Facebook wasn’t incorporated from the get-go, and the 1990s and 2000s are littered with technological giants which started as a hobby such as Linux.↩︎

And speaking of utilitarianism, because hobbies and media consumption use up resources, they are a valid target of critique—5 or 10 DVD box sets might cost 1 dead baby.↩︎

‘You should buy fair trade chocolate instead of Hershey’s!’↩︎

The entire raison d’être of Givewell or Charity Navigator.↩︎

I read in the archived text files of one BBS that sometimes when fansubs were unavailable and no one there spoke Japanese, anime clubs might watch an episode anyway.↩︎

Even if the invitation could be best described as a kind of trolling; from the talk “Riding on Fans’ Energy: Touhou, Fan Culture, and Grassroot Entertainment”

Touhou also motivates fans to create because it has serious flaws: ZUN knows how to create wonderful characters, yet his drawings leaves much to be desired. If Touhou were a commercial endeavor, none of his drawing would appear in it, but ZUN has kept the Touhou games as amateur works from the start. Fans are frustrated with the drawing style, so they take upon themselves to beautify ZUN’s drawing. A large amount of fanarts that are ‘better than the real thing’ follows. Ironically, many fans (myself included) are attracted to Touhou because of these secondary artworks.

I surmise that the same reasons explain why Touhou appeals to music listeners. ZUN’s music are imperfect: while they contain many catchy motifs, they don’t sound harmonious and can be arranged better. Again, because they can be improved and have many good parts, Touhou musics became popular among remixers. Some groups such as dBu music republish ZUN’s compositions song by song, changing only the MIDI instruments. Other groups would arrange the musics into different styles (such as Jazz), recombine motifs them to make new musics, or add lyrics. These musical arrangements seem to be the most effective advertisement for the Touhou series nowadays. Many oversea fans discovered Touhou through a flash video clip used to promote ‘Marisa ga Taihen na Mono wo Nusundeikimashita’, an arrangement of Alice Margatroid’s theme by IOSYS. Touhou musics are also widely used to make MAD movies in Nico Nico Douga. Popular songs such as ‘U.N. Owen ha Kanojo nanoka?’ and ‘Native Faith’ would have hundreds of MAD videos under their belts.

Continued:

…It is interesting to note that, in the case of The Matrix or Planet of the Apes, the creators created deep and consistent worlds so that viewers can be absorbed in uncovering the details. [16] Gensoukyou, however, is a shallow and inconsistent composition. It situates in a mountain in Japan, yet there are European vampires living in it. ‘I like to put western things in there because it’s “Eastern”, hehe,’ said ZUN. [17] Also, the culture of Gensoukyou is that of 19^th century’s Japan, but all Touhou games take place in the years they are released. For this, ZUN commented that ‘Well, I live in modern times, so it makes it much easier. And I get to include things like rockets. If I had a setting in the past, I’d have to study a lot of history.’ [18] Moreover, the Hakurei Border that separates Gensoukyou from the outside world is porous, allowing people and objects from modern Japan to go in. In fact, the demon controlling the boundary even knows how to use iPod! It’s clear that ZUN chooses to make a malleable world rather than a consistent world so that he can keep making new Touhou games easily. While this choice deters fans form deciphering the world, it encourages fans to create their own stories because nothing in Gensoukyou is sacred and a lot can still be added to it. The large amount of doujinshi accounting daily lives of Touhou characters is a proof of this tendency.

For example, The Phantom Edit was initially released anonymously, Star Wars Fan Film Awards begun reluctantly & with highly restrictive rules, and it is well-known that any fan production which is sold, lives under Damocles’s sword, regardless of how much it costs to distribute.↩︎

To quote Anno again:

Japan is the only country in the world that actually has an anime industry, and can mass-produce animated works of a high quality for a large audience. It’s only natural then, that this product would be in demand from the rest of the world. Japan is unrivaled in this sense. Disney is really no competition because Disney can only release one film at a time. They are not capable of handling the wide range of stories that we see in Japanese anime. Real anime exists only in Japan, and this is about the only original product Japan can offer to the world—anime, manga and computer games.

