Kodomo no Jikan – A Shameful Cancellation

Wondering what the signs says; well, that’s the infamous “ejaculate inside me” panel from the manga, Kodomo no Jinkan. Thankfully, North American readers no longer have to worry about this type of material reaching our puritanical shores, what with the US release having been canned.

Now that we’re safe, why not read my thoughts on the matter.



Official word finally dropped and as all signs had suggested, Seven Seas’ US release of the Kodomo no Jikan manga (re-titled Nymphet) has now been canceled. The book, which had already received several delays, was as of last Friday put on hiatus—according to a post from the company’s President on their website forum—while Seven Seas opened dialogue with retailers to better inform them on the title’s content and allow them time to cancel their orders should they so choose (the portion of the forum containing this post was deleted late Tuesday, though the same message had been released to the public earlier that same day).

You can visit this thread at Seven Seas’ forum to read the official statement from the company’s President. The aforementioned dialogue was apparently very swift and overwhelmingly negative, as it only took six days (over a three-day-holiday weekend no less) for the final decision to come down, though I can’t help but think outcome of this matter had mostly been reached some time prior.

Despite much of the nonsensical reasoning bandied around forums, the cancellation can be heavily attributed to financial concerns, which was to be expected—available solicitation material and wind of the minor online controversy was enough to dissuade many retailers from carrying Kodomo no Jikan. Seven Seas is a small company that can not afford to have any of their properties become complete failures; if brick-and-mortar stores aren’t willing to carry one of their books, then the chance is probably horribly slim that they’d break-even solely through online distribution.

Regrettably, Seven Seas itself has come to retract their own stance defending the book, saying later volumes are “indefensible” and “inappropriate”, while lugging out the age-old excuse of being too busy to closely monitor their own business and as such the task of properly evaluating Kodomo no Jikan’s content “fell through the cracks.” I fully appreciate a company’s inability to continue with certain projects once their main retail outlets have jumped ship; I can in no way, however, respect such a drastic about-face on their principles. This reeks of concession to what is essentially the winning audience, an attempt to curry favor after unintentionally offending a specific demographic. Also, it is true Kodomo no Jikani takes on darker elements as the series progress, but the material referenced in Seven Seas’ statement is no more reprehensible than anything found in the first volume.

What further irritates me has been the sudden indignation and disgust sounded from certain portions of the North American anime and manga fanbase. We are a hobbyist community that often prides itself on being open minded, accepting, and non-judgmental; this, of course, is all complete bunk, but for what it’s worth anime and manga fans are often exceedingly tolerant, even as we snicker and comment on the creepiness of other community member’s interests. Sentiments of “it’s not my thing, but I’m glad this manga/anime is getting released” are relatively common, except in this particular instance, when a book, aimed at older teen/adult audiences, is found objectionable enough to elicit comments on how it hopefully won’t and shouldn’t get published—all of which is belched forth under the faulty guise of protecting our beloved industry.

At its core, this whole flap boils down to a singular pair of issues: the age of the main female character, and that yes, Virginia, there are pedophiles.

Kodomo no Jikan (I’d rather not use the US title of Nymphet, even with it being the name chosen by the original Japanese author) details the trials of poor Aoki Daisuke—a 3rd grade teacher who’s unwillingly become the major object of desire for one of his female students, Rin.

That’s right: Rin, a nine year old third grade student, wants the teacher as a boyfriend and doesn’t mind using her underdeveloped charms to try and win him over. It’s supposed to be a humorous reversal on the lolicon (read: lolita complex) themes commonly found in Japanese manga; instead of the older male pursuing a younger female, we have a little girl with an enormous crush on her twenty-three year old educator. Sure, Kodomo no Jikan’s content pushes the envelope and panders its visuals to the lolicon subset, but regardless of how distasteful you might find the concept, it’s lack of sex and occasional veiled/implied nudity is leagues away from true pornography.

