Cultural Translations

popular culture like anime, reminding a considerable symbolic power of national origin. 14 However,having warned against downgrading the significance of national origin, Hills writes aboutfandom,US/UK use of the term “otaku” acknowledges that fandom is hegemonically devalued both inJapan and ‘the West’. The Japanese fan is therefore linked to the non-Japanese fan: fan identityis prioritised over national identity. This identification can be read as an attempt to ‘naturalise’fan identities by implying that fandom is an essentially transnational/transcultural experience. 15(Quotation according to the original without any change)His argument is somewhat hesitant regarding the position of the spectatorship; on the onehand, admitting the emergence of a new ‘transcultural’ spectatorship in a global cultural scene,but on the other hand, reminding the existence of the spectatorship that is enhanced by the‘imagined’, stereotype conception of the Other, and for whom the imagined Other carries a significance.Conclusively, however, he seems admitting transculturality in fandom of anime, statingthat,Cultural and national contexts are one version of “academically prescribed categories”, asare categories of “appropriation” and “globalisation”. The case of anime suggests that we needto refuse these terms, or at the very least supplement them by recognising that subculturalhomologies (the way subcultures use certain texts to articulate their group identity) can becometranscultural homologies (subcultures can use representations of other national subcultures toarticulate a shared identity or devaluation). (ibid.) (Quotation according to the original withoutany change)Both Napier and Hills highlighted the changed transcultural practice of the spectatorship ofanime, the latter with a portion of hesitation. The change suggests the emergence of a new kindof relationship of the spectatorship to the world.Subject positionChange in spectatorship seems to point to the changed subject position of the spectatorship.One powerful marker of the subject position has been national belonging and language (themother tongue). With language, one can ‘narrate’ about oneself. Thus, to investigate the subjectposition, written texts seem offering an excellent site.Immigrant literature is a genre, where one may expect transculturality, operating in a space inbetween different languages, between the memory of the native and the new culture.Among contemporary Japanese writers, Tawada Yoko comes immediately to mind as suchwriter. She writes both in Japanese and German, and she has been consciously questioning andcross-examining her relationship with the two languages. 16 Her novels and essays are expectedto give us a picture of how the site looks like in between two languages.614 The most serious point Hills raises against Napier’s interpretation is the fact that her conclusion wasbased only on 30 % of the answers she got of the questionnaire. 70 % knew somehow that what theywatched is Japanese, however, attaching varying‘meaning’ to the knowledge15 Hills, Matt “Transcultural otaku: Japanese representations of fandom and representations of Japan inanime/manga fan cultures”. web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/MattHillspaper.pdf16 Just to mention one work, Ekusofonii – Bogo no soto he deru tabi (Exophone – To Travel outside themother tongue). Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003.Noriko Takei-Thunman