ABSTRACT
The vibrant landscape of youth culture in Southeast Asia is representative of the transcultural flows that pass through the region. From American movies to Hong Kong comics, various fan events celebrate popular media from all over the globe. The largest fan event in the region is Singapore's Anime Festival Asia (AFA), a Japanese pop culture event with almost 145,000 attendees across a span of three days. In recent years, AFA has expanded into Thailand and Indonesia, making the event and its stars more accessible to fans in the region. Apart from industry booths by Japan's state broadcaster NHK and various animation companies, there are also artist tables where fan artists sell fan goods and fanzines, expressing their love for their favorite series using graphic styles that resemble Japanese animation (anime) and Japanese comics (manga). Anime Festival Asia is indicative of Japanese popular culture's reach across Southeast Asia. However, although the event gives the impression that Japanese cultural industries such as anime and manga have become a part of Southeast Asian culture more generally, the extent to which these Japanese cultural industries are welcomed by local cultures is a complex story. This chapter looks specifically at how the surge of manga and local comics that “visually resemble” manga, which we will refer to as mangaesque works, have raised transcultural tensions in Indonesia and the Philippines.