Contention still remains, unfortunately, due to the manga’s sexualized portrayal of an admittedly very young girl (though we must always keep in mind an extremely fictionalized girl who could never be mistaken visually for a real human child). So, yes, Rin’s behavior can be overly lascivious, and the art, at times, is meant to be arousing, but what, I have to ask, is with this sudden preoccupation on age?

We could easily take Rin, retain her physical appearance, place her in middle school wearing a sailor seifuku (school uniform), say she’s 13, and see this whole age issue relegated to scant lolicon jokes on Internet message boards. And before anyone intones this being far from the case, I think we should all consider the vast gallery of 13 to 17 year old anime and manga characters who perfectly fit this very description. For instance, what about the current darling of the fansub circuit, Lucky Star; one of the more recent episodes featured an extended scene of our female cast nude and bathing, while discussing matters such as pubic hair and menstruation, yet regardless of how flat chested and slim hipped these characters might be, no one raised a fuss because our Lucky Star heroines are all safely aged at 17.

Rin, on the other hand, is a disgusting portrayal of near-pedophilic content based solely on the number printed next to her age listing. People aren’t objecting to the content; they don’t mind Shana, the female protagonist of Shakugan no Shana, displayed in provocative poses and clothing—she’s shown as being the equivalent of a middle schooler, it doesn’t matter how old she actually looks. No one finds problems with Negima!’s harem of jailbait, often romping around in their skivvies, many of whom are lusting after a ten year old boy; and then there’s always Chobit’s Chi, a prepubescent looking robotic tart, whose on/off switch is located in her genitalia. I hate to draw comparisons with other manga, but the only difference I can realistically discern between many of these underage, older-than-they look trollops and Rin is that in their prospective fictional worlds, they’re perceived as middle school students.

But why is her age so important? Well, because apparently her age crosses some imaginary boundary that invokes a correlation with material preferred by real child predators. I’m not sure why this disparity exists for some; all I know is that with characters aged 13 to 17, anime/manga fans are taking lighthearted jabs at those filthy lolicons, but with Rin we’re suddenly talking about pedophiles. I’d never defend anyone desiring sexual relations with children; I also know there’s an undeniable difference between the actual impulse to want sex from a real child and the arousal one might receive while looking at an erotic drawing. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but thinking it best to cancel a manga due to the uncontrollable actions of a few ill members of society is ridiculous rationale. Kodomo no Jikan is neither creating child molesters nor is the decision to drop the title saving any children from being sexually abused.

In my mind, this focus on age and the allusions to pedophilia are predominately smokescreens used to obscure the actual reason so much negative attention has been paid to Kodomo no Jikan; the culprit is fear, and it’s why I’m so abashedly ashamed of many in the fan community. No matter their protest, most of the nonsense is clothed in the self-righteous aspirations of wanting to protect our anime and manga industry from all the soccer moms and bible beaters of the world? We certainly don’t want to chance tarnishing the good name of anime and manga, best be safe and bury anything outsiders might regard as offensive, or at least those things people with enough time to lament on messages boards find offensive.

People, canceling Kodomo no Jikan doesn’t benefit anime and manga in the US; the book’s not child pornography, it’s not breaking any laws, and having the release shacked in hopes of preemptively deflecting negative attention has greater potential to harm the industry further down the line. Instead of fans using sales to make their voices heard, this type of online outrage merely tells companies they need to be even more wary of the material they consider licensing, slowly turning the industry as a whole more and more conservative. It also gives license for further stunts like this to be pulled, should another title draw bad press. Fans who adamantly desire to promote positive change should demand material like Kodomo no Jikan get printed; show the companies you’re both willing to stand for First Amendment rights and support, preferably financially, the market’s expansion through a growing variety of published material. Because honestly, if all we’re pushing towards is a US manga industry filled with edited copies of Shonen Jump titles, then I say fuck it, let Rome burn.

It’s sad. For a while there in the late 1990s and early 2000s, anime and manga fandom really seemed to be making some progress; now we’re getting a glut of product, but from a content standpoint, things feel like they’re moving backwards.

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A Giant Robotic Stick in the Eye

Being a fan can be painfully hard at times and take enormous amounts of hard work and guts to get through those difficult periods.

