Paper short abstract:

Manga, anime and videogames created in Japan are populated by a wide range of fictional characters. But how can we characterize this population? How diverse is it? In this paper, I explore a wide range of fan-created data about characters in order to create a census of the visual media population.

Paper long abstract:

Manga, anime and videogames created in Japan are populated by a wide range of fictional characters. But how can we characterize this population? How diverse is it? In this paper, I explore a wide range of fan-created data about characters in order to create a census of the visual media population.

Manga, anime and videogames created in Japan are populated by a wide range of fictional characters. But how can we characterize this population? How diverse is it? In this paper, I explore a wide range of fan-created data about characters in order to create a census of the visual media population.

Prior work on the virtual census project (Williams et al., 2009) critically considered the relation between the characters populating videogames, and the population of the U.S., revealing a systematic over-representation of male white adults in videgames. Building on this approach, the paper firstly shows how the population of visual media created in Japan has developed over time and in comparison to the population described by the Japanese census over time (kokuseichousa, https://www.e-kokusei.go.jp/). This analysis focuses on established categories of the census, such as age and gender, showing that over time, the population has developed a bias towards female teens and, with less prominence, female adults.

In the second part of the paper, I critically reflect on the adequacy of these established categories for describing the visual media population. By applying several population-specific categories, I approximate the visual media population in its own terms, in turn revealing some of the underlying logic of this fictional universe.

The paper has been developed as part of the project “Japanese visual media graph (JVMG),” which aggregates metadata about Japanese visual media compiled and curated by enthusiast fan communities accessible to academic research. For this paper, I draw on data from the Anime Characters Database (https://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/) and the Visual Novel Database (https://vndb.org/), which each provide a wide range of metadata on visual media created in Japan and the characters that live in them.