Abstract
While the concept of a broadly defined subculture of animation fans still awaits a definitive treatment, one of its elements has been extensively studied – the phenomenon of manga and anime fandom. The reviewed work presents an extensive overview of one of its local forms, namely, manga and anime fandom in Poland. The importance of this subculture is best illustrated by the closing remarks of the author, Łukasz Reczulski, in which he notes that this subculture ‘is one of the leading elements of Polish youth culture, exerting a huge influence on the language, interests and clothing style of Polish teenagers’ (p. 266). Elsewhere, he presents novel estimates of that subculture’s growth, from approximately 10,000–15,000 in the late 1990s to 100,000 or so two decades later (pp. 173–175). To put this in context, the current Polish youth demographic (15–29) numbers under six million.
The book is composed of six chapters. The first consists of an introduction and methodology discussion. The second presents the topic of Japanese animation and comics (anime and manga, respectively) in Poland. The subsequent three large chapters present the history and structure of Polish anime and manga fandom up to the early 2000s, while the final chapter is a short conclusion.
The author based his studies on a comprehensive survey of print and online materials (newspaper and magazine articles, fanzines, as well as contents of online forums and other discussions, including logs of services such as IRC and Usenet). As the author notes, gathering print materials was challenging since no library, museum, or other institution in Poland collects and preserves works such as fanzines, brochures, or more exotic media (such as disk mags – digital magazines published on floppy drives). The author’s creation of such an archive in the process of this research, which he describes as ‘an archive of the Polish [anime and manga] fandom’ (p. 31) is therefore commendable and this reviewer hopes it can be eventually preserved in a public academic repository. To supplement archival data, the author also attempted to interview approximately 350 individuals identified as significant within the studied subculture, although in the end only about 50 interviews could be conducted (a response rate of about ~15% is to be expected). The author also discloses that he has been a member of the studied subculture for approximately two decades, which makes him an ‘opportunistic complete member researcher’ from the perspective of ethnographic methodology (Adler and Adler, 1987: 67–68) although Reczulski prefers to use the term ‘akafan’ (‘akademik-fan’), a Polish translation of ‘fan scholar’ (Hills, 2002: 36).
The second chapter begins with obligatory explanations of the concepts of anime and manga, and their international history. While useful for general readers, those more familiar with the subject will not find anything new here until, a few pages later, when the author presents the history of these media in Poland. Although that topic has been covered before by scholars such as Siuda and Karolewska (2014) and Brzostek et al. (2019), Rzeczulski nonetheless presents some valuable and novel points of information, such as his analysis of Poland’s first manga publication (the 1986 translation of Terasawa’s Batto) (p. 54) and his remarks on the surprisingly positive critical reception of Japanese animated pornography (hentai) a decade later (p. 60). There is also new material presented and analysed in the second half of that chapter on controversies related to the coverage of anime, manga and its associated subculture by Polish media. Here, Rzeczulski presents an in-depth overview of how Polish journalists and critics covered those topics, beginning as early as 1980 (pp. 78–79). The chapter is extensively footnoted with valuable information on primary sources, demonstrating Reczulski’s commendable efforts to locate sources ranging from minutes of the meeting of the radio and television committee (p. 78) to interviews with the law enforcement officials investigating this subculture (p. 94). However, there are points where his analysis (see pp. 83–86) could well be strengthened through a more overt engagement with theoretical work from the fields of sociology, communication and media studies. For example, it would be useful to see an engagement with theoretical concepts such as Oberg’s (1960) culture shock.
The rest of the book (chapters 3 to 5) presents a very detailed overview of the history and characteristics of Polish anime and manga fandom, beginning with the discussion of concepts such as fan and fandom. While the discussion is underpinned by Polish scholarship by authors such as Piotr Siuda, it arguably would have benefited from a broadening of scope to include the work of international scholars such as Henry Jenkins (e.g. Jenkins, 1982) . What follows next is the most valuable part of the book – an extensively documented history of Polish anime and manga fandom. Thanks to the author’s extensive archival works and interviews, he is able to show that this subculture began almost a decade earlier than previously thought, tracing the existence of the first anime and manga club in Poland to the late communist era, rather than the mid-1990s as was previously assumed. These chapters also extensively discuss the role of several key figures of that subculture and convincingly demonstrate the importance of agency – the actions of only a single individual, or several, might have arguably speeded up the growth of this entire youth movement by years. The discussion of the emergence of the Polish manga scene is valuable, as well as that of the beginnings of the Polish anime-inspired audiovisual and animation scenes, with their humble beginnings related to fansubbers and creators of anime music videos (AMVs).
While the book presents a comprehensive treatment of the subject, there are nonetheless some aspects that could have been addressed. The most significant one highlighted above is the lack of significant engagement with scholarly theories. In addition to this, the book lacks a sufficient literature review, particularly in the sphere of previous studies on Polish anime and manga fandom. The author does engage with the relevant literature but fails to present any overview of other Polish scholars of related phenomena (i.e. works concerned with the history and reception of Japanese animation and comics in Poland and its associated subculture), and their relevant works (in particular, the previously mentioned works such as Siuda and Karolewska, 2014, and Brzostek et al., 2019) and others, such as Witkowska, 2012). A few paragraphs if not pages presenting the history of prior academic studies of this subculture could have easily found room in this book and would have been a welcome addition to our understanding of the topic.
The second problem relates to a focus on some aspects of the discussed subculture and the omission of others that the author never fully justifies. To some degree, this can be understood due to the book’s focus on the early history of this subculture, i.e. the period from the 1980s to the early 2000s, which explains why there is no mention of, for example, the recent emergence of Polish anime (The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, 2021, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, 2022). There are, however, omissions that are harder to justify. For example, the author extensively discusses groups such as fandom convention organizers, while J-rock fans, cosplayers, as well as yaoi and yuri subcultures 1 are mentioned only in passing, even though the author acknowledges they emerged at the turn of the millennium. The book would also have benefited from a greater positioning within the global context: when the author makes a passing yet profound claim that Poland was one of the European leaders in adopting this subculture (p. 117 and again on p. 266), while that claim is accompanied by a footnote citing several academic and relevant works (e.g. Bouissou et al., 2010), this is unfortunately not accompanied by even a cursory analysis and discussion.
Despite these flaws, this is an otherwise solid and comprehensive analysis of a new and important subculture of Polish youth. On a final note, the author can be commended for making the reviewed work available in open access under a CC-BY licence in his university’s repository at https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl/handle/11089/48095. While the work is in Polish, an open-access format combined with advancements in modern machine translation should make it accessible to most international readers.
Footnotes
Notes
Author biography
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