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.

If you have had no experience with Tezuka’s Black Jack, the silent man with a stitched face is an unlicensed doctor and surgeon who travels around Japan (and sometimes the world) to operate on the most difficult medical cases imaginable. Throughout his travels he establishes many friendships and encounters just as many if not more enemies.

Most manga follows a certain form: four-panel, short story, or long format; while the Black Jack manga is compiled into large volumes in Vertical’s release, short stories comprise the tale’s format. The comics magazine Weekly Champion serialized Tezuka’s set of short medical adventures for the length of a decade from 1973 to 1983. Originally, each serialization contained one of the stories, so the authentic experience of waiting X weeks before the next issue arrived is lost, but it’s not a bad consequence that English readers can read a number of stories in one go. Nonetheless, if you pick up a few of Vertical’s volumes and read them in one sitting, the narrative structure of each story may seem repetitive. However, Tezuka throws in surprises every few chapters, so it fails to ever become a boring read. In the long run of his manga production, Black Jack appears relatively late in Tezuka’s career, so the stories and art are respectively well developed.

Picking up the physical text, the reader might notice that Vertical’s paperback is no ordinary release. The colors, texture, and overall presentation of Black Jack’s fifth volume barely resembles the usual standard of manga out there on the market (flimsy pages and a shiny cover). Instead, Vertical provides an excellent physical book, with a rough cover that helps it stay in the reader’s hands (and doesn’t make your fingers sweat). The cover even flaunts a concrete indent that creates the allusion of the text’s “skin” being pulled back to reveal the bodily innards of the medical mysteries that await. The cover also shows off a few frames of the original Japanese manga (which with respect to the fifth volume is actually a spoiler!). Finally, the text reads right to left in a respectful, unflipped format to retain the original Japanese layout (which means, of course, that a humorous note in the “front” of the book notifies the reader of the design). In a way, it seems that Vertical attempts to create a sort of hipster manga that a reader can play off as a adult novel on the morning commute to work; but really, it’s basically a beautiful release.

In terms of the fifth volume in the set, Black Jack is entirely approachable by anyone, since the comic is comprised of individual stories. However, characters reappear in the fifth volume from earlier chapters, so I will reiterate my suggestion to pick up at least the first volume before reading the fifth. Actually, I would recommend reading Volume 1 through 4 at the outset if you can afford it. I did in fact read Volume 5 before Volume 1, which produced a very interesting surprise when I learned of the origins of Black Jack’s tiny assistant, Pinoko (illustrated above), which were explained in the earliest chapters of the first volume! Nevertheless, feel free to pick up Volume 5 before anything else, because the stories are just as good throughout.

In terms of the content of the fifth installment, Tezuka makes his stories as interesting as possible (or as unbelievable, given your preferences). Not only does Black Jack encounter a number of friends, rivals, and especially mentors from his past, but he also makes contact with aliens, ghosts, and even a popular idol of the times. And if you have been a fan of the first four volumes, the secret history of Black Jack’s medical equipment is finally revealed!

Overall, Tezuka’s Black Jack is one of his more popular works, but also one of his more mature texts. The maturity of his artwork particularly stands out in his panel layouts, which reflect both the inner consciences of his characters’ personalities and the unruly power of nature. His distorted and meandering panels resemble the surgical cuts of the scalpel that Tezuka abandoned when he left the medical profession to take up drawing comics. Alongside the intense, realistic depictions from the operating room, the feeling exuded from the stories are graphic yet true to life. Ultimately, the pictorial medicine of Black Jack is merely objective, as the real force behind Tezuka’s work lies in the personal connections to his characters. Sometimes “big eyes” of Japanese animation are still criticizes by young fans, but the profiles and facial expressions in Tezuka’s productions continue to tell the real story.

Are there any faults? With a academic background in English, I tend to notice typos right off the bat, but Vertical produces a streamlined piece of copy with no errors. A few references might go over the head of the reader, such as the opaque allusion (illustrated above) to Weekly Champion, the magazine which serialized Black Jack. However, if you have already read through Volume 1, a footnote in one of the initial chapters explains this reference, since it seems Tezuka likes to play frequently with the concept that a kid can learn to be a doctor by reading comics. My other complaint is a bit petulant. In the first chapter, a footnote explains a pun made in the original Japanese that plays off readings of kanji (one of the most common literary forms of humor in Japanese, Chinese, etc.). The problem for the reader is that the original kanji are not printed in the footnote, so unless he or she possesses a knowledge of Japanese, the joke cannot be reverse engineered. If the kanji were printed in the footnote (it would take about six extra characters, so it’s not difficult), it would provide readers unfamiliar with Japanese a method of understanding a subtle bit of humor that usually goes unnoticed.

