http://genre.dukejournals.org/content/36/1-2/189.

short

D R A W I N G ON T R A D I T I O N : TRANSLATION, MARTIAL
A R T S , A N D JAPANESE A N I M E IN A M E R I C A

KENNETH H O D G E S , KEENE STATE COLLEGE

Japanese anime (animated television shows and movies) has had an increas-
ingly great effect on American popular culture in the last two decades, altering
animation styles, influencing science fiction, and creating the Pokemon fad.
Anime comes in many styles and genres, from children's shows to pornography
to high art (such as Angel's Egg), from movies to television shows to direct-to-
video releases. Most of it does not get commercially released in the United States.
Because American animation tends to be reserved for children's shows, many
genres of anime lack an obvious market niche, limiting the kinds of material that
get translated. Fans have gotten around some of these problems by doing their
own translating, subtitling, and distributing of anime, and their success has gen-
erated commercial interest in anime. All of this makes anime an ideal subject for
looking at modern translationtranslation in its broadest sense, the bringing of
an object from one place to another, with all that entails: shifts in language, shifts
in format, shifts in audience.
Fans' success in distributing anime in this country depends on recent tech-
nology: videotape, since most anime is not broadcast by commercial stations,
and personal computers advanced enough to enable subtitling. While much
attention has been paid to how personal computers will affect books, electronic
technology has already altered the way anime is distributed (and DVD technolo-
gy is altering it again). Using video-cassette recorders and personal computers,
fans can add their own subtitles to programs or movies (with the right equip-
ment, a computer can read an original video signal, superimpose on it subtitles
from a translated script timed to hundredths of a second, and record the result

GENRE XXXVI - SPRING/SUMMER 2003 - 189-210. COPYRIGHT 2003 BY THE UNIVERSITY

OF OKLAHOMA. ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM RESERVED.
190 GENRE

on a blank videotape). This allows these "fansubbers" to produce translations of

foreign works that commercial distributors ignore. Often, several groups of fan-
subbers will translate the same series. The multiple versions, the glosses provided
by the subtitles, and the creation of copies in small batches in some ways resem-
bles medieval manuscript culture more than mass media publication or broad-
cast. The result, since art is not independent of its medium, subtly alters the
effect of the shows. Fansubbers also alter shows (including the perceived genre of
the shows) by their translations of the language. Works that, in Japanese, explore
elements of Japanese national tradition and history are recast to address more
general issues for American audiences.
Two shows, Ranma 1/2 (about a high-school martial artist under an ancient
Chinese curse that causes him to turn into a girl whenever he's splashed with
cold water) and Rurouni Kenshin (about a master swordsman during the Meiji
Restoration who attempts to renounce killing while still fighting for justice), pro-
vide good examples of the complicated swirl of translation issues that surrounds
anime in the United States. They highlight the three major areas of translation
that I will focus on. The first is the technological translation from digital to ana-
log that makes possible fansubbing and thus new relations between publishers
and viewers. The second is generic translation, since Japanese artists use anima-
tion for a far wider range of material than Americans do. The third is cultural
and historical translation: Ranma 1/2 and Rurouni Kenshin both use animation
as a new medium to explore tensions between historical tradition and modern
life.

Subs and Dubs

The first broad area of translation that I will look at is how the technologcial,
legal, and economic translations that bring anime to the United States affect the
way programs are watched. Fansubbing alters the way anime is watched, encour-
aging collective watching instead of the private viewing often associated with tele-
vision. Since fansubbers are not commercial publishers and thus do not cater to
large markets, not everyone has access to their materials, forcing people to rely on
acquaintances to acquire new anime. Originally, anime was distributed through
conventions (science-fiction or comic-book conventions until anime became
popular enough to support its own gatherings). Computer technology helped fans
find distributors, at first through computer bulletin boards and later through
websites. Even when fans can find distributors, videotapes are relatively expensive.
 JAPANESE A N I M E IN AMERICA 191

Some anime series are over a hundred half-hour episodes. Since normal video-
tapes hold about two hours in the best-quality mode (used to minimize the degra-
dation of copying), a complete series can run over twenty tapes. This discourages
individual ownership and private watching; instead, anime fans tend to join
groups where tapes can be shared and watched together. 1
This communal atmosphere, especially if some of the people are or know
fansubbers, makes viewers feel entitled to critique or alter translations, as they
might not when watching commercially produced films that claim to be authori-
tative and that lack the c o m p e t i t i o n f r o m other translations of the same
material. 2 If, as often happens, there are many different fansubbed translations of
a series available, the lack of one authoritative version only stimulates discussion.
Because fansubbers were so successful, they built a large enough market for
anime that commercial translators began to pay attention, and in the last decade,
commercial distributors have been making more translated anime available. 3
Some distributors, such as Viz Communications, are owned by Japanese pub-
lishers; others must negotiate American licensing rights. Mass production and
the increasing availability of anime in video rental stores are changing anime cul-
ture in the United States. DVDs, which can allow users to choose between several
languages and either subtitles or dubbed versions, broaden audiences for their
programs. So far, however, the traditions of watching in groups and considering
the translations to be part of an ongoing discussion of the work rather than the
authoritative record continues.

