Anthropocentric media, anthropocentric media theories

Systemic approaches to modern Japanese media center on the media mix production system, which involves creators from a variety of media industries collaborating to design a fictional world like BSD with the goal of iterating that world in their respective media according to agreed-upon boundaries.Footnote ² No single model covers all media mix properties. Rather, the system is defined by networks of corporate and personal relationships within Japanese media industries combined with established pay rates for various media, a history of reliable product combinations, and beliefs about what target audiences are willing to pay for assorted media products and cultural opportunities.

Media mix productions become even more complicated as they are implemented over time. It is not enough for participants in a media mix to set initial guidelines for the project and then disperse to iterate it independently. Rather, representatives from each party form a committee that holds regular meetings whose function is “less to secure a sacred space for creativity than to build and shape consensus opinion among various professional roles[…] related to production financing, labor coordination, and franchise branding” (Hartzheim Reference Hartzheim2024: 78).Footnote ³ Production committees are opaque to outsiders by design. Far from naïve daydreams about starving artists producing works of genius in lonely garrets, the media mix production process primarily reduces friction between large numbers of people cooperating for the sake of lessened upfront risk and reliable financial returns for all.

For authors like BSD’s Asagiri, media mix-style production means creating a series’ concept in collaboration with a manga magazine editor (and future production committee member) who is attuned to whether proposed concepts align with both the magazine’s needs and the desires of potential collaborators in a variety of media industries. In BSD’s case, it does not seem like the “hot dudes” portion of BSD’s founding concept stemmed from Asagiri’s personal interests, which may explain why his editor paired him with Harukawa 35 (pronounced Sango), a female artist notable for layering stylish, detailed character designs on top of sparsely limned backgrounds. Almost all of the BSD characters’ designs can be attributed to Harukawa, with Asagiri noting that it is “very uncommon and rare” for him to draft an initial character design (in Dong and Chik, Reference Dong and Chik2023: para. 29). Artists focus on their work, guided by committee members who manage intra-franchise relations with an eye to considerations such as the importance of strong character images.

Characters are arguably the most important aspect of a media mix franchise. Eiji Otsuka’s influential early theorization of the media mix argued that consumers want to consume not a media product but the fictional world that encompasses the product’s characters, narrative, settings, physics, technologies, magical system(s), history, and so forth (Reference Otsuka2010, orig. 1988). Media products merely constitute the means by which consumers enter fictional worlds. In theory, it should be possible to enter a fictional world via any of the features listed above. Yet, Otsuka’s evidence is grounded in characters: anthropomorphic monsters are the doorway to Bikkuriman, “characters and their human relations” (110) provide entrée to Captain Tsubasa, and Mario’s sprite is the key to Super Mario Bros. The apparent disparity between characters’ importance to consumers and their equal weight within media mix worlds led Hiroki Azuma to suggest that people are actually driven by a postmodern, animalistic desire to consume—specifically, the desire to repeatedly consume characters in possession of human features such as a certain hair color or glasses (Reference Azuma, Abel, Kono and Minneapolis2009). Marc Steinberg similarly, if less apocalyptically, argues that the “dynamically immobile character image” (Reference Steinberg2012: 6) enables consumers to simultaneously enter media mix worlds and broaden those worlds’ reach across the real world through “character goods” (キャラクター・グッズ), i.e., products made in or emblazoned with a character’s image. In sum, scholars implicitly agree that humanoid characters attract consumers to media mixes; debate centers on how and why this is the case.

With the development of 2.5D culture, media mix theory seemed like it would expand beyond professionally produced characters (and their media products) to include the physical environment. The concept of 2.5D culture emerged from studies of a new medium, the 2.5D musical (a musical theater adaptation of a media mix based in anime, manga, and/or other major media of Japanese popular culture). However, it quickly grew to include activities related to popular media that involve similar consumer behaviors, like cosplay and fan tourism. These activities all have travel in common. 2.5D play can be distinguished from private consumption by the fact that it usually occurs outside the home. The environment in which consumers engaged in 2.5D play thus entered academic conversation as scholars began to notice that “the places and spaces of otaku fandom” (Steinberg and dit Alban Reference Steinberg, Alban and Booth2018: 289) had not been properly addressed. Early academic usage of the term “2.5D” to indicate solely 2.5D musical theater adaptations was overly limited, but the expansion of 2.5D’s meaning over time risked becoming too broad instead.

