If you watch British telly you will be under the misunderstanding that F1 in Japan is all silly hats and cosplay.

Well, there is a lot of that but going to the Japanese Grand Prix I got talking to people and learnt there are a few more things going on around the sport.

Actually I didn’t learn too much because I was mostly talking to other foreign types at the beer tent but would I did learn rocked my world.

Ask any Brit what “the F1 song” is and you will always get the same answer, Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain. It’s a song that is forever linked with F1 for British fans and for those in the other countries that got BBC coverage (i.e. there rest of the English-speaking world)

Japan is not part of the English-speaking world though and got its own song. Truth by a Japanese Jazz fusion band called T-Square has a bit of a different feel to The Chain but it works and the CG intro is nicely put together.

These days the song has been retired but it is miles better than just playing American Idiot by Green Day like Japanese TV did for its F1 intros last year. It also doesn’t stop T-Square from playing a concert at every Japanese Grand Prix either.

That’s it for F1 and music but what about F1 and manga? Everyone knows that the Japanese love manga, they also love their F1, so it is only natural that there is an F1 manga out there. Grand Prix Heaven (Guranpri Tengoku) is a 4 panel manga (US comic style basically) that has been running in an F1 magazine called F1 Newsflash (F1 Sokuho) for the last 20 or so years. The manga is by a fellow called Fumio Murayama who doesn’t seem to have any other manga of note under his name. As a result of the magazine this thing is serialised in only F1 fans know about it, that is fine though, only F1 fans would get any of the jokes.

The strips all parody the various events, stories and controversies going on in F1 at the time. The writer also injects some interesting personalities to the drivers and people around the pit garages, his versions of F1′s various heroes and villains can be very different from the British public perception of these characters. The collection of strips I picked up from Suzuka this year were all taken from the 1999 and 2000 seasons. I ended up seeing running gags such as Mika Hakkinen’s scary wife, Ron Dennis constantly giving David Coulthard the cold shoulder by closing a curtain on him and Heinz-Harald Frentzen acting like a woodpecker.

Here are a few of the strips (keenly translated by me), I hope they bring back a few memories for the F1 fans amongst you:
(Remember! They read right to left!)

One last thing:
(Not entirely sure what it is but thought I’ll show you anyway)

If you have been a regular reader of this website you may have noticed by now that I am a huge fan of Shiina Ringo and I like to read manga. Imagine my joy then, when browsing the selves of my local RECOfan used music shop, I found a manga about the life of the lady herself.

Ringo Through the Looking Glass (Kagami no Kuni no Ringo) was a manga released in 2001 and written by a bloke named Soushi Sakurai. It appears to be part of a set of manga that was written about famous Japanese bands of the time. Ads for comics about the likes of L’Arc En Ciel, Glay and the wonderfully named KinKi Kids litter the book.

The comic itself is a biopic (biocom?) about her life before becoming famous, largely focusing her school years but runs all the way up to the release of her first album.

To its credit the book seems like it is quite well researched and covers all the key aspects of Ringo’s life. Things like being unable to do ballet because of the operations she had as a child, the talent shows she entered, the conflict she had with producers over lyrics and her study in England are all mentioned. I guess the comic deserves full marks for that.

Where the thing falls down though is with Sakurai’s art. It ranges from competent to ruddy awful and back again. He has drawn Ringo with a crazy moon face and the expressions she pulls are really ugly. The other characters in the book don’t look too bad so I guess his style doesn’t lend itself well to real people.

Worse still is that sometimes the body proportions are all over the place, with Ringo suddenly possessing huge man hands every so often. You can tell this comic was drawn for money and not for love by the huge inconstancies in the art. This is really exemplified by the end of the book where the artist has drawn his own renditions of CD covers and famous photos of Ringo. Some are actually pretty well drawn others are grotesque.

Just look at these examples:

Ok

 Ok

OMG THE HORROR!!!!!!

Would I recommend this book? Nah.

