When it comes to anime, academic research has generally focused on the studios, technologies, narratives, and characters of anime cultures. As such, anime studies often fail to grasp Japanese animation’s more trivial yet fundamental daily impact in its most common from: flows of women fans walking in the streets, transporting banal items like keyholder and badges on their way to school, work, home, or leisure spots. This talk explores anime’s pedestrian space in a key gesture towards transformative frameworks binding high and low anime theory through innovative interview-parkour methods. Mixing geographical and media mappings with urban ethnography within women’s and LGBTQ+ anime communities, our journey in the territories and history of the Maiden’s Road (Otome Road) fan mecca in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, will contrast key academic texts including Ōtsuka Eiji or Thomas LaMarre with their cultural grounds from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. The pedestrian double entendre as people walking, and things that we barely notice because of how trivial they are, will serve a revisit of the potential and limits of anime theoretical framework through the forgotten voices of women who have worked in and outside of the industry to build anime as a city space.

This event will take place in person and online.

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THIS EVENT TOOK PLACE IN ACADEMIC YEAR 2023-24

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Reischauer Institute Japan Forum