I’m quite an old school anime fan, having gotten into it in the early 80s. Back then, there was precious little anime in English, and if you could come away understanding even 10-15% of what you were watching it was a good day indeed. The idea that anime could be watched with dubbed English voices or English subtitles was a long way off, and so fans got very good at figuring out the story with nothing more than a few lines of synopsis someone who didn’t understand Japanese either had written up and xeroxed for you. So whenever some English popped up in the background of an anime series I was watching, it was really something special, and I remember getting quite obsessive about catching every bit of English I could find using the frame-by-frame feature on my VCR. In the classic Macross: Love Do You Remember? film, there’s a frame where Minmei is reading an English translation of the final song from the film, which provided a wealth of information in a time when my comprehension of the language was near zero. Then there was that silly English on a computer screen in the original Macross series, which read, “If mice could swim, they would float with the tide and play with the fish down by the seaside. The cats on the shore would quickly agree.” While it’s certainly nice to see so much anime available in English these days, I’m often concerned that it might be harder for people to teach themselves Japanese.
