From Character Toys to Designer Toys (Or, How I Became a Toy Collector)

Dunny from artist Tara McPherson, a concert poster designer and
former production assistant on Matt Groening's Futurama.

This is the third in a series of posts about author and anime scholar Marc Steinberg's personal collection of collectibles. See all posts here.

BY MARC STEINBERG
Assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University

In criticisms of the shift from the toys of the 1950s and early 60s to the character-based toys of the mid-60s onward, we often find an interesting articulation of the relationship between generic and singular. Collectors and historians of buriki tin toys such as Kumagai Nobuo in Buriki no omocha regret the shift to character toys (what were known as masu komi gangu or “mass media toys”), bemoaning a loss of the singularity of the toys in favor of a character-based generality. Children no longer played with the toys for their own individual appeal, but instead bought them for the access to the manga-anime worlds the toys provided.

Reading Kumagai’s and others’ critiques of the mass media toy is quite interesting, since I must admit to having the opposite reaction: upon first encounter I found the '50s and early '60s toys to be generic, undifferentiated, often lacking in defining attributes. By contrast I could easily recognize the character toys of the mid-60s, and for me this gave them their singularity, or specificity. Of course the question of the singular-generic depends on perspective. From the perspective of a single robot toy that has no anime or manga serialization, no world, and no narrative serialization, it is unique. It’s a stand-alone entity, only available and accessible as the toy in your hand. The Atomu toy, by contrast, may be immediately recognizable (and therefore seemingly singular), but it’s recognizable precisely because it belongs to a larger narrative and commodity universe. It’s recognizable because of its transmedial generality. As such it’s also eminently replaceable. Character merchandising creates a system in which objects become at once singular (a notebook marked by the Hello Kitty image) and general or de-differentiated (this is merely another Hello Kitty product from the Sanrio universe of image-driven goods).

Contemporary designer toys (a.k.a. urban vinyl or art toys) take up the relation of generic to particular found in character toys and give it an interesting twist.

While designer toys first appeared on the scene in Hong Kong and Tokyo around 1997-98, it would take almost a decade before I would first encounter designer toys, at the moment my initial research on character merchandising was nearing completion. It immediately struck me as an area where fascinating artistic and material work was being done exploring the boundaries, limits, and potentials of character merchandising. They seemed to be subverting the normal workings of character merchandising in their concrete toy form, calling into question the unity of character image across incarnations, the singularity of form, the relation between character and world – so many tenets of merchandising practice. And yet designer toys were also fundamentally based around the practice of collection, inciting a desire to complete the collection, a desire that would inevitably be thwarted. Or cost a lot of money. Or both. (At right is someone’s collection of Kaws pieces, including a wonderful subversion of Atomu in the front center.)

I was quickly hooked.

The three terms used to describe the toys all have their merits: they’re toys that are integrated into an urban culture, often drawing on the talents of graffiti artists and put out by those working at the cross-overs between urban arts and clothing (Kaws, Bounty Hunter and Kid Robot – some of the most prominent toy makers all have clothing lines). They’re toys that draw on talents from the world of graphic design, as well as from the art world. And they’re toys that are themselves considered pieces of art. Whether coming in limited runs of tens or hundreds, or in larger runs of the thousands, these toys generally play on a sense of rarity in production (as compared to other mass market toys), but at the same time accessibility in price (when compared to other art pieces by contributors like Gary Baseman or Tara McPherson).

I managed to pin down some of what I found exciting in designer toys in “Vinyl Platform for Dissent,” an article published in The Journal of Visual Culture that can be seen as a kind of companion piece to Anime’s Media Mix. But let me point to a couple of the elements that make designer toys compelling – and collectible.

First and foremost is the prevalence of the “platform.” An interesting concept heard more and more across media studies in general (in fact we need a general theory of the platform more than ever, but that’s another project entirely), the platform in designer toys refers to a single shape or toy form which artists use as their base or “canvas” on which they design their particular toy. Generally humanoid, there are several main platforms: the Dunny (by KidRobot), the Be@rbrick (by Medicom), and the Qee (by Toy2R). Some artists use the platform “well” – drawing on their own character onto the existing surface (like Tara McPherson’s Dunny [top figure]). Some artists use the platform against the grain (like Tim Biskup’s brilliant reversal of the Qee’s orientation [Figure 2]). And some just use the platform as a literal canvas for painting whatever (Baseman’s Dunny is my favorite example [Figure 3]).

A second style of designer toy – on its fringes in some ways, but one that definitely has a hardcore of followers in North America, and is generally a stronger trend in Japan – is the Japanese-designed or inspired toys that come from the tradition of kaiju monster toys. The kaiju toy established itself with the Ultraman craze of the mid-60s (Figure 4) – the next big event in Japanese children’s culture of the 60s after the TV anime boom – and was a major toy trend of the mid to late 60s. These toys are generally sculpted from vinyl, and hand-painted. The art toy variety of kaiju aren’t based on TV shows, are generally more daring and artistic than TV show kaiju, and differ from the smooth designer toys of North America and other parts of Asia. They’re also fertile areas of experimentation in hybridization, with an artist like T9G (pronounced Takuji) creating some brilliant and disturbing hybrids of kaiju and dolls (Figure 5). While not as wedded to the platform as other designer toys, companies like Secret Base tend to produce relatively standardized forms with an infinity of color variations and small-run releases that literally change with the weather (Figure 6). Total collection is both impelled and impossible.

Both the kaiju style toy and the platform-based designer toy play with the relation between generic and singular, shifting the ways these terms are articulated in the character merchandising universe, even as they play with elements of this world. In fact, unlike character toys, these toys are mostly singular entities, stand-alone in a way that harkens back to the tin toy of the pre-mass media days. But they’re also very much aware of a certain kind of standardization or generality, which they put into play in their emphasis on the platform, or in the relative stability of the form with the kaiju-style toys. Here variation becomes the name of the game, and artistic merit – and the desire to collect – stems from an appreciation for the virtuosity of the variation.

