Research Guides
Japanese Pop Culture: Books
Resources for researching Japanese pop culture, including anime, fashion, film, manga, and video games.
UW Libraries Search
Monthly New Books List
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Japan Collection Newly Added TitlesNew books acquired by the Japanese studies area of the East Asia Library from January 2018 through July 2018 are listed under each tab.
Print Resources
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Asian Popular Culture
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Asian Popular Culture: New, Hybrid, and Alternate Media, edited by John A. Lent and Lorna Fitzsimmons, is an interdisciplinary study of popular culture practices in Asia, including regional and national studies of Japan, China, South Korea, and Australia. The contributors explore the evolution and intersection of popular forms (gaming, manga, anime, film, music, fiction, YouTube videos) and explicate the changing cultural meanings of these media in historical and contemporary contexts. At this study's core are the roles popular culture plays in the construction of national and regional identity. Common themes in this text include the impact of new information technology, whether it be on gaming in East Asia, music in 1960s' Japan, or candlelight vigils in South Korea; hybridity, of old and new versions of the Chinese game Weiqi, of online and hand-held gaming in South Korea and Japan that developed localized expressions, or of United States culture transplanted to Japan in post-World War II, leading to the current otaku (fan boy) culture; and the roles that nationalism and grassroots and alternative media of expression play in contemporary Asian popular culture. This is an essential study in understanding the role of popular culture in Asia's national and regional identity.
Call Number: East Asia Library General Stacks DS12 .A7358 2013ISBN: 0739179616Publication Date: 2012-12-13 -
Atari to Zelda
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The cross-cultural interactions of Japanese videogames and the West, from DIY localization by fans to corporate strategies of "Japaneseness." In the early days of arcades and Nintendo, many players didn't recognize Japanese games as coming from Japan; they were simply new and interesting games to play. But since then, fans, media, and the games industry have thought further about the "Japaneseness" of particular games. Game developers try to decide whether a game's Japaneseness is a selling point or stumbling block; critics try to determine what elements in a game express its Japaneseness--cultural motifs or technical markers. Games were "localized," subjected to sociocultural and technical tinkering. In this book, Mia Consalvo looks at what happens when Japanese games travel outside Japan, and how they are played, thought about, and transformed by individuals, companies, and groups in the West. Consalvo begins with players, first exploring North American players' interest in Japanese games (and Japanese culture in general) and then investigating players' DIY localization of games, in the form of ROM hacking and fan translating. She analyzes several Japanese games released in North America and looks in detail at the Japanese game company Square Enix. She examines indie and corporate localization work, and the rise of the professional culture broker. Finally, she compares different approaches to Japaneseness in games sold in the West and considers how Japanese games have influenced Western games developers. Her account reveals surprising cross-cultural interactions between Japanese games and Western game developers and players, between Japaneseness and the market.
Call Number: Suzzallo and Allen Libraries Stacks GV1469.3 .C646 2016ISBN: 9780262034395Publication Date: 2016-04-08 -
Comics Worlds & the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale (English)
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Call Number: East Asia Library General Stacks PN6710 .G65 2010Publication Date: 2010 -
世界のコミックスとコミックスの世界 : グローバルなマンガ研究の可能性を開くために Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale (Japanese) byCall Number: East Asia Library General Stacks PN6710 .G65163 2010Publication Date: 2010
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Fashioning Japanese Subcultures
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Western fashion has been widely appreciated and consumed in Tokyo for decades, but since the mid-1990s Japanese youth have been playing a crucial role in forming their own unique fashion communities and producing creative styles which have had a major impact on fashion globally. Geographically and stylistically defined, subcultures such as Lolita in Harajuku, Gyaru and Gyaru-o in Shibuya, Agejo in Shinjuku and Mori Girl in Kouenji, reflect the affiliation and identities of their members, and have often blurred the boundary between professionals and amateurs for models, photographers, merchandisers and designers. Based on insightful ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, is the first theoretical and analytical study on Japan's contemporary youth subcultures and their stylistic expressions. It is essential reading for students, scholars and anyone interested in fashion, sociology and subcultures.
