Tag: book chapters


Jan
2026

Who Are the Anime/Manga Studies Publishers – 2025 Essay Collections

categories: Commentary

When thinking about the nature of anime and manga studies as a discreet subject area, it is certainly possible to raise a whole range of different questions. For example, in a chapter in the recent 2nd edition of the definitive essay collection Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, Mark McLelland highlights some of the unique challenges of “managing manga studies in the convergent classroom“. Similarly, in the latest version of the International Center for Japanese Studies report Japanese Studies Around the World (2024), Yoshikuni Igarashi presents an overview of “the state of manga studies in North America“. And, in the one of the leading journals in the broader Japanese Studies field, Ryotaro Mihara, in the provocatively-titled Decolonising anime studies: A prolegomenon makes the argument “that the field of Anglophone anime studies should itself be scrutinised in relation to how it canonises a specific ‘style of thought’ (as Said terms it) in understanding anime at the expense of anime itself”.

At the same time, even as we ask these kinds of questions about anime and manga studies, it is also crucial to ask other questions – that are not as much about general and abstract concepts as they are about the specific activities that we label “anime and manga studies”, primarily, teaching, and scholarly publications. Asking certain concrete questions lets us essentially operationalize the abstract concepts and treat “anime and manga studies” as something that can be not just defined, but itself studied.

One such question, perhaps one of the most straight-forward questions to ask about any new developing academic field, is simply how is new scholarship in the field actually published – in what formats, and by what publishers. Is the field dominated by just a small group of publishers? Or are publications dispersed among many? A prominent study that asks this question is The oligopoly of academic publishers in the Digital Era (PLoS, 2015). Critiques of the “oligopoly” are also frequent – one excellent example is the chapter by Paige Mann, Scholarship in a globalized world: The publishing ecosystem and alternatives to the Oligopoly, in the 2022 essay collection Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship (Rutgers University Press).

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Feb
2025

Authors’ Roundtable – The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime

categories: Announcements

When, in 1999, Susan Napier published her study Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, a scholarly monograph of that kind was both unique and unexpected. It was also foundational to the field of anime studies – and paved the way for the easily several dozen full-length books on anime/manga that have come out since – titles such as Anime: A Critical Introduction, Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan, Leiji Matsumoto: Essays on the Manga and Anime Legend, and Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. Perhaps predictably, the focus of many of these titles has gotten progressively more narrow – some recent examples are monographs on “The Moral Narratives of Hayao Miyazaki“, and on “Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health“. This is of course not to dismiss these more narrowly focused studies, but rather, to argue that the field would also benefit from books that were perhaps broader in scope.

And, as it turned out, just last year, Cambridge University Press, one of the world’s most prestigious and recognizable academic publishers, met this need – by publishing The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime – a collection of 19 short essays, each around 10 pages long, that would serve as “a lively and accessible introduction, exploring the local contexts of manga and anime production, distribution, and reception in Japan, as well as the global influence and impact of these versatile media”.

The emphasis in the Companion is not as much on specific representative or prominent anime/manga titles (or directors/creators)as it is on exploring some of the major general characteristics of the two media forms. To this end, some of the topics of the individual chapters include “graphic style in manga and anime”, “voice acting for anime”, the nature of the relationships between “manga editors and their artists”, and a survey of “anime fandom in Japan and beyond”.

On February 19, Hosei University (Tokyo, Japan), will host a special round-table discussion bringing together the book’s editor and several authors of the individual chapters. The goal of the discussion will be to consider applications of the Companion to classroom instruction, and future perspectives in anime and manga studies, and it will also be accessible online.

Participants:

Dr. Jaqueline Berndt, Professor, Japanese Language and Culture, Stockholm University
– editor, and author, Introduction: Two Media Forms in Correlation and Premodern Roots of Story-Manga?

Dr. Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, Professor, Urban Innovation, Yokohama National University
– author, Anime Fandom in Japan and Beyond

Dr. Patrick W. Galbraith, Associate Professor, International Communication, Senshu University
– author, Manga Readerships, Imaginative Agency, and the “Erotic Barrier”

Dr. Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, Associate Professor, Culture & Communication, Waseda University
– author, Genre Networks and Anime Studios

Dr. Stevie Suan, Associate Professor, Global and Interdisciplinary Studies, Hosei University
– author, Character Acting in Anime

Location:
Hosei University, Ichigaya Campus
Ouchiyama Building, Room Y401
Time: 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

[Additional Details and Registration]



Jan
2025

Anime and Manga Studies in 2024 – Year in Review

categories: Commentary

As we close out 2024 and move into 2025, content providers everywhere online, from Vox to A.V. Club to Anime News Network are publishing year-end summary articles and Best-Of lists. (…and worst-of lists). Here at animemangastudies.com, I do not have either hopes or ambitions to compete with those kinds of content providers – but you know what, maybe I can also take a bit of time to point out just some of the highlights of 2024 when it comes to – anime and manga studies!

