A Half-Arsed History of Anime Fandom in Canberra 1995 - 2006, Part 3

Here's the final part of my half remembered personal history of anime fandom in Canberra. As I've said in the first two parts, this is by no means a comprehensive list of what went down in that decade. As you may have seen from the first two parts, most of it involves me in some way. Anyway in this final part, first I'll be looking at the two other anime clubs (now defunct) clubs in the region. First the UCU J-Pop Culture Club (as always, click on the images to enlarge);

This rough looking flyer mysteriously appeared in local comic book shops in early 2001. Discounting the Canberra Anime Society, this was the first (and only) official anime club that the University of Canberra ever had (UCU = University of Canberra Union). I think I met the club's president, Isaac, at a ANU Anime Society (ANUAS) screening sometime after that as I have his email address scrawled on another flyer. Anyway the goals of the club were to screen anime and do other stuff related to J-Pop music such as karaoke and god knows what else. The flyer opens up to about 200 words gushing about how great the club is going to be. I went to a couple of early screenings and they were a bit of a shambolic affair. Isaac invited me along and wanted to use me as a tape and DVD library, which I declined from doing. Apart from loaning out CD-Rs of J-Pop music, that was about it in terms of the J-Pop side of things. I think they just stuck to anime after the first year.

Along with the Magical Girl Club (which I will talk about next), they collaborated with ANUAS for Anime.au.04 (a convention I previously discussed in the previous part of this series). I did a fair bit of work on the booklet/program guide which included write ups of the three clubs participating. Late in the day the very angry president of the UCU club (a young woman, Isaac had left in late 2003), came up to us and said my write up of their club was "not in the spirit". We were all baffled as to what hell she was on about. All I had done, like in the descriptions of the other two clubs, was give the basic details of who they were, where they met, the URL of their website and when they had screenings. Everybody was flummoxed as to what they actual problem was with what I had wrote. Later in their online forums they continued to complain at the terrible treatment they received by ANUAS without ever articulating what we actually did.

It looks like the club changed it's name sometime after 2004 to the UCU Anime Club and eventually ceased operations in 2007. Their website still exists here. Now on to a fantastically odd offshoot of ANUAS, the Magical Girl Club;

The club started in 2002, and from what you can see from the flyers, they screened a bunch of magical girl anime every week (and ate Pocky, something which I don't recall happening at all). It was run by Alana who was an absolute Sailor Moon nut and especially loved the live action musicals. At one point they had over 70 members which is pretty amazing for such a niche club. During the O-Week market, people would always ask her if you had to be a girl to join the club, which I think equally amused and infuriated her. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the club finished around the time Alana graduated, maybe 2006 or so.

Just to finish up, here's a few more flyers I found;

Not sure when this was, 1999 to 2001 or so. As you can see it's a screening to help out one of the clubs to send students to preform a kabuki in Japan.

I think the above event happened in 1998 or so. Both titles had been available on video for a number of years, so I really don't know why you'd want to watch scratchy old dubbed 35mm prints of the same thing at the national gallery.

This a flyer for the 5th Japanese Film Festival in 2001. This was the first time the festival toured Canberra. Of note was the unbelievably obscure 1997 anime film "Home of Acorns". Based upon a manga which follows the life of a disabled young girl who opens up a home for children with disabilities when she becomes an adult. As far as I'm aware this film never got a home video release anywhere, even in Japan. The closest I've come across a copy of the film is on one Japanese site which is bootlegging a DVD of it for 5,000 yen. I didn't go to this screening, and I have always regretted it since.

I did go to Japanime 02 which was hosted by the now defunct Electric Shadows cinema for three days in November 2002. It was a pretty damn good line up; a remastered "Akira", "WXIII Patlabor the movie 3", "Millennium Actress" (some people actually cried at the end of the film), "Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door"etc. Pretty amazing line up. They also had "Princess Arte", however the print was too damaged to screen, so they showed a dubbed print of "Roujin Z" which was utterly lame as it had been on video for nearly a decade here! This very short lived festival (this was the second and final one) began in 2000 in Sydney as part of the Olympic Arts Festival. After Japanime failed to show up in 2004, Madman Entertainment did their own little festivals called Reel Anime from time to time. Eventually those festivals stopped and they now do one off screenings of various anime films. In the years leading up to Japanime 02, Electric Shadows did screen some anime films such a s dubbed print of "Perfect Blue" and a subtitled print of "Princess Mononoke".

