The Rise of Japanese Visual Narratives

Characteristics of Japanese visual narratives are depicted in this book, shedding light on cultural, institutional, and industrial aspects of reproducible contents. The book consists of three parts which deal with the Japanese contents industry, the hypervariety industry revolution, and related case studies, respectively. The first part proposes points of view for organizing research on the Japanese contents industry. The authors explain characteristics of the industry from the standpoint of cultural, institutional, and industrial strata. The second part explains the system of revolution in the industry as a hypervariety industry. The Japanese contents industry implicitly predicts the next innovation system, which will be hypervarietal but not top-down or Hollywood style as in the Western economy. The third part provides case studies on phenomena such as the comics market, Akihabara: a cross-cultural town, Cool Japan, and animation.