Japanese manga as intercultural media of the U.S. and Japan: a case study of Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball

The world has been bombarded with American popular culture. Since the year 2000, however, there has been a new challenge to U.S. popular culture called Manga (also known as Japanese comics). As a newcomer in the market, Japanese Manga has been so successful. Using Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball as a case study, this research investigates how Manga features create the culturally odorless imaginary territory in the U.S. readers’ minds and how they allow the cultures from the East and the West to co-exist, by. The research applies Barthes’s poststructuralist qualitative semiotic analysis and Fairclough’s three dimensions of CDA to analyze the visual and linguistic signs in Dragon Ball. The results indicate that there are numerous intertextual references s in Dragon Ball such as Hollywood, Hong Kong martial arts movies, Chinese and Japanese ideologies, Shintoism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on. This research offers a unique way to create a new body of knowledge from different disciplines, namely, applied linguistics, intercultural communications, and literary studies. Furthermore, it points out the importance of media artifacts in any cultural markets as being culturally odorless. Finally, it exemplifies the successful commercialization of cultural products by using the Manga Dragon Ball as a case study.