[research] Comic City, the dojinshi market, James/Snape, fandom etiquette, dojinshi legal troubles

(Beware, lots of links to Japanese-only sites in this one.) While I was in Japan last month, my Japanese advisor dragged me to Haru Comic City so I could chat with a former student of hers who is now active as a dojinka in Tokyo. This was my second time at a big dojinshi convention (sokubaikai), but since I was only there for about five minutes at the very end on that first occasion, that one probably doesn't count. The one-day Haru Comic City was held in the same building as the more famous Comiket (the one with over half a million attendees), but in the end I didn't even get to see the fabled big halls because there were so many damned people in the way. The number of attendees was staggering and I was afraid of losing sight of my advisor, so I stuck to the smaller (heh) west halls. It sounds very abstract to say that the dojinshi market is worth 50 billion yen, but this is suddenly much easier to imagine when you're standing in the midst of an ocean of dojinshi-toting women. (The total manga market, pockets and magazines but minus dojinshi, is estimated at 450 billion yen. That's only nine times the value of the fannish manga market. 50 billion isn't peanuts by any definition, and the dojinshi market is still growing, while the manga market for pockets and magazines appears to be shrinking. Interesting.)
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