Japanese Episode 38--From the Forest

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"More on the Incident"

by Takashi Oshiguchi

The Pocket Monsters incident has been the center of attention, not only in the Japanese animation and manga industries but also in the whole country, since the end of last year. Thanks to the incident, the TV show is still on hiatus and the TV special that was to air around New Year's eve was canceled. Many children have been saddened.

The gist of the incident was that over 600 children saw flickering explosions on the TV screen and felt ill, or had seizuers, in extreme cases. Apparently, the cause of this was the contrasting colors of red and blue flickering in alternating sequences on a TV screen. Screens have become much larger compared to those of past televisions, and children watch the screen up close and with intense concentration.

But what is this Pocket Monsters that's captivating children so?

Pocket Monsters, a.k.a. Pokemon, was first a game for the Nintendo Gameboy. There are two variations of the game, "red" and "green," and each type has different monsters. There are a total of 151 Pocket Monsters. Children can connect their Gameboys by cable and make their Pockets Monsters fight each other, or they can exchange them to collect all 151, but the 151st Pocket Monster is available only at special events. The "blue" cartridge, which also has 150 Pocket Monsters, but a different selection from those on the red and green cartridges, is a limited-edition, available only at convenience stores. The difficulty of collecting and the race to collect all the monsters made Pokemon a hight-interest item among Japanese children.

Next, a collectible card game version came out, which also focused on fighting and collecting. Currently, the first release of the card game, with 60 types of monsters, and the second release, with 30 types, are available.

The biggest reason for Pokemon's popularity comes from the information articles on Pokemon and the manga story running in KORO KORO, a children's manga magazine read by the largest number of children in the country. KORO KORO's publisher also produces other magazines for the 1st through 6th grades, and each of these magazines also has Pokemon articles and a manga story, thus expanding the market.

This is a typical example of multimedia marketing between publishing and toys. The animated TV show further extended Pokemon's popularity. Electronic pets that only children knew about got exposed to society via Tamagotchi. The market for dolls and goods expanded to grownups. The Japanese have a weakness for stumpy, cute characters like Pikachu. Grown women buy stuffed dolls on the sole criteria of cuteness.

The difference between Japan's recent pop-culture obsessions, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Tamagotchi, is that while Evangelion's market was in anime fans around age 20, Tamagotchi became a grownup's product whose popularity started with high-school coeds. Pokemon may have some grownup markets with its character goods, but the basis of its popularity is still with children.

In conclusion, I'd say it was really Pokemon's children-centered market that led to the social attention and criticism surrounding this incident.

The worst thing about the incident, however, was the broadcast TV station's low esteem for animation. If the cuase of hte incident was the flickering backlights, then they should have just explained it was a fault of the animators. They didn't do that in official briefings, and instead made it look as though Pokemon itself was responsible. It was such a sorry response from the TV station that once broadcast Evangelion and is still airing many animated shows.

It was an incident that left a bad aftertaste, and exposed the lowest failings of Japanese TV stations.

Takashi Oshiguchi's tenure as manager of Tokyo's Manga no Mori ("Comics Forest") has been invaluable for his role as an anime/manga journalist. His writings have appeared in ANIMAGE magazine and the comic trade journal COMIC BOX.

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Pocket Monsters was not created by me. It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the crew at TV-Tokyo. Pokemon is (c) Game Freak, Nintendo, 4Kids Productions, Hasbro, Bandai, and a ton of other companies. When you have a popular anime like Pokemon, lots of people own it so it's impossible to list every company who owns a piece of Pokemon. No infringement of copyrights is meant by the creation of the web site. All images were gotten from official websites (Nintendo, TV-Tokyo, etc.) unless otherwise noted (I don't steal images from other sites!).