Frederik L. Schodt Talks With Anime Herald

Note: Due to the time-sensitive nature of our coverage, this article will debut on the main Anime Herald site on October 15 . We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Interviewer: Seth Burn

• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Anime Herald: How would you describe your experiences in releasing Manga, Manga! during a time when manga, itself, was barely a concept in the greater North American public consciousness?

Frederik L. Schodt: I was really into manga. I thought it would be great if more people knew about manga. It's true, people didn't know very much about it in the United States, and even in Japan, the attitudes were very different then than they are now. Manga wasn’t as accepted, even in Japan. They were still regarded as this kind of lowbrow culture. You didn't have it how it is like today, how the Japanese government is pushing manga, that kind of thing. A totally different environment. I never imagined that manga would become as popular as they have.

I just wanted people to be able to appreciate them in the United States, because I thought it was such a unique popular culture, sort of a further development of the grammar that was developed in the United States at the end of the 19th century, with comic newspapers, comic strips. But Japan just took it in a different direction and got through the 1950s and 1960s without some of the problems that happened in the United States, the political conflicts. To me, it was just a totally different world. I just thought it would be wonderful to appreciate it. And for me, it was also a wonderful window into Japanese culture. In one of my books I wrote about it was kind of like a view into the id, you might say, of the Japanese psyche. It's a very unfiltered view, just like foreigners when they read American comic books, they get a very unfiltered view. That would be my answer.

Anime Corner: It’s beginning to become more and more common for people to pick up other languages and become more invested in the translation of their favorite works. How do you feel this increase in interest from readers and fans has affected the work of translation?

Frederik L. Schodt: Well, good and bad, I think. You know, there are more and more people who are translating manga. And of course, you don't have to be professional to translate manga anymore. You can be an amateur, because there's a whole scanlation universe. And I think it's great that more people want to learn new languages. I do have a concern about the future of translation, because I think that even with manga, I'm sure that all the manga translators, maybe they're not saying so, but I'm sure at times they are using ChatGPT. And if it's used as a tool, which I'm sure it is, and it will be, then the whole game changes. 

And of course, if you look at the science fiction future, there will be a lot of people who say, “Well, why bother to learn the language? Because the translations, the machine translations, the Gen AI translations are getting so good so quickly.” That's kind of a complicated answer. I expressed a lot of my darker visions for the future. But we'll evolve. You know, humans will deal with it.

Manga Mavericks: You published Manga, Manga! in 1983 and now here, forty years later, you’ve been honored as the first inductee into the Manga Awards’ Hall of Fame. I was wondering, looking back at your career in manga scholarship and translation these past forty years, what are you most proud of? What do you want to be remembered for?

Frederik L. Schodt: In terms of translation, I like all the works that I've worked on. I've been really, really lucky, maybe because I was very early in the game, I've been asked to translate works that were just fabulous. Then occasionally, on my own, I was able to propose works that I wanted to translate and have them accepted and published. That just gives me an enormous amount of interest. One work I'm really proud of is The Four Immigrants Manga which is by Yoshitaka Kiyama, and I'm still hoping that more people will be aware of him and what he did. Because actually, in 1927, he created all the images for an over 104-page book. A graphic novel, basically. It was published in 1931 in San Francisco. It's just such an amazing thing that I hope that people who are interested in the history of manga and also comic books will read that. That's something I'm very proud of.

I love all the stuff I work on. I loved working on Ghost in the Shell. I love Astro Boy. I’m an Astro Boy fan to the core. I've just been really, really lucky in that way. If I were younger and later into the game, I never would have been able to do that. But I don't want to give you the wrong impression. I don't sit at home collecting checks from manga translations. It's always been a labor of love. Most of my income, actually, for the last 20 years or more, has been simultaneous interpreting in the IT field. I know some people say, “I want to be a manga translator. What should I do? I want to live in a big house,” and, well, you're probably going to be living at home, or probably going to be living on welfare. That's the reality I think. We have to do it for love.

Nerdier Times: What has it been like to see the growth of manga and its popularity in the west?

Frederik L. Schodt: Oh, to me, it's just incredible. I never imagined; I just never dreamed that manga has become so popular around the world. And, I'm actually on the executive committee for the Japan International Manga Award, which is run under the auspices of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My role is very limited. I'm just participating. I'm not a judge. I'm just participating in a small group of people who are trying to figure out the right direction for the award. But that award now gets hundreds of submissions from all around the world. And they don't have to draw exactly in the manga style. But they're all influenced by manga in some way. 

