Western Audiences and Japanese Animation

APPENDIX THE FIFTH LOOK: WESTERN AUDIENCES AND JAPANESE ANIMATION For more and more cultural critics and historians, the absolutely crucial question has become not “what do texts mean?” but rather, “who are these meanings available to?” and, related to this, “how does meaning vary from audience to audience?” —Eric Smoodin, Disney Discourse ANIME IN GLOBAL CULTURE I enjoy being part of a group that’s not mainstream: i.e. that’s slightly on the edge. I’ve always seemed to have followed my own 240 ✱ ANIME FROM AKIRATO PRINCESS MONONOKE path . [S]o although many of my family members and acquain- tances find my Anime devotion odd, it doesn’t matter to me. My interest has spawned many new experiences. I love learning about the Japanese culture and I’m currently taking classes in the Japanese language. I’ve met many interesting people, made new friends, traveled to different cities, and developed a palate for Japanese food. Anime has broadened my world. —18-year-old female high school student Anime is a serious art form. —25-year-old male graphic designer It’s different. —22-year-old male computer science major THIS BOOK HAS LOOKED AT JAPANESE ANIMATION in both its local and global context, though it has stressed the Japanese context more than the international one. As a result, this appendix looks at anime from another angle: its development as a cult phenomenon in the West, particularly in the United States. Based on new research, it appears that anime is attracting an increasingly diversified audience, expanding from its original core of university students to include professionals in high tech industries, finance, and law. But what is it that draws Americans and other Westerners into the world of amine? Is it the medium itself, its artistic and dramatic effects, or is it because it is exotic and different? Is it because of its often graphic depictions of sex and violence, which are usually highlighted in discussions of anime?1 Who are the fans of anime? What relationship is there between anime and its Japanese origins in terms of its attraction for Western viewers? This appendix offers a few answers to these questions based on preliminary research conducted from September 1998 to January 1999 using a questionnaire, interviews, and personal correspondence with individual anime fans. Those surveyed include students in Copen- hagen, California, New York City, and, most significantly in terms of detailed statistical results, the University of Texas anime club. The goals of the survey were: THE FIFTH LOOK: WESTERN AUDIENCES AND JAPANESE ANIMATION ✱ 241 • to develop a profile of the anime fan, not only in terms of specific factors such as age, occupation, and interests, but also in relation both to other members of the world of fandom in general and in relation to the “average Ameri- can,” whose habits and beliefs are tracked through the vast survey literature already available; • to find out what attracts them to anime; • to discover what relation their interest in anime had, if any, to an interest in Japan. In developing a profile of the fans, it was important to let the fans speak for themselves as much as possible, and they turned out to be a thoughtful, intelligent, and articulate group of people. Many fans are stereotyped, or even stereotype themselves, as otaku—“diehard fans who ignore everything else because they love anime so much,” as one respondent defined it—but in general they are far more diverse and have far broader interests than this image suggests. It was also important to paint as detailed a picture of anime fandom as possible since the two major, if not only, English-language discussions about anime fans (Susan Pointon’s “Transcultural Orgasm as Apocalypse: Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend” and Annalee Newitz’s “Anime Otaku: Japanese Animation Fans Outside Japan”), though containing many significant insights, tend to see fans in somewhat narrow terms. Both critics are correct to a degree when they suggest that a prime audience of young males often find a “fantasy escape and source of identification”2 within anime’s graphic violence, voluptuous female characters, and politically incorrect male-female relationships. However, both tend to see this as the main, or even the only, aspect of anime’s attraction in the West. Pointon describes the medium entirely in terms of its “inordinately high content of sexual sado-masochism and graphic violence.”3 Given that Pointon is discussing Legend of the Overfiend, this description is hardly surprising, but it seems clear that anime’s attraction for Westerners is far broader and more diverse than such an assessment conveys. As for Newitz, she develops a somewhat contradictory theory that American anime fans, through their appropriation of a Japanese cultural product, are both exercising “a form of revenge on Japanese 242 ✱ ANIME FROM AKIRATO PRINCESS MONONOKE animation, so heavily influenced by Hollywood that it is