ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews how Japanese Studies, as taught in the academy, has changed with an emphasis on the new agency exerted in the classroom by students who are fans of Japanese popular culture. It surveys the history of the shift in production and consumption patterns of manga in the United States—from the perceived need for localization strategies toward an increasing demand for an “authentic” product. It describes how “comic books” were received as a cultural product back in the 1980s and shows how fans’ Japanese-language literacy that developed alongside increasing ease of access to original Japanese material via the internet led to new fan-based modes of manga distribution and consumption. Today almost anything can be found and downloaded in a few minutes. Much of this material has not been licensed for overseas distribution and hence raises issues concerning copyright violations and the circumvention of official product ratings. This chapter argues that these moral and legal issues have implications for classroom practice that is often unforeseen by students but which cannot be ignored by educators in the increasingly bureaucratized “corporate university.”
