Japanese comics have been translated into English and other languages by the hundreds, but overseas publishers have long overlooked one of the biggest local genres: gag manga. Their usual excuse is that Japanese humor, which relies heavily on untranslatable wordplay and cultural in-jokes, doesn't travel well.
But on the evidence of Daigo Matsui's "Afuro Tanaka (Afro Tanaka)," a laugh-till-you-hurt comedy based on Masaharu Noritsuke's award-winning gag manga, they are missing out on some comic gold.
Or maybe I've been too far East too long. Real Americans (i.e., those who did not raise gag-manga-loving kids in Japan) may well raise their eyebrows at the joke of a Japanese boy with a huge cloud of 1970s-style Afro hair. But the hair, as the movie explains at the beginning, is natural, which makes the young hero a target of playground bullying.