range from straight to gay, funny to really serious. A few examples: Fushigi Yugi, Saikano, His and Her Circumstances, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Gravitation, Yami no Matsuei.
• Magical Girls. A long running theme of stories generally aimed at young girls is that of a young girl who is somehow imbued with the power to take on some sort of adversary. There’s a diverse range of examples, Including Sailor Moon (very much a traditional example - a group of girls taking on evil), Tokyo Mew Mew (about a group of girls imbued with the powers of animals taking on alien invaders), Earth Girl Arjuna (where a mid-teen girl has to take on the earth’s pollution), Ground Defense Force Mao (industrial grade cute anime series about a group of 3 8 year olds chosen to fight the “cute alien” invaders).
• ‘Robotic Maid” series, where a generally somewhat dorky guy ends up falling in love with a robot who ends up living with him for one reason or another. Examples: Mahoromatic, Hand Maid May, Chobits, ...
• Downright Wierd. There’s a selection of series in which the creators seem to have taken it upon themselves to create the wierdest things imaginable. Examples include Wierd Anime Excel Saga and it’s “sequel”, Puni Puni Poemi, Serial Experiments Lain, FLCL (Furi Kuri), ...

There’s also a whole collection of series which don’t really belong to any particular category, like Cowboy Bebop, Photon, Ebichu, ...

Being made in Japan, there’s often a whole range of cultural and/or linguistic differences that just seem bizarre to the average reader/watcher.

Puns are often the thing that people don’t understand, simply because they’re almost always impossible to translate. In addition to puns though, the Japanese don’t have an alphabet in the same way we do, they have a pair of syllabaries (that is, sets of symbols that each mean one syllable), and a third set of symbols called kanji, which is a collection of ideograms - each of the kanji is read in a particular way and has a particular meaning. Often “puns” will involve taking a different reading of the kanji, or splitting the kanji apart and putting them together to make new words.

There’s something close to 2000 kanji in “standard” use - which makes even reading a newspaper difficult for anyone under the age of about 16, and even some adults struggle at times.

Japanese names are “backwards.” That is, they write and say their family name /before/ their given name. Also, their names almost always have some easy to decipher meaning because of the kanji they use in it.

Typically, people will refer to each other as “family name-san”, for example Kinomoto Sakura from Card Captor Sakura might be called Kinomoto-san by someone who didn’t know her. As people get friendlier, it becomes more common to use their given names, and the -san might become -kun (for a young man) or -chan (for a young girl). Returning to the example I used before, Daidoji Tomoyo refers to Kinomoto Sakura as “Sakura-chan.” *(Does she???)*

Politeness is a big thing in Japan. In western countries, you simply have to avoid not directly insulting people, but in Japan, there’s a much-honoured “respect” system. Talking to your superiror without the correct ‘honorific’ is regarded as very rude. Common examples of this are:

• Using the wrong form of “you,” maybe referring to someone like your childhood friend instead of your boss.
• Using an inappropriate suffix on someone’s name. Calling your superior “chan” would put you on somewhat shaky ground (for example in Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, Nene continually annoys Leon by referring to him as Leon-chan).
• Bowing is also a common form of respect. Failing to bow generally doesn’t get people very far.

The age of consent in Japan is 14. Prostitution is still illegal, but apparently a major social problem is schoolkids offering their bodies up for an “allowance” from a client. It’s not vastly uncommon to see sexual themes used with characters below or just past the typical western ages of consent.

The Japanese have quite a spiritual culture, and it’s not uncommon to find ghosts, demons and the like featuring in storylines.

In the same way that we have astrological fortunes, the Japanese have blood-type fortunes. It may seem odd, but lets face it, it’s more scientifically sound than astrology. :)

For some reason, anime characters often seem to have an obsession with these. Just don’t ask. :)

It’s not uncommon to see whole pagefuls or screenfuls of falling cherry blossom leaves. Cherry blossom is often symbolic of change of some sort. It’s also often used as backing when a really good-looking guy enters the stage.

Romaji is the romanisation of the Japanese language, essentially “Japanese written in English”. It’s very structured and once you get used to it, it’s very easy to work out how to “spell” things in romaji. Romaji is often used for writing the lyrics for songs so you can sing along to them in an awful drone and annoy your housemates.

The Japanese have five vowels - a (cat), i (pea), u (chute), e (pen), and o (cot). They also have a whole bunch of dipthongs (that is, two vowels stuck together) like “ai”, which you say generally by intoning each vowel for the same length of time.

There’s also a whole collection of consonants. Most are pronounced how you’d expect, except:

• R/L — These are the same consonant in romaji — normally written as r. It’s pronounced like the l in ‘like’, but with the tongue higher up in the mouth.
• -N/-M — ‘n’ can be used in a syllable, or as a “syllabalic consonant”, that is, a consonant with no vowel attached. It’s pronounced either as ‘m’ or as ‘n’ depending on context - and is almost always changed to the one it’ll sound like.
• F — There’s only ever ‘fu’, and it’s like a cross between an English ‘f’ and ‘h’.
• Tsu — Pronounced in an obvious way, but hard to get the hang of.
• -Y — Many syllables (eg kyu) have an added ‘y’ in them. You pronounce the consonant then the ‘y’ with no vowel in between them. For example, ‘kyu’ ends up like “Q”, and ‘myu’ like “Mew.”
• Double-consonants — pronounced simply by starting to say the consonant, and holding your tongue in place for an extra “beat”.

Now, when it’s all written out in a song lyric, all you do is pull it apart syllable by syllable, and fit that around the tune. Examples:

  sore -> so re
  sempai -> se m pa i
  shinigami -> shi ni ga mi
  toukyou -> to u kyo u