The reception of Japanese animation in East Asia is a topic of special interest in social sciences; however, little empirical research has been performed that explicitly examines the determinants of its audiences in different countries using quantitative methods. This article studies historical, social and cultural factors that affect the reception of Japanese animation in East Asia, and investigates its determinants among audiences in Taiwan, South Korea and China using a logistic regression analysis model to analyse the data of the East Asia Social Survey 2008. The authors' findings primarily indicate that higher schooling and the consumption of other cultural goods such as Chinese movies or South Korean dramas are positive factors concerning Japanese animation. In contrast, older audiences have a negative attitude towards Japanese animation. These variables and the self-assessment of community are discussed in the context of previous research. Through empirical analysis, the authors' findings support this previous research, confirm possible new tendencies and suggest a possible transition in the concept of 'Japan' in the context of East Asian cultural consumption.

Video-sharing sites like YouTube and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, along with unlawful platforms such as Anitube, are environments of consumption enabled by increasing transnational consumption that are pushing for transformations in the Japanese animation industry. Among these platforms, the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation is known to rely on the integration of consumers’ practices and the needs of the animation industry in a changing and challenging era of transnational content flows. In this paper, I focus on the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation, a major player in the contemporary media mix, and its pushing forward of the creation of an environment that integrates two different stances on cultural content: one which represents the industry’s needs regarding cultural content as intellectual property, and another that represents consumers’ practices and which regards content as a common or free resource for enabling participation in digital networks. I argue that rather than the production of content, it is the production of value through the management of fictional worlds and user’s participation in media platforms that lies at the core of the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation’s self-proclaimed ‘ecosystem’. This case represents the transformations in the Japanese content industry to survive the increasing transnationalisation of consumption and production.

This paper focuses on Japanese amateur text producers–often addressed as dōjin–who have been frequently described in contrasting terms: either as isolated, insular individuals who lack social skills or interest in intersubjective interaction, or as communities built on shared mutual interest and emotive bonds. In this paper I argue that a focus on the different orientations of dōjin cultures towards the value of media texts allows us to build a bridge between both of these stances. Along with analysis of texts and appropriative practices, this perspective advocates for the analysis of institutions as a different empirical field in the study of contemporary popular culture. In this paper my goal is to propose a distinction within dōjin cultures between activities and participation, described as two different forms of social action shaped by different orientations towards the value of texts. Both orientations share however an acknowledgment of a certain value in specific texts, which becomes the driving force behind textual production. As I will suggest, the word activities is useful to represent a vertical orientation towards value. This is a kind of orientation that lies at the foundation of individualistic attitudes within the practices of dōjin cultures. In contrast, the word participation helps to characterize a horizontal orientation towards value. This is a kind of orientation that supports collective participation and links individuals into wider groups and networks. Activities and participation are constitutive elements of amateur dōjin culture.

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