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

4. Media Mixes, Media Transformations

Media Mixes, Media Transformations 4· 135 Since the 1980s, the term media mix has been the most widely used word to describe the phenomenon of transmedia communication, specifically, the development of a particular media franchise across multiple media types, over a particular period of time. In a word, it is the Japanese term for what is known in North America as media convergence . Yet, despite its importance for understanding the present and past of Japanese media, this term is undertheorized and suffers from a surprising lack of historicization. Although there are a few important exceptions, there has been little serious consideration of the term itself, much less any attempt to situate it in relation to its genealogical origins: postwar American and Japanese marketing discourse.1 Though the term continues to be used within contemporary marketing discourse, it is greatly overshadowed by its popular use in describing the circulation of characters and narratives across media types—an essential part of the anime system.2 Yet there has been almost no attempt to differentiate the two quite distinct uses of the term and little acknowledgment that this term originates in the realm of marketing theory. Shifting focus from the close study of the emergence of the anime system that occupied the first part of this book, this chapter proposes to look at another key moment in the development of the anime media mix: the use of the media mix strategy by publisher Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa Books). Kadokawa Books is of key historical significance for transposing the methods of media connectivity practiced by television anime to the realms of film and the novel. It is also an important point of reference insofar as Kadokawa is also most frequently credited 136 · Media Mixes, Media Transformations with having invented the contemporary form of media mix practice.3 Despite a degree of misplaced historical priority, however, Kadokawa is a key player in contemporary media mix practice and an important site from which to understand both the continuities and the transformations of the anime media mix since its emergence in the early 1960s. This chapter will provide an analysis of the transformations of the term media mix, from its origins in postwar marketing discourse to its use, as of the 1980s, in describing the media mix developed around Kadokawa. A comparison of the two models of the media mix will not only reveal important differences between the two but will also make visible transformations in the media and social spheres that attend the rise of the anime media mix. Indeed, we will find that both the anime and Kadokawa media mixes are responsible for, and bound up with, the historical shift from a modern or Fordist social regime to a postmodern or post-Fordist one. For the sake of clarity, I will distinguish two applications of the term media mix by referring to one as the marketing media mix and the other as the anime media mix.4 Before introducing the marketing media mix, we must begin with a brief consideration of the history of marketing in postwar Japan and a sense of the context into which the practice was introduced. Postwar Marketing and the Society of Mass Consumption There is general consensus among historians that marketing developed in postwar Japan as a direct response to the importation of American-style marketing techniques beginning in 1955. Indeed, the term marketing itself only came into wide use in Japan around this date.5 While advertising and forms of marketing certainly existed before this time—dating as far back as the Edo period (1603–1868) at least—marketing, which includes advertising as one of its techniques, is regarded as a more recent invention . The American style of marketing was, Kohara Hiroshi argues, a particular body of knowledge, practices, and discourses based around the provocation of consumer desire for a particular product through mass advertising as well as the quantitative or “scientific” research techniques for calculating the most effective means of doing so.6 The impetus for the introduction of American-style marketing was the September 1955 trip of top management executives from Japan to the Media Mixes, Media Transformations · 137 United States for the purpose of observing and learning from the business practices of U.S. companies. What they noted, among other things, was the importance that American enterprises placed on marketing, and they brought back to Japan an increased appreciation for the place of marketing within...