Support Japanese Manga Authors through Amazon.co.jp

It's every otaku's worst nightmare: just when you've gotten well and truly hooked on an offbeat, genius-level manga series, the series gets dropped by its American publisher - even though it continued for dozens of more volumes in Japan! Sad examples of this fate include Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture by Masayuki Ishikawa (canceled after two volumes in the U.S., but ran to 13 volumes in Japan) and Beck by Harold Sakuishi (dumped after 12 volumes in the U.S., but ran to a whopping 34 volumes in Japan)!

During a brief pause in your wailing, gnashing of teeth, and general lamenting, you wistfully Google some more only to find that the missing volumes are available online, in English, for free on any of a number of manga aggregation websites. Through the diligent and unpaid efforts of a legion of amateur scanners and translators, you can enjoy the further adventures of all your favorite characters! But no sooner have you started to enjoy this cornucopia than you discover the awful truth: manga aggregation sites are EVIL, having caused a major collapse in the market for legally translated manga, leading to the demise of many publishers, and doing nothing to recompense the artists who originally created the work or the publishers who originally issued it in Japan. (See Cecilia d'Anastasio's fascinating article "The Invisible Labor Economy Behind Pirated Japanese Comics.")

So you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: you can't use manga aggregation sites, because they are EVIL, but you have to, because your pathetic fan life depends on it! How to deal with this mire of cognitive and moral discord, not to mention the probability of enduring many many rebirths in dark Buddhist hells (or whatever brand of inferno you happen to subscribe to)?

The answer, at least for now, comes from a post in the "Learn Japanese" Reddit called "Buying Japanese Kindle Ebooks from amazon.jp." Yes, there is a way to salve your conscience. Go ahead and read the manga at an aggregation site. But buy a Japanese copy of the book to support the original authors and publishers! And, to avoid killing trees for a copy that you can't read anyway, buy the Kindle e-book version.

Alas, navigating the Amazon.co.jp website is not an easy task for an English-only speaker. The Reddit post mentioned previously has a few tips, but it can still take quite a lot of futzing around for an American to get Kindle orders working properly on Amazon.co.jp. The following steps are provided here to save you the trouble (and perhaps to save your very soul!):

1. Open a web browser and go to https://www.amazon.co.jp/. Once there, right-click the JP globe below the search bar and choose Translate to English.

2. Create a new account. To do this, click the down arrow next to Account & List, then click Are you new to the registration?



3. On the Create Account screen, enter your name in both the Name and Phonetic boxes. Reportedly, you can enter the same E-mail address that you use for your Amazon account in the U.S. However, in that case, you must be sure to specify a different Password. I actually used a different E-mail address than my U.S. account, so cannot promise that using the same E-mail address will actually work.

4. Click Account & List to go to the Your Account screen, then click 1-Click Settings.

5. Click Add an International Address. On the Add a New Address screen, fill in your information and then click Save & Add Payment Method.

6. Click Enter information on the new payment method. Fill in information for your credit card. (Important:  From my experience, you need to use a credit card and not a debit/credit card, as debit/credit cards do not seem to work for overseas purchases.) Then select your billing address. You are returned to the Manage default address and 1-Click setting screen, and the message "The update has been successfully applied" should appear.

7. Under 1-Click status, click turn on. At this point, you are now able to complete purchases from Amazon.co.jp, but some more steps are needed to enable you to purchase Kindle books.
8. From Account & Lists, choose Your Content and Devices. On the resulting screen, click Settings, then click Country Settings. Next to Current country, click Change.

9. On this screen we're going to indicate that you live in Japan. This is a requirement in order to be able to purchase Japanese Kindle e-books. On the Country of residence screen, enter your Full Name. For the ZIP/Postal Code, put a three-digit number in the first field and a four-digit number in the second field. (I used 123 4567.) You can leave the Prefecture as Hokkaido. Fill in random information in Address Line 1 and Address Line 2. Leave Company Name blank. Fill in your Phone Number. Click Update.

10. Back on the Manage Your Content and Devices screen, on the Settings tab, under Kindle Payment Setting, click Edit Payment Method.

11. On the Kindle Payment Setting screen, choose the credit card that you defined earlier, then click Done editing.

You are now able to order Japanese Kindle books. However, locating the books you want to order may take some research. You might find what you want by entering the author's name in English letters, or the English language title. More likely you will have to poke around on the Internet until you find the author's name in Japanese or the series title in Japanese. One place to look is in Wikipedia; if they have an article on the author or the book series, the article typically includes the spellings in Japanese characters. Once you have the Japanese spelling, you can enter it in the search box in Amazon.co.jp.

Here are listings for the first volumes for some of my favorite series:

• Rin, by Harold Sakuishi
• Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture, by Masayuki Ishikawa

Good luck! Let me know if you have corrections to these instructions.

