I’ve had this short interview with Shoko Nakagawa at Anime Expo 2008 from Anime Genesis in my Firefox tab queue for a number of weeks, but I finally got around to clicking play this evening.
If Japanese otaku fandom is a bit under the radar for you, Nakagawa-san’s name has garnered a lot of attention in the past couple years. Besides obviously singing the intro theme to Gainax’s Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, “Shokotan” (as many fans call her) is notorious for calling herself an otaku (or, well, “not really”). Whether or not she cares about authenticity, she runs a blog on which she at least sometimes posts about otakudom. Patrick Macias wrote up an article about her for the Japan Times at the beginning of this year if you’re interested in reading that here.
The blog must be mentioned, since it caused a stir on 2channel, but particularly because in the Anime Genesis interview above, she draws a connection between blogging, the Japanese otaku community, and the contemporary reception of otaku in Japan. If you were too lazy to watch, the translation reads, “Times have changed and the otaku culture is certainly more accepted in Japan right now, because everyone blogs and there are community sites where you can share your interests with other people.” I’m not so certain if the public sentiment toward otaku has improved because of blogging. But it seems that Nakagawa-san suggests at minimum a stronger, maybe even reestablished, sense of community among otaku in Japan, certainly post-Miyazaki. Obviously there’s been a huge cultural shift in otaku habits to the Internet, particularly at 2channel. However, I can’t really judge the relative impact of the Internet on Japanese fandom, mainly due to the dichotomy between blogging and general Internet communities and where 1) discussion, 2) critique, and 3) socializing occurs.
The Internet has also visibly helped out the American fandom in solidifying regional bases and connecting fans on a wider scale across the nation (which of course is much larger than Japan). But my thought is whether the American fandom needs anime bloggers. Japan for the most part lacks any events similar to American anime conventions, so I can understand how blogs have aided in the dissemination of ideas for otaku. However, anime conventions in the United States were created for the explicit purpose of connecting fans to watch and discuss Japanese animation. As a lot of the fandom established headquarters on the Internet, we saw the convention circuit explode with new faces and names, as staff circles could be more easily formed and marketing of events more easily announced. But what has blogging as a medium done for the American fandom?
First, I must distinguish between the mediums over which fans communicate. Basically, there exist forums and blogs, which serve different purposes: the former to foster discussion, the latter stimulate long-form writing. In theory, blogging would have replaced fanzine articles. But I’m not so sure that it has. In my limited experience of looking at anime blogs, I see more articles relates to episode-centric impressions than anything else, but how many times does this observation have to be repeated?
One thing we certainly don’t see much of anymore is fansites. The fall of Geocities possibly heralds the end of that form of fan-propelled curation of information. But with free services like blogs replacing services like web hosting, we won’t see much more of the intense excavation of series as we did with fansites, on which the creators wrote as much as possible about one (or more) series. The modern equivalent of this is Wikipedia, which I suppose might make fansites pointless.
But if blogs aren’t going to connect fans to information, or at least critique, then I’m not so sure that blogs matter in the long run to the anime fandom. Or is it really that communication as a fan activity has decreased as well? It seems at modern conventions we see a minority of discussion about anime, with more focus spent on masquerades or what have you (this observation has also been beaten into the ground). But if panels are the only surviving artifact of fans sitting in a room talking about anime, then perhaps the fandom is slowly breaking apart, returning to a bunch of people in the same country watching the same shows. At the same time, though, American fandom hasn’t suffered from the social affects (ie., 義理) as has the Japanese fandom (here I blatantly mean the repercussions of Miyazaki in 1989). Then there’s also the question of how many fans actually use blogs or read them at all.
Not many is my assumption.
I think your perspective is flipped. Blogging is akin to fan sites for the consumer mode, as I read what you’re saying. In other words, what is this need you are looking to satisfy? You never defined it and it’s pretty critical IMO.
