Regulating Japan - The Role of Indian Broadcast Censorship in Shaping Anime Narratives for Domestic Viewers

Aug 24, 2026

Upload by Hazel

Japanese anime’s growing popularity in India reveals how cultural mediation and institutional control operate in practice. This paper investigates Indian broadcasting censorship and regulatory practices that alter and reshape Japanese anime stories, visuals, and themes during official adaptation, with a focus on widely known titles such as Doraemon and Crayon Shinchan. It analyzes how networks including Disney Channel India, Sony YAY!, and Hungama TV manage moderation to fit Indian domestic cultural values and broadcasting rules, assessing the effects on the final glocalised product.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages13

Reading Time33 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

An Overview of Anime History in India

Factors Shaping the Glocalisation and Censorship in India

Regulating Japan: The Role of Indian Broadcast Censorship in Shaping Anime Narratives for Domestic Viewers Khushboo Bansal Abstract : Japanese anime continues to gain popularity with global audiences, including India. At the same time, its reception and glocalisation in India reveal crucial insights into the mechanisms of cultural mediation and institutional control. This paper examines Indian broadcasting censorship and regulatory practices that change and redefine Japanese anime stories, visuals, and thematic elements during their official adaptation, with a special focus on popular titles such as Doraemon and Crayon Shinchan. It will also analyse how Indian television networks, such as Disney Channel India, Sony YAY!, and Hungama TV, exercise content moderation to align anime with Indian domestic cultural values and broadcasting regulations, and the result of such sanitization on the final glocalised product. Bio: Khushboo Bansal is a PhD researcher in Japanese media and cultural studies at the University of Delhi, India. She specializes in the transnational circulation of anime and the aesthetics of Japanese visual culture. She holds two Master’s degrees, in Japanese Language and Society, and in Japanese Modern Literature. Her research explores glocalisation, user-generated adaptations, censorship, and the recontextualization of Japanese media in India. A former MEXT scholar, she has also worked as a cross-cultural supporter with the Hyogo Prefectural Government in Japan and served as Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Research in Japan at the University of Tokyo India Office. Khushboo has presented her work at national and international academic forums and published on topics such as anime adaptation in India and the history of Indian animation in Japan. Her current doctoral project examines the glocalisation of Japanese anime in India, with a particular focus on fan adaptations, transnationalism, and mediated cultural negotiations. SPECIAL ISSUE: Proceedings from the Transnational Perspectives on Anime Symposium Recommended Citation: Bansal, Khushboo.“Regulating Japan: The Role of Indian Broadcast Censorship in Shaping Anime Narratives for Domestic Viewers”. Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2025) . Eds. Zoe Crombie, Billy Tringali This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License Introduction Japanese anime has established a significant presence in global media and is influencing media consumption patterns worldwide. According to JetSynthesys’s 2022 survey on anime consumption in India, over 83% of Indians prefer anime content over other animated content.1 This not only reflects the popularity of Japanese anime in India, but also indicates an increase in volume of imports into India, making the glocalisation process of anime inevitable. The glocalisation process, including censorship, occurs when a global cultural product is imported and localised to suit the cultural needs of the target country, but at the same time carries the cultural components of the source culture, while some components of the target culture are also reflected back to the source, making it bidirectional and cross-cultural. This process includes cultural modifications like edits of scenes to better align the content with the target audience’s cultural norms. Furthermore, it involves linguistic modifications, such as subtitling and dubbing. All these practices reshape Japanese anime narratives and influence how the Indian audience consumes anime. This paper argues that Indian broadcast censorship and glocalisation not only filter‘inappropriate’ content but also regulate Japanese anime narratives to align with local socio-cultural norms. Analysing Crayon Shinchan and Doraemon, the paper highlightshow Indian broadcast regulators, censorship, self-regulation by channels, and parental expectations interact to redefine anime for the Indian audience, with broad implic

FAQs

How does Indian broadcast censorship affect Japanese anime adaptations for Indian viewers?

It filters “inappropriate” content and regulates narrative elements to align the shows with local socio-cultural norms, reshaping stories, visuals, and themes during official adaptation.

Which anime titles and broadcasters does the paper focus on?

The analysis centers on popular titles such as Doraemon and Crayon Shinchan, and on Indian television networks including Disney Channel India, Sony YAY!, and Hungama TV.

Why is glocalisation described as a bidirectional cultural negotiation in the paper?

The process localizes global media to meet target-country cultural needs while carrying source-culture elements, and local cultural influences can also feed back into the source context.

Aug 24, 2026

Upload by Hazel