New doll arrival!

As mentioned in my previous post, I ordered myself a new doll from Korea. Two months later and he has arrived at last!

I’ll do some proper photo shoots at some point, but for now have some photos of the box opening:

The arrival of a giant box. This is bigger than the box for any of the other dolls I’ve owned, including the 60cm ones! I was a bit shocked at first, since the doll itself is only 45cm.

New doll ordered

So I er, ordered myself a new resin doll this week. I’m selling quite a few anime figures in return, but it will be worth it! I’ve actually sold quite a few anime figures over the last couple of months (not to mention one of my SD-sized dolls – not Maya of course). I’m not going off collecting them or anything, but I simply can’t support the hobby in the way I did in Japan, and I’ve had more pressing financial concerns (and I’m not talking about dolls – I mean my rent!)

In any case, after working out that I’d have enough money by selling the right things and being careful with money, I went ahead and ordered the doll. I’ve now got a wait of a couple of months or so ahead of me, but I’m sure the time will pass quickly with ‘delightful’ things such as my 15,000-word dissertation to deal with in the meantime…

Joining and leaving an anime club

My exams are all done with, I have a shiny new monitor for my PS3 and I now have a week off before the new semester starts! I got an email newsletter from the local anime society today which inspired me to write a (rather self-indulgent) blog post.

Back when I was applying to university, I made a point of looking at the social side of the university – specifically the clubs and societies – because I was looking forward to the prospect of finding more people who I shared hobbies with. I was really excited to see that Sheffield – my first choice for educational reasons – also happened to be home to an anime society. I was accepted to Sheffield to study Japanese, and of course I joined the anime society right away.

As a first year I really enjoyed being part of the society – everything was new and shiny and I got on well enough with the members. The society held its roughly annual charity fundraising ‘all-nighter’ in which members pay a fee that goes to a charity and spend 28 hours watching anime. This was loads of fun, since some of the members at the time were highly knowledgeable about older and more obscure anime, which I feel really broadened my horizons as an anime fan. I watched Cowboy Bebop for the first time, a long overdue introduction to a classic among Western anime fans.

As a second year, a few months in things began to go down hill a little. This was nothing to do with the club members as a whole, or the anime being shown – it was the unfortunate consequences of a short, disastrous relationship and a really messy breakup (that was woefully prolonged against my will) with a classmate who was also a member of the anime society. It was an interesting year in other ways, though. We had some of the Japanese exchange students join the society (which later resulted in my contribution to a doujinshi) and I also got on really well with some of the new first year students. The society showed Revolutionary Girl Utena as part of that year’s lineup, something I had heard a lot about but never watched for myself, to mixed reactions from the society members, and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which was loved by everyone.

Then came the year abroad, so of course I couldn’t be part of the anime society that year. I actually found myself watching far less anime while living in Japan than I had done in the UK, but on the other hand I made plenty of trips to Akihabara, conventions like Comiket and Wonder Festival, and of course I bought a lot of manga and figures. I branched out into things that would challenge my Japanese reading abilities, and I began to read less and less scanlations for lack of need.

Now I’m in my fourth and final year, and something seems to have gone rather wrong with me and my relationship to Sheffield Anime. When the list of titles for the first semester were posted, I was disappointed. There was one show I really wanted to see, and one show that I liked but had already seen. Nothing else caught my eye at all (and some of it actively repelled me!) which is something I never experienced in my first two years there. There was always enough ‘hey, that looks interesting’ to balance out the ‘not my sort of thing’ and my taste in anime isn’t all that narrow. I went along anyway, just to see if the social side could make up for things. Having been away for a year, I now found myself with two years worth of people I did not know (this year’s new students, and last year’s who I never met). There were certainly people I knew part of the society as well, but everything was out of sync – few people had even heard of the anime I liked, post-showing socials were spent talking about video games I don’t play and internet memes I don’t care about. Half way through the semester I just stopped going, not an intentional break, but rather a lack of motivation to go and stress from the workload on my course.

Today they sent out the newsletter with the new anime for the Spring semester, and I was hoping for something more interesting but my reaction was about the same as last time, and this time I know the social side isn’t going to make up for that. Now, I didn’t write this post with the aim of complaining that the society don’t cater to my interests. Rather, I simply don’t ‘belong’ there any more. When I was a new student, I had never met so many anime fans in real life before and I felt a sense of community, but now simply being an anime fan isn’t enough for me to have common ground with someone. We’re all anime fans and most like gaming as well, but aside from that I have very little in common with any of the society members.

