As done as iss gon git.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UU3u3ntKkyzVLA9ZCMmI9TcGKPtHD5yUtbCKY0SDDMw/edit?usp=sharing

Read full here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ch8Va1Iiqtwd8PV-bGqgxvxVtI5zlWDJ/view?usp=sharing

The East and West have been great collaborators in perfecting and producing brain-rotting commercial entertainment content for people all around the world.  Especially in entertainment that targets children. With every decade that passes, there is an escalation in both the cross-cultural fusion of entertainment media as well as its conceptual density and complexity.  Imports of foreign pop-culture have struck chords with us and added new flavors and dimensions to our own pieces of media. New generations of creators enter the industry with the influences they absorbed as children and we the consumers devour increasingly potent fantasies.  We live in an age of hyper flavor blasted movies, television, comics, cartoons, toys, and videogames. All designed to capture our attention, excite us, flare up our imaginations, create addiction, consume our brains, and ultimately loosen our wallets. We are overloaded with exposure to this from day one and so we grow up with what I consider to be remarkably vast conceptual literacies.  For example, nowadays, I would think most Americans would understand many different time travel shenanigans, supernatural monster origins, and post-apocalyptic scenarios that were once cutting edge even if they wouldn’t consider themselves to be nerds or creative types. In this paper, I’ll be mostly going over the history of Japanese entertainment in America and it’s impact on American youth culture.

In America’s entertainment industry, influence from Japan has come in waves.  Starting with the cartoon show Astro Boy, the first Japanese cartoon show to air in the USA, premiering on American TV’s in 1963.  Astro Boy’s global success paved the way for the imports of many more Japanese cartoon shows such as Speed Racer, Gigantor, and Kimba the White Lion.  Kimba is thought to be an influence on the Lion King (1994) and Gigantor is thought to be an inspiration for The Iron Giant (1999). Funny enough, in the 60’s there was an outcry against cartoon shows like Astro Boy that were thought to make children think of cartoon characters as real people.  The 60’s were the first decade where televisions were in almost every American household and commercialization was ramping up hard with toys, comics, superheroes, and the tradition of Saturday morning cartoons. Parental and government concerns over cartoon violence, imitation, social messages, manipulative advertising, speech, morals, and the mental development of children led to laws and regulations for children’s media.  Many shows of the time were heavily censored and edited according to these regulations. Astro Boy and other Japanese imports were often revised and rewritten to be palatable for Americans. With Japanese imports, trends of parental paranoia, government regulation, and American localization have continued in flux over the decades.

The 70’s were a time where anime was hard to come by and what did come over was usually butchered into garbage through censorship and revision.  Government FCC regulation and overzealous parent groups like Action for Children’s Television had a tight grip on the television industry until the 80’s when Ronald Reagan “dismantled agencies created to protect the public, and signaled to broadcasters that the FCC, which had bowed to the demands of ACT, would no longer be so stringent in its oversight” (Ladd, 2009).  With the 70’s came space operas like Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato which was rebranded for the US as Star Blazers (1979).  Unlike previous shows that were imported, Star Blazers came with much of it’s maturity and complex story intact with only minor revisions and censorship.  This caught some people’s attention and so the 70’s saw the rise of the first Japanese animation fan clubs in America as well as a growing anime fan presence in Sci-fi conventions.  Star Blazers came during the time Star Wars (1977) was the big thing and is considered to be the show that truly spawned the US anime fandom.  This all foreshadows what the 80’s were about to be for anime.  

The 80’s in general saw a gargantuan explosion in children’s entertainment media in America following Ronald Reagan’s deregulations.  The corporations were unleashed and could execute almost as much shameless advertising and “half-hour toy commercials” as they pleased.  Toy companies took over children’s television and everything was milked into oblivion. “Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Golden Age of Deregulation (roughly 1983-1989) was that it dominated the memories of a generation. Many college-age Americans spent their formative years during the Fowler era, and He-Man, She-Ra, and the Transformers are now cherished relics of their childhoods. It was they who collected nearly one billion plastic figures, strained their thumbs on Atari games, wore out batteries by the truckload, and spent dreamy afternoons by the TV watching Voltron and Legend of Zelda.”(Goodman, 2010)  Collaboration between America and Japan really started lifting off at this time as America adapted many Japanese products and shows like Transformers and Voltron while beginning the practice of outsourcing animation work for American action cartoon shows like Ducktales and X-men to Japan.  The 80’s are also known as the golden age of anime in America. There was a new explosion of anime airing on TV, getting imported by VHS, and fan communities were sprouting up all across the country. Fan communities distributed unimported shows that were inaccessible to normal consumers by translating and sharing copies amongst themselves.  Many of the people who participated in these communities grew up watching Astro Boy and had rediscovered the series as adults. The 80’s were full of variety.

