Submissions

Author Guidelines

Find JAMS current Call for Papers HERE

Submissions will be accepted until March 31st, 2024. While JAMS accepts submissions on a rolling basis, only papers submitted by the deadline will be guaranteed to be reviewed for this volume.

What is the ideal submission to JAMS?

Submissions to JAMS can be about any subject concerning anime, manga, cosplay, and its fandoms, and come from any discipline.

Ideal submissions to JAMS are between 4,500 and 7,500 words.

JAMS intends to publish between 6 and 8 works per issue.

How will the journal accept submissions?

• Only completed work should be submitted.
• The maximum length of any contribution should be 7,500 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography.
• Feedback will not be provided on work in progress.
• Abstracts and five keywords must be included in the same file as the article.
• Abstracts must not be more than 250 words.
• Descriptions of the material analyzed must be included in the abstract.
• Submissions must be double-spaced
• Page numbers must be placed in the upper-right corner, paragraphs must be indented, and all illustrations and tables must be labeled and captioned accurately.
• Times New Roman, 12 point font, left-justified text, and bold-faced headings must be used.
• Follows the Chicago citation style

If selected for publication or further review, authors will be contacted by JAMS.

By submitting any material to the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, you agree your work is original, unless otherwise specifically acknowledged.

If you are working with a fellow student or professor on your submission, it is imperative you speak with them prior to submitting work to this journal. You must clear any conflict of interest prior to submission since some graduate students/professors may intend to submit that same research for publication.

If the Editor returns a work that requires revisions, the author(s) is(are) responsible for making the necessary changes and resubmitting the manuscript to the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies.

Open Access, Copyright, and Licensing Statement

All articles published in JAMS are licensed with an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) , unless another CC license is specified. Authors may contact JAMS if they wish to have a different Creative Commons License applied to their work before publication. As JAMS is an open-access journal, authors must be willing to publish their material with a Creative Commons License. This allows for immediate free access to the work and permits any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose.

Publishing with these licenses does not constitute a transfer of the copyright by the Author. The Author retains all rights to their work, including but not limited to, the right:

• To reproduce and distribute the Work, and to authorize others to
  reproduce and distribute the Work, in any format;
• To post a version of the Work in an institutional repository or the Author’s
  personal or departmental web page

Authors are permitted to deposit all versions of their paper (Preprint, Author’s Accepted Manuscript, orPublished article (Version of Record)) in an institutional or subject repository. An embargo will not be applied. Authors are encouraged to cite the JAMS publication with the DOI whenever they do so.

Complete Style Guide

JAMS’ Style Guide is based almost entirely on:

MECHADEMIA STYLE GUIDE Version 4.0 by Andrea Horbinski, 25 March 2018. Originally compiled by Christopher Bolton

Permission has been given by Mechademia to use their style guide as a basis, and JAMS hopes that maintaining a unified publishing style within anime and manga studies as a discipline will allow for more streamlined citation and use of these materials.

ROMANIZATION OF JAPANESE

Consistent, correct romanization is necessary so that readers can look up works and people in Japanese reference sources. If you do not work in Japanese and are unsure about romanizations, consult carefully with the editor assigned to you.

Names and Titles In general, you should follow the prevailing practice to indicate names. Accordingly, most Japanese names of creators, critics, etc. should appear in Japanese order, with the family name followed by the given name. This applies to endnotes as well.

Exceptions include Japanese figures working globally or in Anglophone countries, such as Takashi Murakami or Yoshikuni Igarashi, or figures who are known by single names in accordance with art practice, e.g. Rakuten, Ippei.

Some artists and directors use non-standard romanizations to represent their names, e.g. Matsumoto Leiji. When referring to these figures, use the romanization in current use in North America. When in doubt as to prevailing practice, consult Wikipedia across the relevant languages.

For titles of works and names of characters, writers may use the names most familiar to North American audiences.

Azumanga Daioh is an example.

Use the complete orthography for a title when it is understandable to do so, e.g. Yuri!!! on Ice. Others may be discarded, such as the symbol in the Japanese orthography for Lucky Star (Raki☆suta). Please describe emoji as opposed to trying to use them in your piece.

Italicization Romanized Japanese is not italicized. Italics should be used solely for titles of works.

Noriko finds the okonomiyaki in Osaka "much, much tastier" ("motto motto oishii").

