MANGA, ANIME AND VIDEO GAMES: GLOBALIZING JAPANESE CULTURAL PRODUCTION
This special issue of Perspectives is devoted to translation questions arising from the globalization of the Japanese popular cultural production of manga1, anime2 and video games. In his article Japan's Gross National Cool, McGray (2002) drew attention to the collective power of Japanese popular culture permeating through the rest of the world. His observations highlight the globalization process undergone by these areas of Japanese cultural production and as such serve to raise the question of the role played by translation a topic little explored in Translation Studies (TS) Widespread popularity of these genres beyond Japanese shores is evident in that the Japanese terms manga and anime together with associated but rather obscure culture specific concepts such as otaku3 have come into the vocabulary of an increasing international audience. Examples of the influence of manga and anime range from Hollywood films such as The Matrix and Kill Bill to a UK publisher's recent launch of a Manga Shakespeare series4 turning Romeo and Juliet into a contemporary story set in Japan with Japanese characters depicted in a distinctive manga style. The latter is an example of the emergence of so called Amerimanga and Euromanga, i.e. the adoption of manga form by comic artists in the US and Europe, adding to the deep seated impact of manga and creating a domain of its own. Similarly, the popularity of Japanese video games has long ago crossed the national border to produce best selling games in the global market (Roturier 2003) Japanese role playing games (RPGs) are known for introducing a completely new storydriven, rather than action driven, dimension and winning international fans for their unique characteristics. According to the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) the Japanese game export market is over 80 times that of the import of overseas games (cited in Nakamura 2006a: 16) with an implication that the localization direction is predominantly from Japanese rather than into Japanese. The extent of the international influence of these products can indeed be inferred from some statistics. In terms of international dissemination anime occupy 60% of the TV animation broadcast worldwide with the ratio in Europe exceeding 80% (Nakamura 2006a: 30) The US forms the single biggest anime market and accounted for US$ 48.4 million (EUR 35.6 million) in 2004. This apparently equates to several times the value of steel exported from Japan to the US. Anime sales as a whole are reported to be as much as US$ 4 billion a year in the US, with leading Japanese anime studios earning up to 35% of their revenues on foreign markets (Brown 2006: 6) The worldwide export of Japanese video games, including hardware and software, was approximately Y= 560 billion (EUR 3.5 billion) in 2004. Japan is considered to be the second largest video game market, following the US which is estimated at EUR 5.8 billion in 2004 (ESA 242