Summer Wars: It’s the audience’s fault.

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I really hate how I can go to a forum on ANN or Kotaku, and hear all kinds of bitching about the evil “industry” and its “profit.” Profitability has become a dirty word these days, and not without just cause, but this is just overkill. Since the days of the Ford Pinto and even further back, the “profitable” bottom line has been synonymous with cold uncaring indifference to the human tolls that business operations have, and anyone who now will forever hate the letters B and P, will know what it feels like to have that trigger go off.

But there’s another side to “profitability,” and that is one which sustains a functioning economy. Without profit, manga doesn’t get printed, anime doesn’t get animated, and Amazon.com doesn’t pay UPS to drive a DVD to your house after you click a button or two. One of the main targets of criticism that the quest for “Profitability” in entertainment media has always had, is the one painting it as a cause of a corruptible influence when an already established story is expanding into other mediums. For example, in the new “Star Trek” movie, the Engine Room looks like a friggin cornmeal warehouse and not like what every Star Trek fan knows a starship engine room should look like. Why? Because “Star Trek Fans” aren’t a large enough movie-going audience to cater to at the expense of 80% of the audience who only knows 2 things about Star Trek and they’re both “Beam me up Scotty!” Rather than make the set authentic, thereby creating alienation within most of the audience members (and making the poor Star Trek-literate guy have to deal with all the “what’s that thing?” questions whispered to him), the filmmakers went with a backdrop that would effectively convey the feeling of “Engine Room” to 99% of the audience. For the uber-fans (10% of the people in the theater), this was awful and hurtful, but for the rest of the audience (90% of the people in the theater) and to the movie studio, it was a good move to make.

So otaku-nerds, let us not react in anger at changes in continuity or blatant contradictions and anachronisms which occur to us, for in the end it is for profitability, and without such things, none of this is going to get made.

Why am I bringing any of this up? Well, I finally got around to watching Summer Wars. When I was living in Tokyo, I was in so much work up to my eyeballs and money was so tight thanks to a shitty dollar (yes, living in Tokyo and getting paid in USD. It sucked), that I didn’t have time to check it out when it opened, despite the fact I wanted to. I did manage to catch Redline there though when it opened. Sweet.

Watching Summer Wars, there were a number of things that bothered me a bit. It’s a great movie, and I love how (like almost all anime features) it doesn’t feel it needs to spell everything out to a stupid American audience which must have an IQ of 12 like Hollywood productions. Younger anime fans who have tried to watch anime films with their parents know what this can lead to. Endless interjections of “What’s that?” “Who’s that?” “Why are they doing that thing?” “What do they mean by ...?” Don’t you just sometimes want to yell at the person that you haven’t seen the movie either and you don’t have a secret set of headphones where more things are being explained to you and not them, so could they please just shut the fuck up and watch?!. Anyway, Summer Wars is nice. It makes you follow the story without spoon-feeding it to the audience, escalates emotional commitment, and pays off with a great big finish. The problem is that there are certain times when that process is interrupted and you are jerked out of the movie by something a bit too hard to accept... but only for that 10% of the audience who can see what the problem is in the first place. Everyone else is enjoying the movie, but you can only mostly enjoy it, because something’s bothering you that isn’t being addressed. Why not? For the sake of that 90% of the audience who aren’t bothered by it, that's why not. That's how you make a profitable movie. No matter how wide or narrow your target audience is, there is always a threshold for the lowest common denominator, and a need to meet it in order to make your money back. So it's not good to dwell on thole outlying things that don't need to be listed.

But I'm going to list those issues here anyway.

Kenji the Herbivore: This is just an opinion more than the rest of these issues, but fucking seriously, the Herbivore Male is sending Japan to hell in a handcart faster than anything else. There’s cute ineptitude, and then there’s “I’m an a-social idiot who wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if she landed naked right on my...” let’s stop there, I’m sure you get the idea. I have to believe that the whole indecisive-male in the face of blatant girl-interest grew out of a backlash from the 1980’s “cool guy” as an otaku audience was never going to be cool enough to actually actively attract girls. Since then the “I don’t know what to do with an interested girl” character has been a staple of harem programs like Tenchi Muyo. The thing about Tenchi the character, is that he always (more or less) puts himself into a socially awkward sexual dead-possum mode to avoid hurting the feelings of the other competing girls and not because he was totally inept. It was always the notion that he’d piss one girl off by going for the other, which kept that kind of behavior at least mostly believable. When there are no competing love/humping interests, for a guy to act like that is only cute for the initial character introductions. If his balls don’t drop for the whole movie, you just want to punch him.

Why this doesn't matter:
But this personality archetype has become so ingrained into anime, that it would actually throw audiences off if Kenji both liked math AND was good with the ladies. If that were the case, he would have seemed too perfect, or perhaps may have been hiding sinister motives.

...He's just waiting for Sasami to leave the room.

Social Media Spaces: So somehow Norad, JR, Heart Monitors, and who knows what else have all allowed OZ (the furry wet dream version of facebook) access to systems that are guarded at the highest level? WTF? I know, the intro mentioned that defense agencies, big businesses, and all kinds of other major entities have established presences on OZ, but actually causing a threat to these entities through that presence is like thinking that by hacking into www.goarmy.com you are somehow going to gain access to strategic missile command. And don’t give me that “the hacked accounts from NORAD used the same passwords for OZ as they do for their sensitive systems” bullshit, because ...really? Really? Is that so easy to believe because that kind of thing happens now all the time where people with access to defense grids can use the same password for their fucking Twitter as they can for super-secret-classified-network? No matter how bad-ass this AI is, it’s not going to gain anything special by taking over some weirdo future version of Second Life.

Why this doesn't matter:
But “War Games” the sequel isn’t what this movie was about, that extra dimension would just be extraneous and take away from the more important character development.


