The making of a 餅

January 30th, 2011, 23:58 | 1 comment

Yesterday I attended a mochi (餅) event in Kreuzberg with my sensei (先生) and his friends. The mochi is a Japanese rice cake that is eaten at special occasions. It takes time to prepare the dough. Okawari, the organiser, describes it like this:

The steamed rice is smashed down with a big wooden hammer in a big stone bowl for long time!!! until it has the right consistence.

It was quite fun to see, but I can’t say I loved the cake. I was also told that about one thousand people die each year from eating mochi.

A Japanese girl asked me why I left half of my cake. Since I didn’t know how to explain it in Japanese (yes, I spoke Japanese for the first time outside my studies!), I just said: 死にたくないです。(I don’t want to die.)

But apparently, it is only old people who die when the cake gets stuck in their throats.

Category: English, Japan, Personal
Tags: Berlin, mochi, rice cake, 餅

Swedish manga translator still guilty of child porn charges

January 28th, 2011, 14:11 | 7 comments

Svea Hovrätt, a regional court in Sweden, today found manga translator Simon Lundström guilty of possession of child pornography, because of 51 drawn pictures (cartoons) that were considered child pornography. The court thus confirmed the verdict from July 2010 by local court Uppsala tingsrätt, but lowered the sentence a bit after scrutinising the drawn cartoons.

In a press release, Svea Hovrätt explains that “in four images, it cannot with absolute certainty be ruled that they depict children” and that “in eight images, it is uncertain if they are pornographic in the sense of the law”.

But they also write:

Regarding the remaining 39 images, the court finds that they are, from a legal perspective, to be regarded as pornographic images of children.

It should be remembered that there were no real children depicted in these images – all were cartoons. It was thus fantasy creatures that the court investigated. A bit surprised, they note that some of the “children” have “cat ears and tails”. Nevertheless, they come to this conclusion in the verdict, which I have read:

Even if some of the images do not appear real in all details, there is no doubt that they depict human beings.

Lundström is thus sentenced for child pornography of the lower degree, and has to pay a fine of 5,600 SEK (632 euro).

Lundström is Sweden’s most famous manga expert. He is teaching in this subject at the university and has translated over 80 manga, most of them published by Bonniers, Sweden’s biggest publishing house. One could expect that Bonniers would defend Lundström, since this verdict will most definitely affect their own business, but instead they chose to stop working with him, according to DN.

As a manga expert, Lundström possessed about three million pictures, that were investigated by the police. Of these three million, only 51 were considered child pornography (or 39 of them, according to Svea Hovrätt). One can also note, that out of these 51 pictures, 20 were duplicates from a backup disk.

Lundström says he is surprised at the verdict, and concludes that he must now stop working as an expert of manga in Sweden (from TT Spektra/SvD):

“I can work as a translator, but not as a manga expert, as I would need access to the erotic cartoons that exist in Japan. I’m not even allowed to visit manga artists’ homepages in Japan, since that is considered a crime”, he says.

Many are surprised that drawn cartoons, where no child has been involved in the creation process, can be deemed child pornography in Sweden. In its press release, the court explains the aim of the law:

The reason why the law has been extended to include drawn images is that such images are seen as humiliating to children at large, and not only to the child that might have been used as a model.

Personally, I’m very surprised too. I was convinced Svea Hovrätt would find Lundström not guilty – the court always has a choice to interpret the text in the law. Hopefully, Lundström will appeal to Högsta domstolen, the highest court in Sweden, and it will repeal the ruling.

I’ve chosen to illustrate this post with a painting by Gaston Goor (1902-1977), a French illustrator who worked closely with Roger Peyrefitte. This painting is now most definitely illegal to possess in Sweden. (Neither me nor my blog’s servers reside in Sweden.)

Some Swedish blog reactions to the verdict:

Wille at Prylfeber recommends Swedish manga fans to go through their mangas and cut out any picture that might be considered child porn in Sweden.
之乎者也 on what he calls “blaspedy”.
Mårten Schultz analyses the verdict, and regrets that fiction, here in the form of cartoons, are not protected by the constitution.

