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Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
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An interview with Stevie Suan
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Jenny Lee
Hello. Welcome back to another episode of New Books in Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I am Jenny Lee from the University of Arizona. Our guest today is Dr. Stevie Swan, Associate professor of Media Performance and Asian Studies at Hosei University in Japan. His new book, Anime's Performativity and Form Beyond Japan, just came out through the University of Minnesota Press. This book examines Japanese anime in both its domestic and global context and uses a lot of theoretical lenses to analyze anime in a very global context. So welcome Dr. Hsuan. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Thank you. Nice to be here. Very happy to talk about my book.
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Jenny Lee
Thank you. It's a very interesting book. But first of all, can you tell us about your work and perhaps a bit about yourself?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Yes, as was stated before, my name is Stevie Swan. I'm an Associate professor at Jose University's Faculty of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies, or gis. And the majority of my interest is really in formal analysis or looking at form and exploring how that can be active and operative in the world in different ways. And specifically I draw on theories and concepts from performance studies and media studies and topics from Asian studies to approach anime in particular, but perhaps media more broadly and how they are showing us different tensions of Globalization in the contemporary moment.
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Jenny Lee
Fascinating. So are you a big anime lover then?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Yes, I do watch quite a lot of anime. I'm not sure if the viewers can or listeners I suppose can hear this, but there's a EVA poster on my wall. So I do watch and enjoy anime quite a bit.
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Jenny Lee
Might I ask what are some of your favorite ones?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
That's a really difficult question, to be honest with you. I hesitate to give a definitive answers. What is your favorite? Kind of tends to change over time, but I can say what are the anime that I tend to return to? And Evangelion, the original series, is one of them. I also really enjoy the Cowboy Bebop anime from the late 90s, as well as somewhat lesser known Ova or prequel to the Rurouni Kenshin series. And it's called Tsuyoku Hen in Japanese. I think it's Trust and Betrayal in English. And those three tend to be things that I keep returning to, but I think also that favorites list will kind of date me to that particular era. So there are other ones, of course, that I've enjoyed over the recent years, but I guess because those were things so far in the past, I can continually return to them and see them as anime that I continue to draw joy from.
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Jenny Lee
Indeed. Now, what. What brought you to work on this project? How did it.
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Dr. Stevie Swan
So as I was saying a little bit before, I'm very interested in form and formal analysis and what that does. Usually it's derided, especially the last 20 or 30 years or so. It's often seen as somehow esoteric at the expense of engaging with social issues. But I think that it's actually really fundamental to thinking about these broader issues. And to quote from one of the people I draw from in this particular work, Caroline Levine, she is pretty assertive in saying that there is no politics without form. So when you look at the forms of the works that's at work in anime, it also makes you think not just how those forms operate, but who makes those forms, where are they made, etc. And as I was researching this, I came to see that there was a lot more transnational participants in anime production than was usually discussed. So for instance, the idea that anime wasn't only made in Japan is something that's been known for a number of years and talked about, but it's usually addressed very briefly as saying, well, anime is not always made in Japan, so it calls into question the quote unquote Japaneseness of anime. And so this type of question gets raised critically, but it ultimately is left as A kind of rhetorical question and never really gets answered. So I started to notice, well, oddly, in this raising of the question of critiquing of the national and this idea of anime, it somehow keeps the national inside of it. So I wanted to think like, is there another way that we can think about what it means to be operating across borders, to be transnational? What type of patterns are emerg from this type of production? And I started to get really, truthfully, kind of frustrated with the fact that there weren't really frameworks or vocabulary to talk about the different ways something could be transnational. So I wanted to address that particular question. And then I started to get into even thornier questions that this opened up, which is, well, if something that's supposed to be a cultural media product from one particular place is actually partially or maybe even mainly produced somewhere else, what does that mean? What is that? And how do we address something like that? So, for instance, this then spirals into further questions like if anime is supposed to be part of the quote unquote, Japanese creative industries, but its production is transnational, then how do we consider this type of creativity? So things like creativity being distinction, difference, departure from trend, valorizing newness and novelty, that is not really always apparent in anime. There's a lot of repetition. And I start to see that this repetition is really crucial for anime for maintaining its form, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. There are these conventions or cliches or whatever you want to call them that are repeated in anime so much that it makes it really distinct. And oddly, this is linking people together. It's bringing them together in these communities across the world who are not just consuming anime, but sometimes in some cases, actually producing anime through repeating these conventions or cliches. So this means that there's some kind of alternative transnationality that is coming to view, an alternative view of space that is very different than the classically defined borders of internationalism. And so that led me into further questions about saying, well, if there's this new organization of space, then what type of relationship do we have to that space? And what type of self comes from that? We tend to relate ourselves to cultural things in connection to the national. But if things are transnational, then how do we conceptualize that aspect? So suddenly I started to see that issues of form, creativity, the self, nation, transnationality, all these things were intertwined with anime. And I wanted to unpack the them from different layers and show their various intersections.
