The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture

THE JAPANIFICATION OF CHILDREN’S POPULAR CULTURE From Godzilla to Miyazaki Edited by Mark I.West The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2009 SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Mark I. West All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Japanification of children’s popular culture : from godzilla to miyazaki / edited by Mark I. West. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5121-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8108-5121-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-6249-4 (ebook) ISBN-10: 0-8108-6249-2 (ebook) 1. Children–United States–Social conditions. 2. United States–Civilization– Japanese influences. 3. Popular culture–United States. 4. Popular culture– Japan. I. West, Mark I. HQ792.U56J37 2009 303.48'273052083–dc22 2008027163 ϱ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America. CONTENTS Acknowledgments v Introduction vii Mark I.West 1 Godzilla, the Evolving Monster 1 Dale Pike 2 Reptar: The Rugrats Meet Godzilla 7 Jan Susina 3 Invasion of the Japanese Monsters: A Home-Front Report 17 Mark I.West 4 Hello Kitty in America 25 Kathy Merlock Jackson 5 The Allure of Anthropomorphism in Manga and Animé 41 Fred Patten 6 We All Live in a Pokémon World: Animated Utopia for Kids 53 Cary Elza 7 Pokémon as Theater: Training the Pocket Monsters of Self and Consumerism 73 Mark Pizzato iii iv CONTENTS 8 Japanese Dominance of the Video-game Industry and the Future of Interactive Media 85 Joe Wezorek 9 Jet-Set Kids: Mutation/Seduction/Hybridization 107 Derek A. Burrill 10 Interviews with Adolescent Animé Fans 119 Brent Allison 11 North American Reactions to Yaoi 147 Antonia Levi 12 Paradigm Lost: How the Rising Ubiquity of All Things Japanese Ruined the National Pastime for One American Father 175 Bill Davis 13 Two Worlds, United by Animé 185 Elizabeth Flynn 14 The Cross-Cultural Appeal of the Characters in Manga and Animé 191 Hiroaki Hatayama 15 The Censorship of Japanese Animé in America: Do American Children Need to Be Protected from Dragon Ball? 199 Rieko Okuhara 16 Early Japanese Animation in the United States: Changing Tetsuwan Atomu to Astro Boy 209 Brian Ruh 17 Inu Yasha:The Search for the Jewel of Four Souls in America 227 Nicoloe Farrell 18 Folklore and Gender Inversion in Cardcaptor Sakura 249 Bill Ellis 19 Anima and Animé: Environmental Perspectives and New Frontiers in Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away 267 Nathalie op de Beeck Index 285 About the Contributors 291 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My son, Gavin West, first became interested in Japanese popular culture as a toddler and, now that he is a teenager, this interest has developed into a passion. The decision to edit this book is tied to his fascination with animé and other forms of popular culture that have Japanese roots. I thank him for introducing me to this fascinating and multifaceted world. My appreciation also goes to the contributors of this volume, not only for sharing their expertise but also for their patience. I became a full- time university administrator shortly after I began working on this book, and this development limited the time I had available to complete this project. Over the course of editing this book, I worked with three supportive editors at Scarecrow Press. Sue Easun is the editor who first encouraged me to pursue the idea of editing this volume. Kim Tabor helped me dur- ing the middle stages of editing this book. Most recently, Corinne O. Burton has played an important role in bringing this project to comple- tion. My thanks go to all three of them. My thanks also go to Patty Moore, who helped me with some of the correspondence with the contributors, and to my wife, Nancy North- cott, who played a supportive role throughout the entire process of editing this volume. v INTRODUCTION Mark I.West When Tokyo Disneyland Park opened in 1983, commentators cited this development as an example of the global reach of American popular culture. America, however, is not the only country to export its popular culture products. For more than fifty years, many young people in Amer- ica have taken an interest in various forms of Japanese popular culture. This phenomenon started with the first Godzilla movie, which opened in Japan in 1954 and in America in 1956. Other Godzilla movies soon followed, and before long Godzilla became nearly as popular among American children as he was with Japanese youngsters. Next came a wave of Japanese animated television programs, generally known as an- imé. At first only a few Japanese animated programs aired on American television, the most famous of which were Astro Boy (sometimes called Mighty Atom) and Speed Racer. Gradually, however, more and more such programs were imported. Nowadays, animé accounts for a major portion of the programming for children aired on American commercial television networks. Soon American children embraced other forms of Japanese popular culture, including comics (generally known as manga), computer/video role-playing games, and feature-length films. The films of Hayao Miyazaki have become especially popular as well as critically acclaimed. In 2003, his film Spirited Away won the Academy Award for vii viii INTRODUCTION animation. The granting of this award underscores America’s increasing acceptance of animé and other forms children’s popular culture that have Japanese roots. For many years, American adults seemed largely oblivious to the increasing Japanese influence on children’s popular culture, but beginning in the 1990s critics began to take notice of this phenomenon. David Sheff was one of the first Americans to write a book on this topic. In Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children (1993), Sheff took an alarmist response to the growing popularity of Japanese video games among American children. Soon other American authors began writing about Japanese popular culture from a more sympathetic point of view. Sev- eral American authors wrote scholarly books about the history and na- ture of animé and manga. Three important examples are Antonia Levi’s Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (1996), Frederik Schodt’s Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), and Susan Napier’s Animé: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (2001). These books include passages about the popularity of Japanese popular culture in America, but none focuses on this subject. More recently, a few books have been published that began to explore why many American children gravitate toward forms of popular culture that have Japanese connections. For example, in Wrong About Japan (2004), Peter Carey writes about a trip that he and his twelve-year-old son took to Japan in response to his son’s fascination with manga and an- imé. In Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon (2004), Joseph Tobin compiles a number of scholarly essays about the international appeal of Pokémon, and several of the chapters deal specif- ically with the popularity of Pokémon in the United States. As Carey’s and Tobin’s volumes suggest, there are aspects of manga, animé, and other forms of Japanese popular culture that resonate with American children even though these children do not fully understand the historical and cultural references imbedded in these imports from Japan. The contributors to The Japanification of Children’s Popular Cul- ture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki discuss the history of this phenomenon and provide a variety of reasons why so many American children like Japanese and Japanese-influenced forms of popular culture. These con- INTRODUCTION ix tributors come from diverse backgrounds, and consequently, they approach this overarching topic from different angles. Some take a scholarly approach, while others write out of personal experience. Some fo- cus on particular animé programs or other specific forms of popular culture. Other contributors, however, are more interested in the re- sponses that audiences have to these forms of popular culture. This book begins with Dale Pike’s chapter about Godzilla, which is a fitting start since it was the 1956 American release of the first Godzilla movie that introduced American children to Japanese popular culture. Godzilla not only won the hearts of many American children, but as Jan Susina points out in the second chapter, Godzilla also served as the in- spiration for Reptar from Rugrats. The third chapter looks at other Japanese monsters in addition to Godzilla and explores some of the reasons why these monsters appeal to American children. The monstrous is an important element in Japanese popular culture, but so too is cuteness, which the Japanese call kawaisa. Kathy Merlock Jackson discusses the appeal of this aspect of Japanese popular culture in her chapter titled “Hello Kitty in America.” Fred Patten, a well- known figure in animé fandom circles, examines the connections be- tween cuteness and anthropomorphism as portrayed in popular animé and manga. Characters from Japanese popular culture, both monstrous and cute, also figure in computer and video games.

Load more