Review of Casey Brienza, Manga in America: Transnational book publishing and the domestication of Japanese comics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Hardback £70 (232p) (ISBN 978-1472595867); paperback £21.99 (232p) (ISBN 978-1472595874); e-book £23.74 (ISBN 978-1472595881).
[1] Although its main topic is the American publishing industry, sociologist Casey Brienza's Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics is essentially a book about American fans of Japanese popular culture—specifically, manga, the serialized graphic novels whose runaway success has transformed transnational mediascapes during the past two decades. Brienza is interested in the people who license and translate manga, many of whom were fans before they became professionals, and continue to bring their fannish passions and preferences to their careers.
[2] At the end of the appendix, where she discusses her research methodology, Brienza explains that the goal of her project is to address a critical gap in the English-language scholarship on Japanese popular culture, which often focuses on "culture" while failing to address what is meant by "popular." Mass media texts are generated by media industries, after all, and they cannot be fully understood if they are separated from the patterns, practices, and peculiarities of these industries. Brienza closes Manga in America by writing that "researchers assume without trying it for themselves that making industry contacts as a researcher is too difficult," and her monograph serves as an exciting invitation to explore the information and new avenues of inquiry that can be revealed by speaking with the people behind the products (194).
[3] Brienza's own fannish and professional background situates her in a unique insider position with specialized expertise. As she recounts in the appendix, Brienza worked as a journalist during the manga boom of the mid-2000s, publishing writing on manga and other works of Japanese entertainment media in venues such as Anime Insider and Otaku USA magazines and the Anime News Network website. Her work on what she calls "the periphery of the manga industry" has provided her with a wealth of key insights and contacts; but when she performed the bulk of her fieldwork for this project in 2010 and 2011, the American publishing industry was reeling from the blow of the global recession of 2008 (182). This inspired a certain critical cast in the attitudes of many of the industry professionals whom Brienza interviewed, while she herself was able to create an appropriate critical distance through the methodology of her PhD research, which forms the basis of this monograph.
[4] The introduction positions the book within the specific cultural moment of its publication in 2016. Brienza clarifies what she means by "manga" not simply in terms of artistic styles and demographic marketing categories (in which the presumed age and gender of the reader matter more than genre), but also in terms of how manga has served as a central category within the construction of the concept of "Cool Japan" within both the English-language and the Japanese-language journalistic press. Brienza also references political and academic attempts to use Japanese popular culture to fashion a national brand of "coolness," the purpose of which is ostensibly to profit from the association with international interest in media properties such as manga, anime, and video games. The second chapter, "Theorizing Domestication: Manga and the Transnational Production of Culture," builds on the introduction as it explains the theoretical foundation of the author's discussion of cultural production and flow across national borders. Brienza opens this chapter by imagining a composite image of the sort of person who works in the business of manga publishing in the United States, "a young, casually dressed Caucasian woman hard at work in her home office," and then she offers her own term for what this woman is doing, which is not exactly "translation" or "localization," but rather, "domestication" (15). Brienza draws on scholarship relating to international book publishing to argue that there is a separate space that exists between national fields of production, and it is in this transitional space of transnational cultural flow that the domestication of culturally specific content occurs. Brienza's point is that the social practice of domestication is not unilateral; instead, it affects both the origin and the target of the flow even as the processes that enable and facilitate this flow—such as licensing, editing, translation, lettering, graphic design, marketing, and so on—collectively generate a subculture within the larger practices of the domestic and international publishing industries.
[5] Chapter 3, "Book Trade: The History and Structure of American Manga Publishing," contributes additional background information in the form of concrete examples and data sets. Brienza first contrasts the manga industry in Japan with the practices of American book publishers, pointing out that one of the most significant differences between the two originated in the Japanese emphasis on serialization of content through printed periodicals and the concomitantly brief scope of advance scheduling for the publication of individual manga volumes. These differences meant that it was difficult to fit manga into the pre-existing practices of most American publishers, which resulted in an opportunity for independent publishers to create their own niche in the American book market. Brienza then demonstrates how this market was greatly expanded through the partnership of manga specialty publishers such as Tokyopop with chain bookstores such as Waldenbooks (a former staple of American shopping malls) and "big box" stores such as Borders (a major American bookstore franchise that declared bankruptcy in 2011). This chapter contains multiple tables and graphs tracking sales, publishers, and top titles in the decade between 2002 and 2012 that saw the sudden rise in the popularity of manga as a publishing category. Brienza thereby demonstrates how, "within a few short years, manga publishing went from being a nonentity bumbling gamely along at the margins of the American cultural field to the overnight success story that everyone working anywhere in comics or books was talking about" (67).
[6] In chapter 4, "A License to Produce: Founding Companies, Negotiating Rights," Brienza elucidates the details of how this shift in the American publishing industry occurred. This chapter is where Brienza begins her discussion of her fieldwork in earnest, as it contains a summary of her conversations with industry professionals about the process of selecting and securing titles to license for translation and publication in the United States. Based on these conversations, Brienza is able to create a typology of the people who make these decisions at the executive levels of American manga publishing companies. There is "the evangelist," who was emotionally affected by manga in his youth and thus "introduces a new product to the market not because he thinks it has an audience but because he believes it should have an audience" (77). There is "the opportunist," who "is motivated solely by the notion that there is value to be extracted from publishing manga in America" and simply wants to make as much money as possible (80). Then there is "the specialist" in manga publishing, who resents the standard industry practices and wants to create a better model for licensing and translating manga in the United States. While the evangelists and opportunists did not survive the market crash of 2008 and 2009, many specialists did, a victory of sorts that Brienza attributes to the ability of these executives to work well with Japanese publishers, as well as the close attention they were able to devote to the consumer market.