Ultimately, designer toys at once confound the logic of character merchandising, and reproduce its impulse to collect. If the best form of homage is betrayal, designer toys are the ultimate betrayal, producing the desire to collect that animates the anime system.

And so, via an appropriately circuitous intellectual journey that started with contemporary Japanese artist Murakami Takashi’s engagement with character merchandising, took me through the history of Japanese animation and its vibrant material culture, and culminated in Anime’s Media Mix, I now find myself in place not so far from where I started: with artists who make toys, or rather toy-makers who are artists. Only now, I’ve become one of the collectors. A development that my collectible-filled closet and display case bear witness to.

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Marc Steinberg is author of Anime's Media Mix and assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University.

"Anime’s Media Mix is a must-read for anyone interested in the transformations of contemporary media. In portraying how anime characters are emblematic of mobility and connectivity in a broader media ecology, Marc Steinberg maps a new logic of production and consumption that shapes our world today."
—Ian Condry, MIT

"Marc Steinberg opens up brave new possibilities for the study of global media cultures. Attending to the watershed years of Japan’s 1960s and the ascendance of televisual animation he details how entire commodity regimes came to circulate around the idea of the anime “character.” Original and timely, historically dense and theoretically acute, Anime’s Media Mix definitively teaches us that anime can no longer be thought outside the networks of its transmediation."
—Marilyn Ivy, Columbia University

Representation and the digital environment: Essential challenges for humanists

 BY JOHANNA DRUCKER
Breslauer Professor of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles

The basic challenge for humanists comes from adopting visualizations that don’t suit our fundamental epistemological values. Obviously humanism is not monolithic. But methods of statistical analysis and empirical observation are grafted onto the humanities, they were not created from within the traditions of textual analysis and study. Put simply, the distinction between humanistic and empirical methods is the difference between interpretation and scientific positivism. I have no quarrel with the latter, only with the ways visualization techniques from the natural and social sciences have been adopted for use in the humanities. The result is reductive, and in most instances, produces a reification of misinformation. Exceptions exist.

Nicolas Felton’s work is a performance, nearly parodic, of the process with which I take issue. His wonderful designs, beautiful to behold and an amusing, diverting, presentation of self-generated statistical analyses of his own existence, are annual report type graphics put in the service of his auto-ethnography. “Here I am in numbers and graphs, here are all my activities, allocations of time, energy, attention.” Does he actually document the amount of time he spends documenting? I can’t recall. In Harry Mathew’s darker The Journalist, the OuLiPian writer creates a classification scheme for his own journal entries. The scheme becomes so self-referential that it smothers the author, making it nearly impossible to write anything but more refinements of the scheme. All content is absorbed into metadata. But back to Felton, what gives his work a humanistic spin is the way it activates the reader/viewer into consideration of how one is or is not like Felton. The gap of critical thought is the space for production of interpretation as an generative, recognized, substantive part of the activity of a text or image.

The principles of humanistic method are simple, after all: interpretation always produces a work as a reading; no work, image, text, is self-identical, it is always produced anew; and the humanities are fundamentally concerned with interpretation, which is necessarily grounded in embodied individuals whose historical and cultural identities factor into the work. Extrapolate from this to our basic notions of time and space. If we consider that time is always experiential, rather than given, and that space is not a container, but an effect of actions, behaviors, movement, motivations, then we realize that we have to shift our understanding of these fundamental categories towards temporality and spatiality. Thus temporality is time with a factor of some kind – where the factor can be emotional, economic, political, in short anything that is integral to experience (e.g. anxiety). Does Felton include such notions in his representations? Of course not. He uses standard metrics borrowed from the empirical sciences. As do almost all projects in the digital humanities.

Yannis Loukassis, a designer/scholar I met recently, has produced some remarkable visualizations of urban geography in a course he developed on SurfaceCities. These maps are humanistic. They are built as an expression of spatial experience, rather than assuming space as a given that can be shown on a Google map. The difference between putting humanistic information into a pre-set convention – e.g. using a standard metric timeline to show experiential or relativistic records—and using these experiential foundations to build the basic model is enormous. I could cite other examples. Stuart Dunn’s work with modelling experience in prehistoric structures in Britain, Leif Isaksen’s work on Ptolemaic mapping, Chris Johansson’s work on point of view systems within the Roman Forum—each has engaged humanistic experience in the content model of their digital projects in interesting ways.

What’s at stake is the cultural authority of the humanities. If human beings matter, in their individual and collective existence, not as data points in the management of statistical information, but as persons living actual lives, then finding ways to represent them within the digital environment is important. If the value of interpretative approaches to epistemology matters, it is because it undoes the fundamental assumptions of univocal authority, singularity of point of view, and absolute values.

In whose interest is it to find an expressive graphical and conceptual vocabulary for humanistic approaches to knowledge as knowing, as partial, situated, fragmented, and located in specific individuals and their point of view?

In whose interest is it not to?

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Johanna Drucker is Breslauer Professor of Information Studies at UCLA and a contributor to the volume Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. She is also the author of many books, including SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing.

"Is there such a thing as ‘digital’ humanities? From statistical crunches of texts to new forms of online collaboration and peer review, it’s clear something is happening. This book is an excellent primer on the arguments over just how much is changing—and how much more ought to—in the way scholars study the humanities."
—Clive Thompson, columnist for Wired and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine

"I look forward to the day when anxieties about the disruptive nature of ‘digital humanities’ fade into memory and the innovative methods, theories, and approaches championed by those who have contributed to this valuable volume are respected across academia for their rigor and utility. This book will go a long way toward clarifying the debates within and about digital humanities."
—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything—and Why We Should Worry

Obama's support of same-sex marriage: A game-changer?