Romanization System for Japanese Mechademia uses a modified Hepburn system, similar to that in the Kenkyûsha romanized dictionaries. JAMS follows Mechademia’s system. In most cases, writers in doubt about how to romanize a word may consult a Kenkyûsha dictionary. Long vowels must be indicated. Failure to do so is akin to a spelling mistake. Represent long vowels as follows. Indicate long u and o vowels with a circumflex accent (as in this guide); these will be converted to macrons at the press. Please do not try to generate the macrons yourself.

long u = û long o (oo and ou) = ô long e (ei ) = ei long e (ee) = ê long i = ii long a = â

Names that are familiar in English (Osaka, Tokyo, Hokkaido) do not need macrons. Similarly, names of Japanese companies that do business in English (e.g. Kodansha) should also omit macrons. When in doubt about whether to omit macrons, consult Wikipedia or the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Spacing, Capitalization etc. in Romanized Japanese

• Capitalize proper nouns, including names of publishers.
• Capitalize the first word of a romanized sentence or a title. Do not capitalize subsequent words in titles, except proper nouns. Capitalize the first word of a subtitle too.

Ueno's work includes Kurenai no metaru sûtsu: Anime to iu senjô.

• Represent particles like ni, he, de, etc. as separate words
• Use hyphens before name suffixes like -san, -sama, -chan. Avoid use of hyphens elsewhere in romanized Japanese.
• Where the nasal syllable "n" is followed by a single-vowel syllable ("a" "I" "u" "e" "o") or a y+vowel syllable ("ya" "yu" "yo"), a single quote may be placed after the n if there might be ambiguity about the word represented, especially for names.

Ko+ni+shi (a name) is represented as "Konishi" Ke+n+i+chi (a name) is represented as Ken'ichi

shi+nyo+u (excrement) is "shinyô" shi+n+yo+u (trust) is "shin'yô"

but ho+n+ya+ku (translation) can safely be written "honyaku" without a single quote, since it is a common word and there is no such word as ho+nya+ku to confuse it with.

CITATION & ENDNOTES

Sources are documented in endnotes. Please include all sources in a complete bibliography at the end of your piece.

Insert the endnotes with the endnote feature of your word processor. Discursive endnotes should be kept to a minimum; incorporate your points into the body of your article to the greatest extent possible.

Titles in the body of the text

For primary texts and Japanese works, if possible the original date of publication should be given in parentheses in the text (if it is not mentioned nearby), and both the Japanese and English titles should be provided.

For works with a published English translation or an established English title, use the English title and give the date and the Japanese title in parentheses at the first occurrence.

"Ôtomo Katsuhiro's manga A Child's Dream (1983, Dômu) has many parallels with the manga version of Akira (1984-93)."

Published English titles are italicized and in "title case": all major words are capitalized, as in A Child's Dream. Where the Japanese and English titles are the same, as for Akira, there is no need to repeat the title.

For works without an established English title, provide your own translation in parentheses. After the first occurrence, use either the Japanese or the translation consistently to refer to the text.

"Abe's collection Toshi e no kairo (1980, Circuits to the city) contains an essay on this theme."

Where there is no published English translation, translations of Japanese titles are not italicized and appear in "sentence case": only the first word of the title (and subtitle) and proper nouns are capitalized.

Japanese titles appear in sentence case: capitalize only the first word of the title (and subtitle) and proper nouns. Publications such as the Asahi Shinbun may be referred to as they would in English, with all words capitalized, e.g. The Washington Post.

First citations The first time you cite a given source, give full bibliographic information in the endnote. Subsequent citations to the same source use an abbreviated format.

Book

Give the pages you are citing or quoting. Omit pages if you are citing the whole work.  If there is no published English translation, place your own translation of the title in parentheses. Capitalize only the first word of the title and subtitle, and proper nouns. If there is a published English translation, see the following example.

Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 30. 

Japanese book with a published translation

In general, use these formats for translated books if you worked with both the original and the translation. If you worked only with the translation, you do not need to provide publication information for the original.

"Murakami Ryû, Koin rokkâ beibiizu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984); translated by Stephen Snyder as Coin Locker Babies (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995)."

Book chapter

Give the pages you are citing or quoting. Give the inclusive pages numbers for the whole article only if you are citing the whole article.

"Richard J. Hand, "Aesthetics of Cruelty: Traditional Japanese Theater and the Horror Film," in McRoy, Japanese Horror Cinema, 18-28."

