The Barriers of Anime

Assignment Individual Essay (Communication and culture)

The Barriers between Anime and parents of the Western World

To many people who are known as Otaku or fans of Anime, they would know that Anime is a form of Japanese Animation and Anime can appeal to many different diverse audiences from young children all the way to adults. But many parents who have never been aware of Japanese animation beyond the likes of Astro Boy or Pokémon believe that Anime is just like a children's cartoon, just like the western cartoons of Disney, Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera from when they were younger. This essay is all about the barriers of communication between Japanese Anime and Parents of Western Culture.

In Japan Anime has been around in the early 20th Century when Japanese Graphic artists began to feel the influence of western culture in the form of the newspaper comic strip as well as the motion picture (Anime_nanet, 2008). Until the 1960's, Anime would be only shown in Japan and targeted towards Japanese people. One of the earliest Animated motion picture films from Japan was called Momotaro's Sea Eagles that was made in 1943 during World War 2 (Galbraith, 2009: 20). Because of the limited exposure of earlier Anime, this presents a clear culture barrier that while the Anime medium had grown and matured in Japanese culture among many adults, many people in the western world today still view Anime as a cartoon for kids because of the lack of exposure to Japanese Animation when they were younger. The animation style of post WWII Anime can be most identified with characters having large eyes that portray the most effective emotions that were inspired by the early Walt Disney films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Anime_nanet, 2008). One of the most famous examples of this Disney like inspiration in Anime came from a Manga artist called Osamu Tezuka when he made Astro Boy in 1963 (Galbraith, 2009: 219-220). Astro Boy would not only become Japan's first successful Anime but he would also be remade in the 1980's with colour and from that moment on Japanese Animation would have allot more exposure in the Western world and expand towards appealing to people outside of the traditional children's target  audience. Since that Anime draws upon earlier Western Cartoon like from Disney, there should not have been any barrier between Anime and the western world to begin with, even though a clear barrier exists.

The themes that Anime delves into as well as the target audience that Anime caters to can be varied ranging from fighting and friendships seen in the animal catching Pokémon series as well as in the action ninja anime Naruto. Love and relationship themes between a guy and a girl like in Love Hina and Kanon to same sex relationships seen in Gravitation and Ninja Nonsense that can often be seen as a taboo for cartoons in western culture. There are also the more adult themes of street crime and political cover-ups as seen in Akira as well as the sexual and horror themes in Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend. The target audience most Anime shows in Japan aim towards is the Otaku. Also known as geek, nerd or fanboy/fangirl since the 1980's the word Otaku has been used to refer to people who are into Japanese pop culture and anything to do with Anime, Manga and videogames. Sometimes during Anime conventions, many Otaku would cosplay (Costume role-play) as their favourite Anime/Manga or Videogame characters (Galbraith, 2009: 51, 171). Even though the Otaku culture has grown in the last 10 years in western countries, the misconceptions of the older generation that Anime is just a cartoon for kids can be misleading as parents often forget or are not aware that Anime can also be targeted towards adults like the Otaku audience.

One prime examples of how an Anime show was heavily criticised by parents and governments of the western world was with the global success of Pokémon where many religious people from the western world were saying that Pokémon was satanic and causing children to reject their moral values. But this was nothing more than just a group of people using the news media to stir up moral panics and attacking youth culture for society's problems (Tobin, 2004: 108-134).
"The pioneering work from Stanley Cohen (1972), writing about the sence of moral panic in media coverage of youth disturbances in 1960's Britain, looms large here. Though his analysis, Cohen developed a processual model of deviancy amplification leading to a sence of panic as follows:
(1) Initial problem.
(2) Initial solution
(3) Societal reaction
(4) Operation of control culture, in particular with the creation of stereotypes
(5) Increased deviance and polarization, and
(6) Confirmation of stereotypes."
(Tobin, 2004: 109)
One misunderstanding that Pokémon caused was the image of the Swastika when back in 1999 a boy in New York brought a set of Pokémon cards that were imported from Japan and his parent's complained all because of the images of the Manji symbol looked allot like a mirror image of the Nazi symbol of the Swastika.  This could be another barrier to communication between two different cultures as a symbol in one culture could mean something different in another culture (Krish,2009). The western publisher of the Pokémon Anime, 4Kids entertainment, banned some of the episodes an episode where the large Jellyfish Pokémon, Tentacruel, was knocking down buildings with its tentacles was seen as too sensitive for western society after the collapse of the World Trade Centre in 2001.
Other episodes like "Beauty and the Beach" and "The legend of Dratini" were banned from the Western Audience due to mature themes (Firechao, 2009). The banning over a few Pokémon episodes is just another example of how the misconception of Anime being just for kids was misleading as some examples of the Pokémon Anime are also catered to an older audience was not understood in the western world, apart from the Otaku audience.

With western parents not being able to understand something that their younger generation of children are interested in compounding on the misleading information and noise from news media and politicians that make parents fear for their children's safety often results in a moral panic in western society. This has happened several times in history as even rock music was once called "The devil's music" back in the 1950's before becoming part of western pop culture as it is now. On one of the Pokémon fan sites, Dogasu says it best when he/she comments about the media's Pokémon bashing.
"Now that the fad stage of the franchise is over in the United States, fewer and fewer people are speaking out against it - after all, why speak out against something if doing so won't give you your fifteen minutes of fame?" (Dogasu, 2008).

In conclusion as each generation passes who knows and has had exposure to Japanese Animation, Anime will become just another normal part of western culture as much as it has been part of Japanese culture for almost 100 years. There will always be moral panics about Anime just as there have been moral panics about everything else in youth culture but it will never stop the next generation of western parents from understanding Japanese Animation as long as they had exposure to Anime when they were younger or who have lived though life when something they had liked has been the target of moral panic.

Bibliography (references):

Anime Nanet, (2008) The Anime History –origin and roots from 1900 to the 21st century, retrieved from 16/5/2010
hubpages.com/hub/The-Anime-Phe…

Galbraith, P. The Otaku Encyclopaedia. Kodansha International Ltd (2009)

Tobin, J. Pikachu's Global Adventure: The rise and fall of Pokemon, Duke University Press (2004)

Krish, (2009), Swastika, retrieved from 25/5/2010
www.pesarota.com/2009/11/swast…

Dogasu, (2008), Pokémon Bashing, retrieved from 25/5/2010
dogasu.bulbagarden.net/bashing…

Firechao, (2009), Banned Anime Episodes, retrieved from 25/5/2010
firechao.com/pokemon_banned_an…