Did manga conquer America? Implications for the cultural policy of ‘Cool Japan’

Abstract

This paper explores the efficacy of an international cultural policy based upon the export of a nation’s popular culture through the case study of Japanese comic books, called manga, in the USA. I begin by exploring the origin of the historical and theoretical underpinnings of ‘Cool Japan’ and providing a concise account of the Japanese cultural policies in this vein. Then, drawing upon participant observation and seventy in-depth, semi-structured interviews from informants in and around the American manga publishing industry, I discuss in detail what is actually involved in publishing Japanese comic books in the USA post-2007. Arguing that what they do is first and foremost to make manga American, I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the likely fortunes of ‘Cool Japan’ and any other cultural policy premised upon exporting popular culture.

Keywords:

• brand nationalism
• comics
• globalization
• publishing
• soft power

Notes

1. The word ‘manga’ originates from the Japanese compound reading of the two Chinese characters 漫画, meaning ‘random’ or ‘irresponsible’ and ‘picture,’ respectively. While the earliest recorded usage of the word dates back to the 1770s, it did not acquire its modern sense until the early part of the 1900s with Japan’s exposure to and emulation of Western forms of cartoon art (Shimizu 1991). Today, ‘manga’ may be written in any of the four scripts (hiragana, katakana, kanji, or romaji) of modern Japanese and commonly refers to any sort of comic book or strip, or printed cartoon. In English language contexts, it is most often used to refer to comics originally published in Japan. Some English speakers in the UK also use the word ‘manga’ to refer to animated cartoons for television, video, or film from Japan. The confusion originates from a marketing campaign in the 1980s by the anime company Manga Entertainment to rebrand what the Japanese call ‘anime’ as ‘manga,’ which was deemed easier to pronounce. As this usage is not correct in Japanese or accepted in other parts of the English-speaking world, I use ‘manga’ exclusively to refer the printed medium throughout this article. For an in-depth treatment of the history of manga and the manga publishing industry, along with the range of genres and artistic techniques typical of manga, in Japan, see Kinsella (2000), Schodt (1983), and Shimizu (1991).

2. The term scanlation, a portmanteau of ‘scan’ and ‘translation,’ refers to the illegal practice of scanning Japanese manga and then translating, editing, and distributing digital copies of that manga in another language, typically English. Scanlators, it follows, are those individuals and groups who scanlate manga, and scanlation sites are websites which collate, curate, and/or otherwise aggregate collections of scanlations. For more on scanlation producers and consumers, see Terpstra-Anderson (2012) and Lee (2009, 2012).