“Hacking”: Ok so Kazuma is some gaming bad-ass, and takes on a computer program in an online fighting game. They start to fight and you hear... tappity tap tap... The whole. Fucking. Time. Ever play Street Fighter? Ever play Street Fighter but ...by typing shit? What the fuck, is he writing brand new code right there for the command “kick now” or something? This is a result of lots of Hollywood dribble, where whenever anyone does anything with a computer ever, you hear keyboard typing at an inhuman pace, even though the applications where text editing would actually have any effect don’t work like that... ever.

Why this doesn't matter:
 But the audience needs to know this is some very important computer stuff happening on the interwebs, so Kazuma holding a console-style controller is out, even though it would be a more accurate portrayal of what’s going on. Let’s also not forget that a vast amount of web interaction in Japan (way more than the USA) happens via hand-held mobile device, where tapping on buttons must happen for everything, so it’s not a huge deal for most Japanese audiences. Kazuma is Hacking the GPS system? Oh that’s totally normal... they have trucked in a supercomputer that is running... an online fighting game program... which is being programmed in real time by a 13 year old... it’s ok, it’s “computer stuff.”

Oh no... VISUAL BASIC!

Low Earth Orbit vs Outer Space: So the Arawashi orbital satellite (remember "orbital") is a probe that is supposed to slam into a comet or something so researchers can study it. Comets are far away, even when they show up in our neighborhood. If a comet came by earth so close as to be able to be impacted by an earth orbiting satellite (an area where there are lots and lots of other satellites doing other things), then this would be a fucking earth shattering event. We’re talking close enough to cause a serious scare that it could hit earth and cause an ELE. Now, since the film opens with normal people in their normal lives and no riots in the streets, we have to assume that whatever comet/asteroid thing that the Arawashi was supposed to hit, it was far enough away from earth as to not make the entire human race collectively wet themselves... you know... fucking outer space! ...so what is Arawashi doing hanging out in orbit? Remember Deep Impact ? (No, not the movie, the actual NASA probe. I'll give you a hint: No you don’t remember it and neither does 90% of the audience). It took 7 months to get from Earth, to where this comet was, by flying on a rocket... then the impactor itself took 5 days to hit the thing AFTER it was launched at it... FROM SPACE! This Arawashi thing should already be on a trajectory to slam into this interplanetary body very far away at uber-speeds and no amount of AI is going to be able to turn it around. Even if it could, there’s no way in hell it would be using GPS as a targeting reference because A) It’s above the GPS sats in space, and B) Why the fuck-shit-hell would a piece of space equipment designed to hit another object in space be equipped with GPS targeting sensors, OR atmospheric navigational hardware (wings & fins). These things would only be effective for hitting something on EARTH! It’s not a fucking j-dam!

Why this doesn't matter:
But the average audience member is only going to be aware of “smart bomb video” circa Gulf War part 1, and the very scientific principle of “big thing go boom.” So taking time to explain how we get around these problems isn't worth it.

E = mc²: Ok so something the size of a school bus is heading towards the earth faster than a ballistic missile and you manage to get it to miss the mark by... what did that look like, maybe 300 feet? I don’t know what the actual mass of that thing was, but it was made to be a high velocity impact device. Let’s look at Deep Impact again, and remember that the thing that slammed into the comet weighed (on earth) 816lbs (370kg) and was traveling at 10kps. It was a little bigger than washing machine, and the explosion released energy equivalent to 5 tons of TNT. That's 5 Bunker Busters (or 5 Pepcons) going off all at once. The impactor in the movie looks considerably bigger than that. Something that size traveling at speeds like that is going make the impact entire area look like Tunguska... MOAB level power being unleashed by this thing is not a stretch by any means.

Why this doesn't matter:
The audience has no idea what Tunguska was, is, or what it means, and they don't care, because the movie shows that they all had a close call and saved the day in the end by working together as a family in unison (Spoiler Alert; that bit you just read). So the filmmakers didn’t need to bother explaining how something that big wouldn't blast that entire mountain into dust.

Hi, it's just me, 1 ton yield here, yeah, there are 20 of us, and we all wanna come in at once... you can't stop us by the way.

North Koreans: There are stories of how errant weather satellites have come within a hair of starting World War 3 because they flew over the north pole when Russian missile command hadn’t had their morning coffee yet and scared the pants off of everyone there. Something falling out of the sky from space heading straight at Northern Japan is going to look like one thing: North Korean Missile Attack. I don’t care what systems are or aren’t under the control of “Love Machine,” it’s almost impossible to suspend belief that some missile shaped tungsten death-rod the size of a bus heading for Japan isn’t going to have missile bases in North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, and any US subs that happen to be in the area, totally losing their shit over this. I honestly think this might be weighing in the back of the minds of a higher portion of the audience in Japanese theaters, more than the other points I've brought up, due to the recent scares that happened there form thsi sort of thing (during the height of the N. Korean missile tests, there were Patriot Missile launchers set up across the street from my apartment... you know, just in case).

Why the NorKos don't matter:
But since this scene comes at a crescendo of such high cinematic intensity, the audience doesn't notice the problematic potential. It would be like trying to pay attention to a candle in the middle of a forest fire.

It was either this or 99 Red Balloons.

These are all necessary problems. What I mean by that, is that if any of them were addressed or compensated for withinthe film, it would have been just a case of spending time and money to animate needless sequences which would explain technical things that didn’t need explaining because the audience doesn't care. It would take away resources that the film had put to much better use in the story telling. Fixing or addressing these issues would in no way make this movie any better, and in fact would probably detract form it. In short, fixing these issues would have actually made the film worse, not better.