What follows are many, many words devoted to Gunbuster—a classic anime title if there ever was one—and why I’m thoroughly upset over 90 seconds of background music being changed for the show’s first North American DVD release.

The year is 1988, and you’re celebrating eight years of life with a party attended by most of your second grade classmates. Tiny paper plates decorated with garish balloons and red plastic cups blanket every available surface of your home, kids dance spastically to friendly hip-hop music, all the while a pile of birthday offerings stacked on the kitchen table begs to be attacked—they’re the real reason for this shindig. Your school chums can all go straight to hell, “Give me the presents.” The obligatory pizza finally arrives, is eaten, and bland cake distributed. Gift time, and there’s only one box you want, the one containing the single item you had your Mother promise to buy: a Donatello action figure from The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Scanning the wrapped specimens for what’s obviously the desired toy, you see Mom’s name on the appropriate package, which you snatch and immediately liberate from its paper prison. Raphael, the red turtle, sneers back at you.

As we speak, the rough equivalent of getting Raphael instead of Donatello is slogging its way to my house via the tireless efforts of the US Postal Service. What I’m talking about is Bandai Visual’s anime DVD release of Top wo Nerae! (Aim for the Top!), also known simply as Gunbuster.

Japan has been steadily churning out countless animated series on a yearly basis, since Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwon Atom first appeared on television sets in the early 1960s. While anime can certainly be considered a form of entertainment art, it’s also a product made to feed the voracious consumer appetites of young children and adult males who spend their money on six inch plastic figures of saucer-eyed schoolgirls with removable skirts. Each season sees another onslaught of new shows, the majority of which are forgotten about in less than five years as their luster fades and product tie-ins dwindle, leaving only a few rare gems to endure in the hearts of fans that years from now will find themselves re-buying these same series on the DVD’s successor to play in super-high definition.

Gunbuster is just such an anime.

Back in 1988, a young Japanese animation studio named Gainax—and a director who’d one day make a movie where a 14 year old boy jerks-off to the body of a comatose 14 year old girl—were taking virgin steps into the OVA (Original Video Animation) market; for the uninitiated, OVAs are a direct-to-video format allowing for greater overall production quality at the expense of a limited episode count. Their efforts resulted a work many fans of Japanese animation still consider to be a masterpiece, Top wo Nerae!. The Gainax of today is a major player in the anime industry best known for their ultra stylish shows, expertly crafted to sell expensive product lines from PVC figures to soft drinks, all with a penchant for blowing the minds of teenagers, eager to find hidden meaning in every colossal, disembodied hand clutching a clothing iron-shaped office building that continually belches out steam, but there was a time when this same animation studio’s name was synonymous with a reputation for being founded by anime and manga otaku (obsessive fans), a fact they later showcased in their semi-biographical piece, Otaku no Video.

Top wo Nerae!—crafted during those bygone days when a small and determined fan-run studio was trying to carve out a niche for themselves in the anime industry—is a show of polar opposites, evolving over six episodes from lighthearted schoolyard comedy into heroic tear-jerking drama. It’s a superlative example of what can be achieved in the animation medium when there’s a tight script and strong wills guiding a work towards the finale. This might seem hard to shallow with a title parodying Top Gun and a well known tennis anime, Ace wo Nerae! (Aim for the Ace!), even more so when the series is generally full of references to other shows and doesn’t mind occasionally borrowing a thematic element or two…or three. And yet, as Gunbuster transitions into a hard-nosed sci-fi epic for the second act, it manages to rises above being a purely derivative work, played solely for laughs, and become a uniquely poignant story of bravery and sacrifice.

My own Gunbuster fandom was born the moment I came home in 1990 with a clamshell VHS case—covered in gorgeous Haruhiko Mikimoto artwork—and watched the first of three tapes officially released in North America by the now defunct US Renditions. Far from my initial tryst with Japan’s indigenous 2D animated entertainment and long after the enticing, almost voyeuristic, lure of viewing an inherently alien production had worn off, Gunbuster still managed to sear itself into my consciousness as the final scene of episode six rolled up the television screen. “Welcome Home.”

