Taniguchi, Tomoko

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Tomoko Taniguchi

(Hokkaido, Japan)
Japanese author, illustrator

Manga creator Tomoko Taniguchi has made a name for herself, both in Japan and in the United States, with all-ages stories bearing positive, upbeat messages about family, friendship, love, and loneliness. Though her works are similar to many in the booming Japanese market for shojo manga (manga for girls), Taniguchi stands out for her desire to publish her work beyond the shores of her island nation. Even before she published her first work in Japan, Taniguchi dreamed of publishing in America. She persisted in her dream even when friends in America and Canada assured her that "no one would read shojo manga in their countries, because girls are different," she related to Graphic Novelists (GN). Her patience was rewarded with the successful publication of her books in English translation more than a decade after her first publication in Japan. Taniguchi happily told GN that the "time has come!"

Tomoko Taniguchi was born in Hokkaido, Japan. Taniguchi told GN that in her culture authors do not usually share the year of their birth because "sometimes age bothers us in this field." Little is known about her youth, though the Animefringe Web site indicated that she longed to be a manga creator from an early age. Rather than taking formal art lessons, Taniguchi developed her storytelling and artistic skills through diligent independent practice. Her formal education focused on language.

"This has always been one of my big dreams—having one of my manga published abroad, because I have many friends in many countries.…"

When Taniguchi saw Star Wars in Japan in the late 1970s, she knew she had to learn English. "Star Wars changed my life!" she told GN. "If George Lucas had not made Star Wars, I would not have studied English so hard." In college, Taniguchi studied the language at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she also absorbed American culture, falling in love with science fictionmovies, especially those about Spider-Man and the X-Men. While in America, Taniguchi explored the possibility of publishing her manga, even though her friends told her that "Western girls prefer actually dating than reading such shojo manga," she told GN. Unable to secure an American publisher, she returned to Japan.

Taniguchi's career as a professional manga creator began in the mid-1980s when she submitted a forty-page story to a contest in a monthly Japanese horror magazine. The story won first prize and was published in the magazine. When the horror magazine stopped publication, she submitted her work to shojo manga magazine Omajinai Comics. Her story "An-Pan-Balance" was a winning submission and marked her debut as a shojo manga creator.

Best-Known Works

Graphic Novels (in English translation)

Call Me Princess (1999).

Aquarium (2000).

Spellbound (2001).

Princess Prince (2002).

Just a Girl 2 vols. (2003).

Let's Stay Together Forever (2003).

Miss Me? (2003).

Popcorn Romance (2003).

Taniguchi told GN that winning magazine contests was a common way for manga creators to get started. "Almost every magazine has a contest, monthly or annually. So we have many chances," she said. "I always explain to both Japanese readers and American readers that there are lots of chances for you to enter the manga field, but staying in this field is more difficult. Every month somebody wins, but many of them have a difficult time two years later." Taniguchi worked hard to continue success in her career. She spent a year drawing for Omajinai Comics before publishing her first fully developed manga in 1989 in Japan, Let's Stay Together Forever. (This title would be translated and published in the United States in 2003.) She told GN that "I was really lucky. Many of my friends, who debuted at the same magazine in the same year, had not published any graphic novels by the time I had published nine books."

With Let's Stay Together Forever, Taniguchi set a tone of emotional sensitivity that would permeate her later work. Telling about a high school romance fraught with troubles, Taniguchi navigates the relationship between two people, heavy metal rocker Leo and shy girl Ayami, who belong to sharply divided social groups. Her characters approach each other cautiously, getting to know one another while learning to deal with the social pressures of their different social cliques. Taniguchi handles the emotional struggles and growth of her characters with great care. In Let's Stay Together Forever, she composes her artwork to reveal the emotional strain Ayami and Leo experience when they are first seen in public at an ice cream shop. Taniguchi creates a sense of social pressure by filling the pages with negative opinions and gossip of onlookers staring at them. Taniguchi's technique builds a sense of the panic felt by Ayami and Leo. In the end, Taniguchi reveals the benefits of respecting your own true desires without giving in to social pressure.

Taniguchi's approach to storytelling differs from that of many shojo manga artists. Most shojo stories involve a long-running, soap-opera-like story for a steady set of characters, but Taniguchi creates shorter stories with a shifting ensemble of characters. While most of her stories involve some sort of romance, she also tackles issues such as starting school without friends and dealing with the impending loss of family property, with suicidal feelings, and with a person whose affections you don't share. She also approaches such unusual circumstances as living as a practicing witch and growing up as a girl when you are really a boy. Aquarium, first published in Japan in 1990 (translated and published in the United States in 2000) offers insight into a teenage girl's suicidal feelings after failing an important high school placement test. Call Me Princess, first published in Japan in 1992, is a teenage romance about a girl's hopes of finding a boy who will treat her like a princess.

