Category: Commentary


May
2023

Manga in the 2023 Eisner Award Nominations – and 2012-2023

categories: Awards, Commentary

On May 17, the organizers of Comic-Con International: San Diego announced the nominees for this year’s Eisner Awards (for materials published in 2022) – officially the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. Although the Eisner Awards are generally known for honoring specific comics and the work of specific comics artists and writers, since 2012, one of the awards has recognized the year’s Best Educational/Academic Work. The category is now officially titled Best Scholarly/Academic Work, and this year once again, although none of the five titles that have received nominations in it specifically discuss Japanese comics, one is an essay collection with several chapters that do.

The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions (University Press of Mississippi) includes among its contents 3 very different essays on different aspects of manga, brought together under the section heading “Global Crossings and Intersections”:

First, Prof. Keiko Miyajima (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York), contributes the chapter XX, XY, and XXY: Genderqueer bodies in Hagio Moto’s science fiction manga, a reading of several classic manga titles including Marginal, Star Red, and They Were 11, that emphasizes depictions of trans* identities “as a site of resistance to any coercive gender norms”.

Following this, William S. Armour is the author of An exploration of the birth of the slave through ero-pedagogy in Tagame Gengoroh’s PRIDE. In this follow-up to the 2010 paper Representations of the masculine in Tagame Gengoroh’s ero SM manga (Asian Studies Review, 34:4), Armour introduces non-Japanese audiences to what he refers to as a “Bildungsroman ero-MANGA”, discusses particular aspects of it that may ” resonate with Tagame’s intended audience”, and makes the point that in addition, PRIDE can be viewed as essentially a “how-to manual” or instructional work.

Finally, with Gay fanzines as contact zones: Dokkun’s adventures with “bara” manga in between Japan and France, Edmond Ernest dit Alban (Tulane University) argues that amateur pornographic comics such as those published in the French-language fanzine Dokkun enable and support “contact zones” for local, regional, and global cultures and communities.

(more…)

Apr
2023

Book Review – Manga: A Critical Guide

categories: Book Reviews, Commentary

[Ed. note: Book publishers rarely make an effort to promote new books on topics like manga. Guess leaves it up to people like me, who are interested in these kinds of books, to promote!]

Shige (CJ) Suzuki and Ronald Stewart
Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 280 pages.
[Amazon] — [Bloomsbury USA]

This is a pre-peer review preprint of an article that has been accepted for publication in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 9:2, 2023.

When it comes to books that can explain manga to a non-Japanese reader, Fred Schodt’s Manga Manga: The World of Japanese Comics and Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga are the ones that come to mind right away. But important as these two titles are, they are now more useful as historical artifacts – Manga Manga was first published in 1983, and Dreamland Japan last received an update in 2011. Japanese comics have changed a good deal even in the last decade, and how we understand Japanese comics has also changed quite a lot. And while several authors have recently written (or contributed to) in-depth studies such as Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, and Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, what we haven’t had is a general survey that would try to explain, or at least summarize “Japanese comics” in a neat and comprehensive package. And this is precisely the task that Manga: A Critical Guide sets out to accomplish – the book’s goal is to serve as both an introduction to the art form of manga, and to its impact and influence around the world, and as a summary of how critics and scholars approach manga and the questions they ask. Accordingly, its focus is on “manga” (exactly what is meant by the term is itself one of the points the book addresses) as a whole, rather than not on particular titles or creators, and while this book is not aimed purely at a scholarly audience, it’s also not designed for fast and casual reading like something like the now out-of-print The Rough Guide to Manga, or the just-released (and translated from French) A History of Modern Manga.

(more…)

Mar
2023

“But I don’t know Japanese” – “Global English” and anime and manga studies

categories: Commentary

The theme for the upcoming Spring 2025 issue of Mechademia: Second Arc will be “methodologies” – such as “theoretical frameworks” and “methods of analysis”. The Call for Papers for the issue lists several potential topics to consider and questions to ask in connection with this broad theme, and one of these questions is “What hampers the interrelation between English-language and Japanese-language scholarship (including publications by non-Japanese nationals in Japanese, and translations of popular or non-academic Japanese media criticism in English)?”

