Manga

When you think 'Manga', you think Japan. Indeed, I see spent manga everywhere in my Japan. From fluffy animal manga to hard-core panty-ripping alien penetration manga, from children's bookshops to convenience store shelves, manga play a decisive role in Japanese popular culture. But where do they all go after they've been read? Well, there are the obvious places: the luggage racks in underground trains; the waste paper bins on the platforms; the motorway roadsides where severed pages become one with city detritus; the communal waste-disposal areas where you might see towers of spent manga bound together with kitchen string, waiting patiently for the next rubbish collection. But there are also the less obvious places, the kind of spots you wouldn't usually associate with manga: river beds at low tide; the small plastic pouch behind the taxi driver's headrest; half a page hanging from a washing line; on a seat in the inner chamber of a buddhist temple; soaking in a rice field amongst the summer harvest; and there are more, many more if you're willing to open your eyes and look. So what is it about manga anyway? What's all the hype about? And why bother reading printed matter now that we have ultra-portable electronic devices at our recreational disposal? Perhaps it's somethign about the rough grain of recycled paper, or the blank smell of factory ink, perhaps you might agree that its worth paying tribute to all that time spent by drawers and script writers, cigarettes smoked, nights spent in small rooms to deliver the next big hit. But beyond all that is the powerful means of escape that manga offer to their readers. And although we are already 2 or 3 generations into the screen age, there is still an unbreakable transformation that occurs somewhere between the eyes viewing the print on a page and the brain passing that image on to the imagination and from thereon out the sky's the limit.