Overall, Black Jack is an excellent story, and Vertical’s release of the fifth volume should capture any manga fan’s intrigue. As always, I recommend Tezuka’s work because he established so many foundations and trends in the manga universe. Black Jack Volume 5 is available at most book stores for US $16.95. But don’t go off the price; buy Black Jack because you will enjoy it!

When I was younger, I liked to brag a lot, until one day I realized I was gradually turning into “that kid,” which propelled me into a slow process of self-exoneration and forced-realization of the humble. But I’ll take a moment to plug two upcoming talks that I’m hosting at Connecticon in Hartford, CT, from 1-3 August, entitled “R-R-Remix! The Mashed Up Culture of Anime Fandom” and “State of the Otaku 2008.” I mention these because I have been reading through a book by one of my favorite beach-babe-turned-Harvard-professors, Chris Kelty, called Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, for a Harvard Free Culture mini-group project, which will henceforth be known as 2B2P for short, or the Two Bits Processor Project for long. This post will be a reaction and modulation of/against/for Chapter 1, Geeks and Recursive Publics, of Part 1, The Internet. I apologize in advance for this article’s long, rambling nature. If you comment, it’ll help me to organize my thoughts for the future.

Free software… to hormone-crazed, socially-bungling Japanophiles? Where’s the segue? On one hand, I could say the Internet (the title of Part 1, hey hey, coincidence?, I think not!) and only be half right. On one foot, I could say geeks, and become a tad closer to the answer. Doing a handstand, though, if I uttered “recursive public,” I just hit the bullseye. And on the topic of recursive publics is where I will tie in my latter, Connecticon-bound presentation. I want to bring in the demographic of fans of Japanese animation (also known colloquially as otaku), unrelated to any matter in the book, as an experiment in modulation: instead of responding directly to Kelty’s content, in this post I will try to flesh out, squish, and redefine the idea of recursive publics while applying the concept to another relevant population of geeks.

To begin, let’s simplify this notion of recursive public. Kelty’s definition essentially boils down to a population that deals with a content through a form, yet the content and form are the same thing. To develop it slightly further, a recursive public works through the form to protect the content mediated by the form. Kelty uses the Internet as his example, being the form that geeks use and through which geeks mediate. Geeks want to foster the Internet by coding the Internet to their own specifications (bounded by the geek moral order). Very meta indeed. Putting a quote against my simplification, “A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public” (Kelty 28).

Recursive publics are not limited to geeks or the Internet. Kelty does not provide examples of branches. One possible example: American Republicans and Democrats might be considered inclusive to the recursive public scene. Political subtleties aside, both parties exist as part of the government — the medium through which they operate and the content on which they focus their operations. Government also is the medium that allows the parties to “come into being in the first place” (28).

But there’s more to recursive publics, in fact another element entirely. Kelty discusses the concept of “layers,” regarding which he says geeks can identify and connect to create new structures to operate the form. He writes, “[Geeks] express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways” (29). This second element ties in with the idea that recursive publics “argue through” their medium(s)” (29). Kelty highlights the combination of Napster and network connections to form a miniature scale of the Internet at large. The layering process then provides additional support for the population of the recursive public to develop and protect the medium.

Otaku are part of a recursive public. However, the demographic of anime and manga fans interacting with their medium fundamentally challenges Kelty’s notion of the recursive public. Why: the anime fandom’s medium is, obviously, animation. However, most anime fans do not have the technical expertise or sometimes even amateur aptitude to interact with the animated medium. For anime fans, it is easy to “express ideas” yet difficult to “express infrastructures” (29).

I’ll step away from that difficulty for a moment. First, I want to tackle the ideology of the recursive public. In a long-winded explanation, Kelty basically argues that recursive publics operate through a type of morality, one that structures the goals of the community. To reiterate, geeks of the recursive public participate in “writing and publishing and speaking and arguing” but also make software for “circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability” of those forms of rhetorical communication. In total, arguments and the methods employed to sculpt those arguments evolve into a sense of morality which will govern future arguments and methods. It’s all very cyclical, but “the circularity is essential to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (48).