BY AMY STONE
Assistant professor of sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio

This has been an unexpectedly dramatic year for same-sex marriage, and this past week is no exception.

Not only did North Carolina voters handily pass a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage this week but President Barack Obama also publicly announced his support for legalized same-sex marriage.

First, North Carolina. My Facebook and Twitter feeds have been full of commentary and outrage over the passage of yet another constitutional amendment in North Carolina. The passage of this marriage ban is neither new nor surprising; 29 other states have passed similar constitutional amendments at the ballot since 1998, and 19 of those prohibited both same-sex marriage and broader relationship recognitions for same-sex couples.

What is new is the surprise and outrage. Much attention was paid to California Proposition 8 and Maine Question 1, which were both votes on legalized same-sex marriage. However, there has not been a vote on one of these same-sex marriage bans since 2008. Before 2004 and the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, when same-sex marriage bans passed in states like Alaska, Nebraska and Nevada, there was little large-scale public outrage. Same-sex marriage was not legal anywhere in the United States; it was not shocking that voters were opposed to it.

But things have changed. As more states legalize same-sex marriage and American adults increasingly support it, there is a growing sense that the tide has turned. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of states that recognize or allow same-sex marriages tripled. Indeed, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, excluding Maryland and Washington state, seven states have same-sex marriage benefits and an additional three states recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. I think that some of this outrage and attention on North Carolina is that it is “business as usual” during a time in which people expect change.

Second, what is not “business as usual” is that Obama just became the first sitting president to publicly support same-sex marriage. Former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Vice President Al Gore have all come forward to support same-sex marriage after their terms ended. There has already been much speculation on how this might change the presidential election, support for same-sex marriage nationally, and ballot measures on legal same-sex marriage in Maryland, Maine, and Washington in the fall. In addition, voters in Minnesota and potentially the states of New Mexico, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Rhode Island will face same-sex marriage bans similar to Amendment 1 in North Carolina. There are predictions already that Obama’s statement may increase support for same-sex marriage in Maryland, where approximately 30% of voters are African American. In this case, the stakes are high; voters will be making decisions on actual same-sex marriage rights that were passed by the Maryland legislature this year. Right now the polls show divided support for same-sex marriage, and a small increase in public opinion could make the difference between retaining same-sex marriage and losing it.

It is unclear, however, how much people’s opinions will change due to presidential opinion. Opinions about same-sex marriage can be deep-seated, connected to larger belief systems about family and gender, and thus difficult to change. In an interview with a national LGBT organizer with more than 30 years of campaign experience, this organizer also described these opinions as “egg-shell thin”—that they may seem hard and unchangeable but can be transformed by a conversation that breaks through that egg shell.

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Amy Stone is author of Gay Rights at the Ballot Box and assistant professor of sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio.

"Amy L. Stone crafts a compelling, deeply textured portrayal of the more than 200 anti-gay ballot campaigns in the U.S. since 1974. Through interviews with movement leaders and other sources, Stone deftly analyzes the tension between winning campaigns and building a sustainable movement, between national, urban activists and local, rural communities, as well as debates over tactics and messaging. Gay Rights at the Ballot Box is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the central, disturbing role anti-gay politics has played in contemporary U.S. politics."
—Sean Cahill, Ph.D., Fenway Institute and New York University

At Spoonriver Restaurant, excitement, a happy and healthy community, and awesome local food are all in a day's work.

Chef Brenda Langton signs a copy of The Spoonriver Cookbook
for a regular customer.

BY MAGGIE SATTLER
UMP blog editor

It’s just after lunch-rush hour at Spoonriver Restaurant, and when I arrive the place is hardly at a lull. Satisfied customers are casually hanging out. Staff are conscientiously attending to their needs. And beloved local chef and founder of the Mill City Farmers Market Brenda Langton is itching to show off a photo from local farmer Andy Rider—of a single morel mushroom that stacks higher than a soda can.

“You can’t believe for a minute the morel you’re going to get. Two of them make a pound!” she exclaims to familiar customers.

Farmer Andy Rider compares
the size of his atypically large
morel to a soda can. His
morels will be on sale at the
Mill City Farmers Market
on Saturday.

She’s never seen morels like this. For someone who’s been in the business as long as she has, that’s saying a lot.

Langton is a conscientious purveyor of all things local and organic, and has been so since the age of 15. She moved from Commonplace Cooperative Restaurant (formerly of St. Paul) to her own Café Kardamena in St. Paul, to Café Brenda in the warehouse district, to Spoonriver Restaurant, which handily sits right next to the Mill City Farmers Market, opening for the new season on Saturday. Despite her business’ booming success (“The recession never hit us!”), she’s quick to say she hasn’t gotten to where she’s gotten alone.

It’s her community that makes the restaurant special.

This sentiment is translated to action right before us. As we talk and order food, Langton is peppered by very nice compliments from friendly regulars, requests for cookbook autographs, quick questions from staff, and recurring summons from her phone. She manages to handle everything with expert ease and her full attention, never appearing overwhelmed. Before I know it, more than an hour has passed.

Within this time, I manage to be introduced to several of Langton’s longtime colleagues, including chef Chris Bundy, whose forte is the fish; Heather Reynolds, who will be demonstrating at the farmers market tomorrow with her daughter and who has been whipping up vegetarian creations with Brenda for at least 10 years; and Liz Benser, “chef extraordinaire,” who has been with Brenda for more than 25 years—together, they’ve served approximately 1,000,500 meals.

For lunch, we split the vegetarian enchiladas special
and the Commonplace veggie burger. Yum!

It’s clearly crucial to her to establish an environ-
ment in which her staff shows up excited and looks forward to working in a comfort-
able, happy environment. Not to be trite, she says, but food created with a good vibe is very important—and critical to making the community, staff and customers alike, happy. Without this community, she says, the restaurant and The Spoonriver Cookbook would not be possible.