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Jenny Lee
That's great. This is absolutely a fascinating book. And personally, I watch a lot of anime for myself and as I would like to say for my students. And I really think this book, the approaches you took in this book opens a whole new world for students who want to explore anime in this direction. But. But I want to begin with a question about the, I guess the context of anime being this Japanese representation. Because now when we talk about anime, most people would immediately, as you said, associated with Japan. So what was the process of anime becoming a representation of Japanese culture? And you mentioned about this a little bit. But what might be some of the problems with this association with. With of anime and Japan?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Well, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate the kind words about the book. And the issue of how anime connects to Japan is a bit of a complicated one because I think a lot of this connects to. Well, what. What do people in different places in different times consider what the word anime or anime points to. So I think a lot of this is difficult because in Japanese, anime is traditionally seen as a shortening of animation, which is the word for animation. And it implies commercial or popular animation of all different kinds. So from Disney to Dragon Ball, this all would technically fall under anime outside of Japan, though the word has a bit of a much more narrow meaning. It's not just a word for Japanese animation, but a particular style of what people presume is Japanese animation. And this is really associated with, especially after the late 90s, a specific grouping or time slot or time slot when certain types of productions were shown, which was late night TV animation shown in Japan. So this is what really starts to gain wider popularity outside of Japan. And once this starts to get more openly recognized in multiple different places around the world, it starts to gain this recognition inside of Japan, that this should be something that could be promoted as a representative of Japanese culture and perhaps even stimulate economic, I guess, growth within Japan. And this really culminates in the early 2000s with the cool Japan Nation branding campaign. So what we have here is this kind of divergence between two different associations of the word anime inside and outside of Japan. And if we are to say something like, well, okay, let's just settle on anime being Japanese popular animation, well, if that's the case, then the anime we should all be studying is an anime called Sazae San, which is, every week in the animation rankings, the number one anime in Japan. It's massively popular inside of Japan. I would go so far as to say that you could probably go up to almost any random person on the street and be like, hey, do you know sazae san. And they'll be like, yes I do. Maybe they're not fans of it, maybe they're not watching it, but they probably know of sazae san. So that's the one that is really this kind of Japanese popular animation definition. But nobody's going to Akihabara to buy sazae san goods. Nobody's cosplaying as, as, as sazai san outside of Japan. In fact, it's rarely really even known outside of Japan. They're interested in things like Bocchi the Rock or Do It Yourself, which are kind of the recent slightly trending works of this broadly late night TV anime genre. And these are relatively minor by national standards. These are late night TV anime that you could probably pull a random person off the street and they'd be like, what? And they never have heard anything, maybe not even heard of the name itself. So really when you have nation branding campaigns like Cool Japan, they have to reconcile these two different definitions of it. So late night tv, which is externally popular and internally has this subcultural following and this through these types of nation branding campaigns are slowly over time raising this notion, this kind of subcultural understanding of TV late night anime into a, to the like national level. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that anime, the word itself in Japanese has changed towards this global definition. But there is a type of internal, external negotiation going on that is really spurred spurring domestic change by external appreciation or popularity. And so nearly 20 years of this and I have a job at one of the oldest universities teaching about anime. And I, I'm, I'm kind of saying this at ingest, but the institutionalization of anime studies is part of this equation because anime is now seen as something that is officially worthy of study as quote unquote, Japanese culture.