The art is mostly horrible and it is not available in English. I had to struggle through it in Japanese, which meant I had to look at some of those shoddily drawn panels much longer than the artist probably intended. If you really want to find out about Shiina Ringo’s life I recommend you just read her wiki page. It’s all in there, spookily so, it’s almost as though they used this book to research the entry.

As you learn another language you start to realise that words which are commonly said in one language simply don’t exist in another. Either that or the usage of one word in a certain language is changed.

Walking about Tokyo, getting on with my life, I’d noticed that people tend to say natsukashi a lot. After looking up this word in my trusty pocket dictionary I discovered the definition for this word is nostalgic. That was good enough for me and I went on my merry way.

That definition suited me just fine for the longest time until one school lunchtime the kids were getting exceedingly happy about having jelly served up for the first time in ages. Almost in one voice they all exclaimed “Natsukashiiiiii“. This almost made my brain explode. I could not comprehend quite how any 8-year-old could justify calling anything nostalgic. “They’re eight”, my thought processes were reasoning, “They haven’t had the time to get nostalgic, everything is still new”.

It was that time I realised that natsukashi and nostalgic didn’t so much have a one to one correlation but natsukashi meants something more like, “This reminds me of something I enjoyed once, sometime ago”. I guess it could be something from your childhood anywhere up to 6 months ago.

This month, meanwhile, has been natsukashi overload for me. Recently I watched the live action remake of Ranma ½, which brought back so many memories. I first saw the original cartoon version way back when I was 14 in Colombia, in Spanish. It was the first cartoon I watched that I realised was from Japan and it set me off on the slippery slope that eventually led me to come here. I remember buying a new VCR that could play American videos just so I could import some from the US and watch it in English. I remember buying the comics and being shocked that I spent so much money on something I could read through in an hour.

Watching the live action show, it reminded me about all the silly gender bending humour, the original kung fu panda, love struck doctors, lost piglets and perverted old men. So much so I just had to procure all of the cartoon series and finally watch it through in Japanese and I’m having so much fun seeing it all again. I’m especially enjoying the early episodes I watched in English, way back when, and comparing how they originally sounded to the memories of the English version in my head. The American pronunciation of “Shikoku” still haunts my soul.

After writing this I realise that I have just described something that could be classed as nostalgic as well as natsukashi, oh well. On Friday I ate a saffron cake for the first time in ages, that was natsukashi, I guess.

Following on from the men’s win in the Asian Cup, Japan’s soccer success continues with the Japanese women’s football team winning the Women’s World Cup in Germany. Well done to them, I didn’t watch any games but I am told they played well and deserved their victory.

Going by this video on Time Out Tokyo, it seems that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really know much about them.

The main thing that stuck out for me though was their choice of nickname. The women’s team is often referred to as Nadeshiko Japan.

Nadeshiko (or なでしこ) is the Japanese name for a plant whose scientific name is the very unladylike Dianthus Superbus. It grows in northern Asia and also in Europe. It’s English name is the far fairer but still not really that feminine, Large Pink.

However, the Japanese ladies team was not called Nadeshiko because of their desire to be a really convenient mass transit system or a building in Portland. It was called this because of the Japanese ideal of Yamato Nadeshiko (大和撫子).

Yamato Nadeshiko is a term for the ideal traditional Japanese woman. Perhaps this is now an antiquated notion but the model Japanese lady was once considered to be feminine while being chaste and devoted to her husband. She would never disagree publicly with her husband but if she felt she could guide him on the right track without him losing face, she would. Also she would appear to be delicate (like the nadeshiko) to the outside world but actually be strong enough to raise children and do the housework. The term comes from Yamato (大和) which is one of the many words referring to Japan (the two kanji mean ‘big’ and ‘harmony/Japanese style’) and the aforementioned Nadeshiko.

Being the big geek that I am though, the word Nadeshiko stood out for me because it flung my mind back to an old anime series which went by the name of Martian Successor Nadeshiko. This show not only keeps up the anime tradition of having silly names for everything but also has big giant robots too.

