week 3 post from Kayu

Hey, guys. Its me, Kayu again. We are up to week 3 already. For my last 2 posts, I have been briefly talking about how does Asian pop music influence youth culture through introducing some Japanese bands and the most famous Chinese singer, Jay Chow. However, I reckon myself is getting a bit boring if keep saying ‘How does Asian pop music influence youth culture.’ So this time I want to talk about something special to escape a bit from this particular topic. Well, I would like to present some awsome Japanese cartoons to you guys. This is also one of the major issues to direct the trend of youth culture.





Before going more further, have you guys ever watched Japanese animation? They are good eh. Anyway, by the time you watch time, do you realize the song track in the beginning and the ending of the animation. Yea, they are the so-called opening track, op and ending track, ed respectively. What is the function of them, the first is to introduce or state out the name of people who has done any work to the animation. However, they will not just say out all these stuff normally, but combines them with visual picture and song and make it still looks like one of the entertainment parts of the cartoon. The second one is to impress audience as much as possible. Like create an image into viewer’s mind and therefore viewer can realize the cartoon and keep watching them in the next following days.

How do you think those ops and eds are made? People do not intended to make them with purpose just to fit in the animation. But is in the other way around that they choose recent, current and latest songs to be the ops and eds. The reason to do this is to keep the animation fresh so that audience would not forget it.

Do you notice the trend of cost play activity? Like people fully dress up like the character in the animation. I have been doing survey and even interview people who do this. I can tell that cost play requires more time and effort than a girl to put on perfect make up to go to any party.



For addition, there is an activity organizes in Sydney each year which calls Smash and it is all about animation stuff. Over there, you can see people dress up cosplay and even sing, dance and do performance as what audience see in the ops and eds. As in re do the ops and eds in real life. Moreover people would also have a chance to sing the songs from animation. More than this, there is always a singing completion in the end. Seriously, its really cool, feel free to check it out.



So, there is not only pop music to influence youth, but the grow of animation (songs, cosplay…etc) still consider as a great issue in this case. As I said last week that watching MTV is the other way to listen to stories. And here, ops and eds are also like MTV that can tell a story, but this time, we watch and listen some other styles stories in animation way.