Guest Post by Nele Noppe:
‘Comiket’ has about the same connotations as ‘El Dorado’ among many fans of Japanese pop culture, both inside and outside the country. This fanworks-centric event is said to be the largest regular public event in Japan, and it’s easily the largest comic convention in the world. The edition I attended this summer, Comiket 80, welcomed about five hundred and forty-thousand visitors, thirty-five thousand fan creators come to sell their works, and a small army of three thousand volunteers there to direct the rivers of people through Tokyo’s flagship Big Sight convention center.
One’s first Comiket is a bit of a rite of passage, and I’d like to celebrate by giving a quick overview of this iconic event for those who may have heard about it as a massive fanworks market but are a little unsure of the details. The sale of paper dojinshi – zines, most often in manga format – is still very much an intrinsic part of fannish life in Japan. Dojinshi shops and dojinshi conventions have only become more popular as online fandom developed. Between forty and ninety large and small dojinshi conventions are held throughout Japan every month; Comiket, which has taken place every August and December since 1975, is only the biggest and most famous.
Socializing is a large part of the Comiket experience, but most visitors come to snap up the latest dojinshi by their favorite creators and discover new artists and fandoms. The fannish move onto the internet only seems to have made Comiket even more of an important showcase event for creators. Fifty-two thousand dojinshi creation teams, or ‘circles’, took part in the lottery that determined who could have half a table for one day at Comiket 80. Circles of two or more people are very common, but technological advances and the rise of support services like specialized dojinshi printing companies have leveled the playing field and made it easier and cheaper for single-person circles to create dojinshi as well.
The scale of circles’ activities and sales varies wildly. A majority of circles report that they sell up to a hundred dojinshi while at Comiket and generally lose money on their fannish activities, but some of the more famous and successful circles sell over a thousand dojinshi during Comiket and earn several hundred thousand yen (one thousand yen is about 1300 US dollars or 970 euros) over the course of a whole year of attending conventions. Dojinshi circles that can actually make a living with their fannish activities are highly exceptional. The general sentiment is that dojinshi should be made out of love for their source works and nothing else, so there’s little tolerance for circles who are perceived as deliberately trying to turn a profit.
Exact numbers about the size of the dojinshi market are hard to come by; it’s very much a shadow economy, untaxed and unregulated. Japanese copyright law forbids the sale of unauthorized derivative works, and most scholars and fans agree that what takes place at Comiket is probably illegal. However, rights holders turn a blind eye to the sale of dojinshi at conventions and in dedicated resale shops because they believe that a flourishing dojinshi scene nurtures up-and-coming artists and serves as free publicity for commercial offerings. There have been a few clashes involving individual dojinshi that media companies considered both too popular and too offensive, but on the whole, there’s a tacit understanding that the fans who buy and sell dojinshi are the industry’s biggest supporters and should be left alone.
At Comiket itself, nothing shows that tacit understanding better than the official presence of about a hundred and fifty companies, ranging from manga publishers to anime production houses to dojinshi resale shops and other fan-oriented companies, like Pixiv, the Japanese equivalent of deviantART. To preserve the fannish atmosphere of Comiket, the company booths are located on a separate floor entirely and have to make their own little catalog. (The official Comiket catalog, which has blurbs about all participating dojinshi circles, puts most phone books to shame.) It’s perfectly possible to attend Comiket for years and see nothing more of the company booths than the signs pointing towards the stairs, and some participants report doing just that.
Comiket’s ever-increasing popularity among both fans and companies has caused some new problems of its own. Some fans feel uncomfortable with the media attention that’s invariably drawn by half a million people converging on Tokyo Big Sight. There are security concerns about overcrowding inside the center, and Comiket is unable to control turnout simply by switching to a Comic Con-like system of advance registration. Participation in the event has always been free of charge with no registration required, and any changes that may lead to some participants being privileged over others will probably be seen as a violation of Comiket’s strong code of egalitarianism.
But Comiket’s biggest headache right now is Bill 156, a recent law that aims to prevent the distribution of explicit material to minors in Tokyo. As soon as it was first proposed, this piece of legislation was widely reviled as a possible source of censorship by manga publishers, fans, mangaka, rights activists, and academics alike. These broad protests succeeded in watering down the proposal significantly, but it still passed, and there’s real concern among fans that it could have an impact not just on commercial manga but on dojinshi culture as well. One Comiket staffer I spoke to urged me to spread the word about Bill 156 among non-Japanese fans, and remind fans around the world to remain vigilant about obvious and non-obvious threats of censorship.
Thank you for sharing this report! I wish I could have attended. Someday…
You’ll be coming to Japan again, right? Aim for mid-August or the end of December next time, we’ll go together. Comiket is definitely worth the trouble of planning a trip around.
Japanese copyright law forbids the sale of unauthorized derivative works, and most scholars and fans agree that what takes place at Comiket is probably illegal.
That’s fascinating! Based on the popularity and prevalence of dojinshi, I had assumed that Japanese copyright law wasn’t as draconic as U.S. copyright law, or that there was a special exemption for dojinshi.
There definitely isn’t any sort of exemption for dojinshi. There’s no case law related to dojinshi or other fanworks, but I’ve yet to come across a paper that argues that the sale of dojinshi may be legal. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that it’s not. Author’s rights are rather extensive, including moral rights and such.
