Legal Strike | The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog
To Japan, where four twenty-something university buddies have been charged with a new type of crime – illegally selling anime production materials from Strike Witches. To be clear, they weren’t ripping Blu-rays or scanlating manga. They were making copies of sketches, in-between drawings and backgrounds, and then flogging them online, racking up around 10 million yen (£52,000) over the last eight years.
According to the Yomiuri Shinbun, one of the defendants argued “It’s not a copy, so its not a violation” (Fukasei de wa naku, ihan de wa nai), which is, I might note, a use of the Japanese plain verb-form in front of the police, where the polite form might have been a better idea.
Production materials used to be regarded as industrial waste – something the companies couldn’t give away. Carl Macek famously took a container-load of Akira cels and sketches off the hands of its producers, to give away as freebies with the VHS release. Now we’re living in an era when production materials are not only valued in film criticism, but bought and sold as collectables, and now, it seems, even faked by would-be entrepreneurs. The copyright implications of the case, in terms of the notional value of scrap paper and literal bin-ends, is going to be fascinating.
Now, you may be wondering what it is about a newly resurrected nineteen-year-old franchise that excites such activities at all. Well, Strike Witches isn’t just your average under-dressed-girls-with-guns-and-rocket-feet-fighting-alien-invaders anime, because it also takes place in an alternate universe World War Two, in which the nations of the world stop trying to kill each other and instead use teenage magical girls to hold off a global threat. Its reimagining of real-world war heroes as spell-casting schoolgirls in their underpants led to some wonderful real-world situations, such as queries to the Finnish embassy in Tokyo in 2012, asking whether or not the ambassador was aware that the veteran “Terror of Morocco”, Aarne Juutilainen (1904–76) was now a 21-year-old cat-girl in the manga spin-off.
The Finnish embassy merrily played along, wishing Juutilainen’s aerial ace sister Eila a happy birthday on its Twitter feed, and taking the opportunity to educate social media about how to say it: “Hyvää syntymäpäivää Eira Ilmatar Juutilaiselle!” Ah yes, said the enthusiastic embassy tweeter, whose switch from r to l in the character’s name implies a familiarity only with the Japanese materials: Juutilainen transforms to Juutilaiselle when it’s in the allative case, one of the Finnish language’s many exciting grammar forms. Let me tell you all about… [That’s enough – Ed.]
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #243, 2024.
