Search Results (10)

This study conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis of the masculinities of male characters in Doraemon, a famous Japanese manga series. It explores the masculinities in Doraemon from three perspectives by utilising the following Critical Discourse Analysis framework: text, process and society. Five male characters in Doraemon were selected as the main research objects. Firstly, the text analysis of the male characters in terms of their appearances, characteristics, behaviours and values reveals major masculine traits such as the maintenance of patriarchy, the pursuit and yearning for fame and fortune, competition and aggression. Analysing these masculinities can help remind audiences and consumers to be cautious about works that seemingly do not convey gender stereotypes to viewers. The process analysis identifies corresponding masculinities of the creator of Doraemon through his life experiences. Innovative spirit led him to create characters and manga that could both reflect and confront social reality and promote new gender concepts and ideas that were different from the mainstream at the time. The social analysis of Doraemon attributes the masculinities in the manga to Japanese culture, which has been deeply influenced by the culture of the salaryman, Confucianism, androcentrism and Bushido. For audiences in Japan, anime is a way of spreading and consolidating traditional Japanese cultural ideas, at the same time provoking reflection on whether these inherent gender roles are reasonable and should be perpetuated in the contemporary era. For audiences outside of Japan, this manga and cartoon is equivalent to a typical case of the export and recreation of Japanese culture to the world. This study conveys gender equality values, especially in children’s TV programmes. Full article

Background: Youth suicide remains a significant public health concern in Japan, driven by multifaceted factors such as academic pressures, social isolation, bullying, and family dysfunction. Recent societal changes, including the rise of internet addiction and subcultural influences from anime, manga, and gaming, have further shaped the psychological landscape of Japanese youth. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges, intensifying feelings of loneliness and anxiety about the future. Methods: This study explores the impact of these factors on youth suicide risk through a systematic review of existing literature and statistical data, focusing on trends from 2000 to 2024. Results: In 2023, 513 school-aged youth in Japan died by suicide, marking persistently high rates. High school students accounted for the majority of cases, followed by middle and elementary school students. Key risk factors include intense academic expectations, cyberbullying, and internet addiction, which are often compounded by cultural stigmas surrounding mental health. Subcultures offer both solace and potential alienation, influencing youth emotions in complex ways. The COVID-19 pandemic has also worsened mental health issues and heightened suicide risks among this vulnerable group. Conclusions: The findings highlight the urgent need for comprehensive mental health support systems tailored to Japanese cultural contexts. Recommendations include enhancing access to school-based counseling, promoting family-based interventions, and implementing policies to regulate harmful online content. Additionally, efforts must address cultural attitudes that stigmatize mental health care. Collaborative societal and policy-level interventions are crucial for mitigating youth suicide and fostering a supportive environment for young people in Japan. Full article

To improve the problem-solving capabilities of students, this study explored using interactive digital teaching materials based on animation and manga. A classroom teaching system was developed based on teaching material using a manga format. Students from a national university and a science and technology university in southern Taiwan were recruited. A questionnaire survey was administered for data collection. A total of 104 valid samples were collected; the data were analysed using SPSS 17.0. Two statistically significant models could be used to predict learning outcomes, and the highest R2 value was 52.5%. The utilisation of interactive multimedia teaching materials based on animation and manga helped students apply knowledge to solve practical problems, cultivating their problem-solving capabilities. The findings differed from previous studies; models developed in this study could be used to determine the effects and relationships of multiple factors. Full article

This study analyzes the central role of landscape in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. The depiction of landscape in Miyazaki’s films goes beyond mere visual backdrops in order to convey deep symbolic meanings and to foster an empathic connection between the viewer and the world depicted. The renowned Japanese animator, filmmaker, screenwriter, draftsman, manga artist and film director has strongly promoted environmental awareness in his productions by paying close attention to the depiction and visualization of landscape dynamics, using details, and real and invented elements to create an engaging visual experience. The landscapes also take on emotional, metaphorical dimensions, reflecting the emotions and inner thoughts of the characters. Through an in-depth critical analysis of eleven selected films, the proposed research identifies the character-defining elements adopted by Miyazaki to stimulate reflection on a sustainable combination between urban development and the preservation of natural elements, as well as increasing focus on the beauty of the landscape, thereby highlighting the importance of its preservation. The relevance of this research is to understand Miyazaki’s approach to creating representations of natural elements and how he has managed to combine them with the plots of his various films, indirectly stimulating environmental awareness and fascination with nature in its different forms. Full article

