Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.

by Roland Kelts

Overview

Japanamerica is the first book that directly addresses the American experience with the Japanese pop culture craze—including anime from Hayao Miyazaki's epics to the burgeoning world of hentai, or violent pornographic anime to Haruki Murakami's fiction. Including interviews with the inventor of Pac-man and executives from TokyoPop, GDH, and other major Japanese and American production companies, this book highlights the shared conflicts both countries face as anime and manga become a global form of entertainment and change both the United States and Japan in the process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403984760
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/13/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Roland Kelts is a Lecturer at the University of Tokyo and a co-editor of the New York-based literary journal, A Public Space. His articles, essays, and stories have been published in Zoetrope, Playboy, Salon, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue, among others. He currently splits his time between New York and Tokyo.

Table of Contents

Foreword * May the G-Force Be with You * Atom Boys * The Business of Anime * Toy Story * Japan's IP Problem * Strange Transformations * Cosplay and Otakudom: The Draw of DIY * Future Shocks * Anime Appeals

Editorial Reviews

[This] tells the incredible story of the way...Japanese entertainment and popular art...continue to grow and draw two very different worlds together.” —Pete Townshend, The Who

“Embrace the world of otaku in Roland Kelts' comprehensive study of how Japanese pop culture enchanted the West, from Speed Racer and Pokémon to cosplay and hentai manga.” —Wired

“If you wish to understand the nuances of otaku-dom, or are just hentai-curious, Japanamerica is a broad primer” —The Village Voice

From the Publisher

The influx of Japanese art and fashion into the American cultural mainstream gets an entertaining treatment from Kelts, an essayist and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, who interviewed many of Japan's leading culture gurus over the past three years. Kelts is clearly most interested in the world of anime and manga (from Pok mon to Princess Mononoke), as his readers will most likely be. A primary theme is that of the Japanese paradox: how has such a strictly defined and rigid society produced pop art that is, compared to its American counterparts at least, wildly imaginative and boundary bursting? Kelts's belief is that one directly created the other, that anime and manga's wild and kinetic structures, hyperaddictive apocalyptic story lines and surprisingly emotional content (not to mention sex and violence unheard of in American pop culture) could never flourish in an openly permissive and individualistic society that had not experienced nuclear devastation. Although the book grasps too eagerly at its subject's grander implications, it still effectively conveys the cross-Pacific cultural dissonance. Kelts has a sharp grasp of his subject and is on sure ground when discussing the history of the form, especially the impact of Disney on postwar Japanese animators or the reverential awe in which American animators hold such filmmakers as Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away). (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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