Stolen from Kevo’s blog.

I presented three panels this year (as well as participated in two others). I had a great turn out on Friday and Saturday, and an average turn-out on Sunday (though pretty good for a 9:00am panel on Day 3!).

The talks were:

1. Uncool Japan: The Trials & Tribulations of Japanese Pop Culture (Friday)

Click for larger image.

2. A Survey of Anime Opening & Ending Themes (Saturday)

Click for larger image.

3. Anime Tune-Up (Sunday)

And then two more that I participated in:

4. Benu’s Violent Torpedo Of Moe (I was a guest on this live podcast. / Friday)

5. Anime/Manga Studies Academic Symposium Open Session 4 (I gave a research presentation on Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid. / Sunday)

If you were able to attend any of the following, I would really appreciate feedback! Feel free to post a comment here, or email me at alexleavitt@gmail.com.

Hope to see everyone next year! I’ll probably be checking out the other cons on the West Coast as well, so if you have any to recommend, email me or ping me on Twitter (@alexleavitt).

All the info you need and the RSVP form can be found here.

We really want to meet people local to LA, but we’d love to meet new people going to the con anyway, so we have some friends to hang out with. Check out the meetup page!

Friday, July 1
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Keynote Address: Prof. Ian Condry (Comparative Media Studies, MIT)

3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Roundtable Discussion 1
Theoretical perspectives on Japanese visual culture

* Samantha Close (University of California, Irvine)
* Amanda Landa (University of Texas at Austin)
* Gino Zarrinfar (University of Hawaii Manoa)

8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Open Session 1

Andrea Gilroy (University of Oregon)
* This place is a nightmare: Globalization as horror in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu

Casey Brienza (University of Cambridge)
* Manga Revolution or logical evolution? Field theory on the rise and
demise of Tokyopop’s U.S. publishing programme

Saturday, July 2

12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Open Session 2

Sandra Aragona (Claremont Graduate University)
Sherrie Bakelar (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
* Between Yasashii and Bushido: The balancing power of warrior mothers in anime

Annie Manion (University of Southern California)
* Modernity and pre-war Japanese animation

* Deborah Scally (Southern Methodist University)
Cogito, ergo anime: Some thoughts on using anime and manga in the classroom

3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Open Session 3

Paul Cheng (University of California, Riverside)
* History, memory and aesthetics in animation: Isao Takahata’s Grave
of the Fireflies

Kukhee Choo (Tulane University)
* “Cool Japan”: Soft power in the 21st century

Gino Zarrinfar (University of Hawaii Manoa)
* The Guyver and societies of control

Sunday, July 3

10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Open Session 4

Samantha Close (University of California, Irvine)
* Real ninjas make AMV’s! Anime through the eyes of vidders

Northrop Davis (University of South Carolina)
* Title to be confirmed

Forrest Greenwood (University of Southern California)
* “Past fungibility”: Examining the speculative value of history in the doujin works of Takeshi Nogami

Alex Leavitt (University of Southern California)
* “Open-source culture”" and the cult of Hatsune Miku [this one is mine!]

3:30pm -4:30pm
Roundtable Discussion 2

Teaching, writing and thinking about anime/manga: New directions, new
opportunities

* Northrop Davis (University of South Carolina)
* Druann Pagliassotti (California Lutheran University)
* Kim Rudolph (University of Oklahoma)
* Deborah Scally (Southern Methodist University)

4:30pm – 5:00pm
Closing Remarks

Writing about otaku: Lessons from fandom, academia, and beyond
Lawrence Eng (Anime and Manga Research Circle)

This year at Anime Expo in Los Angeles, CA (where I’ve recently relocated for my PhD program), I’ll be giving a handful of panel talks. Additionally, I’m also presenting during the new AX Academic Symposium. Check out my schedule below, and feel free to swing by and say Hi!

BUT before we get to the schedule, here’s an interesting bit of information regarding one of the panels I submitted called “Scans, Trans, and Fans: A Closer Look at Piracy.” It was rejected by Anime Expo, but on unique grounds: “Unfortunately we have to deny this panel because we feel that the topic of fansubbing and scanlations will not be suitable for AX. We do not endorse these activities and have a zero-tolerance policy on even the slightest advocation of such practices. We hope you understand.” Pretty unexpected response, but valid nonetheless. One of the issues I was grappling with was an ethical conflict between presenting research and insights about the culture of piracy in the anime and manga fandoms while also basically teaching people how to pirate in those explanations. (Of course, the irony is that Crunchyroll will probably make a big appearance at AX, and we all know that while Crunchyroll promotes their business practices in reaction to piracy as a market failure, the company did start off distributing pirated content.) I’m not complaining about this outcome — though I would have loved to present this topic to the AX community — but I thought I’d share because it’s an interesting lens into the inner workings of the anime industry and how conventions play a role within that industry.