Scholars delimited the bounds of 2.5D culture by focusing on the humans engaged in 2.5D play, for example, in studies of pedestrian practices at Tokyo Disneyland (Dit Alban Reference Dit Alban2023: 250) and the relationship between WWII historical sites, fandom, and nationalism (Sugawa-Shimada Reference Sugawa-Shimada2019). In returning to the person engaging in 2.5D play (meaning specifically their mind and/or body), theories of 2.5D culture have increasingly divorced 2.5D play from those players’ surroundings. Whereas early 2.5D culture was tied to the theaters in which 2.5D musicals were staged, “since the early 2000s, the 2.5-D (sic) has begun to be used as an umbrella term to express virtuality embodied by actual human bodies as well as human bodies that look unreal” (Sugawa-Shimada Reference Sugawa-Shimada2020: 125). Kohki Watabe insightfully observes that a person can only engage in 2.5D culture if they already have a mental image of the fictional characters represented in a given entertainment before entering said entertainment (Reference Watabe2023) in an echo of Linda Hutcheon’s point that an adaptation can only function as an adaptation for an audience that is already aware of the adapted text (Hutcheon and O’Flynn Reference Hutcheon and O’Flynn2013). In the case of 2.5D culture, the pre-existing mental image indicates that a “cognitive process enables the incarnation of 2D characters’ images in the 3D material world” (Watabe Reference Watabe2023: 97). 2.5D culture is thus limited to a zone circumscribed not only by the human body, but by a human mind that has already been inducted into a fictional world previously iterated in other media.

Anthropocentric theories of 2.5D culture have explained much about the people who engage in 2.5D activities and human society more generally, but the 2.5D concept is ill-equipped to tackle the environmental effects of contemporary Japanese popular media. Attempts to insert the environment into the 2.5D conversation focus on manmade aspects of said environment, whether that means the built environment of the city (Steinberg and dit Alban Reference Steinberg, Alban and Booth2018), the political structure of the Japanese nation-state (Yoshioka Reference Yoshioka2018), or the merchandise, clothing, and décor that “transform a physical space” into a 2.5D playzone (Gn Reference Gn2023: 71). Consequently, the environment was eclipsed by consumers and character-based products in theories of 2.5D culture just as it had been eclipsed by consumers and characters in media mix theory.

While systemic media theory has coopted the environment explicitly in concepts like “media ecology,” it also subtly elides references to actual physical spaces. Fan tourism is commonly called “pilgrimages to holy ground” (聖地巡礼) in Japanese. This historical religious term affirms that the physical location (地) is the focus of activity. Moreover, that activity is not disconnected from but integrated into participants’ everyday lives: the characters translated here as “pilgrimage” indicate a cyclic (巡) showing of respect (礼) to sacred land (聖地) that will recur throughout life much like the seasons come and go, or like how humans around the world celebrate bountiful harvests on an annual basis. In contrast, systemic theories of Japanese media subsume the land at the heart of these fan behaviors into “contents tourism” (コンテンツ ・ツーリズム), or tourism related to the content of a given media mix (Seaton et al. Reference Seaton, Yamamura, Sugawa-Shimada and Jang2017). Much like theories of 2.5D culture prioritize a consumer’s prior consumption and/or replication of media products over the actual location to which they put some effort reaching, “contents tourism” prioritizes the consumption and products that precede fans’ journeys over the physical environments that are their goal. The “contents tourism” concept functions as one link in a chain of de-naturing that ends with the word “organic” no longer referring to living organisms and instead indicating media (Seaton et al. Reference Seaton, Yamamura, Sugawa-Shimada and Jang2017: 5).

Systemic media theories’ erasure of the environment was not intentional, and some scholars have attempted to reinstate the environment as a central concern for contemporary Japanese media studies. Maxim Tvorun-Dunn and Nathalie Pascaru (Reference Tvorun-Dunn and Pascaru2023) brilliantly dissected the famed Studio Ghibli’s media mix activities to prove that its eco-friendly reputation is no longer warranted, as it capitulated to environmentally destructive merchandise in the 2010s. Similarly, Hiroaki Mori identified some potential environmental benefits of Japanese media systems while neatly substituting terms like “anime-induced tourism” (Reference Mori2022: 330) for “contents tourism” in a subtle refocusing on the act of travel over media products. These efforts to unearth the environmental impact of media systems should be continued and expanded.

