In the opening pages of the introduction to the textbook Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, first published in 2018 and last year updated in a second edition, the book’s editors call Japanese popular culture studies “a field in formation”. Support for this assertion is easy to find. Scholarly writing on anime, manga, and other categories of Japanese popular culture continues to expand. Just recently, a major research university announced a search for an “Assistant Professor in Japanese contemporary literature and culture – with interdisciplinary research and teaching interests in manga and ..read more

Japanese animation is many things. On the very first page of the excellent Anime: A Critical Introduction, animation scholar Rayna Denison uses the phrase “a shifting, sliding category of media production”, and further in the same book Dr. Denison also refers to anime as a “cultural phenomenon”. But outside Japan, and especially in Western media, Japanese animation is (still) often synonymous with the persona of Hayao Miyazaki and the films he has directed at Studio Ghibli. In fact, Jaqueline Berndt specifically points to this as one of the shortcomings in contemporary scholarly approaches t ..read more

In the classic study Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, Susan Napier identifies “the apocalyptic” as one of the three major “modes” of Japanese animation. But this is a relatively narrow approach – a much broader one would move to consider both East Asian popular culture products, expressions, and activities in general, and a more abstract idea of “endings”. And it it this approach that Mechademia: Second Arc is proposing for the upcoming Volume 18.1, currently set for publication in the Winter of 2025 with Prof. Anne Allison (Duke University ..read more

In the classic study Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, Susan Napier identifies “the apocalyptic” as one of the three major “modes” of Japanese animation. But this is a relatively narrow approach – a much broader one would move to consider both East Asian popular culture products, expressions, and activities in general, and a more abstract idea of “endings”. And it it this approach that Mechademia: Second Arc is proposing for the upcoming Volume 18.1, currently set for publication in the Winter of 2025 with Prof. Anne Allison (Duke University ..read more

Usually – and by their nature – academic conferences are not open to general, non-academic audiences, and for that matter, not really intended for them. But at the same time, nothing requires academic discussions to exclude the public, especially when members of the public may be interested in the same themes and topics that scholars are. And it is this understanding that lies at the heart of the Academic Program track at the Anime Expo convention, the largest in the U.S. I first proposed this track in 2011, and was its Executive Producer through 2017. And now, for 2024, the Academic Symposiu ..read more

The full schedule is now available for the upcoming online symposium Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures, organized by a team of scholars from Concordia University (Canada), UNSW Sydney (Australia) and Tulane University (USA), and supported by the Media, Gender and Sexualities Study Group (University of Tokyo). The goal of the symposium is to explore points of contact between Japanese popular culture broadly defined – including anime/manga, videogames, fashion, literature, and other fields and areas – and feminist studies, with an emphasis on issues of and intersectio ..read more

Over the past ten or so years, the Japanese program at Baruch College (City University of New York) has hosted a series of mini-seminars and talks by individual speakers on topics related to Japanese animation and comics. The series started in 2015 with Globalized Manga Culture and Fandom and continued with Alt Manga: Alternative Manga Symposium (April 2016), Manga/Comics and Translation (April 2017), Manga/Comics against Human Trafficking (April 2018), and, in 2019, Untold History of Japanese Comics: Prewar and LGBTQ+ Manga. And, after an understandable hiatus, it has continued, with the lat ..read more

Any kind of writing about anime will at some point have to consider anime’s audiences and their activities and practices. And in fact, studies that ask questions like “what anime fans do, and how, and why” are prominent in the field. As far back as 1994, writing for the journal Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Annalee Newitz examined “Japanese animation fans outside Japan“, and in 2001’s Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, Susan Napier devoted an appendix to the topic of “Western audiences and Japanese animation”. Other not ..read more

When it first launched in 2020, the open-access Journal of Anime and Manga Studies represented a major new development in the establishment of anime and manga studies as a defined academic field. Since the launch, it clearly thrived, with each new issue a range of new authors, and covering a diverse array of topics under the general umbrella of Japanese animation and comics. JAMS’ latest volume (2023) was formally released on December 3, and its eight articles once again do a great job of representing some of the most innovative scholarly writing on anime/manga that is currently available in ..read more

Several weeks ago, the American Folklore Society, the leading organization for the study and advancement of folklore and expressive cultural traditions wordwide, broadly defined, announced that its 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award was being bestowed on Dr. Bill Ellis, emeritus professor, Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Ellis is a pre-eminent folklore scholar – and, over the last fifteen years, he has written extensively on the intersections between folklore in general and fairy tales specifically, and anime/manga. Some of his major publications in this area include the chapter “Folklore and ..read more