Manga Entertainment purchased most of US Renditions’ anime catalogue in the mid-90s and reissued their titles under its own label, helping this relatively new company to enjoy some notable success during the remainder of the VHS dominant days of home video. As the decade drew to a close with the anime industry increasingly shifting support towards DVD as their preferred release medium, Manga Entertainment failed to embrace the new technology in the same capacity of its peers; their early DVDs were plagued with problems, and older titles only slowly trickled onto retail shelves in the new disc format—except for Gunbuster, left to perpetually waste away on out-of-print VHS tapes.

By the time Gainax produced the first episode of its sequel, Top wo Nerae! 2, in late 2004, the original Gunbuster had become something of a lost relic in the US anime community; Japan, on the other hand, had already received two DVD releases of the series: a standard film-to-disc transfer in 2000/2001, and a special box-set remastered edition in 2004. Younger fans drawn to Top2 by its lush animation and FLCL styling suddenly found themselves eager to view the preceding work, while those of us who fondly remembered watching Gunbuster on VHS eyed the Japanese discs, jealously hungering for DVDs of our own. The first encouraging news appeared in early 2006, when Manga Entertainment disclosed they no longer held the license to Top wo Nerae!; then several months later at AnimeExpo, Bandai Visual USA—the American arm of the company responsible for producing Top wo Nerae!—finally announced what many North American anime fans had been waiting to hear: not only had Gunbuster been licensed, the company went over the top and secured rights to the limited edition Japanese DVD remastered version.

And so here we are today. Bandai Visual’s Gunbuster DVD was officially released on February 20, 2007, though many online retailers began shipping preordered copies earlier in the month. My own copy—I begrudgingly purchased it because of the price ($43.00 and free shipping can open many a wallet when the other legal alternatives cost at minimum $99.98 MSRP)—should arrive any day now. The question that may be asked, “If you wanted Gunbuster on DVD for such a long time, why are you unhappy.” Well, as I said, I’m getting Raphael instead of Donatello.

Bandai Visual’s Gunbuster DVD was positioned to be the perfect model of a domestic release geared towards hardcore anime fans: there would be no individual discs sold, only a one-time purchase box-set featuring a reasonably more expensive price tag, the DVDs themselves were based on the out-of-print remastered edition and would come with a 24 page supplementary booklet sourced from material original included alongside the Japanese discs, with all of this being housed in a special imported artbox. Admittedly, the imported artbox—assumed to be the box made for the Japanese remasters—was in truth a rather humorous mishmash (apparently fashioned in Japan by real Japanese people no less) of character artwork placed against a live landscape image of red grass and mountains topped off with an actual—by which I mean available for purchase in the real world—toy Gunbuster photoshopped into the background. Still, this horribly crude box and even the absence of some DVD extras found on the Japanese releases were minor non-issues.

What ultimately taints Bandai Visual’s set is the alteration of about 90 seconds of background music from the first episodes. Yes, you read correctly, 90 seconds of background music.

In the affected scene, Noriko, our protagonist, seeks out advice from her coach after losing confidence in her ability to succeed as a robot pilot. What unfolds is a training montage featuring music made to parody the Chariots of Fire theme; the song is in no way a direct copy, though anyone familiar with the movie’s titular track will immediately notice the similarities.

Less than a month before the set’s release, Bandai Visual screened episode 1 of the series for a Los Angeles anime convention, where a diligent fan thankfully noticed the newly installed music. No prior mention of this change had ever been made, and upon questioning, their convention representative was lacking any definitive answers. Soon after, the only official response on the issue came in the form of an E-mail posted to AnimeOnDVD.com (the full contents can be read here); it essentially stated the alteration was made at the behest of the Japanese producer who felt it needed to be done for the US market and further went on to suggest those “die-hard stickler” fans wanting an original, unmolested version of the anime should consider buying a non-region coded reissue of the Japanese remastered edition, available for a limited time solely in North America. This release, of course, has no subtitles and costs $99.98 before taxes and possible shipping fees. Though Bandai Visual’s explanation was evasive at best, fan conjecture agreed fear of the United States’ ridiculously litigious society likely prompted this meddling to avoid any possible lawsuits stemming from copyright infringement. On an interesting side note, Chariots of Fire is a British film; where in the UK, an extremely poor quality DVD release of Gunbuster has existed for years, with this same music left intact and having drawn no unnecessary legal action.

