A group of diehard LSU fans calling themselves The Painted Posse paint their chests for every game. For the LSU vs. Arkansas game they decided their spelled-out letters should read, "Pray for Paris."
Blake Meyers, a member of The Painted Posse, explains the rationale, including the need to reciprocate for the support Louisianans received after Hurricane Katrina.
Manga rows show why it’s still Japan’s medium of protest
Next year’s G7 summit in the Japanese city of Shima has already been hit by controversy. However, the row is not over policy, but over the meeting’s official mascot, Aoshima Meg – a manga rendering of a teenage girl dressed as one of the area’s famed ama divers.
The city dropped the mascot last week after it had been denounced as sexist and an insult to the female divers – many of whom are in their 60s and 70s – who traditionally dive for pearls and abalone without breathing apparatus.
But that has not been the only recent manga row. There was barely a murmur of disapproval when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, announced that his country would not be taking in Syrian refugees. It was left to a pitiless manga depiction of a six-year-old Syrian girl to ignite public debate. The illustration drew loud protests on social media and prompted a change.org campaign demanding that the artist, Toshiko Hasumi, remove it from her Facebook page.
The furores underlined manga’s capacity to attract controversy and provoke debate in Japan, where just about everyone has, at some time, delved into a manga comic, book or weekly magazine serialisation. The books alone generate a domestic market worth 280bn yen (£1.5bn).
Mass-market titles such as Doraemon, featuring a robot cat popular with children, and Golgo 13, the adventures of a professional assassin which has sold more than 200m copies since its release in the late 1960s, share shelf space with an array of specialist titles that take on taboo subjects.
Manga’s capacity to shock was highlighted again last month when the UN envoy on child protection, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, called on Japan to ban sexually abusive images of children, amid resistance from authors and publishers who say the move would threaten freedom of expression.
Aoshima Meg was dropped as the G7 mascot following protests.
Manga is probably Japan’s most versatile form of narrative fiction, according to Dan Kanemitsu, a manga translator, covering everything from care for the elderly, multicultural identities and gender issues to poverty and even rural depopulation. Many authors, Kanemitsu said, “employ the medium of manga to explore many difficult issues facing Japan today. While titles that provide casual entertainment are legion, there is no shortage of titles that concern themselves with numerous social issues.”
The medium – one of Japan’s most successful pop-culture exports – has drawn inspiration from some of the most divisive issues of recent times, from the health effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to Japan’s testy relations with South Korea.
Patrick Galbraith, author of The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insiders Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan, points to the gekiga (dramatic pictures) genre, which addressed the human cost of war and economic recovery in 1960s Japan, as a shining example of daring manga of the kind that have reappeared in the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown. “Manga was, and continues to be, gutsy in ways that put other media to shame,” Galbraith said.
It also explores topics that most journalists and writers prefer to avoid. “Even the subject of the [Japanese] imperial household can become the object of humour and satire,” said Kanemitsu. “While no commercial publisher will touch a manga that makes fun of the emperor, they do exist and are circulated through alternative distribution channels.”
Even Osamu Tezuka, considered the doyen of manga artists, made room in his eclectic portfolio for difficult subjects, while at the same time publishing mass-market series for children and adults. Perhaps best known outside Japan for Astro Boy, Tezuka also broached the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and nuclear holocaust.
“Since the end of the second world war and the lifting of censorship restrictions, manga has been a platform for confronting and grappling with social and political taboos,” said Roland Kelts, the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US. “This is partly because manga still flies slightly below the radar. Mainstream public discourse is comparatively more muted and discreet. In this context manga is more like punk music.”
Manga has been among the victims of Japan’s political drift to the right under Abe. Two years ago, authorities in the city of Matsue provoked an outcry after it ordered the removal of the anti-war comic Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) from school libraries. Critics labelled Keiji Nakazawa’s work “defeatist” for its criticism of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, and its graphic illustrations of atrocities committed by the Japanese imperial army.
Several years ago, Japan’s troubled relations with its neighbours inspired a wave of nationalist manga, includingKenkanryu, whose unsympathetic depictions of Koreans and their culture drew allegations of racism.
Japan’s polarised political scene, coupled with rising regional tensions and challenging domestic issues such as depopulation and the role of women, should generate ample material to cement manga’s place in the public discourse.
“Traditionally, Japanese manga artists have been cutting edge,” said Brian Ashcraft, a Japan-based contributor to the video game site Kotaku. “For decades, they’ve dealt with a wide variety of social issues, such as identity politics and sexuality, in heartfelt, progressive and engaging ways. Not all manga has taken a smart, nuanced approach to these issues, but just like in the west, not all art does that either.”
Experts say there has always been a gap in the market for manga that tackles political issues, from Japan’s prewar experiment with militarism to Abe’s controversial security bills.
“Manga are so diverse that there are even titles about the ‘ageing society’ problem, gay lives and rights, the ‘comfort women’ and war responsibility, pretty much any issue of social importance,” said Matthew Penney, an assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who specialises in popular representations of war in Japan.
Melissa Click, a mass media professor at the University of Missouri, is seen pushing a student journalist's camera and asking "for some muscle" during demonstrations on campus on Nov. 9. (Youtube/Mark Schierbecker)
Sorry, “liberal media.” Today, you’ve been knocked from your perch atop the conservative enemies list. The new No. 1 is University of Missouri mass media professor Melissa Click.
Wait, it could be Melissa Glick or Elisa Click. Rush Limbaughisn’t quite sure. But he’s very sure that she represents everything that’s wrong with this country. Click is the bespectacled Mizzou faculty member who, in a now-viral video, can be seen ordering a student journalist to leave a public area of the state-run campus where other students protesting the university's handling of racial incidents had set up tents and held meetings. At one point, Click seems to suggest removing the journalist by force: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?” she asks. “I need some muscle over here.”
The full video is below:
A journalist at the University of Missouri was challenged and physically blocked from filming protests at the school. The man was met with chants saying, "Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go!" (YouTube/Mark Schierbecker) Click has beenwidely criticizedfor her actions, including notably by prominent members of the media. The Post's media blogger, Erik Wemple, said any staff that were involved in what happenedshould be fired. Colleagues were considering revoking her courtesy appointment to the university's journalism school Tuesday afternoon,according to the Columbia Missourian, with the school’s dean telling the student newspaper that Click clearly violated 1st Amendment principles.
Click is an assistant professor in the university’s communications department, which is separate from the journalism school, but she has a courtesy appointment that “allows members of one academic unit to serve on the graduate committees of students from other academic units,” the Missourian reported.
And for some conservatives, Click is now the ultimate bogeywoman — an “academic fascist” in the words of Fox News commentator Todd Starnes, who epitomizes the liberal, politically correct thought-policing that conservatives have long decried.
Limbaugh, despite some trouble with Click’s name, captured the sentiment on his radio program Tuesday:
They’re demanding safe spaces at places like Yale and at Mizzou and many other college campuses. What are safe spaces? Where they are not subjected to people that disagree and where they’re not subjected to symbols that hurt their feelings, and they’re not subjected to negative comments, and they’re not subjected to jokes that they don’t like.
In other words, they are shielded and protected from reality. They are basically — I don't know any word to describe them but cowards. They’re just scared to death of reality. They're scared to death of life. And they have been raised and educated to believe that it is legitimately possible to shield yourself from anything that’s upsetting.
And if somebody gets through that shield and succeeds in upsetting you, then they have to go. We've got to do something about them. We can't handle symbols that offend us. We can’t handle speech that bothers us.
Contrast Limbaugh's take with what Tim Tai, the student journalist on the receiving end of Click's directive to leave, said about the whole episode.
