The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, strategies and Identities of Japanese Imagination.

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TunuĂŠ InTernaTIonal

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Marco Pellitteri

The Dragon anD The Dazzle Models, strategies, and identities of Japanese iMagination a european perspective

Preface by Kiyomitsu Yui With an essay by Jean-Marie Bouissou Contributions by Gianluca Di Fratta Cristiano Martorella Bounthavy Suvilay

The Japan Foundation has generously funded the translation and publication of this book

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guide For bibliograPhiCal CaTaloguing

Pellitteri, Marco, 1974– The Dragon and the Dazzle. Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination—A European Perspective. / Marco Pellitteri; Preface by Kiyomitsu Yui bibliography included p.cm.–(Sociology—globalization—Japan—Mass Media) iSbn-13 gS1 978-88-89613-89-4 1. Sociology of mass communication—Japan—Japanese society—Cultural industries—imagination.

2. globalization—asia—Popular culture—Consumer goods—animation cinema—Comics. 3.

Marketing—Youth culture—Manga—anime—robots.

Translation by roberto branca Proofreading by Christie barber This scholarly work is aimed to analysis and promotion of ideas, authors, artists, and works, and avails itself of the right of citation and quotation, as in art. 70, comma 1/bis of the italian Legge sul Diritto d’Autore (‘law on Copyright’), in art. 10 of the Berne Convention, and in Title 17, § 107 of the Copyright Act (united States of america). The works hereby cited/quoted and the images reproduced—all of which include the citation of the authors and/or copyright owners—are aimed to validate a thesis, or constitute the premise for a confutation or discussion, or are part of an organized review, or illustrate a scholarly or journalistic discourse. The illustrations and photographs, in particular, are reproduced in black and white, smaller size than the originals, low digital resolution, and constitute specific and partial details of the original images. Therefore they perform a merely suggestive function and fall in every respect within the fair use allowed by current international laws.

Copyright © Tunué S.r.l.

Via bramante 32 04100 latina – italy tunue.com | info@tunue.com editorial director: Massimiliano Clemente graphics, pagination and cover: Tunué S.r.l.

Translation, reproduction and adaptation rights are reserved for every other country.

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Table of ConTenTs

xv xxv

PreFaCe by Kiyomitsu Yui ForeWord

xxv

a starting note for the international readers

xxx

original presentation for the italian edition bibliographical note—note on the edition—acknowledgements

xxxiv

3 6 11 12 14 17 20 21

Introduction

27

ParT I — Themes of JaPanese TransnaTIonal PoP CulTure In ComICs, anImaTIon, anD VIDeogames

29

I

i

general framework

ii

limits of the italian literature

iii Three changes in the approach to mass media and the imagination iV UFo Robo Grendizer V

Pokémon

Vi using a syncretic view to study mediatic phenomena Vii Three models and two strategies

PoP’n’global JaPan a few useful concepts for looking at Japan and its pop culture in the 21 century st

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29 29 35 45 46 48 54 55 61 67

68 69 71 75 77

i.1

i.2

i.3

Cultural globalization, and transnationality i.1.1

Cultural globalization, and postmodernity

i.1.2

orientalisms, and transnationality of Japanese culture

From taishû bunka to J-Pop i.2.1

Popular culture and pop culture

i.2.2

Pop culture, cool Japan, and J-Pop

nationalism and «odours» in Japanese globalized culture i.3.1

nationalism and mass culture in contemporary Japan

i.3.2

odourless cultures, fragrant cultures, and perfumed cultures

II The TraVellIng CulTure of manga anD anIme Manga and aniMe in the light of the transnational dynaMics with western sequential art and aniMation ii.1 Manga ii.1.1 What manga are and how they arrived in italy ii.1.1.1 notes on the manga publishing market in italy ii.1.1.2 The importance of manga for Western readers ii.1.1.3 The distinction between character and kyara in contemporary manga

82 83 84 86

ii.2 disney, television, and the consolidation of a «rule» for animated cartoons ii.3 Serial animation in Japan and a new technical-linguistic standard ii.4 a short comparative analysis ii.4.1 historical-graphic differences Sketches and cartoons vs emakimono and kamishibai

89

ii.4.2 anthropological-expressive differences Vaudeville, chalk talk, and human types vs Kabuki theatre, Nô theatre, and a multidimensional idiom

93

ii.4.3 Semiotic-communicative differences Theatre-based verbal emphasis vs predominance of image on word

97 99 100 100 107 110 112

ii.5 Concise discussion on the genres of Japanese serial animation ii.5.1 a definition for «anime»

ii.6 on the expressive codes of anime ii.6.1 on the big eyes ii.6.2 Character design ii.6.3 notes on direction ii.6.4 Temporality and spatiality

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114 115 116 117 123 124 125

ii.7 ii.8

ii.6.5

Visual metaphors

ii.6.6

Sonorities

The «travelling culture» spread by manga and anime The odour of anime

III/1 maChIna ex nIPPon the robot and the artificial person in the west and Japan iii/1.1 Towards automation, from myth to robots iii/1.1.1 Classic science-fiction, and the conflict-based idea of the robot

127

iii/1.1.2 From the alchemical homunculi to mechanical movement as art

132 134 141

145 145 146 148 151

iii/1.2 The shell and spirit of the Japanese cyborg iii/1.3 Japan and «mechatronics» III/2 nIPPon ex maChIna robot and cyborgs in aniMe: generational conflicts and political Metaphors iii/2.1 Manga by gô nagai in the 1970s iii/2.1.1 notes on «gekiga» manga iii/2.1.2 demons and gears

iii/2.2 robots and not: identity-related armour plates, metallic uteri iii/2.2.1 astro boy, the postwar tabula rasa, and the cyborgian prophecy

153 256

iii/2.2.2 robots from Mazinger Z to gundam iii/2.2.2.1 Mazinger Z and the revenge of sub-consciousness

157 159 161 162 166 168 169 172 172

iii/2.2.2.2 Tradition, nationalism, and identity iii/2.2.2.3 drama, pain, and generational conflict iii/2.2.2.4 Trauma and catharsis iii/2.2.2.5 Cooperation and sexuality iii/2.2.2.6 Post-nagai robots and the exoticism of evil

iii/2.2.3 From samurai robots to legged tanks iii/2.2.4 honour, duty, and citizenship in robot wars iii/2.2.5 new robotic perspectives iii/2.2.5.1 novelties, and the revival of the oldies but goldies

173

iii/2.2.5.2 beyond the robots: cyborgs and androids

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177 178 180 181 183 184 190 190 191 194 198 205 208 209 211 214

223 223 226 229 235 236 238 238 240 243

IV KawaII InfanTs the aesthetics of youth and the epheMeral in today’s Japan iV.1 Kawaii iV.1.1

Kawaii before kawaii (by Cristiano Martorella) iV.1.1.1 Sociological level (CM) iV.1.1.2 aesthetic level (CM)

iV.1.2 Kawaii in manga and anime iV.1.3 Kawaii in Japanese society iV.1.3.1 animal Mania iV.1.3.2 birth of kawaii as a youth culture iV.1.3.3 Kawaii as «ideology»

iV.2 otaku and hikikomori: the adults rejecting the misfit youths iV.3 a note on shinjinrui iV.4 The denied childhood as opposition to kawaii and moratorium ningen iV.4.1 Ties to Western literature in anime about children iV.4.2 The roots of the loneliness of youth in anime

iV.5 normativeness in anime as a symbolic reaction to the moratorium of youth V from Dorama To suPermarIo short notes on television and videogaMes in Japan V.1 Structure and contents of Japanese television V.2 Anime and advertising V.3 From Puckman to Sonic: videogames and kawaii VI In The Dragon’s CoIls Ufo Robo gRendizeR and Japanese identity Vi.1 The project and the pilot movie Vi.2 The series: a vision of Japan behind the Screw Crusher Punch Vi.2.1 Technical data, and plot Vi.2.2 Filmic language, and soundtrack Vi.2.3 design, and symbolic balances between invaded and invaders: the earth-Fleed cooperation as a metaphor of the Japan-uSa axis

247

Vi.2.4 Values, philosophies, and metaphors.

Politics and robots in the 1970s

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248 251 254

Vi.2.4.1 Characters and settings Vi.2.4.2 generations, war, and portrayal of the enemy Vi.2.4.3 Watermark messages on the political identity of Japan

254

• First metaphor: the sorrows of young Kôji, between marketing and authorship

255

• Second metaphor: Japan, the uSa, and the postwar geopolitical situation

259

Vi.3 Conclusions: Japanese uneasiness about the totalitarian geopolitical encirclement in east asia Vi.4 A latere: UFo Robo Grendizer’s success in Japan

263 267 267 268 270 270 271

VII DazzlesTruCK the birth and glories of PokéMon in the era of polyMediality Vii.1 general coordinates of the Pokémon universe Vii.1.1 Pokémon authors and merchandise Vii.1.2 Contents: issues, messages, codes Vii.1.2.1 The look of Pokémons Vii.1.2.2 The animation and the graphic style of the TV series and the videogames

272 274 275 276

Vii.1.2.3 Plot and values

Vii.1.3 Containers: media, formats, platforms Vii.1.3.1 The bumpy mediatic career of Pokémon

Vii.2 relations between commercial strategies and meaning paths

283

ParT II — reCePTIon anD DeVeloPmenT sTraTegIes of JaPanese ImagInaTIon In ITaly from grenDIzer To PIKaChû

285

I

286 286 288

Dragon TeleVIsIon television and televisual culture in italy in the 1970s i.1 notes on television in italy i.1.1

From pedagogical television to commercial television

i.1.2

national mass culture and the transformation of broadcasting strategies

290

i.2

Television’s children, and children’s television

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295 296 302 310

II The Dragon from mounT fuJI To monTe bIanCo cultural shock and gaMeplay revolution ii.1 Atlas UFo Robot in italy ii.2 goldrake, the political debate, and the peril coming from outer space ii.2.1

Visceral rejections, Western unease, and hyper-protective pedagogy

316 318 318 320 325

ii.2.2

The stigmatization of anime in a historical perspective

ii.3 about goldrake and anime as medial commodities ii.3.1

Toys and cognitive skills

ii.3.2

Anime, fabulation, and new gameplay practices

III sCrIPTa manga the italian and western essay tradition on Japanese iMagination for youth, and the probleMs of Mutual knowledge aMong the international voices in the debate

326 326

iii.1 in italy iii.1.1 From fanzines to professional magazines (by Gianluca Di Fratta)

329 334 336 341 344 350 353

iii.1.2 Critical studies and amateur essays (GDF) iii.1.3 Journalistic press (GDF) iii.1.4 academic studies and informative works (GDF)

iii.2 in France iii.2.1 a very early French study iii.2.2 old theoretical tools for new languages iii.2.3 an excursus in French critic literature (by Bounthavy Suvilay)

355 356

iii.3 Western essay writings iii.3.1 Manga and anime in the uSa, base for the local essay tradition

361 363

iii.3.3 notes on the development

364

iii.3.4 The auto-reference and linguistic isolation issues

iii.3.2 research in the united States of a european essay writing tradition and research in the scientific debate

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367

368 369 369 370 371 373 374 376 377 378

IV From Astro Boy to Pokémon And Beyond Six intermedial development modelS of the ludic-narrative univerSeS for children IV.1 Two levels of intermedia design IV.2 Five models of intermedia growth IV.2.1 Dawning model IV.2.2 Binary model IV.2.3 Inverse binary model IV.2.4 Synergic organized model IV.2.5 Synergic spontaneous model

IV.3 Super-synergic model IV.3.1 The pervading nature of the Pokémon model IV.3.2 Quasi-simultaneity in the launch of Pokémon merchandise

379 381

387

389 394

IV.3.3 Globalist evolution in the circulation of imaginary worlds

IV.4 Shrek, Harry Potter, and the new multimedial «hotchpotch» V the «soFt Power» oF JAPAnese PoP Culture phaSeS, StrategieS, and effectS of manga and anime in italy and europe V.1 Strategies and reactions during the Dragon phase V.1.1

Cultural codifications and recodifications at the start and at the destination

396 400 413

V.1.1.1

At the start: five kinds of cultural setting

V.1.1.2

At the destination: five kinds of re-adaptation

V.1.2 From reception to production / I The graphical métissage in Italy during the Dragon phase

414 415 417 420 422 430

V.1.2.1

Manga drawn by children

V.1.2.2 Fanzines and amateur manga

V.2

Strategies and reactions during the Dazzle phase V.2.1 Neo-television and animation for children in the Dazzle years V.2.2 Rejection and interpolation of the Japanese cultural odour V.2.3 From reception to production / II The graphical métissage in Italy during the Dazzle phase

432 436 440

V.2.3.1 Hybridization of the comics style

V.2.4 The so-called Italian otaku, an open issue V.2.5 Advances of the Dazzle phase in Italy and beyond

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442

V.2.5.1

The adoption of the manga reading format from right to left

443

V.2.5.2

Comics conventions as the headquarters

446 451 454 455 460

V.2.5.3

animation songs, revivals, and cover bands

V.2.5.4

Fate of Japanese animation in Western cinemas

V.2.5.5

W.I.T.C.h., Winx Club, and trans-creolization

V.2.5.6

The expansion of manga in europe

V.2.5.7

real Japans and imaginary Japans

of manga fans

465

465 466 468 469 472 475

479

480 483 484 484 488 492

VI global manga why Japanese coMics have becoMe a global cultural coMModity (by Jean-MaRie boUissoU) Vi.1 Paradoxes Vi.2 a short history of a French baby-boomer fond of bandes dessinÊes Vi.3 The impact power of an industrial commodity Vi.4 an exuberance (almost) free from censorship Vi.5 Scenarios for a worldwide post-industrial youth / 1 Akira, or the dynamic disillusion Vi.6 Scenarios for a worldwide post-industrial youth / 2 a farewell to Astro Boy VII reaDIng manga fanDom soMe inforMation on recent Manga/aniMe audience studies in italy and europe Vii.1 From the underground to public libraries Vii.2 The Japan’s New Cultural Power international research Vii.2.1 a brief look at the first italian results Vii.2.1.1 Socio-demographic data Vii.2.1.2 Some aspects of the relationship with manga Vii.2.1.3 Cognition on Japan previous to the discovery of manga

493

Vii.2.1.4 desires for/purposes of knowledge about Japan suggested by manga

494 497

Vii.2.1.5 image of Japan received/derived from manga

Vii.3 a short in-depth examination of some young manga readers

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498 501 503 506 509 510

Vii.3.1

a portrait of the manga reader as a young person

Vii.3.2 being adolescents, reading manga Vii.3.3

Cultural knowledges about Japan

Vii.3.4 Manga, everyday life, and values Vii.3.5

reality and fiction in manga

Vii.3.6 Side notes

515 519 527 529 531 539 543

ConClusIons

547

noTes

619

bIblIograPhy

i

The machine

ii

The infant

iii

The mutation

iV

The dragon, the dazzle, and‌

V

The mythic viaticum from Japan to italian/european publics

Vi

Final considerations for future work

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PrefaCe

by Kiyomitsu Yui1

I. A Dazzlestruck Japanese Thanks to this «dazzling» book The Dragon and the Dazzle, published at the beginning of the 21st century, i have realized that we have finally entered an era of all-comprehending and systematic analysis of manga and anime—the Japanese comics and cartoons—as a glocal phenomenon. before this volume, those who analyse these two expressive forms had never reached this level of accuracy and attention. one of the most amazing (and indeed most «dazzling») features of this book is its perfect combination of detailed information, precision in discussing them and in-depth analysis. as a Japanese scholar, and therefore a «compatriot» of the manga/anime phenomenon, my surprise is doubled and focused around two questions: first of all, how did the author of this book reach his goal? and, more importantly, how did he do it despite being—from my point of view as Japanese scholar—a foreign author? i am sure that, reading this book, the readers will ask themselves the same intriguing questions.

There is nothing more i can add to this book, but i can try to highlight other topics that could be explored and developed from what has been discussed here; this is my aim for this Preface.

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preface

II. Glocalization and anime

xvi.

over the last few years, every time i have had the opportunity to visit different countries, holding conferences on manga and anime in several universities in Poland, austria, italy, France, egypt, China, and South Korea, i have used two diagrams as starting points. The first is on the next page. in my opinion, there can be great differences even between manga and anime because they are distinct cultural products, but have in common some basic sociological elements; they are features related to glocalization [robertson 1992] and to postmodernity. as shown in the diagram, i have attempted to theorize a basic social disposition around the manga/anime phenomenon. in the middle of the vertical/temporal axis is the modern age, characterized by the nation-states. on top, there is the postmodern or late-modern age, while below lies the pre-modern age. on the horizontal/spatial axis, in the direction of the local dimension, we find the phenomena of «less than» national importance, like regionalism, ethnicity or small groups that can be defined «tribal»; in contrast, moving in the global direction, we find the phenomena of «more than» national importance, like Mcdonaldization and the information society. i believe that manga and anime can be placed in the postmodern direction, in the middle of the local-global axis, or, in other words, in the glocal zone. it is said that the nPo and ngo (non-profit and non-governmental organizations) movements can be glocal, represented by the slogan «think globally, act locally»; manga and anime are glocal themselves, but not exactly like other cultural productions of the glocalization age. as arjun appadurai suggests, the tie between imagination and social life is becoming increasingly global and less territorial [appadurai 1996: 55]. it is my opinion that appadurai means that nowadays all the cultural products generated and distributed through the electronic media share the same destiny to intersect with these two contemporary tendencies: postmodern and glocalization. in this context lies the basic difference between manga and anime: anime are a product closely associated with the electronic media, and often become the ambassadors of manga in the global arena before manga is exported through the press. Manga fans in the world are often exposed to the anime first, and only at a later stage their passion brings them in contact with the broader contents of the manga and the large amount of collateral information orbiting around them. ironically, on account of the creativity of this enormous sector of the content indus-

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glocalization and aniMe

try, it is really manga that have served as a sort of endless well and have constituted the central image for a typical strategy of media mix; animated television series, films, videogames, food products, trading cards and so on, what is elsewhere called image alliance [Shiraishi 1997]. in other words, in this whole strategy of media mix, manga is the starting point, which is exactly the opposite of what happened with the historical and chronological process of penetration of Japanese comics into markets outside Japan. in order to look for the true creativity core of the industry of manga/anime, fans from across the whole world are searching for and examining original manga.

DIAGrAm 1

窶｢ Temporal

Postmodern (Late-modern)

axis

ethnicity tribality

information society

.xvii

npo窶馬go Manga as glocal phenomenon Mcdonaldization

regionalism

Modern Local

Global

nation-states

e.g. intellectuals e.g. feudal system

Medieval world, pax romana

Traditional

窶｢

spatial axis

窶｢

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preface

III. Postmodernity and anime/manga

xviii.

The popularity of anime (and then of manga) and the promptness in welcoming them, particularly from new generations, is indicative of a deeper predisposition to postmodern condition. The role of manga and anime today must be explained in connection with the postmodern tendencies/conceptions that now follow.

1—Time fragmentation and space reorganization, in close relationship with that process already called glocalization. let us think about daily life in contact with MTV and the internet, that can bring us in every angle of the world in a heartbeat. This situation can result in continuous space-time fragmentations of our life.

2—aesthetic reconfiguration of daily life. This process concerns the diffusion of urban lifestyles. Sociologist and philosopher georg Simmel has explained this process very well, but for him this tendency was limited to some small middle-class groups, which introduced a large variety of possibilities within which it was possible to decide to assume a large variety of behaviours dictated by personal tastes and styles. now, this tendency has expanded to other social classes in almost all the advanced capitalistic countries.

3—Self decentralization or deconstruction of the subject. Following the time and space fragmentation, the «modern man» described by david riesman as a human being who has absorbed a transcendental system of values does not exist anymore. here «transcendental» means a system of values that is not inserted in a concrete context but transcends it, puts it aside. in place of this type of modern man, now the dominant person is «eterodirect», as riesman calls it [riesman et al. 1950].

4—de-differentiation of the boundaries. between high and low culture, nation and ethnicity, original and copy, real and fictitious, genres and forms such as the classical arts, objects, the visual arts, novels, games, etc.: all these boundaries have a tendency to fade. regarding the decline of the great narratives in discussing postmodernity, we can see many small narratives and stories coming from every corner of the world, each with its own «exotic» fragrance. it is easy to perceive the bond between this phenomenon and the fragmentation of space and time, and therefore the connection between this situation and the pluralization process of the globalization centres. The anime dVds and the manga books and magazines that we can find in almost every newsstand, bookstore, comic-book store and grocery store all around the world, are one of the examples of this plurality.

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postModernity and aniMe/Manga

besides, this fragmentation of time and space corresponds, in the Japanese case, to a syncretism at the level of the value system. Japanese syncretism, well-known as it is, is in direct correspondence with the processes of modernization as much as with those of postmodernization. The fundamental duty of modernization in Japan was very different from that of the Western world. Since in Japan—both in the late 19th century and after 1945—the central problems were accepting, adapting and planning a strategy to obtain short-term objectives, the typical local syncretism and the mixture of religions had a functional importance. Therefore, both the Japanese society and culture already possessed some postmodern elements during their process of modernization, and now these are gradually gaining the spotlight. it is however important to look at the differences between modern and postmodern Japan: if in the former the key word was «attainment» (of industrial, economic, urban, political, military, colonial objectives, etc.), in postmodern Japan the most important points are «invention» and «creation». it is not a coincidence that Japan is currently emphasized as one of the main propulsive centres of glocalization.

This type of Japanese syncretism involves almost all the neuralgic points of the postmodern condition. i strongly doubt that riesman’s crucial image of «modern man» who absorbs a transcendental value has been included in the process of historical and social modernization in Japan. Certainly the «situational self», which is the ability of handling every situation in a different way—a sort of collection of oneselves which vary according to the various contexts—is not at all an unusual factor in Japanese structural and social organization. but it is westernization that is one of the most crucial aspects of the Japanese modernization: during the process of «importation» of elements of the Western world, the previous boundaries and distinctions among genders, areas and hierarchies have become confused.

Finally, Japan is famous as a land giving a lot of attention to aesthetics. but why? one can once again call upon the case of Western-style modernization. From a Japanese point of view, the combination of a nucleus of values seen as transcendental, of a Freudian disciplining super-ego and of a Weberian ascetic tradition is not universal at a historical level, not even if considered inside the process of modernization. i am certainly not saying that asceticism or suppression of the super-ego are unknown in Japan; to the contrary, some important areas and situations, mainly in public life, exist where «repression» is essential for Japanese society and way of thinking. but there are other sectors of social life which are totally free

.xix

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preface

from these containment processes. once again this follows the division of a society in portions of fragmented space and time. in every sector of social life, people follow different behaviours. That is, the expression of desire is different in Japan in comparison to what happens in the West. This difference has allowed Japanese society to develop asceticism in daily life in a relatively easy way, without interruption in the passage from the traditional to the modern ages.