With her restaurant, her focus is on community, engagement, and happiness. With her recipes, her focus is on simplicity and creations that are approachable for even the busiest working individual:

(The Spoonriver Cookbook) is intentionally simplified from the Café Brenda Cookbook. I really wanted to cut out any step, or any ingredients, possible. Really, it’s my job to inspire people to want to get into their kitchen. So again, the simplicity is very intentional.

Of course there are recipes in here that are not real simple, but I really tried to put a lot, lot of recipes in here that are very simple. I really love the chapter on whole grains, beans, legumes, vegetables, just very simple combinations of two or three vegetables that are beautiful together and make the meal extra special with hardly any more work.

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QUICK TIPS FROM BRENDA:

The Spoonriver Cookbook recipe you should make right off the bat: Broccoli and Squash Saute over Couscous.

The Spoonriver Cookbook recipe that might be challenging but no less rewarding: White Fish with Persian Nut Crust and Yogurt Mint Sauce.

Hosting Mother’s Day brunch? Brenda recommends including the Smoked Salmon Quesadillas (recipe below). “They’re so damn easy you can’t believe it.”

Why you should eat more squash: “I love to put squash in a lot of my dishes instead of carrots, it just has a sweetness to it that’s so comforting. People think that you have to cook squash in the oven for an hour when you can peel it and slice it up as quickly as you can a carrot—so we’re talking 7 minutes or so.”

What she’s most looking forward to at the farmers market this year: The vegetables (of course!) and the community. “It’s a great opportunity for people to get to know the farmers and develop an appreciation for the food we consume.”

Dressing up a plain beer: I ask about Brenda's recent feature in Minnesota Monthly (Granola Glitterati) in which she pours a shot of yuzu juice into her beer. Curious, I’ve tried to find it myself to no avail. “Get it at Surdyk’s,” she says. She also recommends mixing kombucha with beer: 1 part kombucha (or more) to 3 parts beer.

Hosting? Tips for presentation: Pay attention to height, texture, and color, sometimes going that extra step to plating a meal for a dinner party instead of serving family-style, which “gives it something extra.” Also: incorporate fresh herbs.

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Smoked Salmon Quesadillas

Ingredients:
1 bunch green onions or chives
12 (6- to 8-inch) flour tortillas
¾ to 1 cup sour cream
Chopped dill, tarragon, or basil (optional)
8 ounces cold smoked salmon, thinly sliced
Olive or vegetable oil

Directions:
1) Wash the green onions and remove the roots. Chop the green onions, including the greens.
2) Spread 6 tortillas with a generous 2 tablespoons of sour cream each. Sprinkle the green onions and herbs on top, then add the salmon slices.
3) Place a second tortilla on top of each prepared tortilla. Brush the top tortilla with olive or vegetable oil. Turn the quesadillas over to brush the bottom tortilla with oil.
4) There are two options for cooking the quesadillas. You can cook them on top of the stove in a skillet over medium heat, or place them on a cookie sheet in a preheated 350-degree oven. Turn the quesadillas after 3 or 4 minutes and continue to bake for another 3 or 4 minutes. The tortillas will be golden brown and the insides heated through.
5) Slice the quesadillas into wedges and serve them with salsa. (Spoonriver’s mango salsa is really good with these!)

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Brenda Langton has been a presence in Twin Cities dining since 1972. She started her first restaurant, Cafe Kardamena, in St. Paul in 1978, and then moved it to Minneapolis and renamed it Cafe Brenda in 1986. Cafe Brenda operated until 2009. In 2006, Brenda opened Spoonriver and founded the Mill City Farmers Market. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota and an educator and consultant on healthy eating.
Margaret Stuart is a horticulturist, landscape designer, and personal chef who has been cooking natural foods since her late teens. Langton and Stuart are coauthors of The Spoonriver Cookbook (2012) and  The Cafe Brenda Cookbook, first published in 1992 and republished by the University of Minnesota Press in 2004.

Find out what's happening this weekend at the Mill City Farmers Market's seasonal opening.

Upcoming events:
-On Wednesday, May 16th, Magers & Quinn is hosting a recipe tasting and book signing.
-On June 7th, the Mill City Museum will host a "farm to market" discussion with Brenda and Atina Diffley.

Kenneth B. Kidd: Goodbye, Maurice. And thank you.

Moishe from Where the Wild Things Are. Image via Flickr.

But the wild things cried,
Oh, please don't go
We'll eat you up
We love you so
And Max said:
"No!"

And we roared our terrible roars, and gnashed our terrible teeth, and rolled our terrible eyes, and showed our terrible claws, but Maurice Sendak stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye.

Sendak was one of our most gifted and prolific author-illustrators – for everyone, child, adult, what have you. He was also a living legend.

Unlike some friends and colleagues, I didn't know Sendak personally. Like so many of my generation, I grew up on Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen and other Sendak productions. For a brief period in college I was obsessed with the Carole King rendition of "Pierre" from The Nutshell Library. (I'm not proud, but I don't care!). Later I acquired his illustrated version of Melville's Pierre. All along, I had this sense that Sendak was familiar; I felt a strange kinship with him. Eventually, of course, I realized he was family.

Sendak came out to the general public in a 2008 New York Times profile by Patricia Cohen, in which he mentions the recent death of his long-time partner, Dr. Eugene Glynn, (not incidentally) a child psychologist. He also talks about how tricky it was to be a gay man working in children's literature in pre-Stonewall New York (he began his career in the late 40s and early 50s).

