Japanese has around 1,200 onomatopoeia divided into 3 families (Kadooka, 2009.; Inose,n.d. ). That’s around 3x more than English has. Onomatopoeia are words used to represent calls of animals, sounds of nature, sounds of people, and other sounds (Alilyeh & Zeinolabedin, 2014). Luckily, manga doesn’t use all of these sound words. However, it’s common for manga…
Category: Otaku Culture
The Otaku Versus the Sportaku
Society thinks anime fans are uncool. Yet, that same society accepts the sportaku. A sportaku is better known as a sports fan. You know, the people who fill their houses with jerseys, blankets, and everything else stamped with their favorite team’s logo. Really is a sportaku any different from an otaku? Nope. In fact, sportaku…
10 Anime Essay Topic Ideas
People often ask me for help with choosing topics for essays and thesis assignments. Anime gives us many, many topics to write about. Sometimes too many. So here is a list of ideas and links to articles I’ve written that have sources you may find useful. 1. Manga and American Comics Contrast the different themes…
How to get a Convention Girlfriend or Boyfriend: American Otaku Dating
Dating sucks, particularly for those who like anime. In the US, anime and manga fans are still stigmatized as loser neckbeards (including girls!). While this unfounded stereotype is wrong and slowly fading, it still hangs on in many areas. Because of this, many anime conventions feature speed dating events to help anime fans meet. The…
Musings III: On the Use of Premodern Japanese in Anime
Hard but hardly useful? As a master student of Japanese Studies, I am obliged to concern myself not only with modern popular culture and anime but also with the subject of Premodern Japanese. To be precise, I’m learning to read texts from the Edo period and older which use bungo, or premodern grammar. I’m also…
Musings II: Magical Girls, or, Empowerment VS Sexism
Magical Girls puzzle me; they make me feel intrigued and desperate at the same time. That is not just because of my, admittedly, relatively limited experience with shōjo (‘[for] girls’) anime genres – until recently, I preferred adventure fantasy, which is sadly, but undoubtedly, shōnen (‘[for] boys’) material of the most popular order. No, Magical…