To return to the otaku: these geeks too share a moral ideology based in the medium of animation. Examples include the cease of the distribution of fansubs (subtitles added to the original Japanese animation, distributed for foreign audiences) once an animated series is licensed by a US company, or doujinshi (comic book remixes of series) that do not copy the original series but build upon it [this latter topic is discussed in Chapter 1 of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture]. This morality, then, continues on to affect what Kelty calls “changing relations of power and knowledge” (29). Japanese animation, particularly dealing with fans in the US, has challenged the current production market and copyright itself, particularly regarding Free Use. And although barely developed as that of the culture of free software, the power and authority in otaku culture continues to change, led by greats such as Toshio Okada and Takashi Murakami.

But I must return to and address the problem of the formulation of infrastructures when animation is the medium. Can a recursive public exist when a technical boundary is inherently set up in the public’s system? Let’s examine a possible route to the solution: topical and metatopical spaces. Kelty recognizes that geeks of free software do not congregate in topical spaces, meaning assembly in the physical arena, but instead “[knit] a plurality of spaces into one larger space of non-assembly” (39). Anime fans in the US, contrarily, began in so-called topical spaces (also known as mom’s basement), eventually immigrating to the Internet where the fandom now continues to thrive. Is it possible that because the culture of free software began online that its followers automatically shared the prowess necessary to participate fully in both argument and creation, and they shared such knowledge and capabilities between each other, while otaku might not possess these technical traits because they did not mature in the presence of the medium (layman’s terms: they weren’t animators, so should we expect them to animate?).

That’s certainly a pressing question to Toshio Okada, co-founder of Gainax (one of the original major Japanese animation production companies) and self-proclaimed Otaking. So pressing, in fact, that he has declared, “Otaku are dead.” What can he mean, when thousands of American anime fans are running around with their heads cut off at hundreds of conventions across the United States yearly. Just that: with their heads cut off, today’s fans have no direction.

In a public talk, recorded by Otaku2.com, Okada answered the following question:

You mentioned that there is a gap between fan generations, or yours and that of today. Can you elaborate on this?

Okada: I think there is a big difference that is clear in what is popular. Take manga, which is selling in the mainstream, and series popular with maniacs, which are not selling. “Clover and Honey” is a good example. Some people just buy it, some are fans and only a few are maniacs who really dive into the series, so it fails to move the masses. The manga becomes nothing but a topic of discussion among older men who compete on who read it more properly. When with others, these tangents don’t go well and a discussion never takes off. The media can’t talk about otaku as one anymore because we aren’t. There is no core literature or readership. I don’t think I can explain this well enought to convince you, but anyway.

Okada is famously known for his participation on the infamous otaku commentary, Otaku no Video, a major yet sardonic commentary on the state of otaku in Japan. As a producer, though, Okada exemplifies the paragon leader of the otaku recursive public: one who comments on and comments through the form. He sees, though, a major change in generations of otaku, which leads to his harsh declaration. Describing his own generation of anime fans, Okada said at MIT in 2003: “These were fans who were so passionate and enthusiastic about anime that they became vocal and informed critics.” Speaking of the modern anime fanatic, he stated, “Unfortunately… the latest generation of anime viewers in Japan are not true Otaku. They may be anime fans, but they lack the deep, passionate connection to the medium, and many of them seem to have taken up anime fandom because it’s cool or “fashionable.” Rather than being active critics of anime, they are content to be customers, or consumers.” Okada is right about many viewers even five years later, today, as teenagers attend anime conventions with nothing short of shoutouts to Naruto and Bleach. Still, there are some fans that put their critical eye to work to uphold the name of otaku, but cannot argue for anime through the infrastructure of animation. How should they be considered in a culture that began as a recursive public yet has in recent times reverted to a mere consumer culture? A younger Okada, seeing no good animation after the end of the original Gundam series way back when, participated in the creation of two original animated shorts, Daicon III and Diacon IV (the latter of which, if you watch it quickly, contains a homage to Star Wars of all things). The importance of these novelties remains the fact that the recursive public protects the content by arguing through the form. Okada’s message to young fans rings with Keltyism: “Just make your own anime, in English, by yourself.”

