Huh, learn something new (about author). I never read the manga, but I really liked the "Silver Spoon" anime. Something about people opening new chapters and discovering new interest/passions really satisfies me.
Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, and Ranma ½, were all massive successes at the time. Even her minor story Honoo Torippā, once polished into Inuyasha, went on to be pretty big.
I really struggle to look at Tsurita's work and see how she "shaped" manga history in any way, beyond being one of the first published females.
She is hugely popular in east asia. Although the popularity did reach Europe but for some reason not the UK, manga/anime in general I feel. Am I wrong? Could anyone explain why?
That may be, but I looked for references in the story for modern female mangaka that might have been influenced by her work and the author does not seem to make that case. Instead the author seems to only talk about the work and art that influenced Kuniko Tsurita, and presents it as a given that she shaped manga history rather than was just another participant.
Searching around, I found an article in The Comics Journal[1] from July 22nd, an article from The Paris Review[2] July 17th, an article from coolyeahright[3] July 7th, and an article from AnimeNewsNetwork[4] from July 2019. All of them are talking about Kuniko Tsurita’s compilation that was released in English last month, The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, not one of them draws a straight line between her work and the work of female mangaka today, so I think it’s fair to say the Atlantic is taking some license with what would otherwise be a review of a manga compilation.
> I looked for references in the story for modern female mangaka that might have been influenced by her work and the author does not seem to make that case
Why should it? It is a review of a new book about Tsurita. Book reviews rarely talk about the other people who were, in turn, influenced by the artist.
If your complaint is that the title doesn't match the article very well...those complaints have become frankly tiresome. Does every single post ever need to remind people that the editor picks the title not the author?
By engaging with the title, instead of the substance of the article, you're just proving the editor's point.
If you don't like a title, ignore it and respond to the actual substance of the content.
> If your complaint is that the title doesn't match the article very well...those complaints have become frankly tiresome. Does every single post ever need to remind people that the editor picks the title not the author?
1. I was responding directly to a comment on this site, not to the article as a whole.
2. Read my commentary again, I refer to the author of the piece and what they wrote and the Atlantic itself separately.
So would Rumiko Takahashi and a number of other creators. This is just a puff piece where the author is showing off how deep they dug into a subject to namedrop and overstate the importance of someone.
> ETYMOLOGY. The name "Clamp" comes from a misspelling of the word "clump", meaning: "A bunch of potatoes". This is referenced in Duklyon: Clamp School Defenders, where a teacher is observed saying: "The name 'Clamp' incorporates the words 'hinge,' as well as 'potato mountain,' within its definition."
That's just weird! (And foolish. And nonsensical...)
It's not so much a misspelling as a transliteration. Japanese lacks the ʌ vowel sound (or anything close) so ア/a is as close as you can get. Once that's turned back into the Latin alphabet (Romanji) it becomes clamp, hence the combined definition of clamp and clump given by the teacher, whose English teaching level is probably about standard for the Japanese school system (unfortunately).
There's probably a whole host of Japanese names that come from misspellings. Two come to mind immediately:
Mitsubishi Starion: officially "Star of Arion", but few people claim that it's just a misspelling of "Stallion", images of which were featured in some marketing materials. There's also the Mitsubishi Colt and Mitsubishi Eclipse which were given equine names.
GLAY: Japanese rock band which supposedly intentionally misspelled their name although their former classmates claim that they just didn't know how to spell "gray".
Similar stories in retro shmups: Gradius was obviously supposed to be Gladius, while R-TYPE was named with the intention of R standing for "Laser". Upon discovering laser is spelt with an L, the creators retconned the R to stand for "Round canopy", a trait of the ship in the game.
I only recently realised that in Card Captor Sakura the protagonist's friend followed her around all the time with a camera, filming their adventures. I found that super creepy at the time, and yet here we are now. At least she kept the videos to herself instead of making gifs out of them.
Whether the authors saw the writing in the wall before everyone else, whether it was a reflection of something that already existed in Japan at the time, or whether it was simply a coincidence, I couldn't say.
Her friend is in love with her -- there are generally a lot of themes like this in the series (her brother and his best friend are also in love, etc.).
And her male rival had a crush on a high school boy and eventually her. It steered far clear of sexual tones, but showed romantic attraction. It was so obvious that many of those scenes were censored in the US.
> It was so obvious that many of those scenes were censored in the US.
> It steered far clear of sexual tones.
What are the tests or societal norms that censors employ for US releases?
What is censored or changed always seemed pretty arbitrary from my point of view, though I have no knowledge of CCS and don't know what specifically was changed there.
It feels like romantic, sexual, and violent themes are fine in domestic media, but are censored for imports.
As an extreme example take the previous God of War titles with their violence, gore, and literal sex mini-games vs. cartoonish violence and clothing getting censored in imports. Somehow one thing is fine for US publishers, and the other isn't.
I can't speak to the censoring of Cardcaptor Sakura... I watched the unedited subtitled DVDs. The edited dubbed version that some people are referring to had the slightly different title "Cardcaptors".
But another example of censorship is how the relationship between Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus was changed from being lesbians to being cousins. If you search for "sailor moon cousins", you can read about how that turned out for them. (eg: "they certainly didn’t act like any cousins I knew" -- Sara Roncero-Menendez)
The show wasn't censored in the traditional way. The show was basically reframed as an action monster-of-the-week targeting a much more male audience than the original anime. They basically edited the shit out of it and turned it into a different show.
edit: for the record I would not recommend the US "dub", since it's terrible (I don't even think they did the whole series). The original, however, is wonderful.
An example of the levels they went to: Renaming the series from "Card Captor Sakura" to "Cardcaptors" wasn't just superficial, they reordered and cut up episodes to try and switch it from main-character-and-rival into duo-main-characters.
I did like the new opening they came up with, though it totally didn't fit the overall series aesthetic.
Seconded. They also censored out the explicit (or even mildly implicit) romantic relationships that late-1990s/early-2000s America considered inappropriate.
Which, as far as I remember, was most of them - multiple non-heterosexual relationships, multiple student-teacher relationships and multiple cousin relationships.
> And her male rival had a crush on a high school boy
This one was subverted later in the series - turns out that highschooler secretly had moon-based magic that was compatible with the rival, that he was subconsciously sensing.
We need some articles along the lines "A male artist...". You know, because equality cuts both ways. If you elevate one sex over the other, you're being sexist.
English is my second language and it has genderless nouns by default. That's enough if equality is really what you want.
Imagine a headline "A Male Artist Who Shaped Manga History". That would sound ridiculous. A headline with "female" is the same kind thing if you like equality.
It's notable because the field is mostly male. That's really all there is to it. It's right there in the subhead "an overlooked Japanese cartoonist who smashed both gender and genre norms".
Males who insist that there is a political agenda in articles like this make the same mistake as the feminists who argued that missiles are phallically shaped because they were invented by men
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamp_(manga_artists)