Systemic analyses of contemporary Japanese media do have one significant benefit for ecocritical scholarship: they clarify the roles played by different media organizations in media production. Though the media mix system relies on merchandise, merchandizers generally do not create or hold rights to media mix worlds.Footnote ⁴ Legal rights in media mix-style production are held by what I will call major media companies. Typically, anime is seen as the most important medium in the media mix system (see, for example, Steinberg Reference Steinberg2012). The manga from which most anime are adapted play a key role as well, in part because of the Japanese legal system’s recognition of artists’ moral rights (in Davis Reference Davis2016: 181–5). Kadokawa Books, a major publisher that happened to publish the BSD manga and novels, pioneered an early form of media mix consisting of a novel–film–soundtrack triumvirate (Zahlten Reference Zahlten2017). The anime, manga, book, film, and music industries continue to function as major players in contemporary media mixes, joined by new digital media such as video games. These major media provide members for production committees and retain key rights, such as to the characters’ images.

In contrast to the major media, a host of other media industries that we might call minor media iterate media mix products without necessarily having any influence on the creation of the original world. These products have historically been of the type often dismissed as mere merchandise, such as clothing and toys. The majority are character goods such as trading cards, figurines, and other basic products that can be endlessly re-released with a new character image. In general, minor media companies create character goods according to schedules governed by the needs of the major media involved in the media mix in question. The hierarchical nature of the major–minor relationship can lead to environmental degradation under the right circumstances, but major media companies can also exploit their controlling rights to protect the environment (Tvorun-Dunn and Pascaru Reference Tvorun-Dunn and Pascaru2023).

The media mix system thus creates a recursive, anthropocentric circuit. Consumers are lured into media mix worlds by the humanoid characters depicted in major media products. The consumer then purchases merchandise from minor media companies, which enables them to alter their surroundings, to effectively cover their environment with items that serve as entrée to an imaginary world. The consumer consequently perceives surroundings that are attuned to their own personal tastes, while the actual environment in which they live is camouflaged by merchandise. Of course, the degree to which the environment is camouflaged depends on the consumer’s control of it. Papering a bedroom in character posters would cover that environment in its entirety, but consumers on the move—perhaps on a train mid-commute, or while walking in a park? Their control over their environment is limited to what they can carry with them. It is perhaps for this reason that Mori’s anime-induced tourists “are likely to become involved in environmental preservation at the destinations they visit” (Reference Mori2022: 339). The act of thinking about a fictional world while looking at the real world carries with it an innate contrast between what a place is and what it could be. Left to their own devices, consumers are inclined to strive for the ideal, holy ground.

Dogs stray in space and time

Close examination of Bungo Stray Dogs shows that media mix production practices can drastically complicate the relationship between places and media. Including BSD’s esoteric relationship to time in this analysis further clarifies that the location–media nexus is inextricably interwoven with temporal factors. Indeed, modern and modernizing Japan’s varied temporalities come to the fore in discourse about Japan’s environment (Thomas Reference Thomas2001). Since media technologies affect temporality (Lucken Reference Lucken2017: 20–21), it is no surprise that neither media, environment, space, nor time can be fully understood on its own.

While the narrative of BSD has always been explicitly set within and around the city of Yokohama, the franchise’s initially straightforward relationship with that real-world location has become extremely complex. Put another way, BSD portrays itself as a paean to Yokohama, but its various incarnations encourage consumers to see the city as exotic spice added to a meal they were already eating, rather than to get to know Yokohama itself and themselves love it. If the place of BSD’s setting is Yokohama, its time is and has always been unclear. BSD’s specifically non-specific spatiotemporal location is optimal for media mix manipulation.

BSD’s relationship to Yokohama can change so drastically because the first iteration of a media mix world to appear on the market does not necessarily have the cultural or legal authority commonly accorded to the source work in a series of adaptations or the first work in a given franchise. Rather, as in Henry Jenkins’ analysis of transmedia storytelling, different iterations have the potential to stake out their own territory and may ultimately overtake in importance the chronologically original product of the media mix. BSD’s initial iteration does offer a useful affordance, however, and that is its temporal range. Since it is the oldest version of the world, it documents how the world was first visualized—including character designs, settings, and so forth—as well as how the narrative was initially imagined. Because BSD’s initial iteration is a manga that is still being serialized today, the series’ evolution over time provides evidence that developments originating in other iterations have influenced the overall BSD fictional world in a way that is connected to real locations.