Did my taste in anime change irrevocably during my year abroad so that I can no longer relate to the average British anime fan? Am I a different person now, more suited to different social circles (certainly my social circle is drastically different now to the one I had as a second year)? Did this year’s committee simply pick a poor lineup of anime? I don’t really know, but I can definitely say that my time at Sheffield Anime has come to an end. I’m going to miss seeing the members I do get along well with, whose departments are so different that I never see them around the university, but there’s no use in trying to force myself to be a part of something that just isn’t working for me any more. I’m still going to keep watching anime, but no more anime clubs for me, I think. I’m not going to make an announcement of my leaving (and I haven’t mentioned this blog before) or anything like that, but I won’t be going again.

Maya – Ghost [Volks SD13 boy]

Wow, it’s been a while since I updated! I’m back in the UK now, and I’ll cover more personal stuff in another post at some point, but for now have some doll photos. This is a sort of redux shoot in a way. The first shots I took of Maya other than the unboxing were of him in this outfit, and his looks have been updated a little since then (plus I have a nicer camera) so I decided to take some new photos.

Photographs: Selidor
Model: Maya (Volks F-17 SD13 boy)
Outfit: Volks SD13 boy Omukae set, Japanese style

As always, click for full images.

Animerca Volume 1

Here’s something a little different from my usual posts – I have an illustration in a doujinshi! I got involved in the project via one of the editors, who studied at my university on exchange last year. It’s called アニメルか (Animerca) and it’s a magazine with articles and essays (in Japanese) about anime, with some illustrations included, one of which is mine. The website for it can be found here, and contains a full list of the contents (in Japanese). Some of the articles have been submitted by foreign fans, including David Cabrera (whom followers of the American anime industry might recognise as the new Astro Toy columnist at Anime News Network) and a kouhai of mine from the UK.

I think it’s quite different from what most English-speaking anime fans think of when the word ‘doujinshi’ comes to mind, but I think it’s a great project and a good counterpart to most of the stuff sold at doujinshi events.

Animerca Volume 1 will be sold at Bungaku Freemarket in Tokyo this Sunday, and also at Comiket in the summer, so keep an eye out for it if you’re appropriately located for either of these events!

Here’s the basic info on it:

アニメルカ vol.1
(Animerca vol.1)

Published by Project Animerca (アニメルカ製作委員会)
Publishing Date: 23 May, 2010
Place: Bungaku Freemarket (文学フリマ）in Tokyo
Price: 800 yen

And the list of contributors in English:

Nobuyuki Izumi
karimikarimi
Yuichi Murakami
Edoya Neko800
Kokone
noir_k
Sakasa Donburi
Sugitau
n_euler666
Kain
Jennifer Fu
David Cabrera
Brett A Smithson
mitsugo
kotohatoko
Kia Akita
Itsuya Shinooka
Robin (Me!)
EPISODE ZERO
ill_critique

I’m glad I was able to draw for the magazine. The majority of my experience with comics has been as a webcomic artist, so it was great to get an opportunity to try something different. It was also an interesting challenge for me, as I don’t have my scanner with me in Japan. I could have borrowed one from a friend, but instead I’ve been practicing drawing digitally in full (instead of my usual hand-drawn lineart with everything else digitally) since coming to Japan, and I decided to try doing the whole illustration with my tablet and copy of Photoshop. I was pleased with how it turned out, and while I won’t be giving up drawing by hand any time soon (I can’t imagine reproducing the cityscape I’ve just finished digitally), I’m can be more flexible with drawing now.

Dolpa 23 Report

I couldn’t miss the opportunity to go to a Volks Dolls Party event while I’m in Japan, and the Tokyo Dolpa 23 was held in Golden Week so I made sure to attend. I got my copy of the guide book (which serves as the entrance ticket) in advance rather than at the door, which allowed me early entry to the event. While most events go on during the day, two of the most important ones require you to turn up early: the Tenshi no Sumika shop and the limited edition lottery. The Sumika shop the Volks official store for the event, and sells various things like regular edition dolls, stands and also a whole range of new, limited-edition clothes and accessories. This is what attendees turn up early to the shop for. The Sumika event outfits are only sold at the Dolpa event, and then at the after-events online and in their stores, always in limited numbers so you have to be fast to get what you want. The limited edition lottery is for attendees who want to get hold of one of the limited dolls Volks is releasing for an event. This time there were two YoSDs, an SD girl, an MSD boy and three DD girls. Attendees had to line up to get a ticket with a number on, and the lower the number the earlier they could go and try to buy a doll so the better chances they had of getting what they wanted.