I’m not depressed. The phrase “All is not lost” is too drastic to use, yet it would encompass a little bit of the situation. But only a little, because the situation is improving. Paul “Otaking” Johnson recently published on YouTube a criticism of the online fansubbing community, a five-part video series which begins here. It’s just one example of the recursive public finally taking a stand once again. In an interview not too long ago, he stated, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. My video was free and I got paid nothing, but it didn’t stop me researching translation theory for a year or hand drawing and animating the cut scenes just to grab people’s attention (they certainly wouldn’t stick around for my voice, that’s for sure!),” which exemplifies exactly what Okada wanted out of the new otaku generation. Other models include Makoto Shinkai, who animated his own story, Voices of a Distant Star and went on to produce a number of other anime, or even the father of Japanese animation, Osamu Tezuka, who copied Disney’s style to form the foundation of what would compose anime fandom today, who animated for entertainment yet still included his own acute commentary on post-war Japan.

Back to the issue, though: What happens when a fan simply can’t do this sort of high-caliber work?

Layers. The second element in Kelty’s concept. What does Japanese animation become when applied to new intrastructural models? Doujinshi. Anime music videos. Cosplay. Fansubs. Remixed comic books. Reworked animation set to music. Dressing up as characters. Subtitling original show material. All these examples are miniature structures of the animation scene at large, yet do not require the ultimate technical expertise vital to the production of genuine animation. But Kelty does not approach the potential for layers to avoid manifestation as the actual infrastructure (eg. Internet) and instead form new forms of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, for free software in relation to the Internet, no new form of the infrastructure exists, because there is only one Internet. For anime, though, animation exists as media with many offsets. Anime fans congregate in topical and metatopical spaces. Otaku participate as much as possible as the true nature of the recursive public has begun to resurface over the last decade. Hopefully as technology advances fans will be provided a more accessible platform to evolve the recursive public and resurrect the name of otaku.

Please comment on this second post in the Two Bits Processor Project, and please visit the blogs of my friends who are participating with me on this most excellent project:

Tim Hwang, blogging at The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches
Christina Xu, blogging at ComPromise
yours truly, blogging at DianaKimball.com
Mike Wolfe, blogging at Machinations
And me, Alex Leavitt, blogging here

I should be writing about the 27 Bits blog project (or reading for that matter), but I had to compose this article tonight out of a pure buzz for 1) blogging and 2) magnificent content.

If you know anything about the history of Japanese animation, it should be that anyone can easily trace its origins back to the United States and Walt Disney. Osamu Tezuka (most famous for Astro Boy) was inspired by Disney’s work, but of course moved well beyond the scope of serious content that the Disney Corp. would ever attempt to consider. The ironic thing about contemporary broadcast American animation (the stuff on Cartoon Network targeted at the ordinary youth demographic) is, of course, the influence of Japanese animation (see, for example, the art style of Teen Titans).

But I don’t want to blabber on about anime, even if I can be a real geek about it. That’s for later (aka. YouTomb blog post I’ve been meaning to compose for a while). What I do want to introduce, though, is a strange yet fascinating instance of secondary cross culturalization, but one that has to do with music.

This evening in my weekly Japanese class, 雨水先生, before we started our lesson, wrote on the board a popular singer’s name, ジェロ, and mentioned something about J-Pop, all of which went for the most part over my head. The name, though, transliterates to Jero. I assumed, after a syllabic translation, that she had been talking about J-Lo. 日本語-fail.

Actually, Jero, the pseudonym for Jerome White, of Pittsburg, PA, is a black American kid, now five years out of college, who sings enka. Yes, 演歌, the twentieth century Japanese music genre. But not regular enka, oh no. Enka, remixed with hiphop.

Why is this cool? Well, let me quote from Wikipedia for a terse explanation on what enka is: “Modern enka (演歌 — from 演 en performance, entertainment, and 歌 ka song) came into being in the postwar years of the Shōwa period. It was the first style to synthesize the Japanese pentatonic scale with Western harmonies. Enka lyrics, as in Portuguese Fado, usually are about the themes of love and loss, loneliness, enduring hardships, and persevering in the face of difficulties, even suicide or death. Enka suggests a more traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes, comparable to American country and western music.” Essentially, enka is already a blend of multiple genres of remix: Performance and song. Modern/postwar and traditional. Japanese scale and Western harmony. Nippon country culture and American country music. I find the last one the most unusual, because the country melodies sound particularly corny.

