Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan

Notes

Notes·   209 Introduction 1 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 14, aptly critiques this presupposition that all media would merge into a single form as the black box fallacy. 2 Angela Ndalianis uses the term cross-media seriality in Neo-Baroque Aesthetics; Barbara Klinger offers an account of the industry term repurposing in Beyond the Multiplex, 7–8. 3 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2. 4 For an example of the close tie between technological visions of convergence and the rise of digital media, see the editorial of the first issue of the journal Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, which describes the publication as “a journal of research into new media technologies,” situating digital media as the principal site of investigation from which social and cultural issues might be explored; Knight and Weedon, Editorial, 6. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, offers a more nuanced model of convergence that, rather than privileging digital media, assumes the complex interaction or “collision ” between old and new media, as the subtitle of his book implies. Nonetheless, there is still a strong tendency to assume that media only converge—or collide—when some are new and others are old. 5 See Allison, Millennial Monsters; Ito, “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination”; and Lamarre, Anime Machine. Shiraishi, “Japan’s Soft Power,” offers an early and important account of Japanese media convergence —terming it an image alliance. 6 I use the term things to refer to the material objects and consumer 210   ·   Notes to Introduction products that surround the image culture and are an essential part of the anime system. This is of necessity a rough designation insofar as images also have a materiality of their own and a thingly infrastructure on which they depend. Moreover, the emergence of what I call mediacommodities alongside the anime system blurs the media–things boundary even further. Still, the usefulness of the term thing comes in its emphasis on the material property of the objects mobilized within the anime system—against the emphasis on the purely sign-value of objects within Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects or commodities in the classical Marxist sense. It also allows me to link my discussion of anime to the transformations that Lash and Lury, Global Culture Industries, 25, have usefully termed the “mediation of things and the thingification of media.” Finally, the emphasis on the material things of visual culture reflects recent calls to think about and through things by writers such as Brown, “Thing Theory,” and Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”—calls that this book heeds. 7 Given that this book focuses on the Japanese context, I will refer to the series by its Japanese title, Tetsuwan Atomu. 8 This understanding is an established one among scholars of anime, manga, and character merchandising in Japan. See, e.g., Kusakawa, Terebi anime 20 nen shi, 30–32, and Nakano, Manga sangyōron, 72–81. 9 The term system here should not indicate a closed or static set but rather an acknowledgment that anime cannot be understood apart from its surrounding media and commodity forms, which together constitute a particular media ecology. It is this open, often expanding, yet relatively stable group of media and things that I refer to as the anime system. This conception of anime as a relatively stable group of media in processual interaction with subjects, objects, and other media forms owes some inspiration to systems theory sociologist Niklas Luhmann, actor-network theorist Bruno Latour, and assemblage theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. 10 Kusakawa, Terebi anime 20 nen shi, 30–32. 11 Lury, Brands; Arvidsson, Brands. For work on media convergence, see Grainge, Brand Hollywood; Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex; Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics; and Wood, “Vectorial Dynamics.” 12 Fuller, Media Ecologies; Guattari, Chaosmosis and The Three Ecologies. The term media ecology also has a longer genealogy that includes the writings of Marshall McLuhan (whose engagement with media as interacting forms informs the approach taken here), Gregory Bateson Notes to Introduction   ·   211 (on whose work Guattari builds in his development of the expanded conception of ecology), and Neil Postman. 13 Though the terms postmodernism and post-Fordism are both used to describe the present socio-cultural-economic space, I prefer the latter term, which does not carry with it the cultural baggage the term postmodern does. The postmodern has been, in my view, too closely associated with characteristics associated with particular artistic or literary movements—pastiche over parody, surface over...