So, through these processes, in which postmodern characteristics and glocal movements meet, a favourable situation for the development of a Japanese pop culture and the explosion of manga and anime has come to form, based on these very presumptions.

IV. How to «read» manga and anime

xx.

in a second diagram analysing less general aspects, i offer a scheme «to read» manga and anime.2 on the top, divided by the top half of the vertical axis, on one side there are the creators, who are the producers and the authors; in the opposite direction are the consumers, who are the recipients and readers. Manga and anime are on both sides of the horizontal axis, being considered both as products of a historical and social context, and as works. Several critics have discussed the textual component of manga and anime and their multi-faceted characteristics as narratives; others instead have tried to explain them in sociocultural terms, at times seeing the themes or the quality of some manga and anime as a reflection of great social events.

The image alliance is positioned in the quadrant combining production and social context, while the most assiduous fans are found in the reception quadrant. i have chosen to position the fanzines on the production side, but it must be underlined that one of the peculiarities of the manga is the lack of distinction between official and amateur producers: the fan base and the world of fanzines are an inexhaustible source of creativeness behind the world of the manga. recent research has underlined that cooperation between editors, publishers, and authors is increasingly important. This collaboration, and the close relationship between groups of fans who make fanzines and the professional authors, once again point out the indefiniteness of the border between fans and professional manga authors. in the world of manga, the phenomenon is connected to the so-called niji sôsaku (‘derived creation’), which high-

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how to «read» Manga and aniMe

lights the inter-textual nature of Japanese comics. it is well known that the readers’ answers to the postcard feedback questionnaires for the various stories published in magazines is the principal tool to check the quality of the manga stories from the point of view of the productive apparatus.

DIAGrAm 2 Background (social and historical)

•

• image alliance • fanzines • cooperation between

•

authors/creators Production

• readers/fan base • komiket’s public representing the primary reader body • readers’ reactions sent via questionnaires attached to the manga magazines • campaigns by the parents and teachers associations against the manga considered harmful

Recipients/readers Consumers

• competence of the manga producers

•

• competence of the manga recipients

kyara and character kyara, made of panels (koma) and text derived creations = manga’s intertextuality emakimono inheritance basic Japanese linguistic structure = invention of the tradition, cultural nationalism glocalization and/or hybridization postmodern condition invulnerable and immortal body of the kyara

• Anime/manga as texts

on the bottom side, along the vertical axis, are listed several facets of manga seen as «texts». i will not go into a detailed discussion of such facets, which have already been largely studied, in Japan and foreign countries, for at least fifteen years; but i will mention one of the most recent elements of reflection, the difference between kyara and character in man-

.xxi

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preface

xxii.

ga, proposed and explained by Japanese critic gô itô [2005]. Kyara, koma and word3 are the three elements that itô proposes in his theory on the expression of manga as text. itô points out that the qualitative difference between kyara and character as symbolic expression in the most recent manga resides in the different nature of the body: the character’s vulnerability on one side, and the immortality of the kyara on the other. if the kyara has a postmodern nature because it does not have a body that can be hurt or that can die, then the character was and still is represented and understood as endowed with a vulnerable and mortal corporeity. either way, being a text, in manga both the skills of the author in creating an enjoyable comic, and the readers’ competence in being able to read it, count. based on these two competences, the manga and the anime industries flourish as much as the image alliance strategies. it is said that manga’s origins go back to the scrolls drawn in medieval age, the emakimono, as was discussed by the filmmaker isao Takahata in his book [1999]. Takahata adds that the same Japanese language is the authentic root of manga because of its nature of hybrid idiom. i more prosaically believe that, since every tradition is a cultural construction elaborated in retrospect, Japan has been emphasizing this rich historical heritage for the advantage of manga and anime ever since it noticed their great international success. as such, this can be connected to an intensifying cultural nationalism. at the same time, the cultural origins of manga can once again be factors in the hybridization and glocalization of comics and cartoons in the West.

The matter of the campaigns in the early 1990s against those manga that were seen as harmful can be relevant, considering the process of progressive acceptance of anime and manga in the world. notoriously, the greatest supporters of the anti-anime/manga movement were those mothers worried by the proliferation of pornographic comics, potentially within reach of their children. in my opinion, this is one of the effects of the processes of variegated interrelation of previously separated fields, which animate the postmodern condition, and which have a tendency to make the boundaries between what previously used to be very different and separate spheres fade. because of this process of dedifferentiation, the «pornographic» manga have come to the attention of a population of housewives who before ignored or snubbed their existence.

The same type of dynamics have also taken place in foreign countries, when the parental world has found itself—sometimes indirectly—in touch with anime considered «harmful» because they are full of erotic allusions.

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how to «read» Manga and aniMe

as Tamaki Saitô puts it [2000a], the Japanese otaku can enjoy the perversions of the fictional anime world because in truth they are not perverts; more precisely, the border between fiction and reality is deeply different in Japan in comparison to what is seen in the West. anyway, this is not the right place for me to get into too many details on this topic: i am only trying to write down some notes and impressions on the process of acceptance of Japanese anime and manga in the world, basing them on general reasoning, given that every real acceptance process differs from country to country.

DIAGrAm 3 Entertainment

•

II

Mainstream entertainment robot anime, adventure anime etc.

I

dangerous, harmful anime, full of violence, sex, perversity

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•

•

Centrifugal movement Denial

Centripetal movement Acceptance

avant-garde art works (despite cointaining sex and violence) oshii, Ôtomo etc.

good quality anime by osamu tezuka, hayao Miyazaki etc.

III

• Art

IV

The acceptance of Japanese manga and anime seems to have been met with resistance from the start. Anime were and still are supposed to be full of violence, sex and perversion—at least some of them—and these topics are not suitable for children. Some ethical codes or regulations of receiving countries have in the past prevented the broadcast of anime. From this starting point, represented in quadrant i of diagram 3 (above), many countries have subsequently moved to phase ii, in which, following more

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preface

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balanced reasoning, the public recognizes the quality of anime and manga as entertainment products. in phase iii, the anime by Tezuka or those by hayao Miyazaki—just to give two famous examples—have received international praise and won many important awards in film festivals. Phase iV, which is taking place in recent years, has seen films like Ghost in the Shell

by Mamoru oshii and Akira by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, or comics like NonNonBâ by Shigeru Mizuki, gaining international success and being seen as sophisticated art. in my opinion, the flow of events resulting in the progressive acceptance from phase i to phase iV is between «centrifugal» and «centripetal» positions. The «centrifugal» position is one of great denial from the receptive countries—which for years have believed that Japanese products were only a lower form of entertainment, cheap and of poor quality. The «centripetal» position is of great reception of manga and anime, whose artistic potentialities are now also better seen, and which are put in comparison with works of great merit. in the latter case, the considered works could also again result in a centrifugal mechanism of refusal, this time because of avant-garde works carrying «radical» and «dangerous» images and content, seen as new forms of art: «perversion» as a form of avant-garde art. i certainly do not mean to say that the problem of sex and violence in manga and anime does not exist anymore or has been misconceived by Western observers, but it involves other considerations.4 With this certainly incomplete summary of some of the basic elements needed to try to understand the general processes of the gradual acceptance of anime and manga across the world, i conclude my Preface, letting the reader open the doors of this book, a work of great value that contains innovative and exceptionally profound investigations.

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foreworD

A starting note for the international readers i am deeply honoured that the Japan Foundation decided to grant this book two subsidies, for the translation into english and for printing/publication. it is, i think, a sign that this work, with its strengths and despite its possible (or, perhaps, inevitable) flaws, has been considered worthy of consideration for an international readership of students, scholars, and followers of Japanese culture.

This book was originally designed and written in an italian context and for an italian readership. in italy there is a basic lack of the kind of works that try to describe and explain from a Western (specifically, european) perspective the impact of Japanese pop culture on the local public; in particular, of a Japanese pop culture expressed through comics, animation, toys, and videogames. That is why my principal aim with this book was to propose somewhat a «cartography», an overall mapping of the main processes of perception and understanding of Japanese pop culture in europe and specifically in the country with which, for obvious reasons, i have the greatest familiarity, italy. of course some very interesting works, using both academic and popularizing approaches, have been written in italian—and i won’t fail to mention them in this book—but i also realized, when first writing Il Drago e la Saetta, that i was finding no texts that tried to propose a general picture of the

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foreword

complex dynamics according to which this Japanese pop culture arrived in europe and was received, perceived, understood, evaluated, appreciated or criticisized, dismissed or embraced. The works that i could trace in the italian language dealing, at one level or another, with the issues i intended to work on, belong either to literary analysis or to the political-economic debate; it seems that on the one hand the italian academic world has not dealt with Japanese pop culture from a mediologic/sociologic point of view, and on the other hand that the italian works in the field of popularization have often failed to consider Japanese pop culture in its general aspects related to the local reception and practices of re-elaboration, focusing instead on the enthusiastic description of Japanese fashions and fads, on the nostalgic recalling of beloved fictional characters and television series, and on the alleged «eccentricities» of a perceived Japanese society expressed by such narratives.

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Though, if there is, in the italian context, something in common among many academic works and most popularizing books and articles on Japanese (both classic and contemporary) culture, it is the constant, often automatic, highlighting of a «Japaneseness» of this culture. This can appear to readers as a truism («Japanese culture is… Japanese») and to many scholars of Japan as a gross mistake, but either way, in the light of the vigorous international debate about/against orientalist/essentialist clichés concerning many asian cultures/societies, including the Japanese one, this line of reasoning must be read as a non-secondary epistemological issue.

From the point of view of those scholars (be they Japanese or not) who see and fight the orientalist/essentialist clichés about Japan and other asian areas as a product of complex historical dynamics of power, colonialism and colonization, racism, eurocentrism, political/economic/cultural imperialism, i can only agree. Still today, many Western observers (members of the general public, scholars, politicians, economists) think of Japan and other asian countries as an irreducible other, alien, incompatibly different, exotic, and often rather weird. apart from the current necessity of a dialectics based on equality, a set of pre- and misconceptions remains about how Japan is and should be thought of. but from the point of view of the reception of Japanese culture in europe, we should face how this Japanese culture is concretely perceived and understood, even if this perception and understanding are partially based on stereotypes. We should consider the ways Japanese culture, and even

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a starting note for the international readers

Japan, when (wrongly) perceived as abstract entities, have been conceptualized, popularized, and communicated, in order to understand not so much what Japan and Japanese culture are «in themselves» (whatever this means, if it means anything), but, at least according to my main research interest for this book, what and how much of Japanese pop culture has been understood by Western publics: the stories, characters, figures, concepts, issues, and themes of those cultural expressions coming from Japanese narratives, production companies, and authors on which the european public has fixated its attention. We should consider how the Japanese cultural products and their narratives themselves, voluntarily or not, have been proposed in Western countries. of course, we should try to see what their contents actually were when they were designed by the Japanese authors, but, following the approach of this book, we should also focus on what those contents presumably conveyed when they were received and then handled by their foreign publics.

This is why in the first part of the book i felt it necessary to illustrate a series of concepts, information, and reflections/evaluations about some general issues, seen as tools to better understand the reception of this Japanese pop culture in italy and europe (covered in the second part of the volume). in the first chapter, in fact, i talk about cultural globalization, popular culture in Japan, the rising of certain nationalist tendencies in Japan and their possible correlations with some nationalist manga series.

These issues are covered in order to present a general discussion upon the perceived contrast between some nationalist policies in the promotion of an official Japanese culture by the government (using also manga and anime), and the modalities of circulation of manga and anime in europe, which were always detached from whatever governmental institution.

This is also why i describe, in short, some general features of manga and anime. i had no intention to conduct a strictly scholarly discourse on these two forms of expression: i have rather given the reader some basic information, however based on a reliable international bibliography. The discourse on manga and its actual origins and modalities of development, in particular, is very advanced, therefore i have cited several qualified sources for possible further readings and in-depth examination. The fact remains that my discourse on manga, which mentions some notions about its alleged origins (emakimono, etc.), simply records the «invention of a tradition» in the Japanese discourse itself, as also mentioned by Kiyomitsu Yui

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foreword

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in his Preface, and is solidly functional to the following discourse about the perception of manga and anime among european publics as a typical expression of a culture that is perceived as «profoundly Japanese».

This is also why, finally, i have used three definitions that are certainly not an exclusive prerogative of Japanese cultural expressions and that have been used for heuristic purposes much more than as empirical statements.

The «models» of machine, infant, and mutation that i use are somewhat ideal-types whose function is primarily that of grouping and ordering three different sets of contents, issues, narratives, and commodities that we can observe in Japanese contemporary imagination from the 1950s to the 2000s, despite having a longer history (about which i provide some general information). The fact that these macro-themes are not a Japanese prerogative is highlighted in my very discourse, which is based on several parallelisms between the Japanese and the european social and cultural situations. in order to better illustrate these three macro-themes and their incarnations in television series, narrative recurrences, and toy products, and to do so also from a sociological perspective, i felt it necessary to present information, references, and personal reflections about some Japanese phenomena (such as a «kawaii culture», the otaku subculture, and others), framing them first in Japan and only after in europe and italy, in order to discuss their possible differences and similarities. in this discourse, it is made clear that i see that many phenomena that have occurred in Japan are connected to certain similar european processes; meaning, i suggest that we should not consider those Japanese social phenomena as something weird, to be seen from above, as expressions of an alien world, but on the contrary, for certain aspects, as events occurring in a society that is not as different from ours as some would like to think, and as a partial mirror of what is happening and/or might happen in closer contexts, among european youths. another point that i would like to address here, is that the vast array of products and narratives belonging to this «J-Culture» was received and understood in Western europe—and in my book i will mainly refer to italy and France, as the reader will see—not as a «neutral», or «non-regionalized» culture, but as a perceivedly Japanese one. That is, despite the alleged «universality» of these cultural products and narratives (or the alleged attempts, according to many observers and some scholars, by the Japanese companies and authors to often create «non-nationalized» products and fiction), on the contrary this J-Culture has been very often per-

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a starting note for the international readers

ceived and read, by most readers/viewers and especially in italy, as deeply Japanese, even if sometimes, or often, just as stereotypically Japanese.

This means that in the book all my discourse starts, and i think necessarily, from this documented assumption: from the fact that even amidst (or perhaps, because of) the dynamics of intercultural encounter and/or transnational re-elaboration of contents and themes, a large portion of the public in europe has understood the Japanese pop culture carried by manga, anime, and toys also as an expression of an alleged, often stereotyped—and hence, simplified and sometimes «wrong»—Japaneseness. it is true that the issue of orientalism (that’s, in short, a set of assumptions on the «orient», including Japan, of essentialist nature by Westerners) has not been profoundly problematized and, surely, it has not been overcome yet, neither in italian academic debate nor, of course, among the general public; or, at least, not as much as in other scholarly or cultural arenas. it is also true that an intuitive orientalism still wafts through the conceptions and conceptualizations of Japan and Japanese culture among many european (not only italian) academic arenas and general publics. hence let me be clear on some very basic points. in most cases i use a language that sacrifices complexity in favour of communicative pragmatism. i often use expressions such as «Japan», «the Japanese», «east», «West», «Japanese imagination», etc. here these terms are neither used nor conceived as abstract agencies; i avail myself of them just as discoursive simplifications that, despite possibly being criticized as essentialist definitions, are above all aimed at achieving concision and fluency in the language. in particular, the term «imagination», which i use in the singular, of course does not imply that there is «one» Japanese imagination, «one» Japanese popular culture. on the contrary, it will be clear from my discourse that this book focuses on a range of imaginary characters and narratives, and on their related commodities, fads, and subcultures, originated mainly from the sectors of manga, anime, and all the derivative commercial products. besides, when i talk about «Japanese pop culture» it will become clear that i am not referring to a culture distributed from above, from an abstract Japan acting as an immanent agency, but rather to a culture concretely produced «from below» or anyway from the plurality of authors, artists, production companies, and toy corporations. but, nevertheless, what cannot be excluded from the discourse is the fact that these authors, artists, pro-

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foreword

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duction companies, and toy corporations, are Japanese, come from and live in a Japanese milieu, and think about themselves as Japanese. Yes, they may also think (and many of them actually think, we can serenely suppose) of themselves as citizens of the world, and surely they are; but the national configuration in terms of interiorized values, ethos, education, ideas, customs, behaviours, manners, and politics, is still there even in an increasingly globalized world. Much of this complex set of expressions has shone through in the many Japanese products (mainly, animated films and serials, and comics series) that have arrived in italy and other european countries, such as France, Spain, germany, Switzerland, and they have been recognized by the various publics through, and according to, previous assumptions, information, and ideas on Japan and Japanese culture. it is therefore possible that, despite my efforts not to assume an essentialist approach or essentialist assumptions and undertones about Japanese pop culture, Japanese products and narratives, and about Japan itself as a country, the more expert readers might well find in more than one point of the book that i actually fell back, albeit in good faith, into an essentialism of sorts. i am however sure that the readers will find in this volume a collection of information, reflections, data, and a general framework, that will reveal itself to be useful—through the possible approval of some of its points, and the confutation of others, as obvious—for pursuing, continuing, improving the international debate on Japanese pop culture and its narratives and products.

Original presentation for the Italian edition in 1999, i published a volume that tried to take stock of the situation of Japanese imagination for young italians who had been children at the time when Japanese animated series broadcast on television became popular for the first time. The book was titled Mazinga Nostalgia and it was that type of work that today i could define as «militant»: it had begun when a fan, having become a 25 year old young adult, had rediscovered the attraction of the heroic world of his childhood and had realized that behind it there was not only a group of communities and subcultures, but a population of former children who, with various intensities, had become nostalgic for the Japanese heroes they had watched on television during their childhood.

For good or bad, Mazinga Nostalgia was and still is a book that could be

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original presentation for the italian edition

considered a subtle generational claim: although it was far from a booklet— the richness of the contents and the articulated arguments mark it as a critical essay—a sharp polemic undertone was evident in several points. besides, the approach was not focused on the coherence and theoretical depth, but rather on the accumulation of news, reflections and comparisons between the texts—the animated cartoons—and the public debate made on those texts by the adult commentators who denigrated them in spite of the evident fact that the youths liked them.

Mazinga Nostalgia was met with flattering reception; fans and several people working in the field said that the book had arrived at the right time, and the journalists generally made positive comments too. re-reading it today, i can see a lot of flaws, but it still holds its own and is a useful tool for those who want to understand what Japanese imagination represents for a generation—to which i also belong—of television watchers. however Mazinga Nostalgia focused on what had arrived in italy from Japanese television, concerning itself only with the landing area and our response. everything before these stages was left out of the analysis: the inter- and transnational dynamics of circulation of this imagination made of robots, orphans and girls with huge weepy eyes; the original sociocultural context of these themes and aesthetics; the way in which they work in countries other than italy; the social and cultural effects on the habits of the fans. For this reason, i have decided that it was the right time to resume some concepts and themes of Mazinga Nostalgia, taking now into account not only the italian context but also the more general flows, in relation to which italy is just one of several outlets; and trying to build a new, larger, more complete and, i hope, more mature piece of research. The aim is to propose, somewhere in-between academia and popularization, a theoretical tool and source of news and remarks available to students, researchers and teachers in the fields of sociology of cultural processes, of the mass media and of cultural globalization; for critics of the field; for journalists and scholars of the subject; for operators in the audiovisual and in print publishing industry. as a matter of fact, for some time now, the necessity to renew the analyses of the cultural dynamics taking place between the eastern and Western imaginative worlds for youth has been felt. We are witnessing a series of processes that do not concern only the general movements of this cultural exchange on the macro-economic and macro-sociological levels. This phenomenon is also made of many imaginary characters and of the values they propose; of languages and narrative universes; of the interactions between

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foreword

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the world of production and the world of consumption; of the dialogues among the groups of consumers, readers, and viewers. Such dynamics have vast amplitude and do not deal with «a» phenomenon, but with a plurality of events and processes. as the wide and often valid international literature on the subject has so far confirmed, there are many ways in which to approach these topics.

For these very reasons, The Dragon and the Dazzle tries to harmonize the presentation of a theoretical picture (related to the general processes inherent to the dynamics of introduction of some important eastern imagination and cultural models—in this case Japanese—in Western contexts—particularly, in italy) with more detailed reflections and analysis, about some wellknown narrative cosmos and characters successfully arrived from Japan. besides, so far, little attention has been granted in italy and europe to studies on the public and on the reception of such imagination for young people. luckily, in the last few years, new italian and european works have started to explore in this direction; as such, the small contribution given by this book is a synthetic and initial compendium related to an investigation of a set of samples— italian readers of Japanese comics—and is part of a larger, europe-wide, search in progress, of which i will talk more extensively later.

What you hold in your hands is a volume that i have completed trying to follow an organized criterion of continuity; nevertheless, it is partly a collection of different materials. Some texts have already found a place elsewhere before their revised edition in this book, and, for various reasons, for a long time had been hardly available: because they were in currently out of print books, or only a few copies were printed and not always well distributed in bookstores, or because they come from newspapers and conference papers with little circulation in italy. The majority of the texts used here, however, are in their first edition. i have tried to give all these writings a systematic arrangement, driven by a unitary path of arguments, and inside a theoretical shell, which i hope will be more complete than what i have done in the past with the topics that i have discussed since 1997. What follows is information on the original publication of the texts that have already been printed. Those listed below have been included in the present edition, to the best of my abilities; and, to tell the truth, in almost all of them the updates have been so radical that in their new version they have become something appreciably or entirely different. before continuing, however, i want to tell you an episode that i consider important for this book. it is about a beautiful trip to South Korea and

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original presentation for the italian edition

Japan that took place in october and november 2006. The opportunity was given to me by an international conference in gwangju, in which i took part, discussing the story of Japanese comics and animation in italy. i was there with two other european speakers, bernd dolle-Weinkauff and olivier Vanhee, who presented their reports on the subject talking about their respective countries, germany and France. We had been sent by JeanMarie bouissou, coordinator of the project of international research on Japanese comics—about which i will talk later on—and we represented a european «expedition», in an environment where there weren’t too many Westerners. That itself ended up being an experience of cultural, academic and human enrichment. after the conference, being just two hours away by plane, i took advantage of the situation to spend ten days in Japan. There i have various friends and colleagues. My trip was satisfying; i went to osaka, aomori, Tokyo, Kobe, nara. good. everything that i did and i saw in that journey has already been a topic of conversation with my friends and relatives. but it was also decisive for the creation of this book. in the previous months, i had already summarily thought about some hypotheses on the strategies of diffusion of certain Japanese cultural models in europe, in part thanks to the reading of some particularly good sources about which i talk later on in the volume. nevertheless, the catalyst of my energies and what made it so that i focused on The Dragon and the Dazzle was a meeting which, for some reason, i see as crucial. in Tokyo i was staying in one of the typical minshuku of the city, a traditional and low-cost spartan inn. it is there that i met deborah, a nice and cultured australian lady who was visiting with her sixteen year-old son oscar, a fan of videogames (and of surfing, but this does not have anything to do with it). as it often is the case when travelling, we became friends and organized a few lunches at district snackbars, exchanging our impressions on Japan. before their departure, deborah presented me with the first edition of Wrong about Japan by Peter Carey [2003], of which i already knew the italian translation titled Manga, fast food & samurai: the book is about the visit to Japan of an australian (but living in new York) dad with a twelve year-old son, who is a great fan of Japanese comics and animation.