'This can happen at conventions: originally fans gathered at science fiction or comic book con-
ventions, and the first anime convention occurred in 1991. Clubs are another natural venue, espe-
cially at colleges. See Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley,
CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996).
2
Henry Jenkins has explored how fans create a dynamic, responsive culture rather than being
passive television viewers mindlessly receiving static programs. While he mentions anime in passing,
he does not discuss fansubs: but the act of translation significantly alters fans' relation to the material.
Instead of responding to shows they are helpless to control, fansubbers help produce the shows. The
closest he comes is the discussion of music videos, in which clips from a program are arranged to
match popular songs (223-49) and he is right to note that videotape shifts narrative emphasis from
relatively self-contained episodes watched once a week to a larger episode in which many episodes
can be watched in a short time (70-72). But anime fan networks often have to get their primary
material from each other, not from commercial television, and this shapes their viewing habits in
ways he does not discuss. See Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
3
Mary Grigsby discusses international commercial marketing of anime in "Sailormoon: Manga
(Comics) and Anime (Cartoon) Superheroine Meets Barbie: Global Entertainment C o m m o d i t y
Comes to the United States," Journal of Popular Culture, 32.1 (Summer 1998): 59-80.
192 GENRE

Fansubs obviously violate copyright law, but labeling them as pirated videos
obscures the complex relation between amateur and commercial distribution.
The fansubs usually precede licensed translations. Fansubbing began when there
was no commercial system for distributing anime in the United States, and one
explicit goal of early fans was to demonstrate to publishers that there was market
for such material. As part of this goal, many fansubbers developed an informal
set of copyright ethics different from the law. They subtitle and distribute shows
that otherwise would not be available in English in the United States, but they
stop subtitling and distributing shows that become commercially available. As
one fansub distributor's website says:
Fansubs are not cheap alternatives for store-bought tapes! Fansubs are brought
to you for the purpose of helping build an audience for anime titles so that an
American release can be possible. Please help spread the word by making copies
for friends, and support the releases from commercial companies when they
become available!4

In this Utopian model, fansubbers and commercial distributors are allies: fansub-
bers help create an audience and determine its size and enthusiasm; the publish-
ers then can buy the rights to the popular shows. Rightly or wrongly, fans claim
this is what happened with Rurouni Kenshin: publishers feared it would be too
historically specific for American audiences until the wild popularity of the fan-
subs proved otherwise.
Since most fansubbers do not profit from their work, they have little incen-
tive to duplicate the labor of a commercial company and do stop distributing
shows. Many fans, however, prefer the fansubbed tapes: they are cheaper (five to
ten dollars, as opposed to twenty or thirty dollars for commercial tapes), and
often of comparable quality. These fans either copy tapes among themselves or
put pressure on fansubbers to continue distributing (thus the warning to fans
quoted above). Commercial publishers are aware that fansubs cut into their mar-
ket, and the relation is uneasy: as anime becomes more familiar in the United
States, there is less need for fansubbers to create a market for new shows and less
reason for publishers to tolerate fansubbers. The presence of active fansubbers,
however, has changed the role of publishers. They are no longer the gatekeepers,
choosing which foreign shows to let into the United States. Their monopoly on

4
Kodocha Anime, http://www.animemetropolis.com/kodocha/main.html, accessed 25 February
2001.
 J A P A N E S E A N I M E IN A M E R I C A 193

the means of distribution has been broken. Shows they overlook are brought in
to the United States by other means.
The commercial companies tend to prefer to dubbing to subtitling, since
"dubs" are more widely popular, even though many serious anime aficionados
dislike them. Most companies produce both subtitled and dubbed versions of
anime. In dubs the act of translation is less visible, and therefore the sense of dia-
logue with the original material is diminished. Dubbing obviously erases the
original, Japanese sounds; echoes are left in the names (if they are preserved),
and in social customs and references that are not American. However, because
anyone buying dubbed tapes is faced with a choice between subtitled and dubbed
versions, the sense of an authoritative translation remains elusive: buyers are
reminded that translation is a process and that different modes of translations
result in different programs. Some shows, like Ranma 1/2 (in which advertise-
ments for dubbed episodes appear on subtitled tapes), emphasize this. With the
switch to DVDs, the options of subtitles or dubbed dialogue are often made
available on the same disk, even with the choice of watching English subtitles
while listening to an English dub (frequently with the subtitles using a different
script than the dubbing), thus making the process of translation less authorita-
tive and more open for watchers' interventions.
This process can be seen in the liner notes accompanying the commercially
subtitled videotapes of Ranma 1/2. The liner notes for the subtitled series explain
the process of creating the dubbed version, reminding watchers of the intertextu-
ality of Japanese anime with other versions of itself. The liner notes for the first
several tapes are parodies of high school newspapers or yearbookspresenting
the work as a finished product and encouraging watchers to imagine a commu-
nity with the characters on the show. Very quickly, though, the notes shift to a
newsletter in which Editor Trish Ledoux addresses the audience directly,
explaining translation choices, adding notes on Japanese puns and visual con-
ventions, acknowledging errors viewers had pointed out on earlier tapes. These
notes encourage viewers to imagine themselves as part of a community of view-
ers, translators, and editors. It makes the process of translation more open and
continuous. Ledoux spends seven paragraphs discussing her ideas on translation
in the liner notes for episode 16. While not immediately relevant to the action of
the show, it recognizes that the show is not simply a canned program to be
watched, but part of a continuing dialogue of fans with each other and with the
material.
194 GENRE

The result is to shift fundamentally certain dynamics of translation. Sakai

Naoki distinguishes between homolingual address (the postulated normal
regime of communication), and heterolingual address (the realm of visible trans-
lation). 5 The two create different senses of community: the first assumes a com-
monality (often ethnic or nationalist); the second must acknowledge serious dif-
ferences between people and thus addresses a fractured audience. While dubbing
can try to present foreign work as if it were homolingual, effacing the effort of
translation, serious anime fans seem to prefer the translation to be visible: the
heterolingual nature of the work becomes part of the appeal. At the same time,
however, translations (and translators) lose some of their privilege. Instead of
one translation by an authoritative translator whose work cannot be challenged,
translation becomes a collective effort and various strategies of translation are
debated and appreciated. 6 Since, as Sakai argues, language is a strong marker of
national identity and translation and acknowledgement of the quality between
nations, having anime audiences choose to foreground translation means they
are always acknowledging their separation from the original audience but choos-
ing to participate as a member of the audience anyway; they are defining a fan
community not limited by language.