P.S. — If you’re interested, here’s the description of the piracy panel I submitted: The anime industry has borne the weight of critics against fan distribution of anime and manga over a number of decades, so this panel presents a chance to look closer at the details of the (illegal) translation, sharing, and globalization of Japanese popular media. When did this all start? Did it really help popularize the titles we know and love today? We’ll look at the early history of tape trading and fansubs, the market for bootlegs, how fansubs and scanlations took off online, what’s hurting the industry today, and some new initiatives in Japan that embrace aspects of sharing free media.

Anyway, on to the schedule:

Friday July 1

Uncool Japan: The Trials & Tribulations of Japanese Pop Culture
6:30 pm in LP4
[Note: A panel I've presented before, but this time from the critical perspective of "uncool" otaku culture.]
While fans in America consider Japan a pop culture mecca, otaku remain undesirable in Japan. This panel looks at the history and current developments around otaku and the “Japan Cool”-ification of Japanese media abroad. We’ll look at the history of the fandom and today’s anime consumer culture of Comiket, moé girls, and Akihabara; the Japanese government’s attempts to regulate otaku culture at home while promoting it internationally; and the struggles of anime trying to survive abroad. The panel also uses anime and manga about otaku as a lens for understanding these cultural issues.

Saturday July 2

Anime Intro & Ending Themes
10:30am in LP5
[Note: The usual and polished anime theme panel I've done at Anime Boston, Otakon, and waaay back at Anime Expo 2009.]
When we watch anime, our minds glaze over the animation that begins and ends our favorite series. But anime intros and outros are more important than you think! These small clips help sell series, promote bands, summarize plots, and emphasize important details. We’ll show many of the best and worst anime intro and ending themes on the market, the trends that flow through these promotional songs, and their importance in the context of anime’s history and popularity.

Sunday July 3

Anime Tune-Up
9:00am in LP5
[Note: This is a panel I tried out at Anime Boston 2011 for the con's musical theme, but I decided to bring it back for Anime Expo because people seemed to like it.]
Animation in anime comes in many styles, and a good lens to look at them is in anime about music. This panel takes a look at the whole gamut of musical anime — Beck, Nodame Cantibile, NANA, To-Y, Gravitation, and many more — to see what musical anime reveals about animation, the importance of precise animation (and how animators tend to ignore it), the creation of “fake” bands and songs, and how music works in the adaptation of manga to anime.

“Open-Source Culture” and the Cult of Hatsune Miku
(Academic Symposium Presentation)
TBD – sometime in the afternoon
An academic analysis of Vocaloid as a case study of peer production in the creative industries.

Last week on Friday, I was featured on In Media Res, an experimental academic publishing platform for short-form media-centric pieces from academics related to research questions and issues on which they’re currently working.

I’ve been doing some work on the Vocaloid franchise recently, and so I put up an article on Hatsune Miku and Japanese/global identity. You can check out the article here: The Global Cult(ure) of Hatsune Miku

This is the first bit of scholarship that I’ve written on the subject, with a bunch more opportunities coming in the next few months. I’ll be presenting a larger investigation of “open-source culture” and the Vocaloid franchise at Media in Transition 7 in a couple weeks as well as at a preconference for the International Communication Association conference later this month. Also, I’ll be presenting a similar paper at Anime Expo at the beginning of July: if you’re in LA, come by and say hello!

So, now that our staff at the Department of Alchemy has returned from their much-needed period of hibernation, we’ll be bringing a lot more content to the blog in the next few weeks. Said content will most likely be encapsulated by the following three categories:

First, now that the summer convention season has (for the most part) ended on the East Coast, we’ll be presenting retrospectives on Katsucon, Anime Boston, Anime Expo, and Otakon as well as a few critical thoughts and theories on the contemporary fandom.

Second: audio. We’ve been recording a lot of panel content, which will slowly be thrown into an mp3 format for your listening pleasure.

