Who could possibly fall asleep on the way to work when simply buying a ticket results is hours of fun trying to work out how to actually get there. Bless!
Image credit here.
[Originally written for Sticky's Electronic Sporadic Correspondence: February]
Did somebody say "doujinshi"? Just one set of shelves at Mandarake.
Unlike other parts of Asia I’ve visited, Japan has a thriving zine culture in the form of “doujinshi” (lit. same person magazine, as in “zines written by and for people with the same interests”). Like zines, doujinshi can be virtually any kind of self-published booklet or book containing original material and/or a synthesis or expansion of other peoples’ work (e.g. fanfiction and fan art). Doujinshi containing short stories or manga (Japanese comics) using the characters of other popular manga, anime, video games and celebrities are the most common types of doujinshi you’ll see lining the shelves of bookstore-distros, though unknown and already popular artists and writers also use the unconstrained nature of self-publishing to create entirely original doujinshi. To avoid prosecution for using copyrighted characters and other material in their work, Japanese zinesters and groups of co-authors known as “circles” generally keep print runs low, which in turn can make prices for rare doujinshi extremely high if you’re lucky enough to find them at all.
Japan’s twice-yearly Comiket (aka “comic market”, arguably the largest zine/doujinshi event and exchange in the world) had ended a month before I arrived in Tokyo for my four day visit, so I did the next best thing and headed to Mandarake, a Japanese pop culture fan’s paradise store, selling manga, anime, collectables, CDs and, vitally, a huge array of doujinshi. This was the first time I’d seen real Japanese doujinshi in person, so after kind of dying of joy, I began scouring the shelves for anything I
recognised.
The first thing I noticed about Japanese zines was the binding (go figure). Virtually every doujinshi I picked up was perfect bound — not a staple or wonky page in sight. I already knew professional printing was cheap in Asia, but this was ridiculous. The quality of most of the art was also incredible, whether it was stylised versions of popular characters, or artwork so well emulated I began to wonder if this “fan art” wasn’t the work of the original artist after all (which does happen too). Almost immediately I began to understand the allure of collecting doujinshi, particularly if it’s re-imagining and re-interpreting your favourite fandoms, and clearly the other customers in Mandarake (90% of whom seemed to be female, though that’s not surprising considering how much yaoi they stock) had long since passed the “stunned” stage into buy mode. I saw at least half a dozen customers come in, pick up one of the shopping baskets stacked by the door and move progressively through the store’s labyrinthine shelves until their basket was full of doujinshi.
It looked like classic retail therapy to me, so I thought I’d give it a go. Unfortunately my Japanese is practically non-existent and having to pull out every doujinshi to see what it was because I couldn’t read any of the shelf labels started to become tedious (also the non-zine-interested person I was travelling with was starting to throw me dirty looks). So eventually I settled on the few shelves whose labelling I could read either because the name of the original franchise was in English (e.g. Death Note) or because the Japanese name was the same as the Chinese name (e.g. 黑執事). The next problem was that all of the doujinshi were packaged in plastic, and so the merits of any given doujinshi had to be assessed by its price (the cheapest I bought was¥140 (AU$1.70), the most expensive ¥1200 (AU$15)), the quality of the art on the front cover and any other peripherals like a list of contributing artists and R18+ labels. Unfortunately all of these competing factors became too much for my addled brain and the five doujinshi I wound up buying were not what I was expecting: one turned out to be a short story when I thought it was a comic, and the other four contained certain images of much-loved characters doing things I’ve since attempted to expunge from my memory.
All in all though it was fantastic being in Japan and seeing how they contribute to local and global zine culture, and I can’t wait to go back and do it all again (this time with a shopping basket).
Head of Media and Communications in a random Melbourne University lecture theatre, welcoming the undergraduates*: ”you should all be very proud of yourselves for coming this far — apart from Biomedicine, this cohort contains the highest percentage of perfect or near-perfect scores achieved by high school leavers…”
V: *feels self-satisfied*
Head of Media and Communications: “…of course, this just means you’ll all be competing fiercely against each other for good marks in your subjects.”
V: “shit.”
***
So I’m finally back home after five extremely excellent months living and travelling through Asia, which also means I’m currently in the throes of mild but everpresent reverse culture shock. Nothing’s upset or pissed me off too much so far, but I haven’t exactly re-integrated into society yet either. But seeing as it’s just a day after Australia Day** (which I only remembered after queueing behind some lobster-complexioned lasses in Australian flag dresses at the airport), I thought I’d share with you all my thoughts on being back in Melbourne.
1. Where did all these pale, hairy, large-limbed and extremely loud people come from, and why are they speaking English?
2. Giving the trams a new exterior paint job does not make them any less infrequent and slow.
3. Ravioli! Ravioli! And the pizza…OMG, it actually tastes like food! *slobbers some*
4. $2.50 water? That’s so cheap! *mentally multiplies this by six* …or maybe not so cheap. But there’s something about overpriced Mount Franklin water that soothes the soul (and then you remember it’s owned by Coca-Cola).
