Trials and Tribulations with the Fred Patten Collection

Posted on 6 July 2009 by Alex Leavitt

Click for a larger picture.

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.

To Be Continued

Posted on 6 April 2009 by Alex Leavitt

The faculty over at the Department of Alchemy will be on break for the remainder of the week. We didn’t post anything since the beginning of last week, unfortunately, but we did end up switching domains on top of that, so that counts as an update, right? We’ll be at the Popular Culture Association national conference in New Orleans this week; if you’re around, come hang out or drop by the Japanese Popular Culture panel on Wednesday. It’s about anime, and Alex is demonstrating this fine presentation:

Otaku and the (Un)popular Fandom

Over the course of the past three decades, the term “otaku,” a moniker for fans of Japanese animation and its related passions, has survived a multitude of public and private appraisals. “Otaku” describes the conceptualization of a generation’s adherence to fan values, society’s opprobrium toward a targeted yet indistinct group, and the market’s generalization of an obsessive consumer.

What are the politics surrounding this categorization of loyalists to the anime fandom, in which “otaku” remains a negative classification even in the eyes of contemporary fans? What has caused Toshio Okada, theorist of the otaku culture and self-proclaimed Ota-king, to declare that otaku are dead? And in the cultural translation of the anime fandom from Japan to the United States, how have all things otaku blossomed into a mature consumer culture and an accelerated educational progression in the past decade?

From the beginnings of the “otaku movement” (Thomas Lamarre) established in the pursuits of the founders of Studio Gainax, we will examine the rise of otaku culture in the science fiction conventions of Osaka, its public disapproval stemming from media portrayals of Akihabara and hikkikomori, and the subsequent revitalization of anime fandom in the United States as the socialization of otaku proliferated in conventions, across the Internet, and eventually in local bookstores.

The actual presentation will probably not reflect most of the abstract (it was written back in December), but the paper will be uploaded to the blog come Saturday, so look out for it. Until then!

Cool Japan: A Look Into Exotic Anthropology

Posted on 22 March 2009 by Alex Leavitt

Via Japan Society

A response to coverage of the KRAZY! anime & manga art exhibit at the New York Japan Society and a preview of my lecture/presentation at the Popular Culture Association national conference on Wednesday 8 April.

If geeks had never thought of anime as cool, it would never have become popular in America. This is a basic but true statement, hands down. One intrinsic tenets of being a fan of something is that we want more of it. So when science fiction geeks back in the ’70s noticed this new thing called anime being shipped over to the States, they wanted to get their hands on more. Once they were able to do just that, the opportunity to discover more about Japan became a reality.

I’m not here to say that geeks in America were the first to jump on the “Japan is awesome” bandwagon. In fact, interest in Japan hit another peak of popularity before the ’70s, when ukiyo-e block prints were exported to the States (to end up primarily at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). It’s almost common knowledge nowadays that ukiyo-e were not respected by creators of high art in Japan; the Wikipedia page confirms this, describing the prints as “mainly meant for townsmen, who were generally not wealthy enough to afford an original painting. The original subject of ukiyo-e was city life, in particular activities and scenes from the entertainment district.” But artists — particularly those Impressionist painters in Europe, like Van Gogh, — thought the prints were cool (or at least different), picked them up like a frequent browser in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and brought them home to share with their friends. The story of art and the story of fans.

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