Japanese media influences on university students:translocation and the sublime

In the past 20 years, Japanese anime and manga (Studio Ghibli movies, One Piece, and Dragon Ball among others) have become increasingly popular in Denmark , contemporarily our students attending game design courses (University of Southern Denmark) are mentioning anime and manga as sources of inspiration for their projects.<br/>Since we wanted to understand how our students were inspired by Japanese media, we conducted an online survey at the end of two courses in game design, targeting BA students from engineering and MA students from humanities. We asked them which media and what aspects they found inspiring, listing Japanese anime and manga among others. We kept the questions short and open, to enable them to quickly fill the survey and freely write their own impressions. <br/>We received 31 replies out of circa 50 students. We applied a mixed method analysis, leveraging quantitative analysis through SurveyXact and interpretive analysis, building on the notions of transmedia imaginaries and creation, and emotional entanglements (Tosca &amp; Navarro-Remesal 2023).<br/>Results from the survey show that our students are mostly inspired by the quality of storytelling and visuals of Japanese anime and manga, for their “uniqueness” and “variety” as: “There are anime for everyone (…)”. The students refer to aesthetics as key elements in making anime and manga a “great experience”, referring to the colors, animation and character design. During class, a student told with a bit of self-deprecating humor, that he got hooked watching the anime series “Food Wars!” despite finding the characters too much over the top, because: “The food looks amazing!”. Surprisingly, kawaii was not mentioned, despite in class many students referred to kawaii characters from Sanrio or Nintendo, while trying to make cute original characters.<br/>Japanese media seem to foster intense emotional entanglements in our students, leading to the sublime: an overwhelming aesthetic experience elicited by nature or art . This is reflected by the words used in the survey to define anime and manga, such as: “great”, “timeless”, “unique”, and eliciting “emotions that can only be experienced”.<br/>Implications for translocation emerge through comparisons between American/Western and Japanese media as products of different cultures, where Japanese media are seen as superior for the beauty of their visuals, greater degree of immersion, and for better understanding the “intelligence” of their audience. Moreover, students wrote to emulate the qualities they appreciate in Japanese media in their personal or course-related media production, striving to “create something just as extraordinary!” Similar reflections about the role of beauty in design and in human experiences can be found in Alexander (2020) and Norman (2002, 2007).<br/>Finally, providing glimpses of Japanese life (Napier 2001, 2023, Iwabuchi 2002), fruition of anime and manga acted as translocation stimuli in the students, who became curious about Japanese cooking, language, and in visiting Japan. This entanglement between aesthetic and cultural stimuli could become the focus of a new survey and follow up interviews with our respondents.