Note: this post is very image-heavy. As usual, click on any image for an enlarged version.

Nier Replicant Impressions

It’s the new academic year here in Japan now, so I’ve been a little busy lately and neglected blogging again! This post doesn’t involve uploading dozens of photos though, so I found the time to write it.

As readers following video games might know, new Square Enix titles Nier Replicant and Nier Gestalt were released in Japan a couple of days ago, with the latter seeing a US release within the next few days as well, I think. I got my copy of Replicant on release day, and have had the chance to try it out a little. I haven’t finished the game yet – not even close, but I can give my initial impressions of it at least. I probably won’t do a full review because I don’t have a lot of time for video games so I rarely finish them in good time, but I can give an overview of the gameplay and early story.

Note: as mentioned, this is based on Nier Replicant, the Japan-exclusive PS3 game. I have no idea the extent to which it differs from Gestalt, although it’s pretty safe to say the basic game system, dungeons and bosses will probably be the same, so I can’t say how much use this will be to anyone looking at Gestalt. This will contain spoilers for the earlier sections of the game, but I’m not far enough to have uncovered anything drastically spoiler-y.

Spring Break in Kansai – Day 1

It’s Spring Break here in Japan at the moment, and the end of the academic year. I got most of March off, so I went traveling for a week with a few friends, and we visited some cities in Japan that are too far away to travel to normally. I spent two nights in Nagoya, and then four nights in Kyoto, and from each place visited various places in the surrounding area.

I got to play with my brand new camera, which was good since it’s far superior to the old Nikon Coolpix L2 that I share with my sister normally but brought to Japan with me. My new camera is a Panasonic FZ38 (FZ35 for American readers). It’s not a DSLR, as I didn’t feel like making the jump from a four-year-old simple compact to something quite that advanced, but it has a lot more features than my old camera and the picture quality is really nice.

We went by highway bus, which was a new experience for me. The journey to Nagoya was about seven hours from Shinjuku in Tokyo to Nagoya Station, and we traveled overnight. We caught a bus at 11.30pm, and reached Nagoya a little after 6am. We paid for the tickets separately online, so they put us on different buses, although I was with one of my friends on the bus I rode. It was not a particularly pleasant experience, but it was far cheaper than taking the Shinkansen. The lights on the bus were switched off shortly after leaving, and we were supposed to sleep but it wasn’t really possible because the seats weren’t designed for comfortable sleeping and we stopped a couple of times at service stations to use the bathrooms and buy more snacks and drinks.

Hourou Musuko

I’m currently off traveling around Kansai for Spring Break here in Japan, and I’ll be making lots of posts after I get back this weekend about the places I got to visit, but I thought I’d make a quick post related to a manga I’m rather fond of. As a warning in advance, this post deals with some quite personal stuff.

Hourou Musuko, translated as Transient Son, is a series by Shimura Takako. Yuri fans will know her for being the creator of Aoi Hana which had a fairly recent anime adaption, but she has a really interesting catalogue of manga dealing largely with relationships, but touching on a wide range of themes especially in the LGBT side of things.

Hourou Musuko has gained quite a bit of attention recently after it was licensed in English by Fantagraphics as Wandering Son, and only a few days later an anime adaptation was also announced. With Aoi Hana having gained quite a fan following for it’s more mature and realistic take on lesbian relationships compared to most other yuri manga, Hourou Musuko seems to have piqued the interest of quite a lot of people.

For me, seeing it become more mainstream leaves me both excited and worried, and probably not for the reasons a lot of people might expect. Hourou Musuko is rather unusual in that it deals with characters who are transgendered. I mention it briefly in my about page but I’m actually trans myself so to see a series dealing with trans issues touches quite a personal note for me. It’s sort of interesting to look at trans representation in Japan, because in some ways it’s superior to my own country – the UK – and in others rather inferior. There are certainly a lot more actual trans individuals (especially trans women) to be seen in the media, but at the same time Japan is lacking in terms of things like equality legislation. Certainly with regards to fiction, in Japan you can see a lot more fluidity in mainstream media representations of gender than in the West. Thus, Japan is probably one of the few places where something like Hourou Musuko could see a TV series at this point in time.

To me, Hourou Musuko has a pretty good representation of trans characters – they are realistic characters rather than stereotypical caricatures that are often seen in anime, and a far cry from the way Japanese media can’t seem to differentiate between a gay man, a drag queen and a trans woman (Western media is much the same in this respect). The series deals pretty well with the hardships faced by trans children, whose lives are rather out of their own control, and is certainly miles ahead of any other series I’ve read.

