Japanamerica

A journalistic account of how Japanese popular culture reached the United States, built from interviews with creators, executives, translators, fans and academics on both sides.

Kelts, who is half-Japanese and has lived in both countries, uses his own position as a frame for the question of what travels and what does not.

Why Japanese popular culture found an American audience, reported from both sides of the exchange.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The book's substance is its access: Miyazaki's producer, industry executives, translators, and creators including Katsuhiro Otomo all contribute.

Several of these conversations are the only English-language interviews of their kind, and the reportage is the book's most durable value. Kelts also speaks to people on the American side — publishers, distributors, convention organisers — which gives the book a range that Japan-focused accounts do not have.

Kelts argues that the traffic runs both ways and always has, with American animation shaping Tezuka, Japanese work shaping later American animation, and the process continuing.

The framing resists the usual narrative of one-directional cultural export, and the examples are specific rather than gestural. He also notes that the exchange has frequently been invisible to participants on both sides, each assuming their own tradition was self-generated.

The book proposes several reasons for the American reception: the internet's role in fan distribution, the appetite for animation aimed at adults, and a perceived absence of certain kinds of ambiguity in domestic production.

The explanations are plausible and are not systematically tested, which is the limit of a journalistic approach.

Convention culture, fan subtitling, cosplay and the online communities of the early 2000s are documented from direct observation.

This material has become historical and is useful precisely for that: it records a fan culture that has since changed substantially. The account of fan subtitling in particular records a practice that operated in a legal grey area and that the industry has since largely absorbed or suppressed.

Kelts covers licensing, the risks publishers took, and the commercial structures that supported early English-language releases.

The business material is lighter than in Clements or Schodt and serves mainly to contextualise the interviews. He is also good on the mismatch between Japanese production schedules and American release expectations, which caused a substantial number of the early failures.

Kelts writes about his own bicultural position throughout, and the memoir element runs alongside the reporting.

Readers respond to this differently. It supplies a perspective the material benefits from and occasionally displaces the subject. Kelts is also candid that his own position gave him access that a purely American or purely Japanese writer would not have obtained, which is a fair point.

Written in 2006, it predates streaming, the collapse and restructuring of several publishers, and the current scale of international distribution.

Its account of the internet's role in particular describes a moment that ended shortly afterwards. Several of the companies he describes as significant have since closed, and the distribution landscape he documents has been replaced almost entirely.

It is accessible, enthusiastic and written for a general readership rather than for specialists.

The book assumes no knowledge and explains its terms, which makes it a reasonable first book for a reader with no background at all. It also moves quickly between subjects, which suits a reader browsing and frustrates one looking for sustained treatment of any single question.

It is a survey rather than an argument, and readers wanting a sustained thesis will find it diffuse.

Its value is in the interviews and the snapshot of a moment, and it does not attempt the analytical depth of the academic works in this section.

Among the English-language books on the subject it is the most journalistic and the most concerned with reception rather than production.

It complements Schodt and Clements, who are interested in the Japanese side, by documenting what happened at the other end. It is also the most recent of the general books in this section, though that is a relative claim given how much has changed since publication.

Readers who want to know how anime and manga arrived in English-speaking countries, and readers who enjoy reported interviews with people who made the work.

It is short, readable and requires nothing, and it is the most approachable book in this section's criticism. Readers who already know the industry well will find relatively little that is new, and should go to Clements or Condry instead.