Also read my three posts in Swedish (but with illustrations that everyone will understand), about ways other than sexual that Ecpat and other defenders of the law think are goods way to humiliate children in drawings (murder for example):

I’m still convinced this interpretation of the law will not hold, or that the law will be changed. But until then, Sweden should be considered a no-go area not only for manga fans, but for artists in general.

Category: English, Politics
Tags: barnpornografi, barnporr, child porn, child pornography, Gaston Goor, manga translator, mangadomen, mangamålet, mangaöversättaren, Simon Lundström, Sweden

My epiphany with Yotsuba-to!

January 23rd, 2011, 14:28 | 20 comments

This was supposed to be a post about practicing your Japanese by reading Yotsuba-to! (よつばと!), a popular manga which according to this post is ideal for Japanese learners, partly because of the furigana (small hiragana letters printed next to the kanji characters, thus revealing how the kanji should be read).

I managed to find the comic both raw (meaning in Japanese) and translated into English. I’m reading them on my computer and keep the window with the English version under the raw one. It’s perfect to have a key handy!

(And don’t worry, Yotsuba-to! publisher, I will probably buy the print versions eventually, just like I did with all volumes of Loveless after having discovered the manga through filesharing. Or some merchandise.)

However, something happened as I started to read. I suddenly found myself staring at the frames at the top of this post for a long time.

First I realised that they are slightly different; they added some details on the right frame, or took them away on the left one.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that this difference made me realise just what an art it is to reduce as much as possible from a picture without losing its expression. Yes, the art of reduction! The left frame is even more expressive than the right one – you can really see that little enthusiastic girl in front of you!

So this is how you should read manga. This is their allure. Manga readers don’t see cartoons – they see real characters, created with the help of lines that the manga readers’ brains know how to parse just in the same way as the novel reader’s brain knows how to parse words and sentences expressing the same thing. It’s really just the same! And the step to expressing something with a picture instead of with words is of course smaller in Japan, since kanji actually linger somewhere in between text and drawings. After all, kanji is nothing but very reduced pictures.

This made me think of Donald Richie’s Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Yotsuba-to! is a perfect example of the Japanese aversion to our Western mimesis, and of the Japanese “tendency to value symbolic representation over realistic delineation,” as Richie puts it. What an art!

This might be obvious to all of you, but I actually haven’t read that many manga, except Loveless. This was my epiphany, and I will always remember it. The moment when I fell through the paper and into the manga.

Category: Culture, English, Japan, Personal
Tags: Japanese, learning Japanese, manga, Yotsuba-to!, よつばと!

Death penalty – maybe not so bad after all

January 22nd, 2011, 12:43 | 4 comments

I’ve always been against the death penalty. Recently, I asked myself why. You see, I formed this opinion when I was pretty young. Maybe it’s time to reconsider.

There is one reason to be against the death penalty that is so strong that it vaccinates you against further discussion:

The wrong guy might get hanged.

There are so many examples of that that it’s a very valid argument. You can’t go around hanging innocent people. You must be absolutely sure, which you seldom can be. Okay. But let’s say we can, in order to force ourselves to take a stand beyond the practical aspects. Then, my argument used to be:

But it’s always wrong to take a human’s life!

Okay. It sounded good when I was 20, but now I got to ask myself: Why is it always wrong to take a human’s life? I don’t think I ever answered that one. I think I had this opinion because everyone else did, and because it made me look like an altruistic person.

In principle, disregarding the first argument about hanging the wrong guy, I think there’s a point with the death penalty. I think so because it has existed in so many cultures throughout history. Such widespread phenomena, that exist in cultures otherwise geographically and chronologically separated, usually have a point. (The similar ways in which different cultures have related to boys historically does, for example.) Sometimes it’s hard to see the point, but with the death penalty it’s pretty obvious: By killing off a dangerous person, you save your species.

Being against the death penalty in principle is in a way a luxury. You have nothing to lose. And you’re looked upon as a good person which means you can get laid easier. But if put to the test, let’s say I lived in the stone age and was part of a tribe of a hundred people, I’d say we kill the one who kills us! It’s a matter of survival.

