We’re dropping the I ♥ Comics this week in lieu of a series of Field Reports from Cool Japan 2007. I’m not totally sneaking out of my responsibility, because some of what was covered in the conference pertains to some of the tongue-in-cheek squabbling Matt and I were doing here a month or two ago.

Why did I go? Well, Matt’s the manga guy, but the conference was in Cambridge, MA. So, in light of financial considerations, I represented Comicsnob.com at the panel. Please deduct $1.70 from the travel budget, Mister Matt (round trip was half-price because I walked home. Score!).

So what was this thing? The Cool Japan project is a research project headed up by Professor Ian Condry of MIT to “examine the cultural connections, dangerous distortions, and critical potential of popular culture.” As he explained in his opening yesterday, the term “Cool Japan” is used with trepidation. The point is to understand the power of cool, not necessarily to determine how to make things cool.

This year’s topic is “Love and War in Japanese Popular Culture.” The first day was broken into two sessions and a screening. I found out about the conference too late to attend the Wednesday night screening of Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time or the Thursday night concert featuring Tokyo Hip-Hop artist Miss Monday. I did make it to yesterday’s panels on “The Visual” and “Design” as well as a screening of Afro Samurai with discussion with the manga-ka, Takashi Okazaki, and I plan on being there again today. I’ll present reports on things that I found interesting (and hopefully you all will also find interesting), probably in several parts (I have 12 pages of type-written notes from yesterday). We’ll see how long this goes, and go as many days as we need to.

If any of this really interests you, Anime Pulse should be posting the podcasts of the sessions in the near future (Hi Adrienne, er, Rangiku!). You can check out podcasts of last year’s sessions (“Violence and Desire in Japanese Popular Culture: Anime Capitalism”) starting here. I also met Scott Green from Ain’t It Cool News, and Brigid from MangaBlog should be there today if she’s feeling better, so this is a fairly well-covered event. Between Adrienne and Scott, they’re already going to get me watching more anime.

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The first session was “The Visual.” The first panelist was Dr. Susan Napier of Tufts University. She is the author of Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, and her discussion was “Where Do We Go From Here? Japanese Popular Culture After the Millennium.”

Dr. Napier has been in the Japanese Pop Culture field for over 15 years. She currently teaches “Japanese Popular Culture: Art, Entertainment, Power” at Tufts University. She began by showing a clip from one of the “A Portrait of an Otaku” segments from Otaku No Video [wiki], much to everyone’s amusement. What was once seen as a somewhat shameful type of fan behavior has now become “in” and “cute” thanks in part to the popularity of Densha Otoko [wiki].

Dr. Napier referenced her own experience. Several years ago, she was a visiting professor at Harvard. She introduced herself to another professor, and after telling him that her concentration was anime, he sighed, shook his head, and said, “In this day and age, I suppose that almost anyone can teach a course on almost anything.” Yesterday, Harvard was co-hosting this conference.

Her main question was this: Are we writing books on almost anything, or should we be more discriminating? Japanese culture certainly has economic effects (i.e. soft power), but have we reached a point in Japanese Popular Culture studies (especially anime and manga) where we can start talking about it as art? She referenced Osamu Tezuka, Spirited Away, and Neon Genesis Evangelion in order to say that yes, we can start talking about this as art.

There is the question of Orientalism/Occidentalism. Are people simply enjoying anime and manga because they’re different? She says no. She sees us moving into a time where art and play are becoming more important, and so the accompanying study of these fields is growing.

Dr. Napier has interviewed many anime fans over the years, and ended her presentation by presenting some of their responses. A 49 year-old male librarian feels that he is recreating himself as an adult by going back to his childhood. Anime can show things that live action cannot do easily - such as a Kafka-esque transformation or stark images of children starving. Respondents consistently compared anime to Hollywood film and American culture – not to American animation. Others felt as though anime removed them from the real world and allowed them to experience someone else’s imagination – something that American entertainment culture has seemingly given up on in this age of reality TV and stock sitcoms. Something like Evangelion takes you apart and in the midst of its legions of robots, carries themes of painful transition from childhood to adulthood.

