Ask John: Can You Explain “Doujinshi Circles?”

Question:
I’m interested in joining a doujinshi circle in Japan one day. How, exactly, does one join a doujinshi circle? Can it be considered a real job or a hobby? Also, can a doujinshi artist be sued by anime companies for copying their characters? Does this sort of thing happen a lot?

Answer:
By definition doujinshi are Japanese fan produced manga comics or animation. That means that technically, to produce doujinshi, you have to be in Japan, and your doujinshi has to be a self-published or small press production. But that’s not to say that Americans can’t produce doujinshi. In a loose sense, anyone that’s ever drawn his/her own fan art manga has produced a doujinshi, and small press publications like the hentai Dirty Pair comic “Nostalgia,” are examples of true American created doujinshi. Writing and drawing doujinshi is a hobby, not a profession. Artists that start off drawing doujinshi and later make a living out of it, like the ladies of CLAMP for example, aren’t doujinshi artists any longer, they’re professional manga artists. A “doujinshi circle” is simply the name for a group of friends that work together to produce their amateur manga. These fan produced comics are sold to other fans, and may even be sold through doujinshi stores like Comic Toranoana, but they’re still amateur because they don’t generate enough profit for the artists to live on. Joining a doujinshi circle is as easy as finding an established group willing to let you work on their comics or publish your art in their book. In fact, you and a small group of creative friends could get together, work on a comic and legitimately call yourselves a doujinshi circle.

Doujinshi is such a massively popular hobby in Japan that there are chains of stores in Japan that sell only fan produced comics and the annual Comic Market conventions of self published and amateur manga only draw crowds in excess of 100,000 attendees. Video game company Leaf even dramatized the exploits of a fictional doujinshi circle trying to balance high school, comic conventions and creating doujinshi in the popular PC and Dreamcast game Comic Party, which was also turned into a 13 episode anime TV series. Since doujinshi is so popular in Japan, and so many professional anime artists have their roots in the “doujinshi scene,” most creators and Japanese studios overlook doujinshi or consider it a form of flattery. Furthermore, since the people that create doujinshi are the same people that financially support the Japanese animation industry, it’s natural for Japanese studios and distributors to be hesitant to threaten the very same customers their rely on to buy anime products. However, there have been instances of companies pursuing charges of copyright infringement against fans for using famous characters in fan produced comics. In 1999 Nintendo pressured Japanese police to arrest 32 old Yukie Michimori for distributing copies of a Pocket Monster (Pokemon) hentai doujinshi she created in which Satoshi (Ash Ketchum) rapes Pikachu. Nintendo charged Michimori with copyright infringement and “destroying the dreams of children.”