It’s Wikipedia Asian Month again

Wikipedia Asian Month 2018 official logo

November is Wikipedia Asian Month. Each year, Wikipedians are invited to write new articles relating to any aspect of Asia. Depending on the number of articles you manage to create within this month, you are awarded bronze, silver and gold virtual badges (though that might be specific to the German Wikipedia), and anyone who creates at least 4 articles gets a postcard (by snail mail!) from a random Asian country.

If you’re reading this weblog, chances are you’re particularly knowledgeable about manga, so how about participating in Wikipedia Asian Month by checking if there’s any manga or mangaka not yet in the Wikipedia of your choice (but should be)? However, there are two caveats:

  1. Make sure that any articles you’re about to create meet the appropriate notability guidelines. There’s already too much stuff in Wikipedia that shouldn’t be in there, and if no one else cares about the topic of your article, it won’t get improved much by the Wikipedia community.
  2. I won’t say “Writing a Wikipedia article is easier than you think”, because probably the opposite is true: successfully creating an article takes a lot of effort, particularly because you need to properly cite published sources for everything you say.

Last year I took part in Wikipedia Asian Month for the first time and created articles on the German Wikipedia on a Japanese live-action film and its director, an anime voice actor, and an anime series. This year I’ll try to reach 4 articles again on the German Wikipedia, maybe with a stronger focus on manga this time.

Artifacts from Japan, part 5: Morning #43, 2018


Language: Japanese
Authors: various
Publisher: Kōdansha
Pages: 400
Price: ¥370 ($3.30 / €2.85)
Website: (Japanese)

Morning (or “Weekly Morning” according to Wikipedia, but the word “Morning” [EDIT: I mean “Weekly”, of course] is not on the cover as far as I have seen) is not quite as widely read as Young Jump, but its circulation (well over 100,000 copies per issue) is still huge compared to Western comic magazines. In the past, Morning has run famous manga series such as Gon, Planetes, Space Brothers, and Vagabond.



<img class="wp-image-3485 size-medium" src="" alt="A particularly striking page from Toshiya Higashimoto's Theseus no fune.” width=”200″ height=”300″ /> A particularly striking page from Toshiya Higashimoto’s Theseus no fune.




Japanese artworks takes place within an actual context of an asymmetrical power
Akira Kurosawa to the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki.

Politics in Warren Ellis’s Planetary #2

Happy May Day everyone, or ‘Warren Ellis Day’ as for some reason it has come to be known in this little corner of the Web. This time we’re going to look at politics in Warren Ellis’s classic, Planetary (art by John Cassaday). Planetary was published in 27 issues by Wildstorm/DC from 1998-2009. As far as the main story is concerned, the political setup of Planetary is a standard Warren Ellis one: it’s a conspiracy of supervillains who pull all the strings in this world, and the democratically elected governments of the world are powerless against them. It takes superheroes – vigilantes, rogues, operating outside of the law – to protect the world from these supervillains.

There is more going on here, though. Among the earlier issues (collected in Planetary Book One, not to be confused with Planetary Volume 1 which only contains #1-6), some stand out in particular from a political perspective because they comment on real-world political events and figures. Of these, we’ll discuss issue #2 (“Island”) here (but #7 and #8 are also noteworthy in this regard).

“Island” is mostly set on “Island Zero”, a fictional island that “forms the far north-western tip of the Japanese archipelago. Also the closest island in the group to the Eurasian landmass – specifically, Russia”, says Shinya Fukuda, a Tokyo-based employee of the Planetary organisation. He continues, “It’s off-limits, due to an issue of war legality still under arbitration. Basically, we think it’s ours, and the Russians think it’s theirs. One of our prime ministers visited Yeltsin to try and iron it out last year, but, you know…”

Another Japanese character, the terrorist Ryu who plans to overthrow the Japanese government, describes Island Zero like this: “The last island between Japan and Siberian Russia. Unpopulated because of its nature as a political football. The Russians claim it as spoils of World War Two. We, naturally, claim it as part of Japan. Legally, this island is a nowhere thing.”

