Baud Attitude

Let’s be perfectly clear: I am horribly, horribly tempted to write a whole new set of lyrics set to the tune of “Rainbow Connection“, starting with the title of this post and continuing apiece, but that is dangerously close to writing filk, and once a man writes filk he may as well just resign himself to a life of shame.

That being said, there do seem to be an awful lot of shows about otaku lately.  I mean, sure, in the early 90s we had Otaku no Video, and then there was Otaku Planet a few years later – the latter of those two being something I know about only through seeing ads for the LDs in Animage; it seems to have vanished into the mists of history – but the last, oh, five years have given us Genshiken, Lucky Star, Welcome to the NHK, Densha Otoko, OreImo… and a couple of shows I’m going to talk about now.

I’ve watched an awful lot of shows recently that revolve around nice-but-relatively-personality-free young men that wind up in the center of a hurricane of cute girls.  Most of them, to be honest, involve aliens or anthropomorphic versions of Japanese myths, so it’s actually a bit refreshing to watch Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu, which is just high-school-slice-of-life.

Of course, even a pure slice-of-life show needs a “hook”, which in this case takes the form of a beautiful, cultured, fabulously rich – yet still going to a public school – girl who just happens to be a massive closeted otaku.  Of course, the main male character finds out her secret but – as the Nice Guy – swears to keep it private between the two of them, and you get twelve episodes of so-when-are-they-going-to-kiss, mixed in with the usual assortment of maids, rival girls, curiously precocious younger sisters, quirky childhood friends and so on and so forth.

Oh and it’s got a Comic Market Episode that actually comes close to the Comic Market experience; that is to say waiting in long lines in hot weather to buy comic books you probably wouldn’t show your parents.

It’s very much the paint-by-numbers approach to anime production, with the only unusual thing being that the main character is even more of an enigma than you usually get in these shows.  After watching twelve episodes, I couldn’t tell you a single one of his likes or dislikes, not even a favorite food.  To carry on with the paint-by-numbers metaphor, just because I like it, he’s the white space that isn’t numbered so you don’t paint it in.

The series – or more likely, the series of light novels it’s based on – was popular enough to get a second 12-episode run, anyway, which I will probably watch at some point just because I’m morbidly curious to see if they’ll ever give the guy a personality.

Kuragehime, on the other hand, is NOT aimed at young men desperately trying to imprint themselves on an onscreen avatar, and I liked it rather a lot.  It’s about five otaku women living in a run-down Taisho-era apartment house and having their peaceful routines disrupted horribly when a fashion-obsessed Shibuya-type joins the group.

Note that “otaku”, in this case, isn’t used in its typical sense of “obsessed with manga and anime”, but rather in the sense of being really just a little too much into a hobby.  The group includes a railfan, a Three Kingdoms geek, a woman obsessed with older men, a traditional-dress-and-doll nut, and, well, the main character, whose specialty is jellyfish.

I learned SO MANY THINGS about jellyfish from watching this show, it’s not even funny.

To be honest, it does drag a bit near the end and it never even comes close to hinting at resolutions for most of the story threads that it opens, but it’s only eleven episodes and based on a currently running manga – it’s designed to introduce you to the characters, set up an initial conflict, and resolve that initial conflict while still remaining open-ended, and it does that all quite well.

Oh, and most of the characters are in their thirties or older, which is pretty unusual but quite nice, it means that the show avoids the obligatory beach-trip and culture festival episodes that a high-school based show always seems to throw in.

Nothing against culture festival episodes, of course.  One of my favorite anime movies of all time is Beautiful Dreamer, which is an entire movie revolving around a culture festival.  For some reason, however, the culture festival episodes in Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu were giving me flashbacks to the culture festival episodes in School Days, and those are not flashbacks anyone wants to have.

But I digress.

