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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Studio Ghibli (maker of Spirited Away) is in a league of its own though.

That specific outlier aside; I get the impression that cartoons in Europe and the US picked up quite a bit of slack in the adult demographic with shows like Archer and Rick & Morty in the past decade, building on what Adult Swim prepared in the US. In Japan this niche was already much more explored, although it is not a pass-time most adults flaunt. While I never got the impression that adult viewers of anime were anything more than a (sizeable) minority, they are certainly a target demographic, and manga (comics) even more so. One example that always stuck out to me was former prime minister Asō Tarō who openly admitted to being quite well-read in manga.

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I watched "10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki" [1] recently, besides knowing his stubborn character and artist life, and the work they do at Studio Ghibli is pretty outstanding, as terms of time, effort and dedication. There is also an indie movie, "Never Ending Man" [2] they shot after he suddenly announced his retirement at the age of 72, but later came back with his first CGI project. Years of hand-drawing, an old man through his digital transformation

Studio Ghibli also released all their posters and stills [3] from its animations.

[1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/program/video/10... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvslsD9F0bk [3] https://www.ghibli.jp/info/013344/

Oh what a treat that was, thank you for the link to "10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki". Looking forward to "Never Ending Man".

I'm not a fan of manga or "anime" per se, there's a ton of mediocre and mass-produced stuff. But as someone of Japanese heritage, I feel fortunate to have experienced some of the history and culture of manga books and animated films, as they blossomed after WWII - on occasions they achieve sublime expression as visual story telling.

Mangas are a massive mainstream phenomenon in Japan since before animation was even a thing. Japanese long commuter-train journeys were normalized earlier than elsewhere, packed carriages didn’t suit newspapers, and reading literature is harder than average with all those kanjis (most people only know a relatively small subset of them), so mangas fit that niche better than anything else. This said, I wouldn’t be surprised to read that the sector is declining due to competition from phones and other devices - my personal feeling is that the material targeted at adults has significantly declined in both quality and quantity in recent years.

> reading literature is harder than average with all those kanjis

Do you have a source for this claim? I have a hard time believing the average Japanese person has that much difficulty reading literature in their own language.

  Japanese folks lag behind in education simply because their language requires them to spend far longer mastering reading. This significantly delays their progress.

https://japaneseruleof7.com/are-japanese-people-retarded/

EDIT: I see the URL seems offensive but it's clickbait, the article is actually serious.

> https://japaneseruleof7.com/are-japanese-people-retarded/

That is not exactly an academic source and it's from someone living in Japan that doesn't read Japanese very well (check the comment section where they admit that themselves) so this is far from authoritative as a source.

I heard that after WWII the US occupation administered a national literacy test to see if Japanese people were as literate as their US counterparts, as it was becoming a serious idea to replace the existing writing system with the US alphabet. It was found that their literacy level was comparable so they didn't change anything so drastically.

Consider that learning to read kanji is much different from (easier than) learning to write them. There are a ton of contextual clues when reading, and furigana inserted by the publisher if the kanji would be hard to read for the target demographic. There is also the option of just substituting kana for hard-to-read kanji. Publishers and writers will obviously add furigana to any kanji that are hard to read as they have a monetary motivation to make their content as accessible as possible.

So you tend to pick up a lot of kanji based on these contextual clues and furigana over the years if you read anything, similar to how English speakers learn spellings of words when they read a word they've only "heard" before.

Writing is harder because when writing you will sometimes struggle to remember the correct kanji to use, or sometimes forget a small portion of the kanji. This is the why schools need to spend so much time teaching kanji as a subject of itself.

That makes sense. On the other hand, what made me side with the author here is this.

  About a year ago, I read a study (which I wish to hell I could locate again) that made the case that children raised with more phonetic languages, such as Spanish and Finnish, had a notable advantage over children whose native language is English, because they learned to read and write much earlier. While American, British, and Australian children puzzle over words like “plough,” “epitome,” and “Worcestershire,” children in Spain are steadily progressing through more and higher-level books, enabling them earlier access to advanced skills such as reasoning, synthesis, and discussion. They simply read at a higher level than English speakers of the same age.

this highly resonates with my experience as Spanish is my first language and started learning English since first grade.

Spanish speakers are expected to read arbitrary words and write (albeit with lots of spelling mistakes) by (optimistically) kindergarten or early first grade. The written-spoken language is very regular so it's very easy so "sound out" words. This is in contrast to what I hear is like to teach English speaking children. So yes, the author's hypothesis seems plausible to me.

I'm not one to get offended easily, so that aspect of your post isn't an issue for me. However you don't seem to have a real foundation for your belief, just an assumption. I can believe that the average Japanese person doesn't know every single kanji, just like the average english-speaking person doesn't know every word in the dictionary, but I think it's a big stretch to assume that Japanese people can't even read books on the train because their literacy is so low.

  I think it's a big stretch to assume that Japanese people can't even read books on the train because their literacy is so low.

That's also an uncharitable interpretation of the article, or anything I pointed.

The best way I could put it is, "the Japanese writing system is pretty cumbersome and in turn the people on average are less drawn to literal mediums and more drawn towards visual media".

And that's just the opinion of an english teacher in japan after all.

  >  The written-spoken language is very regular so it's very easy so "sound out" words.

I don't know where I stand on your thesis (I was mostly arguing against the idea that Japanese people are demotivated to read more than English speakers because of kanji), but the main reservation I have about this is that it's pretty easy to fake knowledge of words this way. The pronunciation of something is secondary to its definition. But with a phonetic language, it's easy to fool yourself as well as others of an understanding that is not very deep.

I remember once in middle school I elicited a laugh from my classmates when during group reading, I mispronounced "awry" (I had put the stress on the wrong syllable as well as pronounced the "y" as "ee"). However, I had a very good idea of what it meant at that time. OTOH, in that same class, it was a very unusual occurence for the teacher to interrupt group reading and confirm everyone knew what a word meant, so I believe many misunderstood words were glossed over routinely.

I'm not saying being phonetic is a net loss, of course, just that "understanding" is a tricky thing to gauge, and may be harder as a side effect of some language being phonetic.

  The pronunciation of something is secondary to its definition. But with a phonetic language, it's easy to fool yourself as well as others of an understanding that is not very deep.

well, children are introduced to "reading" as in mapping written symbols to phonemes. Yes, there's more to reading than that, as in you can side-step the mapping to phonemes and map straight to "meaning", but nobody is doing that with children. Phonetic languages just make the (indispensable) step of text to sound easier and gives you a head start.

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