And many of your winners now, the quality is just mind blowing. There are winners from Mongolia. There are winners from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, which is kind of obvious, and the natural thing. But there's also people from Europe, and Africa, and the Middle East. You know, it's just amazing how it has evolved. And to see the quality of the works is also just mind blowing. And in many ways, they're getting to the point where, technically, they may be better than many of the Japanese artists in Japan. That's what's just so amazing to me. And there's always a manga link. They may be drawing bandes dessinées style or even American comic book style, but there's always a link somehow to Japanese manga culture.

Michael Tom: What do you feel has been the biggest impact of Manga, Manga! on the world of Japanese comics, or American fandom, or in general really?

Frederik L. Schodt: I guess the thing is so amazing to me is it's still in print manga. Manga, Manga! is already, what, forty-one years old? I still meet people who say that they find it not only informative, but stimulating. I think in the award ceremony the other night, somebody mentioned that there's still a lot of works that are in there that are not available in English. It gives people ideas. I know a lot of publishers, they've scoured the books I've written, and then sort of think, “Well, what do we do next?” And that's just wonderful. I'm just really happy that it's still in print and people are finding it useful. Because in all my books that I've written, the goal is to make it useful.

Anime Herald: Tezuka-san would take offense from beyond the grave if I didn’t ask you any questions about him. Can you please share one of your Tezuka stories?

Frederik L. Schodt: Oh, there's lots. I was asked the other day by somebody about Tezuka, “What was unique about him?” Actually, it was a Japanese screenwriter I was talking with. To me, Tezuka was like a sponge. He was a curiosity sponge. Wherever he went in the world, he's absorbing information. He's absorbing people's conversation, absorbing what he sees, and he's incorporating that into his stories. And because he's running and serializing multiple stories at the same time, and drawing hundreds of pages with his assistants every month, and often in weekly magazines, he needed an enormous amount of information. 

So the story I often tell to represent that is that once, Tezuka was on his way to an animation festival in Canada. The plane came into San Francisco, where it was supposed to go to Montreal or Toronto. I can't remember, but the irony of it is that I was there at the gate, waiting for him. He and his friends, they came off the plane, and I was sitting next to Tezuka in the waiting area, right in front of the boarding gate. We're waiting for the plane to come in. It's going to take us to Canada. I start talking with him, and we're talking, and we get so involved in conversation that the counter, they announced that the plane's going to be landing, and people got off the plane. Then they announced it's time to get on the plane for the people going to Canada. And we missed the plane. (Laughs)

I was not only the interpreter, but I had a certain responsibility as the kind of quasi-coordinator for, and I would have thought that he would be really angry, but he wasn't. Of course, it was part of his fault, because he was the other side of the conversation. That's an example of how Tezuka was a very focused person, and he was also hungry for information. He would pick my brain. There wasn't much in it, but he would pick anyone's brain, and to get what he can find, so he could use his stories, or he could recycle in some way.

Anime Corner: Which of your works, besides Manga, Manga!, would you most recommend to someone trying to dive into your work?

Frederik L. Schodt: I spent ten years writing a non-manga-related book about a young man who was half Scottish and half Chinook. He went to Japan in 1848, which is when Japan was still closed. He is kind of my hero. So, if people are interested in some of my work, that is one book. It's called Native American in the land of the Shogun. Ranald MacDonald, that was his name. 

Terrible name, and that's kind of hurt the sales of the book, because people think it's about a hamburger chain, but had nothing to do with that at all. He went to Japan, and he spent six months there, in jail largely. He was deported and picked up by the US, a US Navy ship. But this is before Japan was even open to the outside world. So, he's kind of my hero. one of my main heroes.

Manga Mavericks: What do you feel about the accessibility of Tezuka’s works overseas?

Frederik L. Schodt: Well, Tezuka created so many works in so many different genres, so there’s lots of room for people to publish. I’m sure in the scanlation world, if you go on BitTorrent, you can probably find just about everything that's been translated. But, in the official publishing world, there's still plenty of room for works to be issued. There are also stories he never completely finished. I think Gringo is one of them. There’s a lot of room for people to explore Tezuka. Ryan Holmberg has written a lot about Tezuka’s early works. Those are much harder to publish because it’s so removed from the style people are familiar with. There’s lots of room for Tezuka scholarship. I’m sure we’re gonna see people get their PHD’s writing about Tezuka. They probably are already!

