For $10—the cost of one volume of manga—visitors to the Japan Society's gallery in New York City can read entire series of manga (in English or Japanese), or watch all four feature anime films in continuous screenings during gallery hours. There are even several video game consoles available to the public to play on in the exhibit, KRAZY: The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games, transforming the Japan Society gallery halls into something like an impromptu Japanese manga café.
KRAZY is sprawling exhibition that examines the fast-growing popularity and cultural impact of three critical forms—manga, video games and anime—of Japanese popular art and culture on American youth culture as well as their impact on the broader international market for popular culture. The show, currently at the Japan Society until June 14, is a scaled-down version of an exhibit by the same name which ran in Canada at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2008. The New York version of the exhibit is arranged into two rooms of manga, one room of videogames, and a small area where visitors can listen to highlights from select anime soundtracks. According to Bruce Granville, senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the idea behind KRAZY was to create a space where these three types of media come together in a "convergence of visual culture".
KRAZY focuses exclusively on post-1982 works and the 21st century. Works by such giants of manga and anime as Osamu Tezuka and Hayao Miyazaki are conspicuously absent. According to Toshino Ueno, a Professor of Sociology at Wako University, who spoke at during exhibit's opening panel, including Tezuka's work would make the exhibit too big. Nevertheless, Ponyo on the Cliff merchandise from Miyazaki's latest film is prominently on display in the museum gift shop. The exhibition Catalog features one-page biographies of many comic artists, a large number of whom are not Japanese (among them Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman). And while works by these artists were featured in the Vancouver exhibit, the works are not on display in the New York exhibition and actual fans of American indie and alternative comics might find the book lacking in the work of their favorites.
The manga area at Japan Society hosts a claustrophobic "pod" in which visitors can read manga in either English or Japanese editions. The pod's collection includes anthology magazines like Shonen Jump as well as complete runs of series such as Shaman King, Boys Before Blossoms, Prince of Tennis, and Five Star Stories. Many of the titles are from Viz.
Along the walls of the manga gallery are single works from specific artists; some original pages and rough pages are on display. Most of featured works are available in the U.S. in English: Junko Mizuno's Pure Trance, the Afro Samurai manga by Takashi Okazaki, Tekkonkinkreet by Taiyo Matsumoto (the display includes back issues of Viz's discontinued Pulp magazine), Yuichi Yokoyama's experimental work New Engineering, and Five Star Stories by Mamoru Nagano.
Hitoshi Odajima's Mu: For Sale, Moyoco Anno's Sakuran, and Hisashi Eguchi's Stop!! Hibari-kun are the only untranslated titles in the exhibit. The wall display of information about Sakuran fails to mention that some of Anno's other works are available in English (Happy Mania, Tramps Like Us). It's also worth noting that Anno is the wife of Hideaki Anno, creator of the popular and influential Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series.The videogame room hosts a two-player Ms. PacMan game, Mario World on the Super Famicom, and a couple of Ninendo 64 units running The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
In the anime room, looping clips from six different movies play side-by-side on one wall. The Vancouver version of the exhibit featured a maze-like area of anime playing on walls designed to disorient visitors, said Granville. The New York version is a little disorienting, but on a much smaller scale. The featured films are Paprika (Satoshi Kon's latest), Super Dimension Fortress Macross (Episode 9), The Place Promised in Our Early Days (by Makoto Shinkai, famous in America for Voices of a Distant Star), Akira, Patlabor 2; The Movie, and Mind Game (from Studio 4 C, who also produced the anime of the acclaimed the manga, Tekkonkinkreet).
Along the opposite wall a series of cubicle-like spaces provide each of the films in their entirety playing with English subtitles on televisions with headphones for two to four people. For a more traditional movie-going experience the films are also being screened in Japan Society's auditorium over the next few weekends until June 14. Check the Japan Society Website for the schedule.
The soundtrack room features only Yoko Kanno soundtracks: Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and Wolf's Rain. Her earlier works, Marcross Plus and The Vision of Escaflowne are conspicuously absent. Yoko Kanno is so well-known and well-loved by U.S. anime fans that the soundtrack room seems obvious—like a primer course in what's cool. Unfortunately the soundtrack room plays only series of repeated clips and visitors cannot listen to the entire soundtracks.
The gift shop for the show looks uncannily like an anime convention dealer's room. Blind-box toys sit along side hip messenger bags and T-shirts. And at the opening there was a woman that looked very much like a grandmother, flipping through the hardcoveredition of Cosmode, a cosplay photo and how-to book published by Broccoli Books. On the next table, English translations of Bushido: The Way of the Samurai and the Book of the Five Rings are also on sale.
"I am critical of the Japanese-ness of manga and anime," Ueno said during an address delivered during the show's opening reception in March. "I hope by seeing the exhibition, you will think about the nationality, ethnicity, and civilization of each piece,” Ueno said, emplacing that he hoped to get across to the audience a sense of the emerging trend towards, “Trans-Local Modernism” and away from pure nationalism. "There is a difference between singularity and originality," Ueno stressed.
