Anime inspires exploration of Japanese culture for some Americans

By Shawn Hutchinson

Photo provided by Christopher Fahlin. Art by Oda Eiichirō.

Turn on the TV and you’ll find any number of programs to potentially immerse yourself in. There are shows for just about everyone. For some people, animated cartoons from Japan, called anime, are very popular. One of these fans, Christopher Fahlin, has taken his love of anime even further as he is learning to speak Japanese.

“I watch subtitled anime, so I kind of learn [the language],” Fahlin said. “I wanted to read the manga before they were translated.”

Fahlin said he likes anime because there tend to be good storylines in the shows, and they can work in plot elements and actions that regular shows cannot.

“The best part of anime is that it’s 100% CGI, so they can do whatever the heck they want,” Fahlin said.

Fahlin started watching anime in the early 2000s, when shows like Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z had strong followings. This time represented a boom in American anime consumption. Now, Fahlin said many anime have gone mainstream, which he considers a mixed bag.

“A ton of people I never thought would watch anime actually do,” Fahlin said. “The downside is that mainstream anime do exist. They’re trying to make money, but they have really bad plots.”

A person familiar with the history of anime in the United States, Russ Walsh, said this is part of the bubble bursting on anime.

“Back in the day, there were seven or eight huge companies, and now there’s just Crunchyroll and Funimation,” Walsh said about American anime companies.

Walsh said anime has developed its own niche fandom among other media commonly categorized as appealing to nerd audiences. Walsh said the anime group is big enough to be noticed, but still separate from the fandoms around major video game and movie franchises.

Not everyone is on the anime bandwagon these days. Ted Sandberg considers himself a casual anime watcher.

“I developed a more perceptive eye for the faults in the content, the errors in animation, and anime was just kind of a phase for me,” Sandberg said.

Sandberg said current anime shows have a problem with focusing on a romantic comedy plotline.

“You can take the main plot of just about every show, and it’d be the exact same thing, give or take a couple of variables,” Sandberg said.

Anime has lost a bit of steam since about 2008, but it still maintains a large following in the United States. Walsh said the key to future growth lies in Japanese companies embracing the streaming culture. He said Japanese companies will probably need to embrace streaming and working with Western companies to find a larger audience.

Sandberg said anime is not something people tend to get into just on their own.

“It’s definitely a thing where unless something really captivates you, you’ll probably get into it from a friend,” Sandberg said. “I didn’t have close friends interested in it, so that’s why I fell out.”

Still, for Fahlin, anime remains an important part of his identity that he is willing to stick with.

“When I first started watching anime, I thought ‘wow, this is cool,’” Fahlin said. “I don’t care what other people think about it. I’m going to watch it no matter what people think. You’ve got to watch what makes you happy.”