When the director of New York's Japan Society, Joe Earle, introduces its gallery's latest exhibition, Krazy!, he sounds apologetic. He explains the group show is devoted to anime, manga and video games, and it is appropriate for US society, since it is through this culture that young Americans receive their strongest impressions of Japan.
'There are millions of specialists in this country, and most of them are under the age of 35, and they have a passionate knowledge of every last detail of every manga character that I could never possibly aspire to with my pre-modern predilections,' he says.
One can sympathise with him. Earle's galleries have been colonised by the likes of Kuro (Black) and Shiro (White), stars of Taiyo Matsumoto's comic Black and White (1993-4), and orphan inhabitants of a place called Treasure Town; and Mu, a character who sells mysterious 'voids' in Hitoshi Odajima's cartoon satire on corporate drudgery, Mu: For Sale (2001-4). In Yuichi Yokoyama's New Engineering (2004), the cartoon centres on a series of dream-like occurrences involving bizarre digging machines.
There's also a room darkened like a shrine to video games: a Pacman arcade console sits centre stage, while old game consoles are arrayed on the walls behind pods.
In the show's 'anime garden', banks of screens show highlights from the past 25 years of anime, including films such as the widely known Akira (1988), and the 2006 film Paprika. There is even a listening booth playing music by anime-soundtrack composer Yoko Kanno.
The show is curated by Bruce Grenville, from Vancouver Art Gallery, where Krazy! originated and where the work of American artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Raymond Pettibon, and manga-influenced young Japanese such as Mr. is on display. It also included noted American comics such as Art Spiegelman's Maus (1972-91), and George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1913-44), which inspired the show's title. The New York exhibition has been slimmed down to concentrate on Japanese production, but it still answers to Grenville's original desire to survey an area of what he calls 'visual culture'.