Where we run into actual trouble is when American audiences get a hold of it. Am I saying Americans are smarter than Japanese? Fuk the hell no. What I am saying is that this film is going to end up being followed by a smaller, niche-type audience in the US, as opposed to a wide general audience as in Japan. The American audience is going to be a pinhole-lense concentration of the top of pyramid fans (the ones who are really into this "annie-may" stuff), representing only a small fraction of any movie going audiences as a whole. Further exacerbating the problem, is that this concentration that gravitates towards anime in the USA, tends to contain the demographic clusters that are going to be much more literate in the types of scientific dynamics that these problems grow out of (science, computing, etc), and so a larger portion of the American audience is going to find trouble suspending disbelief to the degree that this movie is 100% enjoyable.

 But this movie also addresses this problem as well; by not giving a crap what non-Japanese audiences think of it (seriously, do you really think they had a strategy session where the American market came up and had any effect on the treatment, characters, or overall tone, or even the marketing of this film? ...I’ve been in meetings like this, and the answer is no). The reasons these little holes go unaddressed here, are because this film is trying to appeal to a general audience, or in other words; be profitable. Not "buy a new Bentley for every day of the week" profitable, but more along the lines of "let's pay our staff a living wage, and invest what's left in the the next movie project" kind of profitable. Fans should not have a problem with this.

The film is incredible. It’s an involving story that does what cinematic anime has often been best at, and that’s produce a strong character driven series of events peppered with elements that are just too impractical to use in live action. No matter how you slice it, to try and recreate the scenes in OZ with live action and green screen would just produce something reminiscent of a bad Next Generation episode, where we’re trapped in a character’s mind or something. The film did a great job at being genuinely entertaining, and is a perfect gateway film for anime-ignorant family members (let them watch the dub if they want...). The best part is, that any nitpicky problems you have with it, can be placed at the feet of the lesser intellects in the general audience, and are totally not a result of you and your lack of social skills. Totally.

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Technical Difficulties and Tantanmen

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It seems like some drafts and other upcoming posts have gotten scrambled and/or lost.

You will never, succeed. Success is the fortune of only a chosen few... not you.

Long story short, next post is May 16.'

In the mean time, I guess I can lament giving up the first-mover advantage by neglecting to register "TheAngryOtaku" as a youtube.com username. Nope, some other dork got there first, and now theangryotaku channel on youtube is this crapfest. So do keep in mind that it's not me if you come across it on youtube. Such are the perils of establishing a personal brand on interweb2.0. I had wanted to make a few video posts but now I'm gonna have to use bit.tv or something like that.

Also, this weekend was Anime North in Toronto. I still am probably not allowed there anymore, ever since the disaster that was the execs at Crash (who were not me) wanting to go and do the anime convention thing, and then showing up, checking into the hotel, and then blowing the convention because it was "too nerdy" to go hang out at Tower Records in downtown Toronto, leaving me to explain things and take the fall. I stayed and had a nice time, but the con ppl were rightly pissed off. Thankfully, it was the only convention where they ever showed up. I'm sure something awesome happened there but I wasn't paying attention. Maybe I'll go to Otakuthon in Montreal. My passport needed renewing this month anyway and so now I've got a new one that's got nothing in it, so may as well get some Canada in there.

I guess I could have pulled out some old fandom stuff or scanned that Otakon 1994 program book, just to keep this anime related. Or maybe pseudo gripe about feeling a bit homesick over my old Tokyo apartment, but then realize that it was built in 1972 and in all likelihood took a serious beating in that earthquake, and then feel happy about not being there when I see the current exchange rate. Not so fab.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that many people reading this haven't had the experience of living in Tokyo (even if it was a grinding dehumanizing existence) so stuff like this is worth sharing. So let me just say this... If you find yourself in Tokyo and you're on a budget (you're reading this, so I know you will have limited funds) get over to the lower floor of the Palaceside Building at Takebashi station (that's off the Tozai subway line, but walkable from lots of places, and it's right on the moat of the Imperial Palace Park)... anyway go in there and look for a place called Shanghai somethin-or-other written all in Kanji,so it's "上海市" and then some other stuff I don't remember (it's got one of these in the logo so look for that too). It is there you can get the straight up best tantamen in the universe, and for under 1000 yen. (FYI, the best things to eat in Tokyo are in small places where literally everyone in the lunch-rush has ordered the exact same thing because it's so f-ing awesome... that's how I found this place and discovered tantanmen in the first place).

Tantanmen, although not being mentioned in Shampoo's Nekohanten Menu Song, is a big staple of lunchie-munchie noodle houses in Japan. Though the origins are Chinese, that's like saying the crap that you find over at "Great Wall Buffet" over in Peoria is authentic Chinese cuisine. No, tantanmen is one of the few Japanese dishes that are normally spicy. It's also easy to make at home as long as you can get your hands on some ground pork. If you are in the USA, it's not terribly hard to find as long as you're in NY LA or SF. If not you might be screwed.

Well, that's it for now. There will be an actual post next week. In the mean time have a drink or something. ...no seriously, check out my other blog... it's really lonely.


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Ching Chang Chong: Racism and Not-Racism in Entertainment Media

Subjective Reality continued: Today's vocab word is Butt-Hurt.

I just don't have the words for how stupid this case involving Simon Ledger and the song "Kung Fu Fighting" is. It's already over and done with, but it's still an unbelievable incident to say the least, it shows how an out of control obsession to meet an impossible standard can be a serious threat to artistic creativity, and entertainment.

I've picked on Australia previously for doing this kind of thing, but now it seems that its mommy is outdoing it and raising the bar on the stupid-standard to an inconceivable level. Yes those limey bastards have taken political correctness to an extreme the likes of which make Pat Condell seem like a reasonable individual. Yeah, I know the story is from The Sun. but if you must, here have the same story from Daily Mail or BBC.

ENEMY OF COMMON SENSE

This is entertainment not criminality.

