Well, this is not representative of all anime, but admittedly of a large subsegment.
> but why are so many anime women depicted in an overly sexualised manner?
Because it sells very well to young males, especially the stereotypical basement-dwelling sexually frustrated nerd population. And Japan is the land of the Hikkikomori, after all.
But it's not like this kind of thing doesn't exist in the USA either. Just take a look at some superhero comics.
>Japanese manga is fully of sexy, weird, objectifying stuff that most people really wouldn't want their kids to see, but go to a bookstore in Japan and you'll also see bookcase after bookcase of manga totally appropriate for all ages with young girls pressing their nose into them. Stories about teenage girls getting picked on at school or trying to meet the right guy or saying stupid things in class. Stories about girls who are in bands and office workers and every possible thing.
I, uh, read a lot of manga intended for teenaged Japanese girls. The ironic thing is, a lot of times even the manga intended for girls is mildly sexualized to please members of the peripheral male demographics, yet the original female audience doesn't run away screaming in response. Guys enjoy "girls comics," and vice versa, and growing up around female anime and manga fans, I never really questioned it. Stories about girls trying to choose between a group of handsome suitors, or stories about guys surrounded by improbably attractive women. Cutesy slice-of-life, or ultra-violence. Ones with boobies and panty shots out the wazoo, or ones with homoerotic undertones... we didn't care, we watched it all together.
Meanwhile, in our more "enlightened" mainstream American culture, people write angry blog posts filled with stupid impact font image macros about how they literally judged an entire medium by its cover, because the female body is offensive or something.
>It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.
Man, that's a pretty big reach to go from shoujo manga is unpopular to "the west is suppressing women's media". While growing in popularity for some time, I believe that manga in the US was and still remains a niche market that remains associated (to a greater extent than comics) with low social status groups.
I will say that the American comic scene is pretty inbred though. Yes, there are indie comics, but in the US, the vast majority of comic sales are from two companies marketing their shared universes and associated characters [1]. In comparison, manga tends to have each author put out >=1 distinct series, typically with their own separate worlds. I believe the same applies to the french/belgian comic scene as well.
> Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community.
Really, do you have some numbers? Here in Germany, Shoujo/Shounen Ai are the most popular genres. I would imagine that those are pretty popular in France as well for example.
> Second: Japanese Manga. When you put it in perspective, a couple scantily-clad women, eh... could be a lot worse!
There's tons upon tons of manga that never so much as touches on sexual themes. It's a wide and diverse medium. This is like suggesting that because porn exists, all video is porn.
> Anime is not the dominant form of media in Japan, and is largely targeted at a relatively narrow age band. Outside of the main target demographic, you're not going to get a lot of familiarity with anything but the very largest show.
The top two highest grossing films in Japan are both anime; Spirited Away and Demon Slayer. Titanic follows at a distant third. Forth is Frozen, which you could argue is basically anime.
I live in Japan, and most anime is not really my thing, but its huge and definitely mainstream here.
> I think there might be something deeper to it. A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren.
That's for the simple reason that this is their main target-group. Anime is for kids, because adults don't have time to waste for them. Adults read manga, on train or break-time. And many manga have mature characters and topics.
Of course are there are also manga aiming for kids and anime targeting adults, and in the last decades things have changed, because technology as also society changing. Also today there are strong tropes, sophisticates nerds, etc.
> Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
That's not really true, it's usually the most popular as it's a money issue. Pick randomly a few seasonals and you'll find that most of them are not that good.
> There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas.
That's just wishful thinking. There are decades of effort tapping into that potential with mildly success.
> And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.
Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids.
Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.
> and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)
Not enough. Market-localisation is too expensive to justify the risk of pampering a handful fans.
The whole japanese Pop-culture is divided in a very small number of big franchises, which make the gross of the money, and a very big number of very niche-productions which hardly make enough money to even survive. The big franchises can take the risk of going overseas, and they do that for a long time now. But the small companys don't have the money, often not even the knowledge for it.
