Animation and Manga: New Vision and Imagination

Three professors of different universities, all with profound knowledge about animation and manga, were invited to Soochow University on May 6^th as part of the event “2016 World Book Day: the Dawn of Anime and Manga” to introduce the intriguing charm of this rising pop culture.

Professor Zheng-Jia Tsai of the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, had his fortuitous encounter with Japanese manga when he was once frustrated by his students’ lack of interest in his class titled Study on Japanese Politics and Economy. His curiosity about Japanese manga was aroused in a subway train in Japan where a white-collar worker was reading one of the manga magazines. After reading them by himself, Tsai found out that lots of serious issues in current-day Japan have been the themes of the manga, such as “Like Shooting Stars in the Twilight,“ which discusses the issue of aging population, “Politics in the Forefront,” which reveals the ugly truth of Japanese politics, and “Section Chief Kōsaku Shima,” which depicts Japan’s corporate culture with a mockery of Panasonic. In addition to serving as an entertainment, Tsai observed, Japanese manga have brought up and scrutinized various political, economic and cultural issues in Japan in a much more appealing way.

As a Japanese anime and manga maniac who started to buy and read manga at the age of seven, Assistant Professor Tetsuro Sumida of the Department of Japanese, Soochow University, talked about the difficulties in translating these manga stories due to cultural differences. For example, the role language (Yakuwarigo) in Japanese, where sets of spoken language features are associated with particular character types, will distinguish how an old man and a tough guy call themselves. And the honorific language in Japanese also shows nuances in conversations, just as in “Slamdunk,” the famous manga of high school basketball, where the funny protagonist uses honorific speech to the girl he likes but has never done so to his coach, showing his unconventional personality. These are intricate details unfortunately lost in their Chinese translation.

Assistant Professor Wen-Ting Hsu of the Institute of Applied Arts, National Chiao Tung University, analyzed how cartoons and comics have influenced contemporary art like conceptual art Dadaism, the highly commercialized pop art (led by artist Andy Warhol), and new pop art advocated by artist Jeff Koons. Hsu also explained how cartoons and comics like Snoopy, the Simpsons or Spongebob Squarepants, through the hands of trend-leading artists like KAWS, Takashi Murakami and Roy Lichtenstein, are appropriated, transformed, extracted and recreated into arts. 

The three speeches have provided new perspectives to understand the culture of animation and manga in more depth and width. Soochow University’s library also plans to hold a national conference on this subject field in May, 2017, to promote its library resources and academic research.