Manga bridges U.S., Japan cultural gap

Eric Leake

Saturday, Nov. 13, 2004 | 12:09 p.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

November 13 - 14, 2004

Though 65 years old, Chiba Tetsuya still has something about him reminiscent of a child. It may be his obvious enthusiasm or the way he always seems just about to smile.

His life's work as a manga artist, a Japanese cartoonist, may have started as child's play, but the imported cartoon and its animated counterpart, anime, have ever-widening appeal.

"I believe that anime and manga have qualities of hope, courage, perseverance -- themes that people in America can sympathize with," Tetsuya said through a translator Thursday night.

Manga is a style of comic book art -- known for unique cartoon characters with large eyes. Anime is its animated counterpart.

"The manga and anime that we create in Japan comes to America, and that people like it makes me very happy," he said.

Tetsuya is the first of three speakers who will visit UNLV this month in a lecture series about anime and manga. He kicked off the series, sponsored by the Tokyo Foundation, on Friday.

Before that, Tetsuya visited a university anime club Thursday night. As students troubleshot a projector, Ronald Morse, UNLV's Tokyo Foundation professor-in-residence of Japanese Studies, introduced Tetsuya as probably the most famous Japanese cartoonist.

"Anime in Japan is very popular right now, as it is in America as well. I hope that through anime and manga our two cultures can understand one another," Tetsuya told the students. "That's the hope I have as I do my work now."

Tetsuya began drawing manga cartoons when he was 12, went on to produce some of the form's most famous series and now serves as managing director of the Japan Cartoonist Association.

His signature piece is the 1968 boxing epic "Ashita no Joe" or "Tomorrow's Joe."

Tetsuya read Superman and Spider-Man comics when he was young. He still likes Blondie and Dagwood, which gave him a window into American life.

What makes manga different, he said, is a wider variety of themes and characters that give it "something of a dreamlike quality."

That wide variety of themes gave Alec Smolyar much to choose from as he prepared the OtakUNLV anime club's feature for the night.

Smolyar, the club's president and a freshman computer science major, advertised the club's Web site at OtakUNLV.org. He spoke of anime as though he were letting somebody in on a secret.

"It's a whole different type of cartoon. It's a very original type," he said. "No American cartoons can capture that."

He said anime is now everywhere, at video rental stores and in the mall, for anybody ready to escape reality television. With big screen releases such as "Spirited Away," it's only getting more popular.

Across the street from UNLV on Maryland Parkway is Alternate Reality Comics. Near the front of the store, before most of the superhero fare in the back, are displays of manga comic books.

Across from the counter are the erotic manga series, where owner Ralph Mathieu can watch who thumbs through them.

"A lot of my favorite books I'm reading today are manga because they give me something different from what's in the American comics," Mathieu said, adding that there are still several good American comics.

The manga books on display include stories of tennis, cooking, racing and ninja fights. On their covers are typically energetic, large-eyed youth. They're thicker than comic books, mostly around 200 pages and, though translated, read from back to front in the original Japanese format.

Mathieu said manga has really taken off in the past two years, but is hamstrung by the same perceptions that limit American cartoons and visual novels.

"Here in the U.S., there's still a stigma if someone like myself says he reads comics. It's still considered kiddie literature."

A sign that the stigma is changing is Morse's course on Japanese pop studies, also funded through a UNLV partnership with the Tokyo Foundation.

"This field hasn't been seriously dealt with in the past. This is really one of the first attempts to make sense of what you have all grown up with and treat it in a more academic way," Morse said.

Morse taught a similar course at UCLA. Las Vegas, he said, is an even better setting to study Japanese pop culture.

"A lot of the visual stuff you see on the Strip is the same stuff you see in Tokyo," Morse said. "Las Vegas is the closest city in the United States to Toyko in pop culture."

The subject is one worth addressing, Morse said, citing 500 million manga sold in Japan every year, accounting for half of the Japanese publishing revenue. He said manga is even used in education.

"Here we have 'Economics for Dummies.' In Japan, 'Economics for Dummies' would be a manga."

Part of the appeal of manga in Japan, Morse said, is that the books act as a consultant and adviser for children when the family has broken down. And manga is usually the work of a single artistic vision rather than a wide collaboration.

Morse gave some of the background of manga and anime. He said manga usually starts as serials in weekly publications. If it is popular, it is collected into a book, and then may be made into a anime series or film.

The reason characters' eyes are often so big? Japanese animation started in part because readers wanted the fantasy of being different than they were, Morse said.

"One way to do that was to create characters that had big eyes, red hair, big breasts, that sort of thing."

Also speaking in the lecture series, presented by the UNLV Asian Studies Program, are Hiromi Seki and Hiroaki Takeuchi.

Seki is the anime producer responsible for the "Digimon" series and "Marmalade Boy." She will speak at UNLV from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday in Beam Hall room 241.

Takeuchi produces both traditional cel and digital anime and worked in cooperation with Sega in video game animation. He most recently produced "The Animatrix."

Takeuchi will speak at UNLV from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 23 in Beam Hall room 216.