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The next presenter was Roland Kelts, Lecturer at the University of Tokyo and author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. [website]. His discussion was entitled, “The Japanamerican Mobius Strip: Two Cultures, Intertwined and Allied, Against All Odds.”

His main thesis was that Japanese and American culture have become this grand culture where East and West consistently inform and reinforce each other - much like a mobius strip is a loop with no well-defined beginning or ending, such is Japanamerican culture.

Kelts is primarily a freelance and fiction writer. His book was a freelance project, and was intended to open the world of Japanese culture to the general western reader who had just discovered Japanese novels or anime or manga.

In his research, Kelts was surprised to find that Osamu Tezuka was so heavily influenced by Walt Disney, and began to make these connections between Japanese culture and its American antecedents. He asked the editor of a Japanese anime magazine about cosplay and why it was so prevalent in anime fandom. The surprised editor said that he couldn’t understand why people asked that - they learned it in the 70’s from the American Trekkies. Time after time, he found things that reached back to an American approach. The inventor of the Sudoku explained that he had a closet full of American puzzle books and was just looking to invent another type of puzzle that people would like. Mobius strip, people.

Why is the American market suddenly opening up to Japanese intellectual properties? For one thing, the properties are of a completely different tone. They’re seen as hip, contemporary, and futuristic. But why are American’s suddenly interested and how is it getting to the American consumer?

The internet. Many Americans choose to get their fix via fansites. Many times anime on these fansites are free to download - causing come degree of consternation among the producers of this anime back in Japan.

Another reason that Kelts sees that attracts Americans to anime and manga is the belief - however misguided - that the things that can be seen in those media can be experienced in a very real place - Japan. This is in direct contrast to places such as Hogwarts or Middle Earth, which can never be visited. Once Americans begin to explore anime and manga, they often begin to explore such things as bushido and become immersed in the Japanese gestalt.

But the Japanese aren’t just receiving cultural influences - they’re returning the volley. Manga and anime can be seen as a response to WWII and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kelts says that perhaps the rise of popularity of manga and anime in the United States was similarly influenced by an apocalyptic event - September 11.

A final point that Kelts made was that much of the reason that Japanese anime and manga is so good is that in Japan, there was a conscious choice to not invest heavily in film. Hollywood was seen as an unbeatable giant. Instead of being sucked into a studio system, this left many artists free to work in other media - particularly anime and manga.

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The final presenter in the first half was Dr. Adam Kern. He is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard. He is also the author of Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan, and his discussion was regarding “Manga Culture and its Discontents.”

While the other panelists are moving forward into the 21st century with manga and anime, Dr. Kern is moving backwards to the 18th century. He gave an overview of the “Manga Culture Theory,” which argues that kibyōshi was the first manga and there is a consistent tradition from the 19th century to today.

Kibyōshi was massively popular, and there is nothing else like it in history. It was part of a massive publishing industry that was very well organized into a literary assembly line - especially for the 18th century. There were thousands of copies of these woodblock prints made per run. The best selling kibyōshi probably had about three editions of about 10,000 copies each, and would have reached roughly 3% of the population of Edo at the time. By comparison, today’s best-selling novels are lucky to reach 1-2% of the population.

Kibyōshi - similarly to manga - captured the population in a way that was incredibly sophisticated and complex. It was a lens into this floating world of popular Japanese culture and imagination. It engages the reader in a challenging way that is both visual and verbal (has he been talking to Scott McCloud?). A comic book is a sustained visual and verbal narrative sold on the cheap to a wide segment of the population. Kibyōshi characters (again, like manga characters) turn up in patterns, shop signs, figurines, and other commercial products. Kibyōshi even has eye-catching cover art.

But…

Kern argues that kibyōshi and manga are not the same. The similarities are likely superficial and coincidental rather than being evidence of an unbroken literary tradition.

The theory of an extensive manga culture helps to defend manga from the conservative moralistic criticism by grounding it in pre-modern tradition, but this ends up distorting both modern manga and the Edo-period kibyōshi. The theory says that the term manga goes back to 1814 and Katsushika Hokusai. In fact, the term was coined much earlier by people who were much closer to the kibyōshi.

