Anime theme songs, or anison, are one of the main ways in which audiences outside Japan first encounter Japanese pop culture. The comments section beneath official theme song videos on YouTube has accumulated traces of this contact over many years. However, most research on anison reception draws on small, one-off samples, leaving us with little sense of how interest in a given title actually shifts over time. This study analyzes tens of thousands of multilingual YouTube comments spanning several years to trace how international interest in anison videos has changed over time. It focuses on Jujutsu Kaisen. The series has aired continuously as both a television show and theatrical films from 2020 to 2026, offering a valuable historical span for this analysis. Its theme songs have also drawn attention abroad, from viral dance trends to internet jokes referencing the series, providing abundant material to analyze. We obtained comments from the official video of each theme song. The language of each comment was identified using a Python language-detection library and then manually checked. A quantitative text analysis was then conducted to trace how the content of the comments changed over time. Following comments on the theme songs in this way, the paper considers how international engagement expands, contracts, or diversifies as a franchise unfolds, in dialogue with Iwabuchi's (2002) thesis of cultural odorlessness and Lee's (2021) work on language-based communities on YouTube.

Authors:
Yuka Shiratsuchi, Bunkyo University, Japan
Shinji Okumura, Bunkyo University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Yuka Shiratsuchi is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Communications at Bunkyo University, Japan.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

Bookmark