In the 90’s everything was increasing.  More shows, more variety, more fans, more communities, more distribution companies, more products, more bootlegging.  On Cartoon Network’s new Toonami block, big iconic anime shows like Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing, and Dragon Ball Z were hitting in America.  On the Syfy channel, adult and experimental anime were aired on late nights. Disney released Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. American movies like The Matrix were citing anime as a major influence, like Ghost in the Shell and Akira.  The first dedicated anime conventions were happening. Pokemon started hitting as a cartoon, video game, and trading card game. Satanic panics over Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh were happening. The first wave of American cartoons with anime themes began appearing, like Powerpuff Girls,  Dexter’s Laboratory. With anime in the mainstream, the 2000’s were primed for yet more new explosions.

Then I will talk about 2000’s 4kids, Toonami, Jetex, and Adult Swim and other imported entertainment media stuff that started showing alongside American content similar to how Disney and Ghibli became associated together.  Dragonball Z impact, Pokemon craze, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh. This is the point where I think America fully awakened to Japanese pop-culture influence. With global childhood crazes, parental paranoia, and internet access making space and opening the floodgates to exchange.

Then I’ll talk about American cartoons that road the exchange waves.  Creators who grew up watching mechs, magical girls, and martial arts adventures in the 80’s and 90’s started making shows with those themes.

In the 2000’s there was a surge in American cartoons based on or inspired by anime and Asian culture.  Jackie Chan Adventures (2000), Samurai Jack (2001), Xiaolin Showdown (2003), Teen Titans (2003), My Life as a Teenage Robot (2003), Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! (2004), American Dragon Jake Long (2005), The Life and Times of Juniper Lee (2005),  Robotboy (2005), Ben 10 (2005), Avatar the Last Airbender (2005), etc.

And now we have shows by creators who grew up with the internet and as children had those cross-cultural flood gates unleashed on their little peabrains.  I’ll talk about the rest of the shows that are coming out today with that influence. I’ll talk about the indie/alternative comic and videogame scenes. I will talk about artists like Bryan Lee O’mally and Corey Lewis.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/saturday-morning-cartoons

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/dr-toon-when-reagan-met-optimus-prime – deregulation

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/adverse-effects-cartoons-minds-our-children

https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/pok-mon/239407/how-pokemon-survived-90s-pokemania

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-16-mn-22915-story.html – Pokemon cards

http://isismagazine.org.uk/2016/07/6158/ – Yugioh

https://www.metv.com/stories/astro-boy-was-the-pokemon-of-the-1960s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anime_distributed_in_the_United_States

https://www.rightstufanime.com/anime-resources-history-of-anime-in-the-us

https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2015/12/21/understanding-the-japanese-influences-behind-star-wars/#2f5ed6105e1c

https://www.tor.com/2012/03/30/noboru-ishiguro-animes-master-of-space-opera/

https://www.gotquestions.org/Pokemon-Yu-Gi-Oh.html

https://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/academics/communications/research/vol3no2/08ChambersEJFall12.pdf – Anime: From Cult Following to Pop Culture Phenomenon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZsFQPdU2dw – History of Otaku Culture

I took a 180 with my project because I kind of got the other ideas I had about cosmic horror and collective unconscious out of my system and wanted to shift focus to different ideas that have been on my mind lately.  I’ve been thinking of hyper youth culture and nostalgia in comics and cartoons.  Anyways:

