And then there’s my ESL class. After my first lesson with them four weeks ago and the possibly-related loss of my voice, I have been trying to devise time wasting activities that involve the students writing for extended periods of time while I silently roam as much of the classroom as the two rows of tables allow, happily eavesdropping on their hushed conversations in Chinese. Last week I was particularly lazy and photocopied an article out of my Year 12 Mandarin textbook, attached a set of comprehension questions, and asked them to translate it all into English.

***

*Five minutes into class, unfamiliar student approaches the whiteboard, holding out Mandarin article*

Unfamiliar student: “Excuse me, miss?”

V: “Yes?”

Unfamiliar student: “Um, this is in Chinese.”

V: “Yes.”

Unfamiliar student: “Um, I’m Korean.”

*V narrowly avoids slapping her forehead as she realises Unfamiliar Student is in fact the sole non-Chinese member of her class, the one who hadn’t turned up for the last four weeks and had been considered, for all intents and purposes, lost at sea*

V: *rummages in her bag and hastily extracts the first thing she finds in English, which is an article about early 20th Century Japanese occupation of Taiwan* “OK, how about I give you this page and you cirlce all the adjectives, verbs and proper nouns. Don’t worry about what it means, just concentrate on the word classification. OK?”

Now-familiar Korean student: *looks at offered sheet, looks at the floor, glances at the teacher whose face appears to be spasming under the pressure of trying to alternately express encouragement and horror* “Um, I think I’ll just do the Chinese work.”

Of course you will.

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).