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Japanese art, culture and society 

By Karen Herland

For two Fridays in a row, researchers discussed the impact of popular Japanese culture on society and art in two separate, but related, symposia.

The March 6 event took a sociological perspective, while the March 13 event explored the impact of anime and manga on contemporary artistic practice. Both panels featured Matthew Penney, Concordia’s recognized expert on Japanese popular representations of WWII (Journal, Jan. 17, 2008) and Thomas Lamarre, a McGill researcher interested in even earlier periods.

Provost David Graham introduced Anime and Contemporary Japanese Society on March 6 saying the subject, “relates two themes at the heart of Concordia research: Visual and digital culture and the study of contemporary global society.”

It was the Global Futures Laboratory, headed by Concordia Research Chair Satoshi Ikeda, that helped organize the event. The Japan Foundation, a sponsor of the event, announced the donation of an anime DVD collection to Concordia’s libraries, a resource for future scholars.

Jacqueline Berndt of Yokohama National University presented an encyclopedic overview of anime and considered how the private, fantasy-based and individualized retro-futuristic world presented on the screen can relate to social constructions like politics and art.

“Nineteen-seventies anime offers an impression of movement but there are gaps (both in the visual and the voice) that create a space of in-between-ness and frozen moments,” she said. That space offers the viewer the possibility to fill in the blanks with their own experiences.

It was that same absence that Joanne Hui, a doctoral student in Humanities, remarked on, tracing manga and the graphic novel to autobiography, especially for immigrant experiences. Hui discussed how the fragments of memory work and the parallel narratives in text and image of graphic novels can both soften harsh facts, as in Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis, and complicate stories beyond the stereotypical, as in Gisele Amantea’s The King v. Picariello and Lassandro (Journal, May 3, 2007). Hui co-organized the March 13 panel on Comics, Japanese Popular Culture and Contemporary Art with Alice Ming Wai Jim, of the Art History Department.

Hui also invoked the private nature of anime and manga, remarking on how she herself returned to the form as relaxation while working on her MFA, never imagining it would become a feature of her doctoral research.

It was Kaichiro Morikawa of Meikai University in Urayasu, Japan, who drew broad parallels between the private and the privately public worlds of anime and manga within Japanese contemporary society. Morkiawa literally mapped Akihabara, the former Electric City, as now featuring buildings with few windows and blank walls containing a growing number of game stores, model stores, comic and anime fanzines. In short, there are multiple ways for individuals to collect, build and represent their fan allegiances. For many, especially women, that means rewriting the plots of key storylines and selling fan-produced comics alongside the official versions. He contrasted this enclosed community with the transparent, glass buildings of the public, consumer-based shopping district.

Meanwhile, Ryan Rice (Journal, May 29, 2008) spoke of the influence of comics on his own artistic practice, a discipline influenced by, among other things, “the Banana Splits, H.R. Pufnstuff, Keith Haring and, most recently, the Powerpuff Girls”. Much of Rice’s work, developed to counter the ‘racist and romantic ideals’ he often confronted about Mohawk culture, recreates leaders of his community as lunchbox heroes in the Idol Wild series or simply features the exploits of cartoon characters representing the Turtle, Bear and Wolf clans.

In his lecture, he remarked he wanted to borrow the marginalized imagery of comics to comment on the marginalizatinon of Native culture. He quoted Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, another Native artist and Concordia grad he has collaborated with over the years, as saying, “when you tell a story from an alternative universe, you free yourself from an assumed way of thinking.”

The afternoon sessions were sponsored by the Art History Department and The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.