Whining over 90 seconds of background music in a 160 minute series sounds petty to many people; maybe it is, but you know what, those people can fuck off. Just like Mom couldn’t comprehend the difference between your Raphael and Donatello action figures, those people don’t understand the desire for purity, something you can hold up exclaiming, “This is unblemished, this is the way it was meant to be.” Fans—true fans—feel the importance of this need; it’s what we crave and what innately makes us fans in the first place. Sure, Raphael was only Donatello with red ninja gear and slightly different weaponry, but as a kid you couldn’t grab your Raphael figure and say, “This is Donatello;” that just wasn’t possible. And maybe it wasn’t a Ninja Turtle figure, maybe it was receiving the Blue Power Ranger instead of the Red one, or a copy of Adventure Island for the Nintendo Entertainment System instead of Super Mario Bros. 3, either way what you got wasn’t equal what you wanted.

Gunbuster has remained unchanged for twenty years, and to now suddenly have a portion of this classic anime destroyed out of cowardice over the possibility of an unlikely lawsuit is utterly disheartening. What will be left on my doorstep is not Top wo Nerae!. Just like Raphael, it will look almost exactly like Gunbuster, except in the fine details, and that’s enough for a true fan to make all the difference in the world. To those people who buy this set and see no real issue with such a small alteration I say, “Good for you, please enjoy this classic anime.” But for myself and other hardcore fans, we’ll either have to make the difficult decision to avoid what could easily be the last release of Gunbuster North America will see for quite some time, or deal with paying for a product we can’t fully accept. I, unfortunately, caved and bought Bandai Visual’s gimped DVDs—that’s what happens when cheap online prices and personal finances dictate spending significantly more on an un-translated product to be absurd.

There are additional interrelated matters worth quickly touching upon. The sudden appearance of a non-region coded reissue of the Japanese remastered set, available only in the US, is obviously suspicious on its own, but having its existence announced by Bandai Visual USA through their Gunbuster website merely serves to draw further attention towards the altered North American release and leaves debate open over the true intentions behind such an anomaly: is it a quirky experiment or failed concession to hardcore fans? And for a company advertising itself as wanting to “bring authentic Japanese anime…from Japan to the North American” for “[their] customers in the US who are seeking real anime rooted authentically in the Japanese culture,” it suddenly becomes hard to view them as anything more than just another anime distributor, when almost certainly, the decision to change this music came from within the Bandai Visual organization. If this company desires to promote an air of elitism and charge collector prices, besides leaving their titles unedited, they should at least strive to be completely upfront and open with their consumers and not attempt to hide unfortunate circumstances, hoping they’ll slip past people unnoticed. They would also do well to refrain from issuing somewhat condescending statements to parts of their fanbase suggesting they spend a greater sum of money on a product they’ll likely be unable to fully understand. You want our money Bandai Visual; then treat us with the modicum of respect we deserve.

For my part, I did send a courteous E-mail to Bandai Visual voicing my dissatisfaction over their Gunbuster set and the manner in which they handled this issue; I also plan to send a written complaint to their offices once my DVD arrives, containing the appropriate mailing address for such a letter. Expecting any change in future Gunbuster DVD pressings or a recall of the first disc is highly unlikely, though I’d still suggest anyone bothered by these circumstances, at the very least, compose an E-mail to the company in hopes that their future releases won’t suffer a similar fate.

I intend to write a review of the Bandai Visual set once I’ve had the chance to watch the DVDs; please look forward to it.

As a final gesture, I’m posting a YouTube clip of the original, unaltered scene. It begins at 6:03 minutes into the video. Enjoy!

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