(sorry i don't have a link to the article , i read it in a newspaper)

Japan is going to start recognizing one non-Japanese manga artist (every year ,i guess) as part of their manga awards ? i guess its like a catagory now or somthing. the winner will get a free 10 day trip to Japan and get to meet famous manga artists and stuff like that. the Japanese foriegn relations secretary (?) announced this new innovation, he's the same guy in charge of the Kyoto protocol , so i guess it's a big deal. he likened this award to the "Nobel prize" of manga !!

FANTASTIC !

I guess there will be lots of Koreans getting free 10-day trips to Japan now.

Are you talking about the Embassy of Japan's Manga Award [uk.emb-japan.go.jp]? The first prize is two tickets to Japan~ :D

They haven't got a full set of rules up yet so I don't know if it'll be restricted to UK residents only (it seems quite probable)... but still! Worth a shot~

Mlai probably has it right. All the best non-Japanese manga artists I see are from places like Korea and Malaysia. We should see if we can get Eunice a free vacation.

I'm entering that embassy thing, Wylde, so looks like we're in competition!

I think this is something else though. Like, Japan's own manga awards. Heh. Typical, gaijin don't actually just get entered as normal contestants, they're in a different catagory. How unsurprising from a country that made me carry around an alien registration card for the year I lived there.
I'd laugh if they even called the catagory 'best gaijin manga'.

Well, there are many good mangaka coming from Indonesia (me included, hehehe), but alas, we are not given much change like our brethrens from Korea and USA, and Malaysia (I am halfway moving to Malaysia...)

So does this mean they'll start recognizing American comics? Or just other kinds of comics that seem more like "manga".

Koreans dont need tickets to Japan... They're so close they can hardly be called 'foreign' (...unless you mean people like me...Korean in the US...)
lol whatever

Yeah that's my question as well and why I said only Koreans (and Malaysians and the like). Because I'm not sure if they'll accept comics that look clearly American or European influenced.

Edit: Especially if the text has to be in Jpnese.

But as CCS say though, Manga is just the Japanese word for comics. It's only us that think it means comics in a Japanese style.

Well thats cool and all, but its still going to be a winner from that part of the globe.

I read something about this too and I got the impression that it's only for published material so I assumed it included all comics in general not just tokyopop manga or whatever. But yea Korea probably has the best bet since manwha is more similar to the Japanese style than American comics.