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Jenny Lee
That's amazing. And I remember growing up, or just as I started to, to watch anime when I was in ice think middle school or when I learned Japanese by watching anime, there was a lot of misconceptions about this, this action of watching anime. Like there were, there was this sort of almost negative view about watching an anime that it's, you know, there are words like otaku being associated with a nerd. What's the other one? Geek. All kinds of not super positive impression being associated with watching anime. But as you pointed out, anime studies is on the rise and there are institutions setting up programs to study anime. So can you tell us about what kind of misconceptions there were about watching anime and how those have changed?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Yeah, I Think that just like, even in my own personal experience with, you know, being. Going back and forth from Japan for a long number of years and, you know, now, now, now living here, that my interest in anime went from being like, what? Why are you. Why would you be interested in something like that? To oh, yeah, I hear that's, you know, popular outside of Japan too. Oh, oh, yeah, of course. It's. It's Japanese culture. And, you know, these things have shifted over time. And I think for me, the one area that at least I try to engage with in the book is that, you know, anime is often, I guess, taken for granted as something that automatically is representing Japan. And I guess maybe a better way to say that is that you can read Japan directly through anime. Like, there's nothing. It's just Japan through anime. And I'm not saying that you can't kind of glean something about what we might say is like, Japanese culture or society from anime. You can outline a history of anime in Japan, for instance, or connect certain works to specific historical social movements and ideas. I'm not saying that that's, that's not possible. But I think the issue lies in where the, the finality of like, who gets the last word on anime? And I think often in sometimes the popular, but even sometimes academic discourses as well. You know, the last word is whatever the supposed Japanese fandom thinks of. Of. Of anime, that. That's like the true way to really read anime. And you know, with something that's quite as global as anime, that's, That's. That's quite a bit of power. You know, whoever, whoever, whatever shape that wants to take and fits that profile gets the final word on something. So I think there's, at least for me, what I try to bring into the discussion here is that there's this kind of thing in between. There's this media form that makes a direct reading of anime as a reflection of Japanese culture directly kind of difficult. So, for instance, people outside of Japan may have all these stereotypes about anime from. Sorry, about Japan from what they see in anime. But for instance, even just on a very simple level, like, nobody. Nobody in Japan sounds like anime characters talk. You could have the TV on in the other room, and without even knowing what's on tv, you can instantly hear like, oh, that's. That's anime. Like, they're not watching normal tv. This is anime. It's a very stylized way of speaking, both in terms of the. The. The way it sounds, but also sometimes the diction, the things that people say. So, you know, that's not the only area. Like the characters, the way that they act, the facial expressions, all these things are very distinct and specific to the way that anime tends to repeat these conventions. So anime as this media form and you know, as the medium of animation, doesn't have the same type of indexical relationship to reality that other media perhaps we might think of, like cinema or even photography may have. So I think there's these tensions there that are apparent where, you know, is what's being presented an emphasis on maintaining the media form or innovating in within the confines of that media form? Or is it addressing something historical or even locally specific? And then that gets even further complicated by, well, in this global age, like how do we even think about locale or culture in this hyperconnected world that we live in? And at least my I guess assertion is that, well, you really have to address media form with either way that you're going with this to address these issues.
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Jenny Lee
We will come back to some of these points later. But I want to ask about this concept of anime esque that you employed throughout the book. Well, your book uses approaches the question of anime through quite a few theoretical frameworks. And I feel like if I understood this correctly, anime esque is the biggest and the most foundational one of them all. So can you tell us what it means and how you chose this as a lens to analyze the anime works here?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Yes, thank you. For me, anime has a lot of these repeated patterns or conventions that I was just referring to before. Things like, let's say, you know, arched eyes for smiling or rounded white eyes when they're shocked or you know, if you're running late, you have a piece of toast in your mouth while you're running somewhere. You know, these are things that like actual people don't do and. But they've become kind of synonymous with the notion of what we expect from anime. And I would say that these are part of its media form. So in order to better explore this, I adapted the notion of manga s from Jacqueline Burnt and in a very simply, the idea of the manga esque is things that we would commonly expect to associate with manga. And of course there's going to be things you associate with manga that you can associate with anime as well. But there's also differences based off of the fact that they're different media. So basically these, the anime esque are the patterns that we regularly associate with anime that are repeated across genres, across studios, across animators. Things like, for instance, the big eyes with bulbous Lights that are kind of vibrating when people are, or you know, glimmering when people are showing overflowing emotion, things like that. So the thing is about the anime esque is that it depends on the person, where they are. The time period, what you associate with the Anime Ask will differ over time. You know, even things very simply like genres come in and out of, you know, trend, for instance. But also if you think about things globally, different genres and different types of anime go to get, you know, go through popularities in different parts of the world in different times. And you know, even animators who make anime are going to have different opinions on what they feel as anime esque or not. So the Anime Ask can kind of encompass all these different perspectives and shifts, but it also works with a sense of the repetition of these elements that are common across the various works of anime. So what that means is if there is these things that we tend to associate with anime, then what defines anime is really a type of density of these different anime esque elements. You know, everything from maybe plot points to, you know, certain movements, certain character design, certain types of voices and styles of speaking, those things start to get associated with what we assume is anime. And that is something that, you know, an animation that has a lot of those in it, we might think of as anime. And what that does, at least for me, is that gives us a way to think about anime that doesn't rely on Japan as the defining factor of what is anime. And so for me, this allows us to open anime up to a more global view of conceptualizing anime and still concentrate on the formal elements that are involved.