In my experience,fan blogging is often more for bloggers than for readers of blogs. It’s a tricky thing that probably cannot be cleanly delineated using these frameworks. Where does your Facebook stops being about you and start being about your opinions on something you wrote about, for example? Blogging combines both a social networking aspect and a personal expression aspect. Of course, some blogs go all the way and are very formal, where as other blogs read more like a diary of what anime he or she saw today. Most are in between.
I would compare blogging akin to fan art, fan fiction, and a modern equivalent to doujinshi, or fanzines. The reason why a lot of anime blogs do episodic review is a nature of the blog medium and not so much a matter of content, (Or perhaps it’s a result of people watching anime episodically…this makes sense considering the evolution of anime consumption, the rise of blogging, and growth of anime’s popularity) And I think functionally, looking at the motivating factors of fan blogs together with its place in the overall picture of fandom, blogs are what fanzines are becoming thanks to the internet.
In other words, you could ask the same question: does anime fandom need fan art? Fan fiction? Conventions? Probably not. But I believe that’s missing the whole point.
Yeah, the article was very nebulous, but I wanted to draw a line between the formation of communities around critique in both the Japanese and American sides of the fandom. Problem 1: they’re not really comparable.
I definitely wouldn’t place blogging alonside fan art, fiction, etc., because I want to see blogging as a continuation of the discussion/discourse that “makes” the fandom. Problem 2: Blogging never evolved to be that discussion (only occasionally).
I think I get what you’re saying–so where’s the 2ch on the English-language internet right? I mean, there is 4chan (which still started off as a 2ch clone), and many others going way back to rec.arts.misc.anime, science fiction conventions and university anime clubs.
But I think as with any community, the underlying mode of communication isn’t critique or any one thing but just the social aspect of any natural-forming community. The fact that a community exists to critique for a certain anime, and it exists for that reason, doesn’t mean the community itself is any more or less different than any other group of people.
It’s important to note that even with 2ch, it’s hardly where everything happens. It’s just one of the most popular places. My impression is that people in Japan do more or less the same stuff we do on the internet.
I think that it helps that there are multiple areas for communication going on that point as well, since it allows for people who use different means (forums, blogs, social networking sites) to both give and receive information, if just to get your thoughts out there or plan meet-ups in the future.
The post makes me feel like some forums now are where you want blogs to be, if it at least being a means for disseminating information. But you can always link to a blog from a forum, and vice versa. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive in trying to get the same thing across.
Glad you used Shokotan as an example because he exemplifies how to succeed at blogging: Non-stop updates, dozens per day. This keeps her audience jumping and growing. Other blog sites have full staffs to do this. Most of us stand alone. Shokotan was superb at AX 2008 and I’m sire Morning Musume will be even greater at AX 2009!
I think the non-stop update thing only works if you are the reason why your readers are coming to your blog, as in, if you are a celebrity.
Oops, hit reply too soon. A lot of the posts Shokotan makes are pretty much casual 1-liners. It is more like a personal microblogging thing rather than actual, informative blogging (but she writes that too). Again, it depends on what you have going to determine how much and frequent you should be posting.
At the same time, though, American fandom hasn’t suffered from the social affects (ie., 義理) as has the Japanese fandom (here I blatantly mean the repercussions of Miyazaki in 1989).
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. Even assuming you’re referring to “social effects,” what precisely are you referring to? Also, 義理 far from clarifies your point; it can refer to anything from the sense of duty a samurai has for his master to the social obligation women have to make chocolates for men they may not even like on Valentine’s Day. Moreover, I’m not sure how it relates to Miyazaki or his reception in Japan.
Well, just to clarify, I wrote “social affects,” meaning the emotional stage of society at large. In the US, there hasn’t been widespread disapproval of the otaku subculture; however, in Japan, otaku and even the basic use of the term were ostracized after the MIyazaki incident. I think the confusion might lie in my use of “affect” as a noun.