Finally, and more experimentally, Alex has decided to compose reminiscent articles about his four-month experience living in Kyoto (since he never wrote them while in Japan). Many stories about delicious food, impromptu trips to rural temples via ママチャリ, and of course thousands of photographs.

Have a keen interest in any of these topics? Shout-outs in the comments are certainly welcome. ]]> http://doalchemy.org/2009/07/%e6%ac%a1%e3%81%ae%e3%81%93%e3%81%a8%e3%81%af%e3%80%82%e3%80%82%e3%80%82/feed/ 0 http://doalchemy.org/2009/07/small-update-from-anime-expo/ http://doalchemy.org/2009/07/small-update-from-anime-expo/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:55:32 +0000 Alex Leavitt http://doalchemy.org/?p=649 Continue reading →]]>

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from fans that attended my panels at Anime Expo 2009. Thanks again to everyone that attended!

If you didn’t get to attend, there may be more content available online in the near future. I was approached by Anime News Network, Patrick Macias, and a few other blogs/shows about interviews, so we’ll see where those go.

Also, the Anime Instrumentality Blog has published three articles covering the Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes panel. While the trilogy doesn’t cover every detail of the panel, and forgets one or two of the smaller points I wanted to stress (or just show an opening for humor), it’s definitely a thorough reproduction of the panel for those that couldn’t make it out to Los Angeles. The articles are: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Once again, thank you everyone for attending the four panels on which I spoke at Anime Expo 2009. If you’ll be at Otakon next weekend, check out my panels there!

Anime Expo was awesome, hands down. If I have panels accepted next year, I will make an effort to return, definitely. And there are many critical comments I can make about Anime Expo, such as the relationship between industry and fans, or the large size of the convention as justification for its importance (though in my opinion it shouldn’t have to be). Today, I’m going to focus on the Anime Expo dealers’ room.

Anime Expo’s dealers’ room is gigantic. If you’ve ever been limited to East Coast conventions, I would estimate its size to be slightly bigger than that of Otakon. For illustration, it took me a half-hour to browse through one-third of the floor, and I only stopped at two booths for a maximum of three minutes each.

Because Anime Expo is an industry convention (versus a “by fans for fans” convention), the dealers’ room also somewhat resembles Japanese industry conventions, such as Tokyo Game Show. A lot of booths exist just to advertise wares, such as this Astroy Boy movie booth. Still, while a small number of booths boasted walls of gigantic placards, Anime Expo’s room is littered with ordinary booths that hawk anime, manga, and cat ears.

I’m honestly not one of those junkies who stalk out the dealers’ room on the first day of the con, constantly returning to check up on discounted prices, lurking in the shadows to pounce on that ultra rare figure that I hid in the back corner to elude the price-sniffing of others. I buy a lot of my anime and manga online. In the past, I made minimal effort to visit Tokyo Kid, the anime store in Harvard Square. Usually, I know what I want, and I go online to find it cheaply.

Of course, nowadays with the price of DVDs and books on the decline (you can find videos on RightStuf.com for $10 or less, or books on Amazon for at least 25% off), dealer’s rooms are trying to keep up. On most Sundays the dealers scream at the top of their lungs to make sure every fan becomes aware of their “Buy 1 manga, get 5 free!” bargain. Still, after paying $50+ dollars for the convention (though I haven’t done that in a few years, due to panels), I honestly don’t want to waste a few hours in the dealer’s room only to realize that they don’t have what I want to read. Once in a while, I’ll find a great deal (like all twelve volumes of Tezuka’s “Phoenix” manga for $100 at Anime Boston), but otherwise, why can’t I just find things I want online? I’m not into serendipitous buying sprees after all.

At Anime Expo, I bought only one thing in the dealers’ room (besides an omiyage poster in the Artists’ Alley): a copy of Tezuka’s “Swallowing the Earth,” published recently by Digital Manga. Truthfully, I only grabbed it because I got an in-the-last-15-minutes discount of $20. Otherwise, I looked around at every booth, but bought nothing.

However, I came home with a lot of anime-related booty. The cause? Book Off.

I wrote in an article last week about my experiences at the Book Off in New York City and how it’s easy to find manga on the cheap, usually for $1 per volume. While at Anime Expo, I had the privilege of staying with the illustrious Deb Aoki, writer and reviewer of the About.com manga section. On Saturday afternoon, she drove me and a few writers over at Japanator.com to one of the Book Offs in Los Angeles. While not as large as the NY Book Off, I still picked up a number of intriguing items (all of them in Japanese).

