Gee, maybe the U.S. government is cooler than I thought. They’re going to show anime in Iraq.
The 52-part series “Captain Tsubasa” — dubbed into Arabic as “Captain Majed” — will air on the US government-funded Iraqi Media Network.
“As soccer is a popular sport in Iraq, it is expected that the TV program will strengthen goodwill toward Japan,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
That’s the Japanese foreign ministry—the story is datelined Tokyo. And this:
Japan, which has 600 troops in Iraq, previously tried to woo the country in 2003 by offering the tear-jerker TV drama “Oshin”.
I guess a lot depends on who has control of the remote.
About Brigid Alverson
Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started
MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for
School Library Journal,
Publishers Weekly Comics Week,
Comic Book Resources, the
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and
Robot 6. She also edits the
Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
They’ve been showing anime in Baghdad for years. Can’t find where they mentioned it, but one of the early Iraqi bloggers mentionednot long after the fall of the old regime that some of the new TV networks were playing old anime – dubbed in Spanish, i think – and indicated that it wasn’t the first time. Carl Horn is famous for saying that his first exposure to anime came when he was an expat kid in Teheran.