The primary focus of anime and manga studies as an academic area is on the texts/works of Japanese animation and Japanese comics themselves – their meanings, their interpretations, and how they are perceived by audiences. So a “typical” study in this field is something like The altered shall inherit the Earth: Biopower and the disabled body in Tehxnolyze or  The utopia of suburbia: the unchanging past and limitless future in Doraemon. Another strand of scholarship examines how fans actually interact with anime/manga, and fans’ motivations, activities, and practices – just some examples here include A portrait of Japanese popular culture fans who study Japanese at an Australian university: Motivations and activities beyond the classroom and Fannish masculinities in transition in anime music video fandom. But this type of research, valuable as it may be, is generally based on in-depth interviews with very small numbers of individuals. It does not, and really, by design cannot be extended to broader groups, and to presenting a more comprehensive picture of anime fans – not just who they are in terms of demographics, but how they think, perceive the world, behave, and act.

However, one effort to do precisely this is the International Anime Research Project – “a multidisciplinary team of scientists studying the anime/manga fandom (as well as other fandoms)”. Specifically, the project uses an annual survey to explore “various aspects of how anime fans perceive the fandom, interact with other fans, how the fandom influences the self, along with a variety of other research questions aimed at understanding the connection to anime.” The survey has been conducted since 2014, and the Project’s members have used its results in over 20 publications, primarily in the online journal The Phoenix Papers, reporting on topics such as “motivations of cosplayers to participate in the anime fandom“, “anime genre preferences and paranormal beliefs“, and “prevailing stereotypes of anime fans“.

Now, the Project is inviting participants for the 2019 Anime Survey. This year’s goal will be to “understand your experience of being an anime fan, fantasy, identity formation, education, identity, wellbeing, assessments of other fan groups, and LGBTQ inclusion in fandoms.” The survey will take approximately 30 minutes to complete, and all participants will be entered in a drawing for a $25 Amazon gift card.

Additional information about the survey process, including its ethics clearance status, is available on the International Anime Research Project website.

Who exactly are anime fans? What are their demographic profiles, their ethnic/racial/national backgrounds, their income and education levels? How do anime fans view themselves – how are anime fans viewed by non-fans, and by fans of other media or activities? How are anime fans’ personal choices and preferences correlated to their beliefs or behaviors?

Finding concrete answers to these kinds of questions is challenging. Interview-based approaches such as the one Brent Allison uses in his “Interviews with adolescent anime fans” chapter in The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki present some answers, but these probably cannot be generalized in any meaningful way, while the results of any surveys that anime companies may conduct are proprietary and not open to the public. (more…)

As an academic field or area, anime/manga studies is, of course, concerned primarily with Japanese animation and Japanese comics as art forms. But, anime is also a medium – the same goes for manga – and so, anime/manga studies is also inevitably concerned with how Japanese animation and comics are produced, distributed around the world, and experienced by viewers and readers.

Of course, studying media audiences means asking particular questions – and using approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools that are necessarily different from those used in studying art forms. Audience research is complicated, difficult logistically, time-consuming, and, in anime/manga studies, still rather infrequent, taking the form, primarily, of ethnographic studies such as Susan Napier’s The world of anime fandom in America (Mechademia, 1, 47-63) and Patrick Drazen’s “Reading right to left: The surprisingly broad appeal of manga and anime; or, ‘wait a minute'” (in Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World). Sandra Annett’s recent book Anime Fan Communities: Transcultural Flows and Frictions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) is definitely a welcome addition to the literature on this topic, but again, its approach is essentially descriptive, not quantitative.

Another initiative that has specifically focused on researching anime fans – their demographics, attitudes, behaviors, personal characteristics, political affiliations, and other related factors is the International Anime Research Project, a group of scholars led by Dr. Stephen Reysen (Texas A&M University-Commerce).

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