The coincidence of a mother who had gathered information about every aspect of Japan, from the temples and the armours of the medieval warriors to the most pop expressions of the actual Japanese culture, in order to not be caught unprepared by her son’s attraction for the huge games rooms of the akihabara district, somehow repeated Carey’s experience in keeping an

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foreword

open mind about a civilization that can represent a cultural shock for an unprepared adult; this had already impressed me. but to be given without warning that book as a gift, was extremely appreciated and—i still do not know how or why: mysteries of the human mind—it gave me the final push to gather my ideas and to try to organize them in this book.

So, if that’s the case, get angry with her too.

Bibliographical note The title of the book, with its two metaphors, originates directly from the title of my master’s thesis, Il Drago e la Saetta. Transcultura di massa e multimedialità da oriente a occidente (‘The dragon and the dazzle: Mass Trans-culture and Multimediality from east to West’), earned in July of 2002 with Prof. alberto abruzzese in the Sociology of Mass Communication course, Sociology degree— course name «Communication and Mass Media», Faculty of Sociology, «la Sapienza» university in rome, a.Y. 2001-2002. however, to avoid any misunderstanding, i must admit that only the core idea of that study, which in general has xxxiv.

driven much of my subsequent research, is still present in this book.

Paragraph ii of the introduction comes from a part of the Preface for the book by Francesco Filippi—Maria grazia di Tullio, Vite Animate. I manga e gli anime come esperienza di vita (‘animated lives: Manga and anime as life experiences’), roma: King |Saggi, 2002, pp. 5-11. in the Paragraph ii.1 and in the subparagraphs ii.1.2, ii.1.2.1 and ii.1.2.2 some passages are taken from my contribution «Japanese Comics abroad: The Case of italy. a Short history of Manga’s absorption in the ‹bel Paese›’s Comics Tradition», presented to the Asia Culture Forum 2006, published in the proceedings of the conference «Mobile and Pop Culture in asia» (gwangju, South Korea, 28-29th of october 2006) and printed in Shin dong Kim—Mi Young lee (edited by), Mobile and Pop Culture in Asia, gwangju: asia’s Future initiative, 2006, pp. 249-60, and «le manga en italie. du débat politique sur l’‹invasion› des héros japonais à la créolisation transculturelle» (‘Manga in italy: From the Political debate on the ‹invasion› of the Japanese heroes to the Trans-Cultural Creolization»), presented in Paris (16th of March 2007) at the congress La globalisation culturelle et le rôle de l’Asie (‘Cultural globalization an the role of asia’), organized by the research group «international Manga Study network» (in short Manga Network) in Paris, the Centre d’études et recherches internationales (Ceri), Fondation nationale des Sciences politiques, with the Japan Foundation.

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bibliographical note The Paragraph ii.1.2 and its first two subparagraphs derive from passages of the Preface to Mario a. rumor, Come bambole. Il fumetto giapponese per ragazze (‘like dolls: Japanese comics for girls’), latina: Tunué, 2005, pp. Viii-xiV, and from the article «Manga in italy: history of a Powerful Cultural hybridization», International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 8, issue 2, Fall 2006, Philadelphia, pp. 56-76, which already appeared in the italian edition along the same lines as a first version as «il manga in italia. Storia di una ibridazione fastidiosa» (‘Manga in italy: history of an annoying hybridization’), in Matteo Stefanelli (edited by), Fumetto International. Transformazioni del fumetto contemporaneo (‘Fumetto international: Transformations of contemporary comics’), rome: drago arts & Communication, 2006, pp. 50-54 (catalogue of the eponymous exhibition, Triennale di Milano, Milan, 18th of May—3rd of September 2006).

With the exception of the subparagraphs ii.1.2, ii.1.2.1, ii.1.2.2 and ii.1.2.3, the Paragraphs from ii.1 to ii.4 (with the three subparagraphs ii.4.1-2-3) and ii.7, here with many cuts and additions, have been published in italian under the title «Fumetti e cartoon da est ad ovest, una serena convivenza» (‘Comics and cartoons from east to West, a serene cohabitation’), in roberta Ponticiello—Susanna Scrivo (edited by), Con gli occhi a mandorla. Sguardi sul Giappone dei cartoon e dei fumetti (‘With almond-shaped eyes: looking at Japan through its comics and cartoons’), latina: Tunué, 2005, pp. 192-221, the 2 revised edition of which was nd

printed in 2007 and presents the same essay at pp. 275-321.

Paragraph ii.6 and its six subparagraphs are a deeply revisited and updated version of what appeared in Mazinga Nostalgia. Storia, valori e linguaggi della Goldrake-generation (‘nostalgia for Mazinger: history, values, and languages of the grendizer-generation’), roma: Castelvecchi, 1999, pp. 217-40 and 250 (2nd ed. revised and updated roma, King |Saggi, 2002, pp. 222-44 and 255).

Part of Chapter iii/1 and of Paragraph i of the Conclusions come from the more extensive «Promemoria per un discorso sul robot e sull’uomo artificiale» (‘Memorandum for a discourse on the robot and the artificial man’), which in turn is the Marginal note of the book edited by gianluca di Fratta Robot. Fenomenologia dei giganti di ferro giapponesi (‘robots: a phenomenology of Japanese iron giants’), Caserta: l’aperìa, 2007, pp. 135-79 and 188-91 (notes).

My study of the topic discussed in Chapter iii/2 was initially developed in a lecture that i gave in 2001 within the festival I Castelli Animati in genzano (rome), titled «robot giganti e intelligenze artificiali negli anime» (‘giant robots and artificial intelligences in anime’). brief portions of the Chapter have appeared in Mazinga Nostalgia, pp. 199-216 and 247-50 (ii ed.: pp. 205-19 and 425-30, notes); in «arrivano i robot, e sono giapponesi. animismo e simbiosi uomo-macchina» (‘The ro-

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foreword bots arrive, and they are Japanese: animism and man-machine symbiosis’) and «Macchine carnose. la filosofia del postumano negli eroi della infanzia giapponese» (‘Fleshy machines: Post-human philosophy in the Japanese heroes of childhood’), in Diogene—Filosofare oggi, year iV, n. 4, June-august 2006, pp. 26-32 and 33-34; and in a report titled «Metafore e identità giapponese nei robot giganti» (‘Metaphors and Japanese identity in the giant robots’), presented in Robomorfosi: evoluzione del concetto di robot nell’animazione giapponese come specchio di un’analisi sociologica (‘robomorphosis: evolution of the concept of robot in Japanese animation as a mirror of sociological analysis’), a lecture that took place in rome, at the «la Sapienza» university, the 13th of July 2007. The general reflections that arose from it are extensively presented here in their first edition.

Paragraph iV.1, with its eight subparagraphs, derives from «estetica kawaii e modelli di sviluppo intermediale da Topolino a Pikachû» (‘Kawaii aesthetics and models of inter-media development from Mickey Mouse to Pikachû’), in Marco Pellitteri (edited by), Anatomia di Pokémon. Cultura di massa ed estetica dell’effimero fra pedagogia e globalizzazione (‘anatomy of Pokémon: Mass culture and ephemeral aesthetics between pedagogy and globalisation’), roma: SeaM, 2002, pp. 180-247; in that essay, as in the version presented here, Paragraph iV.1.1 (with xxxvi.

its subparagraphs iV.1.1.1 and iV.1.1.2) is by Cristiano Martorella and has been included again not only for its clarity, but also because it is an integral part of that essay of mine that appeared in Anatomia di Pokémon. another part of this essay of mine is in Chapter Vii of Part i.

Subparagraphs iV.4.1 and iV.4.2, here summarized and extensively updated, come from «ad est di oliver Twist», in the aforementioned Con gli occhi a mandorla, pp. 63-84 (titled in the 2nd ed. «a est di oliver Twist», pp. 83-114), essay published as «east of oliver Twist: Japanese Culture and european influences in animated TV Series for Children and adolescents», Japanese Journal of Animation Studies, vol. 7, issue 1a (8), Fall 2006, Tokyo, The Japan Society for animation Studies—Tokyo Zokei university, pp. 57-70.

The core information of the subparagraphs from Vi.2.1 to Vi.2.3 come, in their embryonic form, from Mazinga Nostalgia, pp. 407-13 (2nd ed.: pp. 425-30), but here they have been expanded with further examinations and analytical reflections. between the publication of Il Drago e la Saetta and this version in english of the book, a much shorter version of Chapter Vi has been published as «nippon ex Machina: Japanese Postwar identity in robot anime and the Case of UFo Robo Grendizer», in Frenchy lunning (edited by), Mechademia #4: War/Time. Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 275-88

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note

on the edition

The structure of Chapter Vii mostly comes from the part of the aforementioned Anatomia di Pokémon specifically devoted to the Pokémon phenomenon, and is here expanded with various additions. in Part ii, portions of Paragraph i.2 come from my essay «il sistema cannibale» (‘The cannibal system’), Valore Scuola—Rivista di politica scolastica e cultura professionale, year xxVii, issue 10, 31st of May 2004, pp. 46-53. Parts of the Paragraphs ii.1, ii.2 and ii.2.1 were published in «rileggere la Storia con goldrake e lady oscar.

Ethos e riflessione storica nel fumetto e nell’animazione giapponesi» (‘re-reading history with goldrake and lady oscar: ethos and historic reflection in Japanese comics and animation’), Storia e problemi contemporanei, year xx, issue 44, January-april 2007, pp. 31-59. The Paragraphs ii.3.1 and ii.3.2, here extensively updated, come from Mazinga Nostalgia, pp. 260-63 and 306 (2nd: pp. 265-68 and 309).

Paragraph iii.2.1 has been published in Mazinga Nostalgia, pp. 277-86 (2nd: pp.

281-90) and has been updated here. in Chapter iV, the Paragraphs iV.1, iV.2 and iV.3 (with their eight total subparagraphs) come from a portion of the aforementioned essay published in the already cited book Anatomia of Pokémon. a synthesis of the theories presented there has been published in english, in the essay «Mass Trans-Culture from east to West, and back», Japanese Journal of Animation Studies, vol. 5, issue 1a (6), Spring 2004, Tokyo, The Japan Society for animation Studies—Tokyo Zokei university, pp. 1926. Paragraph iV.4 is a summarized reprocessing of the essay «le nuove frontiere dell’immaginario» (‘The imagination’s new frontiers’), LG Argomenti, year xxxVi, issue 4, october-december 2000, pp. 15-17, and «global Media? eroi-merce, transcultura di massa e mediatizzazione mondiale» (‘global Media? Merchandise heroes, mass trans-culture and world mediatization’), in andrea Materia—giuseppe Pollicelli, Comicswood. Dizionario del cinefumetto (‘Comicswood: a dictionary of cine-comics’) vol. 1 (of 3), roma: bottero edizioni, 2003, pp. 97-111. Paragraphs V.1.2 and V.2.3, with their subparagraphs—here edited and updated—come from the already mentioned conference communication «le manga en italie. du débat politique sur l’‹invasion› des héros japonais à la créolisation transculturelle». all the other sections not mentioned here are published for the first time.

Note on the edition For simplicity, Japanese names respect the Western order name-surname.

Japanese words, where necessary, have the circumflex accent over the vowels in place of the macron, pointing out the long sounds (e.g. yûgô). This is not applied to

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foreword the most well-known place names in the West, such as Tokyo, osaka etc., which keep the Western spelling. The Western names present in the titles of Japanese works are transliterated depending on the european use (i.e. «angel» instead of enjeru, «tank» instead of tanku, etc.); this is to help the reader understand the references chosen by the authors. in this book the inverted commas and the quotation marks used are mainly the double guillemets and the punctuation, when present, is positioned out of them, not inside. in the texts of the guest authors (Kiyomitsu Yui, Jean-Marie bouissou, gianluca di Fratta, Cristiano Martorella, and bounthavy Suvilay) the endonotes marked by the wording [a/n], that’s “author’s note”, have been written by Marco Pellitteri.

With the exception of the bibliographical note presented above, and of Chapter iii (Part ii), the criterion of text quotation is based on the one used by the a Sa (american Sociological association), with a few exceptions that nevertheless, not jeopardizing the coherence of the references, should not be difficult to understand for the reader. a complete bibliography is available at the end of the volume. in the bibliography, the titles of books, articles and contributions in languages xxxviii.

other than english have been translated and put in brackets. Similarly, inside the volume the quotations that originally were not in english are translated in english. articles taken from the internet or from unpublished and private documents, for obvious reasons lack page numbering intended for traditional publications. For articles from paper magazines, the page number is present, for sobriety’s sake, only when a specific passage is referenced. When web addresses are used, the month and the year in which the web page has been visited are also mentioned. if the reader, searching a given page online, does not find it because it is offline or has been suppressed, the access date is fundamental to retrieve the address using the internet tool for chronological research at Archive.org, a website which, since 1996, every two months catalogues the entire contents of the world wide web.

Acknowledgements Passing from the italian to the english edition of this book, i decided to merge the acknowledgements of the two editions. Many of the people who had helped me for the former, anyway, helped me also for the latter or, still, have been in contact with me during all this time; hence, i see the liaison that ties me, them, and the two lives of this book so tight that this is, in my vision, the only and rightest formula.

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acknowledgeMents The first series of acknowledgments is, with all my deep gratitude, to the Japan Foundation, which has so generously supported the translation and publication of this book. The chain of events that led me to submit this book to the Japan Foundation has been very articulated and i have crossed my path with many wonderful people who work for or with this institution. in particular, i want to thank, in chronological order with respect to the «adventure» of publishing this book in english: Ms Mariko oka-Fukuroi, who when i met her was the Vice-President of the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, for her kind suggestions; dr Kazuo h.W. lee, former researcher in language and Japanese Studies at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, for his genuine interest and help; Ms aya Tamura, Secretary of accounting, Japanese Studies and intellectual exchange at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, for her kindness and suggestions; Prof. dr lisette gebhardt, dr bernd dolle-Weinkauff, and dr Cosima Wagner of the goethe-universität in Frankfurt/Main, for their enthusiasm about my work, their insight, and their help; Ms hiromi Satô, deputy Secretary general at the Japanisch-deutsches Zentrum berlin; Mr Masato Furuya, director of the «europe, Middle east and africa division», Japanese Studies and intellectual exchange department, at the Japan Foundation in Tokyo, for his interest in my work; Prof. Kôji ueda, director of the Japanisches Kulturinstitut in Cologne, and Ms Makiko Yamaguchi, Fachreferentin at the Japanisches Kulturinstitut in Cologne; Ms akiko Kameda, Second Secretary of the ambassador at the Japanese embassy in rome, for her invaluable support; Mr Kazufumi Takada, director of the Japanese institute of Culture in rome, Ms rie Takauchi, general Secretary of the Japanese institute of Culture in rome, and Ms Costanza Procacci, director of the office of general affairs and Cultural relations at the Japanese institute of Culture in rome, for their professionality and supportiveness.

My warmest thanks go to Prof. giorgio amitrano of the «l’orientale» university in naples and dr Toshio Miyake, former researcher for the «Ca’Foscari» university in Venice and currently a researcher for Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science: two prestigious colleagues who agreed to write the reference letters that accompained my submission of the book to the Japan Foundation. and warmest thanks go, of course, to my friend and colleague dr Christie barber of Macquarie university in Sydney, who has carefully and professionally revised the translation. i am extremely flattered that Prof. Kiyomitsu Yui agreed to write the Preface of the book, and that Prof. Jean-Marie bouissou consented to write a Chapter. For these reasons my heartfelt thanks goes to both authors. a sincere thanks to the friends Prof. Sergio brancato and Prof. gino Frezza, for their support and confidence. a hearty thanks to gianluca di Fratta for his com-

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foreword ments and for having developed the Paragraphs related to the italian essays on Japanese comics and animation. an equally hearty thanks goes to Cristiano Martorella, who has given permission for the publication of his essay; to bounthavy Suvilay, for having agreed to write a Paragraph in Part ii; and to roberta Ponticiello, for having provided me the text of an interview. a special thanks goes to the great helpfulness of Francesco «Ciccio/Kôji» anteri who has helped me with the iconographic search in a very short time and with great competence.

Worth mentioning are some of the colleagues of the Manga Network, the team with whom since 2006 i have been working on the research Japan’s New Cultural Power: ariane beldi, bernd dolle-Weinkauff, and olivier Vanhee. also thanks to Francesco Calderone, Silvia gianatti, Jacopo oldani and Clothilde Sabre, for having sent me their degree or master’s thesis, and to daniele Timpano, for having invited me to one of his shows and for letting me view its script.

For the information, the quality of their contributions and the profitable exchanges of opinions and news, i would like to thank José alaniz, Madeline ashby, hiroki azuma, Christie barber, Étienne barral, Jaqueline berndt, Julien bouvard, Cinzia bruschi, Paul Caspers, beth davies, ermanno detti, xavier hébert, Patrick honnoré, gô itô, Shin dong Kim, Mikhail Koulikov, Jae-Woong Kwon, Pascal xl.

lefèvre, John a. lent, Frenchy lunning, Paul M. Malone, gianna Marrone, andrew McKevitt, alfons Moliné, Sandra Monte, harry Morgan, Karna Mustaqim, Sophie Peacock, leonard rifas, rolando José rodriguez de león, Michael rhode, brian ruh, Junko Saeki, Melanie Stumpf, Matt Thorn, Chris d. Vighagen, april T. Yap, and Masao Yokota. i also want to mention antonio Cobalti, whose seminars on globalization held in Trento in 2005 has proved particularly useful.

For having hosted the questionnaire «Tu e i manga» (‘The manga and you’) in the aforementioned research Japan’s New Cultural Power, i want to thank the webmasters of the 26 italian websites of the publishing houses, forums, associations, fanzines, comics and animation portals who have been so helpful. They are too many to name them all, so i hope they appreciate a collective «thank you». however, i want to mention Carla Mossolin, who encoded the data from paper to file. a thanks to deborah lockwood, who gave me that unexpected book, and to my dear friend Sonya Seo-Young Kim, for her stupendous presence at gwangju and Seoul; to Kazuo lee, who is a former collaborator of the Japan Foundation in Paris, for having sent to me two splendid catalogues; to andrea baricordi, Claudio Coletta, Maria Ferin, ettore gabrielli, grazia lerose, and giovanni Villella, for their precious information. a special mention for the friend and colleague gianluca aicardi, for the various important pieces of news on disney and Pixar, and for a phone and web exchange

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acknowledgeMents from which the note 57 in Chapter V of Part ii has resulted. and thanks to Francesca Perri for her news on the disney-rainbow lawsuit.

Thanks to my mother for the providential support via phone and web for the search for some texts, pages, passages that had to be found in my home library in Palermo. and thanks to my father for everything else, which is not a little, and because he always reads with interest and critical attention everything i ask him to. a big thanks goes to the friends who have made the years in Trento less boring, with their being funny, their being there, their intelligence, our immoderate dinners, the laughter, and everything else: Claudio, Cristiano, enrico, Franz, Maurizio, Pasquale, annalisa, Chiara, Manuela; and, for the always disinterested friendship, still in Trento, Chiara, Katia, Katja, letizia, Milena, romina, Sara, Silvia.

Finally, and above all, i want to thank Corinna, for being always there. if, dear friend or colleague, i have forgotten to mention you, i am sorry and i thank you here. dear reader, you know well that every mistake present in this book is mine, and mine only.

M.P. Trento-Kรถln, March 2008, and Palermo-Kรถln, January 2010

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The Dragon anD The Dazzle

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InTroDuCTIon

More than thirty years ago an international dialogue took place between some Western and the Japanese mediatic systems and cultural industries. it has developed, in the framework of well-known postmodernity, on such multivarious levels as new technologies, fictions, fashion and pop culture, but with different procedures. a crucial event of this connection has revolved around an audio-visual imagination coming from Japan and intended for an audience of children and teenagers, either local or international. This imagination was characterized by the heroes of comics and television and, later, by videogames, too. The first phase of this process took place with particular intensity between the 1970s and the 1980s.

Various messages and cultural meanings coming from Japan have reached the attention of a large public of european and american children and teenagers, although not always in a glaring way. in fact all content that came to us in ludic and narrative Japanese goods—and that originally seemed to have a specific cultural placing before eventually migrating towards distant receptive contexts, with publics that were not always able to understand all their meanings—have often come to the attention of Western publics almost camouflaged, hidden behind the creases of the exotic charm radiating from the Japanese technologies and homemade audio-visual beauties. Sometimes, it is clear that even the Japanese authors and producers try to make the cultural colour of Japan softer, especially for videogames and cartoons, but nonetheless it is an imprint that is impossi-

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introduction

4.

ble to completely eliminate. My aim in this volume is to look for the biggest footsteps of these footprints as perceivable from a european observatory, because over the years they have been impressed, outside the archipelago, on many readers and viewers. Who, most of the time, by the way, have been able to actively edit the variegated contents and aesthetical traits of the Japanese audiovisual and then comics-related imagination.

