Authenticity from cartoons

Abstract

This ethnography explores how North American fans of Japanese animation or anime are engaging in pedagogical practices. Anime increasingly attracts many North American fans that have had little or no previous direct exposure to Japanese culture. Many fans watch and discuss anime with other fans within an interactive subculture called anime fandom. U.S. anime fandom can be interpreted as a site of informal cultural education wherein participants teach and learn about anime and Japanese culture as a means of making sense of them.

Little research has been done on anime fandom as an agency of pedagogy. Therefore, this study focuses on how North American fans of anime learn to become anime fans, and what they learn in this process. It also addresses how fans of anime create, sustain, and change meanings associated with anime and Japan within anime fandom. Finally, it explores how anime fans negotiate traditional sites of sociocultural consensus and conflict found in U.S. social hierarchies. The research uses an ethnography of one anime club, an ethnographic study of a second club, and interviews of participants at anime fan conventions to address these issues. The methods involved are primarily interviews and participant observation.

The findings illustrate that most anime fans are attracted to anime because they admire visuals used in anime, they favor anime series with narrative arcs stretching across several episodes, and they form attachments to anime characters that develop and change. Fans often contrasted this appeal to North American animation which they criticized as mostly episodic, unsophisticated, and visually less appealing than anime. Acquiring a vocabulary to use in discussing anime and anime fandom was found to be a critical component of fandom pedagogy. While many fans were careful to distinguish between anime and Japanese culture, just as many fans used Japanese culture to explain situations in anime that made them uncomfortable. Anime fandom itself appeared to fans to be an authentic subcultural location from which they could legitimate their judgments about North American media, anime, and Japanese culture. The study discusses implications that anime fandom has for educators and researchers of education and subcultures.