Japanese animation leaving its mark on U.S. culture.

It’s easy to tell that anime has gone mainstream as a pop cultural force. There are 21 anime conventions in September alone, mostly in the U.S. (one a manga convention in Japan), according to the website animecons.com. Denver’s annual Nan Desu Kan is one of hundreds of events held every year around the world that celebrate the anime art form.

Not bad for a bunch of cartoons.

Except, as any anime fan – “fanime” or otaku if you’re a truly serious enthusiast – can tell you, anime is not just an average cartoon. At least, not the kind of cartoons most Americans think of from their childhood. In fact, most anime isn’t aimed at children at all, unlike American cartoons.

Anime is a wide-ranging term for animation from Japan that has influenced U.S. pop culture in the past few decades, and continues to grow in popularity. Its hallmarks include a dynamic graphical style, innovative action, story lines that are easy to follow but complex in their mythic depth, and wild, boundless imagination.

And for Asians, and especially Japanese and Japanese Americans, it’s a triumph of Eastern art form over Western tastes. Anime style has vastly influenced American animation forever.

“I recall that I identified with something great that was from Japan, although I spoke no Japanese,” says Eric Nakamura, the Los Angeles-based founder of the Giant Robot empire of hip magazine, website, retail stores and even a restaurant. “I could easily tell that the USA cartoons were kids’ stuff compared to what I watched from Japan. It made me feel proud and good for sure.”

Nakamura was so hooked on the sci-fi world of anime that he’s made a career of it.

“As a kid, before I knew it was called anime, I watched it nearly daily,” he says. “I watched television in the Los Angeles area, which had two Japanese channels. I believe both showed different anime shows daily.

“The robot ones were definitely my favorite, which then led to me watching ‘Transformers’ and ‘Robotech,’ which were serialized in English. It’s only nostalgic to talk about why I liked them, maybe it was because there was nothing else like it at the time.

“American robots were always buffoons, but the robots from Japan were incredibly heroic. Cartoons were the same. I was used to seeing Daffy Duck and Popeye, but a serious cartoon about robots with explosions and fighting wasn’t normal on American TV.”

Jeff Yang, the New York-based author and cultural expert who writes the popular “Asian Pop” column for the San Francisco Chronicle, had a similar experience growing up with anime – except he didn’t know it was from Japan.

“Interestingly, as an Asian American, I saw quite a bit of anime without knowing it,” he remembers. “Cousins of mine would visit from Taiwan and bring with them videotapes of ‘cartoons’ (that’s what they called them–pronouncing it something like ‘ka tong’) featuring giant robots, and my sister and I would eat ‘em up, even though our Chinese was pretty terrible. I only knew it as ‘cartoons from Taiwan,’ so it wasn’t even like I was aware the shows were produced in Japan.

“Later, of course, I realized that I’d been watching Great Mazinger and Mazinger Z, seminal mecha shows, blissfully ignorant of their cultural context.”

Kalani Reel, a Colorado fan who’s never attended an anime con, but who wrote and drew her senior thesis in college about anime, says she was hooked after she investigated all the buzz about anime.

“What I discovered was that there was a very different feel in anime from that of Western cartoons,” she notes. “Among other differences, the medium was treated much more cinematically, protagonists and antagonists had both good and evil sides, different shortcuts were taken in the storytelling, the pacing was set for different cultural expectations, and there was more emphasis on the ‘void’—the silence, the negative space of both the visual layouts and the timing, just to name a few.”

Reel’s intro-duction to anime was through the work of one of its current masters, Hayao Miyazaki, who’s most fa-mous in the U.S. for “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away.”

“I was watching “Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind” at a friend’s house in high school,” she says. “I didn’t really know what to think at the time. Now, of course, I’m a HUGE Miyazaki fan.”

But the original master of Japanese animation was most influenced by the original master of American animation.

Osamu Tezuka, the late manga, or comic, artist who’s considered the “god of anime” and the wellspring of what we know as anime today, was so entranced by the quality of Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature film, “Snow White,” that Tezuka watched the movie over and over 80 times, studying every moment panel-by-panel and marveling at the creativity of the Disney studio.

Born in 1928, Tezuka was on the path to becoming a doctor after World War II, when he began drawing a four-panel comic strip in a local newspaper. This led to drawing serialized storylines for book-length manga magazines. His titles were so popular they sold an unprecedented 400,000 copies each, and made him a superstar in Japan. He still earned his doctor’s license but he never practiced medicine.

Instead, he kept creating manga, and then pioneering anime, that struck the imagination of his Japanese audience as well as fans in the U.S.

He first drew “Tetsuwan Atomu,” better known in the U.S. as “Astro Boy,” in the early 1950s as a manga. When the anime ver-sion premiered in 1963, it was the first-ever animated series on Japanese television, and later, the first Japanese import cartoon to air on American TV sets.

He also created “Kimba the White Lion,” which aired in the 1960s and shared some similarities in character and scene years later (and without credit) with 1994 Disney’s “Lion King,” bringing Tezuka’s influence full circle after his death in 1989.

The impact of Tezuka’s work, and Astro Boy in particular, as pop culture ambassadors of the Japanese way of looking at and expressing their world, still reverberates today. Japanese animation would not be as advanced and intellectually far-reaching if it weren’t for Tezuka’s groundbreaking work.