Still today, the general public in europe often thinks of Japan as a modern nation only because it is one of the main producers and exporters of mechanical goods, like cars, motorbikes, cameras and high quality technologies for audio/video reproduction. but from the 1980s on, it also started to be famous as an important cultural centre, appreciated all over the world. Cartoons, comics, videogames, toys and gadgets, pop music, adventure and romantic movies, works of fiction and all local mass culture products gained success, and still do, especially in the asiatic Continent, which is the main cultural exportation basin [iwabuchi 2002a]. but, starting from the 1960s, a large slice of this production, mostly cartoons and comics, became famous amongst american, and then eventually european, producers. in the late 1970s, because of a series of business and historical concomitances—which i will cover much more carefully later in the book—a huge quantity of Japanese animated series and then Japanese comics came to europe, causing an important change in the mediatic structure and in the tastes of the young public. as we will see, for years italy has been, with France, the european country with the most central part in this process. inside the large variety of issues, messages, values and symbols that Japanese authors/producers have combined in their own cartoons and comics, which are then bought and spread by operators from different countries, i found three cultural macro-models. here, «model» is used with the meaning of assemblage of cultural contents, a conglomerate of those aesthetics and themes that are kept together by a coherent Leitmotif, however rich and variegated. i thought the models could be particularly encapsulating, both because they contain crucial ideas and meanings to our contemporaneity, and to the way in which Japan has been accepted by many young Western comics readers and television watchers, and because of a large number of social-cultural similarities with the new european generations. i named these three models «machine», «infant», and «mutation». in various degrees of intensity, these models can be found in large parts of contemporary Japanese mass culture, for example in fashion, television, movies, literature, arts in general, music and show business; however, as i said before, they were perceived the

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introduction

West between the 1970s and today, especially through cartoons, comics and gadgets. This kind of introduction of Japanese products and characters to Western markets, directed at young generations, can be divided, until this moment, into two different stages, based on different illustrative metaphors. i chose to call these metaphors «dragon» and «dazzle». The first one took place between mid-1970s and the early 1990s; the second started immediately after the last one and is still taking place nowadays.

These stages have not been divided into two parts just because of the evolution of the graphic design and the themes of Japanese imagination, but also because of two different modalities connected to the market’s rules of promotion and distribution. although Japanese authors, producers, and institutions, until recent years, never had specific plans to spread Japanese own cultural industries into Western markets, the dragon and the dazzle can be considered not just as stages, but also, somehow (and we’ll see later «how»), as strategies of a cultural graft that has reached the West. The historical process of Japanese pop culture’s introduction to europe and america has taken place without a specific beginning and has followed non-predetermined commercial dynamics, but it shows elements that can be defined «strategic». From the 1970s, Japan started to advertise its own comics and cartoons in foreign markets, at first shyly and then, after it achieved success with foreign publics, with much more strength, but these elements are not only the result of this advertising campaign; this process did not have just one direction, because most of the time Western markets and publics bought and asked for Japanese comics and cartoons, stimulated by competitive prices, narrative quality and originality.1 Well, during these historical stages in which Japanese mass culture came to the attention of european and american countries, several people, from the Western to the eastern side, have helped to make these strategies possible, based on specific economic mechanisms of supply and demand.2 as i said before and i will explain better in the book, the first stage for europe began in the middle 1970s and finished about twenty years later, in the mid-1990s. Things are a bit different for the uSa, where the first period began in the first half of 1960s, when the first Japanese cartoons were broadcast; anyway, the focus here is the european experience.

From an italian/european point of view, we can find the symbolic transfiguration of these macro-phases in two Japanese products. They are the giant robot of UFo Robo Grendizer, created in Japan in 1975 and arriving in europe, where it was a big success, in 1978, and the well known Pokémon

.5

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introduction

multimedia universe—created in Japan in 1996 and arriving in europe, via the uSa, in 1999 and still present today, although to a lesser extent than before.3 Through these conglomerates of cultural goods, famous in many countries and not just in europe and Japan, i have tried to give a face to the already introduced metaphors of the dragon and the dazzle. because of this, besides what i explain after and in convergence with the other themes, this volume will also talk about the story of these two Japanese products that have had such great success in italy, France and all around the world.

The main idea behind this book is that, through circulation of comics and cartoons, three cultural models have been perceived in Western countries as coming from «Japan» (meaning, many Japanese authors, producers, companies). These models appear as connected with the features of Japan’s history and social system; the dynamics occurred in two ways, divided into two steps, where all the characters in which we can find these cultural models were created starting from different processes of production and distribution.

I. General framework 6.

UFo Robo Grendizer and Pokémon are two of the most important examples of these Japanese comics characters, business and fashion that have come to italy, France and other european countries, over thirty years ago.4 They can be considered, for europe, the most important of all Japanese products because, although 20 years have passed between the first and the second, they have gained a similar success and generated similar kinds of polemics. as i mentioned earlier, they are just two examples of a huge number of media products arrived from Japan and asia since the 1970s: for example we should not forget movies and heroes like bruce lee, how martial arts were turned into a sport, or the Chinese and hindi pop cultures that are becoming more and more famous in the West. Thousands and thousands of Japanese children’s heroes came to us, and the television series made around the 1970s were what really made them famous in america and europe.

Anime and manga5 really changed the audio-visual imagination of many italian and european children and teenagers, also thanks to particular television broadcasting dynamics. They started to come to europe from the middle of the 1970s, and the first huge wave of Japanese animated series created a new aesthetic taste, which is now typical of the people of the new generations who grew up with the constant presence of this Japanese content on televi-

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general fraMework

sion and in videogames; an aesthetic taste whose influence is also about to increase, because of the important changes in the anime and manga markets that have affected italy and many other countries in the meantime. in The Dragon and the Dazzle we can find three important frameworks for analysing the aforementioned cultural models. The very first framework applies to the technological construction of the android, which prompted the great national and international success of series like UFo Robo Grendizer, based on anthropomorphic robots or cyborgs that play an important role in the cultural model of «machine» that i discuss here. The second one is well known as kawaii, a very important aesthetic category for Japanese pop culture representing the model of «infant», in other words a youth indifferent to maturity also because teenagers cannot find their own space in the world; thus, for this and other reasons, generally connected to the mainstream society, they prefer to (or are indirectly forced to) wait before progressing into adulthood. The third, symbolized by the Pokémons, represents the model of «mutation», a change that can be analysed from three different points of view: a switch in characters’ themes and aesthetics; another, based on market rules; and a third, concerning the relationships between generations, or, in other words, between youth and maturity. diagram 4, below, helps us to understand all the relationships between the macro-themes present in this book.

DIAGrAm 4

«Japan» (Japanese authors, producers, companies), through the three forms

•

•

•

(and videogames)

anime

manga

•

•

• •

«has brought» to the West three cultural macro-models:

•

Machine

Infant

Mutation

arriving in europe and in america during two historical-cultural and commercial phases, thanks to two «strategies»

•

Dragon phase/strategy (1975 – 1995)

•

Dazzle phase/strategy (1996 – present day)

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introduction

8.

The Dragon and the Dazzle is divided into two Parts. in the first part, the most important themes are the models of machine and infant: the topics connected to these models are analysed together with the changes taking place in the last thirty years. in this way, the model of mutation becomes almost a filter for the first and the second models. The two models are studied in connection with cultural globalization studies, with the main expressive forms based on which these models were perceived in the West, with general commercial considerations and with the (presumed) Japanese national identity as perceived from the general public in europe. in the second part i analyse the moment in which these two models came to italy; i track the way they, and the subsequent gadgets made for youths, were introduced to the italian public, in order to verify the relevant issues about this aspect of the model of mutation; and lastly, after we have discussed the two phases/strategies of the dragon and the dazzle, i present some final considerations on how much Japanese products are popular among italian teenagers.

Part i starts with eight important concepts of postmodernity, in which Japan plays an important role. in other words, i reflect—in Chapter i—on the meaning of the terms mass culture, popular culture, pop culture, cultural globalization, transculture, transnationality, nationalism, cultural odour; these are very important concepts for all the issues that i will analyse in the rest of the book. in Chapter ii, i talk about manga and anime as in their being perceived abroad typical Japanese expressive forms, and also about how much they are similar to, or different from, Western comics. on one hand, it is very important to be clear about what manga and anime basically are; on the other, the great international success and all the connections they have with Western cultural forms are very important to highlight these transcultural dynamics, because through manga and anime lots of young european and american readers, spectators, videogames players, and consumers, have accepted and now love Japanese pop culture and are part of related subcultures. in Chapters iii/1 and iii/2 i talk about robots in the West and Japan through different and intertwined ways. These chapters are a very short history and a «gnoseology» of the robot; an excursus in which i analyse why in Japan there is a such a deep cultural feeling about robot machines; a summary of gô nagai’s works, the father of the most important manga in which characters are giant robots, which had great success in Japan and Western countries such as italy; a summary of the general characteristics of Japanese animation, in particular those focusing on robots and science-fic-

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general fraMework

tion, throughout which it is possible to see some connections with Japanese society. all these issues summarise the various faces with which the model of machine was perceived in the West through manga and superhero television animated series from the 1970s to nowadays.

Chapter iV mainly analyzes the model of infant. The covered issues first of all include the birth of kawaii aesthetics in Japan, with the huge use of gadgets by young people and the story of how kawaii came to the West; then, the idea of childhood in terms of the way it is represented in the main series starring children, which came to the West between the 1970s and the 1980s; lastly, the deep meaning that came from these comics, in which society is sometimes described as too prescriptive; a society from which stemmed phenomena often perceived by the public as «deviance», for example the otaku subculture.

Chapter V gives some information about television and videogames in Japan, in order to introduce Chapters Vi and Vii, which close Part i and discuss grendizer and Pokémon. The Chapter about grendizer aims to investigate many perceived traits of Japanese identity and to deal with the great success that the giant robot had in italy, compared to the more humble success it achieved in Japan; the Chapter on Pokémon highlights the vastness of this narrative-ludic universe and the enormous success it gained, twenty years after grendizer. in these two Chapters i propose some theoretical tools to read about why grendizer and Pokémon gained a different kind of international success, the former in italy and France, the latter all over the world, in two different phases of mass media evolution.

Part ii is about the patterns in which the model—or better, as we shall see, the «transmodel»—of mutation, has been shaped from the 1970s to nowadays. This mutation not only deals with the transformations in the themes and aesthetics of manga and anime characters (belonging to the models of machine and infant) during these thirty years; but, most importantly, with the passage from the dragon phase/strategy to the dazzle one. The main topic of this section is how Japanese imagination came to italy and was accepted/reinterpreted by the italian public. The presence of this imagination has had an important role in the production and distribution of narrative and commercial products from Japan; and, recently, it has created new interest in certain Japanese institutions and institutional people —and, actually even earlier, in other institutional environments, like those of China and South Korea—in everything connected with national and transnational cultural industries; this pushes us to consider the possible introduction of a third, new phase/strategy, something i will talk about in the Conclusions of the book.

.9

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introduction

10.

in this Part ii, Chapter i deals with some important aspects of the italian radio and television broadcasting systems between the 1970s and the 1980s, in order to introduce the very first Japanese animated series that came to italy, opening the way, in Chapter ii, for the famous grendizer (goldrake in italy),6 the series that opened the era of the «invasion» of Japanese imagination targeting young european audiences. This helps us understand many important elements of the social and cultural italian background in the 1970s.

Chapter iii gives space to italian and Western critic literature dealing with Japanese comics and animation, in order to understand how important the Japanese audio-visual popular culture was for italy and for other countries, especially for a new generation of scholars of several disciplinary fields.

Chapter iV is a summary of the main narrative-ludic phenomena from the late 19th century to nowadays, for children and teenagers, from disney to barbie, from grendizer to Pokémons, from Spider-Man to harry Potter. it is on this typology of models that the mutation macro-model dealing with the mediatic heroes for youngsters is based. in Chapter V there is an in-depth analysis of the main topics of the book: the sequence of the strategies of the dragon and the dazzle, and the consensus of the young public. i also talk about «italian otaku», the influence of manga and anime on Western teenagers and on the drawing techniques of comics authors; the conflict between the strategic presentation modalities of Japanese culture by anime authors in their products and the Western procedures of narrative and thematic rehash of most of these series depending on the representation of the audience; the various effects of the practices of fruition, sharing and participation of the culture derived from anime and manga on various subcultures and communities of readers/ viewers/consumers; the development of the manga and anime market in italy and in europe following the strong expansion of sales of Japanese comics in various countries; and the increasing legitimation of Japanese animation cinema among both critics and viewers.

Chapter Vi, written for The Dragon and the Dazzle by renowned French historian and politologist Jean-Marie bouissou, analyzes—in a way that i find complementary to what is done in the rest of the volume—the possible reasons for the success of Japanese comics imagination in europe, and why it has been so successful in the forms that it has de facto assumed in the last fifteen years.

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liMits of the italian literature

in Chapter Vii, as a sort of empirical appendix to Chapter V, i present the results of a statistical survey on italian manga readers, which is part of an international comparative project that will see further developments.7 in the Conclusions i talk about the main topics already touched on in the book and bring attention to some future opportunities for analysis.

II. Limits of the Italian literature in italy there is a huge number of essays about comics, cinema and television, and the same can be said about the local bibliography on cultural industries from the 19th century to today. however, only very few of these works talk about the arrival in the West of Japanese pop culture products like animated series, television series and comics that took place about thirty years ago. besides, when we do find some references [grasso 1996: 43, 350; id. 2000 and 2002], they generally come from very specific italian essays, the writers of which mention the topic and consider it worthy of more attention.8 Some of these essays mainly focus on distribution models and general statistics [Menduni 1996], leaving little to no space for discussion about television itself, i.e. on programs, genres, formats, main characters, etc.; others aim to give a more general look [grasso 1992, rondolino 2003] but appear to be impaired by a generational centrism of sorts, which makes them indifferent to Japanese products, authors and characters, even though they have played, and still play, an important role in the italian mass culture. others still, talk about Japanese television characters and television heroes, but do not appear to know the subject completely [d’amato 1993] or start their discussions from arguable points [Cofano 1999; contra, cf. Pellitteri 1999 and id. 2000c], and therefore are somewhat superficial. The situation is not really different in other european countries.

We were so often therefore left wondering why Japanese cultural products are always either avoided or superficially discussed when Western cultural industries were analysed. Keeping the focus on italy, for example, in some very valuable essays the reason can sometimes be connected to technical needs, which makes the absence of Japanese products from the table of contents understandable [Colombo 1998]; but in several other works, what appears to be taking place is a constant removal of a very important slice of the italian media culture. This brings us to think that perhaps the main body of Japanese animation and comics has been ignored by the au-

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introduction

12.

thors because of a generational gap, possibly linked to the same intolerance which, ever since UFo Robot Grendizer arrived in italy, resulted in the well known controversies regarding the arguable idea that anime are bad for children and against educational principles. This could have resulted in the removal of anime from culture, and only in the most recent years things have started to change, especially thanks to new and better informed promotional campaigns, mainstream journalism, and scholarship. only a few writers and scholars have given the deserved importance to what is known as the ÂŤanime boomÂť that took place in italy between the 1970s and the 1980s, and to manga. among them are writer gianni rodari [1980], winner of the andersen award, semiologist daniele barbieri [1991 and 2004], sociologist Sergio brancato [1994 and 2000], journalist luca raffaelli [1994], writer ermanno detti [1998], sociologist alberto abruzzese [1999], and pedagogist gianna Marrone [2005]. For years they have acknowledged that the arrival of anime and manga in europe has been a very important cultural event for two generations of television viewers. it is also true that there has recently been a change of direction even from the press and the media, which in the past had often harshly denigrated several Japanese productions. now, they have started to produce different and more positive news on the topic, mainly thanks to the gradual arrival of a new generation of authors. it was very important to at least briefly mention these structural and sometimes ideological limits in the cultural debate on Japanese audio-visual culture in italy made by the generations of middle-aged writers and authors. This is because, since the 1990s, these debates have started to move in a new direction, thanks to younger authors and writers, who have been conditioned by the fact that they grew up connected with the Japanese imagination, and therefore are more prone to discuss the topic much more objectively and carefully, providing better points and more information.9

III. Three changes in the approach mass media and youth imagination Today we see important structural changes in the imagination and its productive routines, taking place both in regards to the aforementioned creation of new heroes and myths, and through a series of innovations in the three planes of technology, media-languages and cognition.

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three changes in the approach Mass Media and youth iMagination

Since the 1950s, the usual products of the cultural industry, like the press, radio and cinema, which have dominated the first part of 20th century, have been joined by several new ones, for example television, videogames, personal computers, mobile phones and the internet. Their introduction has resulted in the creation of new languages, with which the people who are now, in 2010, in their mid-thirties or early forties, have spent most or all of their life. Just like Marshall Mcluhan [1964], and several others after him [Meyrowitz 1985, de Kerckhove 1991] had theorized, what are now considered habitual practises, like channel-hopping, using a Walkman or an MP3 player, and playing videogames on portable or home consoles, have resulted in a new way of dealing with reality and with one’s own body. using SMS, instant messaging, e-mails, chat, blogs, surfing the web, watching video clips or ever-changing, multi-linear television programs aimed at a young audience, made the children—those living in countries advanced in terms of media—used to cultural universes, the meanings of which are often almost beyond the grasp of their parents. This resulted in a change in the cognitive paradigm, consisting of both a new relationship with one’s own motor and reactive skills, and of different ways of understanding and adapting to new situations and new codes.10 Most of the anime that arrived in italy and europe from the second half of the 1970s11 have gone through this triple technological, mediatic-linguistic and cognitive passage, and have even facilitated it, adding two extra levels, the aesthetic one and the one made of ideologies and moral values. The people from the so-called grendizer-generation12 have been influenced by the aesthetic impression of the anime with which they spent their childhood and adolescence; they have often been inspired by them, and from them have they learned values that were absent in most of the usually more humoristic Western cartoons. The moral attitudes, topics and aesthetic influences have left a twofold sensibility in the people from that generation, who are now adults, and in those who were born in the 1980s and 1990s. on one hand, there are the elements typical of euro-american cultures, and on the other the Japanese heroes, a rich group of characters, narrative universes, ethics, and aesthetic values that are at the same time different and similar in their being often «hybrid», for they mix traits (stereo)typically perceived as either occidental or oriental. Characters and products of an «exotic» cultural industry have found their way into europe—mainly in, but not limited to, italy, France, Switzerland, and Spain—regardless of the cultural decisions taken by the local authorities. besides, Japanese imagi-

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introduction

nation in europe is not everywhere like the north american one, and only concerns fringes—admittedly rather big—of the young generations. however, it still remains a cultural addition worth of attention. in other words, i believe that the grendizer-generation represents a phenomenon of what could be considered transcultural syncretism, which should not be underestimated. in the late 1970s, a rising foreign popular culture, obtaining more and more space on the television for youths, has established contact with very broad and very different national contexts, producing effects still requiring attention today.

IV. Ufo Robo Grendizer after these preliminary considerations, we can now talk about grendizer and then Pokémon. i will talk about the latter a bit later on; for now i want to spend some time on that ludic-narrative configuration that most, in italy, know as «uFo robot» (Figure 1).13 on the topic, in 1999 sociologist alberto abruzzese wrote: 14.

the reaction of violent rejection with which the Witnesses and Controllers of the italian system met the meaning of the Japanese anime, highlights the critical and politic-administrative poverty of those who lived the moment when our national culture […] came really in contact with the technological man, without wanting or being able to understand its meaning and opportunities.

What they met was the great post-human depiction of grendizer, its acknowledged anthropological, emotional and sensory fusion between nature and machine. [abruzzese 1999: 8]

What abruzzese discovered was the fundamental moment that affected a whole generation of young television watchers in the second half of the 1970s. a series of technological and linguistic mass media innovations took place between 1975 and 1980. in just a few years, the mechanical means of communication that had been around for over twenty years (television, record player, cassette player) were joined by new recreational pieces of equipment. First of all, videogames: arcade games, portable games, and eventually the games played at home too [bittanti 1999, Pellitteri 2006a]. obviously, production technologies and products were not the only ones to evolve. Still today, one of the most debated topics in italian scholarship

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Ufo Robo gRendizeR Figure 1 grendizer, known in italy as goldrake. in the medieval english drake means ‘dragon’, from the latin draco, -nis. one can play with the name and make it mean «gold dragon», in order to insert it fully in the dragon metaphor, which partially takes its name from this title.

Ufo Robo grendizer © gô nagai / dynamic planning / tôei dôga / d-visual.

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on television is that of the speed with which, between 1975 and 1976, the entire television broadcasting system in italy was changed, to favour free, private channels; this resulted in a huge number of economic, political and communicative effects.14 This liberalization, and this is what we are mostly interested in, also modified the formats and rhythms of scheduling. before the reform, the animated series and television series had some standard weekly slots. From 1976, first on the rai channels and then on the private ones, those shows started to be broadcast more and more often, becoming daily in the end and changing for good the communicative relationships between television and its audience, especially children [Pellitteri 1999 and id. 2004d: 47-50, Ponticello 2005]. at the same time, in those years sci-fi cinema produced some of its most famous and visually spectacular masterpieces—for example Star Wars, which was made in 197715—and developed the idea of a robot that was not just a factory machine anymore, but a wonderful, smart and self-conscious being, looking at least vaguely like a human [di Fratta et al. 2007a]. in this setting, the arrival of the first Japanese animated series in italy and other european countries, like France or Spain,16 caused a sensation among children and adults, but in different ways. Videogames and such

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introduction

16.

had affected the social system and the general way of thinking of their users mainly from a technical and recreational point of view, and from the way in which new and old habits had to co-exist [ascione 1999]; instead, the coming of heroes like the Western audience had never seen before acted on a whole different level, the linguistic and narrative one.17 These new shows involved huge mechanical samurai fighting against alien invaders on land and in the sky, or animated television series that were generally taking themselves rather seriously, especially when compared to the innocence of american cartoons.

There were no more tender scenes, with animals interacting with reassuring backgrounds, usually for comical purposes; no more situations involving «really good» characters set against «really evil» ones, as in the disney cartoons, or «cunning» ones against «stupid» ones, as in those made by the Metro-goldwyn-Mayer and Warner bros [raffaelli 1994], but dramas where often the heroes themselves would die tragically, and where strong topics were discussed in a not too soft way, despite the young audience. as abruzzese has already mentioned, grendizer and the sci-fi Japanese animation were among the signs of the beginning of a new phase for the media: the one involving the «fusion» of men and technology. The binomial name «flesh & metal» is certainly very interesting, and several authors have worked on this concept.18 but the persistence by the Japanese in introducing the machine universe to a very young audience, placed in a historic period when the idea of industrial mass production was being replaced by a softer one, suggested that what was seen as eccentricity in the West, was in fact a distinguishing tendency of the Japanese imagination. as such, the encounter that took place in the 1970s between the european and american cultures and the Japanese one—which many Western people used to consider unknown, exotic and full of futuristic technology— was as disturbing as unexpected for many adults.