The East and West have been great collaborators in perfecting and producing brain-rotting commercial entertainment content for people all around the world.  Especially in entertainment that targets children. With every decade that passes, there is an escalation in both the cross-cultural fusion of entertainment media as well as its conceptual density and complexity.  Imports of foreign pop-culture have struck chords with us and added new flavors and dimensions to our own pieces of media. New generations of creators enter the industry with the influences they synthesized as children to push things further and we the consumers devour increasingly potent fantasies.  We live in an age of hyper flavor blasted movies, television, comics, cartoons, toys, and videogames. All designed to capture our attention, excite us, flare up our imaginations, create addiction, consume our brains, and ultimately loosen our wallets. We are overloaded with this from day one and so we grow up with remarkably vast conceptual literacies.  For example, nowadays, I would think most Americans would understand all of the different time travel shenanigans, supernatural monster origins, and post-apocalyptic scenarios that were once cutting edge even if they wouldn’t consider themselves to be nerds.

In America’s entertainment industry, influence from Japan has come in waves.  Starting with the cartoon show Astro Boy premiering on American TV’s in 1964. Funny enough, in the 60’s there was an outcry against cartoon shows like Astro Boy that made people think of cartoon characters as humans.  I think of this as a fear of the mind consuming qualities of cartoon media that adults of the time who were not indoctrinated sensed. “The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm.  We don’t just observe the cartoon we become it!” (Scott McCloud 36, Understanding Comics). With the 70’s came space operas like Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato (1974) which was rebranded for the US as Star Blazers (1979) after Star Wars (1977) took off and is considered to be what spawned the US anime fandom.  

I’m going to go on to talk about 80’s mech animes, video games, and studio Ghibli.  I’ll also bring up transformers and vultron. The American toy and cartoon industry.  I watched a few documentaries on this.

Then I’ll talk about 90’s homevideo and bootleg culture  Gundam, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Sailor Moon, Evangelion. How that stuff started subtly entering the pop-culture conscious.  I’ll bring up the Matrix and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Then I will talk about 2000’s 4kids, Toonami, Jetex, and Adult Swim and other imported entertainment media stuff that started showing alongside American content similar to how Disney and Ghibli became associated together.  Dragonball Z impact, Pokemon craze, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh. This is the point where I think America fully awakened to Japanese pop-culture influence.  With global childhood crazes, parental paranoia, and internet access making space and opening the floodgates to exchange.

Then I’ll talk about American cartoons that road the exchange waves.  Creators who grew up watching mechs, magical girls, and martial arts adventures in the 80’s and 90’s started making shows with those themes.
In the 2000’s there was a surge in American cartoons based on or inspired by anime and Asian culture.  Jackie Chan Adventures (2000), Samurai Jack (2001), Xiaolin Showdown (2003), Teen Titans (2003), My Life as a Teenage Robot (2003), Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! (2004), American Dragon Jake Long (2005), The Life and Times of Juniper Lee (2005),  Robotboy (2005), Ben 10 (2005), Avatar the Last Airbender (2005), etc.

And now we have shows by creators who grew up with the internet and as children had those cross-cultural flood gates unleashed on their little peabrains.  I’ll talk about the rest of the shows that are coming out today with that influence. I’ll talk about the indie/alternative comic and videogame scenes. I will talk about artists like Bryan Lee O’mally and Corey Lewis.

https://www.rightstufanime.com/anime-resources-history-of-anime-in-the-us

https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2015/12/21/understanding-the-japanese-influences-behind-star-wars/#2f5ed6105e1c

https://www.tor.com/2012/03/30/noboru-ishiguro-animes-master-of-space-opera/

I’m shifting gears to focus on Asian-American cartoon shows and youth culture.

This is what I’ve scraped together for my sources.

ARTICLES:

The creator of Persona on life, Japanese culture, and the unconscious

• This article provides an interview and analysis of Persona.  It talks about pop-culture, psychology, the collective unconscious, and the concept of a supernatural world running parallel to the mundane world.  Many concepts in Persona are directly based on Jungian psychology.

  https://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/06/08/the-real-psychology-behind-the-persona-games

• In-depth analysis of Persona’s connection to Jungian psychology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

• Carl Jung was a psychologist who worked alongside Sigmund Freud.  He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.  I read that his work became famous in Japan during the 1960’s. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-11547-001

H P Lovecraft, Godzilla, Sadako, and the Universe of Cosmic Horror

• Article: An in-depth analysis of and comparison between Lovecraftian cosmic horror and J-horror.  It references pieces of Japanese culture and mythology that are compatible with Lovecraft.

  https://journal.rikumo.com/journal/paaff/a-brief-history-of-japanese-horror

• A brief history of Japanese horror cinema.  Tracing the roots of Japanese style psychological and supernatural horror to folklore.

  https://www.filminquiry.com/the-beginners-guide-satoshi-kon/

• Analysis of works by the director Satoshi Kon.  Kon focused on making psychological surreal stories that blended fantasies with reality in modern settings.