Asking this leads into another, related question. Is it essential or necessary for scholars working in a field like anime and manga studies, where the objects that the field is about are originally in a different language, to use scholarly materials in that language? And, if someone is not proficient in Japanese to the level where they can access untranslated Japanese books and essays, what kinds of options are available to them if they still want want to make a meaningful contribution to the study of Japanese animation, Japanese comics, and other related topics?

What hampers the interrelation between English-language and Japanese-language scholarship (including publications by non-Japanese nationals in Japanese, and translations of popular or non-academic Japanese media criticism in English)?

As it turns out, this specific question is actually related to a broader question of the role that the English language plays in global scholarly communication more generally. For example, in an innovative 2004 study on “global English in the humanities”, Charlene Kellsey and Jennifer E. Knievel demonstrated that for the fields of history, classics, linguistics, and philosophy, the average number of citations to non-English sources in issues of major journals has increased slightly between 1962 and 2002, while the average number of total cited sources has increased significantly, from 66.8 to 236. The vast majority of citations are to materials either originally published in English, or to translations into English. A similar study with a focus on the scholarly literature for the field of linguistics found that for a random sample of 479 sources used as citations in materials in the Language and Linguistics Behavior Abstracts database, an overwhelming majority – 93.5% – were in English. Additional recent studies on the topic include Can scholarly communication be multilingual? A glance at language use in US classical archaeology, Cross-lingual citations in English papers: a large-scale analysis of prevalence, usage, and impact, and, just recently – and with direct relevance to Japanese popular culture studies – Citing East Asia: A citation study on the use of East Asian materials in East Asian Studies dissertations. For that matter, in my own study of sources cited in the first 10 volumes of Mechademia, I found that out of 2,187 sources that authors cited, 68.22% were originally published in English, and another 7.27% were translated into English from other languages. Materials in Japanese made up 22.54%, and the small remainder was divided between a few items in French, German, Korean, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish.

On average, each dissertation had 44 percent of its citations to East Asian materials. However, the individual dissertations varied greatly in terms of percentage of East Asian citations

– Xiang Li, Citing East Asia

These studies then demonstrate both that scholars in different fields in the humanities that may involve using sources in languages other than English both do and do not actually use non-English sources, and the extent that they do varies widely between fields. So, conceptually, scholarship in the humanities that focuses on literature and media that is originally produced in a language other than English, and does not necessarily refer to sources in that language is possible and accepted. But, the question remains – how do you “do” anime and manga studies without being able to directly access materials written in Japanese?

And, to answer the question, I would point at least four possible approaches. Each of them comes with their own caveats and limitations, but, taken together, these approaches definitely offer some ways to resolve the basic challenge.

1. Consider translations of Japanese scholarly work

The most straight-forward approach simply involves asking the question to what extent is Japanese writing on anime/manga available in English translation? The answer to this question is – somewhat. English translations are available for two foundational Japanese texts in anime studies – Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and Beautiful Fighting Girl, but in the first case, the original book was published in 2001, and the translation is from 2009; in the second, the book is from 2000, and updated in 2006, and the translation is dated 2011. So, neither can represent the “current” state of anime studies, either in Japanese or in English. And this is essentially also the case with the volume that was published in 2021 with the title Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga – the original Japanese edition is dated 2014, and the direct translation of the original title is Eromanga Studies, Expanded Edition: An Introduction to Manga as a “Pleasure Apparatus”.

(more…)

Jan
2023

Studying Satoshi Kon – The Numbers

categories: Commentary

The academic area of interest of “anime studies” welcomes many different approaches and even methods. But fairly consistently, authors who study Japanese animation have drawn on approaches based in auteur theory to emphasize the importance of particular creators/directors.

anime, as a form of postmodern popular culture, can be best understood in the West through a triangulation of different approaches that balance issues of form, medium, cultural context, and individual creators.

Kevin M. Moist & Michael Barthalow, When Pigs Fly: Anime, Auteurism, and Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso

Somewhat similarly, and although this is definitely changing, a significant percentage of what actually makes up English-language “anime studies” consists of studies of anime feature films. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano notes, in a critique of the field, “Big budget anime films such as Metropolis, Princess Mononoke, Ghost in the Shell, and Akira are frequently discussed, along with their contemporary critical themes of technological alienatation, environmental issues, cyborg feminism, and postmodernity, while the majority of TV anime series have been neglected, since an analysis would require an examination of anime’s connections with local audiences and the complex popular culture of Japan.”