NO U
Oh, Internet...

This IS entertainment. One of the pillars of entertainment is it can't be criminalized, if you're American, your right to be creative is protected (hell, your right to be a straight up racist a-hole is protected), while the rights of mental midgets not to have their feelings hurt are not written into insane laws.  This is not the same as advocating that hurtful, insensitive, or even vitriolic expressions should be free from any consequence.  It is that when applying a criminal consequence, there are rigid metrics to follow.  Such is not the case in other jurisdictions.  It would seem that it's only by the consent of the most insignificant plebeian minds and their fragile emotionality, can any media entertainment exist in the UK without being labeled a criminal enterprise.

Well, England being the country that brought us Apartheid in South Africa, the mess in Northern Ireland, India vs Pakistan, driving on the left side of the road, and this non-stop news cycle of 'who gives a fuck' royal wedding carnival of lucky moneyed trailer trash (yes I did just call the British monarchy lucky moneyed trailer trash, and what are you gonna do about it? nothing, that's what.) what can you really expect? It's such a misguided backlash from an unchecked sense of having to make amends from the past, and will most likely lead to the homogenized hell-future of Demolition Man before anyone realizes that the government has taken all the fun out of life. Que the revolution and blah blah blah. Seriously, is this retardulatastic incident really any different from the "swear meter" that fines you every time you drop the f-bomb in public in that movie? Why would a machine do that if nothing else than to "protect" the "feelings" of others from your 1st amendment exercises, no? It puts the state of others in front of your ability/right (depending on where you live) to say whatever you want, while both parties are in a public space.

So the potential problem is huge in terms of not only media, but quality of life in general. I might "feel" the world is flat and screw up your kid's education by demanding the school "respect my belief." Or I might "feel" that sushi is such unspeakable animal cruelty that I might throw a fit if I have to be subjected having someone eat it within my field of vision. Or I might "feel" like Hetalia is offensive to Italians (or anyone else for that matter) and demand that WH Smith not only stop selling it immediately, but also that the person who ordered it and put it on the shelf in the first place be arrested, and they hand over a list of every customer who bought it so they can send Guy Montag to your front door.  There's a difference between withholding customership and busting out the handcuffs.

"Spaghetti" mother fucker, do you speak it?

Like in Miracle on 34th St, on one hand you can count the people who believe that Chris Kringle was Santa Claus and on the other you can count the people who believe the opposite (lol insert religion-joke here). This does NOT mean one group is oppressing the other, this means that such beliefs are totally fucking meaningless unless objective realities can be found to add legitimacy to one side or the other. Without objective facts you have opinions, with objective facts you have conclusions (not opinions). You can "feel" that this song is somehow racist all you want to, but it's not, so shut up. No, your feelings aren't important enough to change the fact that it's not racist. Yes it does kind of feel bad to realize that in the grand scheme of things you and your opinions are pretty much worthless. ...like I said before, deal with it.



The person making the media is the ultimate authority on its meaning.
And before anyone says something about it wasn't the song itself but the fact that the guy somehow played it at the other guy and that's what's illegal in this situation, just shut the hell up. It wasn't.  And don't give me any of that "Isle of Wight isn't England" crap either, because that's bullshit. If you actually think that such minor perspectives are somehow significant, just head on over to Memory Alpha, because there's an argument going on over there about Captain Kirk vs Captain Picard that requires your level of intellect.

This is totally important.

So now is this and every other song that uses the "oriental riff" going to be banned from karaoke joints in WestCliffordShropsherChippingtonShireOntheThems or whatever the fuck England calls it's cities that aren't London? Are we gonna have a good old fashioned book burning where we throw The Vapors "Turning Japanese" sheet music and CDs on the funeral pyre of creative freedom? Are we going to criminalize the possession of Big Trouble in Little China on DVD in region 2 PAL? Is England gonna ban Mikado, HMS Pinafore, and Madam Butterfly while they're at it? Three Little Maids From School are we, singing this now is a fel-o-ny, nicked on the ground as you can see, three little maids in jail.

By that reasoning, you're now a on the UK no-fly list for just watching this.

I feel a kind of personal connection to this because for over a whole decade, I marketed Kung Fu Fighting on home video. No not the song, I mean actual movies where there was Kung Fu Fighting in them and all that good stuff. Michelle Yao, Gordon Liu, Wong Fei Hung, Polly Kuan, Wong Kar Wai, Sammo Hung, John Liu, the entire fucking cast of Shaw Bros, and 10 times more than that, I got their movies into stores like Best Buy and Amazon.com, then I had to make consumers want to buy them. I used shit like this to do it:

You think it's racist? Well, it's not, so fuck off. Involving police over a cover of a disco song from the 1970's can be shown to be incredibly stupid when looking at the alternative possibilities of doing the same thing: Would the police have stormed in and shut the whole place down if the song was being played over a sound system rather than by a live band? What if it was somebody's ring-tone on their cellphone and it went off? Or if this Family Guy clip was on a TV above the bar... or this one... or this one... or, well you get the idea.

Racism makes for great comedy, you know why? Because it's fucking funny, and it's fucking funny because it's fucking stupid. If racism in any media can even be criminal, and then be defined by literally anyone who feels butt-hurt over something, then Chris Rock & Eddy Murphy will be rotting in jail long after Charles Manson gets out.



I seriously don't want to ever go to England ever again because of this shit. It makes me want to find a Union Jack and piss on it.  OK not that, I am just saying that to get a rise out of people (this is the internet), but I do abhor that kind of decision making.  Maybe this whole thing is troll-bait like the Scopes Monkey Trial, but looking back, even the Monkey Trial was still a spectacle which puts the spotlight on how dumb certain people can be. The same is true here. The fact that "Kung Fu Fighting" gets someone arrested is so mind bogglingly 'does-not-compute', that I don't think I can actually understand what it means to live over there. Did they arrest the other musicians? They were accessories after all? They facilitated this "criminal" act, did they not? ...you got a warrant out for Carl Douglas? He wrote the thing, so he must be as bad as Pol Pot or something.

