Anime Expo 2016

• This talk looks to discuss the unique world of comic sound effects, specifically those found in manga. Although many readers may not think about them directly, sound effects affect their ability to read, enjoy, and understand graphic texts—meaning that an inability to understand them can stop understanding, and changing them can potentially cause a disastrous misreading. Sound effects can carry just as much meaning, weight, and import as the dialogue and art they accompany, and this discussion looks to introduce that concept and expand the scope of what can be studied when it comes to graphic works.

• Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue is a film about identity: the conflict of the film is driven by the divide that exist between how people perceive the main character, Mima, as a commercial commodity and a woman, and in turn how Mima perceives herself. I analyze how this is portrayed symbolically throughout the film through the motif of Mima's voice, developing being owned and sold by others to being entirely her own. This provides a useful approach to better understand the outside influences influencing her identity and development as a character, revealing a strong criticism of the expectations of women in a patriarchal society.

• While manga combines image and text, it divides boys and girls. In bookstores in Japan manga is divided primarily by the gender of the target audience, often separated onto different floors in larger bookstores. This reflects the gendered division that begins in manga zasshi [comics magazines] and continues through the media mix chain. This talk will briefly overview how this distinction has been discussed in previous scholarship, and shifted over the years. This talk will also introduce preliminary results from my ongoing research on the divisions between these genres. One of these research projects examines how the reader's sections in shōjo manga proscribe the ideal work to readers and aspiring artists to a far greater extent than their shōnen equivalents. The other examines formalist distinctions between contemporary shōnen and shōjo manga in order to explore what it means when we open a comic, glance at it, and declare it to be one or the other.

• This presentation investigates the archetype of the “loser" in Osomatsu-san, the 2015 anime reboot of the well-known Osomatsu-kun (1966-67, 88-89) franchise. Tensions inherent in the image of the salaryman—simultaneously a signifier of socio-economic stability, yet also of soulless drudgery—paradoxically position it as a personally unfulfilling career, and also a desirable marker of traditional (masculine) success that is no longer attainable for a young workforce in Japan's late capitalist global economy. Osomatsu-san's structure and content preclude any possibility of financial or personal success for its characters, offering a revealing critique of contemporary labor politics in a post-industrial Japan.

• Of all of the Earth's major cities, perhaps none have undergone more cataclysmic changes in a shorter time period than Tokyo. Earthquakes, modernization, firebombings, and urban renewal have changed the three dimensional Tokyo just as much – if not more – than giant robots, angels, or magical girls have changed a myriad number of two dimensional versions. By analyzing the city as both a historical entity and as a narrative setting, Evan Jones will explore Tokyo as a cityscape of limitless flexibility, one which creators and visionaries bend and manipulate at will to satisfy various wants and needs. This presentation will use a number of visuals to highlight various animated interpretations of Tokyo with an emphasis on important representational shifts.

• Depictions of making and consuming food have been prominent throughout the history of Japanese animation and Japanese comics.. This presentation will overview development, role, and significance that food plays in anime/manga, and the place of Japanese media in the emerging academic field of “food studies". In Goro Miyazaki's From Up on Poppy Hill, food can be interpreted as a sign that carries various meanings, which in turn underscore and facilitate specific themes, such as family, camaraderie in the community, and role fulfillment.

• Gate presents a right-wing view of Japan by combining an irruption of a fantasy world into Japan with the real world of the Japanese Self Defense Force (JSDF) and Japanese politics and geopolitics. Gate is a tale of the vindication of three underdogs: Japan, the JSDF, and otakus/otaku culture. Japan maybe a small country surrounded by more powerful nations. The JSDF maybe under funded and under suspicion at home and viewed as a joke by other nations. Otaku culture may not be viewed as exemplary or even entirely adult. In Gate, however, all three are more than conquerors.