One interesting thing I should mention is that in Japan, once the artist dies, that’s it. But because Tezuka’s estate is controlled by his family, and also his son Makoto. Makoto is very progressive in terms of keeping the Tezuka world alive. Tezuka Productions has licensed adaptations of Tezuka’s works, which traditionally would have been almost unthinkable in Japan. That's how we wind up with Pluto by (Naoki) Urasawa, which I think is one of the most wonderful adaptations of any past, especially distant past, manga. And in this case, just one episode of a longer Astro Boy story. So we'll see more things like that, of Tezuka's works, especially coming out of Tezuka Productions, mainly because of the interest of the family in keeping his legacy alive.

To give you another shred of information: one thing that's fascinating to me is to see how, in Japan, stories are being recycled now. Finally, As you know, I think the really popular stories, they’re channeled into animation. Then, after the anime, it's possible to go back and restart a story, and that's happened with Astro Boy. It's also possible to turn it into operas. It's possible to turn into CDs. There's all this ancillary stuff that's being created. I'm currently reading a couple novels in Japanese. And there's an interesting project in Japan where they had taken, Just a few years back, they took the Phoenix. Which is a work very dear in my heart because I worked on the translation with my friend Jared Cook. They took Phoenix and they're novelizing it.

What's particularly interesting about this series is that the last volume in the Tezuka series, Tezuka never created it. He just left some outline notes. It was supposed to be set in China. So, lo and behold, the original volumes have been novelized. I'm reading the last one, which to me is the most fascinating, because Tezuka never drew it. He just left these outline notes. And it's set in China. It involves historic characters. A Japanese woman who was a spy in China. She was a descendant of the last dynasty in China. It's just a fascinating story. But there are some people that are war criminals today. It's all part of history. It's recycled based on this brief outline that Tezuka left. He never drew it, and it (the outline) is just two lines long.

It's a light novel, which you know, is a really popular genre in Japan right now. I don't know if that'll ever be in English, but it'll be interesting to see. Because there's all the stuff that's out there.

It is amazing to me, to see how that story has been reinterpreted. I think in the novels, because there's probably fourteen books, but each one is done by a different writer working off of the original Tezuka manga. Except for the last one, which required a lot of imagination and reinterpretation.

I know that light novels are kind of catching on here in the United States, to a certain extent. But it'll be interesting to see if Phoenix, the novel series, if that would ever be translated. It might be difficult.

Nerdier Times: What advice would you have for those looking to enter the field now? Translating manga.

Frederik L. Schodt: Well, translation is tough. Like I said, it's always been tough. If your dream is to become a professional translator, I honestly almost never meet anyone who just does that. They usually have to do other things. You can make a living doing translation for a while. I have some friends who were working a living doing anime translations. But it's getting increasingly tough, I think, economically. And I think everybody who's doing translation would admit that. Certainly, payments for manga translation have just cratered since I began working in the field. But again, if you do it for love, if it's something you really want to do and you're willing to accept the economic risks, then why not?

Deb Aoki is doing fabulous work recently related to all kinds of manga. She used this term, it's called neuroplasticity. I believe that Americans, and people all around the world, by reading manga, it stimulates a kind of neuroplasticity. It makes your brains much more flexible and open to that outside world. It's a different thought. And ultimately, maybe that's why people love manga, because it's different. It makes them think in a slightly different way.

ESR Gaming Network: how do you like translating manga and anime compared to your other translation work?

Frederik L. Schodt: Oh, it’s much more fun. Vastly more fun. My whole life, I've been a translator and an interpreter, not just related to manga. I translated government documents in Japan. I used to work for a translation company in Tokyo, which is very famous. It's called Simul International. I worked in the translation department there. We translated government speeches. We did all kinds of things. So boring, so boring. (Laughs)

Manga is just so much fun. You know, I loved everything I worked on. And even when I was in this company in Tokyo, they knew I loved manga. This is even before I brought up Manga, Manga! in 1983. They turned to me, because I was an employee. “There's this project somebody wants to make. They want to make a movie out of The Rose of Versailles.” “We hear you like manga. You translate the manga, and then we'll send it to the screenwriters in Hollywood, and they'll work on something.”

I enlisted my friend Jared Cook in this. We did this rough translation of the whole of Rose of Versailles. And this is probably 1977 or 1978. Very early. We did this whole translation, scribbling on photocopies, and handed it over. The whole thing. We didn't take a copy. We didn't make copies for ourselves. It was a job for me. And that was used by the Hollywood screenwriters, and then the director. The actors were British actors. It was shot in Versailles in France, and then dubbed back into Japanese and shown on Japanese TV. Or actually, in a movie. It's called Lady Oscar in English. And of course, I really regretted the fact that we handed over the entire translation. And then a few years later, I was asked by a Japanese firm in Tokyo to work on a translation of The Rose of Versailles, and I didn't have a draft. So I'm one of the only people who ever translated The Rose of Versailles twice.