UPDATE 2018-04-25:
After using the above method successfully for some time, I recently encountered an error on Amazon.co.uk where it said that I couldn't order any more Kindle books while traveling out of the country. I found that others have run into a similar problem. I found a solution in the thread Legally purchasing Japanese Kindle books / audiobooks. Before opening the browser and navigating to Amazon, you need to launch a VPN that connects to the Internet through a server in Japan. One free VPN client that has worked for me is VPN Gate, which is available at http://www.vpngate.net/en/. 

Elsewhere I have seen a recommendation that you can buy Japanese ebooks through eBookJapan, a firm that does not care what country you are located in. For details, see the article How to Read Japanese Manga Online (A Guide to Building Your Manga Library with eBookJapan). Unfortunately, though I was able to follow most of the steps in the article, I wasn't able to actually complete an order. An error occurs whenever I try to complete a purchase using a credit card. I hope you have better luck if you attempt to use this method.

Genkaku Picasso

I first ran across Usamaru Furuya a few years ago via his two-volume series called Short Cuts. These collections of one-page cartoons were loosely themed about the predominance of teenage girls in Japanese pop culture, but on another level they could perhaps be seen as symbolic of that culture in general. In these works Furuyu conveyed a uniquely twisted and independent vision that seemed unlikely to ever cross over to the mainstream. But in his latest series, Genkaku Picasso, Furuyu seems to have accomplished the impossible: a story done for the major commercial Shonen Jump magazine in Japan, with sufficient elements to attract the sympathy of the masses, but without losing the quirky and rather demented qualities that make his work so special.

This story centers on hapless young high school student Hikaru Hamura, a relentless art nerd who continually sketches at his desk rather than interact with any of his classmates. Only his cute classmate Chiaki Yamamoto hangs out with him down at the river during his after school sketching sessions. She might be ready to be more than friends, but never gets a chance as a horrific helicopter crash kills both of them.

When Hikaru awakes, Chiaki has become a miniature angel, in schoolgirl uniform with wings, who hides in his shirt pocket and pops out at inopportune moments. She blithely informs him that she bargained with the Buddhas to return him to life, and they agreed on the condition that he help troubled people when he meets them. Of course, only Hikaru can see this little angel, and his conversations with her just serve to convince his classmates that he's weird.

Neither of them is quite sure just how his gift/curse is supposed to work, but it transpires that he sees a dark aura around people who have serious emotional problems. Thereafter, he is compelled to start drawing, and the resulting scene is a sort of archetypal representation of the inner conflicts of that person. In case that isn't startling enough, Hikaru then gets sucked into the picture, along with Chiaki, and they are trapped inside the subconscious of the troubled person until they find a way to help resolve their problem. If Hikaru ever tries to resist this whole process of helping others, his arm starts to rot, as his body reverts to the decomposed state it would be in by now, were it not for Chiaki's bargain with the Buddhas.

So of course, Hikaru and Chiaki always find a way of helping each person to face some inner conflict that has been holding them back. This element of sudden, heartwarming personal growth runs the risk of making the story too pat and wish-fulfilling for its own good. Fortunately, however, Hikaru remains relentlessly geeky, and a side-effect of his "seizures" is too make him seem even creepier to his classmates.
Over the course of three volumes, Hikaru and Chiaki encounter a variety of people with varied and interesting problems. Before the formula becomes too repetitive, however, Hikaru gets sucked into a psyche even more challenging to deal with...his own! The multichapter epic of Hikaru's inner soul goes to unexpected places, culminating in revelations that are deeply touching. There's something about a comedy with a serious ending that really catches you when you're vulnerable. Don't be surprised if you find tears coming to your eyes before the final page.

The other great joy of this work is Furuya's artwork, which alternates between the crisply delineated everyday world of the school and the softly textured pencil renderings of Genkaku's drawings and the worlds that exist inside them. Furuya also stretches the viewer's imagination with a number of clever homages to surrealism, which form a charming complement to his eccentric storytelling.

Genkaku Picasso, Volume 1

Genkaku Picasso, Volume 2

Genkaku Picasso, Volume 3

The Worlds of Aldebaran, by Leo

Amidst the barrage of manga titles arriving weekly in your local bookstore, and the onslaught of superhero titles arriving weekly at your local comic book store, it would be easy to go for many years without being aware of the existence of a European culture of comic books and graphic novels. Until recently, Herge's TinTin series was almost my only exposure to this world, and the most recent stories in that immortal saga are several decades old now.

Recently, however, the British firm Cinebook ("The 9th Art Publisher") has set about making many other Euro graphic novels available in English translation. The Blake and Mortimer series was the first of their offerings that I tried, and while carefully crafted, it struck me as lacking the colorful kinds of central characters that enliven the TinTin books. However, the second series that I tried has proved to be a real find.

