The media mix has become Japan’s answer to contemporary global media franchising practices. The logics of media mix travel through Japan’s media culture creating chains of production that reach from manga into the worlds of film, television and videogames. This chapter explores the development of media mix and the diverse transmedia worlds created under its auspices, while considering the industrial structures that have underpinned it. In doing so, the chapter argues for a reconsideration of the scope and reach of media mix, contending that media mix now accounts for not just major franchises, but also everything from art cinema to theater.

Introduction

Media mix is everywhere that Japanese media flows. It can be found in the movement of a character across texts, in the movements of texts between cultures and languages and in a plethora of reimaginings, adaptations and franchising practices. You can hold its results in your hand (as a toy, via a video game controller), you can watch it (as an anime, a live action film, a theatrical performance), you can read it (as a manga, a light novel), and you can participate in it (as a player, a creator, a cosplayer). It is also more than just media: media mix opens doorways to complex storyworlds, while at the same time indicating the processes that create them, the industrial structures that enable them and the fans who endlessly collect, collate and build upon those worlds. For these reasons, media mix needs to be considered not just as a key term within Japanese media discourse, but also as a constantly evolving aspect of Japan’s media landscapes. However, it is also important to note that media mix is part of a constantly debated and shifting construction of Japan’s transmedia worlds. It is continually being renegotiated and enmeshed within wider geographies of Japanese media economies and ecologies. To understand the “media mix,” therefore, this chapter offers an investigation of media mix’s conceptualization and history, as well as mapping its trajectories and evaluating its efficacy for exploring Japan’s transmedia horizons.

Conceptualizing the media mix

The conceptualization of media mix as a multifaceted—and not just multimedia—phenomenon in Japan is crucial to understanding how this term is used and when and how it manifests in Japanese media. Marc Steinberg’s influential definition provides a useful starting point.