First, I found two not-so-expensive “Groundwork of Evangelion” art books. As you can see from the scanned images, they were Volumes 2 and 3, and I’m not so sure where I should pick up Volume 1, but (again, looking at the scans) I only spent $12.50 and $15.00 respectively. Awesome! Especially when the MSRP of these two books is ¥2500 and ¥3000 (about $25 and $30, though these would easily sell in the dealer’s room for $45+). The books are practically new — only the edges are slightly rough — and the images inside (all production sketches with a few color illustrations in the front) will make any Eva fanboy cream his pants.

The rest of the books I picked up were only $1 each. Pretty awesome finds.

First, I picked up some manga. As I mentioned in that previous article, buying manga at Book Off is a bit difficult, not only because it’s hard to find the comics by their publisher, but also if you haven’t done any research into the comics, you’re not necessarily sure with what reading level you’re challenging yourself. However, browsing through the titles, I happened upon School Rumble, a series that I’ve never read or seen, but one that has been constantly pimped to me by a number of reliable friends. After examining the content, I decided to pick up the first four volumes (there were about a dozen there, but #5 was missing).

Next, hidden among the art book section, I found Katsuhiro Otomo’s early works Anthology. The 250-page, large-size book features about a half-dozen of Otomo’s shorter stories that were never published in English (and, according to Deb, never will be, because Otomo doesn’t like his works localized, apparently). The art is amazing, and while I’ve been looking for good copies of the English translations of the Akira manga for months, it’s certainly a nice supplement.

Finally, also among the art books, I found this $1 piece of curated information on the history and development of anime in Japan. The title reads, “The New Conquering the World Japanese Culture: Japan’s Anime.” This is pretty much the book that needs to be published in America, because it’s a really interesting primer (with hundreds of large, color images!) for any type of anime fan that doesn’t know the basic history of Japanese animation. The text covers a lot of the major players, including Miyazaki, Tezuka, Otomo, Oshii, and Anno, and also provides good context for the commercial markets of kids’ anime and toys. One chapter focuses dually on the evolution of robots and cute girls in anime. The section that convinced me to purchase the book (besides the $1 price tag), though, was the end of the compilation, which provides a lot of information on the history of anime from 1917 to 2003 (the publication date), the digital creation of anime, and particularly the relationship between anime and the television studios that produced them. The last few pages present a nice timeline of anime on television starting with Astro Boy in 1963. The opportunity to look at anime history graphically really hits home the fact that, OMG, there’s a lot of anime out there.

If I have the time in the near future, I’m going to upload a LOT of scans from this book and attempt to translate what I can.

In total, I spent less than $40 at Book Off. Of course, you need to know Japanese to purchase these and actually comprehend them, but still… $40 for 5 volumes of manga and 3 rather impressive texts. And so I return to the thought imposed on the beginning of this article: Is there a future for anime and manga in convention dealers’ rooms? Basically, the answer will always be Yes. But it may be true that the stronghold that dealers’ rooms had on fans in conventions from the 1990s has almost certainly weakened today. Some of this might be attributed to fans not purchasing series after they watch fansubs or read scanlations, but also, with Netflix, Amazon, and other cheap alternatives, fans can own media for much less than in the past. No wonder the American industry is slipping. And with streaming websites that provide free episodes to fans online… Really, how many fans are going to buy the DVDs after they watch it once? Perhaps the real question might be: What kind of value are fans assigning to the media the consume? Where does the line of rewatchability exist for modern anime fans that do not possess knowledge of “anime greats,” like Oshii and Kon, like Anno and Ishiguro? And what might the breakdown be between the consumption of anime and manga versus other things, like cat ears, figurines, and other merchandise being sold in modern exhibition halls?

Since I was in Los Angeles for Anime Expo, I decided to spend at least one day at the University of California at Riverside, which houses the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, & Utopian Literature. Inside the Eaton Collection lies a stockpile of 900 boxes of fandom history, called the Fred Patten Collection on Science Fiction and Animation.

If you don’t know much about the early history of the American anime fandom, Fred Patten almost “officially” started it when he founded the Cartoon Fantasy Organization in 1977. Many Japanese companies, artists, and directors contacted Fred over the years, and through the C/FO he, along with many other fans, initiated the processes that would give birth to our contemporary anime industry. Unfortunately, Fred had a stroke in 2005, after which his friends boxed up all of his accumulated fandom memorabilia and sent them to UC Riverside’s Rivera Library special collections department. If you want to find out more about Fred or the early years of the fandom, go to Amazon and pick up Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews.