I “discovered” anime on Compuserve’s Comics and Animation forum in 1990, but I didn’t get my first hands-on-fix until I found that the local comics shop actually had a few tapes available for rent.  Most of these were untranslated multigenerational bootlegs, of course, though they did have the first couple of “Bubblegum Crisis” and “Dangaioh” and “Dominion” tapes, and those were subtitled.

The first two tapes I rented were the Dirty Pair movie and the first Bubblegum Crisis OVA, by the way.  I didn’t have a VCR of my own at home, so I watched them at work in the breakroom.  Yeah, I had no idea what a “career limiting move” was and I’m probably lucky that the only person who came in and boggled at the screen was a friend of mine.

Anyway, I watched what the comics store had to offer, and then a couple of other video stores in town started carrying anime tapes, and things were getting off to a pretty good start as far as I was concerned.

I also wasn’t spending TOO much money, because, well, the options I had to spend it on were pretty limited.  The comics shop had some translated manga to buy, but that was about it.

I did find out that one of the local records store could order CDs from Japan if I had a catalog number, so I asked them to order me the first Bubblegum Crisis Vocal Collection CD.  Several months after I placed the order, it actually arrived and I practically danced my way over to give them my thirty bucks for it.

Oh, and I bought my first VCR.  It was a Samsung 4-head job that didn’t do stereo and that wouldn’t play certain brands of tape and that cost me $240 (basically a week’s pay) … but it was MINE.

Then I saw a reference online to someplace called “Nikaku Animart“, which seems to still be open today, that sold stuff relevant to my interests and that would cheerfully send me a catalog from which I could make selections.

That catalog is reproduced below, mostly for my nostalgia.

Page 1: CDs.  Note that the CD I REALLY wanted to get, the Gunbuster soundtrack, is marked off in blue ’cause they were low on stock.  By the time I called, they were out of stock.  18 years later, I still don’t own this CD.

Page 2: Video.  This is mostly imported laserdiscs.  If you thought spending $20 on a four-episode DVD was expensive, imagine dropping 70 or 80 bucks on a single half-hour of animation.

For your elucidation, here’s a larger version of the important bit.  This represents the sum total of all the subtitled anime available as of February of 1992:

These prices were obviously bargains compared to importing the laserdiscs, and you even got a translation.

Page 3, 4, and 5: Models, books, magazines, manga.  English-translated manga is on page 5.  These were prices for single “issues”, which were usually two chapters from a given manga and about 32 pages long.  VERY expensive compared to the Japanese originals, but you could actually read them.

Page 6: Miscellany, posters, pencilboards, etc.  Looking at this now, I really wish I’d gotten some of the 10 Little Gall Force trinkets on offer, or those Ranma door curtains.

Pages 7 and 8: Obviously, you couldn’t be expected to buy a poster or pencilboard solely because it was from a particular show, so they thoughtfully provided these visual guides, if you can call them that.  Try to imagine making buying decisions from these sub-postage-stamp sized black-and-white examples, if you will.

On the other hand, looking back at these pages now, they must have represented a CRAZY amount of work.  Desktop publishing barely existed back in 1992, so someone must have been photographing these, then reducing the photographs, doing the paste-ups… Whoever it was was quite dedicated to making a sale, I’ll say that.  🙂

Anyway, once this catalog hit my hands, it was pretty much over for me financially.  After Nikaku, I discovered Kimono My House and the Right Stuf, and, well, things happened.

No, I didn’t ACTUALLY declare bankruptcy at any point, that was just there for hyperbole.

Fair warning: Wall o’ Text follows.

The first time I went to an anime convention was 1993.  I didn’t even know such a thing existed before 1992, and I certainly couldn’t afford to get from the middle of Oregon to the San Francisco bay area, where the nearest cons were held.

On the other hand, a friend of mine came up with a cunning plan that would get us to Anime America 1993.  A friend of HIS was also an anime fan AND wanted to take his family to Great America in San Jose, which was basically across the street from the hotel where the con was being held, and my friend asked him if he wouldn’t mind a couple of extra passengers.

