Content Warning: This week’s links deal quite extensively with racism and racism-motivated hate crimes
AniFem Round-Up
Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! and the toxic workplace
This office lady romance initially tackles the subject of harmful work cultures, only to end up reinforcing them with its ending
Shattering the Self: A conversation with Blood on the Tracks creator Shuzo Oshimi
We spoke with the Flowers of Evil creator on the autobiographical elements of his work, grappling with gender identity, and what he’s been reading.
Chatty AF 218: Post-Election Editor Discussion
Tony and Cy meet to discuss Anime Feminist’s core values and our plans going forward post-election.
What 2024 anime is still on your to-watch list?
Since the end of the year is quickly approaching.
Beyond AniFem
Manga Erotics F Magazine Launches Website 10 Years After it Ended Publication (Anime News Network, Anita Tai)
The initial run of the magazine was from 2001 to 2014.
The official X (formerly Twitter) account for Ohta Publishing‘s Manga Erotics F magazine announced on November 29 that it has launched a new website. The website is part of the first phase of an overall project for the magazine, and hosts an archive of more than 100 previously serialized titles including Usamaru Furuya‘s Lychee Light Club, Asumiko Nakamura‘s All about J, and Natsume Ono‘s Ristorante Paradiso, among others. It is currently unclear if the magazine’s website will offer brand new works in the future.
The magazine states it offers a place to freely showcase works that express diverse depictions of gender, and open explorations of eroticism to better society’s understanding and acceptance.
The Law, The Witch, and The Wheelchair: Applying the Social Model of Disability to Witch Hat Atelier (Anime Herald, AJ Mack)
The social model proposes that barriers faced by disabled people are created and imposed by structures of power.
Yet Custas is not the first chair user we’re introduced to. Whilst Custas’ journey as a chair user begins in Volume 8, in Volume 6 we are introduced to Lord Beldaruit: one of the leaders of Pointed Cap society, known as “The Wise Ones.” Whilst Custas’ chair is a simple dining chair, Beldaruit has an ornate armchair with elegant legs. We see his chair easily leap over obstacles, climb up and down stairs with no issue, and generally allow him to travel around the realm as well as any of the other witches. He can even transform it so that it can carry him upright to make charging off even faster and easier. Whilst it is clear he is still disabled, suffering from chronic fatigue and flare ups that make him unable to leave bed—suffering from bedsores as a result—his position as a “Wise One” enables him to have access to a wide range of tools that aid him, including things such as an ergonomic writing desk he can use from bed, and emergency healthcare from the most skilled physicians available.
Meanwhile, Custas does not have access to these same tools, and his position as a disabled person in society is much more precarious. In real life, mobility aids are also often completely priced out for disabled people. A basic wheelchair costs around £100, but these chairs are usually poorly made, liable to break, and can’t handle even slightly uneven ground like drain covers or cracked paving. There are definitely chairs that are better suited for these things, the technology is available! But these chairs can cost anywhere from £2,000 to £10,000. A person may even find they need different aids for different purposes. A chair with thick, rugged tires will work well off-road, but be difficult to use over carpet. Naturally, a person who has a lot of wealth and power can afford to have all these tools at their disposal, but a person from a lower economic background finds it far more difficult to function in an ableist society, being more reliant on government benefits, and charity. This real-world disparity is reflected in the contrast between Custas and Beldaruit. It is not that Beldaruit as a chair user is from a less ableist society, but rather that his ability to use magic, his financial assets, and social influence means that he is faced with fewer barriers.
Kodansha USA Launches Kodansha Print Club Program With Print Releases of Love, That’s an Understatement, Teppu, Blade Girl Manga (Updated) (Anime News Network, Alex Mateo)
These starter titles provide an excellent chance to nab physicals of some female-led sports series.
Kodansha USA Publishing announced on Monday that it is launching the Kodansha Print Club, a new publishing program focusing on releasing print versions of previously digital-only titles. The program will start with the physical versions of Love, That’s an Understatement, Teppu, and Blade Girl manga on Tuesday. Kodansha Print Club titles will ship at local and online retailers worldwide.
Update: Director of Publishing at Kodansha USA Ben Applegate clarified on Bluesky on Monday that titles in the Kodansha Print Club are print on demand and not limited editions.
The publisher is asking readers to tell the publisher which series they would like to see added to the Kodansha Print Club list via its suggestion feedback form.
Thin is back in, but did it ever leave us? (NPR, Brittany Luce)
A piece from an audio collection of news stories about Black anime fandom.
When TikTok user, Slim Kim, posted a video expressing how much she loves ‘being skinny,’ she set off a wave of internet discourse. What’s the line between loving your body and dog-whistling fatphobia? This week, host Brittany Luse is joined by authors Emma Specter and Kate Manne to find out: what’s so wrong with loving being skinny?
Then, Brittany takes goes on a field trip to the Anime NYC convention. She and IBAM producer Alexis Williams venture out to find out how generations of Black folks have found comfort, confidence, and fandom in the genre.