On the other side, even with the niche-produtions we now have a rather good situation today. We now have many semi-official english localisations in timly manner for anime and games. It's just not the whole market, and not for the whole world, and manga is still very much a dead fish. But that's simply beacuse it's a different market.
> Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture.
You also only see the fraction of the big picture which you are part in, not the complete big picture.
> ...in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms.
Yes, and not only in anime. The stereotyping of language by gender, occupation, social class, etc. is pervasive in Japanese popular culture. The linguist Satoshi Kinsui calls this practice yakuwarigo [1].
It also exists in translations into Japanese from English and other languages, with dialogue in novels being rendered into stereotyped forms, even though the original dialogue was not marked for gender and Japanese people often do not speak that way in real life, either. I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years, and those gendered translations in the other direction always felt strange to me.
I’ve discussed this issue with Japanese translators several times over the years. Most of them said that they were uncomfortable about using those stereotyped forms but that their publishers and, they presumed, the readers expected it. Times are changing, though. Just last month, the Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles [2, 3, 4; paywalled and in Japanese] about changing attitudes toward gender stereotyping in translations into Japanese.
In real language use, sociolinguistic differences often vary by the individual and the situation. I’ve known Japanese women who never—except maybe when being sarcastic—use the pronouns or sentence-ending forms that are typical of female characters in manga and anime. The faculty meetings at the university where I now teach are conducted in very formal Japanese, and I have never noticed anyone use an expression in those meetings that seemed typically masculine or feminine. Real-life professors don’t talk like professors in manga, either.
> It's ok to have super sexed-up comics in the store, but it's really sad that's all they have.
I've never been to a comics store where that's all they have. Heck, even the comics selection in non-comics stores that carry some comics usually isn't limited to just that.
Its probably the majority of what they have, because the people that buy it are the ones who will by more comics if more of what they want to buy is available, so its the most profitable segment of the market to serve with comics.
> Japanese manga is fully of sexy, weird, objectifying stuff that most people really wouldn't want their kids to see, but go to a bookstore in Japan and you'll also see bookcase after bookcase of manga totally appropriate for all ages with young girls pressing their nose into them. Stories about teenage girls getting picked on at school or trying to meet the right guy or saying stupid things in class. Stories about girls who are in bands and office workers and every possible thing.
I think the big difference here is that the US cultures differs in that it has a very big "picture books are for children who are still learning to read or male adolescents" thing which skews the market for comic books, Japanese culture is different.
> I think the comic industry, video games, tech, and geek culture in general are all going through growing pains as they find adoption in a larger market.
In some cases, I think that's true. In some cases, though, I don't think its so much that the industries are really finding adoption in a larger market, its that people with ideological axes to grind who aren't part of the market are coming to those industries and beating on them for not even trying to find a broader market but instead doing what they've done for a long time to focus on a market that is well-proven.
>Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.
This is patently false. There are lots and lots anime for adults and there are so many adult fans nowadays. To be honest this statement alone would probably disqualify you from giving any opinion worth considering in this discussion.
> Japan isn't particularly culturally friendly to startups.
It's quite the contrary.
Japan, or at least its entertainment industry and pop culture, is full of entire franchises started by minor, independent artists and coders, aka doujins [0]:
> amateur self-published works, including manga, novels, fan guides, art collections, music and video games. ... Of the $1.65 billion of the Otaku industry in 2007, doujin sales made up 48% ($792 million).
>The stuff I liked mostly didn't gain mainstream success at all, what really became mainstream was "shows like Dragon Ball Z."
I mean, it's stuff like DBZ and One Piece that has mainstream success in Japan, too. The weird stuff is/was relatively niche there too compared to the big names, it's just the total slice of the pie relative to the overall Japanese population was bigger.
But lots of the weird stuff that is questionable by mainstream Western standards has also gotten significantly larger here, too. I've been watching anime since the early 90s, and feel like I'm more or less used to it's weirdness, but Monogatari for example still has stuff that makes me uncomfortable - but it was quite popular in the west, far bigger than similarly strange stuff was when DBZ was airing.
That's hilariously false, both in Japan and abroad.
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