Inoue 2003_21ya, being paraphrased/quoted/summarized by Eri Izawa:

There are two main reasons that full 3D rendering is not that common yet. Firstly, of the 80 episodes airing each week, only a few series will run for a full year. Many last only 13 episodes (a single cycle of episodes, or a “Cool”), so there is no economic incentive to invest in full 3D modeling and rendering. Secondly, the costs of Japanese TV animation are still about a quarter the cost of producing American TV animation. A third reason that Mr. Inoue later mentioned is that 2D art has certain strengths over 3D art…With Disney animation, recent movie scenes featuring many horses or other animals are made possible by computerized animation. However, too often in Japan, there is not the manpower nor resources to do these extensive scenes. Unfortunately, this results in such scenes being avoided completely. For the sake of story-telling and remaining true to a story, computer graphics are necessary for Japan’s animation industry.

I’m a big fan of the Noitamina series. What a selection—Tatami Galaxy, Wandering Son, AnoHana, Shiki, House of Five Leaves, Bunny Drop… Some of these series, I wonder whether American networks outside HBO would even dare run a live-action version. Could you imagine Wandering Son on Fox TV? I can’t.↩︎

Inoue 2003_21ya:

Mr. Inoue was asked how many people it takes to create a show. He explained that a typical 30 minute TV anime show takes roughly 120 people: perhaps 2-5 character, mechanical, and background designers; 4-6 scenario writers, 40 in the animation team, 30 people to do finishing/touch ups, background, and compositing/combining; and 20-30 people to do voice acting and sound tech. A film such as Sen to Chihiro (Spirited Away) requires about 500 people. Studio Ghibli itself, although comprised mostly of animators, only has about 100 people; they rely on nearly 500 or so people outside the company for contracted work, sounds, and other support. In addition, 2/3 of the animation jobs are overseas, contracted out to animation companies in Korea, China, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These days, he noted, 80 episodes a week would require tens of thousands of animators, but Japan simply doesn’t have the numbers of people required for that much work. Mr. Inoue later explained that currently in Japan, there are about 10 large animation houses, 30 medium sized ones, perhaps 2000_24ya tiny companies (sometimes with as few as 3-4 people). In the larger company, of the 300 or so workers, only 20% are actual employees with benefits; the rest are basically contractors. Hence (he noted) there is no job security, and he “can’t recommend the industry” unless a person is particularly good.

One might call this the auteur theory of anime:

Mr. Inoue also spoke with me privately at length about why it is that Japanese animation has been able to produce so many shows of good caliber (he believes 20% of most anime is actually good quality, as opposed to our usual saying that “99% of everything is crap”). Part of this is because, he suggests, once a director has established himself as a successful money maker, the studio become tolerant of his desires to make experimental or visionary productions. So, although Spielberg may have had to use the proceeds off the popular Jurassic Park to fund his personal project Schindler’s List, Japanese studios seem to be willing to make deals with their directors—allowing them to make small market or niche films so long as they do not exceed a certain budget (as examples, he said a dream film budget may be set to 2 hundred million yen, while a studio money-making film may have a full budget of five hundred million yen—which is fine as it may bring in three billion yen in revenue). Mamoru Oshii, who directed the popular anime Patlabor, took advantage of this allowance to make a live action film [The Red Spectacles]. Also, he noted, a successful director can often push the envelope—such as happened with Gundam, one of the earliest series to portray the death and destruction of war in such a realistic way. Aspects such as these, Mr. Inoue believes, has allowed the Japanese animation industry, despite being a commercial enterprise that must make a profit to survive, unusually blessed in its ability to create works of profoundness and insight.

Mr. Inoue mentioned another factor in the diversity of anime. He said that “ever since Evangelion, there is no anime [series] that is watched by everyone.” In other words, modern anime is no longer is tied to the mass market, and it may be freer to seek out niche markets and smaller audiences.