Granted, many of the year’s highlights will be based on the full list of English-language scholarly publications on anime/manga that appeared throughout the year. But even a cursory look at this list can bring up some really interesting

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From what I can tell, 2024 saw the publication of at least 6 scholarly monographs that discuss different aspects of Japanese animation and comics either primarily or at least extensively alongside other related topics:

In The Flesh of Animation: Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media, Sandra Annett (Wilfried Laurier University) explores the ways that animation can specifically “provoke” or evoke different sensory experiences – using examples from anime such as Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo – as well as a variety of American, European, Korean, and other animated films.

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Jan
2024

Interview with the Anime Scholar – Dr. Bill Ellis

categories: Awards, In Their Own Words, Interviews

Several weeks ago, the American Folklore Society, the leading organization for the study and advancement of folklore and expressive cultural traditions wordwide, broadly defined, announced that its 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award was being bestowed on Dr. Bill Ellis, emeritus professor, Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Ellis is a pre-eminent folklore scholar – and, over the last fifteen years, he has written extensively on the intersections between folklore in general and fairy tales specifically, and anime/manga. Some of his major publications in this area include the chapter “Folklore and gender inversion in Cardcaptor Sakura”, in the 2009 essay collection The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture, one of the first English-language studies of that particular manga, as well as The fairy-telling craft of Princess Tutu: Metacommentary and the folkloresque, and the chapter Anime and manga: The influence of Tale Type 510B on Japanese manga/anime in the Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy Tale Cultures. Dr. Ellis also contributed the “Anime and manga” section to the Greenwood Publishing Group reference volume Youth Cultures in America.

And, to mark this, I am extremely excited to be able to sit down with Dr. Ellis, and to hear his thoughts on anime, manga, and folklore all fit together!

MK: As an experienced and established folklore scholar, how did you become interested in Japanese comics?

Bill Ellis: To begin with, I should note that I have always been seen as something of an outsider in folklore studies.  My training was in and English program, rather than folklore studies per se, notably Medieval English literature and the American Renaissance.  I was hired by a small campus of Penn State University (freshmen and sophomores only) on the basis of my experience in teaching remedial composition and my work with Ohio State’s Center for Textual Studies, which was preparing a standard edition of everything (yes, everythingI) written by the author Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I edited two volumes of his business letters written when he was American consul at Liverpool and contributed to four other volumes of letters and notebooks.  On the strength of that, I earned tenure from Penn State, which considered my work in folklore a whimsical and irrelevant digression from “mainstream” research.

My first awareness of the anime/manga came in the late 90s by way of my teenaged daughter, who for a time dated a boy who was a fan of Dragon Ball Z.

By disposition I was always something of a lone-walker, doing things not because one gained academic credit by doing so, but because I thought the topics important for some reason.  Examples of these off-beat topics included alien abductions, adolescents’ legend-trips, Satanic cult rumors and panics, topical black humor referencing disasters (e.g., Challenger Shuttle jokes and later the much larger corpus of September 11 humor), and Facebook games.

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Jan
2024

One Piece in Anime and Manga Studies

categories: Bibliographies

One of the most memorable anime-related events of 2023 was the worldwide Netflix launch of a live-action series adapting the long-running One Piece manga and anime series, by far one of the most successful and globally recognized entertainment properties of all time in any medium. As could be expected, viewers were initially cautious about just how the live action series would turn out, but, reviews and audience reactions were largely positive.

For the purposes of this site, however, what is particularly interesting is not so much the reaction of critics and fans, but, rather, whether One Piece has received any extent of attention from anime/manga scholars. And, as it turns out, the answer to this question is very much yes. In fact, with at least eight English-language publications on it so far, the way that scholars have examined One Piece since the manga first began publication in Japan in 1997, presents some very interesting, even if not yet very extensive, examples of different scholarly approaches to Japanese comics and animation!