  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnotherDimension

• Tv tropes is a vast database of tropes in pop culture along with many of the pieces of media that the tropes can be found in.  I can use this site to help trace origins of the pop culture threads I’m following and make comparisons to similar works.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Dkai
• I could do further research on Japanese yokai.  I’ll look at more videos and articles, and maybe get a book on it.
  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/01/how-japan-became-a-pop-culture-superpower/
• “Virtually every childhood craze of the past 30 years has its beginnings in Japan. Today its influence is stronger than ever.”  A lot of my research will be on children’s media.  This article is about Japanese global influence on pop culture.
  

  
  Books:

  Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Experimental Futures)

• “Through an exploration of multiple dimensions of the anime object, from studio production to fan production, piracy, remix, and virtual idols, The Soul of Anime issues a bold challenge to our understanding of the social side of media. Ian Condry’s attention to the singularities of this universe takes us far from the normative horizon of analysis of fans and commodities, highlighting how intimacy arises from impersonal affective life. The social side of anime is the soul of anime, and the dark energy of fans is nothing other than the psychosocial stuff, the vibrant matter, of this emerging constellation.”

  (Thomas LaMarre, author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation)

  Berserk by Kentaro Miura

• This influential dark fantasy manga is a huge synthesis of Western pop-culture, fantasy/horror cinema, mythology, folklore, psychology, and philosophy through a Japanese perspective.  I plan to incorporate interviews by the creator too.  https://www.cbr.com/say-it-with-manga-western-influences-in-berserk

  Uzamaki by Juni Ito

• Isaac recommended Japanese cosmic horror manga.  I’ll find analysis and interviews to incorporate if I use this source.

  https://www.amazon.com/Sandman-Dream-Hunters-Neil-Gaiman/dp/1563895730

•  While adapting Princess Mononoke’s script into English, Neil Gaiman did research on Japanese folklore and incorporated it into his surreal Sandman comic series.  Sandman holds a lot of similarities to Berserk and the Shin Megami Tensei series in that it is a universe featuring astral planes, dream worlds, the collective unconscious, and multiple mythologies from fairies and spirits to pantheons of deities and Eldritch gods.
  

  Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime

• “The narratives of courageous heroes and heroines and the myths and legends of deities and their abodes are not just recurring motifs of the cinematic fantasy world. They are pop culture’s representations of sacred subtexts in Japan. Japanese Mythology in Film takes a semiotic approach to uncovering such religious and folkloric tropes and subtexts embedded in popular Japanese movies and anime.”

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.

• Cultural cross currents in imagination.
• I think that cross cultural back and forth influence between Asia and the West is leading to a huge acceleration in the evolution of concepts, themes, and creative ideas on both sides.  Some examples being in cosmic horror, spirituality, existentialism, fantasy, and mythology but all through the filter of entertainment media.

• Asian American visual artists and media producers.
• With a growing Western taste, consumption, and demand for art media from Asian countries, Asian Americans are gaining more of a platform to enter American pop culture as artists and creators.  There still may not be much room for Asian American filmmakers, musicians, and actors in the West, but when it comes to video games, cartoons, and comic books, Asians are gaining more acceptance as artists and creative contributors in those areas.

• What are the effects of American pop-culture on Asian Americans?
• I think immigrants seem to have a tendency to accept and endure a good deal of oppression while trying hard to survive and assimilate into America.  While the Asian children who grow up as Americans with American ideals, perspectives, and cultural literacy are more likely to perceive and resist the subtle oppressions and overt prejudices towards them.  This is shown in the movie “My America or Honk if you love Buddha” where fist-generation immigrants are shown saying “they won’t turn the other cheek like their parents did” and being involved in activism, civil rights, and asserting their identities as Asian Americans.