Who’d have thought that you could remix this music any more? Well, apparently Jero, and I now brand him as officially badass.

The above video is a profile of Jero and how he got into enka as a child. Just the fact that he learned from his grandmother makes him awesome. And traditional. Traditionally awesome. The Japanese are raving about this guy, too. One interviewee says, “He sings enka, but he looks like a hiphop guy.” This is kind of important, since in Japan physical looks do carry some social weight. I’m sure that a lot of press he receives revolves solely around the fact that he’s an African American who can speak fluent Japanese. But with hiphop rising in popularity, the authenticity of his image in a society foreign to something so culturally American compels Japanese viewers, especially younger ones, to pay more attention.

Here’s another video profile, this time from Reuteurs. The phrase I pulled from the audio is “bridging the generation gap.” Of course, Reuters is directly referencing the multiple issues that the older generation in Japan has had with the younger demographic over the years. However, the phrase also suggests the remix culture that seems to be ever more associated with the Millennial generation. The fact that remix is acting as a bridging agent is beneficial for distinctly traditional societies ordinarily hostile to change. The title of the video also highlights an unexpected element in the enka-hiphop relationship: the “blues” allusion. Blues, in American society, refers to a specific genre of the jazz movement. Plugging blues into YouTube’s search bar yields a B.B. King video heavy on the improvisational nature of American jazz.

Let’s take a quick look at the jam session. First, the audience’s cheers beat down the guitar in the first few seconds of the video; important, because jazz is “social music”, according to Miles Davis. Though, although the audience participates, the spotlight remains affixed to King and his guitar. Second, watch King’s face. Emotional. A bit self-aware. Pretty funny too. The musical performance becomes theatrical in its presentation. Third, if you listen closely, you’ll notice that he reuses melody patterns to remix on the third or fourth repetition — a common and yet necessary component of jazz. Blues, then, is communal, dramatic, and blended.

Above is a generic enka song that I found, sung by Itsuki Hiroshi. Compared with B.B. King’s video, Itsuki’s song shares a number of ingredients though the music remains different. The singer of enka appears to depict him/herself more emotionally even than the blues’ singer. Antithetically, enka seems to focus more on the individual performer than the communal experience, though this reflects the nature of personal storytelling present in common American country music. The spotlight here also stays with the performer. Enka might even be associated with the theatrical monologue: one performer, alone, telling the story from his/her perspective. This again applies to blues, without or with a vocalist such as Bessie Smith. The remixed measures in the enka melodies are subtle, yet the meld between traditional, archaic instrumentation (the koto on the right side of the camera view at the start of the clip) and sung/played notes stands out easily.

This is the final Jero-related video that I’ll reference, but I wanted to throw up a sample of one of his music videos to analyze its aesthetic qualities. The clash between antiquated instrument (shamisen) and modern hiphop moves (yet these are also mashed together with fluid movements which I would refer to as strangely relevant to Japanese seasonal culture and, here in the video clip, the lyrics). Jero’s vocals I find utterly eerie, both in their texture and the fact that they’re too indistinguishable from an ordinary enka singer’s tonality. The video itself should even be viewed as a new style of remix. American hiphop music videos focus on the performer and assistant dancers, yet Jero’s video incorporates the addition of the acoustic instruments, borrowed from pre-hiphop visual styles. I like the more modern instrumentation of this video, because Jero strives for similar sounds those he updates to electric guitar and synth keyboard.

Jero’s remix of the hiphop and enka genres gives birth to nothing seen like this before in Japan, or around the world using these styles. I mentioned before the term secondary cross culturalization which, applied to Jero, relates to the adoption in Japan of American hiphop and Jero’s subsequent return to traditional enka. Basically, as hiphop was remixed in Japan stylistically and culturally, Jero re-remixed the hiphop genre and culture through enka’s respective genre and culture. I hope that people will look at Jero’s work with a critical eye, because it’s interesting to discover what camouflaged nuances you can discover by looking at your own culture through a different variety of window.