A tribute to Japan's "god of manga" by his longtime American friend and translator.

The media industries in the United States and Japan are similar in much the same way animals on earth share a similar DNA, but while a horse and a kangaroo maybe 95% related on a biological level, they are also very different - this is the way it is with manga/anime in Japan and Hollywood animation/movies/TV. Although sharing some key common origins, they developed mostly separately but influenced each other significantly along the way. That confluence is now accelerating into new forms of hybridization that will drive much of future storytelling entertainment. Understanding these common and divergent "DNA" origins, the cross-influences and the independent traits is one of many reasons why this book is so important. Through original interviews with top creators in these fields and illuminating case studies including adaptations of Japanese mangas and animes for Hollywood remakes, Manga and Anime go to Hollywood analyzes the specific dynamics of this confluence between Japanese manga/anime and American film,animation and television. In addition, it shows how to use this knowledge creatively to shape the future of global narrative storytelling, including through the educational system. It is a fascinating to any reader with an interest in the inter-related history of Japanese manga/anime and Hollywood since the Meiji period through WW2, what is happening on the cutting edge right now - and into the future.

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan. Manga and the Representation of Japanese History will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture

This volume provides a historical narrative, historiographical reviews, and scholarly analyses by leading scholars throughout the world on the hitherto understudied topic of Shanghai Jewish refugees. Few among the general public know that during the Second World War, approximately 16,000 to 20,000 Jews fled the Nazis, found unexpected refuge in Shanghai, and established a vibrant community there. Though most of them left Shanghai soon after the conclusion of the war in 1945, years of sojourning among the Chinese and surviving under the Japanese occupation generated unique memories about the Second World War, lasting goodwill between the Chinese and Jews, and contested interpretations of this complex past. The volume makes two major contributions to the studies of Shanghai Jewish refugees. First, it reviews the present state of the historiography on this subject and critically assesses the ways in which the history is being researched and commemorated in China. Second, it compiles scholarship produced by renowned scholars, who aim to rescue the history from isolated perspectives and look into the interaction between Jews, Chinese, and Japanese.

Known as the “Walt Disney of Japan” it is no surprise that Tezuka Osamu is still the best-known manga creator to Western fans. Current scholarship has uncovered the profound complexity and ambiguity not only of his work but of the man, the artist, and his life—dismantling his position as the god of manga. Contributors to this volume of Mechademia—a series devoted to creative and critical work on anime, manga, and the fan arts—analyze Tezuka and his complicated approaches toward life and nonlife on earth, as well as his effect on the lives of other manga artists. Using essays and reprints of Japanese manga on Tezuka, this book questions his influence and attitudes toward the nonhuman, evolutionary theory, the aesthetic lineage of contemporary manga, incipient feminism in the reinscription of the nonhuman feminine, the sexual politics of manga bodies, the origins of the moe culture, and the styles of didacticism revealing the digressions of insects and classical modes, among others. The authors offer varying perspectives on the historical transformations in production, distribution, and reception that gradually integrated and differentiated an overlapping series of markets and readerships in the postwar era. Divided into four sections that explore different “lives”—“Nonhuman Life,” “Media Life,” “A Life in Manga,” and “Everyday Life”—Mechademia 8 serves as a prehistory of the impersonal politics of the present while tracing Tezuka’s legacy. Contributors: Akatsuka Fujio; Anno Moyoko; Linda H. Chance, U of Pennsylvania; Jonathan Clements; Hideaki Fujiki, Nagoya U; Patrick W. Galbraith; Verina Gfader, U of Huddersfield; Alicia Gibson; G. Clinton Godart, USC; Yorimitsu Hashimoto, Osaka U; Ryan Holmberg; Hikari Hori, Columbia U; Mary A. Knighton, College of William and Mary; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Natsume Fusanosuke, Gakushuin U, Tokyo; Ōtsuka Eiji, Kobe Design U; Baryon Tensor Posadas; Renato Rivera Rusca, Meiji U; Frederik L. Schodt; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U; Tezuka Osamu; Toshiya Ueno, Wako U, Tokyo; Matthew Young.

Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives makes available for the first time to English readership a selection of viewpoints from media practitioners, designers, educators, and scholars working in the East Asian Pacific. This collection not only engages a multidisciplinary approach in understanding the subject of Japanese animation but also shows ways to research, teach, and more fully explore this multidimensional world. Presented in six sections, the translated essays cross-reference each other. The collection adopts a wide range of critical, historical, practical, and experimental approaches. This variety provides a creative and fascinating edge for both specialist and nonspecialist readers. Contributors' works share a common relevance, interest, and involvement despite their regional considerations and the different modes of analysis demonstrated. They form a composite of teaching and research ideas on Japanese animation.

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.