A decade after starting what turned into a successful career as a manga creator in Japan, Taniguchi still harbored dreams of publishing in the United States. Her dream started to turn into reality when she met Colleen Doran (1963–; see entry), creator of A Distant Soil. Taniguchi related to GN that she had long admired Doran's artistic ability and was happy when one of her best friends in America introduced her to Doran and the pair became friends. Doran published a drawing of Taniguchi's in one of her comics with a caption noting Taniguchi's wish to be published in America. When Central Park Media editor C. B. Cebulski noticed the drawing, he contacted Taniguchi to offer her a publishing contract. Starting with Call Me Princess, Taniguchi's fifth manga title in Japan, Central Park Media offered Taniguchi's work to English-language readers in 1999. Eventually all of her previous work was translated into English. Despite the outdated hairstyles and fashions in some of her early stories, Taniguchi's stories became best-sellers for Central Park Media. For all Doran's help making her dream come true, Taniguchi told GN: "I owe her a lot!"

The enormous growth of the manga market in the United States during the late 1990s and the popularity of Taniguchi's work prompted Cebulski to try something new. He started up his own comics publishing firm, Fanboy Entertainment, and persuaded Taniguchi to do something no other Japanese manga creator had done before: write a manga specifically for an American audience. Taniguchi's Spellbound, published in 2001, tells the story of Ami, a teenage girl dealing with all the everyday highs and lows of adolescence while also living as a practicing witch. Her magical skills enable her to save her friends and learn more about true love. This manga has not crossed back to Japan: it is only available in English.

Central Park Media Manga

Central Park Media became a pioneer of Japanese anime and manga in the United States in the 1990s. Started by John and Masumi O'Donnell in Manhattan in 1990, Central Park Media translated a wide variety of Japanese cartoons and comics for the American market. Confident that Japanese popular culture would be of interest to Americans, Central Park Media tried to be as true to the original products as possible, not changing scenes or dialogue to better suit American expectations. While Central Park Media has become one of the leading Japanese anime (animated cartoon) and live-action film suppliers in the United States, it also continues to publish translated manga.

Tomoko Taniguchi's graphic novels, and those of many other manga creators, are available through the Central Park Media Press Web site. The site presents a preview of manga in a unique format: the look of a real book. Users can actually turn the pages of Taniguchi's Let's Stay Together Forever, clicking and dragging to turn each page, the graphics seeming to peel back like the pages of a paper book.

In the early 2000s, Taniguchi remained focused on producing new manga. She experimented with her new work, stepping away from the pattern of writing "all ages" stories to write tales that would appeal to older readers (though not "sexy stories," she explained to GN). She described her early work as "happy stories to encourage girls," but her work for older readers would be "a little cynical." Her new stories were for women who "have problems at work, at life, or at love." Taniguchi thought about publishing these new types of stories under a pseudonym. "Maybe this sounds strange to American people," Taniguchi said to GN. "In Japan manga artists often use a pseudonym. We hide name, age, address. Many of us want to stay mysterious in order to let our work stand on its own."

Taniguchi related that another "big step" for her career would come in 2006: She would publish her first work for Marvel Comics, one of America's largest comic book publishers. Taniguchi worked with Cebulski (another person to whom she "owes a lot") to produce a story for I (HEART) Marvel: Marvel AI. "Ai" means "love" in Japanese. The story about the Scarlet witch's romance with a robot is very short, but meant a great deal to Taniguchi because "working for Marvel is one of my biggest dreams," she told GN.

With new publications forthcoming and editions of her work in print in Japan, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and the United States, Taniguchi seemed well on her way to fulfilling the dream she described in her first English translated manga: to have her friends be able to find her work "anywhere on Earth."

For More Information

Web Sites

"Aquarium Manga Review." Tokidoki Entertainment Journal. http://www.tokidokijournal.com/manga/aquarium/ (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Central Park Media Press. http://www.centralparkmedia.com/cpmpress (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Font, Dillon. "True-Blue Dreams Coming True: The Shojo of Tomoko Taniguchi." Animefringe. http://www.animefringe.com/magazine/2003/10/feature/01/ (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Tomoko Taniguchi Official Site. http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~tomoko-t/index.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).