Towards the end of the 20th Century Japanese design, including the design of characters for the animation and comics industries, was praised in the global media. The work of Osamu Tezuka who explored notions of cuteness, identity and gender blur and pioneered the creative development of manga and anime form, became popular outside of Japan. Initially influenced by Disney animation his work would eventually influence the Disney Studio. Similarly, the animation productions of Studio Ghibli found an international audience. Anime and manga infiltrated popular culture. In Japan, cartoon characters were utilised in various forms of merchandising, branding and public relations, in some cases attaining iconic and idolatrous status. In his art and design Takashi Murakami has portrayed such aspects as the obsessive fan and the robot, a central figure in many manga and anime and one that invokes the notion of animism. The fascination with anime and manga has been strong in Australia with many universities having societies dedicated to readings, screenings and discussion and the staging of art and cosplay competitions. This talk presents an overview of character design and its impact on popular culture from an anecdotal as well as academic perspective.

Dr Michael Hill

Creator and former Director of the Master of Animation course at the University of Technology, Sydney, Michael Hill has a Master's degree in animation and a PhD in comics, prompting his introduction on ABC Radio as “Doctor Comics”. A member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Comic Art and the Advisory Committee of the Q-Collection Comic Book Preservation Project, he has lectured on Anime and Manga at the Art Gallery of NSW, Electrofringe, DiGiT Expo and the Powerhouse Museum and been interviewed many times by the media. His considerable experience of Art and Design education at both graduate and postgraduate levels ranges from technology and management to research and he has worked as a consultant to several institutions including providing input into the NSW HSC curriculum study of Anime in Japanese Language and Culture. Having donated his collection of research materials of Australian alternative comics, the Michael Hill Collection of Australian Comics to the National Library of Australia he is now moving further into the artistic domain where he has exhibited at the Silicon Pulp Animation Gallery, DAB LAB, Bunker Cartoon Gallery and in the 2010 Bald Archy Prize. He is currently creating and hopes to publish his own comic.  

The transmission of ideas through visual media is becoming fundamental to our communication with the mode of literary culture increasingly visual: comic, graphic novels, animation, film, television and the Internet. With English (and other European languages) an alphabet view of script has seen words and pictures as fundamentally different. The highly abstract, phonetic and single-directional nature of the alphabet has encouraged a separation of words and pictures, and a predominantly word-controlled linear presentation of information. But with Japanese, multiple choices of characters, script direction, page layout, and much more are the rule, and not the exception. Words and pictures have enjoyed greater equality and been used interchangeably across most forms of literature and art. In short, the nature of Japanese script brings with it a different set of underpinning ideas that offer greater graphic versatility. My talk will demonstrate this versatility and how these ideas permeate Japanese sensibilities across many areas of visual and spatial expression—from the QR code to book pages, TV, animation and computer games. It will suggest how these conditions give the Japanese a creative edge in the world of e-media, where there are ‘new’ opportunities for script-picture combinations to continue ‘old’ practice.

Dr Emiko Okayama

Emiko Okayama is Lecturer in Japanese Language and Culture at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and an MA in Translation Studies from Dublin City University, and has taught Japanese Language at the Universities of Sydney and Tasmania. In 2007, she was awarded a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship which enabled her to conduct post-doctoral research on Japanese scripts and visual culture at Nagoya University. She has been actively involved in script-related discussions and research with calligraphers, typographers and graphic designers in Japan. Dr Okayama is a NAATI accredited translator and has research interests in Translation History. She is author of several papers on literature and visual culture in international books and journals and her work on translators of Chinese in 18th century Nagasaki will be published this year both in Japanese and English. Emiko is now working on the reception process of Chinese vernacular novels such as Suikoden (Water Margin) in Edo Japan; and on Chinese classics as shared knowledge and literary communication in East Asia.

Manga are symphonic texts, consisting of a wide range of interdependently integrated graphics, linguistic text and flexible frames and speech bubbles. Being essentially a cheap commodity, merely for entertainment, manga has been enjoying relatively wide freedom to reveal controversial issues and to encourage readers to explore acute problems that they face, for example, ijime (group bullying) and various kinds of abuse. In everyday life in Japan, compliance with social appropriateness in each varied situation is regarded as an important requirement to maintain a harmonious society. That, however, often forces individuals to suppress their personal preferences in order to play the roles expected of them. The effort to achieve social conformity can cause severe inner conflict and mental disorders. Evolved from such a society, manga has developed versatile expressive power to represent contextualised and psychological ‘fantasy’, or virtual reality, in which people shed their ‘roles’ and live other lives, seek understanding and comfort, and/or experience the extreme state of their struggles. This talk will discuss manga’s role and ability as empathetic media that depict such issues as the individual’s social and emotional experience, and pose questions about who we are as humans and how we are related to each other in society.

Dr Mio Bryce

Mio is a senior lecturer and Head of the Japanese Studies Section in the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University. Mio has a wide range of interests in Japanese language (classical and modern), literature, history and manga/anime and has developed and taught a number of language and culture units, on topics including Manga and Japanese Contemporary Culture; Manga, Anime and Representation of Identity, Manga and Anime as Global Imagery; Exploring Japanese Literature and Intertextuality and the Tale of Genji. Mio’s particular interest is in historical, socio-cultural and psychological issues depicted in fiction. She is involved in interdisciplinary research into youth cultures and has established a manga/anime research group, in conjunction with the English Department at Macquarie University.

Japanese cities crave the attention that comes from being home to a popular culture icon like Godzilla, Ultraman, Astro Boy or Hello Kitty. Western fan pilgrimages to Japanese locations associated with these cult media texts have been variously construed as fads or underground activities. More recently there has been a trend to consider cult media tourism as increasingly incorporated into commercial and state tourism branding and promotion strategies. This talk outlines how fans and industry ‘play’ with Japanese popular culture to experiment with various surroundings and location and will discuss examples such as fans travelling to locations made famous through live-action shows such as Godzilla or Ultraman, video-games like Yakuza, and manga and anime like Lucky Star.

Dr Craig Norris

Craig Norris is a lecturer in the Journalism, Media and Communications program at the University of Tasmania. He graduated with a PhD from the University of Western Sydney in 2004, and studied at Tokyo University from 1999-2001 on a Monbusho research scholarship. His doctoral thesis examined the spread of Japanese manga and anime through Western fandom. His current research interests are in transmedia content and fan cultures. He has published in the area of global media and the dissemination of Japanese popular-culture goods.