Ask John: Why Are English Language Analysis of Anime so Narrowminded?

Question:
The other day I bought Animatrix DVD and found no word to say watching the bonus chapter lecturing on the history of Japanese animation. After WWII Japan has few movie theatres since they were bombed thoroughly. That’s why manga has spread instead of movie in Japan. Japanese animation has developed from the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See Yamato and Akira as examples. Etc, etc.

I’m shocked. I’m Japanese and know these are all “detarame!” (Nonsense). At the same time I was shocked when I went through the Japanese-translated Susan Napier’s book Anime From Akira To Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation since many of titles referred to in the book are not known in Japan. (Very few know of Bubblegum Crisis or La Blue Girl!) It’s like a Japan in Black Rain or in other Hollywood movies focusing on our country. Why are the studies on anime so biased and racist in the U.S.?

Answer:
I’m prepared to admit that I’m probably somewhat as guilty as anyone of publishing or promoting highly reductive views of Japan and its history and culture- especially the origin of Japanese animation. I can’t speak with any certainty, but I strongly suspect that these streamlined critiques are not intentionally biased nor racist. They are simply a product of their origin, and designed as they are only to inform a particular market. An exhaustive, even-handed analysis of Japanese animation would require extensive research and fact gathering, and necessitate the sort of extensive analytical discussion presented in Fred Schott’s book Manga! Manga!, which is a difficult task for most Western writers to undertake, and one too time consuming to always be practical in given situations.

The AniMatrix DVD supplement and similar brief discussions of anime are intended only to give a quick introduction to Japanese animation. Furthermore, they’re written and developed largely by Westerners that can only analyze anime from the perspective of a foreigner at least one step removed from first hand contextual knowledge of anime. Especially because animation still isn’t taken seriously in America as a legitimate form of cinematic art worthy of extensive critical analysis, there are very few serious discussions of anime in English, and few English language translations of Japanese scholarly works on anime. Among those that do exist, few of them are widely known among typical American anime fans. As America continues to discover Japanese animation, there’s naturally a sense of curiosity about it. Especially since mainstream America is so fascinated with anime and wants to know all about it immediately, it’s almost inevitable that Americans would be drawn toward simple, straightforward answers such as, “Japan had few movie theaters after WWII, leading to the popularization of printed manga instead of film.” It’s not that Americans are intentionally trying to reduce centuries of Japanese tradition and culture into simple bite sized bits of information; Americans are simply searching for the quickest and most superficially logical answers to immediate questions.

Susan Napier, for example, is a professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s certainly not an uneducated or non-intellectual person. Her book “Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke” is targeted at readers who are familiar with anime, so it includes references to titles that its readers would be familiar with. The book may simply not adequately acknowledge that the anime titles that so many American fans are familiar with are relatively niche market titles in Japan aimed at a select, small percentage of Japanese consumers. To American fans, titles like Trigun and Tenchi Muyo and Cowboy Bebop are second nature, so it rarely occurs to American fans that the average Japanese citizen is no more familiar with these titles than the average mainstream American. It is these American fans who are intimately familiar with anime that books like Susan Napier’s are designed around and written for, so their viewpoints may be slightly skewed toward a Western perspective.

With limited resources and information available to English speaking natives, and an English speaking audience full of questions, English language answers often end up being selective and concise. The result of this precision is the frequent exclusion of supplemental and related facts and information due to either honest ignorance or brevity by necessity. At least with most mainstream English language analysis of anime, I don’t think the goal is to be intentionally disrespectful or reductive but to rather present brief, compact introductions to Japanese culture that individuals may expand upon through personal research and experience.