The Bungo Stray Dogs manga debuted in 2012 and initially situated readers very vaguely. Though Harukawa selected Yokohama as BSD’s setting in the early stages of production, it is impossible to place the drawings that form early chapters in any particular location (Asagiri Reference Asagiri2013). Had a character not orally identified his location as the city of Yokohama in the first chapter, readers could not even be certain that the manga is set in Japan. The setting’s time period is also unclear. The main characters are inspired by actual historical figures who largely hit their prime between the late 1800s and 1950. On the other hand, contemporary technologies like smartphones and computers are everyday objects in BSD. Costumes evoke the early 1900s without strict historical accuracy but with an emphasis on Western wear and expectations (i.e., of modesty and necessity) that appear contrastingly contemporary. There are allusions to global warfare in the narrative’s recent past, but descriptions of that warfare do not align with any war that occurred in real-world history.

The consequences of BSD’s temporal ambiguity are striking. Anri Yasuda read early chapters of the BSD manga as set in the present day with historical flourishes (Yasuda Reference Yasuda2015). I found Yasuda’s assumption surprising because I had understood the opposite to be true: BSD seemed to me to be set in a technologically advanced 1910s or 1920s. I hasten to add that either way of understanding BSD’s chronological setting is equally supported by the evidence given in the manga. However, the distinction between these two time periods is important. It is the difference between an economically strong but militarily weak Japan whose imperialist project has already been defeated, on one hand, and an economically and militarily strong Japan that might engage in future global conquests. The setting’s vague timing thus renders the franchise open to a wide spectrum of political readings without committing it to any of them. This also places consumers in an inherently vague temporality, which is to say that if the present moment can extend across an entire century, then that moment might occur equally at ease or amidst the direst of emergencies.

The manga’s temporal dislocation has remained consistent over the years, but as serialization progressed, successful aspects of later iterations of BSD were integrated into the manga in such a way as to identify precise physical locations. For example, where the manga’s first reference to Yokohama occurred in an almost offhand manner, the series’ narrative thrust is now centered on Yokohama through the conceit that both the protagonists’ and the antagonists’ organizations were founded by a trio of men acting in concert to safeguard their beloved city. This backstory was originally related three years after the manga’s debut and in a different medium: a 2015 novel written by Asagiri and illustrated by Harukawa called Bungo Stray Dogs: The Untold Origins of the Detective Agency. The incorporation of Untold Origins’ backstory into other iterations of the BSD media mix retroactively centered the narrative and emotional core of the BSD world on Yokohama. The most obvious locative change in the manga, however, stems from the most prominent of BSD’s various media iterations, an anime by the studio Bones that has aired off and on since 2016. The BSD anime distinguished itself from the manga by foregrounding the settings of narrative events and concomitantly digital media technologies.

In contrast to the manga’s early, abstract backgrounds, the BSD anime elevates settings to a position of artistic and narrative importance on par with all other aspects of the world. Historically, the anime industry’s relationship with digital tools might best be described as awkward, with the industry attempting to maintain a hand-drawn effect even as economic and technical requirements necessitated the adoption of digital technologies (Clements Reference Clements2023). By 2016, however, the financial benefits of digital animation combined with technological improvements and the favorable artistic reception of digital anime like 5 Centimeters per Second (dir. Shinkai Makoto Reference Shinkai2007) to generate a flowering of noticeably digital anime. Studios coalesced behind an artistic approach to digital animation that contrasts highly detailed backgrounds with simplistic character designs that hearken back to the art styles of earlier analog anime. In consequence, anime set in real-world locations like Yokohama now feature incredibly detailed, at times photorealistic images of places that local viewers will recognize, and that anyone might be able to identify with a bit of sleuthing. This approach was doubly effective in the case of BSD because it almost exactly opposed Harukawa’s art style: Bones’ beautifully detailed backgrounds physically root BSD’s events in real-world locations that Harukawa’s character-centric artistic style had left blank. Digital animation’s locative dimension complemented Harukawa’s artistic strengths in characterization and stylization in such a way as to broaden the BSD world and deepen its aesthetic value.

The impact of the BSD anime’s situatedness is further heightened by the narrative’s basis in the mystery genre and the characters’ sources in real people’s lives. Harukawa’s minimalist backgrounds allowed Bones to add new meaning to scenes by exploiting the connotations of real-world locations in the public mind. For instance, two characters developing a romantic relationship were animated together at a series of locations that are relatively famous in Japan as dating spots, such as the Cosmo World Ferris wheel. Backgrounds are regularly planted with famed landmarks and legible signs to aid identification. Viewers mimic the detective-protagonists’ investigations by deciphering these geographic visual clues. Pinpointing the locations to this degree constitutes a new method of leading (or misleading) viewers about the parade of new characters that appears in each mystery solved by the protagonists, that is, the super-powered sleuths of the Armed Detective Agency. Witnesses and suspects alike are aligned with different social classes, economic bands, degrees of lawfulness, and ethnonational groupings by virtue of the neighborhoods in which they appear.

