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Stockholm Studies in Media Arts Japan (SMAJ) (ISSN 2004-1292) is a peer-reviewed series of monographs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press.
SMAJ strives to provide a multidisciplinary forum for research on media and arts associated with Japan, prioritizing investigations of forms, formats, materialities and creative practices. The scope of subjects is broad, including texts, performances and artefacts of various times and social position in a variety of local and transnational cultures.
It is the ambition of SMAJ to place equally high demands on the academic quality of the manuscripts it accepts as those applied by refereed international journals and academic publishers of a similar orientation. SMAJ accepts manuscripts in English.
This book is the first comprehensive introduction to the extraordinarily complex comics culture of Taiwan, where, under martial law, mainland Chinese traditions of political cartoons and popular “picture book” existed side by side with pirated and often obscured Japanese manga. Taking a media-historical perspective, the book traces the changes in comics’ cultural, symbolic, and economic capital. It considers publication formats, distribution channels, and stylistic conventions, analyzes the official discourse through government documents and newspaper articles, and scrutinizes the censorship system.
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Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion aims at advancing the study of anime, understood as largely TV-based genre fiction rendered in cel, or cel-look, animation with a strong affinity to participatory cultures and media convergence. Making the landmark series Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Seiki Evangerion, 1995–96) its central case and nodal point, this volume foregrounds anime as a media with clearly recognizable aesthetic properties, (sub)cultural affordances and situated discourses.
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Based on fieldwork in Tokyo, this book explores how and to what effect lines are drawn by producers, players and critics of adult computer games. Focusing on interactions with manga/anime-style characters, these games often feature explicit sex acts. Noting that the characters can appear quite young, legal actions have been taken in a number of countries to categorize and prohibit such content as child abuse material. While Japanese politicians continue to debate a similar course, adult computer game producers, players and critics are drawing their own lines between fiction and reality and orienting themselves toward the drawn lines of manga/anime-style characters. The book argues for understanding this everyday practice as an ethics of affective response to fictional characters. Occurring individually and socially in both private and public spaces, this response not only discourages harming human beings, but also supports life in more-than-human worlds.
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