This is what the shelves of Japanese hobby shops in the 1980s looked like:
(image is recent, products are vintage. taken from here.)
In 2008, this is part of Big Plant 5's model kit section:
Bandai has been producing plastic model kits for the Gundam franchise since 1980. As manufacturing technology improved, the company was able to make kits easier and easier to assemble. The varieties that have been released for the past decade or so don't require any glue at all - the parts are snapped off a frame and into each other. Most are multicolored, requiring no paint to look like their counterparts in Gundam anime and manga.
One of the things I like about the ganpura series (aside from it being Gundam and therefore awesome) is that since it's been around for nearly 30 years, its appeal spans two or three generations of Gundam fans - little Kenji can sit at the kitchen table and snap together his 1/144 scale "Exia" (from the most recent series, Gundam 00) while otoo-san sticks decals on his 1/100 scale RX-78 (the 1979 original) and looks on proudly.
Buy, Use, Dispose
Given the content, it's possible this manga is by the side of the road because someone didn't want their girlfriend finding it in their car, but a more likely scenario is that its previous owner simply finished it and threw it away.
Popular weekly manga publications such as Shonen Jump and Hyper Corocoro print millions of issues per week and sell them for 230 to 250 yen apiece each Monday. Seeing as the volumes are pretty thick for a weekly, attempting to hoard more than a few months' worth of issues would probably take up a lot of precious space in the average Japanese household; on Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings, you can find trash bins (and sometimes train cars) stuffed with issues. You'd think it would be good news for the avid reader who doesn't want to pay for it, but I have yet to see someone pull a used copy out of the can.
Or off the side of the road.
Blech!
1 comment:
I guess I have to accept that manga and anime are art forms. But the cynic in me rises when I can't tell the art from the commercial. Is "art" being used to pilfer money from kiddies and willing parents or is the "product" a response to the art? Certainly these image alliances (manga-anime-feature film-video game-countless plastic products) are successful and making somebody rich.
OK so now you know my inherent bias ...
Really, you haven't seen people dig the old manga out of garbage cans? I have plenty of times (seen it, I mean...). Off the street, perhaps it would depend on its contents - or lack thereof...
Perhaps this is a post better suited for commentary by Dick McVengeance...
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