What Is Doujinshi?

Have you ever wanted to see the characters from your favorite action adventure manga get involved in romantic relationships with each other? What about seeing those characters as teenagers going to a normal high school? The truth is that lots of people wonder what their favorite characters would look like and act like if the world that they lived in were completely different and in Japan, the answer is to take a look at doujinshi!

The term doujinshi simply refers to manga that has been self-published, rather than being picked up by a major publisher. Though doujinshi is often created by amateurs, the truth of the matter is that there are many artists in this field who create works of a professional quality. For instance, the famous artist/writer group of Clamp, which is responsible for everything from X to Card Captor Sakura, began as a doujinshi group, which is often referred to as a “circle.”

Since the 1980s, doujinshi slowly evolved from being something that was meant to showcase original work or a field that was only for people who were interested in avoiding major publishers, to largely containing parody material of regular series. These parody doujinshi might run the gamut from joke manga about a super serious anime to romantic manga that will pair together different characters from the original source material.

It is interesting to note that in Japan, doujinshi are a thriving, if small, market. Though these artists are essentially making money from copyrighted material, there is no prosecution, and some manga authors even admit to checking in on the doujinshi sales of their work to see how popular it has become! While litigation is possible, most doujinshi are published in such small numbers that they are usually ignored. This is very different from the comics market that thrive in the US, where such behavior would be quickly stopped and prosecuted. For that reason, doujinshi are seldom translated into English in any official format. That has not stopped a thriving culture of fans online that will buy the original Japanese volumes, and scan them, and then edit English translations into them before sharing them with the Internet.

In the United States, you will largely run into doujinshi online or at the anime conventions. There are some vendors who have made it a point to purchase doujinshi from Japanese retailers and then to resell it elsewhere. You can also purchase doujinshi online yourself, though they will be in Japanese.

What can you expect when you purchase doujinshi? The answer is “practically anything!” For example, take one of the modern shonen classics, Bleach. There are gag doujinshi where the characters run around as though they were in a romantic comedy, there are serious explorations of characters who get very little screen time, and there is a great deal of doujinshi that deal with romantic pairings between the characters. These pairings might be heterosexual or homosexual, might contain pairings between characters who have never met, and can vary from being cute and romantic to being extremely pornographic.

Doujinshi is definitely a part of Japanese manga culture, so the next time you are wondering when Full Metal Alchemist turned into a lovey-dovey romantic comedy, you know what you are looking at!