The second major issue in translation is how to deal with generic assump-
tions. Reception of a work of art depends on viewers' expectations, and a trans-
lated work is seen not just in a different language but in a different context. 7
While in the United States animation is strongly associated with children's pro-
grams, the initial audience for anime in America was predominantly young,
technologically adept men. 8 In anime, they found a wide range of genres, from
serious artistic films through romantic comedy, science fiction, and children's

5
Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997) 1-17.
6
Sakai imagines the simplest case of translation where listeners do not know enough of the for-
eign language even to identify what language is being spoken (55). For audiences watching anime,
this is seldom the case: they know enough to recognize that Japanese sounds different from, say, Ger-
man; and many have acquired some Japanese phrases. There is thus a spectrum of dependence of the
translator rather than the sharply defined roles of translator and translator's audience.
7
See for instance Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) esp. 3-45.
8
Napier did some limited surveys in 1998-1999, finding that over three-quarters of the fans
were male and many were college-age or older with scientific or engineering backgrounds. By this
time, anime was already shifting to be more popular with a wider fan base, and these tendencies were
probably more pronounced earlier. See Napier, 239 ff.
 JAPANESE ANIME IN AMERICA 195

shows. While usually not considered high literature, manga (cartoons and graph-
ic novels) and anime are popular in Japan, even among adults: in 1995, nearly
forty percent of the books and magazines sold were manga; 9 Japanese studios
produce about half of their shows as anime, meaning about fifty animated shows
a year, not counting movies and video releases (cassettes, laser disks, and now
DVDs). 10 This may be due in part to the lack of Hollywood competition in this
medium. The differing expectations for animation mean that the most successful
anime translations tend to be for children: Pokemon was wildly successful while
the sophisticated Princess Mononoke played only in selected theaters. (Perhaps
the Academy Award for Spirited Away signals a change). The children's shows
that are picked up can be modified, sometimes significantly, to fit American gen-
res. Dubbed Sailor Moon episodes minimize suggestions of a lesbian attraction
between two of the older girls introduced late in the series. Card Captor Sakura
was transformed for cable television into Card Captors by rearranging the order
of episodes drastically (occasionally splicing together episodes to make an hybrid
American episode) to promote a boy from an important secondary character
into a second protagonist, a decision based presumably on the twin assumptions
that American boys would not watch a show with a girl as the main character
and that it would not be commercially viable to show a series for an audience
primarily of girls.

Fansubbing, however, allows niche distribution of shows that don't fit estab-
lished genres. The clash between American and Japanese assumptions seems to
have been part of the appeal: not only did the young male American audiences
enjoy familiar genres in an unfamiliar medium (the stereotype that anime
involves primarily big-eyed, big-breasted women and big battle robots springs
from a predictable taste for sex and violence), but they also enjoyed a freedom to
watch genres that might be considered too cute in other circumstances: romantic
comedies or children's shows were translated, subtitled, and distributed as well.
Because Japanese gender and social roles don't exactly correspond to American
roles, American viewers can watch shows aimed at a variety of different audi-
ences without feeling that they are being forced into culturally prohibited roles:
thus, American male college students will watch shows aimed at Japanese school

9
Schodt 15, 19.
10
Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japan-
ese Animation (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 7.
196 GENRE

girls when they would disdain to watch a similar show aimed at American
schoolgirls.
Beyond the technological and the generic translations, there is a third level
of translation: the transformation of historical topics into a new art form. Rey
Chow argues that Chinese movies involve "the translation of ethnic cultures
from their previous literary and philosophical bases into the forms of contempo-
rary mass culture." 11 Television itself is a shift from writing and oration, the tra-
ditional bases for history and cultural self-examination; and anime allows a styl-
istic distance from the moving photographic images, emphasizing some features
while omitting others. Anime itself is in many ways a hybrid form, drawing on
traditions of kami-shibai (traditional story-tellers who used successions of draw-
ings or prints) and manga (comics or graphic novels) as well as western comics
and animation. 1 2 Despite the old roots, anime's popularity is recent: the first
Japanese animated television shows began appearing in the 1960s. Many shows
make an issue of the kind of cultural mixing that created anime, sometimes
focusing on the fusion of past and present, others on the mixing of Japanese and
foreign. For instance, science fiction shows that feature battle robots often draw
them as giant humans with weapons that suggest swords and spears: the result is
to glue old martial traditions celebrating individual prowess onto modern mech-
anized warfare, and the uneasiness of the fit can be exploited if the series choos-
es.
The translation of old cultural forms into a new medium is present in the
anime before it is translated for Americans, but the translation from Japan to
America complicates matters even further. Since most American audiences are
ignorant of Japanese history, they will not perceive the subject of the shows in
the same fashion, and they may fit the programs into rather different contexts.
This process is neither simply orientalist nor postcolonial: Japan, though briefly
occupied, was never colonized and maintained its own language and traditions;
and, while orientalism tends to see the east as historically backward, anime is
often appreciated for its modernityscience fiction is a popular theme, and the
video technology that allows its distribution is often equal to or in advance of
American technology. Instead, anime deals with the Japanese past (or imagined

11
Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 191.
12
Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open
Court, 1996), 21-22; Napier, 19-27.
 JAPANESE A N I M E IN A M E R I C A 197

future) to help make sense of the Japanese present, and American audiences
translate these efforts into terms that make sense to them in a new context. Two
programs make it clear how this can work.

