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Comic inpainting is essential for language localization and adapting comics into animations, involving the removal of speech boxes, textboxes, and sound effects while maintaining artistic integrity. This paper introduces an automated approach leveraging the Manga inpainting method by Xie et al., adapted for western comics like Tex Willer. Tex Willer comics, known for their fusion of Italian art and American Western imagery, pose unique challenges due to their distinct styles. Customized Manga Restoration and Structural Line Extraction codes are employed, along with automated mask generation using deep CNN-based speech balloon detection and segmentation. Our contributions include the development of a precise model tailored to Tex Willer Comics, resulting in visually coherent inpainting results. The paper follows a structured format, covering State-of-the-Art, methodology, results, and conclusions, aiming to streamline the process of western comic inpainting for professionals in the comics and animation industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was aimed to study the demonstration of urban images as topographic or background effects for depicting the social reality of life in large megacities. The research considered four literary works of Japanese and Chinese writers, namely the manga 'Hanzawa Naoki' (2020) by Jun Ikeido, the novel 'Convenience Store Woman' (2016) by Sayaka Murata, the manga 'Tokyo Ghoul' (2011) by Sui Ishida, and the Chinese novel 'Northern Girls' (2004) by Sheng Keyi. It was found that each literary work demonstrated the symbolism of the urban platform, on which specific cultural and social rules were formed (in the Japanese sense, the term 'joshiki' was used). So, there was a certain transformation of the Japanese traditional worldview to a mutually beneficial life activity, which can lead to marginalization. The study results also showed that the folklore images of Japanese yokai have transformed in the fantasy genre as metaphorical social roles that lack a sense of tolerance and liberality in the context of modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2022, a first-year PhD student published his first peer-reviewed article in the journal Qualitative Research. Less than four months later, amid viral public outrage, that article, Karl Andersson's "I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan," was removed from publication and formally retracted by the Journal Editors. This paper explores the controversy surrounding the so-called "masturbation article" and its relevance to the field of publishing studies. I begin with a general overview of the shota manga genre and its legal context and provide a factual short history of the affair. I then demonstrate what a good-faith positive peer review of Andersson's article may have included and critically assess Qualitative Research's Retraction Notice, alongside other published ethical complaints. I conclude by showing how both Andersson's article and the Japanese manga he studies have been censored for the same reasons, with troubling implications for freedom of speech in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of Japanese comics or better known as manga had reach worldwide. The production of the manga had also led to the creation of derivative products such as animated series and doujinshi. However, most readers outside Japan accessed these media in a translated format that is published independently from the original publisher. As such, many of the readers might not know the distribution system of the original media. In this paper, we discussed the distribution of manga and doujinshi in Japan. These include discussions regarding the general overview of the manga industry, the different types of published manga and doujinshi, as well as their distribution system. Lastly, this paper also discussed briefly what is the unique characteristic of the Japanese manga and doujinshi industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posture and body position are often in the focus of forensic medicine. Visualization for the purposes of documentation, teaching, scientific presentation or expert opinion in court is often desired. Plenty of possible tools to support visualization are available. However, there is a significant gap between quick drawings and more complex techniques. Body-chan (female) and body-kun (male) artist's model figurines (genericized trademark) may provide a useful means to fill this gap. These models, about 12–15 cm in height, are multi-articulated humanoids of realistic proportions, intended to serve as models for manga (japanese comic) drawing. Plenty of different models are available in different quality which usually are equipped with interchangeable hand and feet attachments, a frame for 'levitating' positions as well as assorted objects to scale. These inexpensive models may be positioned quickly and intuitively. Photodocumentation from various angles can be performed using a mobile phone camera. Images may be further improved applying digital image manipulation software. Taken together, the process is quick and intuitive and the level of achievable complexity is sufficient for many forensic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese people's understanding of the Fifteen Years War (1931–1945) is still problematic. The problem of the war was commonly solved by transferring responsibility for the war to an obscure subject called the State, and by offering financial compensation to those who were directly affected. However, there has been no in-depth discussion of how the Japanese public's understanding of the war in the period before defeat was modified in the