PROJECT UPDATE: What I think I want to do

I want to go with crosscurrents in imagination between Japan and the United States.  This is a topic that I’ve thought about a lot on my own but I have never fully researched or explored this in an academic setting.  I want to do research on things like Asian/American creative collaboration on the collective unconscious, nostalgia, fantasy, and horror.  There seems to be a lot of work analyzing these cross-cultural connections that I can look into.  I could also do research to trace the roots of the concepts that get bounced back and forth.  Then I could analyze how the different sides use and relate differently to the same concepts they share.

An example of what I’m talking about can be in cosmic horror.  It is such a popular genre that elements of cosmic horror are seen in a lot of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror media.  HP Lovecraft’s ideas and unique brand of horror can be directly traced to his own racism, xenophobia, and anxieties about his bloodline.  Lovecraft wrote especially unflattering things about Asians, he believed that they would eventually take over the entire world.  So what is it about cosmic horror that resonates so strongly with Japan?  A particular cosmic horror trope that always grabs my attention every time I see it is the idea of a spiritual world or a world of the collective unconscious leaking into, mutating, or invading the physical world.  This idea is shown with many different settings and themes.  Japanese examples: Berserk, Bloodborne, Digimon, Serial Experiments Lain, Paranoia Agent, Paprika, Shin Megami Tensei, Silent Hill, Persona, etc.  Western examples: Sandman, Evil Dead, Stranger Things, Ghost Busters, Gravity Falls, Twin Peaks, Poltergeist, Annihilation, The Cat in the Hat Movie, etc.  This idea is used a lot all over the world, but I have a feeling that it must have some specific meaning when it is used in Japan because Japanese usage of this trope almost always directly connects the alien world to the collective unconscious in some way.  All of the examples I listed do anyways.  This may have to do with Japanese folklore or their cultural ideas about society.  I wonder if Celtic mythology is popular in Japan for similar reasons to cosmic horror’s popularity?  In Celtic mythology, there is also an idea of an alternate world that is formed by dreams.  Spirits and faeries invade from the other world to do mischief.

I think I might want to do some kind of google slides presentation on this topic, as it would make things easier to show visual connections.