Since the mid-1900s, Japanese anime and manga industries have meshed with equivalent Western animation and entertainment media, and through this “constant cross-pollination and popular cultural borrowing” (Navier 2005) between the two cultures, both the creations and creative process of Japanese animation, as well as the their Western counterparts, have been re-envisioned and redefined to appeal to not only their native, local followers, but also to the global audience.

But what exactly are the qualities that anime possesses that lend itself to the smooth hybridization and glocalization it has experienced thus far? One aspect of anime is its statelessness, or mukokuseki, which refers to the racial ambiguity of characters and settings in anime. Navier describes how the worlds presented in anime occupy their own space that are not necessarily Japanese; in doing so, the anime and other related media gain a transcultural quality, and while there is the innate sense that the narrative is occurring in a pseudo-Japanese setting, it can be adapted to various local contexts.

For Japanese youth, the most prolific consumers of popular culture, this extensive hybridization of Japan’s most familiar cultural products presents an avenue into a global youth community. While the local homogeneity of Japanese popular culture has become infused with Western cultural elements, Japanese culture itself has also spread globally, and different groups of youth across various national and cultural backgrounds have incorporated anime into their own subcultures as well. Qualities that were once culture-specific to Japan alone, have been localized both in content, with the incorporation of Japanese traditions in Western media, and in form, involving anime and manga versions of traditional Western narratives.

This glocalization, in which global works are “localized,” or adapted so that a local audience can understand, has been extensively performed in anime and manga. In one of its simplest form, glocalization in the anime industry may be simply localizing subtitle translations in anime:



The glocalization of anime and manga has since been catalyzed by improved distribution technologies and the enthusiasm as fans. Popular anime and manga are licensed overseas, localized, promoted and distributed through local vendors through official lines. However, there are many additional cases in which the same popular content is illegally obtained by fans, and subsequently processed and released online. While these actions are frowned upon by the official publishers of the products, they do provide insight to the actual performance of the consumer products when they are officially released. The ease of access that both factions provide have allowed anime and manga to effortlessly spread across different geographical and cultural boundaries.

Ultimately, anime and manga provide youth with a multitude of characters, themes, and narratives that it can relate to its own identity. The emotional experiences that young people are able to identify with transcend cultural differences; and through the process of translations and localization, the mukokuseki aspect of anime and manga is reinforced, as blurring the separation of what is local and what is global. The struggle to define the cultural identity within the local context, as well as the distinct global cultural identity, of anime, manga, and other forms of Japanese pop culture that have become cosmopolitan, are also reflected the parallel struggle of youth to define their place in their global and local communities.