Ruroutii Kenshin: Pacifying a Martial Past

In Rurouni Kenshin,13 based on the manga by Watsuki Nobuhiro, Himura
Kenshin is a master swordsman whose killing prowess helped usher in the Meiji
Restoration (the nineteenth-century transition from feudal country to nation-
state). When he decides to give up killing, he is left without a clear-cut place in
society. He drifts until he meets Kamiya Kaoru, a young woman who is teaching
a non-lethal style of swordsmanship. He is bemusedas he says, the techniques
were meant to killbut he stays with her at her school. Soon they take in
Yahiko, an orphaned boy whom Kaoru begins to instruct. The bulk of the series
is their conflicts with rebels, corrupt government officials, or businessmen and
gangsters who try to oppress common Japanese. These conflicts are usually vio-
lent, creating a tension between the desires to fight injustice and to preserve paci-
fism.
Since most of the major characters in the series are martial artists, the first
challenge for the show is to translate martial arts into a form visually under-
standable to a non-martial audience. Animation's flexibility is used to good
effect: strong characters are drawn as much taller and bulkier than others. Fast
characters become blurs. Swords split the earth, shock waves knock down trees,
and so on. The result is to exaggerate differences in strength, speed, and fighting
style until they become visible for ignorant audiences, while simultaneously pre-
serving enough plausibility that the martial arts remain a symbol of Japanese tra-
dition and not an escape into supernatural fantasy.
These techniques and the people associated with them often get names that
are descriptive compound words in Japanese. For instance, the hero Himura
Kenshin (whose own name, Kenshin, means Sword-heart), is often called the
hitokiri battousai, roughly translated as "the mankiller of the sword-drawing
technique." The moves he uses in fights are often given names. While these
names would make sense to a Japanese audience that considers swordsmanship

''Distributed in Japan by SPE Visual Works and Fuji Television; in the United States by Media-
Blasters, starting in 2000 and not yet complete. I will also refer to the fansubbed version by Shinsen
Gumi. While I know it is not (or should not be) widely available, the loose fan translation provides
for interesting evidence of how the show was first received in this country and of how the fansubbing
process works.
198 GENRE

part of its national heritage, 14 American audiences are more likely, to find the tra-
dition foreign, and the translations reinforce this. Instead of rendering the names
in English, they often try to preserve the Japanese. The fansub usually does not
translate these names: the visual explanation is enough. The commercial subtitle
occasionally translates but preserves many names in the original, creating odd
hybrids: it translates only half of his nom de guerre: they translate hitokiri (man-
killer), but battousai (sword-drawing technique) is untranslated. To preserve the
Japanese flavor, the fansub translates important martial terms American audi-
ences might not understand into simpler Japanese words that American anime
audiences will likely know: thus shihan (a high rank in a martial art's hierarchy)
is translated as sensei, and kenjutsu (sword style) is translated as budo. The
preservation of Japanese terms, some known to Americans and some not, keeps
the martial arts foreign for American audiences and closer to magic than nation-
al tradition.
Translating the martial arts is crucial because it is the martial arts that allow
a discussion of how Japanese tradition in the Meiji period is to survive in a
rapidly modernizing country where modernizing seems alarmingly synonymous
with westernizing. Swordsmanship in particular becomes the symbol of Japanese
heritage. Kenshin is in danger of having his identity as a swordsman erased by
the reforms he helped create. While for him it is an honorable contrast to the
corruption attending the modernization, the martial tradition has its own prob-
lems of violence and oppression. Many of the villains are masters of Japanese
martial arts. In opposing the west, as they almost all do, they cling to the old
freedom to fight and kill. Their love of martial tradition slips into militarism and
becomes evil. Kenshin and Kaoru try to take from the past the honor and the
Japanese values that will set the nation apart from the west while rejecting much
of the cruelly and tyranny that those values supported. In other words, they try
to translate an antiquated martial tradition into a form useful to modern society.
The decision to present historical events not as written accounts but as a
backdrop for a fictional animated television show is itself an act of translation
(indeed, since Rurouni Kenshin began as manga, the history gets translated

14
Less romantically, the names link not only to a glorious martial past but to contemporary
video games, in which on-screen avatars fight by performing a limited set of preprogrammed, named
attacks and defenses.
 J A P A N E S E A N I M E IN A M E R I C A 199

through several popular forms). 15 This translation means history (and thus to
some extent national identity) are no longer solely the property of scholars but
available for popular examination and manipulation. Rurouni Kenshin drama-
tizes this form of translation from traditional history to popular media in several
ways. The first episode begins with an antique map of Japan with superimposed
white text scrolling over it; this gives way to a scene of men fighting, the transi-
tion from historical text to animated show dramatized in a few seconds. In other
scenes, when the perspective faces a bright sun, fake lens reflections are drawn in
the picture, suggesting live-action filming; this is a reminder that the anime is
not directly representing a historical reality but is responding to an ongoing dia-
logue conducted through many media.
The program translates general historical concernswesternization, dis-
placed aristocrats, disrupted traditioninto the personal concerns of extraordi-
nary characters, making abstract struggles literal, personal fights. The tension in
Kenshin's trying to preserve and pacify a martial tradition affects gender roles.
He is drawn as smaller than other men and with long hair. His traditional haka-
ma is skirt-like, and the voice actor that plays him is a woman, Suzukaze Mayo.
Since Kenshin finds lodging in a dojo run by a woman who will not kill suggests
that the shift from a killing art to a sport risks effeminacy, that swordplay will be
left the property of women and children. The gender dynamics are particularly
obvious in the three-episode story arc beginning with "Raijuta's Desire. Vision of
a Forbidden Empire," (episodes 19-21). A spoiled, orphaned heir, Tsukayama
Yutarou, lives in a western-style mansion and wears western clothes but is des-
perately seeking a sword-teacher to teach him to be as good a swordsman as his
father (shown in a picture in traditional Japanese clothes). When Kenshin refus-
es to teach his sword technique, Yutarou turns to Raijuta, a man drawn much
larger and more muscular than any of the main characters. Raijuta gives the boy
a steel sword instead of a wooden training sword but does not instruct him;
nonetheless, Yutarou worships him as a father. With Yutarou's money, Raijuta
collects a band of other martial artists and rebels to restore the samurai class and
bring the martial arts back into honor.

