As a first for Mechademia, the conference was not held in Japan or the USA, but this time in Singapore. A big thank you to Deborah Shamoon and the local team at the National University of Singapore for organizing the event.
The keynote presentation was held by Chua Beng Huat, currently professor emeritus at NUS. Titled “Approaches to Study of Pop culture in Asia”, he explored the ongoing changes in an increasingly transnational popular culture and the consequences for a field that used to call itself “Asian pop culture”. The discussion went from the definition of the field, its research methods and its visions for research beyond detailed analysis of – in his words “essentially ephemeral commercial products of pop culture.” He finished his presentation with a call to action for researchers to be aware of the options that analysis of large datasets offers in their field and that research without a broader outlook backed by “big data” will become increasingly irrelevant. This was a strong sentiment, and as researchers who are building an infrastructure for data-driven research we were very happy to hear it.
Following the keynote speech, the conference offered rich explorations of various topics that examined the transregional and transcultural flows between Japan and South-East Asia through Anime, Manga, and other phenomena that shape understanding and transformation, economics and politics, as well as aesthetics and technology. On the basis of this topic, we were pleased to present our own research. Zoltan Kacsuk together with Neil Cohn explored how metadata analytics can open new perspectives on Asian popular culture beyond Japan, showcasing the potential of the TINTIN and JVMG projects to provide data for analyzing Southeast Asian and East Asian manga, anime and video games. Christopher Zysik examined the symbolic power of the One Piece pirate flag through a transcultural psychoanalytical frame, analyzing how anime imagery can not only be an expression of political dissatisfaction throughout various regions but also of a desire to change protest culture itself.
As contributors to the conference we were able to engage and discuss with colleagues, especially from Southeast Asia, familiar but also from our perspective unfamiliar topics and approaches, enriching our experience. On Friday, discussions examined anime as transnational history and historiography (Mateja Kovacic) and development through global networks of production and circulation, highlighting how technological transformations have influenced both its aesthetics and industrial practices since the mid-twentieth century (Davide Benvenuti) in the Anime Production panel. Another panel, titled Intimacy, Precarity, and Uncanny, discussed contemporary media environments, including the challenges posed by AI voice technologies in the localization of anime (Minori Ishida), the negotiation of transnational intimacies in manga (Shige “CJ” Suzuki), and the visual clash on online platforms (Gan Sheuo Hui).
Saturday’s panels focused on the affective and spatial dimensions of Japanese popular culture. The Transnational Affects panel explored how desire, nostalgia, and identity are negotiated across media communities, from Singaporean otome game cultures (Kania Arini Sukotjo) and Indonesian Muslim VTubers (Indah Santi Pratidina) to representations of Shanghai in postwar anime (Zihui Lu) and the parody of cute character design (Joel Gn). The following panel on Spatial Imagery in Narrative examined anime tourism, pilgrimage, and place-making. Here, the presentations on Kimi no Na Wa tourism (Maria Corazon C. Reyes), Malaysian anime pilgrimage (Khoo Fong Yi), and Ghibli Park spatiality (Daheen Kim) demonstrated how fictional narratives increasingly reshape real-world spaces and produce new forms of cultural engagement.
One of our highlights was the two-part panel Waving the Jolly Roger in which the last Q&A developed into an open discussion with participants sharing their personal insights and perspectives as scholars as well as fans, exploring and developing in real-time explanations of how symbols from One Piece have been adopted within contemporary protest movements. Presenters of the first session examined the pirate flag as a transnational symbol (Herb L. Fondevilla) and identity formation (Erika Widya Chandra) tracing its use across Asian political contexts. The second session focused specifically on Indonesian protests as they were the first instance, where the flag has become entangled with debates about nationalism and digital citizenship (Shela Kusumaningtyas), and political dissent (Abdullah Faqih). Collectively, these papers demonstrated how anime imagery can acquire new political meanings, transforming popular culture into a powerful resource for activism, identity formation, and public expression.
The panel Artificial Intelligence, Animation, and Authorship, started with an exploration of the impact of generative AI on Anime, with a focus on character design. The core argument was that the criticisms of generative AI being uncreative, derivative and lacking originality come from a viewpoint of creativity founded in European/Western modernity and are less applicable to the process-oriented creativity that is employed in Anime production. This process constantly references previous works and combines aspects of those in new ways. As generative AI is using its training material to create novel output defined by prompts, it matches this creative process well and its influence on future Anime production could be quite pronounced (Stevie Suan). This was further confirmed by the next talk, which analyzed press communication and investor relation materials as well as public policy documents in the domain of generative AI for visual media. Several case studies showed the collaboration patterns between established media companies and genAI startups and the support given to them by policy makers (Zhen Ye). Finally, the last talk explored the reality of using genAI for creative purposes in Asia. As models often have limited training materials from the area, culturally important details of local Asian cultures get misrepresented or are completely unknown and images often trend towards highly represented Japanese styles even when the prompt asks for other styles. Based on interviews with students who used genAI for art projects, the talk made the limitations and the resulting frustrations very tangible (Luyao Zhou).