Toward “Reciprocal Legitimation” between Shakespeare’s Works and Manga

Yukari Yoshihara

doi:10.1515/mstap-2016-0019

Authors

Yukari Yoshihara University of Tsukuba

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2016-0019

Keywords:

Pop culture, Japan, gender, cultural hierarchy, manga, animation

Abstract

In April 2014, Nihon Hoso Kyokai (NHK: Japan Broadcasting Company) aired a short animated film titled “Ophelia, not yet”. Ophelia, in this animation, survives, as she is a backstroke champion. This article will attempt to contextualize the complex negotiations, struggles and challenges between high culture and pop culture, between Western culture and Japanese culture, between authoritative cultural products and radicalized counterculture consumer products (such as animation), to argue that it would be more profitable to think of the relationships between highbrow/lowbrow, Western/non-Western, male versus female, heterosexual versus non-heterosexual, not simply in terms of dichotomies or domination/subordination, but in terms of reciprocal enrichment in a never-ending process of mutual metamorphoses.

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Author Biography

Yukari Yoshihara, University of Tsukuba

Ph.D. from the University of Tsukuba in 2005, on the first Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello performed in 1903. Her publications include “Is This Shakespeare? Inoue Hidenori’s Adaptations of Shakespeare” in Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta (eds.), Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia (Routledge, 2009), “Tacky Shakespeares in Japan” in Multicultural Shakespeare 10 (25) (2013), “‘Raw Savage’ Othello: The First Staged Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism” in Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds.), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (2014), and “Both Goes Glocal: Shakespeare and/in manga” (Japanese) in Fusami Ogi (ed.), Studies on Female Creators of manga/comics (2015). She is an organizer of the Graphic Shakespeare Competition at Elsinore Conference 2016: Shakespeare-The Next 400 Years (April 2016).

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