In the publishing industry, everything is American unless it’s not – and sometimes, even then it is.
Around 2000, I was invited to write the history of the introduction and spread of Japanese animation in America, for a British book, “Animation in Asia and the Pacific” (later republished by Indiana University Press). So I wrote 17 pages on Japanese-language English-subtitled giant robot TV cartoons coming to the Japanese-community TV channels in major cities in 1976, their discovery by comics & s-f fans who spread them via videotaped copies, the first American anime fan club in 1977, the American fans getting Japanese pen-pals and trading videos of American TV programs for anime that wasn’t coming to America, the spread of anime fan clubs and videotape trading throughout North America in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, and so on. I titled this “Anime in America”, meaning both the U.S. and Canada since I mentioned fan clubs in Toronto and a few other Canadian cities. The editor said that my history was excellent, but that he was changing the title to “Anime in the United States”. I pointed out that Canada was covered as well. “Oh, everybody knows that Canada is really part of the United States, culturally speaking, at least.”
In the publishing industry, everything is American unless it’s not – and sometimes, even then it is.
Around 2000, I was invited to write the history of the introduction and spread of Japanese animation in America, for a British book, “Animation in Asia and the Pacific” (later republished by Indiana University Press). So I wrote 17 pages on Japanese-language English-subtitled giant robot TV cartoons coming to the Japanese-community TV channels in major cities in 1976, their discovery by comics & s-f fans who spread them via videotaped copies, the first American anime fan club in 1977, the American fans getting Japanese pen-pals and trading videos of American TV programs for anime that wasn’t coming to America, the spread of anime fan clubs and videotape trading throughout North America in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, and so on. I titled this “Anime in America”, meaning both the U.S. and Canada since I mentioned fan clubs in Toronto and a few other Canadian cities. The editor said that my history was excellent, but that he was changing the title to “Anime in the United States”. I pointed out that Canada was covered as well. “Oh, everybody knows that Canada is really part of the United States, culturally speaking, at least.”
Fred Patten