Week 3 - Japanamerica: The Role of Internet in the Global Proliferation of Anime

Japanamerica by Roland Kelts, pg 125-223

In his Japanamerica section titled "Fritz and Garfield", Kelts mentions a particular phenomena that I caught my attention. When describing the recent proliferation of hentai across the transglobal community, Kelts points out that, "the most popular, the most striking, or just provocative anime titles across a variety of sub-genres can be found on the Internet within days of their release in Japan... whether we like it or not, our physical world is rapidly losing ground to the technological and the virtual realities in which we coexist." Although Japanamerica was written in 2006, six years later, these words couldn't be any truer for anime as a whole.

The "internet age" is a relatively new phenomena that started in the late 1990s. Prior to the days of high-speed internet, information and entertainment was delivered to us through means of television. What we saw and what we enjoyed was limited and controlled by television broadcasting companies. The elementary school me had to haggle with my parents every Friday night to let me stay up til 11pm just so I could watch the latest episode of Gundam Wing (which by then had already finished airing years ago in Japan) on our tiny CRT TV. But with the advent of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, and various other internet resources, what we can see and learn about is limited only on how much effort we are willing to expend looking for information or entertainment. As shown in Otaku no Video, distribution of anime was once restricted to the speed of which fans could trade bootlegged VCR cassettes across the country; the limitation was our physical world. Today, Japanese anime of all genres are often simulcasted or with a few hour delays over the web. Fansub groups rapidly distribute subbed titles across the internet through bittorrent technology, sometimes even within hours of the airing of that episode. Last summer, I personally bought a 21-inch television for my dorm room. Ever since its purchase, however, I have yet to plug in a coaxial cable. After all, I have no need to - to me, it was a secondary monitor, on which I could watch whatever I want to, whenever I want to. For anime trying to reach out and send messages to viewers, while the physical world is a place where cultural and geographical differences limit the receiving audience, the Internet presents itself as an ever-growing, non-culture-restrictive collection of viewers around the world.

~Philip Peng