• Attack on Titan's engagement with the narrative and visual conventions of Japanese ultra-nationalist manga and anime combines an enthusiastic engagement with these elements, on their own terms and with the full strength of their appeal, with the violent interruption of these elements, their foundational myths being torn apart in an impossible blur of teeth. Situating this analysis alongside an overview of the ideological characteristics of Japanese ultra-nationalism and its history in manga/anime from the 1960s and onwards, this key to reading AoT presents insights into the character of these phenomenon in Japan's animation and comics tradition and its political imaginary.

• On February 26, 1936 a group in the Imperial Japanese Military calling themselves the Young Officers attempted an uprising in Tokyo and a series of assassinations, calling on the the people and the Emperor to lead a “Showa restoration" to end economic inequality through the abolition of capitalism and corrupt party politics. Taking inspiration from the shishi of the Meiji restoration, its low status samurai leaders, they belong to a rich tradition of Japanese radicals who have attempted, armed with unfailing moral clarity, to use symbolic violence to bring about social transformation. This talk discusses two recent TV anime that engage with this tradition and the memory of the Young Officers as a potential model for addressing the many social crises of post-bubble Japan and wrestle with its continuing legacy and importance while ultimately endorsing different methods of radical action.

• How did anime and manga first enter U.S. fandom, and why were people watching “Japanimation"? Using materials from the Fred Patten collection, this paper explores early anime and manga fandom in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. The problems that early fans faced were similar to those faced by Japanese audiences encountering English-language movies in the 1910s and 1920s, and the fans who watched anime in these years did so for similar reasons: anime offered them content they wanted mixed with appealing foreign-ness. The practices these fans pioneered eventually gave rise to the U.S. anime and manga industry.

• Whether it was a copied VHS tape or a fansubbed video, chances are that you or someone you know has viewed anime through unauthorized means of distribution. With a consumer base formed partially by fans acting as creators and distributors, how has the anime market continued to grow? How do these fan distributors coexist with corporate distributors in an expanding market? This talk explores the way in which unauthorized distribution played a role in creating the current market of anime fandom and what that history means for the market today.

• This talk focuses on the fan practice of cosplay through a rhetorical analysis of cosplayers' use of social media when building their online persona. Through personal interviews conducted with cosplayers and a textual analysis of their social media posts, we can see how Cicero's three offices of rhetoric (instruction, pleasure, persuasion) work in the minds and pages of well-known cosplayers. From there, let's consider how social media affects the performative nature of cosplay.

We’re pleased to give a special GOD EATER panel to all GOD EATER fans in US!! What are the similarities and differences between the anime and the game? Come and see both the Anime and Video Game in action and find out more about the GOD EATER universe!

• Within ecofeminist thought and theory, the concept of continuity, as articulated by scholars such as Val Plumwood and Lisa Kretz, provides a good fit for the content of Hayao Miyazaki's powerful and deeply evocative film. This view recognizes how humans engage in othering behaviors, distancing themselves from their natural environments. Application of this viewpoint indicates, society ought to move away from such a conceptualization of the self, as well as other harmful dualisms which inform our anthropocentric attitudes and interfere with the creation of an environmental ethic that is truly respectful of nature. This talk incorporates additional sources and works dealing with philosophy and bioethics and themes such as animal rights and the consideration of time in relation to the natural environment.

• Contemporary media production methods have been theorized in two similar ways, as transmedia storytelling and as the media mix, by Henry Jenkins and Otsuka Eiji, respectively. This talk introduces adaptation as a way to reconsider how stories come to be (re)told and suggests how art can evolve through adaptation using Yamamoto Sayo's Lupin the 3rd: A Woman Called Mine Fujiko (2012) as a case study.

• This presentation explores “alternative" archival spaces (“surfaces") of Japanese animation and the historical intersections between scholars and fans, shifting ethics, means of viewing and distribution. It proposes that careful consideration of these trends benefits not only fan studies, but studies of the works themselves in an evolving technological context. Here certain parallels are highlighted between comments on streaming video and file-sharing websites, and the tradition of colophons on Sino-Japanese handscrolls. The talk then proceeds to discuss the unstable nature of these “anime archives," extending this instability to the notion of the digital archive. A case study of the file-sharing website BakaBT.me is explored alongside theories of a utopian “archival commons."