Toshio Okada, anime producer turned academic, holds a similar opinion (translated Aera article):

America already had Disney animation and a tradition of comics, but they had a strong image as being strictly for kids. However, in Japan at some point, animation had headed off in a separate direction. Visual expressions never before seen. Beautiful pictures. Complex stories. Masterful performances. And the distinctive personalities of each member of the cast of characters. Animation was thought to be cheap, but it was an art which had risen to a level worthy of the appreciation of adults. To Americans, with their love of new things, it looked really cool. And so the people, things, and cities appearing in Japanese anime became their new image of Japan. This was spreading not the customary exoticism, but cyber and pop Japanese culture.

The word ‘complex’ shows up again with ANN columnist Brian Hanson:

Anime’s “success” in those heady years of Toonami and Dragon Ball Z being the highest-rated cartoon show on television and whatnot… it was totally a “right place, right time” situation. By that time anime had sort of found its “niche” in the Western market thanks to the groundwork laid out by Streamline and Akira and Ghost in the Shell, in the sense that people had a sort of vague idea what anime “was” and that it was this different, edgy thing comprised of limited but kinetic animation and complex stories and other things they haven’t seen before. And, thanks to some savvy marketing and slick presentation courtesy of Cartoon Network and Teletoon and others, anime was, for the first time, readily and easily available. You could flip on the TV and catch an episode of Outlaw Star or Inuyasha or Cowboy Bebop and recognize that it was anime, but it was presented and marketed in such a way that made it seem cool and alluring. And as a plus, the shows were really good and they were made for a wider audience than Japanese Otaku. The audience for anime was ready for it, but they hadn’t had it presented to them in a simple way thus far; now that it was literally in their homes and edited so it was “safe,” anime was, by all accounts, a cool thing.

Or “oddity” or “insanity”; from “Popularity Contests”:

Really quickly on this, before I launch into a completely separate issue entirely: yes, yes, yes! InuYasha is more “popular” because of its TV airing on Adult Swim and Teletoon and elsewhere in the Western world. Millions upon millions of English-speaking fans were exposed to it. And they loved it. Why wouldn’t they? Rumiko Takahashi knows how to hit an audience’s narrative and character pleasure centers like a tactical missile strike. Fun, lovable characters in outlandish scenarios, fighting tooth-and-nail against impossible odds. Romantic entanglements with slapstick jollyment. Never mind that Ranma ½ never got a TV airing; how in the world could it ever be aired on national television? Even if you cut out the nudity (rendering entire scenes and episodes unairable), the entire premise of a sex-changing protagonist is something far outside the comfort zone of most broadcasters. Especially in the early-to-mid 90’s, when Ranma was one of the hotter anime commodities.

In a way, though, that oddity is exactly what helped it in those early days of western fandom. Where else, outside of anime and manga, could such insanity exist? I remember my exposure to Ranma came from the Super Nintendo game—specifically, a review in EGM. “What the heck? A boy who turns into a girl, whose father is a panda? Characters named ‘Mousse’ and ‘Shampoo’? What is this quackery?” I thought to myself. A couple trips to Blockbuster Video some years later, and I understood. Boy, did I love it.

See Flynn effect and Everything Bad Is Good for You.↩︎

Yasuhiro Takeda (in The Notenki Memoirs) could only describe Japanese Star Trek fans as “a large percentage” of all Japanese SF fans; an American would probably have had to say ‘nearly all fans’, especially before Star Wars offered an alternative.↩︎

Consider all the discussion of the two in my CSE. It’s worth noting that Joss Whedon’s first hit, the 1997_27ya Buffy doesn’t have any clear connections to anime besides a vague resemblance to mahou shoujo, but Whedon has acknowledged the canceled animated Buffy series’s debt to Batman: The Animated Series—whose co-creator Bruce Timm is a fan of anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion.↩︎