The differentiation between indistinct, hand-drawn manga settings and digitally distinct anime settings can be extended across the BSD media mix. While it is doubtful that any BSD products are produced entirely through analog tools, those iterations of the franchise that are more dependent on digital media draw consumers’ attention to the setting more overtly than primarily analog iterations. The smartphone-based video game Bungo Stray Dogs: Tales of the Lost (2018) and BSD’s series of 2.5D musicals can be usefully opposed here. Tales of the Lost prioritizes settings and characters equally. The game regularly pauses on extremely detailed shots of locations that actually exist in Yokohama, even when those locations are as mundane as a set of warehouses near the Yokohama Bay Bridge. Key menu icons within the game portray stylized views of the Future Port (みなとみらい) neighborhood—home base of the Port Mafia—framed by the aforementioned Cosmo World Ferris wheel and sail-shaped Pacifico Yokohama building. The game’s gacha mechanics incorporate three regular lotteries: one for characters, one for locations, and one for items. Moreover, the game’s story mode progresses by first situating players with a picture of a scene’s location and then loading what appear to be shrunken frames from the BSD anime above the still-present image of the location, which remains partially visible onscreen at all times. In contrast, BSD’s 2.5D musicals feature matte black sets composed of minimalistic boxes and stairways over which the actors range in detailed, full-color copies of Harukawa’s costumes while white text is occasionally projected on the static black scenery. Digital technology was used to make both the game and the plays, but it is far less overt in the performances. Consequently, settings are also far less overt—arguably absent—in the plays.

Basic affordances and limitations of digital technologies, such as digital animation’s encouragement of increased levels of background detail and the need to orient gamers within the imaginary space of a smartphone game, thus brought locations to greater prominence within BSD’s overall media mix. In later chapters of the manga, Harukawa 35 abandoned her own illustration of the Armed Detective Agency’s headquarters to adopt instead the building that Bones designed for the anime. Her manga illustrations for later volumes also display a marked increase in background detail—so much so that it is likely she hired an assistant who specializes in backgrounds. Once the anime provided detailed backgrounds, the manga evolved as well.

Over time, BSD’s narrative content, costuming, and characters have consistently placed the BSD world in a vaguely modern time period, while its iterations came to identify physical settings with an incredible degree of detail. The effect of this combination is to imbue locations like the Cosmo World Ferris wheel with a degree of timelessness: they appear to exist, unchanging, across almost two centuries whether or not that is actually the case. These changeless localities, now condoned with the aura of the BSD world, became popular visitation spots for fan tourists during the pandemic. Visiting BSD locations constitutes a form of control over BSD itself, as consumers exploit landmarks’ temporal longevity to enjoy the franchise’s world at a time and place, as well as through a method, of their own choosing. Unfortunately, this relatively healthy form of consumption was upset by the systematization of korabo in media mix production practices.

Korabo

The korabo effectively introduces a third category of media mix organization and an additional layer of spatiotemporal complication into the major/minor media dichotomy that previously dominated popular media production in Japan. Linguistically, korabo is a shortened form of the Japanese transliteration of the English word “collaboration.” The term is often used in Japanese to mean precisely that—a collaboration between two people or organizations, whether for profit or for fun. However, the word korabo as used in the context of popular media has developed a more specific meaning: a limited-time cooperative endeavor between a media mix produced by major media companies, merchandise from one or more minor media companies, and a collaborating organization that belongs to neither category and is roughly equal in prominence in the korabo to the fictional world itself. Korabo are integrated into the production calendars of both the collaborator and media mix. Where a collaborator may engage in as few as a single korabo, however, today’s media mixes engage in korabo on a near-constant basis. In effect, the korabo becomes the most prominent of many short-term events in a given media mix that collectively structure time for consumers.

