Doujinshi

• 1. Introduction

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  Doujinshi is the Japanese word for self-published print works, and twice a year, in summer and winter, they take over Tokyo's Big Sight. Across the convention floor, more than 20 acres of doujinshi are bought, sold and traded by the people who walk through. The books can be magazines, manga or novels. Many are made by amateurs, and many borrow the characters of stories someone else created. That raises some odd questions. How did a hobby press grow so large that it needs acres of floor space? Why do the owners of famous characters mostly let fans reuse them? And how did a world of photocopied booklets become a place where professional careers begin? To find out, it helps to go back to the literary world of nineteenth-century Japan.

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• 2. Literary Roots

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  In 1874, early in the Meiji period, a magazine called Meiroku zasshi began publication. It was not a literary magazine, yet it played a big part in spreading the idea of the doujinshi. In 1885, the writers Ozaki Kōyō and Yamada Bimyo founded Garakuta Bunko, the first magazine to publish doujinshi novels. The form reached its peak in the early Shōwa period, when these small magazines became a voice for the creative young people of the day. Authors and close friends made and shared them in tight circles. That habit contributed significantly to the emergence of the shishōsetsu genre. After the war, doujinshi gradually lost importance, because new outlets appeared for literary schools and new authors. Literary journals such as Gunzo and Bungakukai took over much of their role. Bungei Shuto was a notable exception, published from 1933 until 1969. A few doujinshi magazines survived with help from official literary journals, and haiku and tanka magazines are still published today.

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• 3. The Comiket Boom

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  Photocopying technology improved through the 1970s, and it has been suggested that this helped more people publish doujinshi. Around the same time, manga editors were urging their authors to appeal to a mass market. That may also have pushed more people toward making their own books. In December 1975, the first Comiket, short for Comic Market, was held. It was the first event dedicated specifically to distributing doujinshi. It drew about 32 participating circles and an estimated 600 attendees, and roughly 80 percent of those were female. Male participation grew later. Fewer than 10,000 people attended in 1982. By 1989 the figure had passed 100,000, and in recent years it has topped half a million. Comiket is now described as the world's largest comic convention. That growth let doujinshi authors sell thousands of copies and earn a fair amount of money from a hobby. During the 1980s, the books themselves changed. Instead of mostly original stories, they became mostly parodies of existing series, often called aniparo. Parody was often an excuse to put favorite characters into romances. Male authors focused on series like Urusei Yatsura, while female authors gravitated toward Captain Tsubasa, a soccer series whose characters would echo through a later professional debut.

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• 4. Circles and Genres

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  The word doujinshi is built from a term that literally means "same person" plus the suffix shi. Groups of doujinshi artists call themselves a circle. Some circles are a single artist, and these are sometimes called personal circles. Most doujinshi are commercially bound and published through printing services by authors known as doujinshi-ka. Copybooks are different, since they are made on xerox machines or other copying methods, and a few are copied by hand. The books fall broadly into original works and aniparo, the parodies of existing anime and manga franchises. For parodies, a very popular theme is pairing characters in ways the show never did. Many such books use yaoi or yuri themes, meaning romance between people of the same sex, sometimes as a direct statement of what the original only hints. The genre called BL, or Boys' Love, also has roots in doujinshi communities. Another category is furry or kemono, which often shows anthropomorphic animal characters in pairings and shares traits with yaoi and yuri. A major part of doujinshi, original or not, is sexually explicit, because demand is large and no publishing house rules apply. English speakers call these works H-doujinshi. In Japan the usual term is now ero manga, or sometimes 18-kin, short for forbidden to minors under 18. Books without such material are called ippan. Not every label comes from Japanese. English-language fans, for example, call a story set in an alternate universe an AU doujinshi.

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• 5. Selling and Sharing

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  Comic Toranoana is one of the doujinshi shops that exist because many bookstores will only stock books from registered commercial publishers. Such shops let self-published physical doujinshi reach buyers. Because a single person often makes the whole book, finding a way to earn money falls on that person too. This has produced a distribution system separate from mainstream manga publishing. Creators are also more likely to monetize other self-made work, such as music or lyrics. Some sell online, on their own website or in a digital marketplace. Conventions remain the main meeting point, where circles trade information and finished works. Authors tend to avoid the word "sale" and prefer "distribution." A separate arrangement for putting doujinshi into circulation is usually called consignment. Technology has widened the options, since some doujinshi are now published on digital media, and many creators have moved to online download and print-on-demand services. Others reach readers through American channels such as anime shop websites. A white paper on the otaku industry, published in 2008, estimated that doujinshi sales in 2007 reached 27.73 billion yen. That was 14.9 percent of all otaku spending on the hobby. In 2009, Meiji University opened a dōjin manga library on its Surugadai campus, named the "Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library." It holds Yonezawa's own collection of 4137 boxes, along with the collection of Tsuguo Iwata, another famous figure in the field.