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Jenny Lee
That's very interesting. And this brings us to one of, probably the central focus of your book, which is the relationship between nation state and globalization. So you specifically focus on this aspect of nation state and globalization in discussing. And we come to the title of your book, Anime's Identity. So how do you see first of all the relationship between anime and national identity?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Yeah, thank you. That's a good question. I think, as I said, anime is in the contemporary era in particular, really. It's often defined in its relation to Japan. And so there's this negotiation of, of defining anime, as I said before in the previous discussions with connecting to things like nation branding of these negotiations between an internal and external definition. And what happens is by internalizing domestically this kind of global conception of anime, it gets narrowed, as I was saying before, formally. But the upshot of that from a nation branding perspective is that anime gets nationalized, it gets associated with Japan. Internally and externally. So there's a, there appears to be some kind of consistency here that plays into this notion that, you know, anime is this, you know, broad representative of Japan. So as I was trying to point out with that dynamic, it's interesting at least to me because there's this raising of anime to the national level, which wasn't always the case in its long history. But this is actually not isolated to the national, it's part of globalization. So as anime's profile grows globally, there's a corresponding emphasis on the national. So another way to say this might be that as anime gets presented as more and more of a kind of local thing, that it's actually part of the process of animes becoming more and more global. So the, in terms of time period, for instance, in the mid-2000s, there's a trend that has continued on to this day of really emphasizing certain specific locales within Japan in anime. Now before that there were of course certain small scale fans that would fan events or, or practices where they would go to locations that were in an anime. But it wasn't like customary in like almost every single anime that comes out to really focus on oh, this street corner was in this, you know, scene in this anime or oh, this, you know, old elementary school was in this anime or something like that, or this crosswalk is really important. These smaller locations are, they become part of what people expect of anime. But it's happening at precisely the moment that anime gets increasingly promoted globally through these nation branding campaigns. So oddly like as anime gets more global, the emphasis on the local and really, really tiny local places, it increases. So I think there's that connection there between the globalization and the nationalization of anime. To put it in a really rather, I guess overly simplified terms.
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Jenny Lee
That's a very fascinating point. Actually. One of our other hosts on the, on the channel Radi Generetty, he researches about anime pilgrimages in Japan and he's ment that many of these tourists, well, sometimes there will be tourists coming to Japan specifically to visit these anime sites because they're, well, both Japanese and famous through the anime. So that's a very interesting phenomena.
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Yeah. Oh, sorry, go ahead, go ahead. Oh no, I was gonna say in the, in the book there's a small, there's a sequence where I kind of talk about this and I specifically talk about an area in Kyoto that was used in the anime Tamako market. And I happen to have at the time had lived near that area. And you can still go and in the back of this shopping arcade that was featured in that anime. There's a whole bunch of notebooks with people who would sign it who had come from all over Japan, but also all over the world to see this particular shopping arcade which was featured in in the anime. So I think this is definitely part of this kind of broader focusing and tension between the kind of local and global in in anime.
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Jenny Lee
Yes, that's definitely very fascinating. And now I want to return to one of the points that you mentioned earlier, which is that now more anime works are being made transnationally in their production contents and promotion. So are there any changes or new challenges for anime to maintain their Japanese, their national characteristics? And I guess for our listeners who might not be familiar with the transnationality of anime production, how does it work?