Journal Article

Include the volume of the journal. If pagination is successive within a volume, the issue number may be omitted. If the issue number is omitted, the month or season of publication may be added before the year.

"Thomas LaMarre, "From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving Drawings," Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (2002): 329-67."

Online Journal

"Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski, “Even a Monkey Can Understand Fan Activism: Political Speech, Artistic Expression, and a Public for the Japanese Dôjin Community,” Transformative Works and Cultures 10 (June 2012), DOI:10.3983/twc.2012.0321."

Website

"Nele Noppe, “The Cultural Economy of Fanwork in Japan: Dōjinshi Exchange as a Hybrid Economy of Open Source Cultural Goods” (PhD diss, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2014), http://www.nelenoppe.net/dojinshi/Thesis (accessed February 16, 2017)."

Blog Post, etc

"obsession_inc. “Affirmational Fandom vs. Transformational Fandom.” Accessed February 16, 2017. https://obsession- inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html."

Film and Anime

Give the information for the release you viewed, and if via a streaming service, the date of last access. For YouTube and other online video sites, provide the link as well.

"Yuri!!! on Ice, dir. Yamamoto Sayo (2016); available on Crunchyroll. Accessed 25 December 2016."

Give the Japanese release dates, but it is not necessary to give Japanese production information for Japanese films, OVAs, or TV series unless it is important for your argument.

Manga

Provide citations to easily obtainable editions of the manga or whatever edition you used. You may provide original publication information elsewhere in the note or in the text if you like.

"Hagio Moto, Tôma no shinzô (Tôma's heart), 3 vols. (Tokyo: Flower Comics, 1975)."

Electronic Mailing lists and Web Forums

Author ("screen name"), posting to "forum name," date of post, URL (accessed date).

"Tom Wilkes ("ctw"), posting to "Old Home Bulletin Board," Sept. 6, 2003, http://cff.ssw.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=954#954 (accessed July 6, 2006)."

Video Games

Developer, title (publisher if different), release year (place of release if specifically relevant).

"Chunsoft, Dragon Quest (published by Enix), 1986 (Japanese release)."

Subsequent citations

After the first note for a given work, subsequent notes use a shorted form consisting of the author's last name, shortened title, and page.

"Bolton, "Anime Horror," 67."

MISCELLANEOUS

Dates/Decades/Eras

Do not use apostrophes in decades, e.g. “1970s” not “1970’s.” Write out centuries in lower case letters, e.g. “seventeenth century” not “17th century.” Cite all dates in Month/Day/Year of Common Era (BCE/CE) format, rather than Christian reckoning (BC/AD) or other styles (unless the alternative style is germane to your point—i.e. Japanese imperial dating).

"The 1970s saw a flowering of shojo manga in Japan, spearheaded by the eighteenth century-France fantasy The Rose of Versailles."

Decimals

Always express decimals in numerical form.

"Approximately 9.5 percent of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was excised from Warriors of the Wind."

Endnotes

Use your word processor to create a continuous series of endnotes numbered with Arabic numerals.

Hyphenation

As a general rule of Chicago style, as little hyphenation as possible is preferred. Use hyphenation only to avoid confusion (e.g. between vowels) or in the case of a neologism or a quotation. When in doubt, look up the word in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and use the form cited there.

Numbers

Write out numbers from one to ten; higher than 11, use numerals, except at the beginning of a sentence (in which case, numbers should always be written out).

"Of the first 13 Revolutionary Girl Utena episodes, three are completely frivolous."

Percentages

Always write “percent,” never “per-cent” or “%” (except in tables).

"Five percent of the world’s population uses 25 percent of its energy."

Spacing

Use one space between sentences. Place no space between an endnote or a quotation mark and the text it encloses.

U.S./United States

Write “U.S” (never “US”) only as an adjective: write “United States” as a noun.

"The United States-Japan Security Treaty codified U.S. strategic interests in East Asia."

REFERENCES

• The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2017).
• ALA-LC Romanization Tables: A guide to romanization from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. This is used mainly to determine how to divide words in Japanese (For example, "isu ni suwatte iru" is preferred over "isuni suwatteiru"). Most authors will not need to consult this, but it can be useful for proofreaders. Note that Mechademia does not follow the ALA-LC Romanization for Korean.

Authors may contact JAMS if they wish to have a different Creative Commons License applied to their work before publication.