But Sendak wasn't only gay; he was queer, by all measures of that term. He was eccentric, irascible, difficult. And very funny. Anyone who's watched the Stephen Colbert interviews knows this. "He is not, as children's book writers are often supposed, an everyman's grandpapa," writes Patricia Cohen. "His hatreds are fierce and grand, as if produced by Cecil B. DeMille." Sendak declared himself not overly fond of children or of people in general. By his own report he preferred the company of dogs. If Sendak took a while to come out, his queerness was long on display in interviews, speeches, and certainly in his work.

In that work Sendak found not a safe but an exuberant space for self-expression and even social transformation. There are lots of queerish children in his picturebooks – imaginative, theatrical children, slightly rebellious children, children not drawn to the usual norms. And thanks to the success of Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak could do things his way, share his distinctive vision of childhood and the world. Sendak recognized that children have large, dramatic inner lives, even when they do not (as, unfortunately, they often do) face loss and hardship. Sendak insisted that the only way to "protect" children was to teach them about the world, its evils and disappointments included.

He was a fierce advocate of telling the truth.

Recently I wrote about Sendak as the quintessential "picturebook psychologist." Others before Sendak, I suggest, recognized the emotional and cultural power of the picturebook. Sendak built on and indeed greatly expanded that power, developing further the notion that a picturebook encounter could be vitally transformative. The master practitioner of the genre is therefore an important player in the life of the child, perhaps even something of a lay expert on childhood – creative and intuitive rather than officially credentialed or scientifically trained.

Sendak cultivated and relished his role as an authority on the inner and imaginative world of childhood. No wonder famed child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, author of The Uses of Enchantment, understood Sendak immediately as a rival, and denounced Where the Wild Things Are (he later changed his tune). Sendak's reputation as a picturebook master only grew over the decades.

Tributes and recollections are rolling in. Could be the select company I keep, but my Facebook newsfeed is a virtual wake. It's a huge loss, no question. We are down in the dumps – way down. Still, there's some comfort in all the stories and anecdotes, and even in the passionate mourning.

Goodbye, Maurice. And thank you.

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Kenneth B. Kidd is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. He is author of Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (Minnesota, 2011) and Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minnesota, 2004) and coeditor (with Sidney I. Dobin) of Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism and (with Michelle Ann Abate) of Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

"This canny and original study (Freud in Oz) is far more searching, wide-ranging, and fun than its modest title suggests.  Kenneth B. Kidd not only analyzes but somehow evokes for us the way the child and stories told about her drift through our dreams, literature, and culture, giving form to our finest aspirations and darkest nightmares. An essential, generous, deeply-informed book."
—James Kincaid, University of Southern California

Marc Steinberg: Print Culture and Tin Toys

This is the third in a series of posts about author and anime scholar Marc Steinberg's personal collection of collectibles. See all posts here.

BY MARC STEINBERG
Assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University


Scholarship meets serendipity in the practice of collecting.
What is there to collect?
What is there to find?

All this depends on a certain amount of contingency, serendipity, and of course, a sense of what to look for. Books on the subject and magazines of the time help a lot to learn what to look for. I for one relied a lot on toy trade journals of the 1950s and 1960s like Gangu shôhô to see what kinds of changes were to be found in the toys of the time. Then things move to the realm of chance.

As I noted in the first entry of this series, my impulse to collect things Atomu-related was in part motivated by the need to prove or disprove the thesis that the Atomu TV series of the 1960s was what really kicked the media mix into full gear. But where to look? What things could be objects of inquiry? And how could objects themselves allow us to rethink media history? Omake or freebies like the stickers I wrote about in the last two posts were one group of things to look at.

Children’s print culture and toys were two other places to look. They were two other archives of transformation that could potentially map the changes attendant to the Atomu boom of the 1960s. And they were also closely linked, much as chocolates and toys were.

Children’s print culture has been a vibrant area and a key site for the development of character culture in Japan, going back to the 1920s. With the 1930s came the serialization of Norakuro, whose title character became one of the most popular characters of the 1930s (Figure 6, above), along with Disney’s Mickey Mouse. The Pacific War and the increased militarization of Japan over the course of the 1930s interrupted the development of character culture. It wasn’t until the 1950s that characters developed in earnest again.

Once again it was in children’s monthly magazines that characters found their home. Magazines like Shônen and Shônen Gahô were incubators for the character culture that would really take off in the 1960s. I’ve heard them described as the R&D unit for the media mix – a perfectly accurate description. It was these magazines’ publishers that created many of the earliest character-based toys I’ve come across in the 1950s – toys like a “Cinecolt” light gun that shot images of characters like Atomu or Tetsujin 28-gô (Gigantor) on walls (Figure 7). These toys were offered as prizes for mail-in questionnaires, or for outright purchase. I can picture many a child hankering after one of these – pull the trigger and Atomu will shine onto your walls.

It was also the magazine Shônen that included a “sono sheet” cardboard record player complete with the Atomu theme song as a furoku or magazine freebie (Figure 8). Sono sheets were a kind of low-tech, thin, and flexible record that could be played either on real record players, or on the cardboard ones that sometimes came as freebees with magazines. The only place I was able to come by the Atomu sono sheet and player is a treasure-trove of Atomu goods aptly called the “Tetsuwan Atomu: Happy Birthday Box” – a huge box released in 2003 on Atomu’s birthday (according to the manga, he was born in 2003). The Happy Birthday Box contains reprints of magazines, manga furoku of various sies, as well as re-issues of popular, Shônen-produced Atomu toys including the sono sheet player. Elsewhere I managed to find a Tetsujin 28-gô (Gigantor) sono sheet, released by Asahi Sonorama in 1964 and sold as a stand-alone object (Figure 9). This sono sheet appropriately came with an ad for Glico chocolates, Tetsujin’s sponsor, on the back of the album cover, a short illustrated story on the inside, along with the record sono sheet itself (Figures 10 and 11). Media synergy materialized.

But if magazines were incubators for the media mix, it was in the realm of stand-alone toys proper that we’d find proof of the extent of the material transformations wrought by the release of television animation.