Released during the Evangelion boom, when I was basically hoovering up every anime I could get my hands on, it somehow passed me by. Apperently it didn’t take itself too seriously (which is how I like my fiction) but for some reason I didn’t take to it. Maybe it was simply because my local library didn’t have it available to rent, I’m fickle like that.

Elsewhere in the world of anime and manga, there is a Japanese comic and animation going by the name Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge. Again, I’m not sure about the plot but what is interesting here is how the title was translated. Rather than translate it directly, the original title being something to do with perfect Japanese women and kabuki dances, they chose to call it The Wallflower. According to the urban dictionary a wallflower is “A person nobody pays attention to, and fades into the background, but are really genuine and interesting people if you take the time to get to know them”.

Perhaps Wallflower then is the perfect name for the English women’s football team, given how coverage in the UK was hidden away behind the red button. If they follow Japan’s lead with a flowery nickname, maybe one day they will win something.

Most of my research for this post was basically taken from links stemming from Wikipedia’s nadeshiko disambiguation page.

To Japanese women just about everything can be described as cute. That boy, those clothes, that drain, those leaves on the floor, that lunch box, anything. This leads to a bit of a rejection to this word and all it stands for, as far as I am concerned.

Moe (pronounced mo-é) is Japanese term for super cute things, it is mired in geeky subculture. Especially stuff such as maid cafés, cat girls and anime. According to wikipedia anime moe character designs have:

Large eyes (1/5 size of face)
Small nose
Flat face
Tall iris
Body 5.7 heads tall
Thin limbs
Large head
Colourful hair
Fringe over eyes

And I don’t like it one bit.

When I see an anime or manga with intense moe styling I am usually rather put off and refuse to even give it a chance. This all changed though when I first heard about an anime series called Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

My relationship with this show did not get off to the best of starts, at first I was put off by the silly name and then I saw that it was a Magical Girl anime, the genre that brought us Sailor Moon. Finally I saw the character designs and they were as moe as can be. As a result I completely wrote off the show as something sickly sweet for little girls.

The show just wouldn’t go away though and I found various essays about it invading my internet browser. Most of these said that this show was something special and different. Suddenly things about it’s production started to jump out at me. While the frilly, frilly character designs were off-putting, some of the background designs I was noticing looked like the contents of a deranged fever dream and were very intriguing indeed. I also read that a former hentai director was one of the main creative minds behind it and that showed it may just be trying to do something different, so I decided to give it a go.

Things did not start too well, it seemed like it would be a very by the numbers TV show albeit with some funky dream scape sections. Just about as I was going to give up on it something unexpected happened that caused me to let out a gasp and the show revealed it’s true colours.

It is just so DARK….

…and cruel.

From here on in it begins to deconstruct what it is to be a magical girl and that maybe it is not all dainty outfits and lolly pops after all. Once you get into the mindset of the show you can certainly see where all the plot threads are going as they are introduced but it is fun to see just how far they push it.

Once the dust settles you realise that this is a landmark show. Much like Evangelion before it, it takes what has been done before and puts a new spin on things. Like Evangelion there will be hundreds of copycat shows appearing that don’t quite understand why this show was so successful in the first place. Unlike Evangelion however, it does not seem to have broken into mainstream consciousness and may remain something that only anime fans are really aware of.

It not a perfect show however, I do like that this series took my preconceptions of moe designed shows and threw them in the bin (and then stamped on it a bit) but it is perhaps a little too dark for it’s own good. Once you realise that nothing good will ever happen to any of the characters it all becomes a bit too depressing for it’s own good. It’s hard to tell if it even ended on a high note or not.

Madoka Magica has shown me that I should be a bit more open to media which has aspects that would put me off normally. God knows I get frustrated when people ignore the things that I recommend because of some silly reason, I had better stop doing it myself.

I really should give the K-Ons (more moe designs), Babylon 5s (can’t take another Star Trek style scifi), Battlestar Galaticas (same) and Bright Eyeses (I blame Jo Whiley) of this world a try because I just might end up liking them.

I really should have remembered the melon bread.