Ellis probably alludes to the Kuril Islands dispute here, even though they are located north-east of Japan, not north-west. The status of the Kuril Islands has been settled in several treaties which say they belong to Russia (as the successor of the Soviet Union). The Japanese government accepts these treaties, but claims that the four islands closest to Hokkaidō do not belong to the Kurils and are therefore not part of the treaties. Another difference between the disputed Kuril Islands and Island Zero is that the former are not entirely uninhabited: almost 20,000 people live on three of them, while on the fourth there’s a Russian border guard outpost.

The interesting thing in Planetary, however, is how the two aforementioned Japanese characters – only one of which is a fanatic nationalist – talk about Island Zero: “we think it’s ours”, “we claim it as part of Japan”. Why do they include themselves in the pronoun? It’s the government that does the claiming, so why do Shinya and Ryu adopt this claim as their own? What would Shinya and Ryu specifically gain if Russia ceded Island Zero to Japan? Sure, if Island Zero was part of Japan, Ryu could go on his hiking trip there without the risk of getting caught by the military, but the reason he goes there in the first place is precisely its remoteness due to its disputed status.

For Shinya and Ryu there’s nothing at stake in the dispute over Island Zero, so they probably don’t really “think” and “claim” much about it. More likely, there are some common but oversimplifying conflations at work here: of state and nation, of individual citizen and nation, and of state and individual politician. As abstract entities, states can’t think or claim anything – politicians such as the Japanese prime minister mentioned by Shinya can. And while it can be said that some views are more prevalent in a given nation than others, the assuredness with which both Shinya and Ryu include all Japanese people in their “we” creates the illusion of a completely homogeneous society in which everyone agrees with their government.

It’s particularly problematic that it’s the Japanese society, because this basically repeats the old prejudice of a purported Japanese conformity that borders on blind obedience. It seems like in the world of Planetary, governmental authority is only questioned by superhumans (who are powerful enough to stand above it anyway). Ryu says he wants to topple the government and become “paramount leader of Japan”, but he never says what his problem with the current government is. He is dismissed by Shinya as having “that Yukio Mishima, Aum Shin Ryko [sic, i.e. Rikyō] smell about” him. However, Aum Shinrikyō had their religious doomsday beliefs and Mishima wanted to restore the divinity of the Emperor. What does Ryu believe in? One of his followers says to him, “I believe in your theories. I believe in armed resurrection and revolution and nerve gas and acceptable casualties and all the rest of it.” But what are Ryu’s theories? Ellis doesn’t say. Ideological debates don’t seem to interest him. Apparently ideology is something for fanatics and terrorists, who make for good plot devices – but these characters must be wrong, because they’re the villains, so their ideology must be wrong too and doesn’t need to be discussed. Neither do we learn much about the political beliefs of the protagonists, the three superhero members of Planetary – they’re the good guys, so if they believe in anything, surely it must be right after all…

Upcoming talk: Japanese art in the contact zone








Artifacts from Japan, part 4: Miyajima Misen Story manga




Artifacts from Japan, part 3: Barefoot Gen wheat

barefoot gen grainWhen I bought this item at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I had no idea what it actually was. Well, obviously it’s two ears of wheat sellotaped to a booklet with はだしのゲン / Barefoot Gen on the front. On the back there’s the first page of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga on which Gen and his father talk about growing crops, so the connection between wheat and Gen is made clear even to those who haven’t read the manga.

Inside there’s a fold-out leaflet with instructions on how to plant the wheat and raise it, as well as some information on Nakazawa, Gen and the atomic bombing. Enclosed there is also an envelope which can be used to send a message to be entered into the ‘Hiroshima Heart Database’  (, Japanese). The idea seems to be that one should grow wheat as a symbol of peace. At least some of the database entries reflect this (“As the wheat continues to grow, so will the awareness of peace” etc.).

Barefoot Gen wheat leaflet