Finally, some fandom stupidity. I know the above flyer appeared everywhere around Australia in 1998, but surprisingly appeared in Impact Records as well. Supposedly all you had to do was write to SBS TV and they'd play every single episode of the show if they got enough people writing. Of course it was utterly absurd. I have no idea who thought up this daft campaign up (I mean you can clearly see it was the Australian branch of SOS - Save our Sailors, a rather vocal and nutty fan collective who wanted to get the show back on US broadcast TV) but what in hell gave them that idea? I heard that someone in SBS programming was sacked over this incident, as they told someone at Save Our Sailors this would work. However I have absolutely no evidence this happened. I often wonder how many letters SBS received because of this campaign and if they had any idea what the hell it was all about. It was a really weird time to be a fan during the 1990's. Those Sailor Moon fans were really rabid and strange at times.

I was going to also do a write up of anime shops in the area in the late 1990's, but I think I'll save that for another time. There is so little information floating about in regards to early anime fandom in my region and I really think that's a shame. A lot of websites have disappeared and haven't been archived by the internet archive. Pretty much everyone I knew in the local anime community has moved on from the hobby, except one or two people. Nobody is keeping an archive of this stuff which I find disappointing, but probably to be expected. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed looking through these tattered and yellowing flyers of a fandom long gone.

A Half-Arsed History of Anime Fandom in Canberra 1995 - 2006, Part 2

On to second part of the not very comprehensive or all that well researched history of anime fandom in Canberra. The second anime club in Canberra was the ANU Otaku Council: the Asian Film Society. This odd name I think was in part based upon similar sounding otaku subject “research clubs” names on campuses at Japanese universities. When Peter left the Canberra Anime Society (CAS) sometime in 1997, it soon became quite apparent who the main supplier of material for the club was. The line-up at each subsequent CAS screening just got worse and worse. They ended up showing stuff like the dubbed version of the “Fatal Fury” movie and “Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer” which people just hated. People had become a little sick of CAS. By the time early 1998 rolled around, this flyer appeared in comic book shops around town (as always click to enlarge all images);

This new club was run by Matt Birks and Sam Wilson, two ANU students who had essentially set up the club to put CAS out of business. I kid you not. Note that the annual membership cost that same amount as one screening at CAS. It was a pretty fucking spiteful state of affairs. Of course they could do this as their club was an official Australian National University (ANU) club, they had free access to one of the small theatres there. However Bruce and Dave over at CAS had to deal with hiring out the theatre at UC which was getting close to $100 per screening, because they weren’t students. They had full time jobs.

In the previous year I had heavily got into fansubs and had begun to start trading with people overseas. I had acquired some great shows not available on commercial VHS and was trading some stuff with Bruce and Dave (mostly the former). I was rather sick of CAS and decided to help out Matt and Sam. I even did up a couple of their early flyers;

However it soon became apparent I was being used as a tape library and essentially I told them so. I was then subjected to some rather spiteful and awful emails which I thought was rather shitty. That’s when I joined forces with my fried Nathan and took over CAS for a couple of years. Regardless, the ANU club keep going and must have sourced tapes from elsewhere. As you can see from the flyer below they also played Hong Kong cinema and Japanese sci-fi films;

I sort of lost contact with the club over the next year and half. I had no idea what they were really up to. I do know in the end they stopped mimicking CAS’ schedule and in the last quarter of 1999 started playing some of the latter “Sailor Moon” series. I knew people weren’t all that interested in the ANU club and our patrons had actually increased in number dramatically. There was a bit of tit for tat during 1998 as we played some of the things on their schedule including the “Rurouni Kenshin” movie, because they were playing the series. For a while there, they had actually stopped promoting the club. There were no flyers or anything about. Eventually I made up with Sam. Both Matt and Sam had left the club and in late 1999 the new president Ross (whom I have forgotten his last name…) paid a visit to one of our screenings. From there I decided to wind up CAS permanently and help out the ANU club. I helped with programming stuff, supplying tapes and even the flyers;