Call Number: UW Tacoma Library Stacks GT1560 .K35 2012ISBN: 1847889484Publication Date: 2012-07-01 -
Introducing Japanese Popular Culture
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Specifically designed for use on a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, Introducing Japanese Popular Cultureis a comprehensive textbook offering an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as, politics, society, and economics. As a result, more than being a time capsule of influential trends, this book teaches enduring lessons about how popular culture reflects the societies that produce and consume it. With contributions from an international team of scholars, representing a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to art history and media studies, the book's sections include: Television Videogames Music Popular Cinema Anime Manga Popular Literature Fashion Contemporary Art Written in an accessible style by a stellar line-up of international contributors, this textbook will be essential reading for students of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and popular culture, and Asian Studies in general.
Call Number: UW Bothell/CC Library Reserve - 1st floor DS822.5 .I588 2018ISBN: 9781138852105Publication Date: 2017-12-06 -
Kawaii!
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Showcasing Japan's astonishingly varied culture of cute, this volume takes the reader on a dazzling and adorable visual journey through all things kawaii. Although some trace the phenomenon of kawaii as far back as Japan's Taisho era, it emerged most visibly in the 1970s when schoolgirls began writing in big, bubbly letters complete with tiny hearts and stars. From cute handwriting came manga, Hello Kitty, and Harajuku, and the kawaii aesthetic now affects every aspect of Japanese life. As colorful as its subject matter, this book contains numerous interviews with illustrators, artists, fashion designers, and scholars. It traces the roots of the movement from sociological and anthropological perspectives and looks at kawaii's darker side as it morphs into gothic and gloomy iterations. Best of all, it includes hundreds of colorful photographs that capture kawaii's ubiquity: on the streets and inside homes, on lunchboxes and airplanes, in haute couture and street fashion, in caf#65533;s, museums, and hotels.
Call Number: Odegaard Undergraduate Library Stacks GT1560 .O43 2013ISBN: 3791347276Publication Date: 2013-04-17 -
Manga*anime*games from Japan
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Call Number: East Asia Library General Stacks NX584.A1 N5513 2015ISBN: 4336059365Publication Date: 2015 -
Manga in America
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Japanese comic books have attracted a devoted global following. These books, called manga, are even said to have invaded and conquered the United States, and they are held up as a quintessential example of the globalization of popular culture and multi-directional cultural flows which challenge American hegemony in the twenty-first century. In Manga in America, Casey Brienza explodes this assumption in the first ever book-length study of the history, structure, and practices of the American manga publishing industry. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews with industry insiders about licensing deals, processes of translation, adaptation, and marketing, new digital publishing and distribution models, and more, Brienza shows that the transnational production of culture is an active, labor-intensive, and oft-contested process which she terms domestication. Ultimately, this book argues, domesticating manga rearticulates the very same imbalances of national power that might otherwise seem to have been transformed by it. This leads to the paradoxical-and controversial-conclusion that Japanese manga in the United States actually serves to make manga everywhere more American.
Call Number: UW Tacoma Library Stacks NC1764.5.J3 B75 2016ISBN: 9781472595867Publication Date: 2016-01-28 -
Media Across Borders
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What happened when Sesame Street and Big Brother were adapted for African audiences? Or when video games Final Fantasy and Assassins¿ Creed were localized for the Spanish market? Or when Sherlock Holmes was transformed into a talking dog for the Japanese animation Sherlock Hound? Bringing together leading international scholars working on localization in television, film and video games, Media Across Borders is a pioneering study of the myriad ways in which media content is adapted for different markets and across cultural borders. Contributors examine significant localization trends and practices such as: audiovisual translation and transcreation, dubbing and subtitling, international franchising, film remakes, TV format adaptation and video game localization. Drawing together insights from across the audiovisual sector, this volume provides a number of innovative models for interrogating the international flow of media. By paying specific attention to the diverse ways in which cultural products are adapted across markets, this collection offers important new perspectives and theoretical frameworks for studying localization processes in the audiovisual sector. For further resources, please see the Media Across Borders group website (www.mediaacrossborders.com), which hosts a ¿localization¿ bibliography; links to relevant companies, institutions and publications, as well as conference papers and workshop summaries.