(more…)


Jan
2023

2022 in Review in Anime and Manga Studies

categories: Commentary

The start of the new year implies many things, but for websites that deal with news, the start of a new year often implies “year in review” articles summarizing some of the previous year’s major trends and highlighting major events. And, surprising as it may be, when we look back at 2022 in terms of developments related to anime and manga studies, there were several that are worth pointing out specifically!

2022 Highlights

34th Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards – Best Academic/Scholarly Work winner: Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (Eike Exner, Rutgers University Press)

Marking a high point in the development of manga studies as an academic field, 2022 saw the first time that the Eisner Award in this category went to a book on Japanese comics, although volumes on manga have received nominations before. Exner’s study, based on extensive fieldwork he conducted in Japan, working primarily at the National Diet Library, makes the case that American comic strips played a key role in the development of Japanese manga because they were widely translated, available to both readers and authors/artists, and introduced the Japanese market to potential new storytelling and visual techniques. This does not in any way mean that manga “rips off” American comics; nonetheless, some Japanese Twitter commenters have attempted to accuse the author of racism and cultural appropriation. Interviews with Exner are available on this site and on the New Books Network.

Qualitative Research publishes, then retracts “Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture” paper after media outcry.

This absolutely unprecedented sequence of events started on April 26, with the OnlineFirst appearance of a research article with the full title “I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan”. Nothing of interest happened until early August, when the it began picking up Twitter attention from both other academics and even some politicians, leading, predictably, to media coverage in The Telegraph, Vice.com, and other venues. And an opinion piece in Times Higher Education that presents the original article as an example of “insanity of ethnography’s turn towards introspection and other postmodern research methods that place little value on objectivity” is that paper’s most-read article of the year! (more…)


Sep
2022

Special Feature – The “I Am Not Alone” Controversy

categories: Commentary, Uncategorized

On April 26, the academic journal Qualitative Research published a “research note” by University of Manchester Japanese Studies PhD student Karl Andersson with the title “I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan“.

For the next several months, the paper sat there largely unnoticed. Until, August 8, when it began attracting the kind of attention on Twitter that rarely if ever attaches itself to an academic paper.

And this does not even go into editorials, quick write-ups in tabloids, and, inevitably, social media outrage.

For two weeks, starting August 9, Qualitative Research conducted an investigation into the circumstances that surrounded the publication of the article. On August 22, it issued an official Retraction Notice, and deleted the original article from the journal’s website. It is also not available via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and so, for all intents and purposes, has been removed from existence.

On reflection, due to the potential for significant harm caused by the publication of this work compounded by ethical issues surrounding the conception and design, the Journal Editors have made the decision to retract and remove the note.

Needless to say, the controversy surrounding “I am not alone…” raises a number of interesting and troubling questions. And for answers to these questions, Anime and Manga Studies would like to turn to Dr. Casey Brienza, a qualitative sociologist with a record of peer-reviewed academic monograph and journal article publications on both manga and scholarly publishing. Dr. Brienza is the editor of the essay collection Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics without Japan? (London, Routledge, 2015), and the author of Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics (London, Bloomsbury, 2016), as well as journal articles such as Activism, Legitimation, or Record: Towards a New Tripartite Typology of Academic Journals (Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2015), Sociological Perspectives on Japanese Manga in America (Sociology Compass, 2014), and Opening the Wrong Gate? The Academic Spring and Scholarly Publishing (Publishing Research Quarterly, 2012).

Ed. note: Regardless of the specifics of Dr. Andersson’s research, under U.S. law, receiving “a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting” that “depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct” and is obscene is illegal and may lead to prosecution. Recent cases where individuals were convicted for violating this provision include U.S. v. Whorley, 550 F. 3d 326 (2008), U.S. v. Handley, 564 F.Supp. 2d 996 (2008), and U.S. v. Eyechaner, 326 F.Supp.3d 76 (2018).

===

MK: How common are retractions?

Casey Brienza: They’re not common at all, for any reason! You sometimes hear about them in the biomedical field, where findings based upon flawed of falsified data could literally mean the difference between life or death, but the retraction of Andersson’s article is the first that I can ever recall having encountered in any of my areas of interest.

