When I was a boy, one of my best friends and I sometimes daydreamed about buying monks’ robes and going on a walking tour of Tibet. He is of Filipino and Irish descent, and has always coded in public society as Asian, which has worked for him, given his profound interest in all things Asia. My birthday presents to him used to be exclusively kitschy Asian things I could buy with spare change from the Asian Gifts store that once adorned our local mall: a waving lucky cat, mālā beads, and, on one occasion, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (many years later, when he admitted he had never bothered to read it, I re-adopted this from him). The two of us, and our rather sprawling group of friends—the core of which still meets biweekly most months to play D&D—also grew up inundated by the cultural advent of East Asian popular media in the United States, particularly in the form of manga, anime, and video games. All of us grew up reading and watching Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z; we were kids in the heyday of Toonami on Adult Swim, which resurrected while we were in college, and has in both of these lives been a primary purveyor of anime and anime-adjacent productions for American audiences. (There is still something for me quite cozy about reclining on the couch to watch a new dub that I know has made its way to me via Toonami.) I still remember staying up to 1 AM to watch the jazzy melancholy of Cowboy Bebop in his room, or when at his suggestion in high school I first met Code Geass, Gurren Lagann, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, and the like. (And, circling back around to Hanh’s book, Saint Young Men, about Jesus and Buddha as twenty-somethings sharing an apartment Modern Japan.) Anime and anime-inspired productions, like Avatar: The Last Airbender, its sequel The Legend of Korra, Voltron: Legendary Defender (really, just the oeuvre of Studio Mir), have remained both omnipresent in the entertainment available to children and young adults and, I’m proud to say, well-loved by me throughout my life.
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