Even adult fans stay keen for Japanese cartoons, games

At midnight on a cold Saturday morning, dozens of people, many of whom were Pitt students postponing studying for their midterms, cheered outside the GameStop on Forbes Avenue in celebration of the release of the next iteration of the game that defined their childhoods.

“Where’s group six?” one employee yelled into his megaphone after making his way through the dense crowd to locate the next party in line to pick up the anticipated game.

A faceless voice from within the mass of bodies hollered back, “About 20 feet that way!”

The games for which these jubilant fans crowded the sidewalk were “Pokemon X” and “Pokemon Y,” the first in the highly anticipated sixth generation of the blockbuster game series that began in 1996. Its popularity has not waned, as the release of the latest games in the franchise broke day-one sales records for Nintendo’s 3DS console.

But there is still a division between those who are inclined to relinquish a Friday night for a game release and those who don’t quite understand the massive fan base behind what is marketed primarily as a child’s toy.

On Saturday evening, Pitt’s Japanese Culture Association held its first-ever PokeFest in an attempt to bridge this gap.

“A lot of us college students are people who played it back in the day … trading and fighting off of our old, clunky Game Boys,” senior information science major Vincent Agresti, the association’s vice president, said. “So we just want to get that nostalgia back for people who are still passionate about it now.”

More than 100 people gathered in the William Pitt Union’s Assembly Room for PokeFest, which featured tournaments of several generations of “Pokemon” games and screenings of the original “Pokemon: The First Movie” and the new “Pokemon: Origins” television series.

The new show, a reboot of the original anime television series that began in 1997 and is still in syndication, drew a large crowd, captivated by the re-imagining of the beloved series. 

“I imagine that right now, in this room, or in any classroom really, you’d probably be able to find that somewhere between two-thirds to three-fourths of the people in that room have played “Pokemon” at some point, or have seen the cartoon,” Agresti said.

Another factor in “Pokemon’s” massive success is its universality. It has made an incredible impact on the world, launching one of the most popular media franchises in decades and raising several generations of gamers across the globe. According to a press release from Nintendo coinciding with the launch of “Pokemon Black” and “Pokemon White” versions in 2010, over 200 million copies of Pokemon game titles have been sold since 1996.

David Van Etten, a senior English writing major currently working on a study about capitalism in the “Pokemon” franchise, considers the game series in particular a widespread global phenomenon.

“It’s interesting because it penetrates through so many cultures,” he said.

During PokeFest, Van Etten eagerly handed out a survey related to his study, which included questions such as “How important was in-game money to you while playing the games?” and “To you, what is the goal of ‘Pokemon’?”

Van Etten said he believes that the franchise’s universality is fundamental to understanding its groundbreaking success.

Kiyomitsu Yui, a sociology professor at Kobe University in Japan, wrote an essay in 2010 noting that many Japanese manga and anime, such as “Pokemon,” have managed to flourish in foreign countries. 

According to Yui, these media did not gain global traction until the early 1990s, when the most acclaimed examples of the genre, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Princess Mononoke” and Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic “Akira”, gained attention from a worldwide audience.

Yui also claims in his essay that while the stereotype of anime as “dangerous” and “full of violence and sex” does still exist, it is now significantly less prevalent than the view of it as “a sophisticated, even avant-garde art.”

For “Pokemon,” public opinion is strongly veered toward the latter. If the buzz in the air throughout Saturday’s event was any indication, the franchise won’t go away anytime soon.

For many gamers, the series was their first foray into Japanese culture, an experience that the Japanese Culture Association hopes it delivered to many Pitt students through PokeFest.

“That’s one of the things we’re trying to do,” Agresti said. “We’re trying to get the people who really appreciate it and the people who grew up on it, who maybe moved past it to come back and say, ‘This is what got me into Japanese culture.’”