Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan PDF
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Anime’s Media Mix This page intentionally left blank Anime’s Media Mix Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan Marc Steinberg University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis · London An earlier version of chapter appeared as “Immobile Sections and Trans- Series Movement: Astroboy and the Emergence of Anime,” Animation: An Inter- disciplinary Journal , no. (): –. Portions of chapter appeared as “Anytime, Anywhere: Tetsuwan Atomu Stickers and the Emergence of Character Merchandising,” Theory, Culture, and Society , nos. – (): –. Copyright by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press Third Avenue South, Suite Minneapolis, MN - http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steinberg, Marc, 1977– Anime’s media mix : franchising toys and characters in Japan / Marc Steinberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-7549-4 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8166-7550-0 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Character merchandising—Japan. 2. Character toys—Japan. 3. Cartoon characters—Japan. 4. Comic strip characters—Japan. 5. Animated television programs—Japan—History and criticism. 6. Animated films—Japan—History and criticism. 7. Comic books, strips, etc.—Japan—History and criticism. I. Title. HF5415.17.S74 2012 381'.45791453—dc23 2011031800 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Introduction: Rethinking Convergence in Japan vii Part I. Anime Transformations: Tetsuwan Atomu 1. Limiting Movement, Inventing Anime 1 2. Candies, Premiums, and Character Merchandising: The Meiji–Atomu Marketing Campaign 37 3. Material Communication and the Mass Media Toy 87 Part II. Media Mixes and Character Consumption: Kadokawa Books 4. Media Mixes, Media Transformations 135 5. Character, World, Consumption 171 Acknowledgments 205 Notes 209 Bibliography 261 Index 287 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Rethinking Convergence in Japan Convergence. As Henry Jenkins points out, the term first got its life within industry discourse, media studies, and popular culture as a designation for the promised convergence of all media into one black box. At some point in the 2000s, the term shifted from designating the fated collapse of distinction between hardware platforms—the idea that television, video games, telephones, and computers would all merge into one technologi- cal form—to a divergent proliferation of content across multiple media forms.1 Otherwise known as transmedia or cross-media seriality, or by the North American media industry terms repurposing or media synergy, the term convergence now refers to the ways in which particular texts are made to proliferate across media forms, from television to novel to comic to video game to toy.2 Henry Jenkins played no small part in the semantic shift of the term in articles dating from the early 2000s and in his seminal 2006 book Convergence Culture, where he defines the phenomenon as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”3 When a phenomenon finds a name, there is a tendency to associate the beginnings of the phenomenon with the rise of the term itself. This is no less true of the term convergence. Whether the teleological drive of hardware toward a single black box or the phenomenon of transme- dia movement of texts across media platforms, the term convergence came to be equated with the rise of digital media and its associate culture.4 For many, convergence is digital media. The phenomenon · vii is likewise equated with—and often limited to—developments in the North American media sphere. The focus on Hollywood and North American media and the overem- phasis on the digital are not total, however. Jenkins himself acknowledges the importance of Japan in a key chapter of Convergence Culture—and the role of the Japanese model of convergence in the development of The Matrix films, comic books, video games, and so on. In fact, he isn’t the only writer to grasp the importance of transmedia seriality in the Japanese context; Anne Allison, Mizuko Ito, and Thomas Lamarre have done important work on this Japanese model of convergence.5 As these writers point out, Japanese media convergence has its own name: the media mix. A popular, widely used term for the cross-media serialization and circulation of entertainment franchises, the word gained its current meaning in the late 1980s. Much as the English term convergence has its history and its digital myopia, the term media mix has its own history and its own form of myopia: a tendency to imagine that the phenomenon emerged at the same time as the term, or soon after it, having its peak in the 1990s and 2000s. Anime’s Media Mix of- fers a different point of view: it presents the longer history of the media mix and suggests that it cannot be thought of apart from the media phenomenon that garnered Japan fame and acclaim in recent decades: anime. The emergence of Japanese television animation, or anime, in the 1960s as a system of interconnected media and commodity forms was, I will argue, a major turning point and inspiration for the development of what would later be called the media mix. As such, this particular history of the media mix sheds some light on the very analog beginnings of transmedia movement as well as on the material and immaterial entity of the character that supports it. It also sheds light on the global travel of anime and its associated media forms—manga, video games, figurines, cards, and increasingly, novels and live-action films. The Anime System, Media Theory, and Post-Fordism A balanced understanding of the emergence of the media mix must, I will argue, take into account the particular media forms and the proliferation of character-based images and things that accompanied the emergence of the anime media mix with Japanese television ani- mation in the early 1960s.6 Anime, as discussed in this book, refers to viii · Introduction the Japanese style of drawn, cel-style television animation that is at the core of an inherently transmedia formation. The emergence of anime with Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy; 1963–66), the first made-in-Japan, thirty-minute, weekly television animation show, which went on air on January 1, 1963, proved a tipping point in the development of transmedia relations in postwar Japanese visual culture.7 It also saw the installation of character merchandising and the dissemination of the character image into the lives of Japanese children and, eventually, citizens of all ages.8 Character merchandising is the bread and butter of what I will refer to as the anime system, and media interconnectivity is one of its principal features.9 Tetsuwan Atomu’s 1963 broadcast marked, Kusakawa Shō argues, a “turning point in postwar Japanese culture” that saw a shift in the relation between commodities and advertisement: “Whereas traditionally the method of selling a product was to advertise and sell a product based on its content, after Tetsuwan Atomu companies would advertise and sell products by overlapping the commodity image with a character image.” Offering a new way of advertising, a new way of selling prod- ucts, and a new way of organizing media relations, Tetsuwan Atomu, Kusakawa concludes, “is a symbol of the large-scale conversion of the postwar Japanese economy” from an economy based on the secondary sector of manufacture, to one based on the tertiary or service sector.10 Yet even as it seems to emerge fully formed in 1963, the anime me- dia mix has a particular material history that is inseparable from the sticker-distributing activities of its sponsor, chocolate maker Meiji Seika, and from toy makers’ use of the character image. It is also inseparable from the film and book industries’ later adoption of anime’s transmedia movement. The social and economic ramifications of this institutional history and the materiality on which transmedia communication relies are two of the theoretical focuses of this book. In developing a better understanding of anime and the Japanese media mix in general, this book also aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of media convergence. The problem of the historical emergence of the media mix does not merely occupy the concerns of scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Japan and the Japanese media sphere but also takes center stage in attempts to understand media formations local, global, and everything in between. In part, this is because of the increasing centrality of Japanese anime and media Introduction · ix
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