For example, it is almost just a coincidence that the grendizer/goldrake anime landed on italian public television. it was a coincidence that, in 1978, the person who had to decide which foreign television programs for children could be broadcast, was a public servant, nicoletta artom, who proved to be far-sighted, and the green light was given by a competent person with a personal knowledge of comics and animation, Sergio Trinchero [Trinchero 1983]. otherwise, it is possible that the rai managers would have never agreed to broadcast what was considered to be a very strange series.19 later on, when the controversies about the arguable danger of the

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PokéMon

anime exploded, rai felt it right to give its broadcasting rights for the Japanese series to several private companies, keeping only the softest ones, like Mitsubachi Maya no bôken (known in italy as L’ape Maia— ‘Maya the bee’), Alps no shôjo heidi (known in italy as heidi) and Akage no An (known in italy as Anna dai capelli rossi—‘red-haired anne’).20 anyway, grendizer had done its work: starting to create a new way of approaching fantasy and narration, very different from the Western classic cartoons canons. going more deeply, grendizer proved to the young viewers from the late 1970s that it was possible to think about different television, and that it was possible to enjoy shows coming from far away, not just absorbing the positive values that had been pedagogically calibrated by the Japanese authors, but also keeping track of the local values, customs, and morals, because this expressive fusion was, after all, just a moderated juxtaposition of the contents.

V. Pokémon in the world of children’s entertainment, Pokémon (Figure 2) certainly is the most successful series, both from merchandising and entertainment points of view. built from a videogame fusing four different gaming experiences—fighting, searching for items and knowledge, collecting, and swapping with other players—this series is much more than just a videogame: within months from its debut in Japan, in 1996, it was successfully exported to most of the world—certainly to all the wealthy countries—and has produced toys, sweets, animated series, movies, comics, musicals, becoming a popular phenomenon and a collective mania for millions and millions of children. The characteristics that made it a worldwide success, the speed in which this success was achieved, and also the speed with which the public enthusiasm about this series has subsided, have made Pokémon big medial and commercial news. Since it has been presented to the international public, Pokémon can be considered as a turning point for commercial strategies related to multimedia imagination aimed at young people.

The Pokémon universe has been studied at several conferences and in essays in various parts of the world ever since the early years of the present century. one of the best texts in the english language is Pikachu’s Global Adventure [Tobin et al. 2004a]. Two years earlier, in 2002, a book with partially similar aims to the one edited by Tobin had been published in italy, ti-

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introduction Figure 2 pikachû, the most famous pokémon in the world because it was chosen by nintendo as the visual fulcrum for the planetary expansion of this ludic and narrative cosmos. in the photo, a Japanese girl tightly holds a pikachû plush doll. pikachû’s specific power as a pokémon is to launch electric discharges against opponents: a characteristic which also justifies the metaphoric naming of the phase of the dazzle also on the basis of the Pokémon phenomenon. photo (detail) by Masaaki kato/yamatovideo. pikachû, Pokémon © nintendo / shôgakukan.

18.

tled Anatomia di Pokémon [‘anatomy of Pokémon’, Pellitteri et al. 2002a]. both of them contain essays by pedagogy and children’s literature academics, by writers, by school teachers, by experts on Japanese culture, comics and animation, by sociologists, with contributions by French, israeli, Spanish, american, and Japanese authors. The creation of these two books between 2002 and 2004—and of several others which are not mentioned here for the sake of convenience—shows the extent of the research done in several countries on culture and media, and especially on phenomena for young people, which seem to have reached a new evolutive phase thanks to Pokémon. after having seen how the discussion on the topic evolved—for example in lipperini 2000, Tobin’s work, and allison 2006: 192-270—and based on Anatomia di Pokémon and another previous work of mine [Pellitteri 2002b], i concluded that comparing grendizer and Pikachû would be a sensible strategy of interpretation. Metaphorically, the two characters reveal two interesting strategies through which to filter our vision of Japanese imagination for young people arriving to the West from the 1970s to the 2000s. This is discussed later on, in the final Paragraph of this introduction.

Pokémon is the most obvious manifestation of a cultural model hereby called mutation. The concepts of growth and development, and the associ-

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PokéMon

ated problems, are displayed by the main characters. but the mutation also takes place outside Pokémon, in the merchandising: through these products, a deep change in the promotional and transnational commercial distribution strategies of recreational items can be observed.

The main strategy linked to Pokémon can be compared to that of the dragon, symbolized by grendizer, and can be called the dazzle, from the lightning of Pikachû, the Pokémon that usually represents this universe created by nintendo and its various partners. during the alternation period between the dragon and the dazzle, the people who «create» Japanese imagination—animation firms, comics publishing houses—have organized themselves with growing orderliness, moving out from a period of uncertainty in foreign markets, with increasing coordination. They have started to believe in the influence of Japanese pop cultures on the american and european readers and means of distribution. until recent years, the cultural and commercial processes taking place during these two periods have been only partially depending on the involved people and companies (authors, firms, industries, products). Joseph Tobin wrote: nintendo planned the development and launch of Pokémon very carefully, and they made many wise, strategic decisions about how to capture the children’s market. but this is not to say that nintendo anticipated Pokémon’s incredible success, that they followed a scripted plan, or that they did not make marketing mistakes along the way. When they started out, Tajiri and his employers at nintendo seem to have had no plan or aspiration for Pokémon beyond developing another successful game boy cartridge. The comic-book, the television show, and the trading cards were no part of Pokémon’s original marketing strategy. it is only in such third-wave markets in italy and israel that the rollouts of the various products were fully coordinated and integrated […] the greatest strength of Pokémon is that it is a multidimensional, interrelated set of products and activities, but the multidimensionality was emergent, rather than planned. [Tobin 2004b: 10]

if this is true for the Pokémon phenomenon, which most Western people wrongly believe was a perfectly preorganized plan, then it is also true for all the products that came before it, belonging to the dragon phase. i will cover these points, and all of their main implications, more extensively in Chapter Vii (for Part i) and Chapters iV and V (for Part ii).

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VI. Using a syncretic view to study mediatic phenomena Fausto Colombo, in his book La cultura sottile [‘The thin culture’, Fa. Colombo 1998], talks about the evolution of the italian cultural industry since the 19th century, and highlights two crucial phases of social history and media research. after beginning to look at the birth of the show business society from the historic-sociologic point of view, with its technological components and its cultural forms—visible in the main products made until the second half of the 20th century21—a new study model, following different frameworks, has been developed. The first of these frameworks is composed by research on cultures and on their double relationship with the media.

Three very different types of investigation move in this direction: cultural anthropology, studying for example the shapes of what is visible, from the Middle ages to our days; sociological studies on «local» cultures, paying attention to the types of reception by which media have to deliver their contents; finally, investigations on pre-mediatic structures, seen as a place in which to explain 20.

which needs the media aim to satisfy. [Fa. Colombo 1998: 11-12]

The second framework is the one chosen by the history of mass communication: chronologies that prefer to face the important topic of the evolution of media institutions, rather than focusing on formats, shows, and main characters. Finally, the third framework is the one studying technology and its innovations, and usually (but not always) the relationship they have with their contents. Colombo reasserts the differences between these three study branches, but also clarifies that the new, developing, research paradigm is based on their fusion, in order to produce more complete analysis. it is following this syncretic view that, in this book, i have tried to analyse the cultural models and commercial strategies that i found, and the transnational dynamics of the presentation schemes of mass phenomena for young people; still, as many of you will notice, the nature of the covered topics has often made me act within the field of the aforementioned first framework. This is the framework that investigates the imaginary characters, the products, the forms, and the expressive styles taking place in the media dynamics [ibid.: 12]. Colombo also mentions the receptive forms and formats, two topics that The Dragon and the Dazzle covers in Part ii; and

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three Models and two strategies

the so-called pre-media structures, which receive some attention here for two main reasons: the fact that Japanese society and its values determine the ways of presenting the products that will eventually be submitted to Western publics, and their contents; and the ways in which outside Japan— for example, in italy—other pre- or extra-mediatic structures react to these narrative forms, to these values and exotic, sometimes discordant, contents.

VII. Three models and two strategies Michel Foucault, in L’archeologie du savoir [1969; in english, The Archeology of Knowledge], explains what he means when he describes «the bending point in a curve, the inversion of a regulating movement» [Foucault 1969; it. trans. 2005: 13]. The philosopher explains the concept of a «breaking point» determining a historic change in a «colloquial regularity». in analysing the structures behind the formation and organization of the dominant knowledge, the French author says that «most radical scans are […] the fractures produced by a work of theoretic transformation when it» [ibid.: 8], and here Foucault quotes althusser, «“creates a new science by removing it from the ideology of its past and reveals such past to be ideological”» [ibid.].22 if we can attempt to apply this explanation to our point, anime and Japanese imagination in the West can be seen as a fracture, an expression of a transformation that serves to «foundations and renovation of the foundations themselves» [ibid.]. in other words, the Japanese cultural models that we can observe within manga, anime, and pop cultures can be seen as a joint between the past and the future of youth cultural forms in technologically advanced societies; or, as a filter from which people will—or would have to—start in order to produce what Foucault calls «a genealogy» [Foucault 1971: 136-56] of thoughts, values, and ideologies of the postmodern imagination of the young Western people who enjoy anime, manga, videogames, and Japanese fashions when these products arrive in the West.

The aim of this genealogy should be to analyse the fractures discussed by Foucault, and in doing so it would be appropriate, perhaps even necessary, to develop a new way of thinking about complex phenomena such as cultural globalization, and especially about how the Japanese transcultural imagination and the Western public relate to each other. in short, it would be necessary to leave behind the ideologically filtered vision of many observers

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22.

who, in the past decades, have summarily examined Japanese cultural forms from a eurocentric point of view, in order to be able to better see the breaking point produced by such foreign cultural forms in local (european) ones, and the effects of foreign cultural forms upon habits, aesthetic and general tastes, ideas, fashions and behaviours, which are becoming a hybrid of the historically perceived «east» and «West». on this fragmented background the cultural models of «machine», «infant», and «mutation»—which i consider to be as three of the main postmodern categories through which Japan has been perceived in the West by the general publics—take their right space. The machine usually associated with Japan is either that of the production line, still connected to the industrial rules of mass production—despite some substantial organizational and conceptual differences linked to some Japanese particular cases like the Toyota system—or the one seen in comics and cartoons. both in asia and in the West, robots like Mazinger Z and grendizer have been considered by young publics as the icons of this type of machine. grendizer and other subsequent mechanical characters (like Kidô senshi Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion, about which i will talk later on)23 symbolise a hypertrophied machine, which was born made of metal only, and has later become a mixture of flesh and steel, organic liquids and plastic, mind and software. This machine, after having come from the underground or from space, now—or in a not too unlikely future—lives inside a technological metropolis, of which Tokyo is the best. The machine mainly discussed in this book is the one seen in anime between the 1970s and the 1990s, and therefore close to the apparently playful and childish robotics seen in goldrake & Co.; but, with the evolution of cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the amusement industry, robotics will move towards a new phase, involving «sexual robots», which represent a market that is quickly growing in Japan. here, the machine leaves behind its most sci-fi components and becomes more disturbing, natural and artificial components are mixed together and our biological needs become linked to those of the machines.

The model of infant, the second to be analysed in this book, derives from the meaning of the latin word infans, infantis, i.e. someone unable to speak. The infant who/which comes from Japanese contemporary society is the kawaii puppet, which looks like a cute puppy, or the technological object requiring constant attention, like the Tamagotchi,24 a sweet electric creature asking for non-stop care, or the kitten hello Kitty, so sweet and helpless, which is willingly drawn without the mouth, in order to make it

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three Models and two strategies

look more infantile, both externally and etymologically; and finally Pikachû, the well known Pokémon who/which is only able to say the syllables of its name, repeating «pika-pika-pika-chu» as in a litany. however, if we look less superficially at the infant, we can see it elsewhere too: in a large slice of young Japanese people, and in their attitude. These young people include youths who are considered normal, and others belonging to subcultural groups that are considered deviated by much part of the adult world (like otaku, hikikomori, kogyaru, ganguro, yamanba, burikko, and many more, which i explain in the book). They are perceived/perceivable infantile in many ways, especially in terms of attitude, and considered immature by both adults and several authors from the fields of sociology and psychology; they are infants because they refuse, at least apparently, the responsibilities and habits of the adult world, and, most importantly, because the mainstream society and the higher authorities have deprived them of the power of the word, the faculty of freely expressing themselves to become subjects worthy of political (not cultural) attention.

The generational conflict which, in the past twenty years, has been taking place in Japan and in many other Western societies, including the italian one, is very different from the one occurring in the 1960s and 1970s between youths and adults. Japan, always recounted in the mainstream media as a place of contradictions and deviations in the contrasts between parents and children, seems to me, in reality, like a mirror of the problems that can be seen in europe too, often with similar characteristics.

The young generations reject the adult models, and this results in a discomfort that should be analysed with less severity and more empathy than has been shown so far, both in Japan by famous psychologists [like in okonogi 1981] and in italy by experienced journalists who, perhaps, are somehow too distant from the topics they discuss [Pisu 2001a]. besides, the continuity crisis between generations that anthropologist georges balandier [1974] analysed over thirty years ago should always be kept in mind. and finally, the model of «mutation» which, because of its own nature, entwines the other two, letting them grow and becoming, in the process, a transmodel of sorts. When compared to their original forms, the machine and the infant models have had many changes over the decades. For example, as i already mentioned before, the machine, originally mechanical and distinguishable from the biological being, has started to fuse with it, first in the literature and then in reality, in what is still an ongoing process; the infant has evolved through the development of the industries producing non-

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essential products, and through the evolution of the relationship between young people and adults. More importantly, it has evolved through the dialectics that have always existed between users/consumers and products/ messages [buckingham—Sefton-green 2004]. The children and teenaged girls prone to tears seen in the anime from the 1970s and 1980s, who often were without an adult guide, and always free to move, at least temporarily, in an independent space, have eventually become the infants «unable to talk» seen in the Pokémonian symbology: mutant puppies who indirectly know that, for their public, growing up is a difficult phase, oppressed by a strict normality and by the difficulty of expressing their deepest ego, and therefore often refuse to grow up, preferring to stay in a limbo that the Japanese scholars have called moratoriamu ningen (moratorium people), after the works by erik h. erikson [1950] and the mentioned okonogi.

Together with these three cultural models, and their evolutions, i have devised the two aforementioned strategies that help us to understand the arrival and the success of Japanese imagination in italy, europe, and the West in general. during the first phase, from the 1960s to the first half of the 1990s, the modalities by which Japanese heroes and products circulated in to the West fit under the dragon strategy. With this strategy, which i wanted to symbolically represent with the giant robot grendizer, Japanese characters and products entered the world of Western commercial, aesthetic, and moral rules. This process is mostly the result of a tradition born in the Meiji period (1868-1912) in which Japan, after two centuries of political and economic isolation, was compelled to open itself to the West, and follow other political powers, adopting their technologies, political, civil, and urban organizations. a situation that happened again at the end of the Second World War, from 1945 on [reischauer 1964, bouissou 1992]. in the field of cultural industry, this did not result in a blind imitation of products, aesthetic tastes and languages, but in the absorbing of productive routines: for example, keeping the focus on animated movies, the drawing techniques, perfected after carefully studying the american ones, have gradually improved until obtaining remarkable linguistic and technical results. at the end, this strategy has become a great phenomenon of cultural globalization, in a historical period in which Japanese culture eventually conquered vast fringes of the american audience, in a process lasting since the 1960s, and then the european one, since the 1970s.

When looking at these years, it is not correct to think about a strategy organized from above, as it was custom in the Meiji and following periods,25

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three Models and two strategies

because the editors/producers of Japanese animation and comics, after an initially uncertain relationship with the Western markets (1959-1975),26 have happily accepted the request of several Western producers and editors, fascinated with Japanese products, to buy the rights for a huge quantity of animated series (since 1963) and then comics and videogames (since the 1970s). in more recent years, the dragon strategy has been replaced by a new one, which i have named the dazzle. now, Japan, and the other rich and advanced countries from the Far east, like China and South Korea, do not try anymore to copy the cultural industry of the the uSa and its skills in exporting its mass culture.27 instead, despite some limits that i will discuss later on, they take advantage of the success achieved among new generations, and more often present nation-related cultural features. in this context, we find the Pokémon phenomenon, based on the relationships between capital, factories, distributors, licensees and an aesthetic customization deriving from two generations of multimedia consumers. relations that took advantage of the consensus that had followed the dragon strategy in the West.

The cultural models discussed in this book are certainly not the only ones that it is possible to see, when observing from a european point of view, behind the products coming from Japan. but it is my opinion that the machine, the infant and the mutation are the most important ones, and cover most of the products, characters, and habits that come from the Japan and are very much loved by italian, european and american videogames players, consumers, readers, and viewers. at the same time, the dragon and the dazzle strategies represent the two phases that have so far been taking place during the arrival of Japanese culture in europe and north america; their existence does not rule out the possibility that, in the future, new strategies will develop and take over. in fact, a new phase may be starting, one based on the recognition by the Japanese government of its own cultural industry, employing late but go-ahead promotional tactics, trying to use the cultural power of manga, anime, and videogames made in Japan, with political and economic purpose [asô 2006].

These changes in how the Japanese culture and imagination are promulgated put the country’s identity (as mainly perceived from abroad) once again up for discussion, considering how, up until a short time ago, it was deducible from manga and anime. When compared to the visual identities seen in the adventures of Tetsuwan atom, or gundam (Part i, Chapter iii/2), or the hello Kitty and licca-chan dolls (Part i, Chapter i), or gren-

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introduction

dizer (Part i, Chapter Vi), in recent years Japan has started to to be perceived and acknowledged in foreign countries—and i intend above all, again, europe and north america, because the asian context does not interest us here—in more assertive and well defined ways, beginning from those that can well appear as the possible signs of a new strategy which, as i have written above, seems to be replacing the two previous ones (Part ii, Chapter V). i will talk about this third hypothetical phase in the Conclusions.

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ParT I Themes of Japanese Transnational Pop Culture in Comics, animation, and Videogames

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ChaPTer I

Pop’n’global Japan a

few useful concepts for looking at Japan and its pop culture in the 21st century

i would like to consider this Chapter a second introduction: i review various key concepts upon which the book is partly built and that are often mentioned. it goes without saying that there is an extremely vast literature available on every theme introduced here, and therefore what i suggest inevitably are only some limited and indicative readings on the discussed concepts, in which the aspects that i see as the most useful theoretical tools for the following discussions are privileged.

I.1 Cultural globalization, and transnationality I.1.1 Cultural globalization, and postmodernity The term globalization today is a slogan used to indicate many things, most of the time without due precision. The word has so many implications that it is difficult to discipline all of its meanings and its denotations. it is in short what in english is called a buzzword, a sort of recurring umbrellaword that is used when one does not know how to place a supranational problem. in such sense, there is no limit to the exaggerations, to the point that the word globaloney, has been created; the topic is discussed in an intriguing and illuminating book [Veseth 2005]. one of the main problems in facing globalization as a theoretical prob-

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lem is that for many authors, especially in the economic sector, it almost does not exist as a phenomenon of world circulation of goods, ideas, people, capitals; and, on the other side, there are those who, while admitting the existence of globalization and taking it for granted, assume that its days are over, and have created the word postglobal [deaglio 2004].

To be fair, although the man who first suggested the introduction of a «global» sociology was Wilbert e. Moore in the 1960s [Moore 1966: 47582], the word globalization has been used since the 1990s, initially appearing in the studies of authors like anthony giddens [1990], Malcolm Waters [1995], Martin albrow [1996], John Tomlinson [1997] and later david held [2000], Manfred b. Steger [2003], and many more. globalization covers a large field of problems, and for this reason it is thought of as spanning many areas: economic, political, and cultural are considered the main ones today. guillén has been one of the most lucid scholars to outline the problem of globalization as a field of study. in one famous article, the author asks himself five crucial questions on globalization, which are: whether such a wide phenomenon indeed exists, since the economists prefer to speak of internationalization of the economy; whether it results in convergence and leads to a state of real globality, i.e. whether institutions and cultures become more similar to each other, or at least whether they get close (with a very important corollary, that of the social and economic inequalities between classes and between areas of the world); what’s happening to the nation-states, in truth the most discussed theme since it predates globalization and comes from the debate on modernity (cf. infra); and, finally, whether a real global culture is developing [guillén 2001: 235-60]. according to held, Mcgrew, goldblatt, and Perraton, those who work on globalization, either generally or specifically, can be divided in three groups. The hyper-globalists or globalists, believing that globalization is bringing forth a new age. The sceptics or traditionalists, believing that globalization is something that has already been seen; and, in truth, in the course of the 19th century there has been another globalization, resulting from the great expansion of people, capital, and political models from europe to the colonies, during a westernizing modernization. and the transformationalists, the category where held and Mcgrew position themselves, and which include giddens and others, for whom such processes are unpredictable and contradictory but not inescapable: a mix of events produced by institutions—like deregulation—or by new technologies [held et al. 1999].

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an issue that so far has gone hand in hand with the studies on globalization is globalism, an optimistic idea according to which the expansion of the markets and of the frontiers will result in a world economically unified [beck 1997, Steger 2002]. This idea has been extensively promoted by the media to reassure people about the future. but, as ulrich beck writes, it is more likely to be a commercial logic replacing or removing political action; an ideology of the dominance of the global market and of the new freetrade. after all, in his days antonio gramsci discussed a similar phenomenon, although not as part of a globalist context, with what he had identified as the hegemonic category [gramsci 1929-1935]. as i mentioned earlier, the debate on globalization, and on the other topics belonging to this Chapter is very vast and has largely been developed by economists and political scientists rather than by sociologists. on one hand, the protean nature of the discourse prevents it from being extensively discussed here; besides, a more detailed discussion would be superfluous for the topics to follow. on the other hand, the economic-politological attitude in the general formulation of studies on globalization makes us shift our attention to that dimension of the phenomenon more specifically connected to the transnational expansion of products of pop cultures coming from asian countries—and in particular from Japan—in european contexts, which is what we are mostly interested in here. however, it is useful to point out some core points of the economic dimension of globalization, because, within limits—those which are related to institutions and those which are a responsibility of multinational firms—the shifting of culture/s from one place of the world to the next inevitably depends on the political and economic spheres.

