Japanese pop culture hits home

Decades later, the children of those first-generation "Speed Racer" fans now watch such films as Hayao Miyazaki's Academy Award-winning "Spirited Away." Japanese animation, or anime as it is commonly known, may not yet pose much of a challenge to Disney's computer-generated confections at the box office, but it's no longer odd to find Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Howl's Moving Castle" alongside "Finding Nemo" and "Ice Age" in American homes.

Still, anime hasn't so much invaded this nation, as author Roland Kelts declares in his intriguing book, "Japanamerica," as it has stubbornly refused to be ignored. Mind-bending, provocative, and often filled with sex and violence, anime has steadfastly gained a diverse audience in America.

"Japanese anime and manga (comic books) are frequently less inhibited and more diverse than American animations, more compelling in their narrative and character developments," Kelts writes. "Japan's motion picture industry, realizing that it would never match Hollywood's prowess, never fully took flight, so the best and most innovative visual artists took refuge in the underground forms of anime and manga."

And those forms, which in their earliest incarnations were greatly influenced by Walt Disney, are finding an audience here, Kelts contends, while remaining resolutely Japanese. Part of that cultural identity comes from being the world's first (and so far only) "post-apocalyptic society," as artist Takashi Murakami calls it. That's why so much anime, such as Katsuhiro Otomo's classic "Akira," unfolds in the wake of widespread ruin or feature characters profoundly altered by war or other man-made disasters. It's an artistic approach crammed with complex ideas -- sometimes too many -- about human existence, scientific exploration, and the clashes between the forces of man and nature.