Toys were also, not surprisingly, a lot harder to collect.

Priced in the thousands of dollars, toys of the 1950s and 1960s were to be seen, not touched. Here I relied on the formidable efforts of toy collectors like Kitahara Teruhisa (whose Omake no hakubutsushi is a real treasure trove of anecdotes and information), Takayama Toyoji and Tada Toshikatsu, all of whom have established museums, and published series of books collecting images of old toys. Visiting their museums, and studying the transformation of buriki tin toys from generic robots and automobiles of the 1950s and early 1960s (Figures 12 and 13) to character-based toys of the mid-1960s (Figures 14 and 15) was yet another way to get a sense of the transformations wrought by television animation on its surrounding media ecologies. Not only were characters increasingly integrated into the toys, but the very materials of the toys changed. Vinyl was introduced into the tin toy as a way of better capturing the rounded features of characters, leading to a hybrid tin-vinyl toy. This inclusion of vinyl proved to be an inkling of changes to come, with fully plastic character toys becoming the norm in the 1970s.

These transformations in form and the very material used to create them were proof of the impact of the character image on realms that were – like the buriki tin toy of the ‘50s – previously immune to the circulation of the character image.

This engagement with the form and material substrate of the toy also made me very sensitive to other kinds of toy experiments taking place in the present day. I’m thinking here of the explosion of so-called designer toys, art toys, or urban vinyl.

These I could collect.

(More next week.)

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Marc Steinberg is author of Anime's Media Mix and assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University.

"Anime’s Media Mix is a must-read for anyone interested in the transformations of contemporary media. In portraying how anime characters are emblematic of mobility and connectivity in a broader media ecology, Marc Steinberg maps a new logic of production and consumption that shapes our world today."
—Ian Condry, MIT

"Marc Steinberg opens up brave new possibilities for the study of global media cultures. Attending to the watershed years of Japan’s 1960s and the ascendance of televisual animation he details how entire commodity regimes came to circulate around the idea of the anime “character.” Original and timely, historically dense and theoretically acute, Anime’s Media Mix definitively teaches us that anime can no longer be thought outside the networks of its transmediation."
—Marilyn Ivy, Columbia University

The Occupy Movement and the General Strike on #MayDay

BY EUGENE W. HOLLAND
Professor and chair of comparative studies at Ohio State University

The Occupy movement has already spawned one general strike—a spontaneous mass reaction to police brutality in Oakland last November that ended up shutting down the fifth-largest port in the country overnight. The movement is now calling for a General Strike on May Day (May 1st), and so far, well over one hundred U.S. cities, along with groups around the world (in Germany, Greece, Hungary, and elsewhere), are planning actions. Occupy Los Angeles might have the most intricate strike plan: groups from the four points of the compass will march through their parts of the city, engaging in various interventions along the way, and end up together in downtown L.A. for a "convergence celebration."

A one-day mass strike represents a significant development of Occupy strategy. As everyone (including the initial organizers) knew, the occupation of public sites in North America was not destined to last through the winter, even if it did last far longer than expected. Rather than an indeterminate occupation of space, next week's general strike involves a determinate action in a strictly delimited time frame: its aim is to strike a single blow against a broad range of inequities in an equally broad range of places, all at once. The prioritization of time over space could have unexpected benefits for participants: using hand-held social media, marchers could alternate between concentrating in compact groups and dispersing as ordinary pedestrians (something like a flash mob, or a flock of birds), thereby becoming a more difficult target for police action.

Very much like the original Occupy strategy, however, general strikes are not about making specific demands. They are therefore very unlike your run-of-the-mill union strike, which revolves around specific demands at a specific workplace. Instead, the general strike involves anybody and everybody, and it is directed against an entire social order, economic and political. As the original name and location suggests, Wall Street serves as a convenient focal point for all kinds of discontent. So even if the general strike targets an entire system, that system is now obviously dominated by finance capital—by Wall Street and the "too-big-to-fail" banks.

And so the issue underlying the strike is no longer just the exploitation of workers at the workplace, but the indebtedness of everybody, everywhere: from students leaving college saddled with student load debts in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, to credit-card holders, to the countless homeowners facing balloon payments or foreclosure, to supposedly sovereign nations all across the globe forced to cut back on social services in order to repay bond-holders. (Just recently, student debt surpassed credit-card debt as the second-highest kind of personal debt, after home mortgages; U.S. student debt now exceeds 1 trillion dollars.) At this stage of the game (often referred to as "real subsumption"), the new rallying-cry is not so much "workers of the world, unite!" as "debtors of the world, unite!"—and rough estimates of the proportion of people sharing an "objective interest" in cancelling the debt run as high as ... 99%.

In this context, the "Occupy Student Debt" movement has faced a telling alternative: try to work within the system, or directly challenge it. One in-system alternative might involve something like a counter-Norquist "Jubilee petition." ("Jubilee" was a term for the regular and routine cancellation of outstanding debts, which occurred in all pre-capitalist societies.) Candidates would be asked to sign a petition pledging to side with the people against the banks (or even to cancel the debt). The other, direct-challenge alternative was for students themselves to pledge to go on a "debt strike"—to refuse to pay their students loans—once a specified threshold number of students signed the pledge. Unfortunately, the recent tightening of U.S. bankruptcy law made student loans one of the few debts that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy proceedings, so the threshold number is probably higher than initially proposed. But what if a student loan strike prompted a homeowners mortgage strike, which in turn prompted a credit-card strike? For one of the important effects of a general strike, rather than issuing specific demands, is to express solidarity, and to reveal the extent to which we, the 99%, are all in this together. If the breadth and depth of shared discontent can be demonstrated and widely recognized, there may be enough momentum to advocate for significant social change, working within the system as well as against it. (The possible relation between Occupy and the November elections is already a pressing issue.)