As you can see, from 2000 the club was rechristened as the ANU Anime Society, shortened to the rather unfortunate ANUAS which almost reads as ANUS if you’re not careful… The live action Asian films did continue on for a little while, but all but disappeared from the schedule by 2002. Being there was quite fun and I made a few friends, all of which I have lost contact with. But anyhow… Sometime in 2003 the club thought up the crazy idea of doing a convention. Because every other bloody club in Australia was doing it and you know, it couldn’t be that hard, could it? Well it was. You now this stuff works; people put up their hands and then a few fail to do that task. I was programming a lot of older anime material generally because I saw that the video rooms of other conventions in Australia were kind of shit. I also did the basics for the program booklet which I kind of fucked up because I had too much on my plate (both private, club and work). It all came together on 3 April 2004 as Anime.au.04. In the end it was a pretty successful event; we had some great cosplay, the ANU Go club set up and played some rounds, there were martial arts demonstrations, a band who played J-rock and a Para Para demonstration performed by some really hard core devotees. All in all despite some minor problems I think the organising committee were pretty pleased at what they had achieved. Both the booklets for that year and following had artwork by Kyoto based doujinshi artist Colorful Biscuit;

Not too sure if she is still active now. Her website is here. Her art work seems to be mostly of J-Pop group Perfume, which I think is great. No other convention in Australia could claim that all of their official artwork (and mascots!) were produced by a Japanese doujinshi artist. There was too much rushing about to enjoy anything going on at the convention, so one year was enough for me. I crossed “participating in an anime convention” off my otaku things to do list and I was done with it. For a while there, the conventions continued in the form of mini-conventions such as Chibi.au;

And a summer mini-con;

I haven’t really kept up with what has been going on in the club, but it looks like they’ve had conventions on and off for a few years, with 2012 being the last one from what I can gather. Sometime in 2005 or 2006, I sort of began to felt like a bit of a dinosaur and started to come less frequently. I only had commercial DVDs and tapes, and they didn’t want any of that stuff. It was the age of digital fansubs. Also I probably was bit of a pain in the arse of times, they were probably glad to see the back of me...

I tried coming back to the club, but really felt out of place. It was sort of the beginning of the end between me and the social aspects of fandom. Regardless the club continues on and was renamed the ANU Anime and Gaming Society 2012. The website isn’t very active, but the facebook page is. As you can see they still do screenings and other assorted social outings. Next year will be their 20th year of operation. I did some research and was really surprised to find out they aren't the oldest club in Australia. A couple other clubs are around the same age or older, one over 25 years old.

In the third part of this series, I’ll be looking at the other two (defunct) anime clubs in the city plus a not very comprehensive look at number of anime related events that took place in the decade from 1995.

A Half-Arsed History of Anime Fandom in Canberra 1995 - 2006, Part 1

I'm taking a bit of a break from doing reviews and will probably only do some occasional articles such as this one. I'll be back in full swing in April. Back in 2011, I wrote about my history with the Canberra Anime Society (CAS) and how I ran it (and ran it into the ground) with my friend Nathan for about a year and a half. You can read it here. I thought it might be interesting to scan some of the flyers I had collected over the years from various events around the region. I soon discovered that this would be a two-parter (or three). So first up I’m going to briefly look at the Canberra Anime Society. The history of CAS is pretty much covered in my previous post. Here’s some of the flyers that they put out while it was David, Bruce and Peter running the screenings (click for larger versions of all the images in this post);

Peter soon left and David and Bruce struggled on until May 1998 when they gave up. Before that though they did a screening for Japanfest which was a University of Canberra festival set up by the languages division;

Flyer is really beat up, but they played “Whisper of the Heart”, “Fushigi Yuugi”, “Grave of the Fireflies”, “Escaflowne”, “Patlabor” TV episodes, “Nadesico”, “Combustible Campus Guardress” and a Japanese film called “Family Secret”. Myself and Nathan took over in June 1998, but I think by the end of the year, he’d had enough. I struggled on through 1999;