They’re not common at all, for any reason! You sometimes hear about them in the biomedical field, where findings based upon flawed of falsified data could literally mean the difference between life or death

MK: Did Qualitative Research follow common or typical procedure in making the decision to
retract this article?

The Journal Editors stated that they were following COPE (Committee on Publishing Ethics) guidelines. The COPE guidelines for article retractions are publicly available to read (https://publicationethics.org/retraction-guidelines), and I would highly recommend anyone interested in this subject read them themselves. My personal conclusion, from my own reading of those guidelines, is that, no, Qualitative Research did not do a great job of following the procedure they claimed to be following.

MK: What kinds of problems or issues can you point out in how the retraction was announced and implemented?

First off, speaking as someone who has worked on multiple edited collections, I thought the Journal Editors’ lightning-fast capitulation to viral outrage was shameful.

Casey Brienza: First off, speaking as someone who has worked on multiple edited collections, I thought the Journal Editors’ lightning-fast capitulation to viral outrage was shameful. They’re the ones who published this article and, by implication, believed it had merit. The author is just a first-year PhD student, and this article was his first ever peer-reviewed publication.

As an editor I always go out of my way to provide extra support to student writers. Yet the Journal Editors never mounted even a half-hearted public defense either of him or their journal’s overall editorial discretion.

But the biggest problem, in my view, is their decision to remove the article from publication. They did this about a week prior to their formal retraction, which is not in keeping with COPE guidelines, and they decided not to republish it after retraction either, a decision which should be reserved for “extraordinary” circumstances only. Under normal circumstances, the original text of a retracted article would remain freely available, for transparency’s sake. Removing the article from publication makes it more difficult to “check their work,” as it were. And by extension, the Journal Editors seem to be suggesting they believe the article is too dangerous to be read! In the absence of clear evidence of the article’s potential to cause harm, this strikes me as overkill.

Removing the article from publication makes it more difficult to “check their work,” as it were. And by extension, the Journal Editors seem to be suggesting they believe the article is too dangerous to be read!

MK: In your opinion, were there any issues with the methodology that the author used, with how they presented their work, or with the overall publication that would merit a retraction?

Casey Brienza: There are aspects of the article I thought were great and aspects I thought were less great. This is just par for the course; ask two different academics about one journal article, and you’re bound to get a minimum of three different opinions on it. There is nothing about Andersson’s article that I thought merited a formal retraction, never mind a removal from publication.

MK: Do you think the negative reactions to the original article (including both on Twitter and in media) influenced the Journal Editors?

Casey Brienza: Absolutely. Close inspection of the timeline makes it nigh impossible to believe otherwise.

MK: Do you think this particular situation can occur with other journals, such as those not based in the UK?

Casey Brienza: It does seem possible, yes.

MK: How will this retraction affect research on anime/manga (and qualitative research in general) going forward?

The implications for anime/manga studies are positively chilling. Obviously, shotacon is going to be effectively off-limits to many researchers going forward.

Casey Brienza: The implications for anime/manga studies are positively chilling. Obviously, shotacon is going to be effectively off-limits to many researchers going forward. But also, it’s important not to overlook the wider problem areas: People unfamiliar with the visual conventions of Japanese cartoons often have trouble correctly identifying the intended age, race/ethnicity, and/or gender of the characters- meaning that any sexually explicit anime/manga could be rendered criminally suspect.

In addition to the article retraction, as if that weren’t bad enough, Andersson is currently suspended from his university pending the outcome of an internal investigation, and he’s being investigated by UK law enforcement on top of that. Who would want that kind of professional and personal hassle?


Aug
2022

Comment/Response – Building a Japanese Manga Collection for Nontraditional Patrons

categories: Commentary

Comics, graphic novels, and manga have a place in libraries. The Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association compiles a yearly Great Graphic Novels for Teens list, and just some of the recent books on comics/graphic novels/manga that are targeted specifically at librarians include Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics: Insights and Issues for Libraries (Libraries Unlimited, 2009), Library Collections for Teens: Manga and Graphic Novels (American Library Association, 2010), Mostly Manga: A Genre Guide to Popular Manga, Manhwa, Manhua, and Anime (Libraries Unlimited, 2012), and the collection Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History and Cataloging (McFarland & Co., 2010). Examples of similar coverage in prominent journals in the library science field are the articles Graphic Novels in Academic Libraries: From Maus to Manga and Beyond (The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2006), The Institutionalization of Japanese Comics in US Public Libraries (2000-2010) (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2013), and, just earlier this year, A School Librarian’s Journey through Manga Collection Development (Knowledge Quest).

