Compressed modernity and youth cultural narratives in Japan and China: Japanese animation as a comparative framework

This article examines the transformation of Japanese animation narratives from the 1980s to the 2000s as a comparative framework for analysing contemporary Chinese youth culture under compressed modernity. It identifies three narrative formations in Japanese animation: narrative consumption in the bubble era, database consumption after the weakening of shared narrative horizons, and decisionist or survival-oriented narratives during the prolonged uncertainty of the Lost Decades. The article argues that these formations should not be understood as a simple linear evolution, but as historically situated ways of reorganising the relationship between fiction, subjectivity, and social conditions. By comparing these formations with contemporary Chinese phenomena such as industrial science fiction, blind-box and character-IP consumption, infinite-flow web fiction, and ‘dazi’ relations, the article shows that comparable narrative and affective structures are juxtaposed and recombined within China’s platformised media environment. The comparison does not suggest that China simply repeats Japan’s cultural trajectory. Rather, it demonstrates how Japanese animation can provide a comparative vocabulary for understanding how Chinese youth culture reorganises narrative desire, affective consumption, survival anxiety, and limited social connection under different technological and socio-cultural conditions.