Or maybe this guy?
Bonus points if you can name this movie & actor.

It's not even a small stretch to claim the same "me Chinese me play joke, me go pee pee your coke" levels racist offense is all over the pages and and animations of Hetalia, Ranma 1/2, or just about any manga or anime if you deliberately go looking for it. Like I said before, the reason otakus should be worried about this, is that whoever made this complaint (may they die from cancer up their asshole) could easily cry foul over bruised sensibilities if you happen to be reading a copy of something they find "offensive" because... reasons, while sitting on the bus next to him and force your arrest. The force the bookstores to stop selling any title that they were "offended" by. If you live in the UK or any of it's side projects, you had better worry about what you do/read/sing/fart in public, because if someone decides they don't like it or they just don't like you, then you're in for a world of pain.

Put down the anime and back away slowly! It offended someone!

I'm listening to the song right now. England had better take some time away from kissing the Queen's ass and make sure iTunes doesn't sell the thing to the commoners, otherwise the whole country will just go straight to hell! Pretty prince Willie and Kate whats-her-face are gonna break up, they'll have to start driving on the right side of the road, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Common sense has not triumphed in this situation even though this matter has been more or less put to bed, as the keystone-cop police mentioned that they would be happily prepared to do this crap again if it happened. The "accuser" has not been rightfully thrown in jail and punched in the face for wasting police time, and taxpayer money. I seriously want to know who the fucktard is who called the cops in, so that I can laugh when I hear that he committed suicide because there's video of him being anally penetrated by a Tibetan Yak all Mr. Hands style (it's ok, it's a wikipedia link). This kind of thing happening should have been a warning sign that the law is far too vague to be functional. I have lost faith in England's ability to control itself and it should be left in the corner to soil it's pants every day wondering what year it is. The door would be further open to even more ridiculous legal shenanigans based on the subjective reality of any moron's "hurt feelings" and the simply inexplicable notion that those feelings are worth a speck in the grand scheme of things. The logical progression of this kind of thing is simply terrifying:

FURSECUTION!
Oi guv'ner I'm callin' the Fuzz what with me English-ness an' all!
You bungslab that claptrap-tat right now or I'll kippleswig you in the wobbiecobbles!
(or however the fuck they talk over there).

And the moral of the story:

With apologies to Richy Jelica: Shared Psychosis of the TokyoPop aftermath

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Don't get me wrong; Some people are insane, some people live in a super-intense subjective reality of such mind boggling proportions, that they can see things that apply to them and their version of reality in every every potted plant in the universe. But then there are more subtle manifestations of such things, specifically the group-think common among American anime fans. Not only are these behavioral incongruities to reality not very visible to many, of those that do easily notice them a good portion do nothing to assuage these facilities because in fact they have a vested interest in their perpetuation. For this group, the vested interest is tangible such as revenue, market share, brand equity, etc. For the fans/masses however the barriers of this group-think are much stronger, because they are a self-imposed defense mechanism, shielding their soft personality matrices against the sharp uncompromising rocks of true objective reality.

Even without going into the extreme examples; religious wackos, birthers, and Mac fanboys who will never admit that Apple has become the totally Orwellian entity it portrayed in their "1984" commercial, and still defend a non-existant brand identity created by an advertising agency, it's still easy to see these defense mechanisms of the ego in action when people are confronted by them. Unfortunately this ease in observation is almost always comes with the codicil of having to have an outside perspective to begin with ie a non-Mac fanboy will see this and utter "duh" while the mac fanboy will instantly try to legitimize this inappropriate corporate behavior as totally cool or no big deal.

Add to this equation the ignorance of youth, and you get the kind of reaction that is happening in much of the otaku community when it comes to analyzing Tokyo Pop's shut down. For those of us who are literate in not only anime fandom but also corporate governance/asset management/business in general we know the correct way to look at the situation is from a perspective of fiscal fundamentals first, and only after that can we then superimpose the various unique operational maxims of the anime/manga market as they exist in N. America. Too many people have put the cart before the horse, and simply assumed that the industry was wholly profitable in the first place, because the books cost money. In a business where sell through operates as a merciless iron fist, consistent sales do not necessarily mean a company is healthy (believe me, I've been there). As a third party entity and not an IP creator, Tpop always operated in the chasm that would have been eventually closed by vertical consolidation the likes of which is what Shonen/Viz and Kodansha Vertical currently embody the late proto-form of. Once technology and market understanding are better at a management level, these entities will be able to close the window of opportunity for scanlation piracy and publish multi language versions very close together. They could have never sold the company off, because all the "assets" (which were licenses) had an expiration date on them... so the rate of depreciation is simply too massive to be reasonable.

Don't forget there are politics involved here too. As a 3rd party content licensor, there are licensees to keep happy. When these licensees are steeped in a Japanese business mentality, it's tough to satisfy them, because there will always be an impasse in seeing eye to eye in regards to what "doing it wrong" consists of. This is the only spot where the bulk of my experience is a bit different to what Tpop was dealing with, in that the Chinese were very easy to deal with; it was wham-bam-thankyamam, you signed the deal, they cashed the check, and you never saw them again. And if we were lucky and didn't fuck up (which happened almost always) we'd make enough money to post a profit and pay taxes on it, let alone operating expenses. However, there a lots of parallels do exist in terms of distribution pillars falling down hearkening the doom of the industry (Borders for books and Musicland + Tower for DVD... even Ingram had to get into the beer distribution business since DVD and Music was such crap in terms of the bottom line).

