AniFem Round-Up
Lum Through the Years: Urusei Yatsura’s gender roles, then and now
Ranma 1/2 is just the most recent Rumiko Takahashi title to return to the spotlight–so let’s look at how her other most famous series has been received over the years!
DEVILMAN crybaby, Legacies of Queerness, and Diversifying Remakes
While many remakes only tweak the aesthetics of older works, Yuasa’s take on 1970s classic Devilman set a high bar by conveying the story’s themes for a 21st century audience.
Do you ever watch anime with your family?
Since there are lots of opportunities to gather with family, blood or found, this time of year.
Beyond AniFem
Li Kotomi Comes Out as Transgender After Being Outed by Taiwan’s Anti-Gender Movement (New Bloom, Yo-Ling Chen)
Li was the first Taiwanese writer to win Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize; she had been out as a lesbian but stealth regarding her gender. Multiple authors cosigned a statement in solidarity.
In her TDOR statement, Li correctly claims that Xiang Xiang has the support of “conservative, political party (through TSU’s Chou Ni-an), and foreign powers” vis a vis Genevieve Gluck’s contributions to Li’s outing and online harassment by publishing a Reduxx exclusive on Li’s lawsuits that discloses without consent all of Li’s former and current legal names and pen names. In the immediate aftermath of Li’s statement yesterday, TSU retweeted their July 1st press release, suggesting that the anonymous defendant they accompanied was indeed Xiang Xiang. Taiwan’s anti-gender organizations, as well as anti-gender movement platforms abroad such as Reduxx, have converged on Li’s lawsuits in an attempt to frame her as an aggressor who is, in the words of Xiang Xiang, “attempting to silence women protesting injustice.”
“If I continue persisting in protecting my secret and never come out,” Li writes, “I will be unable to speak for myself and fight back against these bullies.” “Either I die early with my secret,” she continues, “or I can publicly come out and explain everything to the public.”
Li repeatedly emphasizes in her TDOR statement that she never wanted to publicly come out. It is only in the face of repeated outing and online harassment by anti-gender personnel in Taiwan that she has been forced to disclose her transgender status. Immediately after Li released her statement, Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association also released a statement in support of Li emphasizing the serious harm that violating one’s privacy through outing entails. Other LGBTQIA+ organizations in Taiwan are expected to release statements in support of Li as well in the coming days.
Letter From The Editor (But Why Tho?, Kate Sánchez)
The site is currently trying to fundraise to keep itself sustainable into the next year.
Our writers have attended Sundance, Cannes, TIFF, SXSW, Summer Game Fest, PAX, and a number of video game media preview events. We have worked hard to establish ourselves as a reputable outlet but, more importantly, as one with heart. Our team writes thoughtful reviews and essays and conducts interviews that highlight passion and vulnerability in equal measure.
While we punch above our weight class in many aspects, But Why Tho? is a team of two main staff (a word I use loosely, as our co-founder and I do not take any payment), four editors, and our amazing writers, who work to showcase their passion for pop culture and its importance by offering thoughtful criticism, often looking at the ways our identities intersect with everything we watch, play, and read.
I founded But Why Tho? because of how hard it is for new writers, particularly writers of color and women, to break into the entertainment criticism. We have aimed to be a space for writers to explore, learn, and craft their unique voices, whether as the first step in a career in media or as a creative outlet for them to cultivate in their lives while maintaining careers outside of media.
Praise Me When I’m a Good Boy Manga Review (Anime News Network, MrAjCosplay)
Only one volume but ends up serving as a good introduction to D/S dynamic.
Praise Me tells the story of a stressed office worker in desperate need of relief. However, that relief is primarily emotional and social before physical. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of moments of physical intimacy throughout this book, and it is titillating. However, I appreciate Praise Me for its willingness to dive into the psychological aspects of what it means to be dominant and submissive through the leads. It emphasizes different types of dominant and submissive people out there, it stresses the idea that compatibility is important, it separates the dynamic on an emotional level from a physical level, and it even builds up the insecurities that come with being dominant or submissive.