Hard-to-obtain sales figures aside, I believe this assertion because I see all sorts of American SF references in anime which one might not expect. Takeda’s The Notenki Memoirs mentions a number of Japanese SF authors who also translated English SF on the side, and Gainax’s work is littered with American references, from Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind to Flowers for Algernon to Larry Niven’s Known Space to Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”; most extremely, I ran into one rumor that a particular well-regarded author had hired a student to translate new stories from American SF magazines which he would then rewrite for domestic consumption!↩︎

“Brain Diving: Schodt Through The Heart”, Ruh:

So what is the problematic conclusion Newitz reaches in this article? I think it can be summed up in her concluding sentence: “Anime help accustom Americans to a subordinate position in relation to Japan.” In other words, watching anime is setting us in the US on a path for a cultural and economic takeover by Japan. (This idea may seem farfetched now, given the current economic climate, but may have been genuinely worrisome in the late 1980s and early 1990s.) That’s quite a claim! Surely she must have an array of solid evidence and detailed analysis to support this. Unfortunately not. She discusses that there are many different races represented in anime (specifically mentions Riding Bean and Bubblegum Crisis as examples), yet all of these characters speak and (sometimes) act Japanese. Therefore Newitz draws the conclusion that this “American-looking multiculture is in fact Japanese,” intended for a target audience outside Japan, and presents an ominous view of the future in which Japanese culture and language have taken over the world. And it’s a benign takeover for anime fans since, according to Newitz, “When Americans are anime otaku, they are in a sense admitting that they want to be colonized by Japanese culture.” This of course overlooks the more straightforward idea that anime is in Japanese because it’s intended for a Japanese audience.

“Buried Treasure: In Praise of Nerdiness”, ANN↩︎

Anime naturally demonstrates a variety of Japanese values (although one might not draw all the same lessons), from literary allusions to ordinary parts of life like not wearing shoes indoors or students cleaning the schools or sillier examples like the akanbe gesture or the kancho prank. One could claim further differences: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics emphasizes the different approaches manga often takes in depicting events or scenes, and there are persistent claims that one sees entirely different story-types focusing less on conflict, such has the popular iyashikei and slice of life genres (the latter often exemplified by yonkoma manga). One irony is that legends of the American anime/manga scene sought to minimize the Japaneseness of works; for example, the late translator & businessman Toren Smith brought many classic series to America, but ultimately quit the business in disgust, partially due to his chosen style—flipping pages, localizing by relettering sound effects, translating into idiomatic English eg, removing honorifics, as exemplified in his release of Nausicaa —becoming less popular & profitable.↩︎

Walter Murch; quoted in Marcus Hearn’s The Cinema of George Lucas, pg 37:

Japanese films are interesting to us because they were made by a culture for itself. The problem that George [Lucas] and I found with science fiction films that we saw is that they felt that they had to explain these strange rituals to you, whereas a Japanese film would just have the ritual and you’d have to figure it out for yourself.

“Notes on Azuma’s Otaku Database Animals (1. The Otaku’s Pseudo-Japan)”, discussing Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Database Animals:

Let me speak personally here as an American and hope that I’m speaking for others as well. I am attracted to the pseudo-Japan of anime and manga simply because it’s not America. As the dominant culture, we are everywhere in the world. We have to watch as our culture suffocates traditions all over the world, and to be honest it feels kind of bad. I don’t like being part of this, yet there’s nothing I can do to fight it. When I hear that some nation’s domestic film industry can’t compete with our imports, I realize that it is their own choice to let their culture wither in favor of the American culture. So, my reaction to the Japanese elements in anime is gleeful, because to me it is an example of a culture holding its own, preserving itself even while embracing the new world society. I get saturated with our culture every day, I see it reflected back at me in other nations, but when I look to anime, I see a change, and this to me is refreshing.

This is a cop-out on my part. Like many arguments from revealed preferences, that is a fully general counterargument which can be used to justify any choice.↩︎