So me, my roommate, my friend, HIS friend, his friend’s wife and their two young boys all piled into a minivan and drove all night.

In 1993, north American anime cons were still something of a novelty and they attracted a rather high class selection of special guests.  This con had Haruka Takachiho (Dirty Pair creator), Megumi Hayashibara, Monkey Punch, Kenichi Sonoda and Johji Manabe in attendance.

It was also before anyone in North America knew what the heck “Sailor Moon” was, so when we snuck into the dealer’s room before it was officially open, I managed to score these two cels for 5 and 20 bucks, respectively.

It was shortly after that that we were discovered and thrown out so the dealers could keep setting up without people trying to buy things from them.  Of course we went back after the dealer’s room officially opened and spent as much more of our money as we could, but those were the first and most memorable.  🙂

Let’s see… we also went to the Troma screening of “My Neighbor Totoro”, I went to a couple of panels, watched some anime on the in-room channel… In general, I had an awfully good first day just being surrounded by other fans.

Oh, and I discovered that pizza places will deliver to hotel lobbies, which was a major coup considering that the hotel’s restaurant was woefully inadequate to the task of feeding the number of people on hand and the hotel itself had been built in a part of San Jose that was still pretty undeveloped and there no other restaurants anywhere nearby.

Then I found out that my friend’s friend, the one who’d driven us, expected that he, his wife, and their children were going to be sleeping in the room with my roommate and I, which was a small room with two twin beds in it and no room for six people.  One shouting match later, we were stuck in San Jose with no way home.

It worked out all right in the end.  My roommate and I  made our way home thanks to a helpful cab driver who clued us in to the existence of a VERY budget airline, and I get to say to this day that I’ve eaten breakfast only a couple of tables away from Megumi Hayashibara, but it kind of cemented in my mind how bloody cheap some fans can be and how very important it is to ask questions like “So, do you guys have a hotel room yet?” in advance.

From 1995 to 2001, I went to San Diego Comic Con.  Those were generally fun trips; the con had a massive dealer room and enough anime/manga content that I didn’t feel like I was missing out by not going to a specifically anime-oriented convention, and the con staff has plenty of experience in running conventions and keeping crowds under control.  Fond memories include getting a sketch of Cutey Honey from Go Nagai in 1995 and having Naoko Takeuchi sign some manga for me in 1998.

I didn’t go to another anime con for five years after Anime America, until I was living in Los Angeles and some friends talked me into going to Anime Expo ’98, which was, mmm, less than professionally run.  We had to stand in line for a couple of hours just to get name tags, there were cosplayers with ridiculously oversized swords wandering the hallways whacking people behind them whenever they turned around, and the legitimate dealers in the dealer’s room were having to compete with tables hawking bootleg Taiwanese CDs and similar junk.

Then I went to Winter Comiket in 2005, and that pretty much cured me of ever going back to a con in this country, but that’s a long enough story that I’ll cut this off here.

I’m going to come right out and say this: I’m stealing a Char quote for the title of this post and it’s intellectually dishonest to do so because I really haven’t watched much early Gundam.  I did buy the box set of the movies (Gundam I-III) that were made from the TV series footage, because I kind of thought it was Something Significant That I Should See, but my attempt to watch them resulted in actually falling asleep partway through the first one, never getting around to going back to watching it, and then selling the box set for practically nothing.  So, it really doesn’t have much significance to me.

Still, “wakasa yue no ayamachi” is one of those Famous Quotes and I’m going to steal it.

Anyway.

I got sucked into reading a blog recently where the author was doing an awful lot of navel gazing about his days as a young anime fan, when everything was Exciting and New, and I wound up doing a bit of reminiscing myself, and the collection of memories that bubbled to the top THIS time were some really cringe-worthy ones, so of course I decided I’d share them.

