“Teaching Anime and Manga in Canada: LGBTQ Challenges”

Abstract

Why do Canadian students want to study Japanese manga and anime? What are the challenges for the instructor when an anime film uses Japanese words for which there are no equivalents in English, or includes cultural references for concepts that do not exist in North American culture? This essay draws on the author’s fifteen years of experience teaching Japanese popular culture at a Canadian University to explore one of the most challenging areas of cross-cultural (mis) communication: vocabulary, concepts, and discourses around LGBTQ characters in manga and anime. It argues that the mismatch between Japanese concepts of gender, sex, and sexuality and those of Canada provides an opportunity to analyze unspoken assumptions of both cultures.