One common thread that links these books and articles is that they generally either present a “high-level” overview of the idea of including manga, etc. in library collections, or actually quantify the extent to which libraries are doing so. What they generally do not discuss, with the exception of some of the chapters in Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives are the actual mechanics of this process. How does a library go about purchasing comics/manga, what are some of the different possible approaches to adding records for these kinds of titles to a library’s catalog, where should they even be physically located in the library space?

Another recent collection, The Library’s Guide to Graphic Novels (American Library Association, 2020) does specifically try to answer these kinds of questions. And one of its chapters – Building a Japanese Manga Collection for Nontraditional Patrons in an Academic Library, discusses these same kinds of mechanics as applied to manga in particular.

Of course, the first question that can come up in relation to this chapter is what do its authors even mean when they refer to a library’s “nontraditional patrons”. Presumably, the main goal of an academic library is to collect and provide access to books and other materials that would support the needs of researchers. The Japanese Manga Collection that they describe, on the other hand, is designed to support in-class reading (in the terminology used by the University of Pennsylvania Japanese Language Program, “tadoku” – “extensive reading” – where students “choose Japanese-language books appropriate to their level, then read as much as they can without a dictionary and by skipping difficult sections, grasp the overall content from the parts they can decipher on their own”. Traditionally, this approach used “graded readers” – “easy-to-read books specifically targeted at programmed grammatical and vocabulary levels”, but the authors, one of whom was the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Japanese Studies Librarian, realized that students were more interested in, and would engage with the tadoku approach more – if the books it offered would be titles they were interested in on their own – i.e. manga. Coming to this realization then led into the “mechanics-related” questions on selecting titles to purchase, actually purchasing these titles, creating correct bibliographic records, and then simply advertising the existence of the new collection to potential users.

The aim of tadoku is for students to choose Japanese-language books appropriate to their level, then read as much as they can without a dictionary and by skipping difficult sections, grasp the overall content from the parts they can decipher on their own.

Possible approaches the authors describe for selecting titles to purchase include reaching out to language instructors to solicit recommendations from students, as well as trying to become aware of manga titles that are popular “among a more general population of patrons”, using the recommendation algorithm on Amazon Japan to get a better understanding of “what is both currently popular and relevant for the growing collection”, reviewing records in Wikipedia for details about spin-offs and sequels and such, and drawing on the catalogs and other marketing materials put out by the major U.S. publishers of translated manga for a sense of “currently popular titles” and “important publishing trends”. One such trend that the authors specifically point out is “women-authored gay romance stories” and a “queer lens on manga”, leading to “a selection focus on LGBTQ titles that orient readers to gay history and culture as well as
relationships and everyday life.” Of course, all of these approaches have the potential for a selection bias and can lead to a collection that over-represents certain types or genres to the exclusion of others that are perhaps not as “trendy”, but better represent the full range of the different kinds of manga that are available to readers in Japan.

Students of Japanese as a foreign language are often inspired by their interest in popular culture, so there was naturally a demand for Japanese comics, or manga, to engage with in class for tadoku

Building a Japanese Manga Collection, p. 145

From this, the article describes the process of locating details about two particular manga titles (My Brother’s Husband! and Jūhan Shuttai!), aimed at a librarian with no familiarity whatsoever with manga, such as both the advantages and the limitations of Wikipedia for locating details about these titles, and the challenges of using Amazon Japan to actually purchase volumes. The next section is its most intensely technical, dealing with possible ways of actually representing manga in a library catalog in a way that would make these books distinct from non-Japanese graphic novels/comics. Right now, the best such way is to use the Library of Congress Subject Headings system’s “Comic books, strips, etc.” heading, and add the Japan geographic subdivision. The authors also recommend specifically highlighting that the book is in Japanese, and whenever possible, including the actual original Japanese title (in kanji, not just transliterated) in the catalog record.

In the absence of a widely adopted library-facing thesaurus that establishes “manga” or “manhwa” as freestanding subjects – and the consequent lack of representation for established subgenres in Japan and Korea – libraries should adopt and maintain those conventions that serve their users and describe their collections best.

