"Manga," although known to Western audiences to mean comic books from Japan, is a Japanese word with the inclusive meaning of cartooning, comic page or book, or animated film. "Manga," in its sense as cartooning, has been important since the 18th century, when sketches by Hokusai and others contributed to the counter-culture of the Tokugawa era. By the 1960s, the "manga" of comic books had become an important part of a new counter-culture, as commemorated in Oshima's film Band of Ninja (1967).

By the 1990s, "anime" (an abbreviation of "animeshun") had become the primary introduction to Japanese film for a new generation in the West.

At the same time, manga in its broader sense can be understood as the graphic inflection of the visual image, in contrast to the production of cinema by a camera. As artists began to engage the new media of CD-ROMs and the internet, the camera became one more form of computer input, intersecting with graphic arts as a double mode of inscription, increasingly bound together.

I would like to discuss the implications of this development, as represented by such Japanese projects as the CD-ROM Museum or Hospital and the internet site of The Nanjing Massacre Museum.