Just a random thought....   

   Something of a coincidence that Jeanne had written about the realm of dojinshis as I was thinking about writing about the week-long adventure in the very fabled dojinshi-land that Jeanne spoke of. As I was reading the draft copy of Jeanne's article "In praise of dojinshis", it struck me that I suddenly realized that I actually know what that sense of being granted a pass into another world is like. This has nothing to do with owning hundreds of copies of dojinshis that someone hauled from Tokyo for you. Yes, this is one of the things that "you have to be here" for.

    Now, I've only gone into the bigger dojinshi shops like Mandarake and K-Books, most of which I needed Mary to take me to.  The only place that I managed to find by myself (and with about an hour of utter confusion at the subways and JR lines) was the Mandarake at Nagano. A note of advice if you are planning to go to Tokyo and want to brave the new world: have someone who had lived there give you a detailed map and instructions on how to get to wherever you are planning to go. I've been a New Yorker for most of my life and am used to chaos but Tokyo is quite something else. I bought a Tokyo map and that was about useless. It's useful if you're planning to go sight-seeing and visit the usual tourist traps but not when you're planning to go dojinshi hunting. I was spared days of grief with information Jeanne sent me.

    The first place I stopped at was Mandarake.  It's quite impressive, with its own stores in different sections and floors of a 4 story (and a basement) shopping arcade/mall. There's one floor that sells garage kits and other collectibles. There's another one that sells etchi only (posters, mangas,  tapes, etc). There's another one that sells commercial mangas. There's the other one that sells dojinshis. This is just Mandarake, mind you. There's other stores in the same vicinity that deals with similar toys and books. Cells, phone cards and autographed works of prominent artists are also a major specialty.  I was quite surprised that the asking price for an autographed CLAMP picture of a SD Kamui that they've drawn with a magic marker went for $1500. Minami Ozaki's also another one I took notice of. Her Dokusen Yoku pencil sketches with a fast scribble of her name fetches up to $600 a piece there.

    Now the dojinshi shop itself. To say I was overwhelmed is to remark that being shot with a 12-gauge would hurt just a little.  Jeanne described a sense of euphoria, of being in a netherworld--is what exactly that was. I was there on a weekday so I was surrounded by older women above 25 years old. There were men there, but they were scarce. They were mostly downstairs where the etchi stuff is, I'm sure. There were about ten or twelve aisles, that I can recall, comprised of six  five-tier bookshelves pushed together to make a row. Slam Dunk has its own wall. Gundam Wing had one aisle. Final Fantasy 7 and Yu Yu Hakusho made up one aisle. The other fandoms which had not enough to make its own section, such as Angelique or Xenogear or any other Final Fantasy besides 7, were subsequently grouped into a catch-all section of RPG/Games. That means you really have to dig deep  to find the Toshinden zine you wanted.  Other fandoms such as Angel Sanctuary, Caine, Bakuretsu Hunters, Tales from the Capitol, or Shurato, you have to go through each and every zine to look at the cover (and cover only, they are all sealed in plastic to preserve the zine from constant pawing from people like me) to see if it's the theme you want.  Virtually impossible to tell if if it's a yaoi or a gag story unless the circle included specific tell-tale information like "Gai X Shurato only" and they don't always include this on the covers.

    The actual feat of shopping  is a very trying task for several reasons.  It takes an average of 30 minutes to an hour for you to pull out each zine, look at the cover and put it back or put it in your basket. Zines being as thin as they are, up to 200 zines (a very modest guestimation)  can fit into one tier alone (and there's 5 tiers per shelf, remember).  While you're doing this, you're stuck in one posture, while someone else is leaning over you to get the zine in the shelves on top or tunneling beneath you to get the zines below. This is especially difficult if you've reached the top shelf where you have to stand on a little stool or squat down to reach the bottom ones. I have a theory that all of the best zines are most likely on top or bottom most shelves since no one really even bother going through more than 10 minutes worth before they look at the dojinshis at eye level.  I was one of them.

    Well, if you're taste in dojinshi falls into a circle that's produced quite a bit of work, it should be easier. CLAMP, Kreuz (Minami Ozaki), Lapis Hommes, Ken Mizuki, Laim Club (Kaimu Tachibana), Green Company (Noriko Sato), EX (Yoshimi Ozaki) , has their own little sub-sections that is easily identified and it contains all of their works right there. I still think hunting down and being surprised by a beautiful Angelique dojinshi with the delectable Julious on the cover by a fly-by-night circle is worth more trouble.  The fruit of labor does taste sweeter.

    Please note, this is Mandarake. K-Books, another huge dojinshi outlet, organizes their dojinshis slightly different but make no mistake, you will have to dig for what you really want. 

    The first day I was at Mandarake, I spent over $1000 (that's 4 boxes of dojiinshis--over 600 zines) that day. This is not a very unusual thing, by the way.   Places like this caters to the people who buys a ton but too lazy to carry them around. It costs about $10 to have the books boxed and shipped to your home (per box), or in this case, to my hotel room. You must think $1K is quite a bit of money to spend at one time at one store for just the dojinshis. Tell you something, being there at that place, is almost like an addiction. You buy one zine and then you see another one that you have to have as well, then you see another and another. Soon you have a little mountain of zines in the basket at your feet and you only started on one shelf and there's 4 more to go. Then other themes you really want to read about, like Arislan, you also have to get. So you leaf through them.  After you finish Arislan section, you just have to go back to Final Fantasy 7 section to find more  Sephiroth on the bottom combination, so you go through that. Hey, there's one where Vincent gets slashed with Pikachu, have to have that. Then there's another one with Vincent being slashed with Hojo, have to have that one too. Here's Sephrioth, but he's the seme--but the art's beautiful so you have to have it too. Hours and hours of this amounts to 4 boxes of dojinshis.  As soon you're home with your new trophies, you rip through them for quick glance to see if you have something remotely close to what you wanted.   Already you want to go back to the shelves to look for some more.  In a way, I am thankful that my request to go to Japan for my impending assignment for next two years didn't come through. I would've squandered my paychecks and beg, borrow or steal more money to support my habit.

    It's a costly but wonderful fandom.  Thinking about it, I don't think it has to do with yaoi at all. Yes, finding yaois with my beloved Sephrioth being seduced by Zax is wonderful but what I really want is to escape from the actual storyline where I had founded a relationship with these characters. I'd like to learn what different circle think really happened to Gai after the canon show just sent him off to places unknown. I like to read about the Sephrioth who questions his own validity of his own life after realizing he's a copy of someone else and contemplates suicide. I'd like to know what kind of uke would the proud Julious would be to a vivacious Oscar.  I would like to read/see the death or reunion my favorite characters were deprived of from the canonl. Each story or scene catapults me into another alternate world and the trip never ends.  It makes the most mundane shows and lackluster characters that you just tolerate since he's part of the show cast, intensely interesting and profound. It's almost like getting addicted to the game or show again and again and again.  I was also re-discovering shows that I liked but didn't think much about until I read the dojinshis.  Shows like Arislan and Kenshin.  Fanfics can never do this for me.

   This is something of a religious experience, if you want to call it that, being immersed in the dojinshi fandom for that few days where I was able to put my hand on the very dojinshis that I can only yearn over while reading about it in PUFF magazine.   I suppose it could be sacrilegious to say that this is nothing compared to the experiences I had in the Louvre or Vatican Museums but dojinshi world is more on the modest level I was able to comprehend.  Addictive, yes.  But one addiction that I willingly accept and nurse for the rest of my life.

-Susan

Dojinshi theme cuts from Angelique, Final Fantasy 7, Shurato, Sailor Moon