To be Seen, Not Just Read: Script Use on the Votive Prayer Tablets of Anime, Manga, and Game Fans

ABSTRACT

This article proposes one social explanation for the occurrence of graphic variation in contemporary written Japanese by examining a heretofore unexamined context of writing. Embracing the material culture approach, I explore the ema (votive prayer tablets) dedicated at Shinto shrines by fans of popular culture media productions. Fans pen text on the ema that follows aesthetics of manga as well as online communication, incorporating features that are usually limited to print and online writing. Analyzing upwards of 2,000 ema from three shrines, this article proceeds to dissect a writing style composed of a mix of syllabaries and symbols using ‘thick description’ to evince the emotion behind fans’ calculated efforts to construct text that is not simply to be read, but to be seen. Seeking to answer the question of what fans attempt to achieve by writing on the ema in the way that they do, I will reference folklorist Elliott Oring’s ‘appropriate incongruity’ to put forth an argument that fans, harnessing a sense of play and endeavoring to animate the text on the ema, intimate by means of the visual presentation of writing-restricted variation a questioning of the perceived division between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the journal’s editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their many helpful suggestions. I am sincerely grateful to Dr Wes Robertson and Dr Tamaki Mihic for their invitation to contribute to this special issue. Their encouragement was invaluable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Costing from 500 to 1000 yen, these small ema roughly measure 14 by 10 centimeters and are commonly cut into rectangular or pentagonal shapes.

² Thirteen ema without text, unreadable, or written in a non-Japanese language were subtracted.

³ All translations are the author’s.

⁴ My romanization of these irregular usages may not adequately elucidate the Japanese, as some features lack clear readings.

⁵ Yamane has documented a similar handwritten variation (1986: 68).

⁶ To clarify, Wallestad uses keiyu, a term originating with manga artist Natsume Fusanosuke, to indicate a category comprised of manpu (manga symbols), which ‘retain their meaning independent of a subject’, and kōka (effect symbols), which ‘need to be applied to their subject in order to be understood’ (2013: 5).

⁷ It should be noted that fans frequently address their prayers to the characters and not the enshrined deities (Andrews, 2014, 2015; Yoshitani, 2014).

⁸ A certain degree of status is awarded to the individual that can decipher difficult to read writing (Kuwamoto, 2010) and this too is part and parcel to fan play.