When you’re dominant, a lot of pressure is put on you. Sometimes you’re not equipped to give people specifically what they want. This could lead to communication issues, which can leave you feeling insecure. On the opposite side, a submissive could be very insecure about the idea of being someone who seeks out a pampered lifestyle. The latter desire is especially daunting when you are a traditional Japanese businessman, and the book goes to great lengths to highlight those insecurities. The book starts with our main lead losing a fiancé after he came out and was honest about his desires, which only ends up creating a situation where he pushes himself more to show that he doesn’t need somebody, which builds up his emotional stress. There’s an excellent argument about how this book could almost act as an introductory course to people curious about the dominant and submissive lifestyle.
The Story of the Japanese Peruvians (Unseen Japan, Noah Oskow)
An overview of the formation of the Japanese Peruvian diaspora and discrimination against them over the decades.
At war’s end, more than 20,000 Japanese Peruvians remained in Peru, with return to Japan no longer an option. Their homeland was in a state of devastation, reeling from the mass Allied firebombing campaign. Millions of refugees from Japan’s shattered empire were swarming into a country that already had millions more made homeless by the war. Okinawa, from whence so many Japanese Peruvians originated, was even more devastated, the victim of the only ground battle on the Japanese home islands. (Or at least those remaining to Japan after the war.)
The lesson of the war years was the need to keep a low profile. Amongst the degradations of deportations and expropriations, the Saqueo of 1940 seems to have left the biggest impact. In 1990, fifty years onwards, Japanese Peruvian schoolchildren tasked with writing essays based on conversations with their grandparents almost unanimously wrote stories about that riot. Their grandparents had been forced into hiding as their families’ hard-won livelihoods were violently destroyed. The Saqueo became an intergenerational source of trauma.
Worries about national belonging would continue to haunt members of the Japanese-Peruvian community for decades, even as one Japanese Peruvian emerged as one of the most important on the national stage – and into international infamy.
Women in 20s the largest group among suicide attempt patients in Japan (The Asahi Shimbun, Chisato Matsumoto)
Includes descriptions of self-harm tactics.
The JSEM worked with the Japan Suicide Countermeasures Promotion Center (JSCP), a group authorized by the health minister, to create a system for registering cases in which patients were taken by ambulances to emergency rooms or critical care centers following attempts at suicide or self-harm.
The system, the first nationwide and ongoing program of its kind in Japan, began operating in 2022.
Fifty-seven of all 304 critical care centers in Japan were participating in the system as of December last year.
The latest report is a digest of the data collected over roughly the first year of the system’s operation.
According to the report, the cases of 1,987 individuals were registered in the system between December 2022 and December 2023.
The patients included 733 men, who made up about 37 percent of the cases, and 1,254 women, about 63 percent.
By age group, patients in their 20s accounted for the most cases at 570, or 28 percent of the total, followed by patients in their 30s at 334, or about 17 percent.
Japan holds first memorial for ‘all workers’ at Sado gold mines but blurs WWII atrocity. Why? (The Mainichi)
The ceremony did not acknowledge that South Koreans working the mine were forced laborers.
Japan’s government has maintained that all wartime compensation issues between the two countries were resolved under the 1965 normalization treaty. Ties between Tokyo and Seoul have improved recently after Washington said their disputes over historical issues hampered crucial security cooperation as China’s threat grows in the region.
South Korean conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol announced in March 2023 that his country would use a local corporate fund to compensate forced labor victims without demanding Japanese contributions. Japan’s then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida later expressed sympathy for their suffering during a Seoul visit. Security, business and other ties between the sides have since rapidly resumed.
Japan’s whitewashing of wartime atrocities has risen since the 2010s, particularly under the past government of revisionist leader Shinzo Abe. For instance, Japan says the terms “sex slavery” and “forced labor” are inaccurate and insists on the use of highly euphemistic terms such as “comfort women” and “civilian workers” instead.
Takeuchi, the historian, said listing Japan’s modern industrial historical sites as a UNESCO World Heritage is a government push to increase tourism. The government, he said, wants “to commercialize sites like the Sado mines by beautifying and justifying their history for Japan’s convenience.”
‘If I don’t speak up, I’ll die’: woman on welfare in Japan shares hardship as prices soar (The Mainichi, Naohiro Koenuma)
Cutting back A/C is a frequent cost saver, which can be deadly during Japan’s brutal summers.
