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MULTIPLE IDENTITIES VIA THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART, MEDIA AND PERFORMANCE 105of Treasure Island, and laid down one of the mostimportant traits of modern manga: a pure visual formof storytelling, a comic language that relied heavily onthe breakdown of kinetic movement into many panelsto move the story forward, and did not rely on the text.Early in his industrious life, Tezuka also laid down amodel for the manga industry that had a high degree ofcompatibility with the consumption-economic modelof the Showa period. That model of the mangaindustry was best summarized by Jiwon Ahn, quotedby Wendy Siuyi Wong, when he talked about anime orthe Japanese animation industry and its “media mixstrategy”:Although not necessarily in a chronologicalsense, from the original manga (comic book)series, then the manga is adapted to animatedtelevision series or film features or both formats;also video production of the animated seriesfollows… Almost simultaneously, various goodsrelated to the manga and anime, includingoriginal soundtrack CDs, paperback books,fanzines, and numerous character merchandiseslike action figures, toys, stationery goods,confectionary products, etc. are distributed inthe market. Also, the release of computer gamesbased on the manga and anime follows, which inturn increases the sales of the original mangaseries, magazines, books and videos, and spursthe creation extended. 13This media mix strategy was first conceived by Tezuka,particularly with his Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy)comics (in 1952) and animation series (in 1963). AndTezuka himself is a very model of this Japaneseconsumption economy: he made more than 150,000pages of comics, or 700 comic books before his demisein 1989—and we haven’t counted how manyanimation works he made (he is also a pioneer inexperimental animation as well as commercialanimation).This Showa economy context for the birth of themanga industry gives us a glimpse of its importantcharacteristics. First of all, the manga industry and thesubculture it nurtured was a child of the JapanizedAmerican consumption-economy of post war Japan.The gigantic scale of manga industry, and by extensionits very rich manga subculture, resulted from the brutalefficiency of this economic model.It wasn’t because of the power of its content, or itscultural power. It was economic. And so, we can readthe manga subculture, and otaku 14 subculture inparticular, as a focused and specialized mode ofconsumption in the economy of post-war Japan. Thesubculture evolved and is still evolving in accordancewith what happened with the economy.When the capitalism of the economy reached its laterstage (what is known as, of course, “late capitalism”),the otaku subculture reached its postmodern stage asidentified by Hiroki Azuma in his seminal work,Otaku, Japan’s Database Animals. Perpetualproduction and reproduction in larger and larger scale,such as modeled by Osamu Tezuka’s career, is the realresult of the market extension of the manga industry.As Richie wrote:The successful and self-perpetuating factory,which is Japan’s image enterprise, has operatedfor centuries but it is only now, in this age ofinstant communication, that it reveals itself as amajor industry.In this context, the globalization of manga subcultureis only a logical extension of the consumptioneconomy.And in this light, we can also assert that theglobalization of this particular subculture can onlyhappen when global consumption reaches suitableconditions for accepting it.What is so “Japanese” about manga?At the purest sense, and its simplest notion, globalculture, I think, is just what everybody does (or could do)regardless of geography. To be sure, the current form ofglobal culture has international economic forces as amajor force behind it. But when all is said and done,it’s about people consuming fast food, popular moviesand music, branded clothes, etc., with all of the prosand cons of that.And what about identity? It’s only a tweak, I think, ofthat situation. A tweak, arising from each country orlocation’s unique (1) history, (2) geographicalconditions, and (3) language.Everybody (this is of course an exaggeration) can eatMcDonald’s now. But Japanese McDonald’s burgersare actually slightly different from IndonesianMcDonald burgers. The same thing can also be said ofthe consumption and production of comics.Comics everywhere are basically “juxtaposed pictorialand other images in deliberate sequence, intended toThe Work of the 2010/2011 API Fellows