I said before that we were the first club in Australia to play “The End of Evangelion”. Here’s a flyer we made up in our last screening of 1998;

I found a lot of flyers or temp flyers I had made for screenings which didn’t happen at all from late 1998 through the end of 1999;

Interestingly I have a few completed and made up flyers for the 10 July 1999 screening, but can’t remember what the hell happened or why I cancelled it. While CAS usually ran once every three weeks from 1995 to the end of 1998, in 1999 I did a grand total of five screenings. Look at this flyer I printed out towards the end of 1999;

You can clearly see by this time I really had a gutful of the University of Canberra Union screwing me around. And below two more screenings which never happened at all;

I had quit by the end of 1999 (last screening was 6 November 1999, where I played "Spriggan" and got a small mention in BMA) and decided to help the ANU Anime Society (ANUAS) during 2000 and used the CAS website as promotional tool for anime events in the region (it was kind of piss poor though). However I noticed that people were still coming to my website and asking me when the next CAS screening was on. So I did a joint screening with ANUAS in November 2000 in order to get some of those people to join ANUAS;

You’ll note that the “Escaflowne” film wasn’t released on VHS and DVD in Japan until April 2001. This was very early internet film piracy; someone at Sunrise had upped a pretty high quality digital transfer of the film onto the web (not some camcorder crap, a proper transfer) and US fans had already subbed it and put it up for people to download. I always find it really surprising that so little was made about this by fans. You’ll note that flyer is in full colour which one of the members at ANUAS did on a colour photocopier. And yes as I said before in my 2011 post on CAS, never even went to the screening for this one; I went home to see my parents that weekend. It was kind of interesting making up the flyers. I really enjoyed setting everything out, writing up little synopses etc. But it was a bit of a battle to get them printed and distributed to the two comic book shops in town (Phantom Zone and Dee's Comic Book Shop) and the now sadly defunct independent record shop Impact Records (which had incorporated a comic book shop into the store). In the end I had a lot of difficulty printing them off. I could no longer do it at work and local photocopy shops would either do a really shit job or charge absurd amounts.

Next time I’ll be looking at other clubs in the region plus a few notable events.

The Otaku Moralists

A couple of months ago I wrote about a new website (and niche movement) which tried to apply western feminist ideology to anime and manga, without taking into account that Japanese pop culture (and wider Japanese society) is not the same as in the west. There was also the bizarreness of applying a western ideology to a foreign entertainment not produced with that market in mind. I found it rather similar to the phenomena of Christian fans applying their ideology to anime and having difficulty with overtly sexual or demonic themes. If your ideology clashes so much your entertainment choices you have difficulty enjoying it, you really need to find entertainment suited to you rather than tiptoeing through it, or attempting to change it to suit your needs. I recall the rather vocal dislike for ero anime (erroneously called “hentai” by western fandom) in the 1990’s where anime fandom webpages had banners proclaiming “Hentai Free Zone” or the like.

In the last couple of years I have really noticed that certain segments of fandom are vocally complaining about sexual elements of anime and manga. What utterly surprised me was how prudish the complaints were. Sure, there are obviously people complaining about certain series where the main draw is fanservice or other overtly sexist elements which I totally understand. But what blew me away in the previous season were the complaints about shows such as “Sound! Euphonium” and “Flip Flappers”. Neither are shows you’d normally consider to be controversial or have offensive content, however this doesn’t stop the new otaku moralists finding something objectionable in these shows.

First up “Sound! Euphonium”; now most normal human beings would consider this show to be pretty wholesome with relationships being shown in a very chaste way. However like the rather bizarre criticisms of “K-On!”, this series has a small band of high profile detractors who point out it sexualises teen girls. “K-On!” was accused (and continues to be accused) of framing scenes in the male gaze, which essentially means the camera is presenting women in the show as objects of male desire. Of course the claim falls apart when you realise that the director of the show, Naoko Yamada, the head screenwriter, Reiko Yoshida, the character designer, Yukiko Horiguchi, and most of the episode directors, storyboard artists and animation directors are women. Plus the show was broadcast on the Disney Channel in Japan and there really isn’t anything sexual in the show (unless you’re a weirdo and see sex everywhere). I'm finding “Sound! Euphonium” is in the same boat as “K-On!” when it comes to weird prudishness by anime fans. So apart from Kumi Kaoru’s really weird take on “Sound! Euphonium” which I have previously covered here, a few other high profile western fandom figures have had problems with the show. First up Erica Friedman, self-proclaimed lesbian icon, speaker, writer, and founder of Yuricon & ALC Publishing;

