Prologue

Humans employ art and artistic expression as a means to deal with the harshness and brutality of reality. This artistic expression can subvert even the most powerful and repressive political systems, slowly over time. This is the reason some societies control the arts. These societies know that ideas coupled with ‘tincture of time’ are extremely powerful catalysts for social change.

Governments may be embedded with the media and this is a dangerous situation for any society. Media favors the interests and agendas of those that control it, many times at the expense of creating a better society. The phenomenon of the Edo period in Japanese culture is an example of how repressive political systems can be negated slowly over time, in the spirit of freedom of human artistic expression. Manga and anime continue in this manner in our contemporary world, hybridizing cultures and ideas.