And don’t worry, I’m still against the death penalty for the practical reasons I mentioned above.

Why this post? I think it has to do with my coming to terms with the fact that Japan, the country I’m obsessing about lately, has the death penalty.

Category: English, Japan, Politics
Tags: capital punishment, death penalty, Japan

5 months of Japanese studies – making progress!

January 20th, 2011, 1:13 | 3 comments

The day before yesterday (I must keep up with these posts!) marked my five months anniversary of Japanese studies. I never thought I would hold out for so many months when I started learning Japanese on my own on August 18, 2010. Attending a class is one thing, but when you just decide for yourself that you will learn a language, simply by self studies, it is very easy to just let it slip, as I did during my third month.

So I look upon my Japanese studies as not only a way to learn the language, but also as an exercise in self discipline. And believe me, I have been very disciplined in the last month!

During my 10-day Christmas stay in Sweden I took a break from Japanese From Zero (the book was too big and heavy for my cabin luggage), but only to start reading my first Swedish book on the Japanese language:

Japansk språklära by Chieko Fujio Düring.

It’s a grammar. And most of it was way over my head. Still, it felt very good to get an overview of the Japanese language. (Yes, I read the book as you would a novel, from beginning to end.) Now I know what is to come, and how much of it. Half the book covers the conjugation of verbs, which is where Japanese grammar is most complex. Good to know! I finished the book before I was back in Berlin.

One disappointment though: The Japanese in Japansk språklära was entirely in romaji. I’ve taken care to read as little romaji as possible since I began my studies, so it didn’t feel good to “go back” like this – to a spelling stage that I had worked hard to skip. To make matters worse, the book used Kunrei for romanisation instead of the internationally more common Hepburn, which was the one I had encountered before. However, when I got used to it, I preferred Kunrei because it is more logical.

My instinct that romaji should be avoided is apparently supported by “the latest schools of thought,” according to this great text on how to choose the best Japanese dictionary:

Romanisation is the use of the English alphabet to represent Japanese words, and while it may seem a tempting way to get started, the latest schools of thought emphasise mastering each kana syllabary from the outset. Very few textbooks or Japanese language programs these days use romanisation as it is seen as an unnecessary crutch which hinders you from learning authentic Japanese.

For this reason, steer clear of any text that uses romanisation. My experience and observation of others learning Japanese tell me that as soon as you learn kana, all of your romanised texts will become worthless.

That is so true – I hate going back to Japanese From Zero 1 and 2 for exactly that reason. (The “progressive” spelling in Japanese From Zero means that the romaji is substituted by kana peu à peu throughout the book – hiragana in the first book and katakana in the second one.)

When I came back to Berlin, I finished Japanese From Zero 3. That was the last book in that series. There are pictures of the covers of a Japanese From Zero 4 and Japanese From Zero 5 on the back of each book, but apparently, these last two volumes have never been realised.

Since then – that was about 10 days ago – I’ve tried to learn more kanji in Let’s Learn Kanji. But more importantly, I started to use a site that is, how shall I put it, pretty fantastic:

Smart.fm

Yes, that’s the site that the video at the beginning of this post refers to. I’ve become completely addicted to it. When I had my weekly live lesson today, I realised that I used several of the words that I have learned through that site. Basically, you can study anything, but it seems to me that it’s tailor-made for people who study Japanese. I might write a post about it later. It’s so good I can’t believe it’s for free. It’s one of the things that I would gladly pay for!

So, where do I go from here? It’s become quite evident to me that what I lack the most in my Japanese studies is real conversation. I only have it with my tutor and I’m still very bad at it. And I can’t do “tandem training” because there are no Japanese people in Berlin who are learning Swedish. Maybe I’ll pay someone to talk to me.

Oh, and then there’s the radio. Every morning I wake up to FM Tanabe – a station I found by coincidence on my internet radio, and which contains quite a lot of talk in between the music. Unfortunately I don’t understand anything, but I do pick up words every here and there. When I wake up at 8 in the morning it’s 4 pm in Japan and they send a program called ハイスクール – High School! I’ve already become addicted to their song “Radio, Radio” which they sing every morning, or afternoon as it is for them. Oo-oooh-oooooh-ooh-oooh. Ooo-oo-oooo-ooooho! Radio! Raaaaaadio!!!

