Zack Wood, a 25-year-old graduate of Stanford, was looking to prepare himself for a career in animation, design and computer graphics. To that end, he, like many other Americans, turned to studying manga, Japan’s popular comic form.
And as Japanese universities work harder to attract students to fill their classrooms while the country’s birth rate declines, more are offering degrees in manga and animation.
“I like it here because you get totally immersed in the skill training” of manga and animation, said Wood, who is studying at Kyoto Seika University. “It has turned out to be a lot of fun.”
Photo: Bloomberg
In the last 10 years, more than a dozen university departments and programs have been created to offer a degree or a cluster of courses meant as a concentration in manga, animation and video games, and a similar number of vocational schools provide training in the art.
At Kyoto Seika University, which established the country’s first manga program, the number of foreign students enrolled has risen to 57 out of 800 students in the program. That is up from just 19 in 2000.
Since it was founded in 2005, Digital Hollywood University, a school in Tokyo that specializes in animation and video games, has seen the number of international students increase to 84 this year, roughly 20 percent of its student body.
“I want to see it grow to 50 percent of the entire students in the very near future,” said Tomoyuki Sugiyama, president of Digital Hollywood University. Digital Hollywood has campus buildings spread across the Akihabara area in Tokyo, the nation’s capital for otaku, or nerds. Students from South Korea, China, Malaysia, Taiwan and other Asian countries, who constitute the bulk of the international student body, mingle with Japanese students.
The curriculum at the schools usually includes courses on drawing, coloring and motion picture production, as well as film directing, playwriting and copyright law.
Once armed with technical and industry knowledge, many international students are eager to gain work experience in Japan upon graduation before returning home.
Li Lin Lin, 28, a student from northeastern China who attends Digital Hollywood University, said she thought that, after finishing her degree, landing a job in the animation industry in China would be easy. The real trophy, she said, was job experience in the country of manga. Li is especially interested in working for a Japanese animation studio.
“I think you can do almost anything back home once you get a degree and animation working experiences in Japan,” said Li, emerging from her class on digital animation coloring one Saturday afternoon.
Hidenori Ohyama, senior director of corporate strategy at Toei Animation, said it was possible that international students could end up at Japanese companies like his. “If they apply, take our tests and pass, they will become employees just like anyone else,” he said.
His company, a leading animator that has produced Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk films, has Romanian and South Korean producers, among other foreign citizens, Ohyama said.
Still, none of the animation-oriented Japanese university programs seem to be on the international radar yet, said Kison Chang, a training manager at Imagi Studios, an international animation production studio based in Hong Kong.
But he said students in Japan with solid work experience at Japanese studios could be prime candidates for international recruitment.
“They would certainly be a great benefit to our professional line,” he said. “They might bring in some kind of spirit, which we may not know, or something we didn’t realize that would be a benefit to us.”
In recent years, universities in China and South Korea have also begun offering manga and animation programs, drawing many local students. But Keiko Takemiya, dean of the manga program at Kyoto Seika University and a famed manga artist, said there were differences.
“What they teach in [South] Korea is mostly cartoons like you see in the US,” she said. “They don’t quite teach the ‘story manga.’”
Story manga is known for its feature length and distinct story lines, compared with the one-liner cartoon notable for its gags and jokes.
Takemiya said manga’s secret was in its limitless boundaries in form and content, and that the types of manga available in Japan far exceed those in other countries. That includes adult-themed manga and animation that sometimes includes sexually explicit content.
“What they teach in China is animation meant for children,” said Sugiyama of Digital Hollywood. “But what we teach is geared towards both children and adults.”
Still, most Japanese scholars concede that the body of knowledge they teach is still being systemized.
“We put together and offer classes that we believe will be of use to people who are going into the trade, but if we wait till manga and animation studies are fully structured and organized academically, that’s too late,” Sugiyama said. “In a world where creative content is digitalizing and globalizing, we need to train young people in these arts now.”
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