The story went out over the news wires yesterday: there’s a new manga award, and while some details (and of course the first winner) are still largely to be determined, there are two aspects of the award that are worth noting: first, it’s for foreigners, not native Japanese manga artists, and second, it’s being given out by the freaking Japanese Government.

News Articles:
Mainichi Daily News
Japan Times Online

And of course, you read about it on every last manga/anime/comic blog yesterday afternoon, just like I did. From the AP article:

The International Manga Award — which manga enthusiast Foreign Minister Taro Aso likened to a “Nobel Prize” when he first proposed it last year — will be given to an artist working abroad whose work best contributes to the spread of the manga form worldwide, the ministry said Tuesday in a statement.

…

The winner and three runners-up will receive a certificate and trophy at an awards ceremony set for July 2, and will spend 10 days in Japan meeting with local comic book artists and publishers, the statement said.

Japanese Foreign Minister Aso proposed the Award last year during a speech at Digital Hollywood University (link goes to a translation of the speech posted on the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s website). On that same occasion, Foreign Minister Aso also proposed a second award, for Japanese creators:

The truly superior works among the visual works and animated films made by Japanese creators have easily succeeded in overcoming barriers of language and culture, as demonstrated by Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a truly impressive work, succeeding in conveying the Shinto concepts of impurities and purification along with the mood that is associated with a polytheistic worldview instead of a monotheistic one.

For that reason, what I would like to do is seek out young, promising visual and anime artists and present them with an award, in order to enable more Hayao Miyazakis to emerge.

(If they run that program for 100 years and only find one Miyazaki, then it would be worth almost any expense.)

The new manga award and other efforts by the Japanese government to export their culture as a product, alongside cars and electronics, are part of an overall diplomatic and economic strategy. Not only is it a boost economically, but it would seem that the rise of Manga, Game and Anime Culture has done more in the past 30 years to soften Japan’s image in the U.S. than any diplomatic or political efforts — Where once American workers feared losing jobs, particularly in the automobile industry or consumer electronics, now we are more worried about Chinese imports and job outsourcing to India. The “threat” of Japan (which I could argue was largely imaginary anyway as it was merely one the first symptoms of overall globalisation) has evaporated.

Of course, fans (and consumers in general) didn’t care about that. We’ve been buying Japanese exports since the first Walkman (and small transistor radios even before that) and gobbling up her cultural exports in some ways since ‘63 (ref. 5by8 #16) and in bulk since ‘85 (the release of both Robotech and the NES, ref. 5by8 #18 & #19). Depending on how you compile the numbers, the combined exports of the anime, video game, and manga industries are a $20b business. (I wonder how much of that is game hardware & discs, but that’s still ‘b’ as in Billion — and dollars, not yen. Not too shabby.) Instead of there being a resistance to the importation of Japanese cultural goods, there is a growing impatience that properties don’t get licensed and translated fast enough.

There is a very good chance that within my lifetime, we will see a new global popular culture develop and expand in ways that really will make us all one planet; Japanese manga and anime look to be a big part of that. Is the Japanese government revolutionary for extending popular culture as part of a diplomatic strategy, or is it merely reacting to conditions that are already prevalent? Honestly, I don’t care. I applaud the Foreign Ministry of Japan for making the effort and for bringing manga even a few centimetres closer to the mainstream. Now we just have to wait two or three months, to see who the winners will be.

further readings and references:

• This weeks column title is a reference to the visual novel/manga/anime property Comic Party
• BusinessWeek: Raising Japan’s Cool Quotient
• Asia Times Online: Catching on to ‘Japan Cool’
• Knowledge@Wharton [U. Penn’s Wharton School of Business]: Anime– Japan’s ‘Gross National Cool’