Words

Anime

from English animation, loaned and reborrowed
Japanese animation; the word English uses for it is a Japanese clipping of an English word.
Documented

The loan that came home

Japanese borrowed animēshon in the 20th century, clipped it to anime, and English reborrowed the clipping in the 1980s and 90s to mean specifically Japanese animation. In Japan the word still means all animation; abroad it means theirs.

Assessment: Fully documented loanword history. Round-trip words are rare enough to have their own shelf in linguistics.
Stories

The stolen eyes

The story the industry tells on itself: Osamu Tezuka, the God of Manga, grew up marinating in Disney and Betty Boop, and the giant anime eye is Fleischer and Disney design adapted to a starving TV studio, big expressive faces because Astro Boy (1963) could afford only a few moving cels. Anime's signature look is an American import that Japan returned improved.

Assessment: Tezuka's Disney and Fleischer debts are documented in his own accounts, and the economics of limited animation are production history. The eyes really are a re-export.
Interesting claims

The bomb drew the style

The heavyweight claim, from critic Otsuka Eiji to Takashi Murakami's Little Boy exhibition: postwar anime's obsessions, apocalypse, mutation, infantilized cuteness, are the aesthetic of defeat and the atomic bombings, trauma rendered adorable and sold back to children. On this reading the industry is one long act of not talking about 1945.

Assessment: Murakami argued exactly this and the exhibition toured internationally. As cultural criticism it is influential; as etymology it is nothing. The word itself is an innocent piece of luggage.
Sources and further reading
  1. Tezuka's own accounts of Disney and Fleischer influence
  2. Astro Boy (1963) production history, the economics of limited animation
  3. Murakami, Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (2005)
Worth asking

A word traveled west and came back meaning something narrower and stronger. What else in your vocabulary is a return trip?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+