(Moeran 1996).

While he analyzed the meanings of meetings, something I

do as well, he also grew attached to his informants, a finding that Im sure
many fieldworkers also can appreciate. Does this distort the findings of a
researcher? Perhaps, but the flip side is that if you dont spend time in an
anime studio, or an ad agency, you are more likely to see only the content of
an anime or an ad, and there is a risk ignoring (or underplaying) the people
and the labor behind the effort. Is this not a bias as well?
At the same time, I would acknowledge that the examples I ended up with
tend towards the male end of the anime spectrum. Gender in anime is a
topic that deserves more attention than my limited access could achieve. All
the studios I visited had women employees, but, except for Studio 4C with its
woman CEO (see Ch. 6), few were in the top positions. Women animators
were clearly on staff, but in the meetings between those with more power
such as producers, scriptwriters, directors, and key frame artists, I would
estimate that around one in five or six (at most 1 in 3) were women. For
anime genres as well, I would note that my discussion of mecha (giant robot)
anime and the links with merchandising could apply equally well to magical
schoolgirl anime (Ch. 5). Whereas giant robot anime excelled as a marketing
tool for robot toys, magical schoolgirl anime played a similar role in
promoting magic wands and other transformation devices as toys (Allison
2006). Of course, gender dynamics mean more than some anime is for boys
and some for girls. For example, anthropologist Laura Miller (2011)
persuasively argues that the promotion of so-called Cool Japan by the
Japanese government is also skewed towards male geek culture, and
thereby ends up erasing the creativity of young women. Gender issues are
an extremely important aspect of anime studies, and though the limitations
of fieldwork may be a poor excuse for some of the absences here, I had to
work with the cards I was dealt. Rather than asserting a questionable
objectivity, anthropologists tend to