Anime-style comics are popular world-wide and an important industry in Asia. However, the output quantity and quality control of art workers have become the biggest obstacle to industrialization, and it is time consuming to produce new manga without the help of an intelligence assisted tool. As deep learning techniques have achieved great successes in different areas, it is worth exploring them to develop algorithms and systems for computational manga. Extracting line drawings from finished illustrations is one of the main tasks in drawing a manuscript and also a crucial task in the common painting process. However, traditional filters such as Sobel, Laplace, and Canny cannot output good results and require manual adjustments of the parameters. In order to address these problems, in this paper, we propose progressive full data convolutional neural networks for extracting lines from anime-style illustrations. Experimental results show that our progressive full data convolutional neural networks not only can learn as much as processing methods for the detailed regions, but also can accomplish the target extraction work with only a small training dataset. Full article

This article introduces the special issue dedicated to global industries around anime, its theoretical commentary and its cross-cultural consumption. The concepts “anime” and “anime studies” are evaluated critically, involving current debates such as those presented in this volume. This discussion will employ the concepts of “manga media” as well as the “popular global”, giving an account of the transmedia and transcultural character of these creative industries. The conclusion critiques the irregular presence of Cultural Studies in the study of Japanese visual culture and advocates for constructing an updated dialogue with this tradition in order to readdress the study of these media as a form of global popular culture. Full article

This paper examines 2.5-Dimensional musicals, or theater adaptations of anime/manga/videogames. As the genre has been gaining popularity in Japan since around 2007, criticism on the genre began to appear. What they uncritically assume is that the pioneer of the genre was the theater adaptation of Prince of Tennis first produced in 2003, and the unique mise-en-scène that attempts to recreate the “world” of the original, including the characters, setting, and the characters’ extreme skills of tennis, is a hallmark of the genre. However, such a view fails to consider the fact that these are actually merely characteristics of a subgenre of 2.5-Dimensional musicals represented by Prince of Tennis and other similar shows. This paper argues that another show, namely the theater adaptation of the videogame Sakura Wars, first produced in 1997 and continuing to this day, actually presents a number of important questions and viewpoints that are useful and necessary to critically discuss the genre, such as how two-dimensional characters are materialized on stage, which role audiences play in that process, how 2.5-Dimensional musicals can be contextualized within conventional theater genres rather than a part of “media mix” strategies, and tension between the local and global in their production and consumption. Full article

Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner. Full article

As an alternative reading of anime’s global consumption, this paper will explore the multiple layers of transnationality in anime: how the dispersal of agency in anime production extends to transnational production, and how these elements of anime’s transnationality are engaged with in the transnational consumption of anime. This will be done through an analysis of Shirobako (an anime about making anime), revealing how the series depicts anime production as a constant process of negotiation involving a large number of actors, each having tangible effects on the final product: human actors (directors, animators, and production assistants), the media-mix (publishing houses and manga authors), and the anime media-form itself. Anime production thus operates as a network of actors whose agency is dispersed across a chain of hierarchies, and though unacknowledged by Shirobako, often occurs transnationally, making attribution of a single actor as the agent who addresses Japan (or the world) difficult to sustain. Lastly, I will examine how transnational sakuga-fans tend to focus on anime’s media-form as opposed to “Japaneseness”, practicing an alternative type of consumption that engages with a sense of dispersed agency and the labor involved in animation, even examining non-Japanese animators, and thus anime's multilayered transnationality. Full article

Kawaii culture and aesthetics are a peculiarity of contemporary Japan and move across mass media, impulse goods, creative industries, and juvenile tendencies. The concept, graphic styles, and commodities related to a kawaii culture are composite. This article, in its first part, outlines the theories and general features of this cultural trend in Japan and as it is framed in most western countries. In the second part, it also focuses on whether and how the concept and the related styles and commodities have found a place in Europe, with particular reference to Italy and France. These two countries, in fact, have been since the late 1970s the key markets in the Euro-American region for Japanese contemporary culture for youths, namely Japanese comics (generally called manga) and commercial animation (or anime). Anime and manga are, in effect, an integral part of the theoretical discourse on kawaii in the two markets considered, as it is discussed accordingly in the second part of the article. In its last section, the article addresses the impact of kawaii styles on youth cultures in Europe, which is, although limited, multidimensional: it has involved spontaneous drawings among children, a certain amateur and professional comics production, amateur and commercial animation, toys and a diverse merchandising, street art, and fashion design. Full article