My apprehension has more to do with the way the anime fan community that I interact with will react to the series. I’m not talking so much about outright negativity here, although I’m sure there will be plenty of that too, but rather sheer ignorance. Trans people do not have a good media presence in any culture, and the vast majority of non-trans people have little to no understanding of trans people and how to behave towards them. I don’t mean this as an insult, it’s just an unfortunate effect of the position trans people occupy in most societies. It’s mainly ‘small’ things that most people might consider benign, like using the pronoun a trans person wants you to use instead of the one associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. Anime fandom rarely deals with directly trans-related issues so for the most part it rarely makes me feel uncomfortable, but having a series that deals directly with trans characters means that suddenly I’m going to be faced with incorrect pronoun usage, mis-gendering, debates about trans issues (whether transsexuality exists, what gender a trans person is “really” etc.) in the fandom I participate in for fun, and I’m really not looking forward to this. Perhaps being trans myself means I might be able to correct some of the weird ideas people have about trans people, but I’m not a living educational tool and it’s tiring having to fight with people at every step just to be treated like a regular human being (refusing to address somebody by the gender they say there are, using terms like ‘it’ or ‘he-she’ is treating a trans person as though they’re not an equal human being).

This post was probably a little heavy and academic in parts but I wanted to articulate some of my thoughts on the topic, if only to point out that the issues dealt with in Hourou Musuko are also faced by real people, and that there’s more to transgender than just academic theory and comic relief on TV.

The trouble with buying one doll…

Ball-jointed dolls are a dangerous hobby to get into. Why? Well that’s because once you’ve bought one, you start wanting more. Unlike heavily anime-influenced vinyl dolls like the Dollfie Dream girls, resin dolls like mine are from a somewhat more established hobby with a larger fan base. As a result there are dozens of different companies, most with their own style and a wide range of different dolls of different sizes and themes. So it’s very easy to find a large number of beautiful dolls that you’d rather like to own, and you almost inevitably end up buying more. Which is what I’ve just done.

My next doll isn’t nearly as expensive as my Volks boy, although he’s not from one of the cheaper companies either. He’s from a Korean company, and is around the same height (a few centimetres taller) as my other doll Maya. Another boy, since of the three remaining characters of this particular universe that I want to turn into dolls, he’s the simplest as the other two (a boy and a girl) require much darker skin tones. ‘Tan’ dolls as they tend to be called, are more unusual compared to paler yellow or pink tones (usually called ‘normal’ by doll companies) and ‘white’ skin which ranges from paper-white to a very pale cream or otherwise tinted colour. Resin-making is a apparently a difficult process and requires an appropriate climate amongst other things, and making darker-skinned dolls without too much unevenness in the colour is tricky, and with the wrong weather many companies just give up until the season changes. So the two other characters will be harder and more expensive to obtain (Soom’s Chalco in tan would have been perfect for one of them and not too tall, but he was far too expensive and the wait times tend to be long on their special monthly limited dolls so I had to give up on him – I might wait until Crobidoll do another limited tan run on one of their sculpts and see if that works for the character instead).

The company I went with this time is called Dream of Doll. They’re very well-known among BJD fans, and have been producing dolls for quite a number of years now. They’re actually one of the first companies I ever encountered and the first doll I ever wanted was from them, so I feel it’s rather fitting to finally be ordering a doll from them, although it’s quite different to the dolls of theirs I was originally drawn to.

The doll I decided to get is this one – Code no.02, DoD’s newest standard release doll. I’m taking a bit of a risk with him as there are no owner photographs to go on, only the promo shots on the company’s website, but having seen plenty of owner photos of their other dolls I’m pretty confident that I won’t be disappointed by him. With standard release dolls, it’s not the same as with the Dollfie Dream licensed character girls where there’s only a set period within which you can order, the company carries on making them until they may decide to discontinue the doll in the future (and DoD don’t appear to discontinue dolls often if at all) but being in Japan gives me the rare opportunity to import something expensive without the horrors of the UK customs process. I’m not sure whether in Japan they can charge customs duties on expensive items, but I’ve imported things valued over $50 with no problems, and the consumption tax here is a mere 5% compared to the 17.5% VAT in the UK.

I’ve taken a couple of promo pictures of him from the company website and posted them here. There are more images of him to be seen on the previous link.