Korabo trouble our understandings of time and space. Their term-limited nature manufactures a sense of temporal scarcity that shades the overarching media mix as well as the korabo. Concomitantly, korabo must be located in accessible locations to ensure successful outcomes for all parties. Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka, Japan’s three biggest cities and transportation hubs, consequently host the most korabo. When korabo are organized outside of those geographic regions, it is generally because a suitable collaborator happens to exist near a major train station. The city of Yamaguchi, for instance, has hosted three BSD korabo despite its location several hours down the shinkansen from Yokohama, Tokyo, and Osaka because it happens to be the site of the Nakahara Chuuya Memorial Museum.

The Nakahara Chuuya Memorial Museum exemplifies one of two types of collaborating organizations in korabo: those that have some sort of connection with the media mix in question. The Memorial Museum is devoted to Nakahara Chuuya, who is of course both a highly regarded Japanese poet and an executive in BSD’s Port Mafia. Korabo at the Nakahara Chuuya Memorial Museum involved special exhibits, stamp rallies, themed dining options at a neighboring café, and limited-edition BSD merchandise. Involvement with an elite cultural organization burnishes BSD’s cultural bona fides and provides a pretext for new lines of merchandise. From the Museum’s perspective, the free advertising provided by its three BSD korabo drew an influx of new museum patrons who were noticeably younger than previous visitors at a time when the museum was concerned about a shrinking, aging audience (Okano Reference Okano2008). Korabo thus enable this first type of collaborating organization to broaden its appeal amongst the media mix’s target audience.

The second type of collaborating organization differs in that korabo are intrinsic to the organization’s profitability, such that it does not have a pre-existing connection to any media mix world. This type of korabo includes commercial tie-ups between fast food restaurants and media mixes that resemble McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, but over time it developed in a rather unique way in Japanese media. Specifically, a group of businesses arose that capitalizes on the korabo concept by organizing serial korabo for different media mixes. There are several café chains based on this model; in these establishments, the café’s brand identity is tailored to reliably evoke any media mix world through an enjoyable dining experience. Korabo cafés offer new, term-limited menus and merchandise for many korabo in succession. For example, Shibuya’s Chugai Grace Café ran a BSD korabo from February 7th to March 30th of 2025 followed by a Sakamoto Days korabo from April 4th to 30th and a Rose of Versailles korabo from May 3rd to 18th. In between korabo, staff change the café’s décor, switch out merchandise, and train to prepare and sell new menu items. The BSD korabo offered special foods like a peach-stuffed waffle topped by a flag featuring a picture of Nakahara Chuuya and a non-alcoholic kumquat cocktail adorned with an image of Dazai Osamu. After enjoying their meal, customers could buy any of 52 unique merchandise items ranging from pins to a sundae dish—all adorned with illustrations of BSD characters. Mere days later, the Sakamoto Days korabo sold hearty fare like nikuman-topped ramen, in a reflection of that franchise’s heavyweight protagonist, and merchandise including themed name plates that might adorn customers’ desks. Chugai Grace Café epitomizes this type of korabo-focused business as it is actually a sub-unit of a mining corporation. The café chain was created “to achieve business synergies with [the mining corporation’s] precious metals and jewelry businesses” (“Content Business” n.d.). In other words, the café exists to justify the company’s products; both the fictional worlds of the media mixes and popular media in general are of secondary concern.

Today, cafés, zoos, fashion houses, museums, and theme parks all engage in korabo. Involvement with contemporary trends invigorates older organizations like museums and attracts younger audiences to physical installations that they may find passé or otherwise uninteresting. Korabo are regularly credited for spurring Universal Studios Japan’s revival, for instance. The majority of Japan’s literary museums were established relatively quickly in the wake of World War II, and they have experienced a decline in recent years. Part of literary museums’ cultural contribution comes from reprinting rare works and publishing personal documents for the first time, but 95% of Japanese literary museums’ publications came out between 1967 and 1985 (Okano Reference Okano2008: 21). A literary museum that fails to produce new literature might, therefore, seem to have lost its reason to exist. However, staff reported that korabo had spurred attendance at all of the literary museums I visited while researching this article. In turn, korabo partners add a unique element that re-invigorates a media mix world. Where the Nakahara Chuuya Memorial Museum deepens consumers’ sense of the literature and history underlying BSD, Chugai Grace Café broadens the world’s scope to include sociable outings and the sensation of taste. This aspect of korabo—iteration rather than replication—lies at the heart of the media mix system’s success.