Racists Are Trying to Make Dan Da Dan the Latest Front in Their Culture War (Gizmodo, Isaiah Colbert)
This seems to happen reliably at least a few times a year, unfortunately.
Last month, an X/Twitter artist named Lynn6Thorex uploaded Dan Da Dan fan art redrawing protagonists Okarun and Momo Ayase as Black. Since its upload, the post garnered over 88,000 likes and 11,000 reposts, with many of its admirers commissioning the artist for anime profile pics and artwork. The artwork even found its way to Okarun English voice actor AJ Beckles and his fiance (and fellow Dan Da Dan actor) Anairis Quiñones, who changed their matching profile pictures to Lynn’s renditions of Okarun and Momo.
Unfortunately, Lynn’s innocuous bit of fan art has become the epicenter of said culture war where folks on Twitter are accusing the artist, Western Black anime fans, and Beckles of “disrespecting the original work by turning characters Black and excluding Japanese people.” Folks with unwashed asses and a penchant for militarizing on Twitter at the slightest whiff of a non-white person in the space sharing joy from art signal-boosted tweets from Japanese accounts taking issue with the fan art as proof that it exists as an affront to Japan. In reality, it’s just another piece of art a Black artist had the audacity to create. Some folks in said unwashed camp are rallying for Beckles to be removed as Okarun’s voice actor for *checks notes* changing his profile pic to the fan art. Fortunately, people have shown support for Lynn, including Beckles, who, like many Black voice actors, often must rise above the hate and remind fans not to let it spoil their day.
“Honestly this is just another day in the life as a Black man for me so I’m okay,” Beckles tweeted. “But for your own mental health and to avoid triggers please avoid my comments on previous posts for the time being.”
‘Tiananmen code’ embedded in Univ. of Tokyo website may have limited views from China (The Mainichi, Kanami Ikawa, Buntaro Saito and Sahomi Nishimoto
At present, 66.5% of the foreign exchange students at University of Tokyo are Chinese. The characters were removed as of summer 2023.
Interviews with university officials and others revealed on Dec. 6 that the string was five kanji letters meaning “six four Tiananmen” — possibly referring to the June 4, 1989, massacre of civilians by the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing.
According to archived data on the internet, the character string was found in the code of the website that the Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences of the university’s Graduate School of Frontier Sciences had set up in the 2023 academic year. One was in the top page of the English version of the site, and the other in the page showing admissions information. The character string embeds were not there as of the summer of 2023, but were confirmed in November that year.
The string was apparently aimed at inhibiting Chinese students’ entry into the school, and the university has launched an in-house investigation, calling the discovery “very regrettable.”
Source code is a website’s blueprint, and if specific character strings are written into them as keywords, it makes it easier for the sites to be found in some search engines. According to IT industry insiders, if keywords associated with the Tiananmen Square massacre are embedded in source code, it may cause the websites to be rejected by China’s censorship system and made inaccessible there.
Light Enough Skin and White Enough Voices: The Problems and Contradictions of Racial Diversity in Final Fantasy XVI (Zweiteturm, Leanne)
Once more dissecting Yoshida’s ignorant claims about diversity.
Light enough skin and white enough accents is indeed the approach Final Fantasy XVI takes to its racial diversity, but this is complicated by the fact that Valisthea is explicitly not a culturally odorless setting. If Yoshida is taken at his word, it is ‘incorporating historical, cultural, political, and anthropological standards that were prevalent at the time [in Medieval Europe], whereupon ‘over-incorporation [of ethnic diversity] could end up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries’. I do not honestly believe that Naoki Yoshida is a racist person, but this is simply a racist statement that betrays sheer ignorance of ‘medieval Europe’ as a cultural space that one can only land at through one’s only engagement with it being through abstracted facsimiles in fantasy fiction. Medieval Europe was obviously ethnically, religiously, and ideologically diverse even if it wasn’t egalitarian! It’s a brazenly crass way to speak about this matter, even accounting for any ambiguities in translation – but it does hint towards an unusual approach for Final Fantasy in racially defining its characters. Clive Rosfield, unlike Cloud Strife, is white. So is his brother Joshua, mentor Cidolfus, and the very many other characters in Final Fantasy XVI. Is Final Fantasy XVI a game about ‘whiteness’? Not at all – its whiteness is simply an aesthetic referent towards the works of fantasy that influenced it. Jon Snow is ‘white’ therefore so is Clive Rosfield, simple as that! Where does that leave the ‘right amount of inclusion’ for Medieval Europe that is surely found in the game?