Call Number: Suzzallo and Allen Libraries Stacks P94.6 M395 2016ISBN: 1138809454Publication Date: 2016-02-11 -
Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies
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Call Number: Suzzallo and Allen Libraries Stacks PN1993.5.J3 N67 2009ISBN: 1929280548Publication Date: 2009-01-09 -
Teaching Japanese Popular Culture
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Call Number: UW Bothell/CC Library 3rd Floor Stacks DS822.5 .T3964 2016ISBN: 0924304782Publication Date: 2016-02-01 -
Transnational Contexts of Development History, Sociality, and Society of Play
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This book examines the historical background of game development, offline and online gamer interactions, and presents a method to study the health impacts of digital games in East Asia. Focusing on examinations of how video games shape external interactions with the world as well as internal spaces, Lee and Pulos' volume brings together a range of approaches and regions to understand the impact of video games in East Asia and beyond. Contributions range from assessments of Nintendo's lasting technological impact in Japan and globally to analyses of mobile social gaming among teenage girls in Korea, with qualitative and quantitative methodologies set in contact with one another to offer a full spectrum of perspectives on video gaming and its profound cultural impact.
Call Number: Suzzallo and Allen Libraries Stacks GV1469.34.S52 T74 2016ISBN: 3319438190Publication Date: 2017-01-31 -
アニメ学 Anime-gaku
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Call Number: East Asia Library General Stacks NC1766.J3 A535 2011ISBN: 4757142706Publication Date: 2011 -
ポケモンスとーリー Pokemon Story
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Call Number: East Asia Library General Stacks PN6790.J3 H376 2000ISBN: 4822241998Publication Date: 2000 -
マンガ・アニメで論文・レポートを書く:「好き」を学問にする方法 Writing articles and reports on manga/anime: ways to turn "your passion" into scholarship
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Call Number: East Asia Library General Stacks ML3917.J3 N57 2017ISBN: 4623079422Publication Date: 2017
EBook Resources
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The Anime Machine
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Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that animation demands sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media.
Call Number: EBookISBN: 0816670609Publication Date: 2009 -
Boys Love Manga and Beyond
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Boys Love Manga and Beyond looks at a range of literary, artistic and other cultural products that celebrate the beauty of adolescent boys and young men. In Japan, depiction of the "beautiful boy" has long been a romantic and sexualized trope for both sexes and commands a high degree of cultural visibility today across a range of genres from pop music to animation. In recent decades, "Boys Love" (or simply BL) has emerged as a mainstream genre in manga, anime, and games for girls and young women. This genre was first developed in Japan in the early 1970s by a group of female artists who went on to establish themselves as major figures in Japan's manga industry. By the late 1970s many amateur women fans were getting involved in the BL phenomenon by creating and self-publishing homoerotic parodies of established male manga characters and popular media figures. The popularity of these fan-made products, sold and circulated at huge conventions, has led to an increase in the number of commercial titles available. Today, a wide range of products produced both by professionals and amateurs are brought together under the general rubric of "boys love," and are rapidly gaining an audience throughout Asia and globally. This collection provides the first comprehensive overview in English of the BL phenomenon in Japan, its history and various subgenres and introduces translations of some key Japanese scholarship not otherwise available. Some chapters detail the historical and cultural contexts that helped BL emerge as a significant part of girls' culture in Japan. Others offer important case studies of BL production, consumption, and circulation and explain why BL has become a controversial topic in contemporary Japan.
Call Number: EBookISBN: 1626740666Publication Date: 2015-01-28 -
Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia
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Highlights how regional popular cultures and creative industries have become globally powerful, analyzing gender and labor issues amid differing regulatory frameworks of cultural production and piracy in Asia.
ISBN: 9789622099753Publication Date: 2009-06-09 -
Fandom Unbound
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In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan's major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan's identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as "geek"--an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all, as this collection shows, is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. In this collection of essays, Japanese and American scholars offer richly detailed descriptions of how this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, this groundbreaking collection provides fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
Call Number: EBookISBN: 0300158645Publication Date: 2012-02-28 -
Manga and the Representation of Japanese History
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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
ISBN: 9781136224256Publication Date: 2012-10-02 -
Otaku
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In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.Hiroki AzumaOCOs Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of JapanOCOs leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otakuOCOs ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the countryOCOs phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and AmericaOCOs subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database of plots and characters and its consumers mere OC database animals.OCOA vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese popular culture."