Collaborating institutions’ longer timescales mean that they have established reputations for providing consistent experiences and that korabo with them can be timed to match the major media companies’ time-sensitive needs to some extent. Korabo thus fill holes in media production schedules while often being framed in terms of special dates associated with the media mix. The third Nakahara Chuuya Memorial Museum korabo, for instance, was part of a year-long celebration of the BSD anime’s tenth anniversary, which happened to occur while the anime took a year-long break from airing. Events drawing on different aspects of BSD—its literary bona fides, a cute feline character, Harukawa’s stylish costumes—provided consumers with varied entertainments spread across the year, but none of the korabo ran continuously throughout the year. Consumers had to proactively plan not only to participate in short-term events but sometimes also to purchase tickets that were available for even shorter terms. The korabo’s temporal manipulation is matched by a coordinated form of geographic diversity.

Major media companies exploit collaborators’ locations to appeal to far-flung fans and add an air of exoticism to what could otherwise be a blandly globalized or boringly local story. Lying 472 miles to the west of BSD’s Yokohama core, visiting the Memorial Museum in Yamaguchi is a reasonable multi-day vacation for Yokohama locals. For BSD fans in regions like Nagasaki, the Memorial Museum constitutes an accessible alternative to distant Yokohama. Chain-style korabo-based businesses are generally located in major cities, but they too exploit fans’ geographic disposition and potential for travel by alternating the dates that a given korabo will run at different branches of the chain.

The spatiotemporal distribution of korabo across Japan’s geography and a media mix production schedule might seem benign or even beneficial were it not for ecocriticism’s prompt to examine art within its wider environment. BSD’s korabo with Red Tokyo Tower provides a useful contrast with its Memorial Museum activities here. Red Tokyo Tower is a multi-level gaming complex that contains some permanent video game installations and a lunch kiosk alongside a rotating cast of korabo involving unique games and merchandise stalls with korabo-specific branded goods. A ticket to the BSD korabo provided access to a puzzle-solving game played at roughly a dozen sites scattered across the center, video clips from the BSD anime played on a loop across an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling screens, a temporary shop selling limited-term BSD merchandise, and a suite of limited-term beverages themed on BSD characters available at the lunch kiosk. There was also a second, specially ticketed attraction in a separate space where fans could play poker with dealers wearing uniforms seen in a recent BSD story arc. The individual pieces of the collaboration, such as the life-size cardboard cutouts of BSD characters that accompanied most of the puzzle stations, were made well even if they were obviously intended for later disposal. However, there was a striking difference in the quality of the environment containing these materials. Though players enter the gaming center through a dramatic, science-fictionally lit hallway, the interior is composed of unfinished concrete marked with parking lot-like taped lines run across the floor in ways that appear to have been designed for previous installations. When I visited, players entering the korabo area walked directly into a defunct, roped-off virtual reality game that was covered in plastic sheeting hung from the ceiling. In short, players were expected to focus on the work of solving puzzles and taking selfies with cardboard characters to the exclusion of the actual, post-apocalyptic space in which we found ourselves.

Red Tokyo Tower’s austerity is not a failure on its part but a function of the korabo system. Businesses built on the korabo model tend toward bland, utilitarian décor both within the zones that their customers use and for external facades and passageways. The effect is disorienting in a generically urban, postmodern way. Cardboard cut-outs of characters and other korabo materials function as the only objects of sensory interest within these spaces. The flashing lights of the screens playing the BSD anime on loop, the bright colors and rich flavors of the themed beverages, and the puzzle-solving game’s prompt to check one’s smartphone (whereby to gain app-spawned hints tied to that location) all encourage consumers to isolate our focus to a tiny percentage of our perceptual range in a way that amounts to ignoring serious environmental issues.

Here, I am intentionally playing on multiple meanings of the word environmental. On one hand, the windowless, creepily Blade Runner-esque walls of Red Tokyo Tower’s interior environment literally pale in comparison to the bright TV screens and saturated colors of the cardboard characters’ costumes. On the other hand, the entire korabo is premised on pushing fans to abuse Earth’s environment. The entrance fees are too low to cover the development, staging, and staffing costs of an event that ran for a measly five weeks in one of the most expensive real estate and labor markets on the planet. The real money comes from the merchandise stall, whose vast array of items was almost entirely made of petrochemicals (as in plastics and polyesters), and the luncheon stand’s themed beverages, which were packaged in single-use plastic cups with plastic straws and plastic-film lids adhered with plastic glue. As a one-off event, this would create a minimal amount of pollution, but seen as an example of the predominant mode of play in Japanese popular media today, the korabo takes on a more sinister air. Coupled with the fact that any given korabo is part of a larger series of term-limited events, this style of media production prompts a “crisis in crisis” (Masco Reference Masco2017) wherein consumers are prompted to treat the potential loss of a status quo—that BSD media are in production—as though it were an emergency that they must redress. Cornered by manufactured scarcities of time, tickets, goods, and experiences, consumers focus like hawks on their immediate goal—the colorful cardboard cutout, the next puzzle to solve, the bright red themed beverage—at the expense of the wider view they once took in while engaging in fan tourism.