15
For background on the relation of anime and manga, see Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Cul-
ture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (University of Hawaii Press, 2000); Frederik Schodt,
Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), esp. 275-340, and
Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (New York: Kodansha International, 1983).
200 GENRE

Initially contemptuous of Kenshin and his friends, when Yahiko easily beats
Yutarou in a fight, despite the mismatch of Yahiko's wooden sword to Yutarou's
real one, Yutarou begins to accept instruction from Kaoru. Then Raijuta's revolt
commences. The martial artists, each drawn distinctively, initially succeed
against uniformed, indistinguishable government troops armed with rifles; then
the soldiers begin to win. Kenshin arrives, stops the battle, and fights Raijuta.
When Yutarou tries to intervene, Raijuta wounds him, leaving him unable to
hold a sword. After Kenshin wins the fight, Yutarou decides to join his uncle in
Germany, where western medicine may be able to heal his wound. Yahiko
reminds him that they still haven't finished their duel, and they spar, Yahiko's
wooden sword against Yutarou's wooden crutch. Yutarou promises to return
and finish the match.
The westernized Yutarou's desperate desire to find a Japanese father sym-
bolizes a disrupted tradition. His own father is dead; Raijuta can only teach the
violence that must be abandoned lest it destroy Japan; and Kenshin, fearing the
same violence, refuses to teach at all. The organized, westernized government
soldiers have become faceless. The only figure who will teach acceptably is
Kaoru. She can teach because she has already translated the martial tradition
from what it was to suit her needs: a non-lethal assertion of power that as a
woman she traditionally would not have. The only way Yutarou can continue to
train with Kaoru, moreover, is to travel to the west and subject himself to west-
ern medicine to cure the injury inflicted by the very art he wishes to learn. With-
out the mediation of women and the west, there is no access to traditional Japan-
ese m a n h o o d ; b u t the fear is t h a t the w o m e n a n d the west will p r o v e
overwhelming. Kenshin walks a fine line between resisting militarism and resist-
ing the surrender of his Japanese identity, but his refusal to teach makes him a
difficult model to follow. (Uncharacteristically for the show, there are several
shots of Kenshin's bare chest and Yahiko is shown once naked, to confirm on the
basic level their masculinity.) The villains, although hypermasculine, often recre-
ate the west even as they seek to resist it (one goes so far as to build his own
Black Ship), and the versions of Japanese history they cite (and predict) empha-
size cruelty and war.

American audiences typically do not know much Japanese history: I know

one former president of an anime club at a major American university who did '
not know what the Meiji Restoration was and thought the mixing of western and
 J A P A N E S E A N I M E IN A M E R I C A 201

Japanese clothing in Rurouni Kenshin a stylistic choice by the animators. 16 As a

result, the show is watched more as general fantasy and less as historical drama.
The American distributor, Media Blasters, advertises the start of the show this
way:
O u r saga begins over ten years after t h e b l o o d y Meiji Revolution that m a r k e d
t h e e n d of t h e rule of the S h o g u n a n d t h e S a m u r a i in Japan. In Tokyo, w h e r e
swords with blades have b e e n b a n n e d . . . t h e a d v e n t u r e starts as we are t h r u s t
i n t o an era l o n g gone, not o n l y of blades a n d duels, b u t w h e r e h o n o r a n d r e p u -
tation were still a p e r s o n ' s m o s t prized possessions. 1 7

The Meiji Restoration is explained only briefly and in purely domestic terms
(the end of the shogun and the samurai) without mention of the tense relations
with the west that provoked and enabled the modernization. The tension
between east and west fades, creating an emphasis on the tension between mod-
ernism and tradition. Thus the fading of the feudal ideal is brought more in line
with the western experience: an event further in the past ("an era long gone")
and brought about more by domestic than international pressure.
Their subtitled translations of the episodes further shift the genre of the
work away from a meditation on the limits of power and authority in society
toward a simpler picture of a lone man against a corrupt society. The Japanese
"men of spirit" or revolutionaries who brought about the Meiji reforms are
termed "imperialists": a term that is technically accurate (the Meiji revolution
was in the name of the emperor against the shogun) and suggestive of the later
political developments that led to the Japanese conquests in World War II. The
connotations, however, make the new government seem established, powerful,
and aggressive, rather than an only recently successful group of insurgents trying
to found a stable government. Kenshin, in contrast, is made more folksy and
thus more distant from the government he helped establish. In the Japanese,
Kenshin uses a formal, self-effacing style that involves using compound verbs (o-
hanashi de gozaru instead of simply hanasu). In the English subtitles, this style is
translated with an extra or repeated verb (I say this, that I do) that does not seem
formal or antique but instead casual and perhaps provincial. While Kenshin's
key role in forming the new Meiji government is acknowledged, the translation

16
Anime characters are often drawn in western styles, with round eyes and hair that is blonde,
red, brown (and blue, green, and purple) as well as black. It is thus more reasonable than it first
sounds to treat western costumes as stylistic flourishes rather than thematic or historical indicators.
17
Media Blaster web site, http://www.media-blasters.com/AW/catalog.htm, accessed 25 Febru-
ary 2001.
202 GENRE

