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.
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.
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:
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:
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