The Worlds of Aldebaran by Leo is a mind-expanding science fiction series that would make a great movie or TV series. So far, two cycles from this work have been issued in English by Cinebook: the first titled Aldebaran (in three volumes), and the second titled Betelgeuse, which actually begins in the third volume of Aldebaran and proceeds for three more volumes. These are all large-format, full color works that show considerable artistry.

As both a writer and an artist, Leo's greatest strength is in his conception of myriad alien life forms, from the cute but enigmatic Iums, through various reptilian creatures that are as ferocious as they are peculiar. But his most unique conception is a kind of creature called the Mantris: beings of enormous size, but given to dramatic changes in shape and behavior during the course of their lifecycle. At times a single Mantris can even mutate temporarily into what appear to be a multiplicity of independent beings that are acting in a coordinated way, but whose purposes remain a cypher to the human observers.

Let it be said that this is not the typical Sci-Fi work that neglects the shear difficulty in recognizing an alien intelligence, let alone communicating with it. There is no miraculous Universal Translator a la Star Trek to enable you to be instantly understood by the latest batch of strangely humanoid aliens.

The cast of characters changes somewhat from the Antares cycle to the Betelgeuse cycle, but several favorites recur. The character of Kim, who is a sidekick to the narrator of the first story, goes on to be the center of the next one. In the process, she matures dramatically from a bratty and impulsive thirteen year old to a truly intrepid heroine, without ever becoming a mere "action girl" fantasy figure like so many Buffy wannabes on the market these days.

Leo's view of human society seems to be fairly bleak, as the human settlements in both the Aldebaran and Betelgeuse systems revert to being repressive dictatorships when they encounter hardships. Doubtless Leo's youth in Brazil has informed his vision of how dysfunctional human governments can become, as well as providing examples of how those in power are able to rationalize all their actions. The relegation of women to near breeder-slave status is one of the more disturbing developments, but one that seems eerily plausible in the circumstances depicted here.

This wouldn't be the first Sci-Fi story to use aliens to shed light on the shortcomings of our own species, but happily, the Worlds of Aldebaran prove too expansive to be reduced to a mere political parable. Through the sheer strangeness and fertility of his conceptions, Leo invokes the sense of wonder that is at the heart of all worthwhile science fiction.

I was disappointed when the series came to an end, but recently have discovered on the French publisher's website Les Mondes d'Aldebaran, that there is a third cycle called Antares. Hopefully Cinebook will also bring out an English edition of Antares, and we can learn more of the doings of the Mantrises, of Kim, and of her lately acquired alien paramour.

The Catastrophe: Aldebaran Vol. 1
The Group: Aldebaran Vol. 2
The Creature: Aldebaran Vol. 3

The Survivors: Betelgeuse Vol. 1
The Caves: Betelgeuse Vol. 2
The Other: Betelgeuse Vol. 3

Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture

So did you ever play that game with your friends where you ask, if you could have any superpower, what would it be? Chances are that if you did, nobody said "I wanna see germs with my naked eye." But such is the fortunate or unfortunate ability of Tadayasu Sawaki, the protagonist of the brilliant new manga Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture by  Masayuki Ishikawa. For reasons unexplained (at least in the first two volumes), he can see the germs everywhere he goes. They all look like a variety of happy-faced cartoon characters with exotic hairstyles, but that doesn't stop the bad ones from packing a punch.

Sawaki, it seems, is the son of a professional koji maker who supplies cultures for use in fermentation, and the title Moyasimon translates roughly as "mold man." His best friend Kei Yuki is the scion of a sake brewing family, so they are natural allies. The story commences with their arrival at an unnamed agricultural university, where Sawaki is swiftly adopted by a number of eccentrics who hope to exploit his strange power. Chief among them are Keizo Itsuki, a cryptic and visionary scientist who extols the greatness of agriculture and the wonders of fermented foods, as well as his fierce lab assistant Haruka Hasegawa who has a fondness for wearing bondage outfits and grosses out the other characters with her habit of wearing shoes indoors!

At first I thought that Sawaki's strange ability would just be a pretext for depicting college students getting themselves into amusing predicaments. But no: the germs themselves are central to many of the storylines, and if you're not careful, you might find them sparking an interest in microbiology. At the very least you will be amazed to learn of so many bizarre types of fermented foods (and drinks!).

As a bonus, volume 2 gives us a storyline involving the school's Spring Festival. Not having attended a Japanese university, I have no idea how accurate this is, but it makes American fraternity hazings look like a walk in the park.

Occasionally there is also a glimmer that there may be a serious theme buried in here somewhere. A chapter from the germ's-eye-view shows them forming grandiose plans for mutual cooperation, only to be swept away by a mop moments later; it's enough to make you wonder how germlike we ourselves might appear to a higher Being. Not to mention how one each of us humans is, essentially, a colony of micro-organisms bonded together in mutual cooperation. Isn't life weird? This manga makes it a pleasure to contemplate just how weird our existence really is.

Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, Volume 1

Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, Volume 2