Last weekend saw me squeezing through the crowded aisles of the Mandarake comic store in Tokyo's Higashi-Ikebukuro neighborhood on a quest for a Star Wars comic. Specifically, I was looking for fan-created manga revealing the untold love story between C-3P0 and R2-D2.
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This is the world of doujinshi, or self-published fan fiction -- a part of a healthy Japanese visual arts scene based on the appropriation and reuse of commercial characters.
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But when it comes to creating derivative works, the commercial comic and anime companies look the other way. As a result there's consumption, but there's creativity too.
If and when Japan does become a major exporter of its unique brand of "cool," I hope it will preserve and export the doujinshi ethic as well. Perhaps America needs to learn more than the difference between Doremon and Pokémon. We need a new way of looking at creativity that borrows and builds on the work of others.
