Japanese Manga, Hong Kong films and the “unity” of Asia = 日本の漫画、香港映画、そして〈アジアの一体化〉

Japanese manga and anime are popular and influential in East Asia. Politicians recently have attempted to use the cultural products as an ideological tool in order to advance the nation’s political and economic interests. However, manga readers and anime audiences in Asia always take on Japanese culture without loving Japan. Manga actually gets localized in different regions of Asia. The intra-Asian popular culture flows is better expressed in the transnational sense. In Hong Kong, Japanese manga has undergone a dynamic domestication process. Although Hong Kong comic artists have borrowed and incorporated the elements of Japanese manga in their drawing style, the storyline dramatizes the struggle between the righteous Chinese heroes and the evil-doing Japanese villains. Adapting Japanese manga has become popular in Hong Kong film productions since the 1990s. This paper looks at some of these cinematic adaptations in order to examine how Japanese manga has been used to express Hong Kong’s own cultural and political concerns. This denotes the multiple layers of the cultural inter-flows in East Asia, and indicates difference and tension themselves can establish the possible foundation of cultural unity in the future.