Ego Ego Ego. Everybody thinks their shit don't stink. They think because they like "manga title A" that it "sells" and would make money for the company. They think that since Tpop announced that it was going to put manga volumes online but didn't, it's a bad business decision and maybe the license didn't even cover doing something like that, because now that content can be accessed by mobile devices. This blinds them to the presence of a monster that is always sitting in the corner, and it seems only the outsiders can see this thing (which shouldn't be the case, but for the self imposed blinders of fandom). It's name is opportunity cost, and its bite can be fatal when inflicted on small companies like Tpop with cash flows that are susceptible to things like sell-through and other ongoing variables. Just because you bought it, doesn't mean it generates revenue for the company. ...Crystal Pepsi anyone? - Without looking at Tpop's financials, it's impossible for anyone (even me) to accurately formulate a good picture of what kind of shape things were in one way or the other. That's where the pitfall of overvaluation caused by inflated self-worth (I like manga and I am a customer, so therefore the company must be doing well) comes into play. It's easy to make assumptions that anime / manga companies are some sort of profit-machines, but where does that idea really come from? Fans who don't realize that $14.95 for a DVD is of licensed 3rd party localized content is such a low price, that the company can't function like that unless the sales are close to the millions of pieces.

All in all, this was a conservative business decision that made sense on paper and had a reasonable probability of being accurate. To throw reality into sharp relief to the ANN Cast; Tokyo Pop could have NEVER stayed in business as a book publisher because the event horizon of printed manga as a loss leader has been passed. That means manga is the dog and unless you have a business sector other than manga publishing that can be your cash cow, it's the end, plain and simple. This also happened in the DVD market (Mike Toole, I'm waiting for that Crash piece so people know what I'm talking about...) prompting the departure of many home media imprints a few years ago. It is a ridiculous assumption to "hate Stu Levy" because at it's core, such a notion has to make the incorrect assumption; that Tokyo Pop could have survived as a publishing company. No, I will call it sour grapes because all you are complaining about in really, is having your fandom-feelings hurt because your value as a fan has been called into question. I've been guilty of this myself and will probably never truly be able to keep myself from feeling bits of this kind of thing in the future. It's just human nature, but it's important to step outside your own emotional sphere in cases like this. The ANNCast mentioned notions of cutting the CEO salary to retain the "best people" on staff...? But for how long? Nowhere in the future was there an indication that the profitability is going to rebound any time soon, which will allow you to stop doing that and start paying everyone normally again. The ANNCast later mentioned that such an ides makes no sense when you think about it. So rather than run out of gas in the middle of the highway, Tpop made the calculated decision to drive to the dealership and trade it in for the best deal they could get. People feel betrayed, but in all honesty, you're not that important, and neither am I... Neither is Bill Gates unless he's an investor, because if you're a wage slave or a billionaire you're still just one sale of one book (again, unless you're an investor but that's a different post altogether). You can either go crazy with the subjective reality like this guy, or just deal with it. The downside is so many fans have chosen the first option and haven't even noticed how crazy it is since they are surrounded by so many people who think the same.

NASHUA UFO? ...yes, yes it is.

Hell is Other People: Commercial media consumption in the age of fucktards

There was once a time when the only thing to complain about at the movie theater was either the price of popcorn, or the movie itself. To be sure there were some theaters and certain showtime that always had a reputation of the type of place you didn't go if you actually wanted to watch the movie rather than be involved in some sort of culture-specific MST3K improv. There were always "those places" which were that on the surface.

Fast forward a few years and there was the occasional pager that went off in the respectable places. Maybe it was a brain surgeon or something, and it happened maybe once every 10 times you went to a show. Fast forward a little more, and you had cell phones going off. But this was still the era of pre-reality TV, Saved by the Bell was still making new episodes, and when AOL was a legitimate way for people to connect to the internet. The type of people who could own cell phones were mostly those who were of a respectable sort of behavioral set, knowing to turn the thing off, or having forgotten, quickly silenced it should it ring during a screening. But what was happening was an irreversable forward progression of a sad march to the situation we have today.

There was a congruous curve of both the availability of mobile technology and the increase in permissiveness of obnoxitude as a virtue facilitated through the generation of toddlers told by Mr Rodgers that they were "special", then being exposed to reality TV when they reached the age where illicitly procured alcohol was plentiful. Combine all that with the kind of social and cultural malaise which comes from seeing your college tuition sky-rocket while the baby-boomers still get their medicare subsidized Hoverounds and boner-pills; (sorry kid, no free college for you like I had, but don't worry that crappy job you have will still get taxed to pay for my scooter and viagra, because I'm a boomer and I'm worth it),... all wrapped within the American blanket of individualism trumping the collective good, and you are going to produce a segment of people our age who are just terrible to be around. A ruined movie going experience is just one result of it.

From people answering cellphones, to dumbasses showing up late, to even dumber bumbasses all talking to their one smart friend because they can't figure out what's happening because there aren't explosions happening, to the shit bags that show up late and then just HAVE to twitter during the thing, and the breeders with the 11 kids in the rated R film that sit them all over the place and then have to run back and forth to tell each other things... going to see a movie in an actual theater is something I almost never do and deliberately avoid.

Perhaps having a summer-job as a theater usher back in college has something to to with it also. Nothing gave me more job satisfaction than to bounce a cell-talking douchebag or some human ashtray that couldn't wait to light up. The job satisfaction I had didn't come from the feeling that I was taking something from someone and kicking them out, but that I was protecting the value of the expensive movie ticket of all the other people who had paid their own damn money to see whatever the hell Hollywood crapfest that was playing. You using your iphone to checkin on foursquare, or talk to your home-girl isn't your individual right, it's you straight up stealing from the people around you who paid money to see a movie, a price tag which does not include having to deal with your obnoxious ass. This notion directly clashes with American psychology where Gordon Gekko espouses self initiated value creation at the expense of the "resources" around you, regardless of whether those happen to be the well being of others. From that experience, I learned the value of cellphone jammers. Something indispensable not only at movies, but also at meeting and job interviews, because let's face it if they're busy twittering while you're trying to have a conversation even if it's more informal -incredible rudeness aside- you might as well not be there (...right Patrick?).