Suffice to say, then, that according to a large group of theorists, globalization is tightly linked to two historical macrophenomena called postfordism and postmodernity. one of the most lucid theorists is Krishan Kumar, who in a well-known article found five «great transformations»:1 post-industrialization, post-Fordism, computerization, postmodernity, globalization. it is known how at the end of the 20th century a multiplication of post-isms and of the so-called post-theories has taken place [Kumar 1978], since a series of epoch-making changes have been felt and noticed, but it is still not well understood how to theorize, analyze, and historically place them.2 in a nutshell, the researchers of these transformations could be divided into pessimists—the larger group—and optimists, making a dichotomy out of held’s and Mcgrew’s tripartite typologies.

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up to the mid-1970s, one of first researchers was daniel bell, who believed that with this age we had entered a new evolutionary phase based on the production of services, on the rising of a powerful work force of white collars, on increasingly specialized manpower also thanks to the specialization of institutes and schools and to the universities, on democratic regimes, on a reduction in social conflict thanks to the emergence of new classes, and on the new and pervasive role of computer science and telematics [bell 1973]. nevertheless, he was forced to review his opinions in the light of the complex events taking place in the 1970s—economic recession in primis—and became less enthusiastic [bell 1976], like other authors including Touraine [1977] and bloch [1990]. They were eventually joined by lyotard [1979], bauman [1991], and ritzer [1997], theorists of postmodernity and sharp observers of the contradictions and the problems that postmodernity is unwillingly causing for the economic and political equilibriums that were established in modernity. They are analysts who, in different ways and degrees, directly or indirectly, derive at least some of their theoretical presuppositions from a great classic by ralf dahrendorf [1957].3 among the optimists i cite boyer and Saillard, who in their attempt to debunk the consequences of Fordism and post-Fordism from the Marxist point of view, have coined the term neo-Fordism [1995]. but it was the theorist Manuel Castells the first to speak in a more balanced way about the many implications of post-industrialism and globalization, pointing out the potentialities of the network society, the structural advantages of the global economy, and the importance of the nation-states’ policies of development [Castells 1997-1999].

Fordism and post-Fordism rely on a concept of modernity, understood as a period in the late phase of which the former developed, and at the extreme limit of which the latter took over: david harvey [1989] believes that with the 1973 energy crisis we have moved from an industrial society to a post-industrial one, and therefore we have left late modernity behind, beginning the first phase of what, for lack of a better name, is today called postmodernity. now, as observed by giddens [1990], among the main structures that rule modernity is capitalism, in its industrial form. according to giddens, this can only survive concomitantly with institutional surveillance systems, that is the systems of social supervision and information control, and with the systems of retention of the means for legitimately using strength. in other words, what the politologist Joseph nye [1989, 1990, 2004] called hard power, i.e. the military power. This type of institutional

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organization has fuelled the structural elements which, according to giddens, support late-modern—and postmodern—societies, which are spacetime distance, disaggregation, and self-reflection [giddens 1990].4 The assumed difference between modern and postmodern often relies on such mutable bases that in the end it is hardly consistent and coherent; according to giddens, we do not live in a postmodern age, but in a phase of radicalization of modernity; or in what could otherwise be called advanced modernity. one of the most diffused visions of postmodernity points out that what is taking place in this age is a generic reflection on modernity itself, since we live in a historical phase when the West is losing—or, for some, has already lost—the economic and political predominance of the world due to the rising of new national powers. These national powers have resulted in what is considered to be the dominant dimension of the postmodern age: globalization. in turn, according to giddens, globalization is the result of the weakness of the present-day institutions and of the concomitant increase of their diffusion at international level [ibid.: 57-58].

This has produced, and is still producing with increasing insistence, new forms of organization of the institutions themselves, and ways of life that are indeed resulting in postmodern types of society. let us now move to the cultural dimension of globalization: it is been one of the least covered up until a few years ago. neither the economic or political theorists nor the structural-functionalist and the post-structuralist ones have deeply taken it into account, which is really surprising because in the structuralist point of view culture’s role is not secondary for the development and keeping of Parsonsian systems [Parsons—Shils 1951]. For example, giddens, in the aforementioned book [1990] proposes many structural schemes, individualizing different quadripartitions of globalization based on the world economy, military power, the system of nationstates, and job organization (and various variants) but only at the end of the analysis of these dimensions he mentions the cultural one [ibid.; it. trans. 1994: 82], touching on it without ever going in-depth. as mentioned above, the movements of culture—ideas, products, and associated capital—depend on the other dimensions of globalization. Therefore, various scholars, not familiar with the sociology of cultural processes, have included this side of the phenomenon in their investigations, before being replaced in the study of this dimension of globalization by scholars and researchers of this field, who began their analyses from sociological theoretical systems, related to the fields of analysis of cultural industries,

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of imagination, and of mass media. The recurring concepts, for the sociologists, the economists, and the politologists who have studied the theme, first of all concern the space/time turmoil: that is, the imbalance between the local dimension and the possibility of moving through very large areas, previously unreachable in a short time (or altogether). and then the explosion of the flows mentioned previously: capital, people, images, goods, organizational models [appadurai 1996, hannerz 1996]. a key word is deterritorialization [appadurai 1996, Scholte 2000], often used together with the concept of compression: of space and of time, of course [harvey 1989, robertson 1992, Mittelman 2000]. These concepts are discussed by Featherstone, lash and robertson in approaches that combine attention to the circulation of cultures with analysis of their related problems, on the institutional level [Featherstone et al. 1990, Featherstone—lash et al. 1999] and with analysis of the re/construction of identities and social relationships caused by global flows in an age of redefinition of late-modernity, pressed by postmodernity [Featherstone 1995, Featherstone—lash—robertson et al. 1995]. one of the unifying concepts related to the matter of flows is the one especially emphasized by arjun appadurai, interdependence [1996]. This concept comes from the understanding that we witness two dialectic models, being brought forward by the sides interested in—and produced by— international exchanges. during the Cold War, the dominant model was the center-periphery one; now, during this advanced globalization phase, the emergent model, even from the point of view of the cultural flows, is the one discussed here. one of the explanation models that we can reasonably use to illustrate the founding mechanisms of cultural globalization is indeed the one proposed by appadurai, who defines it as a phenomenon, taking place over the last decades, of general breakdown of the very substance and structure of the relationships between societies. according to appadurai, cultural globalization is essentially based upon two interconnected distinctive elements, the mass media—especially the electronic media nowadays [ibid.: 3-4 and passim]—and the movements of populations, resulting in a process of progressive de-territorialization [ibid.: 55 ff.], imaginary and even real at times. Today the world is crossed by complex transits that have a tendency to produce processes of separation and disjunction; flows in which the starting and finishing points are not well distinguishable and often swap places. in other words, the dynamics are more and more circular—horizon-

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tal or transversal—rather than vertical, like the communicative processes preceding the recent development of mass- and new media and the internationalization of media flows were. in this context, imagination becomes increasingly pervasive, like collective and social facts, and, strengthened by the new media tools through which it is possible to create multiple identities and imaginary worlds, deterritorialized communities—imaginary and real at the same time—emerge; they are imaginary because they are founded on common fantasies and on the virtuality of the relationship, which is no longer a confrontation but is mediated by a computer; and they are real because, using a computer, people interact on the basis of their thoughts and ideas, and at times even come to meet in the physical world.

Japan occupies a peculiar role in such dynamics. Kiyomitsu Yui [2006] highlights a parallelism between the processes of time and space fragmentation/compression provoked by deterritorialization and by transnational communicative flows, and the Japanese ability to develop syncretisms between autochthonous and external cultural elements, on an exterior as well as structural level. according to Yui, this ability, which characterizes Japan since early modernity, is a distinctive trait that distinguishes the country in postmodernity too. in turn, postmodernity began in Japan much earlier than in other countries, and in the not too distant future will turn it into one of the cruxes of cultural globalization. i will try to propose a scenario, strictly related to manga and anime, in the following paragraphs.

I.1.2 orientalisms, and transnationality of Japanese culture Japan is a country in which the cohabitation of two souls is above all a good common place for dining room discussions. nevertheless, there is a spark of truth behind this cliché; it is far more complex than what it is depicted to be, but it is there. in the 1940s, ruth benedict described its main elements, albeit from a point of view that today would be eurocentric.

The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. [benedict 1946: 2]

on the other hand, there is a vast collection of essays and fiction centred on the impressions that Westerners have accumulated on the Japanese

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people over the centuries, repeating various errors of orientalist stereotyping (cf. infra), generally more due to intellectual idleness than to objective observation of the local customs: Japan as a land of contradictions and a mass of autochthonous traditions and emulated customs, social innovations and productive structures inspired by Western powers.5 in more recent years, an acute observer of our times, english writer William gibson, has described the opinion that Westerners have of Japan in relation to its alleged «unicity», the result of the unusual union between advanced and omnipresent technology, hyper-industrialization, the current cohabitation of democracy and nationalistic and apparently bellicose regurgitations, and an economy that is still aggressive despite the recessive crisis: Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future. […] they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call «future shock» […]. The result of this stupendous triple-whammy (catastrophic industrialization, the war, the american occupation) is the Japan that delights, disturbs and fascinates us today: a mirror world, an alien planet we can actually do business with, a future. […] a sort of fractal coherence of sign and 36.

symbol, all the way down into the weave of history. [gibson 2001]

The point of view embraced in this volume is an analysis of the transnational strength of Japan as it is perceivable from a european perspective.

Various observers have provided good contributions in the past [Wilkinson 1981, Wilson—dirlik et al. 1995, iwabuchi 2002a]. They have focused mostly on the economic-political side of things, but there are also various works on the diffusion of Japanese pop culture in the world [Schilling 1998, Shiraishi—Katzenstein et al. 1997, Martinez 1998]. in 1994, Frederik l. Schodt, in the introduction of one of his books on the relationship between the united States and Japan, explains why he almost never uses the two terms east and West (that is, with a perhaps more problematic but thicker definition, orient and occident); Schodt explains that the use of those two words mostly belongs to an age in which the americans mentally still lived in europe; and, from europe, Japan has always been reached traveling towards east. That is, the east/West dichotomy has been historically founded on the opposition of the european continent to the asian one. in this opposition, based on social, cultural, economic, historical, artistic, folkloristic and religious aspects, there was not really space for other geopolitical subjects. up until yesterday, and to a

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large extent still nowadays, for euro-americans africa has always only been a land to discover and exploit, and never one that could be discussed with the West; oceania (i.e. australia and new Zealand) for europe is still a new and too faraway territory to allow for real comparisons; and the same american continent, from the european point of view, in the 20th century has not been anything more than a vast and increasingly autonomous appendix needless to say, this is: a eurocentric vision, which still withstands in various environments. opportunely, Schodt points out that for the north american people, asia is found to the West, not to the east, and therefore the sense of direction becomes confused, because the geographical and the cultural dimensions clash.

Schodt believes that it is time, for americans, to start thinking about asia and Japan in a no-longer european perspective; from his point of view, very probably he is right. but the situation is different for those still living and thinking in europe. For most europeans, east and West are not two concepts to set aside, for at least two reasons, tightly linked to the themes of this book: because the two terms contain much more than a geographical sign, as any wind rose or globe could provide, and represent two vast sets of geopolitical, historical and cultural problems, related to the perceived mapping of two visible axes of civilization conceivable as separate despite the inevitable points of contact taking place over the centuries; and, moreover, because it is from the progressive con/fusion of vast cultural, media, industrial, and financial territories that east and West, in the way they have been clasically/stereotypically conceptualized, represented and lived, today are in a discontinuous but progressive phase of overlap. in this regard, one cannot refrain from mentioning the orientalist discourse as acutely criticized by edward Said [1978] and then also discussed by other anthropologists [for example in Clifford 1988]. The classic orientalism derived from the conviction that the east and West of the world share an asymmetrical relationship, with the Western culture in a superior position in comparison to the oriental experiences. as such, Japan, being geographically part of the east, was put together with the other asian countries; nevertheless, not only from a certain moment has it not been possible to include the archipelago in the cauldron of the eastern developing countries—and it can be argued that it never was one of them—but it refuses the definition altogether, having been a colonialist and militarily well organized country since the late 19th century. in such a sense, as Jennifer robertson explains, the validity of orientalism as it has been rightly criti-

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cized by Said and by other european and american researchers, i.e. an essentialist distinction between a West carrier of universal values and an east seen as a totally different place, fails [robertson 1998: 97-99]. on the contrary, a new orientalism has developed in Japan, following the «laws» of Nihonjinron. That is, the domestic debate on the uniqueness of Japan, on its national, homogeneous and exclusive cultural identity. in turn, this is an essentialist point of view, but, obviously, inverted [dale 1986]. a simple starting point—even though it could radiate a scent of oversimplification—to begin the discussion on the dialectics between Japan and the West in relationship with the increasingly frantic circulation of popular imagination, and in comparison to the occasionally conflicting more general communication dynamics between these two worlds, can be the analysis offered by Johann P. arnason [2006]. arnason again presents the renowned locution «clash of civilizations», introduced by political scientist Samuel huntington in an article and then in a book [1993 and 1996].6 The definition is briefly illustrated here, but it will be opportune to get past it, since the interaction about which we are talking today does not develop in conflicting terms but can produce—and has de facto produced, at least at local level— various kinds of tensions, particularly cultural frictions. according to arnason, there is a more proper term to define this type of dynamics, and it is «intercivilizational encounters», proposed by benjamin nelson [1981]. as arnason states, the relationships and the communications between civilizations are not only made of the most violent dimensions, the tangible collisions being part of the clash dynamics: this is what huntington means when, in his article and then in his book, he introduces specific cases like the contrasts between the West and islam or the rising of China from under american hegemony. arnason instead says that in the non-violent dialectics between civilizations, the order of the differences resides in what the scholar calls «hermeneutical dissonances, logics in mutual conflict of divergent cultural landscapes» [arnason 2006: 45]. in his study of the dynamics of the meetings/clashes between civilizations, benjamin nelson presented four «structures of conscience». in individualizing them, he tried to overcome the Weberian perspective, to go beyond the original worry of the german sociologist about the religious rationalization of the West [Weber 1904-1905] and to exploit the different arrival points of the meanings that come into play when talking about the formation of a civilization. nelson named the four structures eros, logos, nomos and polis. i will not go into details, since this book is not on politology, but i remark that in

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the processes of transnational circulation of imagination, although the main emphasis is on the structure of the logos—the sphere related to communication—the imaginations carried inside these processes interact and move the threads of the other structures in a less central but not negligible way.7 For example, various observers have noticed that Japan has always been a more receptive country than China. Suffice to say, in the 16th century the archipelago showed more attention to Christianity compared to China, even though a violent countertrend developed later on. despite the Japanese politics of isolationism during the Tokugawa or edo age (1603-1868), the interest towards european science and culture stayed alive, and at the beginning of the 19th century the Japanese knew much more about the West than the Chinese did. This fact can’t only be explained by the geographical distance, but involves sociocultural factors too, which on one hand stopped China, and on the other made the receptiveness of the land of the rising Sun more enthusiastic [arnason 2006: 47]. The fact remains that Japan answers the very point noticed by arnason and nelson, which is that in the Far east countries, periods of strong social and political crisis have been followed by intense periods of meeting/clash with Western (meaning, european) cultures; moreover, such crises have partially been provoked by the introduction of Western cultures in the receptive country. it was the case with Japan at the end of the Tokugawa period and it was so for China after the philo-Christian rebellion of the Taipings in 1850-’64, and during and after Mao Zedong’s Cultural revolution [ibid.: 49]. up until now, i have discussed the point of view of the West in its processes of discovery and conquest of the asian territories. but westernization has not been the only type of modernization. There has also been a «Japanization» (nipponka). a process of colonization/conquest of various asian territories by Japan, no longer aimed only at taking possession of such areas— like the process begun at the end of the 19th century—but, starting from the 1930s, at the colonial, political, and cultural assimilation (dôka) of the subdued populations [robertson 1998: 92]. The assimilation is also linked to the ability of Japan to peculiarly absorb native qualities and foreign elements (yûgô),8 and in this case became what in the West has been called imperialism. in short, the Japanese strategy during their colonial period was to practice a mission of submission and civilization towards the other asian people, seen as inferior.9 This is a theme connected to the matter of Japanese nationalism, discussed infra, Paragraph i.3; here instead i will mention two documented characteristics of the Japanese colonial strategies.

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The first one is the primary factor implicated in the assimilation concept, that Japan still continues today in relation to the dialectics with other cultures: the ability to absorb and reinterpret cultural difference according to local culture [ibid.: 93]. The other one, a consequence of the former, is the official removal from above of the fear of alterity, which is part of colonial encounters, with the formal assumption of a national cultural configuration based at the root on the synthesis of endogenous and external elements: this process, at the time, produced a deletion of the fears embedded in the operations of transcultural hybridization in place [ibid.].

This brings us to the concept of transnationality today. ulf hannerz devoted a book to so-called transnational connections [1996], pointing out that the concept of transnationality is more «humble» [ibid.: 6] than globalization, because it implies exchanges between nations in a more concrete and specific way in comparison to the generic «globalized» ones; and, besides, because, in the cultural and media fields, it encloses all of the problems that arise from the asymmetry of messages and the mixture of the aesthetics of narrative products that move out of a country towards other nations. iwabuchi says that in the West people hardly speak of Japanese cultural influence in the world; he suggests that, perhaps, this is because of a discrepancy between the perceived cultural presence of Japan and its actual transnational cultural power [2004b: 56]. For this reason, i believe it is right to include another Japanese author in the discussion. Sociologist Kiyomistu Yui, in the very Preface of this volume, opportunely speaks of the acquired notions with which one can distinguish infranational and supranational entities and phenomena in the phase of an advanced modernity still based on the system of the nation-states (kôto) [cf. also Yui 2006]. and he sees anime and manga as a hybrid of these two dimensions. This is because, on one hand, anime are a local form of cultural production with their thematic and aesthetic connotations; and, on the other hand, they haven’t had any problem, especially not in recent years, to travel to an international level, to be welcomed in the distributive systems of other countries, and to be appreciated for their contents and their design by consumers in so many parts of the world. Therefore i would conclude by saying that they are a cultural conglomerate that stays within transnationality: a transnationality that has been fully completed by the expansion of J-Pop.10 in this context, the type of transnationality we are most interested in is the one that travels at the level of systems of communication, the cultural industry and popular imagination, spread by means like animation cinema

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and comics. in such a sense, an extremely illuminating contribution is an essay by ian Condry [2007], according to which in recent years the Japanese national identity is more and more touched and modified by transnational identities through the mass media, depending on the changing correlations between the contents of certain shows and the values of the Japanese public. at the same time, Condry puts emphasis on the theme of national identity and on how recent entertainment products seem to result in a process of indoctrination.

Today, in Japan, nationalistic drives have also emerged in the mass media sectors that Westerners generally consider to be pure entertainment, i.e. manga and anime. The large majority of products imported in europe and america have little overt political content; and, where there are some political messages, they are not fully, or even partially, perceivable to Western mainstream publics. in truth, the tendency noted by Condry is double. Following benedict anderson [1991, ref. in Condry 2007]—and i myself cannot refrain from referencing at least appadurai too [1996] and Tomlinson [1999]—the american researcher notes that the globalized media have changed the ways in which national communities are perceived by their own members. according to anderson [1991: 6, ref. in Condry 2007], the factors that built perceptions of national communities were once the press, the travels through one’s own nation and the bureaucracy on which the nation itself was founded; instead, with new technologies and strategies and new media products diffused across the whole world, the imagined communities are built through the ethnic and national frontiers, in ways that clash with the most traditional notions of nationalism.

While some media messages aim to consolidate the sovereignty of Japanese nation through the reinforcement of a particular view of history, other media forms draw attention to transnationally imagined communities, […] of which anime and hip-hop are just two of the many possible examples […]. [Condry 2007]

on one hand, there is the developing of traditionally nationalist writings, reclaiming the country’s identity as the starting point from which to restart the redefinition of a national political and ideological solidity in comparison to the perceived confusion brought by national communication factors: this is the case for the Tokyo governor Shintarô ishihara, author of an impetuous nationalistic essay, based on a definite historical revisionism related to the war crimes of the Japanese army in asia during the Second

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PoP’n’global JaPan Figure 3 an image from the comic by kaiji kawaguchi Chinmoku no kantai (translated in english as silent service), 1989-96, portraying subtly nationalistic content. Chinmoku no kantai © kaiji kawaguchi / kôdansha.

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World War [2006, ref. in Condry 2007], and of the patriotic comics by Yoshinori Kobayashi and Kaiji Kawaguchi (Figure 3).11 on the other hand, there are examples of popular fiction which, while discussing the Japanese identity, do not renounce observing the merits and flaws of the national past and present, and set themselves in a multiethnic and globalized context, in ways that do not undo or mitigate their being Japanese, but that set up relationships with other realities. according to Condry, many past and recent anime, like Gundam or Blood+, cover events like war, race, morals, and belonging, in problematic ways, pushing the audience to meditate and not to passively accept this or that message [Ôtsuka—Sakakibara 2001, ref. in Condry 2007].12 but it is also true that those who, more than every other category, actively reflect on the critical themes presented in anime are the fans, the most assiduous users who, in many cases, far from passively absorbing the contents of their favourite films or series, elaborate those messages again, on the basis of their own knowledge and further in-depth examination, until they become masters of the thematic implications generated by the beloved narrations. For example, this is the case of fansubbers, the fans who provide subtitles and not rarely provide other users—who can profit from this extra tool through internet downloads—with explanatory notes on contents and references that could be obscure without deeper historical knowledge. This happens for many series, including the aforementioned Blood+ cited by Condry.

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Anime that receive this fond and philological treatment by foreign consumers, morph from local products into authentically transnational ones.

From a Western/european point of view, it is natural to think that the proliferation of Japanese popular culture in asian countries is due to factors of cultural proximity: since South Korea, Taiwan and hong Kong are asian countries, they are more or less bound to share at least some cultural traits with Japan, so that J-Pop is appreciated. For example, let us think about the recurrence of some somatic traits like «almond-shaped» eyes, which are an almost instinctive reference for Westerners. under this meaning, this idea of proximity seems not only very weak,13 but is also considered secondary by some Japanese researchers, who, when discussing the reasons for the positive reception of the Japanese cultural industry in the other countries of the asian sphere, prefer to point out the proximity/sharing of a space and time between two or more countries (the one producing the pop culture, and the one welcoming it): an idea that in its general sense can be defined contemporaneity. a dynamic contemporaneity, as iwabuchi says [2002a, 2004a and 2007], based not only on space proximity but also on temporal contiguity, that is, the notion that the nation generating pop culture and the target countries are proceeding towards a future where distances shorten and similarities are increased, following a reduction of the political, social, and cultural divergences.

