Popular Culture

Monsters, ghosts, fantastic beings, and supernatural phenomena of all sorts haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yokai, these creatures come in infinite shapes and sizes, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water spirits to shape-shifting foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Currently popular in anime, manga, film, and computer games, many yokai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful and accessible narrative, readers will explore the roles played by these mysterious beings within Japanese culture and will also learn of their abundance and variety through detailed entries, some with original illustrations, on more than fifty individual creatures. The Book of Yokai provides a lively excursion into Japanese folklore and its ever-expanding influence on global popular culture. It also invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them. By exploring yokai as a concept, we can better understand broader processes of tradition, innovation, storytelling, and individual and communal creativity.  

From sushi and karaoke to martial arts and technoware, the currency of made-in-Japan cultural goods has skyrocketed in the global marketplace during the past decade. The globalization of Japanese "cool" is led by youth products: video games, manga (comic books), anime (animation), and cute characters that have fostered kid crazes from Hong Kong to Canada. Examining the crossover traffic between Japan and the United States, "Millennial Monsters" explores the global popularity of Japanese youth goods today while it questions the make-up of the fantasies and the capitalistic conditions of the play involved. Arguing that part of the appeal of such dream worlds is the polymorphous perversity with which they scramble identity and character, the author traces the postindustrial milieux from which such fantasies have arisen in postwar Japan and been popularly received in the United States.

This guide to anime offers an overview of the art form, looking at its development in Japan and its export to other cultures. It includes a history of Japanese animation from early examples to the relaunch of animation as a viable commercial entity and its enormous rise in popularity after WWII. Anime explains the difference between manga and anime, offering a brief history of manga including its development from traditional art form (woodblock prints) to massive commercial success with millions of readers in Japan and worldwide.

This comprehensive history of Japanese animation draws on Japanese primary sources and testimony from industry professionals to explore the production and reception of anime, from its origins in Japanese cartoons of the 1920s and 30s to the international successes of companies such as Studio Ghibli and Nintendo, films such as Spirited Away and video game characters such as Pok¿mon.

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

Japanese anime plays a major role in modern popular visual culture and aesthetics, yet this is the first study which sets out to put today's anime in historical context by tracking the visual links between Edo- and Meiji-period painters and the post-war period animation and manga series ‘Gegegeno Kitaro' by Mizuki Shigeru. Through an investigation of the very popular Gegegeno Kitaro series, broadcast from the 1960s to the present time, the author is able to pinpoint the visual roots of the animation characters in the context of yôkai folklore and Edo- and Meiji- period monster painting traditions. Through analysing the changing images related to the representation of monsters in the series, the book documents the changes in the perception of monsters over the last half-century, while at the same time reflecting on the importance of Mizuki's work in keeping Japan's visual traditions alive and educating new audiences about folklore by recasting yôkai imagery in modern-day settings in an innovative way. In addition, by analysing and comparing character, set, costume and mask design, plot and storyline of yôkai-themed films, the book is also the first study to shed light on the roles the representations of yôkai have been assigned in post-war Japanese cinema. This book will be of particular interest to those studying Japanese visual media, including manga and animation, as well as students and academics in the fields of Japanese Studies, Animation Studies, Art History and Graphic Design.