choices yield a folksier Kenshin linguistically distanced from the imperialist gov-
ernment; the questions about when to use force that he faces thus become more
personal and less paradigmatic of Japan's choices as it modernized.
The fansub by Shinsen Gumi, like Media Blasters, plays up the personal
combat rather than the political. The name comes from a group of martial artists
who fought more for the perfection of their art than for political conviction. The
opening logo on each fansubbed tape is a sword being drawn. On the blade
appears "Shinsen Gumi," named for a group of swordsmen, and then their
motto, aku, soku, zan [bad, fast, kill]. Clearly, the martial appeal is what is being
emphasized. What is also being emphasized is (for Americans) the appeal of the
foreign. The identity of the Shinsen Gumi is explained later in the course of the
anime (for those who don't know their history), but the motto is untranslated.
The martial thus becomes foreign (unsurprising, given the glamour eastern mar-
tial arts have in the west). Once the martial is celebrated as foreign, it ceases to be
the synecdoche of lost tradition. Kenshin's androgynous appearance, therefore,
changes meaning. Instead of a traditional warrior become (perhaps) lost and
effeminate, the American emphasis is on a seemingly weak character with unex-
pected strengths, playing on the fantasies of the mild-mannered who hope that,
like Clark Kent, they might be able to transform in a Superman if the situation
required. The translations encourage this transition from a crisis of gender to a
celebration of secret strength. When Yutarou initially dismisses Kenshin in
episode 19, the subtitles say "He looks so skinny," suppressing the "onna mitai,"
"like a woman", in the original Japanese. The emphasis is on his weak appear-
ance, not his gender. Even without such alterations in translation, however, the
subtext is changed: meaning is produced by the interaction between audiences
and art, and American audiences have very different preconceptions about the
history of modernization and the consequences for gender ideals.

Ranma 1/2: Searching for China

Ranma 1/2, based on the manga by Takahashi Rumiko, links gender, martial
arts, and history in a different pattern. 18 Tendo Soon, a karate master in modern
Tokyo, wishes to ensure the continuation of his school by arranging a marriage
between one of his three daughters and Saotome Ranma, the son of fellow karate

18
In the United States, Ranma 1/2 is available from Viz Communications (1995). In Japan, it
was distributed by Kitty and Fuji TV.
 JAPANESE ANIME IN AMERICA 203

master Saotome Genma. Unfortunately, the Saotomes go to China to improve

their martial arts at a legendary training ground dotted with lots of small pools,
in which various creatures have drowned over the centuries. Now, whoever falls
into one of them takes the form of whatever died there. Ever after, hot water
restores the victims to normal, and cold water causes them to revert to the
cursed shapes. Genma falls into a pool where a panda died 2000 years ago;
Ranma plunges into a pool where a teen-aged girl died 1500 years ago. But
mishaps like this, the fathers decide, are no bar to marriage. Tendo Akane, the
youngest daughter who is much better at karate than at any traditionally femi-
nine activity, is chosen to be Ranma's fiancee: her sisters ruthlessly point out
that, since she hates boys, she ought to be glad to have a fiance who is half girl.
Ranma and Akane reluctantly accept their fathers' decision. Ranma and his
father settle in the Tendo dojo to live, and Akane and Ranma start going to high
school together. The adventures that follow form the basis of the series.
In Ranma l/2> the idea that modern Japanese people can literally fall into
Chinese history and have their lives disrupted by events that happened centuries
ago disrupts traditional gender roles. At first glance, it seems Ranma 1/2 is por-
traying a gender crisis similar to that in Rurouni Kenshin. The dojo is passing to
Akane; Ranma has to deal with his magical feminization. But Ranma's female
half does not come from being cut off from the old traditions; rather, it comes
from plunging too deeply into them. In Ranma 1/2 history points to foreign
countries, especially China, and so the quest for pure Japanese tradition disrupts
itself. The martial arts, instead of becoming a synecdoche for an endangered tra-
dition, become a metaphor for contemporary competitions. The tensions of a
modern high-school coming-of-age drama are all expressed in exuberant physi-
cal combat: beyond fights between romantic rivals, there are martial arts skating
competitions, martial arts fast-food delivery contests, martial arts tea cere-
monies, and so on. The martial arts are vital because they can be adapted to the
modern, not stuck as symbols of an imagined past.
Furthermore, the gender disruptions are not as catastrophic as the charac-
ters believe. 19 Ranma learns to use his female side for his own convenience.

" N a p i e r claims "Ranma's transformation from male to female is clearly coded as negative (55),
but this may be mistaking the characters' reactions for the message of the show. Later she acknowl-
edges that the appeal of the show is its gender play and that Ranma is made more appealing by his
repeated transformations (58).
204 GENRE

When learning to ice skate, eating frilly ice-cream desserts, or doing other activi-
ties he fears are beneath his masculine dignity, he (reluctantly at first) uses his
female form. His curse also furthers the romance. The manhood Ranma desires
demands independence and a tight rein on one's emotions; the ideal of woman-
hood continually urged on Akane is shy and retiring. There is little common
ground between these gender ideals on which to build a romance. But Akane's
toughness lets her relate well to men, and Ranma's female side allows him to be
emotionally sensitive to Akane. It is as a girl that he meets Akane, that he first
begins to be friends with her, that he gets engaged to her, that he has what might
be his first date with her, that he first embraces her. It is through some friendly
sparring that Akane welcomes Ranma to the house, it is in her daily fights that
she wins his respect, it is in their battles against common foes that some of their
70
most intimate moments occur/"
These t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s n a t u r a l l y
explode the idea that gender is essential.
At the start of the show, there is the hope
that p e r f o r m e d gender and biological
gender will coincide. In the first episode,
Ranma's father says that Ranma, com-
plaining about the curse, sounds like a
woman and throws him into a pool so he
becomes one. Still, Ranma will not let
b i o l o g y be d e s t i n y . T h e series o f t e n
shows Ranma's breasts since he refuses to
develop the instinct to cover hisher
chest (see figure 1). The result is not only Figure 1: Akane restores Ranma's male form
(from the manga). Notice the Chinese-style
a chance to titillate the audience but to shirt Ranma wears. Takahashi Rumiko, Ranma
serve as a reminder that naked bodies do _ v. 1, trans. Gerard Jones and Matt Thorn (San
Francisco: Viz Communications, 1993) 163.
not display naked truth about characters.
Ranma is as aggressive as ever in his female body. And in Japanese, where there
are distinctive differences between men's and women's speech, he always uses

