A Japanese cultural icon speaks
Please note: The keynote lecture by Eiji Otsuka is now sold out.
How many pop culture auteurs also rank among the most highly regarded academic theorists of their chosen medium? How many can claim a title of a 21st-century Renaissance man, equally comfortable writing on advertising and anthropology, terrorism and pacifism, plus drafting graphic novel scripts and young adult novels?
Eiji Otsuka, a Japanese author and scholar most famous in the English- and French-speaking spheres for the popular manga graphic novels MPD Psycho and The Kurosaki Corpse Delivery Service, fits both those descriptions.
Otsuka is in Montreal on February 4 to deliver a keynote lecture, entitled The Unholy Alliance of Disney and Eisenstein: The Wartime origins of Manga, Animation and Otaku Culture. His lecture, part of the President’s Conference Series, takes place in the Auditorium of the Grande Bibliothèque at 5 p.m.
Japanese popular culture is big business. The market for Japan’s ubiquitous pop products, from anime and video games to Hello Kitty toys, is in the billions of dollars a year. One famous manga series, Dragon Ball, has sold over 350 million copies worldwide.
While the mass-market popularity of manga dates back to the 1950s and titles like Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy, it was in the 1980s that the market for Japanese pop culture began to explode. At this time, Otsuka appeared on the scene as a marketing consultant and theorist. He explained to Japanese pop culture businesses how to market characters across media and narrative worlds. In the late 1980s, Otsuka decided to put his theories into practice himself, penning the media-crossing and genre twisting fantasy sci-fi series Madara.
As a theorist, Otsuka’s identified strategies in cross-media marketing, which allowed companies such as media giant Kadokawa to build their brands in an increasingly diverse and cut-throat consumer environment. As a creator, however, Otsuka has gone outside the mainstream as a fascinating iconoclast and a critic of the Japanese state.
Although he has told companies how to sell mass-market products, much of Otsuka’s own work is avant-garde. The MPD in MPD Psycho is short for multiple-personality disorder. The series features a split-personality detective and breaks up the search for clues and questioning of suspects between different personas.
Incensed by the American invasion of Iraq and the Japanese government’s commitment of non-combat support in 2003, Otsuka used one of the protagonist’s splintered selves to deliver an impassioned anti-war appeal.
In other Otsuka manga about ghosts and spirits, he has resurrected victims and perpetrators of the Rape of Nanking, atrocities carried out against Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in 1937 and still denied by some on Japan’s far right, bringing past war crimes into focus for contemporary manga readers.
He has also tackled many of Japan’s other hot button issues such as censorship, discrimination, and organized crime. His work can be challenging or even uncomfortable, but daring decisions like these have won Otsuka a devoted following in his home country and among fans of graphic storytelling internationally.
Published in English by Dark Horse and in French by Glénat and Pika, Otsuka is one of the most dynamic Japanese creators of Japanese popular culture working today.
His presentation at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, in which he will speak on the links between fascist aesthetics and Japanese animation, will be one of his first public appearances outside of Japan. Admission is free and the event is open to the public.
It is an event not to be missed for followers of his work and anyone looking for insights into popular culture products that break with the banal and offer something different.
When: Saturday, February 4, 5 p.m.
Where: Auditorium of the Grande Bibliothèque, 475 De Maisonneuve Blvd. East
Matthew Penney is an assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of History. His research focuses on critical historiography and popular representations of the Asia-Pacific War in Japanese Popular Culture. Penney will deliver his presentation, Media Mixed Histories: Kyara versus Context, during the one-day symposium on February 5 as part of the President’s Conference Series.
Related links:
• President’s Conference Series
• “Experiencing the Media Mix” — NOW, January 10, 2012-01-25
• “Academics discuss Popular Culture” — NOW, January 18, 2012