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Creating a Cool Japan: Nationalism in 21St Century Japanese Animation and Manga

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Creating a Cool Japan: Nationalism in 21St Century Japanese Animation and Manga Creating a Cool Japan: Nationalism in 21st Century Japanese Animation and Manga Majesty Kayla Zander Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Japanese Language and Culture under the advisement of Robert Goree May 2021 © 2021 Majesty Zander 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................................1 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................2 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................3 Chapter 1: Cool Japan...................................................................................................................8 Cool Japan and Nationalism ..................................................................................................................... 8 Cool Japan and Anime ............................................................................................................................ 16 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 19 Chapter 2: Clean Japan ..............................................................................................................22 Clean Japan and Nihonjinron .................................................................................................................. 22 Clean Japan and Media ........................................................................................................................... 25 Clean Japan and Anime ........................................................................................................................... 27 Clean Japan and Anime: Hetalia ........................................................................................................ 32 A Clean Japan ................................................................................................................................. 34 Tsukkomi as Japaneseness ................................................................................................................ 35 Taiwan: Asia-yearning-for-Japan ..................................................................................................... 37 Korea as a Foil ................................................................................................................................ 41 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 46 Chapter 3: Controversial Japan .................................................................................................48 Controversial Japan and Nationalism...................................................................................................... 48 Controversial Japan and Anime: Code Geass ......................................................................................... 56 Controversial Japan and Anime: GATE .................................................................................................. 61 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 69 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................71 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................................74 2 Acknowledgments I would first like to thank my thesis advisor, Robert Goree, for his endless patience and guidance. Thank you for never giving up on this thesis project, despite my year-long battle with procrastination. I cannot express how much your patience, kindness, and understanding has contributed to the completion of this thesis. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I would also like to thank Yoshimi Maeno, my major advisor, for four years of support and encouragement. I will never, ever forget your kindness and enthusiasm both inside and outside of the classroom. Thank you so much for everything. I would like to thank Eve Zimmerman for all her support and care since my sophomore year. Thank you so much for the years of advice and guidance as I completed my major in the EALC department. I loved all of your courses and wish I could have taken more. To the remaining members of my thesis committee: thank you so much. Thank you, Angela Carpenter, for years of patience and kindness. I hope to be as eloquent and graceful as you one day. Thank you, Sun Hee Lee, for agreeing to be a part of this process and for your kindness. Next, I would like to thank a different Robert—Daddy, I love you. Thank you for going out of your comfort zone and watching anime just to spend some time with your kids. Thank you for the sacrifices you have made in order for me to complete my degree at Wellesley and pursue what I love. Mommy, thank you for never doubting that I would finish this project and thank you for taking me back and forth to work, listening to music with me in the car, and watching all the seasons of Produce 101 with me in the summer. I love you. I would like to thank all my friends for giving me a space to just be myself. Emma, Maggie, Midori, Nafisa, thank you for always encouraging me and sending me love when it felt like finishing was impossible. Jayli, this is probably the last time I will get to say it, so thank you for introducing me to anime. I love you more than you will ever know. Kendalle, thank you for listening to me rant and panic over my thesis deadlines for 8 months. I love you so, so much. I would like to thank Shannon Mewes, whose amazing Ruhlman presentation inspired me to pursue an anime-related thesis. Lastly, I would like to thank my stubbornness for not allowing me to give up and my 3am playlist that got me through the longest nights. 3 Introduction In most scholarship examining the history of Japanese anime, Tezuka Osamu is credited with pioneering the modern age of anime and manga.1 While the origins of anime can be traced to the early 1910s, it was Tezuka’s work during the 1950s and 1960s that influenced an entire generation of aspiring Japanese animators and artists. As his techniques transformed into industry standards, numerous artists began expanding upon the themes featured in Tezuka’s works, leading to the development of well-known subgenres such as mahō shōjo (magical girl), mecha (giant robots), and Figure 1: Tsukino Usagi from Sailor Moon ecchi (playful erotica) during the 70s and 80s. Although series such as Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) and Magical Princess Minky Momo (1982) enjoyed domestic success, few modern anime made their way to Western screens prior to the late 1980s. In 1989, the positive reception of Otomo Kasuhiro’s film Akira (1988) in North America indicated there was hope for a Western market in the anime industry, despite earlier licensing failures. Following a series of hit-and-miss distribution attempts during the early 1990s, anime suddenly gained a strong foothold in the West with the success of Sailor Moon (1992), Dragon Ball Z (1989), and Evangelion (1995). From 1995 to 1997, each anime introduced American audiences to a different genre targeted at a specific audience (mahō shōjo for young girls, shōnen for young boys, and mecha/seinen for older men, respectively). Their popularity and marketability in the West soon made the three series symbols of the 90s anime boom. 1 Manga (Japanese comic books/graphic novels) are commonly used as source material for anime (Japanese cartoons/animations). 4 Western interest in Japanese media did not stop at anime either, as video games and multimedia franchises like Pokémon and Yu-gi-oh also became well-known during the 1990s. As anime became more popular in the West, viewer interaction with the medium also began to evolve. The 90s saw the first American anime conventions, the beginnings of cosplay (costume play) culture, and the rise of fan-produced translations of anime and manga in the West. In 2002, Douglas McGray published an article titled “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” which outlined the Japanese government’s failure to take advantage of growing international interest in their cultural exports (53). At the time of the article’s release, Figure 2: Promotional poster for AnimeCon '91 the anime industry was worth about 22.4 billion yen (203 million USD) outside of Japan (The Association of Japanese Animations, 2013). Within three years, that number had grown to 31.3 billion (284 million USD) (AJA, 2013). While these profitability figures take into account the work of official licensing agencies that made anime more accessible to Western audiences, they are not reflective of the free fan-produced content that dominated the internet and greatly boosted anime’s popularity during the 2000s. Although Western companies such as Funimation and Viz Media were acquiring the rights to dub and distribute an increasing number of anime each year, keeping up with Figure 3: Example of fansubs with a translator's note from Luck Star (2007) 5 the growing demand, especially for lesser-known anime to be licensed, proved nearly impossible. Taking matters into their own hands, piracy and fan-made translations, or “fansubs,” became prevalent in the international anime community
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