Assuming that Fred’s collection would be fairly organized and comprised of mainly English fan works, I arrived this morning at UC Riverside (after a three-hour bus ride) to scope out the collection for potential future research. I spent the entire day looking through only ten boxes of documents (and occasionally antique toys and other items of historic interest). Half my time was spent slogging through hundreds of ads that ordinary fans would automatically toss into the trash, but it seems that Fred kept everything anime-related that he ever encountered. However, I did encounter a number of fundamental fanzines, specifically those of the original C/FO chapter as well as of other sub-chapters, along with various old convention booklets. Surprisingly, Fred also possessed a large hoard of documents, pictures, cels, and toys from Japan, some that he probably bought and others most likely sent to him. A prize for the biggest surprise of the day goes directly to the business itinerary for Osamu Tezuka’s visit to the United States in 1980.

I called this article Trials and Tribulations because the Fred Patten collection is a saving grace for any fans interested in studying/researching the American (and Japanese) anime/manga/etc. fandom, but also remains quite cumbersome to approach. The collection is barely archived. Any attempt to find a specific item related to anime or manga requires searching through at least thirty boxes of thousands of papers. Apparently at least 80% of the donated collection has yet to even be touched or examined by the library’s archivists.

Still, I enjoyed my time searching through those ten boxes. I took about 300 pictures, though I will not post them online. I am considering approaching Fred to ask if I can return in the future to scan the booklets and fanzines to add to the Otaku Archive, maybe building this project up to a fully-fledged website as well. If you’re in the LA area, email the library staff and drop by the collection some day. If you’re too far, try to satisfy yourself with some of the gems I’ve photographed above.

We at the Department of Alchemy (aka. Alex) would like to thank everyone who decided to come out for our/my panels this weekend at Anime Expo 2009. All two of our panels (as well as the two academic panels in which the Department participated) were thoroughly attended! The Problem with Otaku (photographed above) purportedly held more con-goers than the Crunchyroll panel in the previous one-hour time slot! Sorry that the panel had to be cut off; the presentation held a bit too much information. Also, after being featured in AnimeEXPOSURE (Anime Expo’s official newsletter) on Friday as a highlighted panel to attend, Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes featured a full panel room, with a line extending around the bend in the hallway! Rumor has it that about two dozen people were even turned away, since as we neared about 400 members in the audience the fire code seemed about to be breached (though we still had a good number of people lining the back wall and even sitting on the floor in front). Unfortunately, our camera equipment wasn’t working during the panel, so we couldn’t nab a cool snapshot.

For those who attended the OP/ED panel, the list of videos shown is listed below. Thanks again for coming to see us! Remember, we’ll be speaking again at Otakon in two weeks! Check out our three panels:

1) Without Watching the Anime: Opening and Ending Themes – Sunday at 10:15 am in Panel 3
2) The Impact of Evangelion – Saturday at 9:00 am in Panel 1
3) Anime & Manga Studies – Saturday at 11:30 am in Panel 1

So, on to that list:

- Astro Boy 1963, English & Japanese versions [opening]
- Space Battleship Yamato, Japanese [opening]
- Mazinger Z, Japanese & English [opening]
- Big O, Japanese [opening]
- Serial Experiments Lain, Japanese [opening]
- Cutie Honey 1973, Japanese [opening]
- Cutie Honey: Flash, Japanese [opening]
- RE: Cutie Honey, Japanese [opening]
- Honey & Clover, Japanese [ending]
- Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, Japanese [opening]
- Lucky Star, Japanese [ending, episode 14]
- Neon Genesis Evangelion, Japanese [opening & opening during end of episode 26]
- Daicon 4, Japanese
- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Japanese [opening & dancing to the opening in Akihabara]
- NANA, Japanese [ad promoting opening/ending music]
- Cowboy Bebop, English [opening]
- Gurren Lagann, Japanese [opening, episode 4 & 24]
- Macross: Do You Remember Love, Japanese [ending]
- One Piece, Japanese & English [opening]
- Honey & Clover, Japanese [opening]
- Nodame Cantabile, Japanese [opening]
- Eden of the East, Japanese [closing & opening]