itself already ‘stolen’ from American culture” as well as accustoming themselves to a subordinate position in relation to Japan, basing her argument on her theory that American fans “are rejecting their national culture in favor of another national culture.”4 Newitz’s assertion concerning how much anime has “stolen” from American culture is surprising when it seems that many of anime’s themes (romance, war, the end of the world) are as universal as they are specifically American or Japanese. Further- more, although there are inevitably Hollywood influences, there are far more distinctively Japanese elements, from narrative structure to social values, that make it hard to think of anime as a “stolen” form. Perhaps equally important in relation to her second assertion is that it seems increasingly hard to speak of purely national cultures in the current global world economy. Rather than engaging in reverse cultural imperialism or in a particularly lurid form of spectatorship, anime fans are engaged in a relatively new form of spectatorship, that of the committed media fan. The fan’s interaction with the cultural object is deeply engaged, transcending issues of national boundaries, content, style, or ideol- ogy, and it cannot be subsumed under any one-note description. The fact that anime is a Japanese, or at least non-American product, is certainly important but largely because this signifies that anime is a form of media entertainment outside the mainstream, something “different.” In this way, anime fandom can be examined as a “fifth look,” going beyond the three basic looks in cinema—the look between actors in the film, the camera’s “look” at what it is filming, and the viewer’s look at the screen. It also goes beyond John Ellis’s notion of the “fourth look,” the voyeuristic “look” in pornography in which the viewer is consciously aware of his looking at the screen and is also aware of the possibility of being “looked at” by others.5 While watching anime is in no way equated with watching pornography, there is a heightened self-consciousness to watching anime. Indeed, this exists in any form of fan media spectatorship where the fans watching the work are looking at, and for, different elements than typical viewers do. This self-consciousness is heightened by three interlocking factors: the estranging or defamiliarizing aspect of the genres involved, the medium of animation versus that of live action THE FIFTH LOOK: WESTERN AUDIENCES AND JAPANESE ANIMATION ✱ 243 (where it would seem easier to become part of the story), and the Japanese or non-American origin of the texts themselves. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANIME FANDOM IN AMERICA Japanese animation in America has been around since at least the early 1970s (much earlier if we count Astro Boy in the 1960s), when animated television series such as Speed Racer became popular with young American audiences. Often they did not even realize that what they were watching was originally a Japanese cartoon. Although Speed Racer introduced a generation of American youth to the look and style of Japanese animation, the growth of anime clubs was a much more important development in setting the style of anime reception among American fans. Often a subset of science fiction conventions, anime fans would usually meet in hotel rooms for all- night viewings of Japanese imports. Although some fans knew Japanese and would shout out summaries and off-the-cuff transla- tions to the rest of the viewers, many fans came simply for the unusual and sophisticated graphics, rapid pacing, and “adult” sub- ject matter. Frequently, especially as the hour grew later, these imports had a strongly sexual and/or violent content that undoubt- edly colored the way anime was first perceived by fans and by others only marginally aware of the phenomenon. With the increasing accessibility of VCRs, other video technol- ogy, and the Internet, a distinctive anime subculture began to evolve, one related to, but in some ways different from, media fandom in general. Anime began to develop its own separate modes of fandom— its own hotel conventions and its own support network that now includes clubs, newsletters, Internet discussion groups, and general circulation journals such as Animerica or Anime Fantastique. Much of this development is similar to the fan culture of such iconic media phenomena as Star Trek and Star Wars, but there are some intriguing differences worth exploring. Like all fan groups, anime fandom forms what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls “a cultural community, one which shares a common mode of reception, a common set of critical categories and practices, a tradition of aesthetic production and a set of social norms 244 ✱ ANIME FROM AKIRATO PRINCESS MONONOKE and expectations.”6 Often this community can function as a type of surrogate family, sometimes more supportive than the fan’s real family or community.

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