Opinion Read before you judge By Matthew A. Thorn	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
質の高いマンガを読もう 日本のマンガには古典的な名著がたくさんある。その中から質の高い作品を選んで読むことを勧めたい。それはあなたの人生を変えるほどの力があるからだ。

I always hesitate when someone asks me what I do for a living. Sometimes I take the easy way out and just say I'm a cultural anthropologist. Images of National Geographic flash briefly through the person's mind, and the conversation turns in another direction. When I confess that I teach budding cartoonists about comics in Japan's first and only Department of Comic Art in a four-year university, reactions are more varied, running from thinly veiled contempt to puzzlement to wild enthusiasm.

I became interested in manga, as an exchange student in Kobe nineteen years ago. Today, most exchange students coming to Japan have a basic knowledge of manga and anime before they even set foot on Japanese soil. Many develop an interest in Japan through those genres, but in those days most of us knew nothing about them beyond what we remembered from watching "Speed Racer" on TV as kids. In fact, most of us, including myself, were downright contemptuous of the grown men we saw reading comics on the trains.

It was the woman who would later become my wife who told me to read before I judged, and introduced me to such classic manga as Osamu Tezuka's "Hi no Tori" and Sanpei Shirato's "Kamui Den." But it was a work by female artist Moto Hagio, "Toma no Shinzo," that got me hooked and led me to begin my study on the readers of girls' and women's manga.

Manga account for more than a third of all unit sales of commercial publications in Japan. A survey of Japanese reading practices conducted by the Mainichi Newspaper in 2000 reported that 77 percent of men aged 16 to 49, and 47 percent of women aged 16 to 49, read manga with some regularity. Nowhere else in the world are comics produced and read in such quantity, making Japan the Hollywood of sequential art. Japan has been exporting both manga and anime to its Asian neighbors for years, but since the global Pokemon boom of the late 1990s, manga and anime have finally begun to penetrate the Anglophone market in a big way, so that the words themselves have become part of the contemporary language.

Sadly, though, the majority of manga that have been translated into English target the self-described otaku ("geek") crowd, and tend to lean heavily toward space opera, fantasy, the occult, and adolescent titillation. Not that there's anything wrong with such genres, mind you, but they represent only a slice of a very large pie. (The quality of translation has also dropped as volume has increased.)

As with any popular media, ninety percent of manga are junk, and in recent years I'ｖe seen many open-minded adults with sophisticated tastes turned off by their first encounters with third-rate manga. For those who are curious about manga and don't want to waste time on "greasy kids stuff," try one of these: "Kaze no Tani no Naushika" (Hayao Miyazaki); "Love Song" (Keiko Nishi); "A-A' " (Moto Hagio); "Black Jack" (Osamu Tezuka); "Secret Comics Japan" (ｖarious); "Domu" (Katsuhiro Otomo); "Paradise Kiss" (Ai Yazawa); and "Vagabond" (Takehiko Inoue).

Read a really good manga, and it can change your life, like one manga changed my life all those years ago.

Shukan ST: June 4, 2004

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