Do you find Japan to be different in how they tell stories?

[ueonts]

I feel like the Japanese method of drawing and finding appeal through visual art is obviously different than the west, and its interesting because of how much that has influenced us and lead to a mass adoption of the anime style. Its clear how anime is different from western cartoons visually, but I wonder how you guys think this applies to their writing as well.

[Dei]

For graphic novels, I prefer Japanese art style.
For novels, I prefer Western literary style (except some overhyped candy/beach reads that often make their way to the New York Times, those without substance).

[HGohwell]

The artistic influence goes both ways in a continual loop though, so it's not always clear. There's specific "typical" shounen anime style that people think of with anime, but that's not all anime is. Also, let us not forget that the working conditions of animators in Japan are appalling, and when Crunchyroll tried a similar structure we got High Guardian Spice trying to make an entire high quality series on the budget a western studio would use for a single episode while trying to maintain the quality expected of a high production anime (you just can't do it here).

If you're looking specifically at western cartoons vs anime writing, there's 2 main differences.

1. there's still a general perception that cartoons are either for kids or late night TV full of crude humour. It's not really respected as it's own media, just something that kids watch or something that's a joke.
2. and that much of Japanese anime is an adaption of some kind. While there are original anime, many of them are some kind of adaption, so have a proven source to go off of, while much of western cartoons are episodic, or made up of a season at a time at most, because networks can never be sure when they're going off air or shuffling up their schedule, leading to not much in the way of grand overarching stories.

Beyond that, Japanese story telling tends to fall into trends as much as western story telling, once you look at story telling in the round instead of cartoon vs anime. But then, how often do we in the west actually read Japanese books (not Lightnovels, books) or watch their average TV shows not anime to actually judge? That'd be like Japan critiquing the western story telling style based on Disney and Mills&Boon.

[Aeneas1]

Well, for one thing, I find Japanese media to be far more - how you say - inventive than Western media. Inaccurate portrayals of the goddess Athena? Sure why not. Weird monsters that look like yellow balls with tentacles? Absolutely. People shrieking beyond what would be physically possible and yelling fireballs at each other? Let’s go with that. Of course, their mythology is also somewhat interesting and I should know. I studied the Kojiki - by which I mean, I read it.

[kalmia]

I think Japanese media has some sort of charm to it that most western media doesn’t. While Western media also has its own charm, I feel that Japanese and Asian cartoons/animations/comics/etc are a different type.
I have a very anime based art style despite the fact that I developed it before I even knew what anime was because I saw it online and really liked the overall aesthetic. The anime style really has gotten the cuteness of proportions and appealing colors down to a T which is why I think most people gravitate to it as a “base” when first finding their art style and maybe even sticking with it for the rest of their career. The art style of long legs, thin necks, and big shiny eyes just combines into something really nice to look at (usually).

But beyond the art itself, I feel like the writing and stories in a lot of Japanese media is more… personal and romantic in a way, I guess? In the same line that shows such as Steven Universe and Gravity Falls felt more personal and charming. They became such huge successes to the point where people cosplayed the characters, drew large amasses of fan art, and spent hours online discussing theories and even to this day talk about the shows. A big fandom is not something you find very often in western media, specifically cartoons. Whereas If you look at nearly every anime, it has a fan base and that fan base is usually extremely dedicated in the same way.
I also think it has to do with the fact that to most westerners, the culture is much different than ours and so it’s interesting. We kind of gravitate towards things we find interesting, so seeing a character call another by their last name and “-chan” or be overly polite to someone who we’d probably call “bro” in real life is very foreign to most of us and thus it’s interesting. It’s something many of us have never experienced and so it has this way of being charming. That’s just what I think anyways.

[BoomerZ]

I don't think there is anything different in the art or style of artwork of Japan. Style is style, it won't make your comics better or worst inherently. It's the structure of storytelling. This doesn't mean the storyline itself, but the way the story is actually told on the paper. The big difference is what I call "quiet time". A panel of no dialogue and just a reaction. Look at most american and european comics before 2010, this never happened. Every panel usually had dialogue. Instead of spiderman just reacting with a facial picture, there would usually be a dialogue box telling us how he feels. These quiet panels in Manga also can be lead-ups to something. A slow walk up stairs, the hero opens a door, looks around, then closes the door. Those 4 panels would be a single panel in the west. Manga was like watching a movie, with movie style shots and pacing. Western comics was like the cliffsnotes. This is what has set them apart until very recently where some western comics have tried to do it.

[Lensing]

The quiet panel and the movie style shots is super common in euro comics from before 2000, especially comics from spain and italy

[darthmongoose]

As @HGohwell said, Japanese media is always being influenced by overseas media and vice-versa. This has been going on for thousands of years, and was actually the subject of my English Literature dissertation in university, where I described it as a "cultural tennis match".

Japan, like the UK, is an island nation just off the coast of a continent with a bunch of larger nations, and so has a preoccupation with its own uniqueness and identity. This tends to lend itself to a whimsical self-expression that can be charming, or can be obnoxious (especially when the whimsy and charm is juxtaposed against a past of imperialist expansion and oppression, another trait we English share with the Japanese...).

