Hong Kong’s Anime: A Cultural History of Anime in Hong Kong’s Last Decade

In 2019 and 2020, Hong Kong experienced waves of anti-government protests, with millions participating both online and offline. The semiotic of transnational popular culture references, including film and music, played a crucial role in these protests. Japanese animation and manga were especially prominent in online and offline communication, in the form of memes, slogans, videos, and activist art produced mostly by people under 29 years of age. Namely, anime and manga became not only the primary audio-visual language of the protests but also a transnational pop digital anarchist network between Hong Kong and the rest of the world. This article refers to this phenomenon as “Hong Kong’s anime” due to its unique transformation, adaptation, and sociocultural and political significance during these protests. Anime has a heterogeneous history as both institutional soft power and non-institutionalized fandom. While acknowledging the heterogeneous landscape of anime, this article focuses on its potential as a “transnational pop digital anarchist network” by analyzing its role in shaping people’s transnational cultural history and in writing people’s historiography. Based on interviews with the creators of protest art and the analysis of online and offline content, Hong Kong’s anime is revealed to be a new form of transnational historiography, emerging from transnational pop digital anarchist networks and connecting ordinary people in Hong Kong and worldwide through anime.