She had difficulty with the first episode of the first series where the main female characters are momentarily concerned about their appearance and a teacher enforces school dress codes as a couple of girls hitch up their skirts to make them look shorter. In total the scenes add up to less than a minute in a 24 minute episode. Even so, aren't these scenes representative of real life? Don’t real teen girls obsess about their appearance? Don’t real schools enforce dress codes? And what if you didn’t agree with Erica assessment of the show?;

Yes, you’re the weirdo, not them! Let’s check the details on that episode; episode director and storyboards; Naoko Yamada, animation director; Shoko Ikeda… Why you awful and creepy arsehole women!  A local blogger also recently suggested that episode 7 of the second series had a scene which contained the “Gainax Bounce” (i.e. gratuitous bouncing breasts). Here is the scene in full;

Did you see the bouncing breasts? You didn't? You weirdo, you’re obviously not staring at the girl’s chests enough and not mistaking shadow for bouncing boobies!. Besides the non-bouncing going on, yet again the episode was created by a number of women in key staff roles including Haruka Fujita who was episode director and storyboarder. Our local blogging friend also had the gall to suggest that one of the main characters, Reina Kosaka, should not have an (unrequited) crush on the music teacher in the series, Noboru Taki. Seriously?! Students shouldn’t have crushes on teachers? Like this stuff doesn’t happen in real life?

Much in the same way, “Flip Flappers” has also been subject to accusations of sexualisation from people such as Amelia Cook from the Anime Feminist. It’s an inescapable fact the show is about female teenage sexuality, however when Cook criticises the first episode for having a “grabby robot”, she is blind to the fact the main character, Cocona, has an amorphous fragment embedded in her thigh, which is a key part of the show and revealed towards the end of that first episode. Is Cook being disingenuous here? I honestly don’t know. The fact is “Flip Flappers” was the original creation of Yuniko Ayana, yes, yet another woman, who is a fan of the Yuri genre and in a recent tweet admitted that she forced the show’s staff to place a swimsuit episode into the series. “Flip Flappers” also has numerous female staff working on the show including Kotomi Deai (director of “Rolling Girls”) as an episode director.

It really seems a lot of “progressive” anime fans are no better than the Christian right prudes of old such as Mary Whitehouse and Fred Nile. They see sex everywhere and rather surprisingly seemingly see depictions of female sexuality as a threat. Whether or not they realise or understand that many of these depictions of female sexuality are actually created by Japanese women in the anime industry, I really have no idea. To me it’s rather clear; these new otaku moralists are fine with wiping out depictions of female sexuality by female creators. I really find that to be an appalling state of affairs. What’s even stranger to me is that in a broader view of mainstream fandom, popular shows like “Westworld” and “Game of Thrones” are full of violence, sex and “problematic” content, yet anime fans are catching the vapours over what amounts to inconsequential scenes not more than a couple of cuts (or seconds) long in otherwise wholesome shows.

Sure this probably has to do with the western world’s view on teenage sexuality being a topic not up for discussion or exploration (which is only a recent shift, see Gabrielle Carey’s 1979 novel “Puberty Blues” for example), however I can only see it as one thing; a silencing of women expressing female sexuality in fiction. When Whitehouse and Nile did it 30 years ago, they were prudes and moralists. When anime fandom does it now, while wrapping it up in progressive language, they're still prudes and moralists. If you have problems with how Japanese women choose to express themselves and their characters sexuality, move on to another hobby. It's fine to criticise certain aspects of anime as well as Japanese culture as whole, but when its this prudish and moralistic, especially towards women, then I really think you should reconsider why you're in this fandom.