One distinctive feature of the Occupy movement that risks getting all but lost in the call for a punctual, one-day general strike—as important and exciting as it may be—is Occupy's instantiation of the Gandhian principle to "be the change you want to see in the world." With its lending libraries, collective kitchens, people's mics, general assemblies and so forth, Occupy struggled to model a more participatory democratic social order in defiance of the oligarchy our so-called "representative democracy" and the global social order have so obviously become. Along these lines, it is possible to reconceive of the general strike not as a punctual event but as a gradual process—as a slow-motion general strike that might start with the transfer of money from banks to credit unions, say (already taking place in the wake of the crash of 2008), and then combine with the growth of community-supported agriculture, fair trade, open-source software, and so forth and so on.

The point of such a slow-motion general strike would be not just to "be the change you want to see," but to slowly but surely free everyone from dependence on capital for their means of life (and thereby reverse the process of "so-called primitive accumulation" lying at the heart of capitalism). Pervasive indebtedness is only the most blatant form of that dependence, and it may turn out to be one of the unexpected (call it dialectical if you wish) ironies of neoliberalism that in drowning nearly everyone in debt, it ends up turning nearly everyone against itself.

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Eugene W. Holland is professor and chair of comparative studies at Ohio State University and author of Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike.

"This is a brilliant and important book which provides both vital insight into our contemporary political situation and, through a novel synthesis of nomad Marxism and complexity theory, ways for thinking the future differently. Eugene W. Holland’s conceptions of an affirmative nomadology and free market communism make a fresh and invigorating contribution to the contemporary critique of capital and attempts to produce small and large-scale, long-lasting alternatives to its dominion. A superb achievement and essential reading."
—Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick

Marc Steinberg: From "the" sticker craze to my sticker craze

This sticker of Atomu, which the author
owns, dates back to 1963 or 1964.

This is Part 2 of a multi-part series in which Marc Steinberg, author of Anime's Media Mix, lets us into his own world of collectibles. Curious? Read the first part here.

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BY MARC STEINBERG
Assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University


So how did I get stuck on the stickers? And how did they become so important to Anime’s Media Mix?

I first read about them in a booklet included with the DVD set of the original Tetsuwan Atomu in Japan, in a short but fascinating section on goods sold with the original series. From there I happened on the wonderful resource book of Atomu stickers put together by Tsunashima Ritomo, Atomu shiiru to Tetsujin wappen: 1963-1966 (Astro Stickers and Gigantor Badges: 1963-1966). Tsunashima is one of a small group of writer-collectors who spent his time and energy chronicling the material culture of early 1960s children’s culture in Japan (two other impressive writers are Machida Shinobu and Kushima Tsutomu).

But if I knew what the stickers looked like, what size they were, and what kids of the time did with them, well, that part required a trip to Mandarake in Nakano, Japan, to see and feel first-hand what they were like. As anyone who’s done archival work knows well, there’s a kind of thrill of discovery and contact that comes with working in an archive. You’re touching material documents of a particular time and place.

As you leaf through them the materials give you a sense of time travel, of being in the era, of truly living the excitement.

I first felt this in a visceral sense when I was reading through childrens’ magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. And I also felt this at the toy museums (granted, without the privilege of actually touching the stuff). But the strongest “WOW” moment during this project came when I actually came across a number of these "Atomu & friends" stickers in the Nakano Mandarake. Part of the store is a veritable time warp to another era; Mandarake absolutely lives up to its grandiose self-description as the “Rulers of Time.” Going to the store is like visiting a pop-cultural archeological dig into the past. While I’d been to Mandarake's less impressive (but still priceless) Shibuya store innumerable times, visiting the Nakano location was like stepping back into 1960s freebee culture – complete with Atomu stickers, Tetsujin badges, candies of the time, and everything. All the things that libraries don’t archive. All the things I was writing about.

And more.

This 1964 Marble Chocolates
television advertisement was one
of the first to feature Atomu.

It’s there that I found the sticker I initially wanted to put on the cover of my book (see main image above). A single sticker of Atomu, still encased in its plastic wrapper, originally included as an in-pack premium, probably dating to late 1963 or 1964. It’s actually the subject of a Marble Chocolates television ad from 1964, one of the first to see the animated character (as sticker) displace the former star of Meiji advertising, Uehara Yukari (left).

So why couldn’t I use this sticker as the cover? In a thoughtful review of my book, Jonathan Clements wonders why not feature Atomu on the cover, or better yet, the more contemporary Suzumiya Haruhi (who is so important to the later section of my book)? He suspects there is a legal story behind it, and he’s quite right.

While the people at Tezuka Production (the company that holds the rights to the Atomu image) were generous in granting permissions to use Tezuka’s trademark character inside the book, they were more cautious about granting me permission to use the sticker image on the cover. The sticker was, after all, a Meiji Seika product. I should contact Meiji Seika; if they granted me the right to use the sticker image, so would Tezuka Production. As I suspected at the time, that proved to be impossible. In this case there was no response from Meiji, and the clock was ticking on my book.

In the meantime, Brad Norr Design came up with an absolutely fantastic cover for my book – the present cover. I can describe why this cover just works. As Clements rightly suspects, part of the reason lies in not using an existing character. More books than I can count feature the iconic Atomu on their covers (including, I might note, the invaluable resource Clements put together with Helen McCarthy, The Anime Encyclopedia, as well as Fredric Schodt’s incisive and informative The Astroboy Essays). But maybe even more to the point, there was something refreshing about stepping out of the existing system of serial relations across media that is the subject of my book, and that my book would have supported if it had used a recognizable character, whether it be Atomu or Suzumiya Haruhi.

