Crafting culture: Fanzines, DIY production and the foundations of Japanese popular media in the 1970s

Abstract

This article recovers a largely undocumented history: the DIY fanzine culture of 1970s Japan and its foundational role in shaping Japanese popular media. Drawing on archival research, primary sources, and oral history interviews with key participants, it argues that amateur cultural production in this period was constitutive of the media industry’s development. These communities generated shared knowledge, preserved production materials, cultivated future professionals and developed participatory practices that professional publishing later inherited and expanded. In an era before specialised magazines existed for manga, animation, or tokusatsu (Japanese special effects productions), enthusiast groups created their own platforms for research, criticism, and knowledge exchange. The article traces this history through three case studies: Monster Club , a tokusatsu fanzine group with direct ties to Tsuburaya Productions; the Space Battleship Yamato fan groups, whose activities pioneered enthusiast engagement that dedicated magazines like Animage would later build upon; and the Brave Raideen Fan Club, led by women but open to all, whose activities revealed an industry blind spot regarding female audiences. Together these cases illuminate how the collaborative practices of these groups, bridging enthusiasts, studios, and publishers, transformed the landscape of Japanese popular culture. The grassroots infrastructure they built in the 1970s not only laid the foundations for specialised anime publishing but created the conditions for Comic Market (Comiket), the world’s largest fan convention, demonstrating that amateur cultural production was not peripheral to Japanese media history but foundational to its development.