Is that part of the growing acceptance of Japanese pop culture in America?Horibuchi: The name?
Shonen Jump, as opposed to calling it something like Viz Comics Anthology.Horibuchi: I’m seeing a trend that Japanese and Chinese characters are cool. On t-shirts you’re seeing many Chinese characters. And it’s cool to use shonen. ‘Shonen, what is it?’ For children, it might be very cool, ‘You don’t know what shonen means? This is a cool thing.’ We’re doing that intentionally. Bauer: There’s some market research behind this as well. There are two translations for shonen from the Japanese–one is boy, and one is pure of heart. And a year and a half ago when we did the initial market research for this book, we commissioned Insight Research in New York to do some work for us. We took a poll of kids eight to sixteen and said, ‘Would American kids be interested in purchasing a magazine that contained manga from popular anime titles on TV?’ And what came back was that 12% of kids eight to sixteen said, ‘I would buy that magazine.’ What was unique about that was that these kids were different