Seriously, have one of these if you're going to an investor pitch meeting or interviewing for a job. You don't want their cell to ring and take time away from the 12 minutes they're going to give you anyway.

Hence, movie going in Tokyo. A different universe. Sold out theaters where I guarantee everyone has a cellphone (maybe 2), and never a beep, chirp, or ring, let alone someone actually pick up the thing. Old people who can't tell what's going on wait until the thing is over for someone to explain the thing to them, and no one leaves their trash behind. Because that would be YOU causing a loss of value to OTHERS, which is something that Japanese culture has always placed an inordinate amount of importance on. I found myself thinking that I was definately getting a better value for a $30 movie ticket in Japan, than a $12 one in New York despite the fact that the theaters were identical in quality and technology, there were still half an hour of previews before the feature, and a pack of Twizzlers or whatever was still at a 1000% markup.

Unfortunately, in the USA, there is no way to ensure a separation of asshats simply by paying more money. You go to a different theater, different price, and all you get is a different flavor of a-hole that ruins your experience. Not even subtitles are enough to guarantee a proper movie-going experience. So rather than pay in capital, I pay with time, and wait for these media products to become commercially available in a form in which I can enjoy them in an environment more controlled and free from the chance that a d-bag on a cellphone might fuck the whole thing up from across the room.

This dynamic also holds true for the differences in anime fandom between Japan and America, but going into that at this point would just give me more of a headache. Sufficed to say, I'll be covering it again once convention season starts up. Sufficed to say that this is one of the many many Japanese cultural nuances that fail to port over with the proliferation of anime, and many American otaku remained puzzled as to why they are treated like martians by other Japanese when the scream "SQUEE" on the middle of a train platform or something like that.

There are a number of films I'd like to see, but none so much as to take my chances with $20 on a roulette wheel where the entire experience is turned to shit if even one of the other people in the shared communal space we've all payed to experience, decides to be a fuckwit and make my ticket worthless by doing something that has no place in a theater. Nothing (not technology, not the widening of genres or increased number of indie productions) will hasten the end of the movie theater in favor of at-home media consumption so much as the obnoxiousness of others, and the desire to avoid it.

The $30 streaming of in-theater titles concept making the rounds at this point is the harbinger of the impending end of profitability for movie theaters. It's still a long way away, and the problem of "piracy through pooling" (a group of people pay to stream a movie once, but all watch it in the living room of the richest single guy with the best TV setup) has yet to have a conceivable solution present itself. But still, much like the progression of cars replacing horses, the death of rotary phones, or the CRT monitor, this line only moves forward, and movie theaters will become as alien to our grandchildren as floppy disks. The upside is that studios will have less middle men in between the consumers and producers, which will not make anything cheaper, but it will allow for instant international availability that can actually produce revenue. Streaming the latest Japanese, Chinese, or European films will be just as easy as streaming the latest Hollywood release, once things are in place. That's still gonna take a while.

The Prefect Drug: Why the iTunes model will not work in curtailing online manga theft.

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Looking at some of the data available for the Japanese domestic market, it’s easy to be drawn to the conclusion that manga will soon see a significant portion of general revenue generated through distribution to customers via mobile network sales, through a combination of subscription service and pay-per-download sales. A little further down the line, and that mix will reach a 50/50 split when stacked against printed distribution and digital distribution. There is a significant upward trend when you look at traditionally printed media (manga and non-manga) from 2007-2010. The data is proprietary so I’m not going to repost the original here and my own infographics are part of an ongoing project, so no freebies, sorry.

There will be trade-offs of course, there will have to be a bigger revenue split between publishers and telecom networks, but through that new relationship the cost of physical printing will be jettisoned, so revenue actually goes up. The implied decrease in WTP for a digital version of a manga vs a print version that would be present in the USA, would be much more muted in Japan; a combination of the trust that Japanese consumers can have in their mobile technology and service providers actually working better (they totally do), and the fact that manga itself has always been seen as much more disposable even when it was physical media, and so the “fear of loss” that keeps people buying actual albums instead of downloading music from online services, rears not its ugly head. The transition from printed media to a medium of both printed and mobile distribution, and finally a dominance of mobile distribution with high end printings still being sold, will happen relatively smoothly for the Japanese market. Who knows, we might even see streamlined preview and download stations in the corners of all the convenience stores that dot the Japanese landscape.

So much like iTunes, and the later proliferation of many other commercial music services has made music piracy a less viable option for many consumer groups, keeping it profitable enough to continue as an industry, can a similar distribution channel for manga be far behind, and stop the theft of manga and make it a more viable business to be in?

The problem is, this isn’t going to change very much in terms of what’s happening with manga in the USA. That’s because of a perfect storm of factors which all must be adequately addressed in order to stop people stealing manga from Japan. Let’s apply the old consultant standby of the two by two matrix:

(I don't give it away for free people).

This isn’t a standard 2x2, where the factors are counter-related, but rather a larger look at a macro whole, each segment of which is in and of itself an entire business universe of operation. Looking at these factors (hopefully) can highlight the lopsided strategy that’s being employed to combat the situation. However from the vantage point of those employing such strategies, the tactics are not lopsided... and they are correct. The tactics are not lopsided, the market or “field of battle” is itself very lopsided, and the vacuous dark abyss that seems to consume all efforts and show no progressive change. A singularity, black hole, capable of sucking off and compressing the skin of all the efforts done not only directly against it, but to other sectors thought separate from its influence. Bonus points if you already know which factor I speak of.

