JICMS 2 (1) pp. 109–117 Intellect Limited 2014 Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies Volume 2 Number 1 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Interview. English language. doi: 10.1386/jicms.2.1.109_7 Interview Pedro Moura University of Lisbon and the Catholic University of Leuven Interview with Marco Pellitteri on his book The Dragon and the Dazzle Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (2010) This book extends in part some of your previous work. How much do you feel it has achieved in relation to your previous articles and books? My very sincere opinion is that this book, for a European and international readership, is somewhat a general ‘map’ of the whole discourse on anime and manga in Western Europe. At least, this was my objective. With respect to my previous works (previous to 2008, the year of publication of this book 109 JICMS_2.1_Interview_109-117.indd 109 11/29/13 4:32:58 PM Pedro Moura in Italian), I think I have taken considerable leaps in regards to the content, theoretical reflection, and breadth of analysis. The book can be, I believe, very useful for a North American readership as well, since it shows many nuances and aspects of Japanese pop culture in Europe (and, perhaps, something ­interesting about the US too). Now, I think that we finally accept the fact – at least, within academia – that it is impossible to have a single volume tackling all the facets of any given subject. However, your book does accomplish some sort of completeness towards its particu- lar subject. Do you hope this book to be adopted by programmes around the world? In other words, when you wrote it in Italian, where you already planning an English translation in order to make it reach a wider audience? The very fact that I have designed such a book is due to my experience with this international debate since the early 90s – and by ‘experience’ I mean, first of all, the fact that I have tried to read, study, keep informed; then, of course, I have also published. I had already written a popular book, in Italian, on Japanese imagination in Italy (Mazinga Nostalgia. Storia, valori e linguaggi della Goldrake-generation/Nostalgia for Mazinger: History, Values, and Languages of the Grendizer-Generation, in 1999, with two revised editions in 2002 and 2008) and a book on animation for parents, teachers and ­educators (Conoscere l’animazione. Forme, linguaggi e pedagogie del cinema animato per ragazzi/Understanding Animation: Forms, Languages, and Pedagogies of Animated Film for Kids (2004)). I have also written several essays and articles for Italian and foreign journals and books, plus a variety of papers for international conferences. I was aware of the debate and, actually, at a certain point in time I jumped into it. From Italy, the perspective of such debate is very interesting because Italy is the western country where the largest amount of manga has been published and anime broadcast on television; Italy is a pivotal laboratory in the discourse about Japanese pop cultures in western countries. Therefore, after the publi- cation in Italian, I thought I could propose such a book to an international public. Nonetheless my priority, when first writing and assembling it, was to resume all the discourse and the debates in the Italian–European area, for an Italian readership. When I saw that the result might be worth translat- ing (at least, this was my sincere impression), I decided to submit it to the Japan Foundation, in order to ask for funds. They appreciated the book very much and gave my Italian publisher (Tunué) two monetary subsidies, for the translation into English and the printing. Tunué, besides, is currently design- ing an e-version of the volume, for iPad and similar platforms. My main inter- est is, at the moment, to get feedback from colleagues and scholars. There are 750 pages that need to be discussed; this book is, as far as I know, an unprec- edented effort and, besides the size of the volume, the variety of the content deserves analysis (both negative and positive). That the volume might be adopted by some professors or lecturers in graduate or undergraduate courses, is my hope. But it is not my task to judge its possible value as a textbook. You acknowledge that you could have chosen other metaphors, or perhaps, other models. Were there any other alternatives that you thought of, before or after the publishing of your book, that might have lead you into a different direction? I tried to find models that could include most of the themes and issues that I wanted to talk about. With the process of anime and then manga’s arrival in Europe (specifically in Italy, France and Spain), the infant, the machine, and 110 JICMS_2.1_Interview_109-117.indd 110 11/29/13 4:32:58 PM Interview with Marco Pellitteri … mutation were the most inclusive, I believe. But other models and metaphors, or, if I may say so, sub-models and sub-metaphors, where possible. For exam- ple the ‘doll’, the ‘spirit’, the ‘warrior’. And there is still that third phase/strategy to analyse, the one which, on my opinion, is about to arrive and that I briefly talk about in the Introduction and in the Conclusions of the book, a phase to which I have not given a name yet, but which I could name, the ‘Octopus’ … I have the feeling that there is a trend, both in European and North American comics scholarship, to rely mostly on aesthetical principles or on disciplines related to cultural studies. Although there are some studies from a sociological point of view, do you think there is much more to be done, with real hard data, anchoring oneselves in broader social debates and so forth? Definitely. There is a strictly ‘bureaucratic’ reason why most studies on anime and manga still come from literary and cultural studies-related areas: in these academic environments and departments there is more freedom to find new research topics, despite a variety of prejudices, of course. These prejudices are, nevertheless, higher in the domain of sociology. I can say so because I am a sociologist. This situation produces an unbalance from the theoretical and empirical points of view. We know very much about what manga/anime were and are; we know a lot about authors, styles, contents. To sum it up: we know the texts. We are recently beginning, however, to discover the contexts. As a scholar who comes from semiotics and text analysis (in a parallel life I am also a profes- sional graphic designer and my studies were primarily in figurative semiot- ics, Gestalt theory, aesthetics, history of contemporary arts, advertising, visual communication, etc.), I am very interested in this side of the story; but as a sociologist, I notice that much work has still to be done about fundamental questions such as ‘what people do with manga/anime’. And I don’t mean just the fans (much research is currently ongoing in this field, in Europe and in the Americas), but a more general public. And even if research projects are currently being carried out here and there, most of the empirical techniques are qualitative: this kind of research does produce ‘hard data’. In this sense, many European or American departments of sociology tend to underestimate the importance of the cultural and economic phenomena connected to manga and anime, therefore they give little or no money for such kind of research. There are exceptions, of course, but in any case there are very few ‘pure’ soci- ologists (experts in dealing with statistical software, in designing a question- naire, in selecting a statistically representative sample, in working with the macro-, meso- and micro-dimensions of theory, etc.) who are also experts of anime and manga and willing to do research on these topics. The scenario is fastly changing, however, also thanks to initiatives by the Japan Foundation and some Japanese universities, which are funding research with Japanese and western scholars. I myself, for instance, am part of a research team, known as ‘Manga Network’, started by French political scientist and historian Jean- Marie Bouissou at the Centre d’études et recherches internationales (Ceri) at ‘Sciences-Po’ (Paris) and whose senior researchers are Bouissou, Bernd Dolle- Weinkauff (Frankfurt University, one of the main German experts of comics and children literatures) and me; the pillars of this research are also other scholars, above all our Japanese colleague Yui Kiyomitsu, professor of soci- ology at Kobe University, and several Ph.D. students, professors, lecturers and independent scholars from several countries – in fact, we are currently extending the scope of the research to other countries of Europe, to Canada 111 JICMS_2.1_Interview_109-117.indd 111 11/29/13 4:32:58 PM Pedro Moura and to Israel. This project is called ‘Japan’s new cultural power’ and focuses on manga readership in several countries. In the first phase of the research we focused on European countries: France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and we analysed (and are currently analysing) about 1200 questionnaires, thanks to fundings from the Ceri, the Japan Foundation and, recently, the Japanese society for the promotion of science, through the University of Kobe, within another big Japanese project coordinated by the aforementioned Yui and of which we, as ‘Manga Network’, constitute the European team. Further devel- opments and results (and publications) will be soon achieved, thanks to the work of analysis we are currently carrying out between Europe and Japan. In the next years, I believe that some sociology departments in west- ern universities will follow our example.