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).

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.

So I was thinking (and despairing) about what to write for the column this month considering I’ve spent most of it locked in my bedroom, chained to my desk, pounding out my new manuscript and wondering why I do this voluntarily. And then it hit me (not literally, that would have hurt): if Shanghai doesn’t have zines, what’s the closest thing they do have? Logical answer: junk mail and advertising brochures. Naturally. I mean, apart from being shamelessly consumerist, advertising pamphlets have a lot in common with zines: they’re printed, ephemeral, local, random, occasionally ill-conceived and, for better or worse, a window into that city’s people and culture. So over the past month I accepted every brochure and advertisement flung at me on the street by overzealous shopkeepers and their hired minions. And the results are in:

Holiday Apartments on the Wei Hai coastline:

Ever heard of Wei Hai? Me neither. But this city in Shandong province boasts enough sand and surf to rival the world’s most famous beaches, at least according to the pamphlet advertising prime Wei Hai real estate, which also promises “hotel-style apartments” for only 150,000 yuan (AUD$24,000) (actually, that’s not too bad). The ad also shows a couple of indecipherable floorplans, pictures of couples walking along a coastline dotted with wind turbines (apparently endangered birds aren’t an issue in China), though my favourite part has to be the little fish cartoons saying: “recline in bed and watch the lake and the sea”.

Fu City Strip Mall:

Now, I’d already come to the conclusion that China is a cheap place to live comfortably in, but I have the brochure from “Fu City” to thank for really opening my eyes to the true extent of savings possible. Apart from housing internationally renowned couture from stores like “captaino”, “yab yum” (google that for some fun) and the “U.S. Polo Association”, Fu City also promises discounts like “originally priced at 1000 yuan, now 10 yuan” (AUD$158 to AUD$1.50). Incredible!

The Occupant:

A restaurant that sounds like a cross between a pretentious spy movie and a really bad horror flick. We’ll leave it at that. (Also, I can’t read the menu).

Eye City:

It’s telling how myopic China really is when a chain store selling only contact lenses can survive during the GFC. Highlights of their catalogue include the English slogan: “I love Eyecity let’s contact” and the vanity lenses with jewels embedded in them (ouch?).

Web International English:

Actually the longest thing written in English on this brochure is the giant statement on the cover: “ENGLISH perfects your life!” Which makes me feel a bit done over because my life still isn’t perfect, but there you go. Web International English also promises to make learning the world’s lingua franca “more simple and fast”, getting you from “icebreaker” level to “advanced” in only 2.7-3.2 years (I’m waiting until they tell me exactly how many seconds it’s going to take before committing myself).

Winnie’s Beauty and Massage:

Nothing out of the ordinary with this one. Except maybe the last offering: “50mins Fragrance Lymphatic Detoxification”. Sounds like a medical procedure from Alien, but I’m sure it’s all the rage with Chinese society ladies.

Conclusion:

So what have we learnt about the average Chinese person from their junk mail? Well — assuming they have the disposable income to give a damn in the first place — they’re likely to be on the market for a holiday residence, and if the government won’t let them settle in Guam, who’s to say Wei Hai isn’t a reasonable compromise? They are also likely to have bad eyesight, eat at restaurants that remind them of all the horror movies that’ve been banned on the mainland, wear amazingly discounted American polo shirts and be well on their way to attaining bodily and spiritual perfection through the study of English. I feel enlightened already.

A quintessential Chinese neighbourhood print shop

Something that’s become increasingly clear the longer I stay in Shanghai is that there really are no absolutes. You read Western news reports about banned books and extreme internet censorship, and the next day you walk into a bookstore stocked with (albeit illegal) copies of one of these supposedly impossible-to-find-on-the-Chinese-mainland novels, or a clearly controversial website that has somehow slipped through the Great Firewall. None of this means China is a society of individual freedoms, though, and while it feels like attitudes are quietly changing in the public consciousness, events like the country’s recent 60th “birthday” are prime examples of how adept the government is at clamping down on anything and everything it perceives as a threat.

The last two years have been pretty turbulent in terms of the Chinese public’s access to information. Both the Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake meant for a brief period of time the government loosened its control over internet censorship, but other events like the more recent turmoil in Tibet have caused an opposite reaction. As I type, Facebook, Twitter, all Blogspot and Wordpress blogs, and “sensitive” articles on Wikipedia are all inaccessible from the mainland unless you use a web proxy (that is, if you can find one that itself isn’t banned). More frightening is the Chinese government’s ability to censor anything it likes on the internet in real time, which means sometimes seemingly innocuous overseas websites are blocked for no apparent reason, and other times there exists a kind of imbalance where Myspace is not blocked but other social networking sites are, and Hotmail goes down for a day or two while Gmail and Yahoo are still up.

