Since the 1990s, anime has been gaining considerable recognition outside of Japan. This popularity has, and continues to be, bolstered by both our current climate of intense globalisation and the dynamic practices of cultural production which anime fans engage in. It is this intersection between globalisation, popular culture and fandom, which makes anime a fascinating subject of cultural analysis.
In particular, anime poses a unique counterpoint to the traditional discourse of globalisation as presented by scholars such as George Ritzer (1993), who had suggested the inception of a homogenised global industry moulded on American popular culture. Such a traditional model has been challenged by the way anime as a non-Western cultural product has been enthusiastically received across the globe, due in a very large part to the dedicated involvement of fans who created more exposure for anime by translating and circulating it to audiences worldwide. Furthermore, this global appeal has been attributed to anime’s hybrid nature, which refers to the mixing of Japanese and non-Japanese elements that at the same time signifies neither one culture nor another.
However, I argue that anime cannot be completely dissociated from the ‘Japaneseness’ which typically frames its creation. The challenge here, of course, is to then articulate a discourse of ‘Japaneseness’ for an era of global or transcultural influences and flows. This article suggests that one way to do this is to address Japaneseness as a process of genre formation. More significantly, it emphasises the cultural studies approach to genre, which aims “not to posit the inherent value of value, nor to ascribe positive value to any particular entity … but rather to vindicate the activity of evaluation” (Burgass 347) which underlies the way non-Japanese fans engage with anime.