5. People here read books in the wrong direction.
6. Melbourne’s skyscrapers are numerous enough to fit inside a petri dish.
7. I haz balcony. Hawr hawr hawr.
8. What do you mean I can’t have a 20 minute shower!?
9. People actually care when you accidentally bump into them.
10. Cats! I have cats again! *squeezes them both and consequently discovers a large deposit of fur on t-shirt* Cats…I have cats again…
Ah, Melbourne.***
*Paraphrased. It’s too early in the year to be taking notes.
**Referred to by me and mine more commonly as Invasion Day.
***I swear that’s not patriotism. It’s irony, or cynicism, or nostalgia. Or something.
Never thought I’d be trying to regain my humanity in a Kuala Lumpur Airport Starbucks
(But that’s what long-haul flights without any sleep and a limited supply of Kuroshitsuji will do to you, I guess).
Tomorrow I will be back in Melbourne for the first time in five months, and in between all the uni-enrolling, reminding-old-friends-of-my-existence-ing, ravioli-eating, sunburning, zine-making and speaking English to everyone again I just hope I still have enough presence of mind not to crawl under my doona and sleep through February.
Yeah, right.
Allowed.
Escorting children across the street dressed as Willy Wonka.
Lying belly-first on a thin bed of ice cubes.
Not allowed.
Mermaids.
[Originally written for Sticky's Electronic Sporadic Correspondence: January].
December was my fourth and final month in Shanghai, so short of asking my uncle’s wife’s second cousin Yao (who is a city official and can park his car on sidewalks) if I could set up a distro in an aisle of the nearest 7-Eleven or on the back of a tangerine truck, I decided to do what little I could for Shanghai’s zine culture by making one of my own. But publishing things in foreign countries poses its own difficulties, chief among them being the language factor. I wanted my zine to be bilingual, and decided some kind of dictionary or phrasebook would be the most obvious format. And so after several weeks bent over my laptop in front of the TV trying to ignore the national news broadcast and its frequent footage of people setting themselves on fire, I created the Extremely Essentialized Chinese Pocket Phrasebook for Foreign Interlopers, a must-have guide for Western tourists in China — complete with sections on shopping, accommodation, camel hire, extra-marital affairs, running for public office and how to get deported from China without paying a cent. Now all I had to do was get my zine to the people.
Materials.
After finding a wad of beige copy paper in the drawer of my desk under a bunch expired lollies from Halloween, I went to the local stationery store to buy some Doraemon-themed glue, but was too stingy to shell out for a long armed stapler. Who needs binding, anyway?
Translation.
Possibly the most time-consuming part of the process was translating every phrase and vocabulary word in the zine into Chinese, from food poisoning to gerbils, liposuction to Lady Gaga. I did all the translations myself first (albeit with the constant guidance of Google), and then persuaded my nearest Chinese-speaking minion to edit my half-baked grammar. Translating “the abdominal wounds were caused by several stab wounds delivered by a mystery attacker dressed as Hello Kitty” isn’t exactly the easiest way to start the day, but I think we got there in the end.
Printing.
It took a surprisingly long time for me to remember I didn’t have free access to a printer or photocopier, then I remembered the local print shop and decided I could probably get away with a 30 copy run with the amount of change I’d managed to accumulate in the last half hour. But somewhere between spending most of my last days in Shanghai in a karaoke parlour while single-handedly supporting China’s GFC-afflicted bootleg DVD market, I got lazy and decided to reduce my print run to one copy and got a friend to print it at work.
The Planting.
With no apparent distros or zine-friendly bookshops in Shanghai, I was going to have to use guerilla tactics to get my lone copy of the Phrasebook out there (guerilla tactics that would involve dumping my zine in a bookstore and running in the other direction before a security guard could tackle me and demonstrate some not-so-fictional deportation).
I wound up planting my zine in Shanghai Shu Cheng (“Shanghai Book City”), a bookstore with seven Borders-sized floors and an inevitable in-store Starbucks. Tempted as I was to leave the Phrasebook in the computer programming section, I wound up putting it among a stack of bilingual books, where it might at least find an appreciative audience. That was a week ago, and though I doubt I’ll ever hear about or see that copy of my zine again, I can only hope someone who desperately wanted to know how to say “you have abnormal taste in mittens” has found it and given it a good home.
Apparently also rendered in English as “Tamsui” —just don’t expect any of the locals of this Taiwanese seaside town cum glorified resort to understand that version of their home’s name unless you have a pumpkin head and are wearing a black cabbage skirt (apparently).
The last time I’d been in Danshui was also in winter and the weather had been misty, drizzly and anything but festive, but this time vgag and I lucked out with two full days of sun that just happened to coincide with the weekend, and consequently, hordes of young couples, old couples, families, the odd tourist group and virtually anyone looking for a reprieve from Taipei and its comparatively dismal atmosphere.