20
Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court,
1996), 131.
21
Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993).
 JAPANESE ANIME IN AMERICA 205

male forms. He demonstrates that, despite the frequent accusations, Akane is not
truly a boyish girl; Ranma is.
The Chinese element of the show (present in Ranma's curse, his style of
dress, and in some of the music, and later with several Chinese characters)
undermines Japanese history. Stefan Tanaka, in his book Japan's Orient, argues
that, as Japan rapidly modernized and adopted European styles of history, it
needed to find an "Orient" of its own: that is, an exotic, backward location to
serve at once as its origin and its foil, displaying how far it had progressed. 21
China became Japan's Orient, a country distinct geographically but also offset in
time, a reminder of Japanese roots. China was the source for writing Buddhism,
Confucianism, models of government, and martial arts. By the end of the nine-
teenth century, however, China was faltering and Japan could claim itself to be
an equal of the west, having clearly progressed beyond China. China as a symbol
of the past, however, marked Japan as still eastern, still independent of the west.
The series plays with the notion of China as a Japanese Orient. China is the
acknowledged source of Japanese martial arts and writing (there are several jokes
about Japanese readers who can only partially decipher Chinese writing), and
when it is pictured in flashbacks it is shown as rural and primitive. Instead of
anchoring Japanese conventions, however, China loosens them, breaking rigid
gender roles. When Chinese characters appear in Japan, they are no better at
enforcing tradition. The first is Shampoo, a Chinese Amazon who is hunting
both the female and male Ranma, not knowing they are the same person. Ranma
has beaten her in both forms, and tribal law requires that if she is beaten in com-
bat by an outsider, if the outsider is a woman Shampoo must kill her and if he is
man, she must marry him. While her own customs are exotic, initially (as "ori-
ental" customs should) they seem to enforce standard gender roles for everyone
else: strong women are to be punished, and strong men are to be rewarded with
beautiful lovers. But instead of being a stabilizing link to the Chinese prehistory
that might ground Japanese tradition, Shampoo is as unbalanced as the rest by
the curse. She gives up and returns home, neither married nor avenged. Later she
returns to Japan, but she has been cursed herself and now turns into a cat when
wet. She settles down and opens a noodle shop, along with her grandmother
Cologne and her suitor Mousse, and they all add to the comic confusion. (The
western names add to the sense that Shampoo is a disruptive new element, not a
preserver of tradition).
206 GENRE

Shampoo's greatest threat is not that she bears the authority of history, but
rather that she brings about forgetfulness. By trying to enforce traditional gender
roles for everyone but herself, she challenges the relationship between Akane and
Ranma, which is built upon the violations of the stereotypes. In a fight between
Akane and Shampoo in which Shampoo, using a secret shiatsu technique, mas-
sages away all of Akane's memories of Ranma. As Ranma fights to get Akane's
memory back, he behaves much more like a gentleman than usual, and Akane is
far kinder to him; needless to say, with both of them acting so abnormally, her
memory stays lost. It is only when Ranma lets slip an insult that there is a flicker
in Akane's mind. With the urging of both fathers, Ranma lets loose a barrage of
his familiar insults, and, with returning memory, she pounds him into the
ground, the unconventional basis of their love restored. What matters is the tra-
dition they have created for themselves; "traditional" polite interactions between
them have no meaning and keep them apart.
While Chinese origins do not stabilize gender roles, neither do Japanese tra-
ditions. Kuno Tatewaki, an upperclassmen, wants to live in the pure Japanese
tradition. He makes his entry reciting the opening lines of the Heike Monogatari,
a medieval warrior epic, and he wears traditional clothes instead of a school uni-
form. Kuno's purely Japanese historical sense is woefully limited and cannot deal
with the complications Ranma provides. Although several people try to explain
Ranma's curse to him, and although Ranma changes in front of him several
times, once within Kuno's embrace, he refuses to understand: he believes it is all
trickery. He can no more understand the gender confusion that his Japanese
kendo can defeat Ranma's Chinese-influenced martial arts, and his inability to
let go of tradition undoes him.

When these shows are translated for American audiences, the historical
thread changes: China does not mean to Americans what it does to Japanese, and
karate and kendo seem foreign, not traditional. American translators, therefore,
tend to blend the Japanese and Chinese together to form an eastern tradition and
present the series as a joyful upset of that tradition. The slogan by which Viz
Communications advertises the series, "Yin and Yang was never this much fun,"
plays on Chinese words, not Japanese, and suggests a modern destruction of
staid tradition, rather than history shaking up a restrictive modernity.

22
San Francisco: Viz Communications, 1995.
 JAPANESE ANIME IN AMERICA 207

The translations are far looser in the dubbed version than in the subtitled
version, and they transform Shampoo's Chinese role. The liner notes for episode
15 explain:
In the English [dubbed] version of this episode, we asked a native Chinese
speaker to write down in romanized script what Shampoo . . . should be saying.
In the Japanese, what voice-actor Rei Sakuma is reeling off is a list of Chinese
dishes. We didn't want to do the same, so we asked a native Chinese speaker
(who asked to remain nameless) to romanize the lines for us as best he could . . .
so native Chinese speakers, please don't complain how the faux Chinese hurts
your ears, okay? 22