This reasoning is valid for the asian scenery, yet it seems to me that it could also be applied to the european point of view. The pop culture that arrived in italy and in other european countries from Japan certainly did not have, and is not having, an effect on the local cultures as massive as in the various asian countries, because over here it acted on smaller groups of people; nevertheless, the impact is slowly emerging in fan subcultures [according to the definition given in Jenkins 1992: 1-2, 12-16] and, up to a point, also in the vast group of viewers/readers of Japanese products. This is proved by the research carried out in italy and europe following various types of approaches [impegnoso 1999, Pellitteri 1999, Molle 2001a, Filippi—di Tullio 2002, Vanhee 2004, Calderone 2006, Sabre 2006]. after all, modernity, traditionally intended as an expansion of Western civilization, on one hand has forced many non-Western countries, today industrially developed or in an advanced phase of development, to accept westernizing forms of modernity—at least in phases preceding those at work in the last few decades—but on the other hand has made it evident that speaking of modernity only from the Western point of view is inade-

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quate for a correct understanding of the dynamics in play. in such a sense, in my opinion the proximity of which iwabuchi speaks can be expressed with the progressive, mutual approaching of some traits of the various national cultures also through the action of the stronger cultural industries, transnationally diffused. it has happened with the american cultural industries in many european countries, and it is happening with the Japanese cultural industries in many Far east countries; and, although to a much lesser extent, it is probably happening with J-Pop in the united States, italy, France, and in other Western nations.

There is a term, transculture, which in my opinion effectively represents the new phase of the mass cultures that cross nations and civilizations.

Sabrina brancato writes: the traditional notion of culture is being revised. especially in the socio-anthropological and philosophical fields […] people speak more and more often of transculturality and transculturalism. These new concepts put emphasis on the dialogic nature of cultural influences, moving towards a conceptualization of the interaction in which nothing is ever completely «other» (foreign and ex44.

traneous), and therefore they serve to understand the processes of formation of cultural identity in all of their complexity. [Sa. brancato 2004]

i introduce here the word transacculturation, used to point out the dynamics of inclusion of themes, concepts, and Japanese imagination values in the fringes of italian fans of Japanese comics and animation. The original concept was transculturation, introduced by Cuban ethnologist Fernando ortiz [1940]. «The term has ever since been used in the anthropological circle to describe the dynamic of assimilation, through a process of selection and inventive reprocessing, of a dominant culture by a subordinate or marginal group» [Sa. brancato 2004]. i have redefined the term as transacculturation both to distinguish it from the former, which was focused on an imperialistic cultural logic, and to emphasize the process of cultural growth in a sense that voluntarily puts apart (for the moment) hierarchies of cultural power. in the italian story, this process of progressive transacculturation has indeed started with the arrival of anime on televisions. i will not attempt to explain here the characteristics of this cultural crossing experienced by at least two generations of young italian viewers and many european young people, since it is discussed later on. instead, it needs to be said that in the last few years this process has reached a second phase, following two parallel events:

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the proliferation, in the late 1990s, of an unbelievable quantity of Japanese comics that have added themselves to the old television series and to a second wave of less naïve anime, of better quality than those of the «previous generation»; and the development of an all-italian version of the phenomenon of prolonged adolescence—not limited only to the external level and to social behaviours—which had been seen in Japan since the 1980s. There is no question that the phenomenon is the result of various causes, but partly, at least in the subcultures linked to Japan, it has outwardly assumed elements deriving from it: the attire, the accessories, the attitudes of certain teenagers and young people today are inspired or conditioned by an aesthetical and behavioural tendency named kawaii and discussed in Chapter iV of Part i. obviously, these observations should be strengthened by more precise analysis and by systematic surveys; nevertheless, i think that at the very least an interesting problematic area has been located. if today many european and north american youth are heavily influenced by Japanese pop culture, it is largely due to the languages of anime and manga, and to the enormous intensity with which these have been aired on television and published in the newsstands and comics stores. and, after all, looking at things from the opposite point of view, the young Japanese today eat pizza and hamburgers, play baseball and football [richie 1992], wear Prada and armani, put on sweaters sporting the name of Totti or del Piero, following basic, almost symmetrical phenomena of intercultural dynamics with italy and the uSa, the countries most beloved by the Japanese together with France. in short, it is a topic of research that needs developing and that one is now obliged to deeply analyze, especially in the light of the crucial elements that have emerged in the last few years. and a good way to start is to propose a tentative definition of the Japanese «pop culture».

I.2 From taishû bunka to J-Pop besides the complex conceptual and terminological international debate on «popular culture» and on the expression «pop culture», which is very common these days, what we are interested in is the way in which the two terms have been, and generally are, defined and used currently in Japan, because it is from awareness of their precise Japanese definition that we can move on to discuss Japanese popular and mass culture in the West.

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I.2.1 Popular culture and pop culture

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in english, in common lexicon the concept of popular cultures today is generally associated with mass consumption, voluptuary goods, the wide diffusion of mass media like TV and cinema, and the dialectics between production and fruition of the related products and expressions; this is a family of meanings that is added to the more classical one, which is still dominant in europe. in France or in italy, for example, «popular culture», as a semantic area, pertains to the field of traditional expressions, linked to folklore and national historical identity. This meaning of popular culture, according to John Fiske [1989], is based on a brand of excess that escapes the control of the dominant ideologies and that therefore can be used freely. it is also true that most of the forms of popular culture, instead of parodying the institutional/political powers or manifesting themselves in a way entirely unconnected with any dialectics with them, can legitimate and strengthen it, as the critical Frankfurt school used to say. in Japan, the ethnographer Kunio Yanagita, active in the first half of the 20th century, conducted his research on popular culture with an optimistic attitude similar to that of Fiske and saw traditional and folklore production as identity resources [robertson 1998: 28]. nevertheless, unlike Fiske, Yanagita and other Japanese colleagues were of the idea that popular culture—Yanagita called it jômin, referring to the countryside people, seen as forming the base of the nation—had a strong political potential and that it basically was an expression of the dominant culture, acting as an interclass adhesive [Katô 1989: 315]. anyway, as Jennifer robertson notices [1998: 30], this is a vision of popular culture not corresponding to reality, because pretends to be pure in its expression and intents. in contrast with this allegedly harmonious and unitary vision of Japanese popular culture, there is a couple of definitions to consider, already introduced at the end of the 19th century, based on the distinction between two primary classes of citizens, taishû bunka and minshû bunka—where bunka means, precisely, ‘culture’. The first one means ‘popular culture / mass culture’, referring to the middle class. The other one refers, more vaguely, to the ‘mass population’, intended as an indistinct population and with a populist connotation [ibid.: 32-33]. Today taishû bunka transcends the social classes and is transversal; minshû bunka, as opposed to the aristocratic culture (kizoku bunka), has a regional and folkloristic / traditional base.14 When referring to contemporary Japan, robertson suggests the use

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of the term taishû bunka as the translation of ‘popular culture’ and of ‘mass culture’ [ibid.: 34]. besides, she proposes to speak of popular culture for generic definitions, and of mass culture in presence of products, narrations, merchandising, media strategies, etc. [ibid.]. i concur, and such concept is used in this book. Moreover this is in line with what has been asserted by another researcher of cultural production and fruition, diana Crane [1992]: here popular culture is understood not as folkloristic culture but as the aforementioned anglo-Saxon meaning. When speaking of mass culture, i will above all mean the action of the producers / distributors towards the public, seen as receptor and consumer of cultural products. instead, when speaking of popular culture, i will be referring not only to the production / transmission of contents and products «from above», but also to the possibility—not always exploited, but theoretically applicable— that people act «from below» with the / on the contents, taking part in them, elaborating them further on, sharing them and transforming them.

To end the present section on these definitions, i annotate that the term cultural industry / cultural industries, born in a specific critical context [horkheimer—adorno 1947] with a negative meaning, is more neutrally understood here as a process of production, promotion, and distribution of contents and cultural goods destined for vast publics. in this sense, the cultural industry can be pointed out as the union of apparatuses fit to produce mass culture.

What still remains to clarify, and here a short note is enough, is that the pop part of pop culture is obviously a contraction of popular, introduced in the 1950s in the uSa and then used in various contexts, from pop music played by pop singers and pop stars to Pop art, but all related to the production/diffusion of contents, characters, ideas in various ways addressed to a vast public, a popular one in a wide sense. Pop culture unfolds different trajectories in contrast with—or beyond any open consideration for— so-called high art. This is because it is not only issued by the neuralgic centres of the production of mass culture, but often suggested and/or promulgated «from the bottom», through processes of active public participation that give life to trends, tendencies, and meanings that are eventually taken again, evolved and strengthened by firms, mass media, artists, stylists. in the 20th century, the most present and powerful pop cultures have been, in the West, the american (uSa) and british ones, pervasive to the point of penetrating with great momentum the asian cultural markets, in a dynamics that has been seen by many observers as a fundamental part of the im-

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perialistic run of the great euro-american powers in asia. however, as it is by now clear from this Chapter, in the last twenty years Japan has become a further diffuser of pop cultures at the international level.

I.2.2 Pop culture, cool Japan, and J-Pop

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in Japan, the profits of the music, videogame, anime, manga, art, film, and fashion sectors between 1992 and 2002 grew by 300%, whereas the general amount of exports in the same period has «only» increased by 21% [Kawamata 2005]. The same year, animation cinema made up 3.5% of total exports [Sugiura 2003, ref. in iwabuchi 2007]. hello Kitty, the white and pink kitten of the Sanrio firm, that year earned a billion dollars only outside Japan [ibid.]. according to JeTro [2004, ref. in leonard 2005b: 281-82],15 in 2003 the total turnover of anime and related goods reached two trillion yen, that is 18 billion dollars, more than Japanese steel exports [ishiguro 2004]. in 2003, the number of people around the world studying Japanese reached a record number of 2.35 million people, compared to 980,000 in 1990 [asô 2006: 7].16 The given reason for this phenomenon of increased interest towards Japan (learning the language is the result of, or the stage before, making one or more trips in the country), is J-Pop in its various facets. asô himself observes that in many cases the opening and ending songs of the anime aired in foreign countries are in Japanese, and according to him this could have pushed many people to delve into the language [ibid.]. The research carried out so far in europe on the fans of J-Pop shows that many young people who tie themselves to the aspects of Japanese culture considered more superficial and less refined—manga, anime, action movies, fashion, and pop music—then want to broaden their knowledge and widen their interest to traditional theatre, the history and the classical art of Japan, and therefore to the language, in a sort of apprenticeship that will bring them to the country with the whole cultural equipment needed to fully appreciate it [Filippi—di Tullio 2002, Sabre 2006]. over the decades, the popularity of J-Pop in asia has grown, even in countries that for a long time have been hostile to Japan because of unresolved war matters; despite this, the whole Japanese culture has always arrived even in those areas, although via clandestine means and through piracy or «lowbrow» forms, with comic-books and animated cartoons. This is the case for South Korea [Yamanaka 2007]: for instance, in the book industry, for al-

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most all the last century in Korea they have imported more books from Japan that from any other country [Kim 2007]. in short, for many asian people J-Pop is a continental version of Western pop culture; a revised, culturally revisited, version of an exotic elsewhere which is looked at with desire, as it has been shown by Koichi iwabuchi [2002a, 2004a] and confirmed

by Korean cultural industry analyst Karl hwang [ref. in Faiola 2003].

From a european-american point of view, Japanese pop culture consists for the most part of products like manga, anime, videogames—which form the core—and pop music, trends linked to urban styles, gadgets, and products of the most different kinds related to the marketing derived from the previous forms. among the greatest structural strong points of this pop culture would be what Saya Shiraishi [1997] has defined an «image alliance» or what Marsha Kinder [1991] has denominated «super-system of entertainment». We will see in Chapter iV of Part ii that this «super-system» can be well included in a typology of development and intermedia proposition models of commercial poly-commodities phenomena. nevertheless, i can serenely confirm what has been proposed by Clothilde Sabre, according to whom Japanese pop culture originates from a «mediacultural» universe [Sabre 2007] developed in that country starting from the second postwar period, aimed mainly at young people but that over the decades has seen its own public widen. From this point of view, and keeping in mind the model by arjun appadurai on cultural globalization (cf. supra, Paragraph i.1.1), the diffusion of Japanese pop cultures at the international level is to be seen not only as a media flow of goods, but also of multinational communities whose imagination is based on an idea of Japan that perhaps is not necessarily true to reality, but on which the practices of relationship and fruition of such products are based. in fact, it should be kept in mind that the real Japan is different from the Japan imagined by the communities of Western fans. Who, as noticed by Steffi richter, create their own idea of Japan, positively or negatively stereotyped, and at times even mystified in its most evident and publicized aspects. according to richter, part of the responsibility for the construction of this not entirely truthful idea of cool Japan belongs to the same media scholars who for various reasons work on Japan, both at the popular and academic level; she hopes that the scholars would distance themselves further from their objects of analysis.17 in an article quoted by many—here too—despite the various analytical gaps, economic journalist douglas Mcgray [2002] maintains that Japanese pop culture would not be about to oust the american one in the world

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because, according to him, the latter is based on more universal contents and productive and distributive structures, while the Japanese one is rather based on contents and structures set in the local context. in reality, this is not entirely correct. even setting aside the point of the pretended universality of the american (uSa) culture—on which one naturally has to dissent— the inaccuracy of the affirmations by Mcgray on one hand is proved in a structural matter by the capillary diffusion of Japanese pop culture in asia and by the increasingly massive diffusion in the West; and on the other hand, in terms of the matter of content, by the more and more passionate reception of Japanese stories and characters everywhere; the final proof is the fusion of Western distributive apparatuses with the diffusion of Japanese content, resulting in beautiful economic and receptive results, in a hybridization of structures and content.18 in the article by Mcgray, which is more an article of opinion than real analysis, there certainly are some points worthy of consideration, but many others can make one smile. For instance Mcgray implicitly maintains a philo-american nationalism that is somewhat curious for a european observer. one of the points testifying with great strength the lack of knowledge of the topic about which Mcgray is speaking is his great surprise in realizing that pop singer namie amuro (Figure 4) in the 1990s became enormously popular in most of asia, that is in hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and other countries, «without ever going on tour in the united States» [ibid.]; the author also seems surprised—but it is difficult to understand if it is true surprise or a rhetorical artifice to blandish his fellow readers—that young Japanese people can dress up in the latest fashion even if most of them have never been to new York; or that the beautiful Japanese fashion magazines are spread, in their original or bootleg reprint edition, throughout all of asia, «though none has launched an american edition» [ibid.].19 These naïveties, or this malice, prove the ostentation with which Mcgray takes for granted in imperialistic terms that the centre of the world would obviously be the united States, since anything that becomes popular abroad without passing through the uSa first strikes him as the Martian landing narrated by orson Welles.

Mcgray’s demonstrations of amazement are even more curious when realizing that Japan, just to make an example, has the largest musical market in asia and the second largest in the world after the american market; that the introduction and the celebrity of Japanese mass culture are much more solid in asia than in the West, where it is also been firmly taking root in the

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froM Taishû bUnka to J-PoP Figure 4 namie amuro, one of the most famous Japanese pop music singers in asia, even though she is hardly known in the west. photo © namie amuro and other potential rightholders.

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last twenty years; finally, that for years now the paths of cultural industries and of practices of consumption are no longer only hierarchical from the uSa to the rest of the world, but reticular, since they insist on more geographical, industrial and mediatic axes. Yet in 2002, iwabuchi’s first beautiful book on the topic of the decentralization and recentralization of the transnational cultural flows in asia had already been published for one year [2001].20 nevertheless, Mcgray also notes that Japan, despite the economic crisis, or perhaps for this very reason, would be reinventing itself as a «cultural superpower». despite the fact that many Japanese artists, according to Mcgray, have the tendency to base several of their works on Western culture, the majority of their fellow countrymen are still surprised and flattered when a Westerner shows interest in Japanese language or culture. This is because, as discussed elsewhere in this book, even today the Japanese cultural industry is for the most part turned to its own internal market, that is, self-sufficient in several fields; for example, consider the sectors of anime and manga. another factor that according to Mcgray has made the Japanese pop culture attractive is the fusion of (a few) Japanese elements and (many) euroamerican ones. This is not correct either, not in such generic terms, since

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one of Japan’s characteristics is its capacity for syncretism [hall— gauntlett 1949]. The cool Japan, whereas in italy «cool» can be rendered with the word togo,21 does not originate from a superficial union of Japanese elements with Western traits; instead, it derives from a characteristic that has been one of Japan’s prerogatives for centuries, thanks to which foreign cultural products are received, revised, transformed, and reinstated in the national culture, rather than simply absorbed as they are. but there are other reasons for the interest in Japanese culture and they take advantage of a cultural changeover, of innovations in the distributive apparatuses, of the sagging of various popularity parables of forms and characters of the popular Western imagination. all the three factors are mechanisms that are part of the processes of reorganization and—to use again iwabuchi’s term—of the recentering of advanced modernity, which in the last decades has involved the most developed countries of the West as well as those in eastern asia. For these reasons, if in the 1930s Kurt Singer [1931-1939; rep. 2005] was wondering why a country so efficient and gifted like Japan had exported to other nations—implying, to the «West»—so few products and cultural tendencies, today the question could be turned upside-down, that is, how did Japan manage to export so well such large portions of its popular culture to so many countries in the last twenty years? Mcgray can’t find an answer for this question and even declares that it is impossible to measure the impact of a nation in terms of coolness [Mcgray 2002]. This is inaccurate, and it is surprising that the affirmation that «national cool» is just «an idea» [ibid.], and not something tangible, originates from an observer who deals with economy; since, using the tools for socio-economic analysis, it would not only be possible to measure it, but above all to conceptualize it better and therefore to use it as an instrument of analysis in terms of both industrial and cultural production and its perception, representation, and fruition on the national and international stages. a characteristic of cool Japan however is still cleverly found by iwabuchi, who notes that if on one hand the cool and cute (the latter, english translation of kawaii) brands applied to Japanese culture constitute a sort of correction for the underestimation of the Japanese society for its own creative ability, on the other hand by now it seems that J-Pop is being overestimated [iwabuchi 2007]. iwabuchi is also rather careful towards Mcgray’s article and underlines how the concept of cool Japan and the very vision of Japan as a cool country are american/european evaluations, while admit-

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ting that many Japanese feel flattered by this recognition. This gratification originates from a long political «narration» according to in which Japan has always aspired to having its own qualities recognized by the Western nations, and has often been ignored. This story of attention seeking and unsatisfied recognition is judged as evident in the fact that for decades the Japanese culture has penetrated and has circulated in asian countries in a much more organized way than in the West, but the large diffusion of J-Pop has not been noticed at all by non-asian observers until it became a visible phenomenon in european countries and in the united States [ibid.]. another element of great importance in the diffusion of the cultural expressions of a nation in foreign countries, linked to the internationality and transnationality discussed in Paragraph i.1.2, is not only the way in which this culture comes to and is received in a foreign country, but also the way in which it is distributed, commercialized, adapted, and locally revised. iwabuchi writes that symbolic power, in the globalization era, is not necessarily assembled in the country of origin, but it is exercised through the processes of active cultural negotiation that take place in each locality. in fact, it is now almost impossible to imagine local cultural creativity outside the context of globalization and the profits cannot be sufficiently produced without «respecting» local specificity […]. These moves are first and foremost organized and promoted by transnational corporations based on the developed countries, while cultural formats that are shared in many parts of the world originate almost exclusively from a handful of such countries. [iwabuchi 2007]

in other words, at a general level this mechanism produces the globalization of the diffusion of the mass and pop cultures of a country, and of the goods that constitute their by-products. That is, the complexity with which products or lines of products invented in a place (for instance the Pokémon universe) are distributed to the international level not only by the mother company but also by many local licensing firms. and, more specifically, this mechanism produces the ways in which the imagination put in play by the products is reconsidered by the local users: for example let us think about the children, teenagers, and even professional comics authors who, by revising the styles of manga and anime, have produced in italy and elsewhere successful artworks inspired in one way or another by Japanese characters (cf. infra, Part ii, Chapter V).

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The construction of new cultural capital [bourdieu 1979] based on Japanese pop culture—on some of its features, within a group of friends, or a subculture—takes the role of particular tool with which a generation, unlike the previous ones, is endowed, and that then lets it access and enjoy a specific type of culture and the products derived from such culture. among the examples of the importance of the cultural capital related to J-Pop, one can not refrain from mentioning cosplay, the practice of a specific subculture to sew, manufacture, and wear costumes that reproduce the clothes or the uniforms of manga, anime, and videogames characters [Vanzella 2005]. it appears that what i had hypothesized about the arrival of anime in italy and about the sense of cultural affiliation from an entire generation with a foreign imagination [Pellitteri 1999] is confirmed by other authors in whose countries similar experiences have resulted in the birth of a discrepancy between the young and the not-so-young people in terms of cultural baggage: a generation of consumers with «different needs and sensibility» [Kim 2007], who cultivate, in their points of cultural, personal, meeting, linked to sharing practices, several aspects of J-Pop. 54.

I.3 Nationalism and «odours» in Japanese globalized culture The last two points discussed in this Chapter are a certain type of nationalism recently resurfaced in Japan, also linked up to a point to the increasing success of J-Pop and called «cultural odour», a concept discussed by sociologist Koichi iwabuchi. The transnational flows of goods, people, cultures, and capital from asia to the West and back are producing, both in the politics and in the society of many countries, several effects, among which is a series of nationalist regurgitations that cannot be underestimated, because they might be the product of a loss of certainty about local identities, the solidity of which was previously assured by greater isolation. Japan is no exception, and this topic is also discussed in the Conclusions of this book. To this «postmodern nationalism» one has to add the concept of cultural odour, which is the ability of a product of the culture of a country to represent a specific lifestyle and national character, and the resulting possibility of permeating that product with an aura [benjamin 1936-1937] related to its country of origin. if Japan, according to iwabuchi, originally had the tendency to present the Western markets with goods that the researcher maintains to have a mukokuseki quality,22 in the last few years instead their

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strategy has gradually changed, and is almost reversing. This is yet to be understood in all of its implications by the researchers covering the theme.

