Intermediating White Snake and Beyond: The Contingent Trans-Asian Journeys of Chinese Animation into Japan

Abstract This paper highlights cultural intermediaries as an indispensable analytical focus through which we could make intellectual sense of cultural production in East Asia and its global journeys. The existing literature recognises cultural intermediaries as critical agents who orchestrate a match between cultural products and their target markets. Examining cultural intermediaries in the realm of the growing inflow of Chinese animation into Japanese theatrical distribution nowadays, including the introduction of White Snake in Japan in 2021, this paper suggests contingency as one of the most critical features entailed in the work of cultural intermediaries. Our cases highlight how their intermediation process was, in fact, ignited and carried out in an immensely contingent manner without any pre-established plans or principles. The paper underscores contingency as the feature that deserves straightforward attention of the literature on cultural intermediaries, and as the vantage point from which we could make rich sense of the front-line dynamism at work in trans-Asian cultural productions.