Mindset, has been and will always be the greatest asset and liability to the success of Japanese entertainment media in America. This quadrant, being labeled as such, wears a deceiving veil of simplicity and smallness of form, but in fact, it is an area as vast as an entire market itself, taking into account aspects of sociology, economics, cluster-demography, politics, access to wealth, and age based psychology. Try to take that all in, and you realize the immense undertaking that the strategy and follow through of public relations, is something that would require a division led by a Chief Engagement Officer. Something no company is prepared to do logistically, financially, or ideologically. It is in fact the barrier of ideology, which will prevent any company from undertaking such measures, since any positive progress in abating manga theft is beneficial to their competitors as well, making those competitors “free riders” in the eyes of management.

There is no current independent body inside America that is going to undertake this, and unless the manga and anime market increase in size by about 10,000%, there may not be one any time soon. The type of problems they are up against can be seen in the case study of the Son May music label and the grassroots anti bootleg marketing of the 1990’s. Being on the front lines of that operation, it was amazing to see emerging otaku demand anime music as cheap as it could get, and then swing to a high willingness to pay for legitimate releases once they were successfully educated as to what SM actually was and how it did actual damage to the anime industry as a whole.

The “Mindset” quadrant in and of itself can actually be understood as an operational triangle, with the 3 angular nexuses of (Cluster) Demography – Economy – and Psychology, connected by the three communication mediums of Communal Exclusivity – Gamification Behavior – and Consumer Behavior. These are in tern all operational maxims that have been established by business analysts and strategic consultants form here to Kalamazoo, with their unique operational variances. Additionally, the hard data and direct knowledge needed to correctly interpret and apply that data are all very necessary in not only understanding this previously “unwinnable” quadrant of the above Manga Matrix up there, and they are all here behind the curtain that is my hard drive. You out there in cyberspace get the simplified version, because the real deal is going somewhere important where it will be seen by important people.

Like DaVinci would mix up his designs to prevent copying, so too have some components been moved around... or have they?

Unlike the S.W.O.T. analysis which is intended to condense broad expanses or the F.O.M.I. analysis (a derivative of M.E.C.E.) designed to narrow down sources of negative cash flow (something the English language manga industry is grappling with), this method of looking at things is designed to allow us to effectively get a grasp of the size and shape of a strategy that’s going to be needed to approach the problem. To get all metaphor-like; doing this is like doing an exercise to properly know not only the size of a container needed to carry a certain volume of water, but also the proper shape it’s going to have to be to fit into a very particularly shaped spot. This is very much a “measure twice, cut once” approach to the daunting task of American otaku customer engagement. This is very important, because the world is full of examples of how much damage can be caused in failed approaches to customer engagement.

It’s also a pipe dream of sorts. For reasons that we have covered here and for other obvious factors out there, some change in the way things operate isn’t going to be happening any time soon. ...or is it? Well, I am working on something for someone regarding this after all.

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Donations are Worthless, economic issues and the future of Japan

Did I say worthless? No, I meant worth – less (2 words), so put the torches and pitchforks down.

On April 2, the “Dram for Japan” event was held in New York City’s Ward III bar and nightclub, generating a few thousand dollars (I haven’t seen the final figures yet) for the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, organized by a group of very capable entities, including Teleport City’s own Keith Allison. I was happy to donate what I had available to the items that were auctioned off (give them a good home whoever you are) and I also had the chance to sample some very interesting distilled whiskey products including some selections from a distillery in New York hopefully to be featured on Pinky Mixology in a future episode.

It was a nice time and we raised money for a good cause, but this revelry occurred under a cloud so immense and so entrenched in permanence that it went almost completely unnoticed save for a passing mention by a ninja consultant. That is the monster of currency stagflation and what it’s doing to the Yen. To get a picture of it, you can look at this previous post, and since I’ve talked about it before, I won’t cover the entire matter again, but only reference it in order to point out that there now exists a serious potential to finally equalize the yen. It’s no guarantee, but at least it’s real.

At the moment, foreign currencies are quite weak against the Japanese Yen, which means that basically for every $100 you raise for earthquake relief it will basically just buy lunch for 4 guys after the exchange rate kicks in. Yet this current ratio of conversion can not stand forever, and will either be let down gradually in a controlled manner to minimize damage, or eventually progress to the point it triggers a major upheaval or worse, a collapse. It is in the potential ability to facilitate this controlled adjustment that we can (possibly) find a silver lining in the Tohoku/Sendai Earthquake, if one can call it that.

This event will serve as the impetus of action by the BOJ, to release unexpected (or at least unplanned) amounts of currency into the economy, resulting in a flood of JPY into the local and a subsequent inflation that is very desperately needed. In a perfect (aka economically balanced) world, that would be all it would take, however Japan is in a spot best described as being between a rock and a hard place. The country will release a flood of funds but have limited means to implement the programs it hopes to accomplish... leading to an influx. This influx can either be: A) workers not from Japan but willing to work and live in such a country, or B) a mythical number of Japanese which do not exist, willing to work and live in such conditions as the USA forces Mexicans to tolerate. Seriously, in Japan even whitey is an outsider, and given the sociological problems Japan is having right now, this is the literal last straw.

Will Japan lose some culture and history? No, not really. The country has let millions of non-Japanese through over the pre-Meiji era, and the culture it fears losing has been defined after such occurrences. As long as they can get enough money and public support behind the idea of what their culture is, it will never go away.

So we shall see a great acceleration in the formula that was “Japan Inc.” to all of us early otakus and academics... But now that the snow globe has been shaken up... hopefully Japan is ready for a restructuring of that level, which requires foreigners to rebuild many sections of Japan, but this time thedy will stay and there is nothing that can be done.