Before the internet, the only way for an American teen to watch anime was illicitly, on bootlegged video cassettes that were passed fan to fan like some visual drug. Each new discovery felt like a tiny revelation, a step into an undiscovered country. The distant realm of Japan was a place I only knew about from my grandfather’s war tales and dark stories on the evening news.
The Eighties was an era of trade frictions between Japan and the West, of bellicose political rhetoric and literal Japan-bashing: American lawmakers gleefully took sledgehammers to Japanese electronics on the steps of Congress. But my friends and I were not deterred, enchanted as we were by animated fantasies so strikingly different from anything in our own culture. And even then, we could tell that there was something different about a certain anime auteur. His name was Hayao Miyazaki.
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