Yes, I know my cartoons are not updating – I’m on vacation in Japan. Last Saturday I did a speech at the Hara Museum of Modern Art; thanks to everyone who came. I had a translator for this talk, and every so often, I would say a short sentence and the translation would go on for a couple of minutes. I was told the translator was explaining cartoons that the audience wouldn’t understand. It seems the Japanese audience doesn’t understand sarcasm, and since there is sarcasm in so many American editorial cartoons, the cartoons make little or no sense to Japanese readers.

There are a few editorial cartoonists in Japan, but their work is obscure. Flipping through the major newspapers turns up no editorial cartoons and people that I asked don’t remember ever seeing editorial cartoons in the newspaper. Now I know why I’ve never heard of any political cartoonists working in Japan.

They don’t have much in the way of political cartoons, but this country is cartoon crazy. One person at the seminar posed this question: “all cartoonists in Japan are millionaires, are you a millionaire too?” That made me laugh. There are cartoons everywhere here. Japan is Manga crazy.

Above right is a photo of my son, Michael, at the huge Mandarake manga store in Shibuya. There are lots of Manga stores here, and all of the thousands of books on the shelves, in all the Manga stores, are shrink-wrapped, so there is no reading in these stores. I have a hard time appreciating Manga; it seems to me that most of it is poorly drawn. It is interesting that so many readers are girls – unlike comics in America which are dominated by boys.

Here is a photo from one of the manga stores of a rack of maid uniforms. There seems to be a relationship between Manga and sexy maids. I was surprised to see that Tokyo is sexy-maid-crazy. The sexy-maids extend outside of the Manga characters into “maid cafes,” which are restaurants with waitresses who dress like sexy maids and play flirty games with the customers.

Yesterday I was indulging my son in some manga and video games stores in Akihabara, where there were sexy maids on almost every corner, cooing at potential maid-café customers. Our maid was something of an artist with a ketchup bottle, and she drew a Playboy Bunny on my son’s omelette. I don’t have a photo of her, because she wanted to get paid more for that, but here’s a photo of the maids cooing and wooing customers from the restaurant’s balcony.

One visit to a maid café was enough for us.

I’ll be speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan for lunch on Thursday – that’s a “can’t miss event.