And then there’s print media. Needless to say most newspapers and magazines are either state-owned or at least controlled, but so are most bookstores. The small handful of privately-owned bookstores in Shanghai like the Ji Feng bookstore chain have therefore been instrumental in introducing obscure and unusual publications in Chinese to the reading public, as well as foreign books that would otherwise remain unreleased in China (although there is an obvious industry in “bootleg books” produced by photocopying and binding copies of the original and selling them outside metro stations, only the most popular English books by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King get this treatment). Shanghai does have China’s largest public library and an impressive collection of both Chinese and foreign-language publications, but before you can start reading or borrowing them, you need to purchase a reading or lending card. The cards don’t seem expensive to a foreigner like me (even one who’s used to a free library system), but one of the most important roles of libraries is to provide material to people who otherwise can’t afford books, so charging people to even look at them voids one of the library’s most important functions.

I think all of these factors contribute to how underground Shanghai’s subculture really is, but on a more practical level one of the reasons China’s largest city doesn’t have an emerging zine culture is probably because of the scarcity of photocopiers and printers outside special print shops. Most households don’t own printers and I only saw one photocopier during the month I spent on a Chinese university campus (it was also technically in a print shop). When people need something printed on their computer they’ll take a USB drive to a print shop and get it copied there (for about about 20 cents a page). But as many Shanghainese become wealthier and buy cars and enormous flatscreen TVs, I can only imagine printers aren’t far behind, and who knows — maybe an outpouring of zines will soon follow.

I’ve tried. Really. But finding Shanghai’s zine culture — or anything approaching the definition of “underground” in this city— is like looking for a four leaf clover under every pebble in a Japanese rock garden. A Japanese rock garden with a maintenance team. Still, I’ve only been here three weeks, and China’s largest city is starting to show cracks in its State-controlled facade.

Most of the Chinese Government’s current obsession with “cleaning up” Shanghai is because of the World Expo next year. I’m still not entirely sure what this Expo thing is all about; all I know is a bunch of random countries and a couple extra million people (which is just what this cosy burg of 20-something million needs) are going to converge on Shanghai, which will no doubt give the city an opportunity to show up Beijing’s obviously paltry hosting job at last year’s Olympics. The Shanghai Expo’s mascot is a blue thing called Hai Bao (“Sea Treasure”), which looks like a cross between Gumby and Towelie from South Park. Hai Bao is everywhere: statues, floral arrangements, cartoon shows and soft toys for kiddies no doubt desperate for an extra fix of Expo fever.

But what the Expo means in terms of China’s infrastructure is enormous, and serious. Main roads have been shut down for reconstruction over several months, people are getting evicted from their apartment buildings which are summarily destroyed and rebuilt to be more visually pleasing — as if tourists even care. Workers are being employed around the clock to meet crushing deadlines and the metro lines are being extended under our feet. Even for a city under constant construction, the sheer amount of resources being thrown at “beautifying” the city is pretty mind-boggling. And on a more local level, signs of civic disobedience are scarce. The only graffiti around the area I’m living in are scrawled advertisements for, unsurprisingly, builders. Online would-be graffiti artists complain about the lack of spray paint available in shops. But, inevitably, as Shanghai’s mainstream art scene grows and prices for contemporary Chinese art and photography soars overseas, things are loosening up in certain districts of Shanghai.

A prime example of this is Mo Gan Shan Road. It’s in a former industrial area and a backstreet, but is also the home of some of the best sanctioned (and unsanctioned) graffiti in Shanghai. A wrap-around wall of a couple hundred metres is the canvas for several crews of artists with aliases like “Snow” and “Storm”.  A lot of the graffiti is text-based, intermingled with pop culture references from Star Wars and video games, and several dumbstruck-looking pandas in the style of Kung Fu Panda. What I found interesting was there was very little Chinese writing in the graffiti; the few legible pronouncements on the wall were in English, for example: “One China to rule em all!!”. Just beyond the wall several cranes were in motion dismantling a gutted building, overlooked by hundreds of apartment buildings tall enough to be skyscrapers in Melbourne.

Mo Gan Shan Road is also one of Shanghai’s emerging centres for contemporary galleries and rented art space. While I was there I saw three separate groups of people posing in front of the graffiti, including two girls who looked like they’d stepped out of portal from Shanghai’s cyberpunk future, and several foreign tourists. Mo Gan Shan Road is getting known as an alternative destination for art in Shanghai, but the mere fact that it’s entrance looks a dead-end industrial street while demolition continues just metres away is part of its more obscure past. And the stencilled warning on the building opposite the long wall of graffiti speaks for a Government fixated on the Expo: “No scribble”.

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See also:

• Mo Gan Shan Road photos
• That’s Shanghai article about Ting Ting, a Shanghainese graffiti artist who’s sprayed with her crew on Mo Gan Shan Road.