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Dr. Stevie Swan
Okay, thank you for that question. Let me kind of look at give a broader overview on this. And it might come across first as me going on a bit of a tangent, but I promise you I'll come back to all these questions. So first, I think that it's important to recognize the different forms of transnationality that are at play here. And so I'll start with the first one, which is I would call local global tensions. And these are, or some of them I described just before in terms of, for instance, the shift in the naming con conventions or the way that the kind of promotion of different localized places are spurred on by the increased global presence of, of of anime. But I think the it might not be initially apparent as to why there's this type of local global tension, because I think outside of Japan, but maybe even in Japan as well, they're going to look at anime and be like, oh, there's no tension Here, anime is Japanese. This is Japanese culture. But I think actually that's precisely the moment where the tension maybe is revealed, isn't the right word, but perhaps is actually tapered over or maybe even hidden might be a better way to say the opposite. In that anime is so globally known that people can recognize it and then not just recognize it, presume to know its origin. So in that moment, we see this tension of anime as, oh, it's Japanese, but I'm looking at it in Hawaii or Spain or Sri Lanka or wherever you want to talk about. You know, it's got this global presence, but we presume that it's still Japanese. And even if this consumption and in some cases production has gone on for decades, it's still Japanese. And that's the tension there that I think is perhaps the most accepted way of thinking about anime's globality, that it's somehow both local, but really actually it's just Japanese. And this is, I think, one way to conceptualize anime's globalization. But I wanted to think of, well, are there other ways to think about it? So that brings me to the second way. And this would be what I'm calling a centralized transnationality, or centralized transnational network, I think would be more accurate. And here, in the case of anime's production, I think this type of transnationality comes to the foreground most clearly. So here, Tokyo takes on a very privileged position. The vast majority of anime studios are in Tokyo. And usually the way the production works is there's a central studio and they are kind of tasked with creating this anime. And because anime is a very difficult business and it costs a lot to make and the margins are razor thin and people are overworked and underpaid, they outsource a lot of the work. And there's a ton of animators. Significant portion of the industry a few years ago was something like 80% of the industry, which are freelancers. And then there's also other studios, some of them larger, some of them smaller, that will take the extra work or other parts of the work in at different times. Now, some of these studios are in Japan, but there's also a massive number of them that are outside of Japan and largely in Asia, in places like Seoul, Shanghai, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City. There are a lot of these particular studios which are. Are. Are contributing to anime's production. So historically, anime grew out of what's called celluloid animation, where you have these. In these. These thin, clear layers of celluloid that different pieces are painted in different areas and they're composited into a single image and manipulated and then composite into a different image. And that's how we get the different frames of anime. And so layering is very important for anime. And even in the digital era where people aren't using celluloid anymore, there's. The layers are kind of baked into this production process. This also makes outsourcing pretty easy because a different person can work on a different layer in a different place and that's totally acceptable. So this is how it works within Japan, but also outside of Japan. Different parts of the production process are done in different place. But that also means that each anime and each episode could have a different configuration of locations, and those aren't always inside Japan. So for instance, in the book I talk about one particular episode which had parts of it done in Japan, parts done in the Philippines, Vietnam and China. So you have in one episode five different places making the different frames that we see or parts of the different frames that we see in the anime. So when I say anime has this a type of multi layered transnationality in some cases, I mean it quite literally that there's multiple layers of transnationality in anime. And this has been going on since the 1960s. And I think a lot of the time the discussions are that the people who are making these, these works outside of Japan are kind of quote unquote, simply following Japanese orders. But this I think is a. Is not quite accurate to the actual production processes. It's not just directors that have the entire agency about what to do for everything in the anime production. But, you know, animators have leeway to interpret the storyboards that they're given, which, you know, they can make certain changes to the image. Of course, the image is like really, really small and they have to make it quite big anyway. So they're always a process of interpretation. And what I wanted to bring to the foreground is returning the agency to these really overworked and underpaid animators both inside and outside of Japan, and show their participation in this transnational performance. So these are very skilled laborers. And in