Saito Tamaki
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654505
- eISBN:
- 9781452946108
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654505.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always ...
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From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. This book offers an interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. The beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, this book understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.Less
From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. This book offers an interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. The beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, this book understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.
Tze-Yue G. Hu
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622090972
- eISBN:
- 9789882207721
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622090972.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Japanese anime has long fascinated the world, and its mythical heroes and dazzling colors increasingly influence popular culture genres in the West. This book analyzes the “language-medium” of this ...
More
Japanese anime has long fascinated the world, and its mythical heroes and dazzling colors increasingly influence popular culture genres in the West. This book analyzes the “language-medium” of this expressive platform and its many socio-cultural dimensions from a distinctly Asian frame of reference, tracing its layers of concentric radiation from Japan throughout Asia. The book's research, rooted in archival investigations, interviews with animators and producers in Japan as well as other Asian animation studios, and interdisciplinary research in linguistics and performance theory, shows how dialectical aspects of anime are linked to Japan's unique experience of modernity and its cultural associations in Asia, including its reliance on low-wage outsourcing. This study also provides insights on numerous Japanese secondary sources, as well as a number of original illustrations offered by animators and producers that were interviewed.Less
Japanese anime has long fascinated the world, and its mythical heroes and dazzling colors increasingly influence popular culture genres in the West. This book analyzes the “language-medium” of this expressive platform and its many socio-cultural dimensions from a distinctly Asian frame of reference, tracing its layers of concentric radiation from Japan throughout Asia. The book's research, rooted in archival investigations, interviews with animators and producers in Japan as well as other Asian animation studios, and interdisciplinary research in linguistics and performance theory, shows how dialectical aspects of anime are linked to Japan's unique experience of modernity and its cultural associations in Asia, including its reliance on low-wage outsourcing. This study also provides insights on numerous Japanese secondary sources, as well as a number of original illustrations offered by animators and producers that were interviewed.
