Last weekend and Monday (June 7-9) saw the JVMG team represent the project at one of the most highly anticipated events for us, the Mechademia 2025 conference in Kyoto with a whole panel on some of the new results of the second phase. Taking place once again at Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum the conference was even bigger than two years ago, with multiple parallel panels running throughout the three days and more than a hundred and fifty presenters from all over the world. Furthermore, for the first time the conference featured both English and Japanese as official languages of the event, allowing for an even more inclusive exchange of ideas around researching anime, manga, video games and related fields of Japanese popular culture.
Starting our short report in reverse order from Monday, the last day of the conference, Alisa Freedman gave a keynote lecture on the “State of the Field of Japanese Popular Culture Studies: Reflections, Challenges, Advice“, in which she highlighted just how far we have come as a research community. She also commemorated the contributions of some of the important early forerunners (like Frederik L. Schodt) and pioneers of the field, some of whom are unfortunately no longer with us: specifically drawing attention to the impact of the late Barbara Sato and Mark McLelland. The talk also highlighted the many special aspects of our field, such as our reliance on access to the often ephemeral materials of our focus of study, as well as the way fans and fan conventions have also played and still play – not least through our students’ interests and initiatives – an important role in building and enriching this domain of interest.
Sunday’s keynote lecture by Murai Sadayuki focused on the changes in the meaning of sekaikan from worldview to world setting in the Japanese content industry. Tracing the origins of this movement back to the influence of Eiji Ōtsuka, and building on the works of Ryūsuke Hikawa and Daisaku Tsuru the presentation highlighted how worldview used to refer to the special connection between author and audience premised on the unique perspective of the former shared in their works; and how lacking this aspect of the original meaning of sekaikan, now denoting world setting, is closely tied to the shift in the way screenwriters and other creatives are increasingly viewed more as engineers of world building rather than as authors.
Finally, on Saturday, the first day of the conference, among the many panels that day we also presented our own: Metadata Analytics for the Mechademia Field: Introducing Phase Two of the Japanese Visual Media Graph Project. First, Saskia Dreßler presented “Challenges in Working with Fanfiction and Fanfiction Metadata for Large-Scale Analysis” highlighting some of the particular lessons learned from our collaboration with the GOLEM project as well as her master’s thesis research. Next, Bryan Hartzheim, Zoltan Kacsuk, Stevie Suan, and Martin Roth offered “An Exploration of the Profession Based Structure of the Japanese Anime Industry via Patterns in Career Trajectories as Seen through Credits Information” (see also the text of the presentation). Then, Christopher Zysik highlighted some of the most important new results from his ongoing research on “Kaiju Genre Data Analysis in the JVMG Project.” The panel finished with Magnus Pfeffer and Tetsuya Mihara‘s presentation “Utilizing Specialized Smaller Datasets for Anime-Manga Research in Conjunction with the Japanese Visual Media Graph” showcasing the way two unique datasets – Paul Price’s isekai manga dataset published in JAMS and the TRIGGER Dataset of the intermediate production materials of the Little Witch Academia series – can be enhanced and further developed to enable researchers even more in their work.
As always, Mechademia was an absolute blast with so many interesting talks and stimulating conversations. We would like to thank all the organizers as well as all the volunteers for all their hard work in making this event once again one to remember. And we are eagerly looking forward to next year’s Mechademia conference and to continuing the discussions around anime, manga, kaiju, otaku culture and so much more!