The themes of war and time are intertwined in unique ways in Japanese culture, freighted as that nation is with the multiple legacies of World War II: the country's militarization, its victories and defeats, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the uneasy pacifism imposed by the victors. Delving into topics ranging from the production of wartime propaganda to the multimedia adaptations of romance narrative, contributors to the fourth volume in the Mechademia series address the political, cultural, and technological continuum between war and the everyday time of orderly social productivity...

Manga and anime inspire a wide range of creative activities for fans: blogging and contributing to databases, making elaborate cosplay costumes, producing dojinshi (amateur) manga and scanlations, and engaging in fansubbing and DIY animation. Indeed, fans can no longer be considered passive consumers of popular culture easily duped by corporations and their industrial-capitalist ideologies. They are now more accurately described as users, in whose hands cultural commodities can provide instant gratification but also need to be understood as creative spaces that can be inhabited,...

Lines of Sight--the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga--explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art--from scroll paintings to superflat--challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and...

Fetish Style traces the history, forms and tendencies of sub-cultural fashions that are popular in both mainstream and alternative fashion cultures.

Presenting the world of subcultural fetish clothing design in all of its richness and beauty, this book explores the idea of fetish as subversive and repressive as reflected in clothing choices in people of all ages and cultures. Linking the fetishistic aspects of contemporary culture with everyday clothing as dictated by fashion and merchandizing, Fetish Style presents a fascinating study of historical as well as 21st...

Known as the "Walt Disney of Japan" it is no surprise that Tezuka Osamu is still the best-known manga creator to Western fans. Current scholarship has uncovered the profound complexity and ambiguity not only of his work but of the man, the artist, and his life--dismantling his position as the god of manga.

Contributors to this volume of Mechademia--a series devoted to creative and critical work on anime, manga, and the fan arts--analyze Tezuka and his complicated approaches toward life and nonlife on earth, as well as his effect on the lives of other manga artists....

If the source of manga and anime is physically located in Japan, the temptation for many critics and scholars is to ask what aspects of Japanese culture and history gave rise to these media. This ninth volume of Mechademia--an annual collection of critical work on anime and manga--challenges the tendency to answer the question of origins by reductively generalizing and essentializing "Japaneseness."

The essays brought together in Mechademia 9 lead us to understand the extent to which "Japan" might be seen as an idea generated by anime, manga, and other texts...

Mechademia 10 revolves around a maelstrom of events: the devastation of 3/11--the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor crises--and the ongoing environmental disasters that have recently overtaken Japan. Because anime and manga have long proposed (and illustrated) alternative worlds--some created after catastrophes--it is fitting that this volume should consider this propensity for "world renewal."

Individual essays range widely, from a poetic and personal reflection on the ritual of toro nagashi (the lighting of floating paper lanterns that has traditionally...