The woman, a Tokyo resident in her 50s, has been on welfare for about four years. The recent price hikes have cast a shadow over the lives of those in vulnerable positions like her. She goes to a nearby supermarket at 8 p.m. three days a week to look for groceries with half-price stickers on them. To reduce her power bill this summer, she refrained from using the air conditioner even though the room temperature reached 36 degrees Celsius, and used only an electric fan to beat the heat. With a monthly benefit of just under 70,000 yen (roughly $450), no matter how much she saves, she is left with only 2,000 yen (about $13).
In 2018, when she was an office worker, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a condition that makes daily life difficult due to severe pain throughout the body. She was diagnosed with a different disease a few years earlier and had been covering medical expenses that reached 100,000 yen (some $645) per month with savings and other assets, but her savings ran out and she even had to quit her job in 2019 due to side effects of the medication.
The caseworker at her hospital applied for welfare assistance on her behalf, and she no longer has to pay out-of-pocket for medical expenses. However, the current high cost of living is putting a squeeze on her lifestyle, and she is barely able to afford to buy food. When an acquaintance who provided her with support passed away, she was not even able to prepare enough money to pay the funeral offering.
Manga reveals ‘painful reality’ of sexual abuse against students (The Asahi Shimbun, Tomoko Yamashita)
The manga was originally published online and put out in two physical volumes.
Azusa Saito, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Sophia University, said Saiki’s manga reflects the “painful reality for victims of sexual violence and their supporters.”
Saito, who has been supporting those victims, said they suffer from severe and long-lasting problems.
“Some find it difficult to keep living, being unable to form healthy interpersonal relationships or feeling they want to ‘disappear,’” she said.
“An overwhelming majority of teachers treat students with respect,” Saito said. “But we want people to understand that sexual violence can occur anywhere.”
In fiscal 2022, 242 teachers, or 0.03 percent of the total, received disciplinary measures over sex crimes and sexual violence, according to the education ministry.
“First Love” by Rio Shimamoto (Asian Review of Books, Mahika Dhar)
The novel has been translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai.
Kanna Hijiriyama, an exceptionally beautiful and seemingly ordinary college girl, makes national headlines when she is accused of stabbing her father. In a show of misogyny and click-bait headlines, tabloids describe Kanna as “too beautiful to be a murderer”, propelling the case to the attention of Yuki Makabe, a clinical psychologist who works with “hikikomori—socially withdrawn children.” Yuki, who is writing a book on the murder, anchors the story as it twists through various characters, timelines, and potential motives. Together with Kanna’s lawyer, who is also Yuki’s brother-in-law, the two try to piece together the motives of the murder. The increasing blurring of their interpersonal dynamics creates a sense of discomfort throughout the story, while the question of Kanna’s innocence (and the limitations of the word “innocent”) looms in the background. […]
Yuki and Kanna’s past, physically unconnected but somehow shared, form the basis of questioning for Kanna’s legal defence team. Through a series of journeys into the past, of themselves, their mothers, and all the men who have loved and refused to love them, patterns of behaviour begin to emerge that chip at the closely held beliefs of a sacred first love. Relentlessly dark and unsettling, First Love is a powerful glimpse into the minds of women who have watched, faced, and recovered from abuse disguised as affection.
THREAD: On misconceptions about lolita fashion’s “modern founder.”
One of my biggest pet peeves regarding Lolita fashion and how it’s perceived in a large chunk of the anglophone community is with the idea that Mana is the “modern founder” or “popularized the fashion” in a significant way (other than for folks who were already fans of Mana’s music).
— ✨Jacques✨(苺パ~フェ~) (@mllejacquesnoel.bsky.social) November 24, 2024 at 2:48 PM
AniFem Community
Lots of great responses and stories this week!
The only person in my family who enjoys anime is my Dad and he absolutely refuses to watch subs while I refuse to watch dubs. So we enjoy talking about what we’ve watched but we can’t watch anime at the same time
— Luna (@luna3step.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 3:48 AM
my dad thinks they’re silly but supportive when i draw anime and my mom is a bigger sports anime and isekai fan than i am
— IDK (@idkkun.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 7:20 PM
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Occasionally I’m able to get family members to watch anime with me, but a lot of it is inaccessible since very few titles offer official Spanish subtitles. Before she passed, I convinced my grandmother to watch Gundam Unicorn episode 1 because the Blu-ray had Spanish subtitles and she had fun.
— Jose Argumedo (@arguingmeadows.com) November 26, 2024 at 5:43 PM
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