post-war period. This article is a study of the children's magazine Shonen Kurabu, which gained wide popularity by featuring articles related to war during the early modern era of Japan, including the wartime period, and continued to be published until 1962. By focusing on Shonen Kurabu, this paper explores the close relationship between the mass media and the public attitude toward war, and the handling of the theme of war by both the media and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manga (Japanese comics) are popular worldwide. However, current e-manga archives offer very limited search support, i.e., keyword-based search by title or author. To make the manga search experience more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable, we propose a manga-specific image retrieval system. The proposed system consists of efficient margin labeling, edge orientation histogram feature description with screen tone removal, and approximate nearest-neighbor search using product quantization. For querying, the system provides a sketch-based interface. Based on the interface, two interactive reranking schemes are presented: relevance feedback and query retouch. For evaluation, we built a novel dataset of manga images, Manga109, which consists of 109 comic books of 21,142 pages drawn by professional manga artists. To the best of our knowledge, Manga109 is currently the biggest dataset of manga images available for research. Experimental results showed that the proposed framework is efficient and scalable (70 ms from 21,142 pages using a single computer with 204 MB RAM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the lack of color in manga (Japanese comics), black-and-white textures are often used to enrich visual experience. With the rising need to digitize manga, segmenting texture regions from manga has become an indispensable basis for almost all manga processing, from vectorization to colorization. Unfortunately, such texture segmentation is not easy since textures in manga are composed of lines and exhibit similar features to structural lines (contour lines). So currently, texture segmentation is still manually performed, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To extract a texture region, various texture features have been proposed for measuring texture similarity, but precise boundaries cannot be achieved since boundary pixels exhibit different features from inner pixels. In this paper, we propose a novel method which also adopts texture features to estimate texture regions. Unlike existing methods, the estimated texture region is only regarded an initial, imprecise texture region. We expand the initial texture region to the precise boundary based on local smoothness via a graph-cut formulation. This allows our method to extract texture regions with precise boundaries. We have applied our method to various manga images and satisfactory results were achieved in all cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manga, a Japanese word for comics, is a worldwide popular visual entertainment. Nowadays, electronic devices boost the fast development of motion manga for the purpose of visual richness and manga promotion. To convert static manga images into motion mangas, text balloons are usually animated individually for better story telling. This needs the artists to cut out each text balloon meticulously, and therefore it is quite labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach that can extract text balloons from manga images both accurately and effectively. Our approach starts by extracting white areas that contain texts as text blobs. Different from existing text blob extraction methods that only rely on shape properties, we incorporate text properties in order to differentiate text blobs from texture blobs. Instead of heuristic parameter thresholding, we achieve text blob classification via learning-based classifiers. Along with the novel text blob classification method, we also make the first attempt in trying to tackle the boundary issue in balloon extraction. We apply our method on various styles of mangas and comics with texts in different languages, and convincing results are obtained in all cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anime is now considered an accepted form of animation and is considered to represent Japanese contemporary culture worldwide. There are many fans of anime and manga, creating a community known as otaku world. However, Japanese anime and manga have gained popularity in Western countries as well as in Japan. This paper attempts to ascertain the determinants of watching anime in Japan based on individual-level data from Japan. Despite the growth in the number of adult anime fans, children are still more likely to watch anime than adults are. Hence, this study investigates how adults are influenced by the presence of their children. After controlling for individual characteristics, it was found that people are more likely to watch anime when they have children aged less than 12 years who have not yet entered junior high school. Such an effect is larger for parents who belong to an older generation where people are less likely to prefer anime. This implies that the externality coming from children results in parents watching anime. The findings of this study show that externalities from surrounding people play a critical role in enlarging the market of modern cultural goods representing 'Cool Japan.