[7] In the second half of chapter 4, Brienza outlines the concrete details of the process of how manga licensing works. This section is of special interest to fan studies scholars, as it illustrates a specific instance where fan preferences can and have shaped the production of mass-market content. Although many early manga publishers in America chose manga titles to license based on what the executives enjoyed, and while other publishers are pushed by their parent or partner companies in Japan to release certain titles (such as those associated with franchises with anime or video game tie-ins, for example), many companies now conduct targeted market research. This often takes the form of outreach and the solicitation of opinions on social media platforms, but also, "because many manga industry people cannot read Japanese, 'research' in many cases is actually a euphemism for reading illegal scanlations, fan translations of manga published online" (89). Because many Japanese publishers from whom licenses are procured are both physically and financially removed from the American market, Brienza argues that it is American manga publishers who are more invested in the success of their titles. The often tumultuous relationship between American and Japanese companies means that American manga publishers are often relatively dependent on the interest and goodwill of manga fans, while continuing to work in the industry is itself an extension of fandom for many employees.
[8] Brienza delves deeper into the close relationship between fannish interest and professional media production in chapter 5, "Working from Home: Translators, Editors, Letterers, and Other Invisibles." Translators especially tend to be young women, often with advanced academic degrees, who love manga so much that they are willing to accept the poor working conditions that accompany their labor. Many of these translators are freelance, so they have no office space and are not offered any sort of benefits from their employers. Given the relatively low wages they receive, which Brienza targets at about $1.50 per page in 2012 for an experienced translator, many of these young women also exist in a constant state of economic precariousness. Furthermore, the cultural contributions made by these translators, which involve not only the output of English-language material but also the selection of what titles to be translated, are often erased from conversations regarding the transnational flows upon which the Japanese government has relied in its aggressive construction of "Cool Japan."
[9] Accordingly, the question Brienza tackles in this chapter is whether the labor of young female manga fans is empowering its connection to the realization of artistic goals and self-expression or overtly exploited by both a market that capitalizes on emotional investment and by various government agencies tasked with promoting Japan's soft power encouraging tourism. In the process of answering this question, the chapter delineates the details of what the domestication of a volume of manga entails, from the first rough translation to the final adjustments to the cover image. Although certain steps in this procedure may be subject to "direct, day-to-day interference" from Japanese licensors, many of the young women working with manga find ways to exert their control over the text (126). Brienza offers a nuanced yet effective argument that it is in fact the very marginality of these workers that enables the aggressive creative decisions necessary for domestication. As she points out, "their subordination to capital, and the lack of self-determination they have over the day-to-day conditions of their own lives, only magnifies their yearning to have control over something" (135). Because the investment these translators and other localization professionals feel regarding their work stems from their fannish attachment instead of any financial incentive, they are less concerned with profitability than they are with altering the source texts to appeal to communities of their fellow fans.
[10] Brienza conducted the interviews that comprise the bulk of her fieldwork in the early 2010s; since then, the publishing industry has transformed drastically. Chapter 6, "Off the Page: New Manga Publishing Models for a Digital Future," maps out the landscape of book publishing in the United States after the collapse of the bookstore chain Borders in 2011. For manga publishers, this meant that it has become more important than ever to appeal to the specific tastes of fans, as general readers can no longer be counted on to stumble across manga in a physical retail space. The problem with a digital-only market, however, is that licensed e-books must compete with unlicensed scanlations, which often enjoy the benefits of faster serialized updates along with higher search engine visibility. Brienza lists several of the methods manga publishers of various sizes tested to promote their books, from specialized apps to fan-funded publishing (via crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter). Brienza concludes that the main problem these publishers face is that if they focus only on satisfying pre-existing fans, it becomes difficult for them to attract new audiences and renew their readership. The danger of an industry run strictly by and for fans is that it has not been proven to be financially viable on a large scale. Meanwhile, there have been several experiments in adapting popular parent company–owned properties (such as Stephenie Meyer's young adult romance Twilight series, owned by manga publisher Yen Press's parent company Hachette) into manga that can be sold in large retail chains like Walmart—but is this still "manga," and is it even recognized as such by readers unfamiliar with Japanese popular culture?
[11] What Brienza describes in Manga in America is a sizeable corner of the American publishing industry run by fans and, if not necessarily for the benefit of fans, then at least according to the demonstrated tastes of fans. This study is of interest not only to scholars and other cultural critics who are interested in how fandom communities have increasingly begun to shape mainstream media, but also to manga fans themselves, who will find a wealth of information about the behind-the-scenes details of an industry that has long been a hot topic in blog posts, convention panels, and online forums. For an avid manga reader such as myself, the media history that Brienza has constructed is fascinating in its reflection and analysis of what may be personally lived experiences. Even for people who only have a passing interest in manga and graphic novels, however, Brienza's account paints a vibrant picture of the seismic shifts in the structure of the American publishing industry and its transnational components during the past two decades.
[12] With the exception of chapter 2, "Theorizing Domestication," in which Brienza lays the academic foundation of her work and establishes the ways in which her study builds on this foundation, Brienza's writing is not only accessible but also compelling, and even at times quite entertaining. The author's background as a journalist shines through her clear and lucid prose, which is driven by a powerful intellect that is not afraid to ask critical questions and state bold opinions. Manga in America is a valuable scholarly resource for specialists in media studies, fan studies, and Japan studies, and almost every chapter may serve as a useful point of discussion for an undergraduate-level class. I also recommend Manga in America to my fellow manga fans, as the history of the American manga publishing industry is a welcome and engaging history of our own fandom cultures.