Forum - View topicEurocentrism and the Prejudice Regarding Anime/Manga
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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First, I am starting this thread to discuss why the following propositions are true. These propositions are assumed to be true for the purpose of this thread: if you disagree with the proposition being true I think you should start a new thread to articulate your opinion regarding the accuracy of the specific proposition.
These are the facts: 1st - There exists prejudice against manga/anime in the Western World and prejudice against comics/animation in Japan. For example, when I watched Oreimo, I clearly remember the fact that Kirino dropped the anime disk on the living room the reaction was clearly of something that people have prejudice against. Same with her father's opinion. So even in Japan there is prejudice against this artistic medium. In the west a lot of the prejudice against animation has melted away although they still have prejudice against Japanese comics and animation. I talked to a (American) colleague in my PHD program and he said "Manga? That's porn." And that's the opinion of a well educated person! Actually the notion that a person can like or dislike "anime" is itself a form of prejudice since it's implicitly assuming that all "anime" is the same homogeneous thing. As if animations as diverse as Sweetness and Lightning, Psycho Pass, Hyouge Mono, Grave of the Fireflies and K-On! could be regarded as being part of the same homogeneous thing that can be liked and disliked by their common inherent characteristics. 2nd - Only Japan (or East Asia more broadly defined) has developed comics and animation as full artistic mediums, that is, as general mediums for artistic expression, outside of Japan (or East Asia more broadly defined) comics and animation are severely restricted as mediums for expression in comparison. For example, in North America there exists only two genres of animation: for very small children (ages 2-8, like Disney) and crude adult comedies to get a cheap laugh (i.e. Family Guy, South Park), and comics are mainly restricted to one genre only (superheroes comics). This is starting to change, true, and I believe the decisive and major influence for this change was the emergence of Japanese comics and animation. 3rd - Our world has been dominated by European culture: since the 16th century Europe has conquered, colonized and dominated militarily the entire rest of the planet. Their culture was gradually imposed over the entire rest of the world. As result, now we live in a world of Eurocentric cultural standards even now as Europe is being replaced by Asia as the economic center of gravity of the world. This is evident, for instance, if we look at the way culture is produced around the world (the extremely heavy influence of Abrahamic religions, for instance) or the systems of laws established in all countries of the world. This Eurocentric globalized culture is the determining factor in generating prejudice against comics and animation. The reason? It's because European/Western culture and the perception of comics and animation as full artistic mediums are fundamentally incompatible. 4th - European aesthetic ideals have been established in the dawn of European civilization: in Classical Greece. They implicitly say that art is secondary to physical reality. Hence, serious/powerful fictional narratives should be conceived to be either in print as book or to be represented as live action film (that is, photographic realism). While Japan is not part of Western Civilization, it's part of our globalized world. Hence, it's own native culture is driven underground by European/Western culture taking shape as the "official" mainstream culture in Japan: hence the reason why Japan respects people like Akira Kurosawa, who makes movies more than Tezuka, even though manga has been selling 10 times more than movie tickets since the mid 1970's and has been a cultural influence of massive proportions it is still not quite well established as an mainstream art form that is to be respected by everyone like literature or film. So essentially: Eurocentric cultural norms have determined that pornographic comics and animation are "wrong", hence why people are scared of admitting their consumption of anime and manga as masturbation aids. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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While Japan lacks the European cultural background it is extremely heavy influenced by it. Being a country that has historically existed in the periphery of an Eurocentric world, even after becoming an economic superpower in the 1980's it was still harboring a strong inferiority complex regarding westerners.
This European influence has been extremely important in molding Japanese perceptions of animation and comics for instance: in the West, animation and comics are traditionally seem as children's medium, therefore Japan officially sees it as a children's medium, even though it's not. Even today adult manga magazines are called "weekly young" and according to Sharon Kinsella (2000) they used to call adult manga "young men magazines" because they implicitly didn't want middle aged and older people reading these magazines. Hence the perception of adult anime and manga as a niche thing: it's because mainstream culture is Eurocentric. This has been explained by a Japanese anthropologist whose name I don't recall in The Moe Manifesto: that Japanese culture is itself underground in Japan while the mainstream culture is European. Anyway, I think that this influence also has helped the development of stuff like Hidamari Sketch and K-On! which is essentially adult's "children's manga", while Miyazaki's movies are mostly about childlike sense of wonder and imagination. In a way, modern anime/manga has developed as a bridge between childhood and adulthood, allowing children to imagine themselves in adult situations (like for instance Black Butler) and adults to fantasize themselves in childlike/youthlike situations as in K-On! or Bakuon: by trying to force Japanese culture to conform to Western standards it resulted into very unique developments: As a result we have armies of adult writers, manga artists and millions of adult fans producing and consuming stuff that's officially about kids and teenagers in school. Hence the emergence of "otaku culture". So this imposition of eurocentric standards on Japanese cultural products has generated as a positive by-product artistic developments that wouldn't happen otherwise. |
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