Category: English, Japan, Personal
Tags: FM Tanabe, learning Japanese, Smart.fm

The right to be happy

January 17th, 2011, 11:31 | No comments

I would happily support the right to be happy – who wouldn’t? Or das Recht glücklich zu sein, as tonight’s event at Zielona Gora in Berlin is called.

The question is of course what makes us happy. And the answer is that we don’t know. (Although we never tire of trying to find out, as often reported by Niclas.)

So until we have an answer on that one, I’d rather talk about the right to concrete things such as crops, your own body, your own views, and so on. Then at least you know what you’re supporting. Happiness has been used too arbitrarily throughout history to make a good cause.

Category: English, Politics
Tags: happiness, Zielona Gora

Swedish manga translator in court again

January 15th, 2011, 11:36 | 5 comments

Sweden’s most famous manga translator Simon Lundström was convicted of possession of child pornography in July 2010. The local court in Uppsala found that 50 out of his three million images – drawn cartoons, that is, and 20 of them being duplicates from a backup drive – were to be considered child porn, since the definition of child porn in the Swedish law includes drawings.

Yesterday, Mr Lundström was up in the next court, Svea Hovrätt. The prosecutor asked for a trial behind closed doors, but the judge decided they would be open. So for the first time, the public were allowed to see what kind of images the police, prosecutor and court considered child porn. I read this report by Steamboat Willie on Facebook and publish it in its entirety here (in Swedish) for those of you who don’t want to visit Facebook:

Nu har jag precis kommit tillbaks från en något komisk – men ändå skrämmande rättegång.

Det var alltså frågan om den omdiskuterade manga-rättegången i hovrätten vars förhandlingar hölls i dag i en fullsatt rättegångssal.

Jag kan bekräfta för alla som antagit att det varit värre än man trott… Samtliga åhörare som gick därifrån var slagna av det faktum att det generellt var ovanligt oskyldiga bilder. Åklagaren yrkade så klart på stängda dörrar, men hovrätten tog det visa beslutet att avslå åklagarens begäran – så den samlade pressen kunde med egna ögon se vad som i dag av experter och åklagare räknas som barnporr. Bland annat en bild på två sedesamt tecknade seriefigurer omgivna av frukt – ätandes bananer. Inte ens min mormor hade sett detta som pornografi. Bild på bild radades upp – och expertvittnet från barnporrgruppen fick vrida ovch vända sig som en korkskruv för att få argumenten att hålla. Ett samfällt skratt hördes från publiken när hon förklarade att en figur som utför oralsex på en annan var barn för att den hade raka höfter och små bröst… Vilket i sammanhanget vore något skumt då figuren skulle föreställas vara en pojke.

Samtidigt är det en skrämmande uppvisning… Att så pass oskyldiga bilder skall leda till räfst och rättarting?

Åklagaren gjorde flera fruktlösa försök att sammankoppla bilder av så kända seriekonstnärer som Ichigo Mashimaru med avbildningar av riktiga övergrepp gjorde hela föreställningen än mer smaklös.

Åklagarens rena lögner att det finns teknik som gör att man snabbt och lätt från ett foto kan framställa vilken serieteckning som helst firekt från foton med “gratis neddladdningsbara program på internet” är en förolämpning mot alla hårt arbetande serietecknare i världen. Om det vore så enkelt – varför finns det överhuvudtaget några tecknare kvar?

Dagens citat:”Jag har bedömt bilderna som pornografiska för att de innehåller barn.” — Cecilia Wallin-Carlsson, Barnporrpolis

Faktum är att samtliga besökare här på forumet bör ta sig i akt. Om de snällaste bilderna blir fällda så lär det vara mycket få personer med serieintresse som inte har värre bilder än så hemma. Det har fokuserats på de tre bilderna med samlagsscener i domen, men minst lika intressant är de fem påklädda bilderna som bara visar strandliv.

Domen faller den 28:e Januari.