Proponents of manga culture theory have cited three things in drawing connections between modern manga and kibyōshi: pornography, balloons, and motion lines.

Pornography is simply not found in the kibyōshi. We do find some nudity, but it is not done in the service of excitement of sexual fantasies. Sometimes kibyōshi does reference the notion of pornography and play with the thought, but pornography is not shown in kibyōshi.

There are balloons in kibyōshi. That cannot be denied. The problem is that kibyōshi does not use balloons to represent speech as manga does. In pre-modern Japan, balloons signified dreams or visitations from the spiritual world.

We see speed lines in the pre-modern Japanese tradition - just not in kibyōshi. In the over 1000 volumes of extant kibyōshi that Dr. Kern has studied, and according to Japanese scholars who have studied all of the over 2500 available remaining works, a speed line has never been found.

The manga culture theory is overdetermined. There are homologies that emanate from the nature of the comic/manga/kibyōshi medium, but these are not evidence of a continuous tradition. Indeed kibyōshi would have no interest today but for the current fascination with manga.

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A discussion session followed the presentations. One person in the audience brought up the question of historical contextualization of manga and anime, the need to examine it - especially during the middle period after Astro Boy and prior to Akira - and the lack of work in that field. Dr. Condry (non-facetiously) suggested that the person asking the question may be best able to fix that herself. This is a young field, and it is wide open for scholarship.

Someone asked about the concern over downloading mentioned by Kelts. If the producers were concerned about illegal downloads, were they also concerned about the horrible bastardization (ahem, Battle of the Planets) that many of their works go through in their translation to the American Market. Kelts replied that the directors who are most cutting-edge in Japan are aware of the problem and are working on ways to overcome it as well as ways to utilize the internet for distribution.

The question of High Art versus Low Art was brought up. One person in the audience is an art major hoping to work in animation or comics, but facing an uphill fight from the “fine artists” at their school. The panel mentioned positive developments, including Chris Ware winning the Guardian Award and Spirited Away winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

I (yes I - check the podcast if you don’t believe me) asked Kelts if he saw dojinshi and American fan-fiction as being part of that mobius strip, or if in fact he saw them as two similar phenomena that happened to develop separately from each other. Dojinshi is beginning to get in trouble in Japan over intellectual property rights, but is still very much accepted. In the U.S., Tokyopop in particular is trying to cultivate a type of dojinshi relationship with its fans by encouraging them to submit works. There is a western cult of originality that helps to keep western fan-fiction down while Asian cultures tend to be more comfortable with echoes and the sharing of inspiration. Dojinshi is also aided in Japan by the combination of the intellectual property differences with the Japanese educational system. Kelts visited schools in Japan where instead of playing outside, children were inside learning how to draw via rote learning.

One participant asked if the panel saw some sort of cross-fertilzation between Japan and the U.K. For example, much of Terry Gilliam’s animation in Monty Python seemed to have a bit of a Japanese sensibility, and Japanese culture seemed to echo some of the Python silliness of the 1970’s. The panel agreed that yes, there seemed to be plenty of cross-fertilization.

The final question pertained to perceiving of manga as an art form. Manga is disposable. It’s printed on cheap paper, and usually thrown away when the reader is done. How does this jive with perceiving it as an art form? Dr. Napier said that Sturgeon’s Law applies - 90% of everything is crap, and that other 10% is art - what we’re trying to find is which 10% it is. The questioner pointed out that in American culture, one typically either produces either high or low art - not both. The panel responded that transversion is typical of Japanese culture - the blending together of elements of both high and low art.

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I had a lengthy discussion with Mr. Kelts at the reception following the panels which was both fun and informative. We discussed the mobius-style cross-pollination of ideas between the U.S. and Japan in more detail. He’s in a unique position having spent his formative years in both Japan and the U.S. - the child of a Japanese mother and an Anglo (?) father. Based on the panel and our conversation, I would recommend checking out his book. I’m certainly going to pick it up.

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Wow. I’m over 2500 words, and that’s just half of what went on. Guess there’ll be at least one more part to this whole thing…