Introduction to the 2nd edition (and why there probably won’t be a 3rd edition)

Any history of popular culture carries a built-in problem with it: popular culture doesn’t stop. History looks at events that have happened, that have a beginning and an end. Even if those events sometimes can’t be nailed down precisely, there’s a limited time line. America’s Civil War could date from the secession of the Confederate states, or John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, or the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but the first actual battle was the South’s attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Similarly, the war officially ended when the Confederates surrendered at Appomattox; unofficially, there was the assassination of President Lincoln, or the killing of the assassin.

Once a ball starts rolling in pop culture, however, there’s no predicting it. No one could have predicted, for example, that Rumiko Takahashi’s manga Ranma ½ would run for ten years, or that her next work, InuYasha, would run for twelve years. The popularity of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books in Japan was predictable; less predictable was the number of works inspired, directly or indirectly, by Harry, including Witch Hunter Robin, Ojamajo Doremi, Negima! Magister Negi Magi!, Maburaho, Sugar Sugar Rune. . . .

So any look at pop culture is a snapshot of a moving object. You can catch a look at it at that moment and only at that moment. The problem comes from trying to generalize from one such snapshot. That’s going to affect the conclusions, especially since pop culture can be so temporary. A study of manga and anime in the late 1970s, for instance, might tempt the observer to believe that, thanks to Star Wars, science fiction and outer space were dominant themes; a look at the early twenty-first century preoccupation with magical comedies and vampire romances (from Chibi Vampire to Vampire Knight to Millennium Snow) would be making a similar mistake. Anime, and the manga that gave rise to them, has been home to many genres, from domestic comedies to sports dramas, from history to romance.

One way to check all this is to remember that Japanese culture goes back about 3,000 years. Religious mythology, regional folktales, histories from one or both sides of various conflicts, modern “urban legends;” these and more feed into a pop culture and get reflected back, and it’s surprising how echoes of the past keep popping up in Japan’s anime present. Stories are linked to the Shinto legend of the sun goddess Amaterasu, to folktales about Urashima the fisherman, to the heroic “Peach Boy” Momotaro, to the despotic sixteenth century warlord Nobunaga Oda who allowed his friend’s mother to die and thus sealed his own fate.

Finding these stories, and more, salted through Japanese cartoons made me realize that these media were anything but childish and trivial, as comic books and cartoons in the West have the reputation for being. This is storytelling on a very different order from the Brothers Grimm or Shakespeare or Jane Austen—sources that, among others, are also part of anime. Western animators are beginning to recognize these other literary sources. For the time being, they may be trying to stretch the medium to cover the amount of ground anime already covers.

In examining the state of the anime art for this second edition, I ran into the same dilemma I faced writing the original book: every new avenue of research suggested several others. In expanding the chapter on Masamune Shirow, creator of Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, I ran into the newer CG versions of the stories, both of which led me through the Uncanny Valley. There was the global popularity of Fullmetal Alchemist, the passing of director Satoshi Kon, and the grand old men of anime replaced by the Grande Dames: Rumiko Takahashi and the CLAMP collective, rolling merrily on into interesting new projects in the twenty-first century.

The physical media of anime went through major changes in the decade between this book’s two editions. Computer-generated animation requires its own chapter. There was also lots of drama in consumer video media. Home videocassettes were the breakthrough that made exposure to hundreds of anime titles possible, yet by the year 2005 videocassettes were a dying medium, as Digital Video Discs (DVDs) came into their own. The advantages of the new technology, introduced in 1995, were easy to see: the disc was no larger than a music CD, compared to the Laserdisc predecessor, which was the size of an old vinyl long-playing record album; it was easily indexed, so that particular scenes could be located and played as the viewer desired; the content wouldn’t degrade over time (or get eaten by a malfunctioning machine); and, even though DVDs needed a special player at first, by 2005 DVDs could be played back on home PCs and even game platforms, which increasingly came equipped with the proper kind of hardware and software for playback.

By the time this preface was written, the format war between VHS and Betamax videocassettes was as distant a memory as videocassettes themselves.¹ However, not all was quiet on the DVD front. The next war between two incompatible formats may have been shorter, but was no less partisan. DVDs were challenged by so-called Blu-ray technology (a variation of DVDs that uses a blue-light laser to read the disc; since blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, a Blu-ray disc can store more information, thus enhancing picture quality. By the way, the name is spelled “blu” because “blue” is a commonly used word that therefore can’t be copyrighted.) By 2010 Blu-ray was acknowledged as technically superior, but movies and TV series were still being released in redundant formats—in part because DVDs could still be played on so many platforms.

Yet even this advance in the media of anime was fated to be eclipsed. As this introduction is being written, the new mountaintop, so to speak, is “streaming.” Consumer demand for video has become extremely demanding; people want to watch what they want, whenever and wherever they want, using any kind of technology from computers to cellular telephones. When the first edition of this book appeared, the Blockbuster video rental franchise still ruled; as of this writing, Blockbuster is in bankruptcy reorganization, the Netflix company which rents out DVDs through mail has taken over the consumer market, but both are also changing their delivery systems to provide streaming video on demand. The wars aren’t over yet.

Will there be a third edition of this book in another decade? Possibly, since pop culture never stands still. I have no way of predicting what could be added, since it hasn’t happened yet. It’s hard to imagine what technical advances haven’t already happened. Ten years ago computers ran on small floppy disks, which replaced larger floppy disks; now a piece of plastic smaller than my finger, using a USB connection rather than serial or parallel port, holds four gigabytes worth of files, and it costs less than a paperback book. Speaking of which, publishing itself is going through monumental changes, with the introduction of “virtual book” platforms like the Kindle, Blackberry, iPad, Barnes & Noble Nook. . . . Most of these are as big as their paper-and-cardboard ancestors, and (when they work) they come close to the experience of reading an actual book.

But there’s a problem there. There are many kinds of virtual books, most with proprietary software, and getting people to choose among incompatible formats will look like the VHS/Betamax debate on steroids. This will involve anime and manga in the primary legal debate (I believe) of the twenty-first century: What is information? Can it be owned? Can it be copied, and does a simple but unauthorized copy constitute theft? And will the West follow Japan’s lead and tolerate amateur use of existing characters rather than attack them with an army of lawyers? Perhaps some of the plotlines crafted for the TV series based on Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell will be played out someday in an international court, over anime or manga.

Meanwhile, the anime skies are crowded: witches are flying on brooms, spaceships are flying from planet to planet, vampires fly in bat shapes through the night sky, the eccentric aircraft designs of Hayao Miyazaki are up there as well, and even Tetsuwan Atom flies by every decade or so to remind us how an industry so large, so complicated, and so globally entertaining could have grown from something so small.

1. This marketing competition between two Japanese consumer electronics giants, Sony (inventor of Betamax) and Japan Victor Company (inventor of VHS), was once debated as hotly as the most partisan political issues. Yet, in the “Speak Like a Child” episode of the 1999 anime series Cowboy Bebop, the only source of information on this war in the future is a (literally) underground nerd who collects antique videocassette players—a video otaku (obsessed fan).