The Republic of Dhalmekia is a mercantile federation clearly inspired by North Africa and the Levant. Dhalmekia has deserts and oases, majestic domes and blighted shantytowns, rugs and carpets and perfumes, scheming viziers and wile merchants. But are Dhalmekians a ‘divergent race’ to the rest of Valisthea? Let’s take a simple aspect of worldbuilding – names. Dhalmekians have names that aren’t culturally divergent from the rest of Valisthea – or do they? Where Rosarians are analogous to the British, the Sanbrequois to the French and Waloeders to the Norse, Dhalmekians are outright deracialised, deprived of any particular real world cultural referents in a game where other cultures are afforded it. Dhalmekian names range from Germanic ones like Hugo to made up fantasy ones like L’ubor., but never ones of any Arabic or Levantine or North African origin. If you are capable in your work to include specific real-world referential material in all other cultures, why stop here? Here’s the problem – despite all such attempts at deracialisation, Dhalmekians remain strange stereotypes. There is, for example, a minor antagonist, one of Hugo Kupka’s lieutenants, described by the subtitles as ‘Suspicious Character’ who would, in a more explicitly orientalist work be easily described as a scheming vizier. Final Fantasy XVI seeks to solve this problem with giving him light enough skin and a white enough voice! What remains in the game is an Orient, and Orientalism, but without any Orientals.
One can observe a similar phenomenon in Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptations of Dune, where the obviously Islamic aesthetic and cultural references in the source material are toned down in order to avoid controversy, whatever that may involve. Cowardice is the tone of our contemporary blockbuster visual culture. This deracialisation of Dhalmekia where Oriental visual aesthetics without Oriental faces and voices is the upper limit of the ethnic diversity Valisthea can hold in its capacity is downstream of the contradiction within the game’s central conceit – magic slavery. FFXVI borrows heavily, not from historical practices of slavery – the game is confused on whether it is a chattel slavery system or a feudal underclass really, but from historical images of slavery. And it wants to lean into these images – of slaves in bondage, of slaves transported on ships, on slaves enduring dehumanisation and abuse of all kinds – without stoking any controversy based on racial depictions. To avoid such controversy, in the series’ most realistic game yet, they have to make this one specific culture in the game less real people with less real features. In the most explicitly real-world analogous culturally odored game in the series, this one people have to have their odor removed.
Documents show wary Japan gov’t surveyed Korean students after 1923 quake, massacre (The Mainichi, Kanami Ikawa)
Rumors that Korean citizens were poisoning wells after the earthquake led to a still often-denied massacre.
There was also mention of the massacre. According to a record from the Shinjuku branch office, one student was ordered to carry cement-filled bales at the Nakano barracks, an Imperial Japanese Army facility, until Sept. 11, 1923, and when the student suggested returning to the Korean Peninsula, a soldier replied, “It’s difficult to let you go home because you and others will spread the story of the massacre of Koreans in Tokyo to locals after returning home.”
The MPD also kept records of multiple communications stating that Koreans should be prevented from returning to their homeland, indicating officials were wary of the impact of the massacre on Japan’s rule of the Korean Peninsula. At the time, officials on the Korean Peninsula were cracking down on remarks regarding the massacre, criticizing what they described as “disorderly words and actions and wild rumors.”
Masaru Tonomura, a professor at the University of Tokyo and an expert on the history of Koreans living in Japan, said of the documents, “It is not well known that there were activities by administrative authorities targeting only Korean students. They are valuable as historical documents because they record the students’ hardships and difficulties.”
He further stated, “While providing support, there was apparently a sense of wariness that a social movement could develop and awareness that it would be a problem if the students continued to talk about the persecution of Koreans in the future.”
How Japanese Men Are Sexually Harassing Female Job-Seekers (Unseen Japan, Jay Allen)
Data has been provided by the Japan Harassment Association.
Job search harassment, sadly, isn’t a new issue. Back in 2019, organizations like SAY brought to light numerous stories of women who’d been told to stop looking for a job and work on getting married.
However, sexual harassment during job searches has increased in recent years partly due to so-called “broker apps” (仲介アプリ). These apps connect job-seekers or students looking for positions with people in target companies or industries.
Female job-seekers sometimes connect with male employees on these apps, hoping their sempai will help them navigate finding work in their chosen industry. However, stories gathered by the Japan Harassment Association show some men using these apps to pressure women into sex.
“A guy I met through my internship invited me to a dinner meeting and got me to drink a lot of alcohol,” says one job-seeker. “He made me promise not to tell anyone we’d met.”
“One guy tried to get me to go to a hotel, telling me he’d help me get a job offer.”
VIDEO: Discussing the trope of the “clueless uke” in BL.
AniFem Community
Don’t worry, our lists are pretty long too.
The new season of Kimi ni Todoke! I wanted to binge it the moment it came out, but SO wanted to watch with me and then was never in the right mood. <cries> Also, I have heard NO ONE talk about it?? Was it… <terrified whisper> ….not good?
— Marley Rose-Teter (@marleyroseteter.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 2:34 PM
I still need to watch the new seasons of Blue Exorcist, SAO Alternative: Gun Gale Online, Re:ZERO, Classroom of the Elite, Demon Slayer, and The Duke of Death and His Maid. I'm also interested in checking out Acro-Trip, Makeine, Brave Bang Bravern, and Magilumiere Co. Ltd. That's about it for 2024!
— Pearl (@elysiondream.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 9:53 AM
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