fact some of the studios that are anime is outsourced to, they work exclusively on anime, despite the fact that places like Seoul is a major hub for outsourced animation from, you know, studios that are located in the US and Europe as well. These studios there, they, they really focus on, on anime. And the other important part for me is that, you know, the, the very images that you're seeing on the screen are those are the things made by these, these animators. So you know, they're, they're actively participating in this anime production process. So just to kind of bring this back to the notion of transnationality, this is a very specific form of transnationality where there's a centralized network with a very powerful center. And in this case it's Tokyo. And that all the other nodes that the work is sent out to, they're also sending work back that we see in the final images. Now in order for any of this to work, you have to engage with what I was saying is the anime ask. These are skilled laborers. They have to know and be able to perform form the repetitions, the citations of what we expect of anime, the anime ask, this very particular style of producing anime. So because the anime ask is always a, you know, copying of other anime, to put it very kind of crudely, it's always has to do this because it has to make itself recognizable as this particular category of media. So, so here this is a really, this is a kind of not, not really like a direct copy of another work, but a kind of broad repetition or referencing of other examples, like I said before, things like character designs or facial expressions, styles of animation, things like that. A certain reperformance of these patterns. And as I was saying before, the anime s depends on these repetitions. And each repetition then is always referencing previous ones. Meaning that there's a kind of network here of references, but it's not centralized in one particular place like Tokyo is. It's. It's decentralized. And all these iterations, all these repetitions of references are linking to each of those other references. And since the collab anime production is generally collaborative and multi layered and has been happening for decades, then what the general references are are always already these kind of mixed things in the first place. So each iteration, each performance of this anime esque thing connects to this huge vast network of connections and prior iterations that occur across borders. And this is much harder to locate or pin down into one locale, like kind of inside or outside of Japan. And this is the third type of transnationality, this decentralized network which is in many ways open to traveling, but very rigid in the fact that you have to stay within the confines of what is already recognizable as an anime esque pattern. So in some ways the proof of the effectiveness of these animators to participate in anime's production is that the animators outside of Japan who've been producing anime for decades, they're clearly able to to create the anime esque because there nobody's ever commented on this, they just presume that this is is Japanese. So in a weird way, this anime esque performance both enables but also hides the transnationality of anime's production. Because the anime esque is so associated with Japan that if it's a very well done performance that is something that shouldn't be commented on, then it, it technically passes as Japanese even though it's been produced transnationally. So all three of these forms of transnationality are operating together with anime at once. So you have the decentralized transnationality of these anime esque conventions which enables the transnational labor. And all this is centralized within Tokyo as the privileged center and a standard production process. And because Tokyo is located within Japan, it allows an easier sense of associating anime with Japan as this product from Japan which is exported and gone globalized. So that's then where this local global dynamic pops in as well. So I'm sorry, this is again quite a bit of a long explanation, but I promise I'll come back to the, to the point the question here. So for me, if you know anime is this decentralized, the anime ask is this decentralized thing. People who live outside of Japan and have been watching anime for decades and sometimes even making anime for decades, it makes perfect sense that they're going to start making their own works much more or centralized much more locally. So a lot of these anime that are increasing in number, that are made largely outside of Japan, they're also transnational. But their, their kind of central node isn't Tokyo. It would be for instance, someplace like Shanghai, for instance. So this then connects to the local global dynamic because there's this notion of anime and the anime ask as this Japanese thing. And so for it to be seen as authentic, it tends to have to have some association with Japan. So for instance, if a work is centrally produced in Shanghai, it may get a Japanese language dub to then get an association with Japan in kind of some way. But from a formal perspective, they're doing the same things that so called anime proper or anime that people think of as coming from Japan do. You know, they're just repeating the anime esque patterns. So what happens is because of this emphasis on the local global, this kind of local global or like authentication of anime in relationship to Japan, these works that are made outside of Japan have this real difficult bind. Any work that is perceived as being quote unquote Japanese, they can do whatever they want to the anime esque form. And everyone's like oh, that's anime just by its by definition of being