(Found through 之乎者也, who as usual makes a good reading – also in Swedish. Plus a short text in DN.)

The Steamboat’s main point is that the prosecution is a joke, and that everyone in the audience was shocked that these apparently very innocent cartoons were considered child porn. There were also laughter when the prosecutor explained that the drawn girl in a sexual act was a child because of her “slim hips and flat chest.” No wonder – it was a boy.

On the whole, I find this trial very unheimlich. It shouldn’t matter if the comics are innocent or gross. If you argue that this isn’t child porn because the drawn images are innocent, then you at the same time admit that it could be child porn if the drawn images were of a more serious nature. Which it can’t.

Because:

They

are

DRAWN!!!

For fuck’s sake.

I’m pretty sure the court will go against the text in the Swedish law and free the man. (The law in Sweden is shaped only partly by the text in the law book, and partly by the way the courts interpret the text.) Always remember that the politicians who vote for these stupid laws are often without education and though well-meaning, not very smart. That’s why we have the courts. Unfortunately we lack a constitutional court in Sweden, that is, a court that can rule laws unconstitutional, as sometimes happens in for example Germany. (On the other hand, the constitution is changed so often in Sweden that such a court probably would be superfluous.)

The verdict will be official on January 28, 2011.

Update January 28, 2011: Guilty!

Category: English, Politics
Tags: barnpornografi, child porn, manga, manga translator, mangaöversättaren, Simon Lundström, Sweden

Pornography – a thriller

January 6th, 2011, 13:28 | No comments

I watched Pornography – a thriller the other day and wasn’t impressed:

A half-measure, unfortunately

The first half of the film is pretty exciting, let be a bit cheesy, but that’s part of the genre. Then it just gets weird in a “it was just a dream – or was it?” kind of way. Boring.

I got the impression the writer didn’t believe in his own script, thinking the basic story was too over the top to make it on its own. So he made a twist to save face as a serious movie-maker. Or something like that.

Sorry to be so negative about it, but just like another reviewer pointed out, this movie could have been so good with so little extra work done to it.

Technically it was well done, the acting/directing is okay too, I really just object to the script.

One can add that the scriptwriter and the director is the same person. Whenever this is the case, I get the feeling that it’s a good director who also wants to write the script – not the other way around. Scriptwriters are underrated.

Category: Culture, English
Tags: David Kittredge, gay cinema, gay film, gay movie, Pornography - a thriller

Japanese Cinema: 3x Nippon 80s

January 6th, 2011, 12:39 | 2 comments

Sex change in Exchange Students.

What I really like with big cities, such as Berlin, is the constant flow of cultural opportunities, mainstream and alternative; I think I’ve seen three productions each of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Kafka’s Bericht für eine Akademie. Recently, the Institute for Film and Video Art had a little festival called Nippon 80s, during which they screened Japanese movies from the 1980s. I saw these three:

1982: Exchange Students (Tenkosei) by Obayashi Nobuhiko.
1980: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinju) by Midori Kurisaki.
1982: Fall Guy (Kamata koshin-kyoku) by Kinji Fukasaku.

Exchange Students was a pretty fun high school comedy about a boy and a girl who through an accident happen to switch bodies with each other, which leads to a number of comical situations based on how we expect the two genders to act; the girl suddenly becomes brutal and coarse (since it’s really the boy but in the girl’s body), and the boy becomes shy and sensitive. And when they’re alone, they fight with each other since they’re anxious that the other one doesn’t taint their status in school, now that the other one is “acting” them.

Although we shouldn’t imagine that the gender roles are any laxer in Europe (they’re just a bit different), I think Japan is a great setting for this kind of comedy, since everything is much more visible there. For a Japanese girl, it’s a kind of ideal to stand in an insecure posture, looking down and giggling. Which the boy in this comedy constantly does after the body swap. Great acting!

The Love Suicides at Sonezaki was a kabuki drama acted out with puppets. The theatre was full. Nuff said!

Finally, Fall Guy was my favourite. A really sweet action comedy about a stunt man. See it if you get the chance! Here’s a picture from Fall Guy: