Japanese entertainment thunderbolt

The trumpets can start ringing, a new born has joined the increasingly fast-growing body of scholarly works focusing on the spread of Japanese entertainment and its success around the world!

In the wake of the many Manga Network projects, several publications are on the line and Marco Pellitteri’s book entitled “Il drago e la Saetta. Modelli, strategie e identita’ dell’immaginarion giapponese” is the first one to come out of the factory. Although only in Italian for the moment, we can hope that it will be soon translated into English and French. Knowing Marco Pellitteri’s other works, I’m quite certain that the non-Italian speaking (and reading) scholars will greatly appreciate to have it in more widely-reaching languages. Prefaced by Professor Yui Kiyomitsu, a Japanese sociologist from Kobe University specialized in cultural comparative studies, and including a chapter by Jean-Marie Bouissou, scholar at the Center for International Research and Studies (CERI) in Paris and founder of the Manga Network, this 664-pages long book offers a detailed analysis of the arrival of Japanese popular culture in Europe since the 1970’s. Indeed, within the overall international circulation of entertainment goods, the Japanese industry has been holding an important position for the last 30 years.

The book identifies two distinctive periods during which these goods made their way into the entertainment habits of many Europeans, the first one going from 1975 to 1995 and the second one from 1995 until now. Marco Pellitteri sets out to analyze the various types of reception the Japanese global imagination has triggered not only among young consumers but also other more public actors in Europe and particularly in Italy, the number 1 country until recently for the consumption of manga narratives.

From that point on and into a second part of the book, the author analyzes the implication of this commercial and cultural success for Japan’s “soft power” projected abroad and its position on the international scene. This will certainly make for a very intense and rich analysis of this aspect of globalization, linking together politics, media phenomena, consumption culture and economics.