A Danshui speciality: caricatures of you and your favourite celebrities, from Angela Zhang to Maggie Smith, Show Luo to Audrey Hepburn
Feeling peckish after that strenuous metro ride? Might as well stock up on some Taiwan-style American donuts and treat yourself to something resembling coffee at the five storey Starbucks located conveniently to the rear.
After checking into our hotel and walking a surprisingly long distance back to the seaside promenade on largely anti-pedestrian roads, we managed to survive the crush of day-trippers and absorb some of the local colour and Tack best typified by beach souvenir shops.
Hey, I know how to play the ocarina! All you have to do is press the C-buttons on your N64 controller…
I was also mightily pleased to hear one of the buskers singing a Hokkien version of Teresa Teng’s I Only Care About You (我只在乎你), which most sodagreen fans will probably remember from the band’s 2007 Taipei Arena Concert even if they’re not a fan of the timeless songstress’ original hit.
Thankfully our relatively cramped hotel room and the shocking revelation of having no DVD player (!!!) to fiddle around with was well and truly made up for by the hot spring water tub in our bathroom, though the drought-conscious part of me was less keen on the fact that it took half an hour to fill and about five minutes in the water before I felt like an overcooked ham. Still, what’s an indulgent weekend away from the main part of your holiday without a bit of unbridled consumption?
Our second day in Danshui was largely taken up by getting a ferry to fisherman’s wharf (渔人码头), a slightly less inhabited part of Danshui with no fishermen in sight but plenty of tourists taking their fill of the suspension bridge and wooden jetty featured in the relatively competent but underbaked Taiwanese drama A Game About Love (剪刀 石頭 布).
vgag and I ate our lunch of day-old Pizza Hut pizza on the jetty and got a ferry back to central Danshui.
We’d originally intended to take another ferry to Bali (八里), a town on the opposite side of the river from Danshui, but by the time we got back from fisherman’s wharf and saw the queue of like minded tourists waiting for the next Bali-bound boat, we decided to take a much-needed siesta back at the hotel and its tub.
Maybe next time: a ferry passes by Bali
Which was just as well, because our search for the vegetarian restaurant mentioned in our Lonely Planet guidebook ended up requiring more than an hour of inhospitable walking through unlit lanes, unpaved roads and apartment complex backstreets until we somehow found the main drag again and, naturally, a night market.
Just as well we finally found the restaurant and the dumplings were to die for, because I was about to keel over from hunger and the stress that comes with wondering if a rabid scooter driver is going to knock you over at the next corner. Possibly in consequence I ended up buying a Doraemon helmet at the market after dinner, and when vgag suggested we look in a local bookshop, a set of Kuroshitsuji (黒執事) document folders (vgag meanwhile came away with a brand new Gundam t-shirt, because who buys books at bookshops these days?)
Our last morning in Danshui was spent packing for our five hour train journey to Kaohsiung (高雄), and after explaining to the taxi driver who picked us up at the hotel that we were indeed not going to the airport despite our enormous number of bags, we made it to the metro station and enjoyed a relatively peaceable journey back to Taipei main station. Then I decided to go on an ill-fated solo journey in search of manga before our train arrived that ended up with me becoming hopelessly lost with only one pair of new stockings to show for it, but that’s another story for another set of eyes that would actually find that kind of narrative interesting.
Girl walks into supermarket and attracts attention of young, wide-eyed shelf stacker man (who had previously been rustling through the lollies in aisle three).
Girl: 请问, 电池在哪里? (Excuse me, where can I find batteries?)
Shelf Stacker Man: *looks confused and gabbles something incomprehensible*
Girl: *displays alarmed face*
Shelf Stacker Man mimes something that could be anything, and points towards a nearby shelf, at a spatula.
Girl: 不不不, 我想买电池. (No no no, I want to buy batteries).
Shelf stacker man: 电池? (Batteries? ["dian chi"])
Girl: 对阿. 电视的电, 游泳池的池. (Yeah, the “dian” in “dian shi”* and the “chi” in “you yong chi”**).
Shelf stacker man looks around for salvation from this foreign girl speaking in tongues, but none is forthcoming. He mutters something about waiting a moment, and hurries off. Girl looks into her shopping cart and wonders if she could use the shampoo bottle to bludgeon somebody.
Shelf stacker man returns with grizzled superior.
Grizzled superior: 你想买什么? (What do you want to buy?)
Girl: 电池! (Batteries!)
Girl rips electronic dictionary from her bag and points at the battery compartment, and all is revealed.
Grizzled superior: 阿! 电池! (Ah, batteries! ["dian schi"])
Shelf stacker man flees the scene and while Grizzled Superior guides her to the supermarkert’s stock of triple A batteries, Girl is left to contemplate the fact that she in no longer on mainland China and can’t hold it against the Taiwanese for having a Mandarin accent that’s not out of a Beijing audio book.
Even if they’re all wrong!!!!!!
*Dian shi = Television.
**You yong chi = swimming pool. Because Mandarin doesn’t use a written alphabet, putting the individual words that make up what you’re trying to say into a clearer context is the same as spelling them out. Supposedly.
