September-October 2024
Field trip to Denmark
In September-October, 2024, Akiko Sugawa Shimada travelled to Denmark. She engaged with Danish scholars and students through presentations and discussions on 2.5D culture, rekijo, and heritage tourism. Her itinerary included academic exchanges at Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Southern Denmark universities, as well as site visits to museums and exhibitions related to Japanese and Danish cultural dissemination. Some highlights are a guided tour at Tivoli Gardens explored historical Japanese influences on Danish experience design, and another at HC Andersen museum with focus on the communication of his heritage to an international public. Together with Susana Tosca, they attended a performance of Pinocchio, which took up some of the topics of cyborg-made companions they had explored in their field trip in Tokyo the previous year. As part of her field study, she conducted many observations and interviews with young Danish fans of Japanese live stage performances, contributing to the project’s exploration of audience participation and mediated places.
September 2024
Second Project Workshop at University of Southern Denmark
In September, 2024, we gathered at the University of Southern Denmark for a one-day seminar on the topic of "Popular Culture Translocations between Japan and Denmark". Our call for papers was flooded with relevant contributions and we invited an exceptional lineup to Odense to explore the dynamic cultural exchanges between Japan and Denmark, with a particular focus on the realm of popular culture. The seminar focused into the mutual fascination and cultural interplay between the two nations, which have shown a profound appreciation and longing for each other's cultural expressions, from high arts to popular culture and fandom, crafts, food, and fashion. Please find the program here.
May 2024
Field trip to Japan
In May 2024, Susana Tosca visited Japan for a field trip visiting places in the real world that have been heavily mediated by popular culture, talking to academics, representatives from the media industries, museum researchers and other visitors along the way. In Kyoto she followed the routes of Uchoten Kazoku and Tamako Market, besides meeting with the creators of Otori Danshi and following in the trails of their award winning project. The Kyocera Museum hosted an exhibition of Studio Ghibli landscapes, which was also followed up by a visit to the new Ghibli Park in Nagoya. In Tokyo she followed in the footsteps of Makoto Shinkai, exploring the sites appearing in his filmography, as well as holding meetings about the Japanese anime creators understanding of Scandinavia through the lens of Vinland Saga. Together with Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, they attended a performance of the stage play Cyborg 009, one of the most beloved science fiction franchises of all time, running for 40 years, and with a new kind of format that is becoming culturally very significant for the Japanese transmedial franchise economy.
May 2023
First Project Workshop at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto)
In May 2023, we held our first workshop, with participation of several researchers from local and international universities. The theme was "Transmedial Imaginaries of Place". We are working on a publication condensing the discussions of the round table. We also participated at the Mechademia conference, held at the International Manga Museum, where we could present ongoing research and network with relevant researchers interested in the theme of transmedial travel.
April 2023
Project Meeting at University of Yokohama
In April 2023, the project members met for research exchange and planning of further activities. We also visited some iconic transmedial travel places in Yokohama, such as Chinatown, the Gundam center at the harbour, and the Yakuza series city walk. Visit at the Yokohama Archive of History.
COVID-19 pandemic lockdown
The activities for the project were unfortunately put on hold for over a year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan closed its borders to all non-Japanese from 10/04/2020 to 11/10/2022, where foreigners could begin to enter with a very strict cap on arrivals. The long lists of people waiting to get into the country effectively meant that it was virtually impossible to visit Japan as a foreigner until the beginning of the year 2023, still with restrictions. Our fieldwork and workshops were rescheduled and cancelled several times.
January 2022
Project kickstart meeting
Our first project meeting and seminar was online, where we made plans for the rest of the grant period, and optimistically thought that the pandemic lockdown could not last that long. The first sessions involved exchange about our recently published works as related to the network. Prof. Sugawa Shimada had just published her book about 2,5 culture, and Prof. Tosca had published the book Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life. Both works served as the basis for establishing common grounds as to the ways in which transmedial universes intersect with real places.