I.3.1 Nationalism and mass culture in contemporary Japan The cultural and economic dialectics existing between the West and Japan concerns, in the latter’s point of view, a matter of identity. it is well known that the West sees Japan as the most westernized of the eastern countries. however, in europe and america what is less discussed is how for a long time Japan has perceived itself as the most oriental of the occidental countries. ian buruma has been able to clearly explain the matter. in 1905, when Japan defeated russia bringing the first military victory of the east against the West after centuries, Tolstoj described it as a defeat of asia from the West, of the «asian soul» of russia by the Western rationalism that Japan wanted to emulate. The attempts to educate the Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Filipinos, the indonesians, the burmese and the other asian people by teaching them Japanese, and by building roads, railroads and universities, were all imitations of the european colonizing spirit. desperately eager to be accepted as equals by the Western imperial powers, the Japanese were furious to be met with their refusal and contempt. [buruma 2007: 37]

From the end of the 19th century, Japan has experienced a phase of mighty modernization also thanks to the push of the Western powers; the internal debate on the position of the country in the international scenario however was very animated. in those years there was the development of an autochthonous orientalist spirit, very different in comparison to the one brought forward by Western researchers and politologists (cf. supra, Paragraph i.1.2). The Japanese orientalists conducted debate following two ideological axes, according to which Japan was seen either as a civilization/race superior to all other asian ones, or as a unique place and nationstate in respect to both the other continental nations and the Western economic-military powers [robertson 1998: 99]. as a matter of fact, both formulations were distorted and essentialist.

When the problems increased at the end of the 1920s—the economy stagnated, in a condition of constant dependence on the West and its industrial resources—the Japanese started to think that the country was held back by hostile powers that wanted to make it remain a second-class nation, in a pe-

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riod in which nationalistic tendencies heatedly vindicated the ontological superiority of the nation in comparison to other asian countries, and its economic cultural and political equality with the great european and american powers; a saying of those years was Datsua nyûô, ‘away from asia, towards the West’ [Tanaka 1993]. To many it looked like Japan was experiencing an overpopulation crisis to resolve by a military expansion. The government decided to face the problem by conquering a suitable empire, comparable to that of the Western powers. in the meantime, the nationalistic fervour of the Japanese soldiers stationed in China was spreading and reached the Manchuria district, which was already Japanese, purposely causing riots that made military invasion, already demanded by the pressure of strong groups of landowners and industrialists, justified. Japan decided that the time had come for drastic action and in 1931 the district was occupied and subdued completely. The event created a war psychosis in Japan and aroused a wave of nationalistic euphoria, which was translated in expansionistic politics on the continent: the navy was interested in a strategy turned towards the south, towards the oil in indonesia (at that time known as dutch east indies), which was behind the anglo-american naval power; the army aimed towards the north, to expand in the nearby continent and oppose the Soviet power. in just a few years, Japan would invade Mongolia and northern China, taking the first steps towards the explosion of a conflict with the Chinese government that would constitute the premise for the involvement of the country in the Second World War.23 What can be easily added is a simple notion often taken for granted in most classic sociology regarding the expansion of the Western powers from europe to the territories where colonialism took place, including asia.

What happens during the phases of expansion and meeting with the populations and cultures of the visited and/or conquered countries is not only a culture clash but something deeper, linked to the fact that the West has always been perceived itself as the carrier of modernity, whereas the nonWestern countries have always been seen as based on pre-modern forms of civilization. nevertheless, as arnason maintains, West and modernity are not really synonyms [arnason 2006: 50]. When the West’s modernizing push towards non-Western civilizations is exhausted, usually with the latter adopting modern systems and apparatuses (political, social, technological)—although in unequal ways from country to country—and after the dispersion of the impression that a sort of modern civilization has been reached, the old scheme of pluralism starts to take over again [ibid.]. For

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some scholars, including the aforementioned huntington [1993], the situation created during conflicts between civilizations can even be a return to attitudes and behaviours proper of the pre-modern era following a modern interlude. This line of thought minimizes the actual and continued impact of modernity, as understood by anthony giddens [1990] in its advanced and radicalized phase (cf. supra, Paragraph i.1.1), and on the contrary it emphasizes the clash phases and aspects without adequately considering the solidity of the modern structures in order to safeguard the geo-political and economic orders of the world. but it must be recognized that over the last decades the local voices looking for affirmation of various national, cultural, and ethnic specificities have come forward with increasing frequency and strength.24 This has happened with dramatic intensity in the clash between a certain West and a certain islam, a clash that clearly is not only between economic-territorial affairs, but between different conceptions of the world; however it also exists a second kind of encounter, at a less exasperated, less noisy, and so far non-violent level. if the first type of encounter, which is actually a conflict, is the result of divergences that—by using the aforementioned nelsonian typology of structures of conscience [nelson 1981]—involve above all the nomos and the polis, the second kind of encounter mostly penetrates the structures of logos and eros; with secondary effects that may not be obvious, but are present in the other two structures. i believe that the second type of cultural encounter is the case of the Japan from the advanced postwar period and of the present one, and, furthermore, of the Japan of the immediate future, if one wants to give credit to the current trends. as arnason writes, today the scheme of the clash of civilizations is not applicable anymore—since completely separate and unknown civilizations no longer exist—and on the contrary there is a «mobile labyrinth of civilizations» [arnason 2006: 52], all involved in trasmutation processes towards modernity or postmodernity. regarding what was discussed in Paragraph i.1.2, something similar can be said on the contrast between the opinion some old right-wing Japanese people have of youths—seen as ignorant of the past and forgetful of the fatherland’s values, distracted by foreign trends—and the self-image the same young Japanese have of their own generation, which instead would be well aware of its own national identity, but at the same time not for this reason closed to the influences coming from outside the country. The fact that today the nationalists, from Shinzô abe (Prime Minister up to the 12th

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of July 2007, day of his resignation)25 to the revisionists, complain that Japan is experiencing an identity crisis, is partly caused by unhappiness about the social evolutions of young Japanese over the last thirty years.

This change may have some negative aspects, like hyper-consumerism or the emerging of problematic subcultures and phenomena—the otaku and hikikomori about which i speak infra, Chapter iV—but nevertheless it has succeeded in harmonizing the keeping of the main values tied to Japanese collective life, like a sense of national identity, with the acceptance of trends, fashions, and lifestyles inspired by foreign cultures [Condry 2007]. as such, it is a bit strange to see that several manga authors recently have ridden the enthusiasm for the newly found nationalism and hypernationalism demonstrated by a certain right-wing political class of the country. an enthusiasm aroused by annual visits to the Yasukuni temple26

by Jun’ichirô Koizumi, head of the government before abe, and then by abe himself. Visits which, together with the renewal of the military pacts between Japan and the uSa and the allocation of many american Patriot missiles to okinawa, have heightened again the political tension with China and South Korea [buruma 2007: 34-35].27 This is the result of a populism incited by the Japanese liberal-democrat political leaders, and is also due to the increasing resentment, in a large part of the population, for the alleged moral obligation to still manifest to this day, sixty-five years after the armistice, a collective sense of guilt for the ferocities perpetrated by the imperial armies during the Pacific War;28 a sense of guilt which, according to many, should now be put aside in order to build a less pacifist Japan, ready to reclaim its place of honour on the asian chessboard. as such, the return to asia professed by many would result in an aggressive militarist rentrée, according to which Japan would again be a corporate body superior to the other countries of the continent.

This point of view is implicitly promulgated by Yoshinori Kobayashi’s manga (b. 1953), mentioned in Paragraph i.1.2, who believes that many of the slaughters committed by the Japanese—like the one in nanjing in 1937—never happened. another author, promoter of anti-Korean thoughts, is Sharin Yamano, creator of Manga Kenkanryû, printed by the small publishing house Shinyûsha after the refusals of many publishers, which defined his manga as «not historically correct» and «right wing» [Comics Corner 2006]. Published between 2005 and 2006, it is about a high school student who, shortly before the beginning of the Football World Cup, tries to increase his knowledge on the historical relationships between the two

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nationalisM and «odours» in Japanese globalized culture Figure 5 covers of Manga kenkanryû and its sequel Manga kenkanryû 2, the anti-korean manga by sharin yamano. Manga kenkanryû and Manga kenkanryû 2 © sharin yamano / shinyûsha.

host countries, South Korea and Japan. The manga has been rechristened, in english, hate Korean Wave and has been at the middle of a roaring debate even outside the two countries, between the Korean and Japanese communities scattered around the world; the debate has been facilitated and made more bitter by the internet (Figure 5). Several Japanese commentators have suggested that among the reasons for the existence of such manga are a substratum of political dissatisfaction and an emergent problem of national identity in Japan, a country that for decades has run after Western models, losing part of its own «asianness» [onishi 2005, rampini 2005b]. The result is that the Koreans have already produced various manhwa (Korean comics) in answer to Manga Kenkanryû.29 This is a regress in comparison to the fact that in recent years Japanese pop culture had received increasing approval in South Korea, after decades of isolation—i am referring to the ban, eventually removed in 2004, of Japanese cultural products. These tensions are increasing nationalistic ideas on both sides; instead, during the Cold War years, the ideological problem related to cultural flows was scarce, because the cultural transactions between the nations whose political relationships were cold or conflicting were scarce or non-existent [Kim 2007].30 The new nationalism that has started to spread in Japan however does not only come from these causes. in young and less young people it also arises from much more prosaic and concrete reasons, concerning everyday life and small-scale finances. The economic recession in place in Japan

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since the crisis in 1990 has had important consequences on the social system. That is, a notable decrease in the solidity of the full-time working system; the diffusion of part-time jobs with scarce or no career possibilities; an increase in family-run or individual small businesses, promoted by people who reinvent themselves with more fanciful jobs. also because, as Chris anderson notes [2003], smaller companies are more agile, and it is easier to take on the responsibilities of more audacious working activities in comparison to the usual big companies. This is not producing only negative results but also positive ones, such as a more frequent use of creativity and a great freedom of action, in micro-businesses born to compensate for the leaks in the traditional working system. but it must be restated that this situation is also provoking a strong loss of confidence in the institutions and an increase of nationalistic (also on a smaller, local scale) feelings in various sectors of society. and the fact that some observers have the tendency to emphasize the positive aspects of Japan reinventing itself as «the coolest country on earth» [Faiola 2003] does not change the facts: a rich economy, yes, but one in crisis. according to some observers, like iwabuchi himself [2007], this soft nationalism common among young people and among many cultural operators, even some high-level ones, has been produced by the increasing popularity of Japanese imagination and, more in general, of Japanese mass culture, in asia and in the West since the early 1990s. in other words, this process of expansion and appreciation of Japanese pop culture seems to have produced an increase in self-esteem. accordingly, the political and diplomatic environments have had the idea to use J-Pop as a flag for the promotion of national affairs [ibid.].31 Such promotion has taken place in Taiwan, hong Kong, China, and especially in South Korea. in certain environments, the expansion has intensified a patriotic pride which, as it has already been seen, derives from the ancient idea that Japan is a body separated from the rest of asia, and superior to the other countries of the continent. a positive countertrend must be noticed. The cultural flows are not unidirectional; there also are other emerging cultural industries in asia that stir towards Japan. This is particularly the case of South Korea, which has strongly emerged in the last twenty years, so much that people speak of hallyu or the ‘Korean wave (popularity)’ to define the influence of its culture. Such influence can be felt in Japan too: not only on housewives and on young people through the addictive TV series (Korean dramas) [Clements— Tamamuro 2003] and the pop music singers, but also on many fans who,

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wishing to broaden their knowledge of the country from whence their beloved products and characters arrive, study Korean, or the history of the relationships between Korea and Japan, and come across the controversial war and colonial past of the latter, eventually empathically understanding the rivalries and the grudges that to this day still exist between the two nations.32 in this way, even though the phenomenon cannot be considered universally widespread among the Japanese, it is as if the nationalistic feeling was attenuated by contact with other cultures and with the people belonging to them.33 I.3.2 odourless cultures, fragrant cultures, and perfumed cultures The concept of cultural odour has already been defined by the meaning provided for it by iwabuchi in his essay Recentering Globalization [2002a], which starts from the Japanese definition of mukokuseki. iwabuchi shows that the technological and cultural products that Japan exports all over the world are in various ways «odourless». This is because, unlike the cultural products and commodities from other countries—iwabuchi is talking about the united States, but the point is also valid, for example, for italian or French fashion and wines, or for the Vespa scooter—according to the Japanese sociologist those from his own country in many cases are not reminiscent of the Japanese lifestyle, or of Japan at all; this is much unlike what happens for any fast food, or for nike trainers, or for street style pants: all market and cultural objects that clearly feel american and promise various types of dreams to their users. iwabuchi also provides an interesting distinction between odour and fragrance, concepts tied to the prestige enjoyed by the country from which a certain cultural good originates. in his opinion, Japan does not enjoy a strong consideration in the West as a country exporting goods that are admired intrinsically and not only for their instrumental value; widespread Japanese commodities like the Walkman (and such) are used in europe and in the uSa for listening to local music, and not to Japanese music, and even their national origin is ignored, despite the fact that the concept of portable music, invented in 1979 by three Japanese designers, has revolutionized both the modalities for listening to music and the relationship between people and their urban space all over the world [hosokawa 1981]. if goods of this type are therefore entirely odourless, others, like Kawasaki or honda motorbikes—the Japanese origin of which is revealed in their very

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names—at the most spread an odour that makes them recognizable as Japanese, but without brands of particular cultural merit: Japanese people as good technicians, but with little style. This also altogether excludes the possibility that Japan can produce a real cultural fragrance, a scent capable of arousing admiration in Western observers/consumers. iwabuchi however, from his very Japanese perspective, perhaps does not consider that the universe of signs emanating from more than a few Japanese commodities betrays their geographical and cultural origins. iwabuchi follows the reasoning of hoskins and Mirus [1988], who attribute the success of Japanese objects like the Walkman to a real originality, but without the explicit link to the incorporated cultural lifestyles. now, iwabuchi’s reasoning works perfectly well as long as we are talking about mukokuseki for commodities like the Sony Walkman or Suzuki and Yamaha motorcycles. but, since the Japanese researcher also includes manga and above all anime in this list of products, i believe this statement of his needs reviewing. in fact, the scarce connections of a Walkman or a motorcycle with the Japanese universe do not have much in common with the Japanese cultural odour that is instead emitted by products like anime and manga, for reasons which will now be discussed. iwabuchi is not the only Japanese scholar to see mukokuseki where probably there is not any: eiji Ôtsuka and Toshiya ueno also believe that Japanese anime and videogames are beloved in the world for their pretence of neutrality [ref. in iwabuchi 2004b: 61], but instead the cultural scent is strongly present, as Chris Kohler has shown in his essay on Japanese videogames, which keeps communicating their being Japanese even when the american developers modify the scripts and the look of the characters [Kohler 2005]. it is certainly true that, in the universe of Japanese merchandise, strategies of obvious a-cultural camouflage, which are fully part of the mukokuseki phenomenon, cohabit with syncretic strategies of communion/fusion of more levels of cultural suggestions. This is the case for two symbolic products of pop Japanese culture aimed at young consumers, the characters hello Kitty—the kawaii kitten—and licca-chan—the archipelago’s most famous doll. hello Kitty (Figure 6) has been commercially designed as stateless: its physical design only looks Japanese to those who know well the visual techniques of manga and anime, and therefore are also familiar with the kawaii style, about which i talk in Chapter iV. regarding her nationality, Yûko Yamaguchi, one of the main planners of the backgrounds and gadgets

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nationalisM and «odours» in Japanese globalized culture Figure 6 one of the many commercial applications based on hello kitty, the extremely famous white and pink kitten created in 1974 by ikuko shimizu and known all over the world as one of the greatest emblems of the Japanese kawaii, ‘cute’, pop culture. hello kitty © sanrio.

Figure 7 licca-chan (at times transcribed as ricca-chan), the Japanese equivalent of the american barbie, beloved in Japan to the point that on this magazine’s cover she is used as testimonial for products not specifically aimed for children. licca-chan © takara toys and further eligible copyright holders.

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of the white and pink kitten, interviewed by Mcgray [2002], said that hello Kitty has a sort of parallel existence: in her fictional universe, she is a londoner, and yet she is loved in the real world for her being Japanese. it seems that Sanrio’s character is repeating the path undertaken by liccachan, the famous Takara doll which, since 1967, has been beloved by Japanese young girls just like Mattel’s barbie has been by the americans since 1959 (Figure 7): in her fictional life, licca-chan is a «half-caste», being born to a Japanese mother and a French father, yet girls have always seen her as entirely Japanese, identifying themselves with her as a Japanese doll [allison 2006: 143-48].34 The fusion of euro-american and Japanese elements in hello Kitty and licca-chan makes the products «cool» in Japan, and therefore makes them sell well. For the juvenile public—very receptive of everything with a Western scent—they are desirable and far less monotonous than a Japanese-only product. at the same time, the more Japanese side of the two products—and of many others, not mentioned here for the sake of simplicity only—recalls a standard to which the Japanese consumers are bound to be accustomed.

You can now see the double plan: a cultural aroma that smells foreign, Western, cool, and a standard, familiar, reassuring background. in hello Kitty’s

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case, the latter is her kawaii design; for licca-chan, it is her discreet, chaste morphology, with the closed mouth (a sign of sobriety and purity). This is in comparison to the different anatomy and the facial traits of barbie, seen by the Japanese children, and above all by their mothers, as too provocative and sensual, for example due to her half-open mouth. [ibid.: 146]. a sentence to explain my commentary on of iwabuchi’s analysis is that the odour always exudes, at least a little bit; especially if it is smelled by people outside the origin context of the product, which is supposed to be antiseptic. a revealing dialogue of these divergences in perception between Western and Japanese observers regarding mukokuseki is the following, between writer Peter Carey and anime author Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of the aforementioned series Kidô senshi Gundam, in which the setting is the solar system and the characters are not located culturally with the same precision often granted to most anime. in the dialogue, Tomino explains his own attempt—that he believes successful—to make the characters of the interplanetary saga universal, but Carey appears genuinely sceptical. [interpreter:] «[…] Mr Tomino […] tried to avoid ethnicity, and so replaced 64.

common sense, which is based on culture, with general sense, which is a kind of universal sense that all human beings have.» […] «Mr Tomino tried to remove all cultural elements.»

«Perhaps», i [Carey] suggested, «he is being universal in a Japanese way.»

Mr Tomino was nice enough to laugh. «but when a character speaks», i insisted, «and they speak the Japanese language, surely the way they speak must communicate some social value? if so, we foreigners can’t hear that. Might a character’s voice not suggest a place of birth or a level of education?»

«Ahhhhh», said Mr Tomino as if i had understood nothing.

«Mr Tomino thinks», said [the interpreter], «that there is maybe something in your own character which is interested in national identity. as for Mr Tomino, he has avoided it completely. he has always tried to make his characters as standard and as universal as possible by not giving them local colour or national colour or ethnic colour.»

[Carey 2003: 74]

i believe that, for the moment—the point is discussed again in other parts of the book—we can conclude that on this topic there is a deeply different view between european/american observers and Japanese. This is partic-

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ularly evident in nations which, like italy, have gotten used to the styles of anime and manga since the end of the 1970s. The point is also valid for those Japanese audio-visual products in which authors have tried to reduce or hide the Japanese traits—in order, for example, to make them presumably easier to export to foreign countries—but in which the Japanese aesthetical and dynamic factors are intuitively recognizable. it is very easy to understand that the great attention i am paying to the concept of mukokuseki is due to the fact that the reception of the Japanese imaginary characters in italy would not have been the same if the italian public had not received anime and then manga seeing them as clearly Japanese products, therefore referencing an all-new and different cultural and aesthetical universe.

Anime and manga are discussed in their principal characteristics in the next Chapter, where they are put in comparison to the Western graphic tradition and their arrival in italy. The aim of the next Chapter is not a deep and overdetailed description and explanation of the history and languages of manga and anime, therefore my account will be a general one, meant as an agile—however incomplete—set of basic information.

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Marco pellitteri (Palermo 1974). Cultural sociologist.

Author of several articles and essays in Italian and foreign journals and of five books on comics, animation, mass media and youth issues. He has worked for the CErI at «sciences Po» (Paris), the university of Trento, the IArD institute (Milan), and the IsICulT institute (rome). His Ph.D. thesis on youths, cultural consumption and attitudes towards the Other has won the 2009 «John A. lent scholarship in Comics studies».

The Dragon and the Dazzle has been published thanks to grants from the Japan Foundation.

Marco Pellitteri

Photo / Corinna Nobbe

dragon-dazzle_cover:copertina esprit 17/02/2010 11.34 Pagina 1

Marco Pellitteri

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In the transnational circulation of the products of cultural industries, an important role is played by the entrance of the numerous expressions of Japanese popular culture into European contexts. Marco Pellitteri shows that the contact between Japanese pop culture and European youth publics occurred during two phases. By use of metaphor, the author calls them

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dazzle

Japanese iMagination

$ 39,00 | u.k. £ 25,00 | ¥ 3.490,00

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€ 28,00 u.s.

the dragon

© Tunué | tunue.com

Models, strategies, and identities a european perspective

In the worldwide circulation of the products of cultural industries, an important role is played by Japanese popular culture in European contexts.

Marco Pellitteri shows that the contact between Japanese pop culture and European youth publics occurred during two phases. By use of metaphor, the author calls them the Dragon and the Dazzle.The first took place between 1975 and 1995, the second from 1996 to today. They can be distinguished by the modalities of circulation and consumption/re-elaboration of Japanese themes and products in the most receptive countries: Italy, France, spain, Germany and, across the ocean, the united states.

During these two phases, several themes have been perceived, in Europe, as rising from Japan’s social and mediatic systems. Among them, this book examines the most apparent from a European point of view: the author names them machine, infant, and mutation, visible mostly through manga, anime, videogames, and toys. Together with France, Italy is the European country that in this respect has had the most central role. There, Japanese imagination has been acknowledged not only by young people, but also by politicians, television programmers, the general public, educators, comics and cartoons authors. The growing influence of Japanese pop culture, connected to the appreciation of its manga, anime, toys, and videogames, also urges political and mediologic questions linked to the identity/ies of Japan as they have been understood—wrongly or rightly—in Europe and the West, and to the increasingly important role of Japan in international relations.

The book attempts an analysis of this wide process of transcultural transit and re-elaboration. Positioning itself half-way between a multidisciplinary framework and a well-informed popularization, The Dragon and the Dazzle offers a different, and hopefully useful to discussion, perspective in international studies on Japanese pop culture.

the dragon and the dazzle Models, strategies, and identities of Japanese iMagination a european perspective

Preface by Kiyomitsu yui With an essay by Jean-marie Bouissou