One Piece deserves our attention not only because it is the most successful Japanese mangas of all time, but also because it reflects on dilemmas of IR in a surprisingly elaborate manner

– Ákos Kopper, Pirates, justice and global order in the anime “One Piece”

2023

  • Nakamura, Konoyu. One Piece: Diversity and borderlessness.
    In Marybeth Carter, & Stephen Farah (eds). The Spectre of the Other in Jungian psychoanalysis: Political, psychological, and sociological perspectives (pp. 175-184). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

    Anime constitutes prime material to be analysed and interpreted in a Jungian manner. This chapter focuses on ONE PIECE, a fantastic sea adventure. The protagonist is a 17-year-old named Luffy who journeys with his friends, called ‘the team of straw’, in search of a legendary treasure, the titular ONE PIECE. Here Konoyu Nakamura explores the idea of ‘the team of straw’ as an individual. She discusses the ‘variety and differences’ that these characters represent not only in terms of the differentiation of an individual but also in relation to the diversity represented by the cultural and national borderlessness that societies face today.
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Jan
2024

Makoto Shinkai – A Bibliography of English-language Scholarly Writing

categories: Bibliographies

The start of the year’s movie awards season is always a good opportunity to reflect back on what the year has offered to audiences in terms of anime – and what anime continues to offer to viewers. This year, understandably, much of the attention that was directed towards new Japanese animated feature films went to Hayao Miyazaki’s 君たちはどう生きるか / How Do You Live / The Boy and the Heron. But that it was neither the only anime feature film released this year, nor the only one that is receiving recognition now that the awards season has launched. And, perhaps, if The Boy and the Heron represents Japanese animation looking back, the other prominent film that opened this year worldwide – Makoto Shinkai’s すずめの戸締まり / Suzume is inevitably both the present – and the future – of Japanese animation.

And for that matter, in the same way that The Boy and the Heron is the capstone film for Hayao Miyazaki’s career as a director and creator, Suzume, globally successful and critically acclaimed, eligible for the 2024 Academy Awards, and already nominated for the Golden Globes, is a great summation of the work that Shinkai has done up to now, from his first days as a video game artist, through his earliest solo projects, and through more and more sophisticated and elaborate films. So far, Suzume has gathered significant critical attention, though no scholarly responses yet, but watching this film and thinking about it is also a great time to reflect on how scholars are now approaching Makoto Shinkai – because scholars certainly are!

Total: 20 publications (15 journal articles, 5 chapters in edited essay collections)

2023

Izumi, Katsuya. Saviours of the world: Impersonality and success in Shinkai Makoto’s animated films.
In Shih-Wen Sue Chen & Sin Wen Lau (eds.). Representations of children and success in Asia: Dream chasers (pp. 202-211). Abington, UK. Routledge.

  • “This chapter analyzes how Shinkai Makoto, a Japanese animation film director, has built a new image of the teenage hero who reflects shifts in cultural values during the Heisei period (1989–2019). Focusing on the teenagers, Mitsuha and Taki, in Your Name. (2016), this chapter argues that impersonality, rather than strong individualism, enables Shinkai’s characters to become heroes in the sekai-kei genre. Shintoism and classical Japanese language constitute the key elements in Shinkai’s concept of impersonality, or the state of an individual character in which they empty themselves to become a medium for others’ agencies and voices.”
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Dec
2023

Satoshi Kon (1963-2010) – An Anime Studies Retrospective

categories: Bibliographies

When, around Christmas, journalists and other commentators discuss what they consider to be the most memorable depictions of the holidays and related themes in “global cinema”, one title that consistently finds its way into these discussions is an anime film – Tokyo Godfathers, directed by Satoshi Kon. Kon, tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer on August 24, 2010 at the age of 47. At the time of his death, he was already recognized as one of the most prominent directors working in Japanese animation, and since then, his stature has only grown. Accordingly, while reflecting on the anime that he contributed to, it is also important to mark how anime scholars have approached his work.

Previously, I presented a basic content analysis of scholarly works on Satoshi Kon’s films, with the goal of determining which ones of his films were the most frequently studied. And now, supplementing this, I believe it is also useful to present essentially a comprehensive bibliography of English-language scholarly publications on Satoshi Kon and his works, especially designed to commemorate both the 60th anniversary of his birth, and 30 years since the first such publication.

As with other similar specialized resources, this bibliography is based on materials in the larger Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies. It is based on searches for relevant terms in various major specialized academic databases, as well as in Google Scholar, and, where possible, direct examinations of relevant publications to identify other cited materials. The earliest article in the bibliography that I am currently away of is dated 1993 – on Kon’s manga World Apartment Horror; the most recent is from earlier this year, on “giallo tropes and gender in Perfect Blue“. Between these are 36 other publications – for a total of 38 – consisting of 1 full-length monograph, 7 chapters in edited essay collections, and 30 individual articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. And, with as many as six of these added in just the last two years, it may be entirely safe to assume that non-Japanese scholars will continue to be interested in Satoshi Kon and his works for the foreseeable future.

Satoshi Kon – A Bibliography of English-language Scholarly Publications – 1993-2023-?

2023

2022

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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.

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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.”

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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…)