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese, just like any other people of the world, love entertainment. In this article we discuss and analyze three kinds of popular, Japanese mass entertainment utilizing a semiotic approach. We are concerned with what and how manga (Japanese comics), pachinko (vertical Japanese pinball machines), and cosplay (costume play) represent and reflect Japanese-ness: its culture, tradition, history, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manga, a kind of Japanese comic book, is an important genre in the realm of image publications requiring copyright protection. To copy manga, illegal users generally focus on certain interesting parts from which to make partial copies to apply in their own drawings. With respect to their sources, copying of manga can be divided into two types: (1) exact copies, which duplicate specific contents of manga, such as scanned manga publications (printed copies) and traced outlines of manga (hand-drawn copies), and (2) similar partial copies, which infringe the copyright of manga characters based on their features. In this paper, we propose applying content-based image retrieval methods to detect both exact and similar copies based on two kinds of regions of interest (ROIs): generic ROIs and face ROIs. The method is able not only to locate the partial copies from images with complex backgrounds, but also to report the corresponding copied parts of copyrighted manga pages for exact copy detection and copied manga characters for similar copy detection. The experimental results prove high performance of the proposed method for detecting printed partial copies. In addition, 85 % of hand-drawn and 77 % of similar partial copies were detected with relatively high precision using a database containing more than $$10{,}000$$ manga pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores disability in the cultural context of contemporary Japanese comics. In contrast to Western comics, Japanese manga have permeated the social fabric of Japan to the extent that vast numbers of people read manga on a daily basis. It has, in fact, become such a popular medium for visual communication that the Japanese government and education systems utilize manga as a social acculturation and teaching tool. This multibillion dollar industry is incredibly diverse, and one particularly popular genre is sports manga. However, Inoue Takehiko’s award-winning manga series REAL departs from more conventional sports manga, which typically focus on able-bodied characters with sometimes exaggerated superhuman physical abilities, by adopting a more realistic approach to the world of wheelchair basketball and the people who play it. At the same time REAL explores cultural attitudes toward disability in Japanese culture—where disability is at times rendered “invisible” either through accessibility problems or lingering associations of disability and shame. It is therefore extremely significant that manga, a visual medium, is rendering disability visible—the ultimate movement from margin to center. REAL devotes considerable attention to realistically illustrating the lived experiences of its characters both on and off the court. Consequently, the series not only educates readers about wheelchair basketball but also provides compelling insight into Japanese cultural notions about masculinity, family, responsibility, and identity. The basketball players—at first marginalized by their disability—join together in the unity of a sport typically characterized by its “abledness.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market for Japanese comics, called manga, in the United States grew rapidly at the beginning of the twenty first century at a rate unprecedented in the publishing industry. Sales grew a remarkable 350% from $60 million in 2002 to $210 million in 2007 and did not begin to decline until the beginning of the recent economic downturn beginning in late 2008. No published research is yet able to account for this phenomenon in a manner that is both socially-situated and medium-specific. In this paper, I provide such a sociological account of the rise of manga in the United States and its implications for the globalization of culture. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical formulation of the cultural field, I argue that manga migrated from the comics field to the book field and that the ways in which industry practices, distribution networks, and target demographics differ between the two fields are directly responsible for the medium's newfound visibility. Furthermore, I argue that, despite the now-common transparency of the Japanese origin of Japanese titles, the American publishing industry's creation of manga as a category of books distinct from other comics is an ineluctable naturalizing process that ultimately erases from American consciousness the Japanese, the foreign, the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan is seeking to project its “soft power” through the allure of manga and anime in its public diplomacy. The production, diffusion and global consumption of manga and anime are driven by market forces and consumer tastes and not by the Japanese state. However, the latter is seeking to harness this popular culture to burnish Tokyo’s international image. Despite the attractiveness of Japanese pop culture and other more traditional forms of public diplomacy, Tokyo’s pursuit of “soft power” and a good international image is undermined by its failure to overcome its burden of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Japanese appear humorless in the eyes of the Westerners, we have a long tradition of presenting humor in various forms. This paper demonstrates one of the most famous examples of Japanese humor called “Chojyu-giga,” a set of scrolls depicting animated animals frolicking. It is a parody drawn around the 12th century and is said to be a root of Japanese comics termed “manga.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]