related to Japan. But these works that are open about their transnationality, they get overly scrutinized. So they're either, okay, well there, let's say they want to innovate on the anime esque or get or kind of deviate from those patterns. Then people are gonna say, oh, it's not anime enough. It's, it's, it's, it's clearly not doing what, you know, the standard anime esque is. But if they adhere to it and do it really well, then people are gonna say oh no, they're just simply copying Japanese culture. So they're in this real bind here. Despite the fact that most anime that people think are Japanese are themselves transnationally produced and themselves also again, quote unquote, copying the anime esque. So how this all gets negotiated in the future, you know, I can't, I can't predict that. But my, I guess, my, my, my guess is that the heavy association with Japan isn't going to go away for a while. Even if the anime ask tends, you know, changes, which is inevitable, the centralization of Tokyo will definitely continue. And this doesn't mean that it's going to. This is again one of the reasons the centralization is an important point, because it doesn't mean that this is exclusively quote, unquote, ethnically Japanese and that there's a lot of people who are not ethnically Japanese who move to Tokyo, sometimes even founding studios here and participate in the industry at multiple levels, you know, sometimes very high levels in the industry. So this is, I think, going to continue for some time. But there may be other centers that pop up. I think Shanghai is probably the best guess for that moving forward as another kind of center. And that might also be connected to a broader shift in a type of regional understanding of what anime could be thinking about how the various laborers contribute and participate in this and are linked with one another through these decentralized iterations of the anime esque. And I also want to want to point out here that this type of regionalization is not the standard regionalization that we might think of where it's internally homogeneous. I wouldn't go that far. I focused mainly on Asian labor in, in my research. But this shouldn't be considered a type of evenly dispersed network. So most of these animators are operating in major cities. And so you have connections between, let's say like Seoul and Shanghai and Manila. But there are places, you know, outside of those areas that aren't necessarily involved in these production networks or places in, in Asia like Sri Lanka for instance, that have no animators or involved or not involved in production, even though there are fans there. And increasingly there are animators from Europe and the US which are participating in anime production. So all of these are going largely unnoticed. And so I think it, you know, speaks to the fact that the performers in these different locales have the capacity to successfully enact the anime esque and they've been doing so for decades.
- [47:11]
Jenny Lee
Wow, that's very. Well, a bit complicated but also very clearly put. Now I'm curious. Well, you mentioned that this outsourcing of the production Animus production started in the 1960s and with technology moving forward and with, with migration especially, I guess a lot of other from other Asian countries, there are a lot of producers moving into Japan or Japanese producers moving out of Japan. Does the. Do you think that anime esque has shown any transformation until now based on Japan's the change in perhaps Japan's position in the globe or Japan's attitude to this more openness of anime?
- [48:11]
Dr. Stevie Swan
Well, I think it's. I mean it's a complicated question. I'm not sure that within the industry people are quite so. I guess the right word might be nationalistic. I'm not sure if I would go so far but that there's not so much, so much emphasis on that. Although I think, you know, things may change over time. As I said, as things get more popular globally, it seems that sometimes there's the kind of reverse corresponding approach to focus on the local and specifically the national. In terms of the formal shifts. I think that, you know, anime and the anime ask itself is always quite, quite hybrid from the get go and you know, you have in the book. I didn't have time to really out lay out a type of history of the transnationality of the anime esque. But there's a lot of influence, for instance from the show like Thunderbirds, which was a UK puppet show on the robot anime genre. And so there's things like that that I think are open for discovery and you know, a lot of references and connections to things like, you know, like Hong Kong kung fu films for instance, that are important to. They kind of get folded into the anime esque and that's what keeps it changing and engaging and why it keeps feeling, I think so fresh is precisely because it's always bringing in different things and, and what becomes successful gets repeated and then that shifts what we associate as the anime esque. So recently things like Chainsaw man is chock full of, you know, filmic references. And that's coming from all over the world. And so I think, you know, how the anime esque will change what it's going to look like is something that I personally can't predict. But I think that in response to that particular question, I would say it's always been hybrid and I think it will continue. Well, it always will continue to be hybrid.
- [50:33]
Jenny Lee
One last question. Bring this transnationality back to national identity. How do you think anime functions within the Japanese society as a form of media in, I guess, shaping or creating or changing the Japanese understanding of their national identity?