The korabo system’s crisis in crisis is less surprising when viewed against the backdrop of Japanese media systems’ development. In the early 20th century, Japanese elites capitalized on new media technologies’ ability to control temporalities by pushing the Japanese people to speed up as “individuals were called on to change their pace, and a feeling of urgency became all pervasive” in the years leading up to and during World War II (Lucken Reference Lucken2017: 21). The wartime setting of this urgency is important to note, as this is not merely the case of a coincidental re-temporalizing of the people but rather an intentional, fascist mobilization of the citizenry to protect an expansionist state and its elites. When the wartime urgency receded, the media mix system itself continued to have “profound implications for the underlying issue of experienced temporality” across the postwar period (Zahlten Reference Zahlten2021: 292). The korabo system simply resuscitated the “feeling of urgency” for new capitalist purposes.

Despite this rather dark history, the korabo holds great potential for consumers, producers, and the environment if executed a bit differently than it currently is. Korabo already redirect consumption from physical goods toward experiences to some extent; the problem lies in the korabo system’s manipulation of temporality and the fact that too much of the cost is currently borne by sales of environmentally unfriendly merchandise. For the former issue, limiting the overall number of korabo per media mix while extending the length of time of each individual korabo would counter the negative effects on consumers’ minds to some extent. Building décor to last for longer periods and designing merchandise over a longer production timeline would make it easier to use ecofriendly materials like wood over plastic (and that décor might be recycled as ultra-rare event-used merchandise for well-heeled fans). Companies might also collaborate to educate consumers about materials. Not all plastics are equally damaging, for example, but it has become more difficult for Japanese consumers to parse the relative dangers and benefits of different plastics since the 1970s (Shakuto et al. Reference Shakuto, Watanabe and Yeoh2024: 319). Creative designers already experiment with wood, ceramic, glass, and other eco-friendly materials for a percentage of media mix merchandise. These experiments ought to be taken farther—and more seriously. The Square Enix video game company runs a themed café in Tokyo from which diners can take home cardboard coasters printed with designs from various Square Enix video games at no charge. Everyone loves a freebie, but media mix managers might consider whether redistributing their pricing plans to generate a bit more money from eco-friendly products and experiences over petrochemical-based merchandise would more accurately reflect the values of themselves, their organizations, and their consumers.

In addition to lengthening the terms of korabo, the constant parade of term-limited korabo and merchandise might be separated by periods of non-production. Media mix managers may be leery of leaving open space on consumer calendars for fear of losing customers, but that anxiety might be balanced by concerns about overexposure. The biggest media mixes today all launched decades ago. New hit franchises like Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and Kimetsu no Yaiba are flaming out far faster than older juggernauts like One Piece, Naruto, and Pokémon. Further, because media mix properties are so carefully managed, and because the companies most involved are quite large, managers at those companies ought to be able to negotiate with their colleagues to ensure that if, for example, no new BSD products were to be released during the winter of 2026, then products for another manga serialized in BSD’s Young Ace magazine for a similar audience would be produced that month instead. Consumers generally do not only read one manga (or book, television show, etc.), so an absence made easier through the existence of other high-quality fare ought to make the heart grow fonder, as the saying goes.

On which note, I will end by pointing out that consumers can take several basic actions to protect themselves, as well as their friends and families, from temporal tinkering and the Earth from further pollution. Consciously choosing to pay good money for and praise others for purchasing a limited number of products of value (be they merchandise or experience) rather than enthusing over cheap prices, forced rarity, and gacha-style mass purchasing; refusing to pay for petrochemical-based products to the maximum extent possible; opting for long-form media over short-form media; limiting screen time; and limiting the number of screens simultaneously in one’s presence all combat the (non)crisis in crisis, improve mental health, and protect the planet. Climate change is too large a problem for any one person to solve, but the collective of individuals’ actions indicate our values and so inform corporations how to best supply products that truly please us—aesthetically, ethically, and morally.