Call Number: EBookISBN: 0816668000Publication Date: 2009 -
Passionate Friendship
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Shojo manga are romance comics for teenage girls. Characterized by a very dense visual style, featuring flowery backgrounds and big-eyed, androgynous boys and girls, it is an extremely popular and prominent genre in Japan. Why is this genre so appealing? Where did it come from? Why do so many of the stories feature androgynous characters and homosexual romance? Passionate Friendship answers these questions by reviewing Japanese girls' print culture from its origins in 1920s and 1930s girls' literary magazines to the 1970s "revolution" shojo manga, when young women artists took over the genre. It looks at the narrative and aesthetic features of girls' literature and illustration across the twentieth century, both pre- and postwar, and discusses how these texts addressed and formed a reading community of girls, even as they were informed by competing political and social ideologies. The author traces the development of girls' culture in pre-World War II magazines and links it to postwar teenage girls' comics and popular culture. Within this culture, as private and cloistered as the schools most readers attended, a discourse of girlhood arose that avoided heterosexual romance in favor of "S relationships," passionate friendships between girls. This preference for homogeneity is echoed in the postwar genre of boys' love manga written for girls. Both prewar S relationships and postwar boys' love stories gave girls a protected space to develop and explore their identities and sexuality apart from the pressures of a patriarchal society. Shojo manga offered to a reading community of girls a place to share the difficulties of adolescence as well as an alternative to the image of girls purveyed by the media to boys and men. Passionate Friendship's close literary and visual analysis of modern Japanese girls' culture will appeal to a wide range of readers, including scholars and students of Japanese studies, gender studies, and popular culture.
Call Number: EBookISBN: 0824861116Publication Date: 2012-03-13 -
Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society
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The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society is an interdisciplinary resource that focuses on contemporary Japan and the social and cultural trends that are important at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This Handbookprovides a cutting-edge and comprehensive survey of significant phenomena, institutions, and directions in Japan today, on issues ranging from gender and family, the environment, race and ethnicity, and urban life, to popular culture and electronic media. Written by an international team of Japan experts, the chapters included in the volume form an accessible and fascinating insight into Japanese culture and society. As such, the Handbookwill be an invaluable reference tool for anyone interested in all things Japanese. Students, teachers and professionals alike will benefit from the broad ranging discussions, useful links to online resources and suggested reading lists. The Handbook will be of interest across a wide range of disciplines including Japanese Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Sociology and Asian Studies in general.
Call Number: EBookISBN: 0415436494Publication Date: 2011-05-13 -
Structure, audience and soft power in East Asian pop culture
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In this book, the author examines East Asian pop culture as an integrated regional cultural economy that combines Japanese and Korean pop culture with the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture. The book provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences' formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. It will appeal to scholars and students as well as general readers who are interested in media and cultural studies.
Call Number: EBookISBN: 9882208754Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Romanization
The best way to search for specific Japanese language books in UW Libraries Search is to use the romanized title or author name. The romanization method used is the modified Hepburn (see romanization table). Some tips to keep in mind when using romanization:
Long vowels: macrons and double vowels are generally not used when searching. For example:
大江健三郎 [おおえ けんざぶろう] will appear as Ōe Kenzaburo but should be searched as oe kenzaburo (without the macron or double vowel)
ローマ字 [ ローマじ] will appear as rōmaji but should be searched as romaji (without the macron or double vowel)
Double consonants: generally double consonants should be searched that way so that 国会 [こっかい] should be searched as kokkai with the exception of chi (チ), cha (チャ), chu (チュ), cho (チョ) where a "t" should take the place of the the first "c". For example:
密着 [みっちゃく] should be searched as mitchaku
日中 [にっちゅう] should be searched as nitchu
Syllabic nasal - ん: the modified version of Hepburn romanization uses "n" rather than the "m" used in traditional Hepburn. However there is inconsistency so it is best to search for both spellings. For example:
新聞 [ しんぶん] should be searched as shinbun as well as shimbun
Word spacing: generally spaces should be placed between nouns, particles and verbs. For example:
女の旅 [おんなのたび] should be searched as onna no tabi
Detailed instruction can be found at Library of Congress's romanization guide.
Romanization - Notes for Japanese Pop Culture
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Japanese |
Library of Congress Romanization (American Libraries) |
Hepburn Romanization (Japanese Libraries) |
English |
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少女 |
Shōjo |
Shoujo |
Girls |
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少年 |
Shōnen |
Shounen |
Boys |
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青年 |
Seinen |
Seinen |
Young Adult Men |
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女性 |
Jyosei |
Josei |
Young Adult Women |
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同人誌 |
Dōjinshi |
Doujinshi |
Fan magazines |