Mitsunori Morita, president of Shabondama Soap Co., a Kitakyushu-based soap-making company, is doing something no one has ever done. He’s producing a manga… about soap!

His solid belief in the merit of additive-free soap, soap using only natural ingredients, has been made more accessible since a comic book was published by Tokyo-based publishing company, Gentosha.

The book, costing 1,000 yen, and supervised by Morita himself, is titled “Susume! Sekken Seikatsu” (Go forward! Life with Soap). It is the story of Masae, a 31-year-old mother of two. Masae and her family enjoy the benefits of using additive-free soap, such as her 10-month-old baby boy’s relief from diaper rash after she changes from washing his clothes using synthetic detergents to soap without additives.

“I wish young people, especially young mothers with children knew about the importance of additive-free soap,” Morita said. “The production is time-consuming as it takes about a week to make soap without additives, whereas other manufacturers’ production time is just five hours. With this comic book I hope young readers will broaden their understanding.”

Check out the Mainichi Daily News site called Manglish: Manga in English, which displays manga with the original Japanese intact. Simply mouse over a balloon and the corresponding English appears.

Supplementary notes provide interesting background information about expressions, puns and cultural background and enhance understanding of what is happening in the panels.

Great for manga fans and those interested in studying Japanese.

Via Sparkplugged

Really, CBS?

From Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning fantasy flick “Spirited Away” to the violent voyeurism of “Ghost in the Shell,” kiddie fare such as “Pokemon,” TV shows on cable’s Adult Swim and video game offshoots such as “Final Fantasy,” anime has spread its tentacles across American culture.

Snerk. Tentacles.

Women, surging ahead in the video-gaming industry, have embraced anime and manga in a similar way.

Do videogames go hand-in-hand with anime? This is not a connection I have explored before.

Regardless, this article is awesome purely due to the following:

“It was more men before. Nobody knew what anime was. It was a small group of dedicated fans mostly in high school,” said Tony Oliver, the voice of hero Rick Hunter from the famed anime television series “Robotech,” which ran in the U.S. from 1985 until 1988.

Ah, Tony Oliver. Right now, somewhere out there, he’s probably wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

They also got the webmaster of robotech.com to comment, for whatever reason, and here’s his gem of wisdom:

“Back in the day, anime was all science fiction,” he said. “Now it’s everything: war, horror, romance.”

Yeah, they didn’t have, say, historical fiction or dramas back in the day. (You meant to say “in the U.S.”, right, Steve?)

The article also delves into yuri and yaoi, because, honestly, what self-respecting piece about anime wouldn’t? :>

Heather Meadows

There are those of us inclined to snigger at the mere sight of one of the Book Off! chain in Japan but Japanese literature in English is becoming serious business according to the excellent J-Lit resource.

Do check out the emerging writers section and the new trends section also.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph (a conservative paper trying to get younger readers) last week mentioned the rise of Otaku literature, particularly Densha Otoko:

. . .the “real love story” of a painfully shy computer programmer and a sophisticated woman whom he meets on a train. A peculiarly Japanese twist on the beauty and the beast myth, it was written in the style of an internet chatroom exchange - the postings of a hapless nerd negotiating his first romance, running alongside the encouraging responses of an anonymous community of online “friends”.

Of course, the article wouldn’t be complete without a trip to that emerging hotbed of live otaku culture, the maid café, purely in the name of research. The correspondent believes the otaku male may yet become as recognisable a symbol of contemporary Japan as the over-worked salaryman.

It seems some “educators” overseas can’t get enough of banning “dangerous” books in some school and public libraries. Miguel Gonzalez, writing in the Desert Dispatch newspaper recently, notes:

Following a news article that was published here, school district supervisor Bill Postmus has ordered county libraries to remove a Japanese comic book that contained pornographic cartoons.

The book in question?

It’s titled Manga: Sixty years of Japanese Comics, and it became the subject of controversy “after local woman’s 16-year-old son told her the book contained illustrations of sexual acts and sex with animals,” Gonzalez notes. More on the controversy at MangaBlog, “an ongoing conversation about manga”.