Of the first wave of anime to cross over from Japan, Astro Boy, 8th Man and Speed Racer were all revived in the 1990s in new versions, a reflection of the fact that anime was starting to catch on as something more than Saturday morning cartoons in the U.S.

And the second wave of anime, reflecting themes of future societies, technology for good and bad and fantasy worlds mixed with everyday lives, caught the fancy of the current generation of fans.

Japanese sci-fi culture has infiltrated the American pop consciousness with both anime and with live-action TV shows. The Power Rangers, Pokemon, and even, in its own twisted way, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, helped introduce the idea of Japanese culture to action-hungry American kids.

In the 1990s, the Nickelodeon network began airing imported anime; on cable curious viewers were introduced to a gothic anime about vampire hunters, as well as sci-fi set in a devastated Tokyo of the future that was as compelling to watch as the sci-fi movie “Blade Runner.”

The development of VHS tapes and later, DVDs, also helped nurture this cult community of anime fans, with Western companies providing translations of some of the more popular titles from the East. This community met whenever they could, in anime fan clubs in school, and in larger conventions like the Star Trek and other sci-fi conventions, dedicated solely to anime and manga.

Nakamura credits anime in part for the current interest in Japanese culture in America. “Anime was one of the building blocks along with a host of other topics that led to Giant Robot,” he says. “Anime might be a window to a lot of other cultural imports from Japan for Americans. It’s led to topics such as language, samurai movies, good food, travel, and designer vinyl figures.”

Reel agrees: “I think it depends on the anime and the observation powers of those watching. For example, I like watching Detective Conan (since I like murder mysteries) and it takes place in present-day Japan. The cheesy bits (like the high-powered shoes, the ridiculous shrinking drugs, and the implausibility of accidentally running into so many murders) are what drives the story, and they are cross-culture conventions of mystery stories.

“But the backdrop is all Japanese—the bento boxes, the school uniforms, the kid from Osaka with a funny accent, the solution to puzzles that rely on a visual pun in kanji, the rural inns with futons and bathhouses, the really really bad English of their American characters.”

Yang adds that growing up with the original anime gave him status as a kid, and now Asian Americans can benefit as the purveyors of cool culture.
“As giantrobophilia broke out in the U.S. with Transformers and Go-Bots, I was able to pull out those original videotapes for friends and show them the real, original stuff, and that gave me schoolyard status,” he says.

“It’s interesting, because that definitely has not only carried over but blossomed today—now that anime and other Asian pop culture imports are ‘out of the closet’ as originating in Asia, Asian American kids often find themselves in a kind of hybrid dealer/guru role. They end up being a connection to get the ‘good stuff’ – authentic, original material – as well as a source of cultural and even linguistic expertise, translating and contextualizing stuff for peers.

“It’s really changed the dynamics of being Asian American. It’s, like, cool now to have dried squid in your lunchbox.”

That’s one inescapable side-effect of the popularity of anime in the U.S.: non-Asians are in the majority at Nan Desu Kan and other anime events, dressed as their favorite characters, and paying sometimes misguided tribute to Japanese culture.

When asked how they feel about non-Asian anime fans wearing “oriental” print bathrobes to a convention (or a Cherry Blossom Festival) and thinking they’re wearing kimono, both Yang and Nakamura say it’s a good sign of cross-cultural pollination.

“What you might be talking about is the superficial understanding and immersion into Japanese culture via what they see in anime,” says Nakamura. “It’s a cartoon, they’re dressing up like characters they’ve seen, or they’ve done secondary research and maybe went to Japan and bought some gear. It’s part of the cos-play (costume-play) scene as well. They’re dressing up in a costume.”

“I don’t think that these kids think they’re ‘turning Japanese’ per se,” says Yang. “Some may be unhealthily fascinated with the exotic aspects of Japanese culture and people. But the flip side is that Jpop is driving a greater degree of interest in learning Japanese than ever before, and traveling there. I can’t really see the downside to that.”

COS-PLAY short for “costume play” describes the performing art behavior of acting like a character and wearing a corresponding costume. In society, interactions of cosplay behavior form a subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, tokusatsu, comic books, video games, and fantasy movies.

Nan Desu Kan The 12th Annual Colorado Anime Convention
WHEN September 12-14
WHERE Marriot DTC, 4900 S Syracuse St
HOW MUCH $50 weekend pass at the door
MORE INFO www.ndkdenver.org
WHAT TO EXPECT Since 1996, Nan Desu Kan (NDK) has provided a safe, friendly environment for people of all ages to enjoy and share their passion for Japanese animation and culture. It was started as a get-together for a small group of fanatics, but in the years since the first NDK, anime has become a cultural force in the U.S., winning an Academy Award in 2002 (for Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”) and exploding into a video business earning hundreds of millions of dollars.

The convention is now a non-profit organization and the largest anime event in the region, drawing 5,300 fans of all ages last year, many dressed as their favorite characters. Organizers expect 6,000 this year. Nan Desu Kan presents a variety of programming including panels, costume contests, trivia contests, “cosplay chess” (live-action chess played by characters in costume), appearances by anime artists and voice stars, performances, karaoke and screenings of anime 24 hours a day.

A highlight of the convention will be a concert in the Main Events room on Friday, with Portland-based, bi-racial rock band The Slants, formed by an Asian American musician who was a fan of 1980s synth-pop bands such as Depeche Mode, New Order and Joy Division.

Written By Gil Asakawa
Asian Avenue magazine