Building a Japanese Manga Collection, p. 157

Example: Penn Libraries catalog record, 弟の夫 (My Brother’s Husband)


One more part of the article addresses the other key aspect of developing and maintaining this kind of collection – how do you actually make its existence known to library users? This involved deciding on a unique name for the collection, and a dedicated physical location, and even specifically indicating the collection on book spine labels. Nonetheless, the collection remained largely unknown to users other than Japanese language students, and to remedy this, the librarians specifically designed a marketing campaign with both print and digital signs, including signage displayed on the library’s ground floor.

The East Asia Comics Collection has been designed for direct application in language pedagogy and as active circulating resources for student enrichment, and its development represents a shift in how the Penn Libraries’ East Asian-language materials have been advertised and used.

Building a Japanese Manga Collection, p. 161

A conclusion also summarizes the way the collection has actually been used, and how it fits into the library system’s broader mission of “making language learning and the library itself fun for underserved demographics” (such as students in language courses, as opposed to researchers), and even the way it is potentially open to public users who can access university library collections at specified times, as well as other college/university libraries via inter-library loan.

Overall, this chapter is a valuable profile of a unique and important library collection, and a very useful template or guide for other libraries that may wish to establish collections of this type, or simply collect manga titles in the original Japanese. Of course, the methods and approaches that its authors highlight are not comprehensive. They for example do not address the usefulness of other resources, such as the Anime News Network Encyclopedia for locating information about manga titles, using lists of awards winners to select titles for inclusion, or basing at least some of the collection on titles that have been the subject of scholarly research. Nonetheless, Building a Japanese Manga Collection is a valuable addition to the literature on manga in libraries, and to library science/librarianship literature in general, and one that, I hope, will serve as an important resource for and aid to librarians who are interested in manga!


Aug
2022

Comment/Response – The contradictions of pop nationalism in the manga Gate

categories: Commentary

A key feature of scholarly writing as a “genre” is that a new contribution to scholarship on a topic does not just stand by itself, but builds on previous contributions, and in a way, engages in a conversation with them. This feature can be seen in the literature review sections of new scholarly articles, as well as in formal reviews of newly-published books. But while book reviews are common in scholarly writing in many different fields, in-depth commentary on previously published articles and book chapters is not common at all. And I think that anime and manga studies as a field that is relatively new and very much evolving would benefit from these kinds of conversations in the form of response pieces to specific recent articles/book chapters.

In the future, I hope to be able to publish response pieces of this kind that are submitted by other readers/scholars. But, right now, I would like to share my own thoughts on a recently published journal article.

[note: I do not know how common the practice of writing commentary/reflection essays on published articles is in other academic programs, but I had to complete assignments of this type in both undergraduate and graduate classes]

Martin, Paul. The contradictions of pop nationalism in the manga Gate: Thus the JSDF fought there! Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 11(2), 167-181.

“Though Japan’s post-war constitution forbids maintaining the means of waging war, the Japanese Self-Defence Force (JSDF) is one of the most powerful militaries in the world. This contradiction has become increasingly important in recent years as the JSDF has expanded its role and public profile, and as the state has moved closer to re-writing the constitution to allow for a more robust military policy. Alongside this military contradiction is a nationalistic one. The hyper-nationalism of the Pacific War left a general suspicion of overt nationalism amongst Japan’s population, but in recent years casual forms of nationalism have emerged that decouple pride in national identity from political commitment. This article focuses on the manga Gate: Thus the JSDF Fought There! to unpack the relationship between nationalism and the JSDF’s ambiguous position. In this manga, Japan is invaded through a mysterious portal from a fantasy world, allowing the manga to depict the JSDF in combat. While the manga hews close to official JSDF self-representations, in attempting to show the JSDF at war, the manga’s images, characters and narrative foreground contradictions inherent in the JSDF and in Japanese forms of nationalism.”

