I’ve recently been approached by a second year M.A. student who decided to include a manga analysis in his upcoming thesis work. Although I am by no means a “know-it-all” in the field I did write my own thesis paper on manga and was happy to help him with some questions he had. One of his questions in particular struck me as interesting and I wanted to share it with you here. That question was “do you know of any instances in which manga influenced the Japanese society?”
To which I answered that while there have been many manga series that garnered large attention from the Japanese populace throughout the years my opinion as a researchers is that manga is an entertaining medium while anime is a critical medium. Continue reading »