There was also something appropriately generic about the character invented for Anime’s Media Mix – something of a mix between Atomu, the Atomu knock-off Uchû Ace (at right) and Cap’n Crunch (which itself was the inspiration for a counter-stream of toys I’ll bring up in a future post: the vinyl art toy movement in Japan that got its start with Bounty Hunter’s “Kid Hunter”). Add in the retroesque color scheme and the print-outside-the-lines effect that mimics the print style of the time (found in the Atomu stickers in particular) and note the way the “M” for Media Mix uses the same font as Meiji’s logo of the time.

Finally, the cover gestures towards the proliferation of character images across media, evoked literally in the sticker and TV references, and figuratively in the out-of-frame and out-of-medial-bounds framing of the character.

What can I say, except that I was instantly won over. This was the cover I was looking for.

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Marc Steinberg is author of Anime's Media Mix and assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University.

"Anime’s Media Mix is a must-read for anyone interested in the transformations of contemporary media. In portraying how anime characters are emblematic of mobility and connectivity in a broader media ecology, Marc Steinberg maps a new logic of production and consumption that shapes our world today."
—Ian Condry, MIT

"Marc Steinberg opens up brave new possibilities for the study of global media cultures. Attending to the watershed years of Japan’s 1960s and the ascendance of televisual animation he details how entire commodity regimes came to circulate around the idea of the anime “character.” Original and timely, historically dense and theoretically acute, Anime’s Media Mix definitively teaches us that anime can no longer be thought outside the networks of its transmediation."
—Marilyn Ivy, Columbia University

Roland Bleiker: What to do about North Korea?

View of the concrete wall and barbed wire separating South Korea from North Korea. Roland Bleiker studies North Korea's recent provocations and argues for an integrational approach to information diplomacy. Image from Creative Commons.

BY ROLAND BLEIKER 
Professor of international relations at the University of Queensland 

Dealing with North Korea has never been easy.

Authoritarian and reclusive, the country's regime has for long held nuclear ambitions that regularly triggered major international crises. Its recent leadership transition, from the deceased Kim Jong-il to his 28-year-old son Kim Jong-un, has only made the situation more tense and unpredictable.

One of the first actions of the new leader, on April 13th, was the launch of a long-rage rocket: an act seen as signaling renewed nuclear ambitions. Although the experiment failed miserably, its effects have been felt worldwide. Experts now fear another North Korea nuclear test as compensation.

North Korea's provocations offer a direct challenge to President Obama, who only recently promised food aid to North Korea in response to promises that the country suspend its nuclear ambitions.

How are we to understand these provocations—and, more importantly, how are we to respond?

There are two explanations for North Korea's actions. The first is internal. The country's new leader may have all the official titles he needs, but this is not enough to gain legitimacy, particularly at such a young age. There is no better way to prove himself than to show strength and leadership in a time of crisis. This is why many Korea observers see the recent provocations in light of the leadership change.

The second reason is an external and more important one. North Korea’s main goal is surviving in a world surrounded by ideological enemies. But since the country is economically ruined it has very few means to do so. One of the main strategies—which North Korea has used for decades—is to create tensions in order to gain concessions from its archenemies.

The present crisis does, in fact, strongly resemble two previous crises, one in the early 1990s and the other in the mid-2000s. In each case North Korea embarked on a number of provocations, withdrew from the non-proliferation treaty and declared its intention to develop nuclear weapons. After tense crises periods and extensive negotiations, North Korea then abandoned its nuclear ambitions in exchange for economic aid, heating oil and security guarantees. Only to start all over again.

Policymakers and commentators are deeply divided about how to respond to North Korea's recurring nuclear brinkmanship tactics.

The traditional approach has been to confront North Korea with military threats and economic sanctions. But this approach, epitomized by the policies of the Bush administration, clearly has not worked. A military intervention is far too dangerous to be an option in Korea. Economic sanctions have had no success either. The regime was securely in power even during the most severe instance of starvation following droughts and floods. In fact, military threats and sanctions only increased Pyongyang’s perceived need for a nuclear based defense—and gave its leaders an opportunity to rally the population behind a common threat from the outside.

The alternative to confrontation is engaging North Korea in negotiations, hoping to find an arrangement that can bring stability to the region. This is, in my view, a far more promising route. But it too is littered with obstacles. For one, there are major ethical dilemmas in negotiating with or delivering aid to an authoritarian regime that commits widespread human rights violations. Add to this that North Korea has often promised one thing and, in secret, done another, as US policymakers discovered yet again recently.

What, then, is the most promising way forward?

The key, I believe, is to integrate North Korea as much as possible into the world community: to open the country up so that its population is more exposed to information—and ideas—from the outside world.

The North Korean regime is able to stay in power not only because of ruthless repression, but also because it controls the minds of its citizens. It is one the most reclusive societies on earth, anywhere, anytime. Average citizens have no access to foreign television programs, radio broadcasts or newspapers. There is no Internet. Travel beyond one’s place of residence requires permission. The country's official and only media is completely controlled by the state and geared towards one objective: the mythological legitimization of the state and its leaders. The propaganda machine is all-pervasive, entering virtually all aspects of everyday life.

If North Korea is to change, then the motivation and pressures for it have to come from the inside: from a budding civil society, from people who have not only the knowledge necessary to promote change but, eventually, also the numbers to do so.

This is why engaging North Korea politically, economically and culturally is the best way forward—so long as the engagement policy is doubled-up with efforts to open borders and promote the flow of information and ideas.

 This is why it is time for a new approach: information diplomacy.

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Roland Bleiker is professor of international relations at the University of Queensland. He is author of Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation. From 1986 to 1988 he served as chief of office for the Swiss delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Panmunjom.

"One of the freshest analyses of Korean security in many, many years. Well worth reading." —Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 

"Bleiker, formerly chief of the Swiss delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory commission, passionately argues that the prevailing approach of confronting and deterring North Korea will not work. Pyongyang should be treated with respect instead of constantly denounced in offensive terms."
—Foreign Affairs