One common criticism of Japanese popular culture products is that too often, they rely on the same few basic story set-ups that are then explored with only slight modifications and little in the way of innovation. This is why those comics and shows that do significantly buck the expected structures attract so much attention and praise. But every once in a while, a title comes along that doesn’t just “buck” or subvert the expected, but goes in an entirely new direction. An is Gate: Where the JSDF Fought, first a novel series, and then adapted into a manga and a 26-episode anime. (more…)


Apr
2022

Who are the anime/manga scholars? – a 2022 update

categories: Commentary

As anime and manga studies continues to establish itself, developing from simply an area of interest to an established academic field, one of the questions that has to be asked time and time again is not just what is the definition of anime and manga studies, but what are its actual features and characteristics. “Where” does anime and manga studies actually take place – or where do the results of “anime and manga studies” appear. And, similarly, who are the actual participants in this field? Having answers to these questions can help establish a profile for anime and manga studies, and can also allow for comparisons between it and other areas of interest, fields of study, etc.

Seven years ago now, I already tried answering one of these kinds of foundational questions with a basic analysis of “who are the anime/manga scholars“. At that point, I examined the institutional affiliations of the authors who contributed chapters to four different essay collections on anime/manga, and determined that of a total of 59 authors, 35 (59%) were college/university faculty, 8 (14%) – graduate students, 5 (8%) – other academic employees (researchers, etc.), and 11 (19%) – independent scholars or not affiliated with an academic institution (including artists, librarians, museum employees, and industry professionals).

Of course,, anime and manga studies, and Japanese popular culture studies in general has evolved significantly since I published my initial 2015 study. For example, the Society for Animation Studies now includes an Anime Studies special interest group. Mechademia, the first regular English-language scholarly journal on anime/manga and related topics, which first began publication in 2006 but went on hiatus after ten annual volumes, has been relaunched as Mechademia: Second Arc, with an expanded focus on “the study of East Asian popular cultures, broadly conceived”, and a more frequent publication schedule. It has recently been joined by the open-access Journal of Anime and Manga Studies. More and more colleges/universities around the U.S. are offering classes on anime and manga, every year, new graduate students are focusing on anime/manga in their dissertations, and major new textbooks, such as A Companion to Japanese Cinema and Introducing Japanese Popular Culture emphasize the place of anime and manga in Japanese culture.

So, with all of this in mind, I think that 2015 “who are the anime/manga scholars?” is due for an update, with some modifications. In particular, just as Mechademia has expanded its scope, it’s appropriate to go beyond just an analysis of authors of chapters in edited essay collections on anime/manga. In fact, the “new” Mechademia, which has now published 7 issues, each with its own subtitle and general theme (such as “Childhood”, “Soundscapes”, and “New Formulations of the Otaku”) is a perfect source to drawn on to identify some of the current characteristics of authors in anime/manga studies, Japanese popular culture studies, and, really, East Asian popular culture studies in general.

(more…)


Jan
2021

English-Language Scholarship on Osamu Tezuka – Looking at the Numbers

categories: Commentary

If Japanese popular culture studies (and anime/manga studies) is now, in 2021, “a field in formation“, then it is no longer enough just to describe or even analyze. At this point, it is becoming more and important to start thinking about the contours and dimensions of this field, and about what this field encompasses. What topics are scholars who are working in anime and manga studies actually examining? What kinds of approaches are they using?

In this way, Jaqueline Berndt, in an analysis of “the interplay of anime research and the institution of Japanese studies outside of Japan” titled Anime in Academia: Representative Object, Media Form, and Japanese Studies makes the effort to point out that “the bulk of Japanese studies in the humanities pays attention to representations of Japanese culture and society in anime”.

…the bulk of Japanese studies in the humanities pays attention to representations of Japanese culture and society in anime

Jaqueline Berndt, “Anime in Academia”

Similarly, in A Coming of Age in the Anthropological Study of Anime? Introductory Thoughts Envisioning the Business Anthropology of Japanese Animation, Ryotaro Mihara has challenged the field with a straight-forward question: “Why do Anglophone anime studies, especially the anthropological studies on anime, show so little interest in anime’s business aspects and so much interest in its non-commercial activities?”

A related kind of approach would be to ask which particular creators – and even which particular works – is anime and manga studies emphasizing or centering, and the way this process can then affect the expected image or “meaning” of anime/manga outside Japan. I presented an example of this approach in an analysis of English-language scholarly publications on the work of Hayao Miyazaki, demonstrating that, as of the spring of 2018, Princess Mononoke was Miyazaki’s most-studied English film (34 publications, including an edited essay collection), followed by Spirited Away (32, including one full-length book), and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (21).

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