That Shampoo's Chinese is not genuine makes perfect sense in the Japanese
series in which China is the perpetually missing origin, but the American series is
different. The effort of translating from the Japanese "translation" of her Chinese
to English into genuine Chinese to record on an English dub shows Viz's con-
cern with establishing a genuine Asian original which can then be faithfully
translated (the notes emphasize that native speakers were consulted). For Ameri-
can audiences, the show will work if martial arts and the associated traditions
seem genuine; otherwise, parodying them will not be comic. While Japanese
audiences might be more inclined to take the tradition for granted, the American
show has to establish the seriousness of the conventions before the humor works,
and thus the more careful treatment of Shampoo's language. Along the same
lines, the dub replaces Japanese tradition with western tradition when possible to
reinforce the sense that the comedy is overlying serious history. When Kuno
quotes classic Japanese poetry, his lines are transposed into misremembered
Shakespeare. 23
The translations of Ranma 1/2 succeed so well because the show itself is
about disrupted, scrambled traditions. Ranma and Akane are struggling to take
their places in a society that is in constant flux, and the history that might stabi-
lize it is largely fictional a n d mostly u n o b t a i n a b l e . They might serve as
metaphors for anime itself. It is a mixture of old forms and new technologies,
borrowing from sources as diverse as classical Japanese painting and American
cartoons. American versions must work harder to give viewers recognizable
glimpses of the older Japanese traditions, but that these traditions are not known
well is precisely the point of the series.

"Levi, 5.
24
Quoted in Levi, 3.
208 GENRE

Conclusion
Takahashi Rumiko, creator of Ranma 1/2, said in an interview that she was
puzzled by the enthusiastic American reception of her work. "It's my intention
to be putting in a lot of Japanese references, Japanese lifestyle and feelings. . . I
really have to wonder if foreign readers can understand all this, and if so,
how?" 24 Ranma 1/2's popularity in America, however, does not depend on pre-
cisely understanding the Japanese meanings. American audiences and translators
create their own. That the show contains those Japanese elements does matter:
delight in learning about another culture is part of the appeal (even if the imag-
ined Japanese culture of American fans is rather different than the Japanese cul-
ture imagined by those in Japan). But the pleasure does not depend on unmedi-
ated contact with something foreign that must be understood precisely as the
original Japanese audiences would have understood it. In Ranma 1/2 and
Rurouni Kenshin, the origins of modern Japan and its relations to the rest of the
world are treated lightly, at times almost playfully. Martial arts, visually engaging
and dramatically stimulating, serve as a popular form for talking about historical
tradition. These translations offer Japanese viewers new perspectives onto their
own history, their own culture. When translated for American audiences,
changes must occur. The result is not a complete Americanization, but the cre-
ation of a new work comprehensible by a new audience.
The process of translation that allows anime to come to the United States
depends not only on the linguistic and cultural translations that let a work be
understood in a new language and a new context; it depends also on technologi-
cal changes that alter the way the television shows are distributed. Videotapes
and videodisks ended the reliance on broadcast television,25 and personal com-
puters capable of processing video images allowed for amateur subtitling. This
creates a hybrid culture: because videotapes can be modified by the appropriate
equipment, the shows lack the fixity of a television broadcast or a movie on film;
but the dependence on videotape makes the show less pliable than cybertexts.
These constraints in some ways mimic the constraints of medieval manuscript
culture. The subtitles can work the way glosses work in a medieval text, not just
providing translations but providing cultural notes and sometimes the transla-
tors' responses to the text.

25
Schodt, Dreamland Japan, 312
 JAPANESE ANIME IN AMERICA 209

Rey Chow argues that translation is an exchange, a continuing process, that

begins in popular culture when history and other "serious" topics are translated
into popular media. Fansubs make this visible. Since subtitling is a long process,
later episodes of a series are often subtitled after the first are available, so there
can be dialogue between audience and translators continued on the tapes them-
selves. At the end of episode 28 of the Shinsen Gumi fansub of Rurouni Kenshin,
for instance, the subtitlers add a note: in response to fan comments, future
episodes will have less profanity and more faithful translations. If, as frequently
happens, one fansubbing group began a long series and stopped before the end,
letting it finished by a different set of fansubbers, differences in translation style
(everything from spelling of names to the frequency of cultural notes before
episodes) become obvious. 26 The result is often an appreciation of subtitling as
an artistic work in itself: I know of one person, fluent in Japanese, who asked for
a set of fansubbed tapes of a series he already had because he found the subtitles
amusingly bad.
So far, the quasi-legal pattern that seems to be emerging is that commercial
publishers handle the most popular titles while fansubbers handle shows whose
audiences are too small to be profitable; whether this pattern continues remains
to be seen. Computer networks are just now becoming advanced enough to
allow downloading of long video files, making it possible to distribute anime
over the web without videotape. This may begin to disperse the groups that have
come together to watch anime (especially as the technology for downloading
high-quality visual images and displaying them becomes cheaper and more
widely available). Alternatively, commercial means of distribution may destroy
the fan networks: Japanese shows are being purchased more often and more
rapidly, leaving less material and less time for fansubbers.
Perhaps the strongest force for change is DVD technology. Japanese DVDs
are beginning to include an optional subtitle track, making it easier for Ameri-
cans to acquire anime directly. American commercial DVDs include options to
hear dubs or watch subtitles. The choices presented to the viewers still fore-
ground the choices involved in translation. If DVDs continue to thrive commer-
cially, however, the network of fansubbers may become superfluous, or the less
scrupulous may descend to mere piracy. The higher price of anime may encour-

26
A glance at the fansub database, http://chipsworld.llamas.net/~asudem/fsd/, shows how often
multiple translations of the same show are undertaken.
210 GENRE

age group viewing (if, for instance, members of a club pool their resources to
acquire an anime collection), but if cheap rental options become widely avail-
able, audience size for any individual viewing may shrink. Undoubtedly, the
characteristics of the technology and the interests of the groups that use the tech-
nology will affect what gets translated and how. Anime in the United States is
part of a continuing dialogue of translation, a collective, visible, ongoing process
of reception and retransmission, strongly dependent on the underlying tech-
nologies that make it possible.