Manga communicates diverse qualities of sound through visual effects applied to writing. Voices in spoken dialogue, thoughts, and voiceovers are often represented through different type fonts or handwriting. This serves as a narrative tool to differentiate between text categories but also gives each one of them a specific resonance in the reader’s mind. Manga employs a multitude of usually handwritten mimetic words to express sounds and other sensations. Among the various graphic shapes these words assume is a semi-materialization of the written characters, which can undergo physical effects of the represented phenomenon and enter the spatial depth of the storyworld. The Japanese writing system heavily facilitates the visual characteristics of mimetics in manga, be it with the expressive use of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, the vowel-lengthening symbol, or the sonant mark.

Since the middle of the 20th century, manga and TV anime have developed in parallel, borrowing from one another on practically every level from narrative content to expressive devices. Their productive exchange on the level of style has been facilitated by their shared material basis, the line drawing. This material homology could even blur the boundary between the static and the animated image, with anime borrowing and reproducing the dynamism of manga drawings. At the same time, movement inherent in the drawing and movement of the drawing are both intrinsically bound to the graphic style. This chapter addresses the relation between the movement of the anime and manga image and certain stylistic parameters (such as iconic abstraction, visual density, and quality of the line), providing a new vantage point on aesthetic and material connections between the two media forms, as well as on the ongoing evolution of TV anime.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

The practice of imagining idols within romantic and sexual relationships, known as “shipping,” is central to the global fandom of K-pop, allowing fans to develop affective relationships with celebrities through practices such as writing fan fiction. In particular, shipping that reimagines boy groups such as BTS within romantic or homoerotic relationships is especially common as a method of articulating fandom and exploring sexual agency, thus producing spaces within Korea’s patriarchal society where women’s sexual desires can be safely explored. International aspects of BTS shipping, particularly within Japanese and Anglophone fandom spaces (in Australian and the Philippines), is then analyzed. While BTS shipping in Japan tends to conceptualize homoerotic relationships between men via sexual practices and behaviors divorced from identity, Anglophone shipping tends to instead overtly deploy LGBTQ identity politics. Nevertheless, both practices possess queer potentials that allow fans to affectively explore their sexuality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of shipping in affirming the presence of queer fans within global K-pop culture.

continues the explanation of the origin and evolution of emoji by introducing the importance of non-verbal communication for face-to-face conversation and the issues that can arise from the absence of this online. The chapter looks at research into universal facial expressions, from Duchenne to Eckman, and how this provides a context for how emoji are used and interpreted. It also explains how the language of emoji faces has its origins in conventions developed in manga, which means that there’s also a learned element to the way they express particular concepts and sentiments.