Anime and Manga as Contemporary Art in Japan
What is anime and manga? The simplest definition looks like this:
Manga are Japanese comics.
Anime is a Japanese animation.
It is often believed that the terms “manga” and “anime” are limited to some genres (fiction, fantasy) and graphic styles (realism, “big eyes”). This is not true. The terms “manga” and “anime” define only the basic culture on the basis of which the corresponding works are created.
There is not a single country in the world in which such attention is paid to comics and animation. The creators of the popular Japanese comics are very wealthy people (Takahashi Rumiko is one of the richest women in Japan), the most famous of them are national celebrities, manga makes up about a quarter of all printed materials produced in Japan Continue reading
Hentai History of the genre (18+)
The appearance and development of hentai, pornographic manga and anime, is largely due to the specifically Japanese cultural and historical attitude to aesthetics and sexuality. Manga and anime in Japan in their modern form began to emerge during and after World War II. Modern hentai was only developed in the 1970s, when manga began to commercialize, and the readership, who managed to fall in love with it in childhood, grew up. To attract readers again, mangaki began to include elements of eroticism and bloody scenes in their works. Japanese laws from the Second World War until the early 1990s prohibited the graphic representation of genitals, so the creators of hentai, like any other product containing pornographic elements, were forced to partially censor them or to depict them schematically or symbolically. Flowers and shells symbolized the woman’s vagina, and snakes, fruits, vegetables – the male penis. Other techniques were also used, for example, the genitals were covered with aesthetic Continue reading
Japanese genre movie. Pink eig
Pinku eigu (literally – “pink film”) is a direction in Japanese cinema that exploits the theme of a woman in criminal circumstances, containing a large number of scenes of violence and erotic content. The peak of popularity was in the early 1970s. Sometimes Western film experts completely identify pink eig with films of the Sexploitation category or even with Softcore pornographyruen (“easy” pornography), but the cinema of Europe or America has no real analogues in this direction. “The West does not know anything about these films, and it shouldn’t know”, American film expert Donald Ritchie once said. The term “Pinky” was first coined in 1963 by journalist Murai Minoru, but became common only in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, Japanese criticism in relation to the features of the projects of various studios began to single out two more related areas – Pinky Continue reading
The most popular Japanese drummer band YAMATO in the world
Yamato, the world’s most popular group of Japanese drummers, celebrates its anniversary in Moscow – 20 years of the show! On April 4, 5 and 7 in Moscow, on the stage of the Theater of the Russian Army, the Yamato taiko samurai will present a new magnificent show to the court of sophisticated Moscow spectators, combining the most precious numbers and memoirs from 20 years of history and new plots.
For Japanese Yamato drummers (“Yamato”), the drums became an inspiration, through self-realization and the meaning of life at the same time.
The identity of this collective is expressed in everything. Armed with dozens of different drums, Japanese Continue reading
Japanese genre movie. Yakuza Eyga
The Yakuza movie screening followed two canons: Yakuza – noble fighters against evil, and Yakuza – greedy villains. From a historical point of view, both positions are justified. The early Yakuza (17-18th century) deserve to be romanticized even more than samurai. Then they were the lone outsiders hired by the peasants to fight the unbridled ronin and samurai in the civil service (hence the first friction with the law). Peasants often could not pay, so such self-defense units earned their living by playing games (8-9-3 or “i-ku-dza” – a losing combination) or small-scale trading. But then the Yakuza began to unite, pay more attention to making money, and the team does not lead to anything good. Therefore, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Yakuza began to become like ordinary bandits, and in the years after the Second World War Continue reading