Japan’s copyright law in English if you want to check it out: http://www.cric.or.jp/cric_e/clj/clj.html The site is very much of the “all copyright is awesome” persuasion, but this is the official policy. The policy that is actually applied is quite different in some (not all, of course) areas.
Thanks so much for this look at a very important part of fan culture. I’m very intrigued by the way the Japanese fan community is dealing with the copyright concerns — an instructive thing to compare to US culture.
Enjoyed reading.
Glad you enjoyed it. It would be interesting if the understanding between fan creators and copyright holders that exists in Japan could be replicated elsewhere, but I’m not sure that would be possible. It seems to require a level of mutual trust that would be pretty hard to establish at this point between ‘Western’ fan communities and companies.
Nele,
I’m not sure ‘mutual trust’ is the only factor here, or even the major factor. Mehra, for example notes that “Japan has interpreted its Copyright Law in ways that are not strikingly different from U.S. courts addressing similar questions”, but his conclusion is that ultimately under the Japanese legal regime, the economic and reputational costs of litigating against fan creators significantly outweigh any potential benefits. The conclusion he arrives at is straight-forward: “Japanese copyright infringement damage awards are so low that it pays to infringe.”
One question I’ve always had, though, is this – is there anything else to Comiket *other* than the market? That is, is there anything like “original programming” (panels, etc.) beyond just the floor itself?
Of course there’s a lot more to the relationship between fans and the industry than what I mentioned here, but since this was just an introductory post about Comiket in general, I didn’t go into any detail about legal and economic factors. Mehra is good on those topics, and Arai and Kinukawa as well. If you read Japanese, I’d also recommend the publications of Comiket’s preparatory committee, they talk about relations with the industry quite a bit (unsurprisingly).
Comiket itself doesn’t host panels as far as I can tell, but its organizers seem to take part in panels held during other manga- or entertainment industry-related events quite often and report on those in publications like the catalog.
Thanks for posting this – it’s interesting to hear about huge cons and what they’re like, and how the attitude to transformative fanworks is different in different cultures and legal systems. I’m impressed by the sheer number of people, and that there’s no registration required.
This is where I should mention that the attendee numbers are a ballpark figure, precisely because there’s no registration; everyone can just walk in and out of the building during all three days, and it’s not clear to me if/how organizers manage to make an estimate while taking into account individuals who entered multiple times. I’ll try to find out how they count people.
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Comiket’s biggest headache right now is Bill 156, a recent law that aims to prevent the distribution of explicit material to minors in Tokyo. As soon as it was first proposed, this piece of legislation was widely reviled as a possible source of censorship by manga publishers, fans, mangaka, rights activists, and academics alike.
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I agree… we should let more ppl know abt it!!! Of course, minors should not be exposed… but most of the ppl buying doujin and manga are not minors!!! So we should be allowed the right to buy… and support our fave artist!!!
I agree! This law misses the mark entirely. Of course nobody thinks that adult material should be sold to minors, but that was already forbidden by law in Japan before this bill was pushed through. All it does is create a chilling effect for publishers and artists who get worried about making/publishing works whose distribution might be inhibited because they have overly pornographic content. I honestly don’t see how this bill is going to prevent any child from accessing pornography. It just frightens creators into self-censoring their works.
It’s very grating how this bill and similar proposed laws (in Japan and elsewhere) are presented as purely measures to protect children. That’s just a way to silence or dismiss any objections, because who could possibly be against protecting children?
Hi Nele and everyone,
A few comments:
>> on the whole, there’s a tacit understanding that the fans who buy and sell dojinshi are the industry’s biggest supporters and should be left alone.
Publishers scout for new talent at Comike, and some established mangaka publish their own (often sought-after) dōjinshi.
>> Comiket itself doesn’t host panels as far as I can tell, but its organizers seem to take part in panels held during other manga- or entertainment industry-related events quite often and report on those in publications like the catalog.
There is also the Comike Fringe group held (in Japanese) during Comike. The meeting I went to was very informative, with presentations by researchers, scholars, and critics.
>>I’ll try to find out how they count people.
At PCA in April 2011, in presenting preliminary data from a survey held in August 2010 by a team from The University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology, the presenter, Nakamura Jin, that visits were “total combined attendance over 3 days”. So if I were to attend each of the three days, that would count as three visits. See also this report from Mainichi Shimbun on Anime News Network: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-08-14/attendance-dropped-by-20000-at-comic-market-80
>> Japanese copyright law forbids the sale of unauthorized derivative works, and most scholars and fans agree that what takes place at Comiket is probably illegal.
>> The policy that is actually applied is quite different in some (not all, of course) areas.
Mikhail quoting Mehra:
>> “Japanese copyright infringement damage awards are so low that it pays to infringe.”
This may also speak to different ideas about laws and the rights deriving therefrom. Historically copyright was not a concern in Japan at all; that changed only in the Meiji period with the adoption of Enlightenment-derived legal and other systems. I wonder if this pre-modern attitude toward ownership carried over into the modern era.
BTW a cool resource on site is the International Desk. They’ve been amazingly helpful to me.
Gomen nasai (sorry!) for only now starting to read this blog. Hope to see some of you at Comike.