I used to run an anime club.  Hell, I thought it was my Solemn Duty to run an anime club.

See, back in the Wayback When, the halcyon years after I first got hooked on watching cartoons produced in a language I couldn’t understand, people didn’t have ready access to the internet, so getting new anime and talking to other people about anime involved making actual human face-to-face contact with other freaks who were also crazy about foreign cartoons.

So, for a few years, and with the help of a good friend who was bad about saying “No, you’re crazy, I’m not doing that”, I ran an anime club.

We even made a newsletter.  Ranma 1/2 was big at the time, so we called it “Panda Tracks”, and we put out three whole issues.  I was only able to find two to scan for your amusement, here they are:

Beyond newsletters, we had periodic meetings where we showed mostly-subtitled anime (although I did subject people to raw-Japanese, unsubtitled episodes of Sailor Moon and Miracle Girls back when those were airing in Japan).  It was those early meetings that sowed the seeds of what would later become my current rather jaded attitude towards fans.

Our first two meetings were held in local pizza restaurants, because neither I nor my easily-influenced friend were college students and we were used to fan clubs that met in pizza restaurants.  It made sense to us.  Pizza places had nice large private rooms that they were happy to set aside for a few hours based on the idea that the people in the rooms would be eating pizza and drinking appropriate beverages, and we needed a large private room.  It seemed win-win.

For our first meeting, we reserved a room, borrowed a largeish TV with built-in VCR from my friend’s workplace, and did as much advertising as we could to get people to show up.  If I recall right, we actually had a fairly good turnout, probably 20 people or so.

The first problem was that I didn’t realize just how cheap anime fans were until I saw that some of them had brought bag lunches into the restaurant, which didn’t exactly endear us to the management.  We also had a little drama at the end of the night because some people had agreed to split the cost of pizzas and then people had trickled out during the showings, so when it actually came time to settle up the bill, some of the people who’d agreed to split costs on the pizzas had quietly left some time before, so we wound up covering the rest and then tipping rather heavily by way of apology.

We had a second meeting at a different pizza place, and, while the people-skipping-on-the-bill thing didn’t reoccur, the bag lunches thing DID, so it was obvious that we needed to change our tactics before we ran out of pizza places willing to host large groups.

Our savior came to us in the form of the Golden Arches.  It turned out that a local McDonalds had a private room they used for groups to watch sporting events in, it had a big-screen TV built in and was shielded from the rest of the restaurant by blinds that could be closed.  Also, the food was cheap enough that people actually bought it as opposed to packing in their own.

I actually have mostly good memories from that time.  We’d get fifteen or twenty people at any given meeting, we’d watch anime together and eat McDonalds, we set aside a bit of every meeting for Show-And-Tell, where people could show off their latest purchases, and the management loved us because we ate lots of food and didn’t make a problem of ourselves.

We did have one time when, well, see, there was this show called Video Girl Ai, and we got the first three episodes of it and watched them and loved it, and then we got the last three episodes of it and decided that we’d make a meeting out of watching the whole thing together as a group, and then the last episode had an awful lot of blood in it and an employee happened to walk in right during the middle of the gory bit… I don’t think the restaurant actually SAID anything to us but we did adopt a “watch everything BEFORE showing it at the club” policy after that point.

Also, there were some issues with, let’s say, “social graces”. We did have to turn down an awful lot of requests from people to show various sorts of porn (Urotsukidoji had just come out and was All The Rage), and The First Time We Had a Girl Show Up was, well, a little embarrassing.

Still, we were Fighting The Good Fight at getting anime out to the masses, and I was young enough that that actually motivated me.

After about three years of this, I moved out of town and handed the reins over to my friend, and he took the helm for a little while longer – how’s that for mixing metaphors – and then handed them off again, and the whole thing lasted for well over a decade before it finally disbanded.

So on one hand I feel pretty good about having started something that lasted that long, and on the other hand it makes me cringe to think about how naive I was.