Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 406. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2017. xv, 212 pp. [8] pp. of plates. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-97699-3.
The Anime Boom in the United States is co-authored by Israeli scholars Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin, both of whom are specialists in the transcultural flows of Japanese popular entertainment media. In this monograph they tackle one of the key issues regarding the current state of the anime industry, namely, the apparent disconnect between the views and demands of animators, production companies, and consumers. For anyone who has ever wondered how anime became such an incredible cultural force in America or why Japanese companies have seemed so reluctant to capitalize on this popularity, the authors provide a clear and concise summary of the recent history of exchanges between Japan and the United States. Their work focuses on televised animation but has broader implications, and The Anime Boom in the United States will be of interest not only to the field of Japan studies but also to scholars of American animation, television, and internet cultures.
The first chapter, “Reframing the Anime Boom in the United States,” summarizes the history of Japanese animation in North America. Daliot-Bul and Otmazgin begin by challenging the common assumption that animation created by Japanese studios only became widespread in the United States in the 1990s. Astro Boy, which was licensed by NBC in the 1960s, was only one of many works of Japanese animation that were widely broadcast on American network television before the first episode of Pokémon aired in 1998. In addition, Japanese studios contributed a significant portion of the animation for multiple landmark American children’s television shows, such as Transformers and Thunder Cats. The authors demonstrate that such cultural hybrids, whether Japanese shows edited for American television or American shows created by Japanese animators, paved the way for a wider acceptance of anime in the United States.
The second chapter, “Building Silk Roads,” compares the animation industries of the United States and Japan. This chapter directly addresses a common question that many people who study and enjoy anime have raised during the past decade; namely, why Japanese studios and production committees have largely ignored overseas markets and online distribution channels. Based on the information they gathered from interviews conducted with industry professionals, Daliot-Bul and Otmazgin suggest that the explanation for this disconnect is not cultural, but rather structural and organizational. Animation in America has been corporatized to such an extent that it is controlled by several large production companies, while animation in Japan remains more of a cottage industry dependent on the work of small production committees and a number of independent studios, both domestic and overseas, to whom artistic production is outsourced. American media conglomerates such as Disney have the resources to target overseas markets, while ephemeral anime production committees rely on the domestic sale of merchandise to generate short-term profits. As a result, anime producers rely on licensors such as Netflix and the American streaming service Crunchyroll to distribute their content and assume the financial risk of what is typically seen as a “potentially risky overseas adventure” (78).
The material in the third chapter, “Entrepreneurs of Anime,” is drawn from several interviews conducted with key figures in the anime industry, whose opinions augment and complicate the argument of the previous chapter by detailing various workplace environments and corporate strategies. The fifth chapter, “Japan’s Anime Policy,” discusses the Japanese government’s “Cool Japan” strategy, again drawing on interviews with representatives of prominent animation studios in Japan. The interviewees quoted by the authors expressed “general agreement that government policy is barely felt and has not, as yet, been proven to be significant or constructive to the industry” (152). The authors trace the development of the METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry) “Cool Japan” fund and other outreach campaigns during the current century, and they follow this discussion by contrasting the relative ineffectiveness of Japanese state support of the anime industry with the efforts made by China and Korea to promote their local animation industries. Based on this data, the book’s conclusion offers several hypotheses, predictions, and warnings concerning the future of the anime industry.
The fourth chapter, “The Legacy of Anime in the United States,” is somewhat removed from the business-oriented concentration of the other chapters, but it is still relevant and significant in its positioning of the anime industry within its contemporary transnational cultural context. The authors discuss the visual and narrative influence of anime on critically acclaimed and commercially successful American children’s cartoons such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and Teen Titans, as well as the role of the American cable channel Cartoon Network in popularizing anime and anime-styled cartoons for a wider audience.
This chapter also details the influence of American culture in Japan, devoting a significant portion of its discussion to the representation of African-Americans in anime. The authors argue that, despite the ostensible “statelessness” (mukokuseki) of many anime and their visual stylizations, “black characters are more often used as an ethnic/racial marker of otherness, even for Japanese viewers” (124). Although the authors’ conclusions regarding this topic are sound, they have failed to reference the writing of black scholars and cultural critics on the topic of representation, a somewhat surprising oversight in an otherwise thoroughly researched study that generally takes care to cite a broad range of voices and opinions.
The Anime Boom in the United States is an excellent companion to Casey Brienza’s Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Ian Condry’s The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013), and it also serves as a welcome update to Roland Kelt’s more mass-market Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Daliot-Bul and Otmazgin’s scholarship is rigorous and thorough yet accessible, and the authors provide numerous relevant examples to illustrate their arguments. The Anime Boom in the United States will be a comfortable assignment for undergraduates and graduate students, and it will undoubtedly be a useful resource for experts in the field of Japan studies, as well as media studies scholars with limited prior knowledge of Japan. Daliot-Bul and Otmazgin’s fascinating monograph is required reading for anyone studying or teaching Japanese popular culture, and it is certain to pique the interest of anime fans searching for a deeper level of understanding and engagement.
Kathryn Hemmann
George Mason University, Fairfax, USA