- [51:00]
Dr. Stevie Swan
Well, I think, yeah, this connects back to what is, you know, the shifts about what anime, what anime represents. And in recent years it's seen as, you know, teaching as I do classes on anime and manga is me teaching classes on Japanese culture. And I think that it doesn't always have to be that in particular this type of social role of what anime is, what does it represent and how does it represent and why specifically needs to be addressed and engaged with. And I think this is all the more important because it's something that's now undeniably global in presence. It's becoming more and more, I think, mainstream. And I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon. So I think this really is not just a question that's isolated to Japan. This is a question of, of the globality of culture in general. How do we approach culture in general? There's, as I said before, multiple layers of transnationality in anime. And the notion of where anime comes from and what it's supposed to represent becomes all the more complicated when we pay attention to that. So I think this presents us then with a bunch of different possibilities for conceptualizing culture in general. Who makes it, where it comes from, how we relate to it, how we analyze it. All of that gets wrapped into the way that we expect it to perhaps, or what we expect it to represent and what we can glean from it. So as I was saying before, for me it's hybridity all the way up, all the way down. And I think this is a very radical departure from contemporary notions of cultural production or how we relate to culture, which is still very much nation focused, it's very possessive, it's very ownership based. And instead I wanted to highlight this kind of distinct spatial organization that we're seeing that really jumps across borders and this classically modern notion of inside and outside become really thoroughly blurred in specific ways. And so for me, this is a really, this is very, I guess, fascinating, or there's something that is very provocative and worthwhile exploring in this because I think it's radically open and inclusive. If we look at the idea of the anime esque, as long as the anime esque patterns are adhered to, anyone anywhere, theoretically could participate in the cultural production. And as I said, this is a bit of a double edged sword because the patterns must be rigidly adhered to. And they are also in some ways kind of exclusive. It's not only for the people who have to train to be able to produce these, but also those who may not understand them. So you can kind of exclude people in that particular way. But this is a bit of an idealistic notion, truthfully and in practice, as I was saying, Japan and authenticity looms quite large as well as the shadow of imperialism. So as we've talked about here, this transnationality of anime, it's largely the focus historically, but also in my research has been in Asia. And many of the places that anime is and was produced in historically suffered quite brutally under Japanese colonialism. So this emphasis on repetition and copying in the anime esque, when it's seen as representative of Japanese culture, can be seen as a copying over and a replaying of the historical violence of erasure, like what happened in, for instance, Korea during Japanese colonization. So this is also, I think, part of that transnational dynamic. And I think it's important to bring in the different perspectives from different places that are employed and brought in here. Even as I said, it could be in the same production, maybe even in the the same episode. So there's. We need tools to think about this, the transnational labor and the connections, the different viewpoints that are both violent and constructive, the asymmetries and the interconnections. We have to conceptualize this. So for me, this means that we have to refocus on form. Because if we bring back our attention to media form, then the animation becomes paramount. It's the area that we have to focus on. It's about exploring who and how and where that occurs. And this once more becomes transnational. So I think this is about reconceptualizing how we think about cultural production more broadly and just shifting our focus to say, oh, well, this animation is transnational. It's not enough. There needs to be a methodological shift and a conceptual shift that brings us all into focus more consistently. So to kind of make this quote, unquote, invisible labor visible again and reveal the transnational participation that can kind of sketch a different possibility for reading anime to not just focus on the exclusivity to Japan, but kind of embrace this hybridity. And if that's the case, then maybe anime's identity could be seen differently. And then we can shift our understanding of transnationality and globality and the corresponding social functions of that about how we read it, what it represents, what it could be, and not just for anime, but for other media in general. So it could be a shift to something that's much more open to intersections and provide us a very different configuration of space and understanding of how culture operates there, how we relate to it, how we relate to the nation, how we relate to culture in general. And then from there we could start to explore, through the media form and other formal approaches, ways to engage with this and to include, but also move beyond Japan.
- [57:24]
Jenny Lee
That's very well said. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for your time and for this very interesting book.
- [57:32]
Dr. Stevie Swan
Well, thank you and I appreciate the opportunity and you taking the time to work with me on this.
- [57:38]
Jenny Lee
For our listeners who are interested in more details of Dr. Swan's analysis of anime and his discussion of the theoretical approaches to popular media, make sure to check out his new book, Anime's Performativity and Form Beyond Japan. The book is currently available in paperback. This is Jingyi Li from New Books in Japanese Studies. Stay tuned for our next episode and Happy Holidays. Start the season with Etsy and make your holiday traditions extra special on Etsy. You'll discover original pieces from small shops that will help you celebrate your way. Shop Etsy for holiday decor that makes you feel seen. Special starts on Etsy. Tap the banner to shop now.