I’ve always wondered if there is a subculture of kids in Japan who read Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk instead of Japanese manga, watch Disney movies instead of anime, play X-Box instead of Nintendo or PlayStation, have posters of Bart Simpson and Bugs Bunny on their walls, etc etc etc.
I know there are people who prefer American comics (Amekomi), and I’ve seen Mickey Mouse toys and whatnot at otaku stores.
Gut feeling would be that you wouldn’t see people who were into all the American stuff. Japanese specialize pretty heavily, so they’ll probably be Disney fans or Amekomi fans, or whatever else, but probably not both at the same time.
Hiro Nakamura?
Disney movies enjoy mainstream popularity in Japan. They aren’t considered weird or “geeky”.
Japan has a large domestic film industry compared to most other countries, but a large percentage of movies shown in Japanese theaters are dubbed or subtitled Hollywood films. My guesstimate would be about 50%, based on walking past a movie theater every day on my way to work when I lived in Japan.
In thisGameTap Retrospective, in the intro, it is shown that members of Sonic Team were captivated by Western superheroes like Superman.
American comics instead of Japanese manga for the subculture of kids, maybe. But Disney, Microsoft, and Fox, WB, The Simpsons, Loony Tunes, ect. - they all transcend cultures and generations.
Microsoft Windows, sure, but is Xbox 360 popular in Japan? I remember reading that the original Xbox went over like a fart in church there.
Ha, this reminds me of a Japanese exchange student I knew at the school where I used to work. I saw she had a Superman keychain and remarked upon this, and she said “Someone gave me this, but I don’t really know who he is.” I told her that he was a superhero who fought bad guys, and she said “Oh, like Spider-Man!”
I thought, but didn’t say, “How the hell do you know who SPIDER-MAN is, but not SUPERMAN?” But I know the recent Spider-Man films were successful in Japan (while I was living in Japan a geisha once told me that Spider-Man was her favorite movie, but that’s another story), and this girl was young enough that the Christopher Reeve Superman movies would have been before she was born. I think Hollywood movies were her only exposure to American superheroes, so she didn’t know anything about Superman at all.
Also, a live action television show.
Check out the list of episode titles for a good chuckle. I really like “The Terrifying Half Merman! Calling the Miracle Silver Thread.” Wouldn’t a “half merman” just be, like, a regular dude? Or possibly a fish?
Bonus video clip of the show’s intro. It appears that they took very few liberties with the property, other than giving Spider-Man a giant transforming mecha.
Hahaha :D:D:D
This post is especially funny in light of this post.
Hm, didn’t know that, but I doubt that’s where this girl’s familiarity with Spider-Man came from. She’d have been born in the late '80s, so nearly a decade after the TV show and close to two decades after the comic. I’d be pretty sure it was the recent film series that introduced her to Spider-Man.
I’m sympathetic to drastic_quench’s belief, because I too would have assumed that Superman was the most famous American superhero.
Let me ask the question like this: are there Japanese that are as obsessed with the United States, and all aspects of its culture and society, as otaku in the US are with Japan? We’re talking about wearing U.S. high school jackets and t-shirts that say “I’m looking for an American girlfriend”, knowing all the intricate details of lunchboxes, fine-tuning their English so they can better understand and interpret American pop music, and adding “In American cartoons and Marvel and DC Comics” sections to nearly every entry in the Japanese Wikipedia, among other things.
Yes, thank you.
(Emphasis mine.) I encountered a little of this while I was teaching English in Japan, but not the rest of it. Such people may exist, but I never met one.
I’ve known a few Japanese people who were really into American/British rock music in general or who were big fans of a specific Western rock group. Western music is easy enough to obtain in any Japanese music store but most Japanese people don’t know that much about it beyond what’s currently popular – e.g. they’ve heard of The Rolling Stones but think they’re an American band – so being really into Western music is slightly outside the mainstream. In my experience these Japanese rock geeks were pretty much the same as rock geeks you’d encounter in the West: sort of the High Fidelity type, although I never met anyone quite that extreme in Japan.
I think a big difference between Japanese pop culture in the US and American pop culture in Japan is that the latter has been part of the mainstream for decades. Something’s not considered “geeky” if everyone is into it, and there’s also a certain geeky prestige associated with being into things most other people are unfamiliar with. There are of course specific American movies/TV shows/bands that aren’t well-known in Japan, including some that are hugely famous in the US*, but there’s nothing at all unusual about consuming Western media in Japan.
*I was rather surprised to learn that my coworkers, all of whom would have been teens in the '90s and many of whom had done at least a year of college in the US, had never heard of Nirvana. One of our textbooks had a brief reading and listening exercise about Kurt Cobain, and I had to keep explaining who that was and that yes, he had been very famous in America.