50 State Quarters

Until recently, I always tried to use debit card anywhere anytime because dealing with coin is annoying. They are very confusing: Nickel (5 cents) is bigger than Dime (10 cents), and Dime is as large as Penny (1 cents) is in size. I don't like to hold many coins in my pocket or wallet, so I had a habit to use as many coins as possible at the payment in Japan. For example, when I pay five hundred twenty-eight yen, I seldom pay six hundred yen to prevent to receiving nine coins: seven ten yen coins and two one yen coins. I pay the exact amount or six hundred eight yen or something to reduce my coins. However, I have to abandon this deeply rooted habit because I cannot distinguish Penny, Nickel, and Dime immediately at the payment. When I bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks on the first day in Princeton, I scattered many coins on the cashier desk and asked the employee to choose the amount of pay appealing that I was a foreigner. While she kindly explained the difference of coins and I understood it, it took some time for me to learn it intuitively.

But I sometimes use cash recently because I need Quarters for two reasons. First, I need them to wash my clothes. The washing machine and the drier at the public space of my apartment accept only Quarters. To wash and dry my clothes, I need four Quarters in total. It was very sad that I found the other day that I couldn't wash my cloths due to the lack of Quarters and finally went to the convenience store to get them.

Second, I started to collect fifty State Quarters. The 50 State Quarters program is the release of a series of commemorative coins by the United States Mint. Between 1999 and 2008, it is intended to feature each of the 50 individual U.S. states on unique designs for the reverse of the quarter (cited from Wikipedia). They are good tool to learn the history and the character of each state. Delaware Quarter says that it's "the first state." Washington Quarters, "evergreen state," features salmon leaping in front of Mount Rainier. North Dakota has two bison at dawn and badlands, and Kentucky does thoroughbred racehorse behind fence.

Also, they are useful to learn the location of each state. To understand the geography of this country, I bought 50 State Commemorative Quarter Map Holder Album Book. The seller of this album raises ten reasons to buy it on their website. It's interesting that most of them feature financial reasons such as saving and investment. It's very American for me. If Japanese Ministry of Finance issued this kind of coins and somebody tried to sell coin albums in Japan, they would feature the educational utility on their advertisement. By glancing the marketing communication of such small products, we can easily find the cultural difference of the notion on money.

By the way, I visited my colleague who also enjoys his sabbatical in Pennsylvania two weeks ago. His family entertained me with authentic Japanese food, the udon with homemade tempra (a deep fried lightly-battered vegetables and seafood). It was yummy! Thank you very much, Karube-san. After the fine lunch, he showed me his daughter's coin album. It seems that I, a thirty five years old man, shares same hobby with a nine year old girl. Am I childish? Yes, I am a cultural child here.

Luckly every commemorative coin will be released during my stay in the US. To grow up, I will complete this collection.

Japanese Manga Industrial Complex

This month's cover story of WIRED magazine is MANGA CONQUERS AMERICA. One of the article, "Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex" by Daniel Pink reports how Japanese have been obsessed with comics and how the market of nonprofessional self-published manga known as dojinshi has huge market. He visited Japan for two months as a fellow of Japan Society, a NPO which is one of the major introducer of Japanese pop culture in US.

What was striking for Pink when he visited the market of dojinshi was flagrant copyright violation. Most of them sold there borrow liberally from existing professional works such as Dragon Ball and Evangelion. It's no wonder that he was wondering why Japanese publishers doesn't bring a law-suit against them. The scale of the market is incredibly huge. At Super Comic City, two days dojinshi market at Tokyo Big Sight (Japan's largest exhibition oriented convention center), he saw 33,000 dojin artists sold their comics in six huge halls, each the size of a professional basketball arena. About 300,000 books are sold in cash totaling more than $1 million by day's end.

The main organizers of dojinshi markets answered this American question with Japanese-like phrase, anmoku no ryokai, which literally means "unspoken, implicit agreement." Needless to say, publishers never encourage dojin artists to violate their copyrights. But they gave the creators their tacit permit. Pink explains that this anmoku no ryokai is an imperfect but calcurated business model of manga publishers in Japan. He articulated it in three ways. First, the dosinshi devotees are good manga's customers. Second, dojin creators are the huge pool of potential talent. Third, by observing the trend of dojinshi market, they can predict the direction of professional manga market.

This article remembered me the last summer visit to Comic Market or Comiket. Comiket, the world's largest comic convention, is also held at Tokyo Big Sight every twice a year. Any space other than TBC doesn't have enough capacity for Comiket. Besides that, the number of the attendees continues to increase. Last winters's convention, Comiket 71, gathered approximately 440,000 attendees coverge in the course of three days, and Comiket 72 in this summer accepted approximately 550,000 attendees.

It is held during the hottest summer days in August and during the winter days after the Christmas in December. Apparently, these periods are not suitable for more conventional trade show such as motor show. Nobody wants to visit such an inconvenient place at the gulf of Tokyo at temperature over 100 °F. Also, every Japanese is very busy in December, especially after the Christmas, for preparation to welcome new year. But these scheduling shows the fact that the otaku (geeks) of dojinshi are the only people who don't take care of the climate which would cause sunstroke and can ignore Japanese conventional seasonal schedule to pursue their satisfaction.

Telling the truth, the gathering was really bizarre. Both physically and psychologically, the atmosphere was heated (and humid). Geeks with a bunch of one thousand yen bills were hunting their favorite dojinshi, most of them are the pornographic parody of manga as far as I saw.

But the cosplay (a portmanteau of the English words "costume" and "play") was very interesting. At the open space for cosplay, many people dressed as characters from manga and anime (an abbreviation of the word "animation"). On the contrary to the humid atmosphere around the dojinshi shops, cosplay space was a kind of amusement park. Many of handmade costume were highly sophisticated and some of cosplayer women are as beautiful as actresses. When they are asked to be taken their photographers, any cosplayers took their best pose professionally. It is regrettable that I erased the pictures of cosplayes by mistake.

This sanctuary for otaku has set many rules for attendees. Its phone book size catalogue, which contains information about the buyers and sellers, lists detailed Dos and Don'ts: Ask cosplayers' permission when you shoot them. Don't run. Carry a bottle of water. Be careful of your belongings. Don't bring five thousand yen and ten thousand yen bills to buy dojinshi. Use one thousand yen bill is strongly recommended so as not sellers to be in short of their changes.

Many unknown persons cautioned us about our "misbehaviors" during our two only hours stay. They have established many explicit codes to protect their growing sanctuary and expect any strangers to obey them. There isn't any anmoku no ryokai as far as Comiket is.

What is striking for me is the sharp contrast between their strict rules which dominate their cosmos and their obvious violation of the copyright rules which dominate their outer space. Is this enigma the key to understand how Japanese manga subculture have flourished?