Review of Education and Social Justice in Japan

Abstract

fan culture (189), excluding the decisive difference in their approaches, with the former firmly remaining on the positivist side of things and the latter solidly located on the critical one. This is also true for Galbraith’s well-intentioned project to undermine any western attempts to establish ‘weird’ manga as an essentializing Japanese cultural trait harkening back in an uninterrupted line to Edo culture. While this line of argument might have been tempting and true for some scholars in the past, even a cursory look at the rise of manga in post-WWII Japan clearly demonstrates that it rests as much on US comics’ culture as on Japanese history, with the most famous case being Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy, discussed at length in the book (see 83–86), but more in terms of sexual proclivities than technical line drawing. Thus, any attempt at essentializing Japanese culture has already failed and here Galbraith is preaching to the choir. Lastly, Galbraith correctly chastises western media (and academics) for narrowing down their view of Japanese manga and anime to sexual (tentacles!) and, in the worst case, pedophile content. Such attempts did and do exist; however, such a view is equally as erroneous as attempts to mark ancient Greek culture as overwhelmingly gay due to a few depictions on vases and mosaics. That the infamous octopi might be used in such Japanese sexually-connotated depictions should not surprise; after all, Japan consists of islands and in western cultural discourses there are Little Red Riding Hoods and wolves, simply because geosemiotics and Rule 34 (‘If it exists, there is porn of it’) would expect them. A bit more comparative research would certainly have bolstered his claims. If one digs a little deeper in psychosexual historical accounts such as German folk tales or Italian stories of the Decameron-style, many such examples come to the fore and the fact that they also exist in Japan should be no surprise. Overall, though, these are minor gripes; the book is a trove of information on otaku culture, well-argued and a milestone in deepening readers’ understanding of the multiple layers responsible for creating a thriving and important social subculture in today’s Japan.