Notes from the Tigers Cave

Quite often, when I pick up my five year old daughter from nursery school, I take her to a local Japanese “sento“, or bath-house.

Bathing is a recreation in Japan. Bath-houses used to be as common as muck, and very good for removing it in the days when Japanese houses resembled shacks and lacked bathing facilities. Sadly, many of these old bath-houses have shut down as the upwardly mobile Japanese began to be able to build and live in modern apartments with all the amenities supplied and now prefer to bathe in private!

However, you can still find quite a few bath-houses dotted around Hiroshima, where I live, and most other towns and cities, and if you want to experience “the real Japan”, popping into one of these places is a good way to do it!

The baths at these places include a piping hot main bath, a jacuzzi bath, maybe some baths with water jets for massaging your tired muscles. Most bath-houses also have a sauna, and cold plunge pool. Some even feature “electric baths” – i.e. hot baths that have a low voltage electric charge running through them to give you a shock as you climb in!

Anyway, last week, when I took my daughter along for a bath, she discovered that she could climb into one of the clothes lockers and once in, she didn’t want to get out again. In short, my daughter had found her niche!

Next, she wanted me to shut the door and lock it, but I declined that particular request. After all, while it is good to find your own niche, it is not good to be stuck inside it. Some freedom of movement is always advisable because there are plenty of other niches out there that are just waiting for someone to occupy!

Also, had I locked her in and gone and enjoyed my bath in peace, my daughter would have been deprived of her chief delight, namely pouring bowls of freezing cold water of the benighted noddle of her long-suffering father!

If you would like to find out more about finding your niche on the Internet, click here.

David Hurley

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

One of my niche markets is Japanese manga comics. At the outset I did not know much about Japanese manga, but I was interested in the genre and in the social phenomenon of manga in Japan.

However, I gradually received requests from people living outside of Japan for various manga titles, and so with the help of my customers, I gradually built up a knowledge of manga. One of the most popular manga series that I offer is called Silver Fang Legend Gin.I recently wrote an article about the manga series, and reproduce it here:

In 1984, Japanese comic magazine Shonen Jump began publishing a new manga series by manga artist Yoshihiro Takahashi.The series ran for two years and was called “Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin“, or “Silver Fang Legend Gin” in English.

What was especially notable about the series was that the “hero” of the story was a Japanese akita dog called “Gin” (which is the Japanese word for “silver”). The akita dog, from Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu, Japan, is a versatile hunting dog that is ideal for hunting deer, bear and game. It is also the national dog of Japan.

Yoshihiro Takahashi, who was born in Akita Prefecture, is said to have been inspired to create a manga series with an akita dog as the hero after reading a news article about stray dogs that turned wild, formed dog packs and lived in the mountains.

“Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin” is set in the Ohu mountains in the remote north eastern region of Honshu, an area populated by Japanese black bears. The story gradually shifts its focus from a hunting community, with man and dog responding to the menace of giant bears, to the animal world and the visceral conflict between bears and dogs.

Each group, humans, dogs and bears, consists of various characters, breeds or types, which adds variety and deepens the interest and complexity of the story.

The story opens with an account of how an akita puppy, Gin, loses his father, Riki, when Riki is thrown over a cliff during a fight with a gigantic bear called Akakabuto.

Thinking that Riki is dead, his master, Gohe, abandons him. Gin, and his young master, Daisuke, head off to hunt down and kill the giant bear. But the bear they succeed in killing turns out not to be Akakabuto.

Worse still, Akakabuto has gathered a whole gang of bears. Eventually, Gin leaves Daisuke and joins a dog pack that has formed to fight the bears.It transpires that the dogs are able to talk to each other, just as humans are, although the humans think the dogs are simply barking and yelping. The leader of the dog pack is Riki, Gin’s father, a charismatic leader. Unfortunately, however, he has lost his memory as a result of his fall during his fight with Akakabuto, so he does not recognize his son when Gin joins the dog pack…

The story involves a lot of violence but it proved to be popular enough for it to be turned into a ten volume manga book series. In 1987, Yoshihiro Takahashi’s achievement was recognized and “Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin” received a Shogakukan Manga Award.

In 1999, Yoshihiro Takahashi brought out a sequel called “Ginga Densetsu Weed“. He also wrote a prequel series, which was combined in a single six-chapter volume called “Ginga Densetsu Riki“.

The manga was turned into a television animation by Toei Animation and broadcast in Japan in 1986. It was released in the West as a video series dubbed into English and other languages, but because of the brutality of the fighting scenes it was considered too violent for children in its uncensored form and quite severely cut in several places.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com