In the published version that was done, not for a film, but for entertainment. Unfortunately, it was supposed to be a bilingual version for Japanese students learning English, and that sort of thing. So only two volumes came out. But, that's an example of a sort of very unusual project I still marvel over. But it was a lot of fun, and for me to do something different from boring translations.

Nothing to do with manga, and maybe this is inappropriate, but before this meeting started, I went to the bathroom. I noticed that the urinals here are made by American Standard. I've been trying to think recently, “How many times have I been in New York?” Because I don't feel like I know it very well, and I love it this time, but the more I think about it, actually I've been to New York several times. Standing there in front of the urinal, and I realize it says American Standard. And many, many years ago, decades ago, many decades ago, I came here on an interpreting job and visited American Standard, which had its headquarters in a skyscraper in New York. So I think, “Oh, okay, I came to New York for that once.”

Michael Tom: Congratulations on your Hall of Fame induction. Can you please share your thoughts, feelings and reflections?

Frederik L. Schodt: I walked up and I said, “Well, what do I want me to do?” And, of course, the logical thing is to just say “Thank you, I feel very honored.” And leave. And then I was told to say a few words. I said, “Well, that's actually kind of a dangerous thing to tell a writer.” I started off. At the beginning, I thought, “Well, this is cool, you know, I've done this before, and I won a lot of awards and I'm really lucky, and so forth. I’ll just thank a few people.” And then I started talking, and I just totally choked. (Laughs)

So then I'm thinking, this is very emotional for me. And it was. That helped me, because otherwise I probably would have gone on way too long, and tried to thank too many people, and got lost in the woods somewhere. But I totally started to choke, because I realized, not only am I indebted to so many people in the room, and I should probably go around and thank each one of them individually, but I've just been very lucky. And I was very honored. I’m actually really emotional, so it’s a good thing I didn’t fall down and weep, but I almost did. (Laughs)

Anime Herald: My favorite of the Ranald McDonald stories is, this was in the 1800s, and still costs roughly $2,000 to go to Japan.

Frederik L. Schodt: (Laughs) You read the book.

Anime Herald: Yeah. Can you share any stories about working with Stonebridge Press?

Frederik L. Schodt: Oh, I don't know if you realize it, but in terms of thanking people and being indebted to people, I'm up to my neck in gratitude for the owner of Stonebridge Press, Peter Goodman. Because Peter Goodman actually edited my Manga, Manga! book when it was published by Kodansha International. He was an employee there. For him, I think it was one of the first books that he could take responsibility for. We were both young. He was the person to whom I sent the proposal. He was the person I actually met in Tokyo and explained what I wanted to do, probably 1978, or even late 1977. And it took a long time to get to the publication, because the book wasn't published until 1983. But Kodansha International imploded, or it was closed by the parent company, I think, in 2000. But Peter had left Kodansha International, and then he formed Stonebridge Press in Berkeley. So, almost all of my books that I've worked on have been through Stonebridge Press and been with Peter Goodman. and I owe him a huge amount. Huge.

Anime Corner: One of the biggest topics in translation is AI and its role in the translation process. Do you feel like there's room in the industry, the official industry, for translation from AI? Is its heavy involvement in the translation process inevitable?

Frederik L. Schodt: It’s inevitable. And there's room for it. But it won't be 100% AI generated, probably. But I think everybody will be using it very soon. Well, actually, I take that back. I'm sure they already are. Maybe they're just not saying it. It's inevitable. And when people say, “Oh, AI, can’t do this, you know, it's not very good at that.” Well, if we're talking about Gen AI, it's only been around, like, a year. So anybody who thinks that all these limitations make it impossible to use AI in manga or anime translation. That's flawed.

I have also heard, I don’t know all the details of this, but I’ve heard that people are already working on this. You need a large language model. You need a huge database. You need information. I mean, we need to think forward about this stuff. It's not that difficult, really, to create a huge database of the categories of expressions that are used in manga. Because, a lot of people will say, “Well, you can't use AI to translate manga text or anime and text, because it's so oriented to the visual element. The visual element is probably even more important than the text.” But actually, in the world of manga and anime, the number of expressions that are used, it's not infinite. It's a finite number. And I can see easily how people are going to train large data systems, large data models that will not only work off the text, but they'll work off the images. So that's my feeling.