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• 6. The Shinkokuzai Bargain

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  In 2016, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that doujinshi "don't compete in the market with the original works and don't damage the original creators' profits, so they are shinkokuzai." Under Japanese copyright law, that word means creators cannot be prosecuted unless the rights holders complain. Many doujinshi are made without the original creator's permission, a practice dating to the early 1980s. Copyright holders have kept an unofficial policy of not enforcing the law. They see the market as helpful to commercial manga, since it gives aspiring artists a place to practice and lets publishers recruit talented ones. Salil K. Mehra, a law professor at Temple University, hypothesizes that doujinshi make the manga market more productive and that strict enforcement would hurt the industry. The bargain has been tested. In 1999, Nintendo prosecuted the author of an erotic Pokémon manga, which caused a media furor and academic study of doujinshi copyright in Japan. The legal analysis of the time seemed to conclude that doujinshi should be overlooked, because amateurs made them for one-day events rather than the commercial market. In 2006, an artist sold an imagined "final chapter" of the unfinished series Doraemon, and the estate of author Fujiko F. Fujio warned him. His book looked confusingly like a real Doraemon manga, so he stopped distributing it and voluntarily sent compensation to the publisher. The publisher said doujinshi were not usually a concern. The Yomiuri Shimbun noted, "Fanzines don't usually cause many problems as long as they are sold only at one-day exhibitions." It also quoted an expert who said that growing popularity meant a copyright system should be set up. In 2020, the Intellectual Property High Court ordered a doujinshi sharing website to pay ¥2.19 million to a creator whose work had been uploaded without consent. The site argued that a derivative work had no copyright protection, but the court found too little evidence that the doujinshi was illegally derivative. Commentators saw the ruling as potentially broadening creators' rights under commercial law. Out of this legal gray zone came the dōjin mark, a license format inspired by Creative Commons. Ken Akamatsu was the first author to authorize it, in his manga UQ Holder!, released on the 28th of August 2013 in Weekly Shōnen Magazine.

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• 7. From Circle to Career

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  Rumiko Takahashi, creator of Ranma ½ and Inuyasha, made doujinshi before she became a professional artist. So did Monkey Punch, also known as Kazuhiko Katō, creator of Lupin III, and Rikdo Koshi, creator of Excel Saga. Kiyohiko Azuma, who made Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&, began under the pen-name A-Zone. Yukiru Sugisaki, creator of D.N.Angel, started as a doujinka and released gag doujinshi about King of Fighters and Evangelion. Yana Toboso was a yaoi doujinka before writing Black Butler, which explains the notable BL hints in the series. Minami Ozaki wrote numerous yaoi doujinshi starring characters from Captain Tsubasa before her professional debut. The main characters of her manga Zetsuai strongly resemble them. She kept releasing doujinshi about her own professional work, often with sexual material that could not appear in Margaret, the young girls' magazine that serialized Zetsuai. Some professionals never left the format. Ken Akamatsu, creator of Love Hina and Negima, still sells doujinshi at Comiket under the pen-name Awa Mizuno. Yoshitoshi Abe published some original works, such as Haibane Renmei, as doujinshi because he did not want to answer to anyone about a story he saw as so open-ended. Masaki Kajishima, creator of Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, uses the format for interviews, early script drafts, storyboards and short stories that extend his characters and setting. Nio Nakatani, creator of Bloom Into You, first became known for doujinshi based on Touhou Project. Fred Gallagher, creator of Megatokyo, and Jesús García Ferrer, creator of the Spanish online Naruto doujinshi Raruto, show that the form has spread onto the internet. Clamp itself started out as a doujinshi group of 11 people known as Clamp Cluster.

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• 8. Western Eyes

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  In 2005, John Oppliger of AnimeNation stated that making doujinshi is largely popular with Japanese fans but not with Western fans. He claimed that Japanese fans grow up with anime and manga "as a constant companion," so they "are more intuitively inclined" to expand on existing stories. Most Western fans, he argued, cannot understand the Japanese language of most anime, so they have a "more purely" visual experience. They are also "encouraged by social pressure to grow out of cartoons and comics during the onset of adolescence." As a result, he said, most of them rearrange existing work into anime music videos instead. In most Western cultures, doujinshi are seen as derivative, much like fan fiction, and as almost completely pornographic. That is partly true, since doujinshi are often parodies or alternative storylines set in the worlds of popular manga, games or anime, and they can feature overtly sexual material. Still, many are not sexually explicit. The Touhou Project is notable for the large number of non-pornographic doujinshi made for it. At Reitaisai, the annual Touhou-only event, in 2008, only an estimated 10 percent of the groups were releasing adults-only material.

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