The Intercultural Challenge of the “Mangaesque” - Reorienting Manga Studies after 3/11

Aug 27, 2026

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The chapter examines how Japanese comics scholarship has sidelined manga’s sociocritical potential, especially in light of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. It argues for a methodological reorientation: shifting from defending manga and its readers through links to “society” toward questioning manga culture’s contribution to society at large. The discussion foregrounds tensions between form and content, representation and expression, aesthetics and media, and calls for multidisciplinary, intercultural critique to address “(civil) society” and the postcritical condition.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages24

Reading Time1 h 0 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction: Social Critique, Representation, and “Manga”

From defense to reorientation after 3/11

Intercultural encounters in comics discourse

Manga’s sociocritical potential and topical approaches

Downloaded by [Jaqueline Berndt] at 16:05 08 May 2015 4 The Intercultural Challenge of the “Mangaesque” Reorienting Manga Studies after 3/11 Jaqueline Berndt INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL CRITIQUE, REPRESENTATION, AND “MANGA” Since the late 1990s, globalization, the content industry, and fan culture have been prevailing thematically in Japanese comics research, while the issue of manga’s sociocritical potential has been more or less sidelined. Yet the earthquake of March 11, 2011, and its aftermath, especially the meltdowns atthe Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, suggest the need to reconsider what role manga may play in contemporary Japanese society besides serving short-sighted economic and national purposes, or affective interests of (sub) cultural groups. Pursuing manga’s engagement with the nuclear issue, which this chapter sets out to do, is not only a matter of current conditions though; it pertains also to basic methodological problems of manga studies, like the relationship between form and content, between expression (hyōgenron) and representation (hyōshōron), and between aesthetic properties and cultural mediality. As such, these problems are anything but new. Against the“emphasis on content or representation” (LaMarre in Smith 2011, 143), manga research has come to foreground two aspects in particular: the comics form with its media-cultural capacities and the actual agency of readers as users. Signiﬁcantly enough, both aspects draw attention to relational meaning beyond steady, identiﬁcatory references to a certain symbolic order. However, in view of 3/11, time seems to be ripe for a reorientation—from defending manga and its users by, among other things, substantiating connections with “society”, to questioning manga culture in regard to how it may contribute to society in its entirety. Since most Japanese academics keep a low proﬁle in this regard,1 and as answers are not easily available anyway, this chapter aims at raising methodological awareness and suggesting problems that, in the end, will have to be tackled by multidisciplinary and intercultural investigations, starting with the notion of “(civil) society” in twentieth-century modernization processes2 and its recent change vis-à-vis both globalization and subsocietal communities, through to the relevance of critique in an era that has been characterized as “postcritical” (and skeptically revisited, e.g., by Foster [2012]) . Downloaded by [Jaqueline Berndt] at 16:05 08 May 2015 66 Jaqueline Berndt Previous attempts that consider both Japanese-language and Englishlanguage comics discourse have exhibited a strong transcultural inclination; in contrast, the subsequent discussion focuses on intercultural encounters—not with the intention to segregate “manga” from “comics”, but to interrelate the perspectives of comics-speciﬁc and nonspeciﬁc expertise, while taking into account the existence of diverging preconditionsin academia and public discourse. After all, reference to society at large and a respective critical engagement are not given the same importance in recent Japanese manga discourse as in contemporary English-language comics criticism. In the search for manga’s sociocritical potential, topical endeavors are inclined to be favored, and rightly so. Whether nuclear power becomes a subject matter at all is not to be trivialized under the present Japanese situation. Moreover, the topical approach holds another potential: by catching the attention of historians, gender and ethnicity studies, or recently also disaster researchers, that is, academics who are not primarily concerned with comics, it allows for stimulation beyond the narrow circle of manga studies that chooses to avoid macropolitical claims. While the former tend to correlate single manga works to the socioeconomic or even geopolitical situation of the nation, the latter concentrate on readership—as partitioned according to gender, age, and subcultural afﬁnity—and on literacy.3

FAQs

Why does the chapter connect manga studies to 3/11 and Fukushima?

It uses the earthquake and nuclear meltdowns to question what role manga may play in contemporary Japanese society beyond economic purposes or subcultural interests.

What methodological problems does the chapter highlight for manga studies?

It focuses on relationships between form and content, expression and representation, and aesthetic properties and cultural mediality.

How does the chapter propose reorienting manga research after 3/11?

Rather than mainly substantiating connections with “society” to defend manga and readers, it calls for questioning how manga culture contributes to society overall.

Aug 27, 2026

Upload by Dozel