One of the most distinctive things about Japanese culture that I found when living and studying there is something the exchange students started calling "Existing in the moment of doing." Japanese society and art is all about appreciation of the process of doing a thing. It's not that they don't care about the outcome; it's that they believe that if you learn to do the process perfectly, master doing every step of it properly, a good outcome is a natural conclusion.
This approach has both strengths and weaknesses. A strength is that Japanese media has a careful attention to small details, and can effectively use and appreciate quiet moments that a Western creator or studio might cut because they "don't add anything to the finished product". A weakness is an overreliance on tropes and archetypes or stock phrases and plot beats or specific stylistic shorthand that can make a lot of lower-quality anime and manga really start to blend together.

It's a tricky thing. I love Japanese media, and when I first got into it as a teenager in the late 90s, it really was mind-blowingly fresh and unique. As I've got older though, I've got more and more picky, because once the tropes become familiar, so much of it really does become a bland mass of similar stories with similar archetypes. I feel like also the anime industry has stagnated somewhat, and become a bit insular and weird... too focused on making stuff to appeal to otaku rather than making stuff to tell a sincere and meaningful story. I think there are still occasionally great anime, and there are certainly some anime I think are timeless classics (like Your Name, which might honestly be, in my opinion, one of the best films ever created), but I've got past the stage in my life where I always thought Japanese stuff was just better. A lot of creators from other countries now have taken influence from it and done really interesting stuff, and some of the best anime being made now is an international collaboration.

[HGohwell]

It's a tricky thing. I love Japanese media, and when I first got into it as a teenager in the late 90s, it really was mind-blowingly fresh and unique. As I've got older though, I've got more and more picky, because once the tropes become familiar, so much of it really does become a bland mass of similar stories with similar archetypes.

I'd also like to add to this, that potentially this is also an effect of easier access to Japanese media meaning we can see the hundreds of not so great pieces that would have been filtered out in the 90s and early 2000s when I was also first seeing anime. It used to be that only a handful of anime made their way through to the west, often by hilarious dubs for kids networks, and they were the handful of biggest name brands. While these days we have access to the entire anime season every season as it airs, meaning we can see the series that fail or just do the same as everyone else.

In the old days only a 1 or 2 of most genres made it through, so we'd get SAO and maybe 1 other isekai, probably a few years after they were first released, and not see the hundreds of generic cash grabs or more unique others, and would go wow what a cool unique idea. Like Sailor Moon and CCS where definitely two of the biggest magical series at the time, and blew my young mind, they weren't as unique as they looked in our line up, and were built with a lot of history behind them as the magical girl genre that just didn't really exist in the west.

[darthmongoose]

YES. This is a very good addition.

It's something that was very painful to have to deal with as a creator for many years on the UK small press manga scene. People's perception was that "UK manga artists just aren't as good", that the overall quality of our work was lower.

Then I went to Japan and visited a "Book Off"... Which, is a shop you'll know if you've ever been to Japan; it's an enormous book shop that's just ram-packed with books being sold cheap, including tons and tons of manga. It was here that I discovered... that the manga that managed to get licensed in the west, are generally the cream of the crop. There are actually tons and tons of really crap manga, and then inevitably some of them are good. If around 10-20% of stuff produced is really good, and thousands of titles are being made, you get hundreds of good titles (and thousands of crap ones), but if you only have a few people making stuff, like tens of titles being produced, and the same percentage is good, you only get one or two good titles... but if you're seeing all of those tens of titles that include one or two gems, but only the hundreds of gems from Japan and barely any of the thousands of crap ones, you can easily get the impression that "Japan just produces better comics".

...It's kind of like saying "There are more good comics on Webtoon than Tapas". Yes, there are, because there are more comics on Webtoon, and so there are also more bad comics on Webtoon than Tapas and probably about the same proportion of good:bad.

[Nugtown]

On a base line, eastern storytelling follows a 4 part structure, and western storytelling a 3 part structure. Traditionally speaking the stories aren't built around a central conflict. It doesn't mean there are no conflicts in their stories, but that the stories are full of varying degrees of complications instead of one "The Thing was stolen! Blabla and his team much steal back THE THING"

Tatsuki Fujimoto's work Firepunch is a fantastic weird example of this, as the story just seems to follow the main character through the journey of a man who is on fire all the time. But it's a story that lacks that very specific focus of conflict resolution. But that's just a singular example. It's not to say there aren't writers in japan who don't work with a different story structure, but 4 part structure is what is typically taught.

[NickRowler]

When I was in middle school, I never really had much interest in DC and Marvel comics, so when I discovered manga like Ramna 1/2, Dragon Ball, and Astroboy, it definitely was eye opening. But into high school and college, I pushed myself to read more indie western comics and I learned the issues I had was more with DC and Marvel than Western vs Japanese comics.

I think I also struggled with manga as I got older. Like the series I listed were from the 80s and earlier. I feel like I struggled to really attach to newer series. Manga does feel more teenage friendly so when you stop being a teenager, it can be difficult to still relate to the conflict. I do really like series like 20th Century Boys and Akira but most manga doesn't really excite me anymore. Plus, a lot of long running series get to a point where they just drag. I love Naruto but I never finished it because the last arc was just a mess.

I think for the West, it did show that teenagers, especially girls, were a reader base worth writing for. I think it also encouraged more filler slice-of-life moments in stories.

[cherrystark]

It's just different methods of storytelling. I personally don't like anime. The stories might be darker than in Western animation, but pretty much everyone looks the same. Western animation generally allows for more freedom in animation styles. While this isn't true for every case, it makes cartoons more enjoyable for me.

But in terms of writing, every country has its own different style of storytelling. They are all different, but still valid.