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Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.

Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.

Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade.

"In 1999 and 2000, Comix Cafe, a manga coffee shop, as well as the Hello Kitty cafe and the Ultraman restaurant opened in Hong Kong. But they all went out of business due to a lack of repeat customers," said Alan Wan, a Hong Kong-based artist. "On the other hand, the Charlie Brown Cafe opened in 2006 and it's surviving, because they don't overemphasize the cartoon theme and ordinary people who aren't manga fanatics feel welcome."

And therein lies the rub. The image of girls getting out of hand is hard for some to swallow.

Experts predict that Japan’s population will shrink to 108 million by 2030, and critics of the otaku phenomenon blame men and women who can now live meaningful lives without human companionship. One analyst says that the rampant creativity of otaku is rivaled only by their stunted emotional growth. Journalist Yumiko Sugiura, who literally wrote the book on fujoshi (2006’s The Fujoshi-izing World: The Female Otaku of East Ikebukuro), says women who indulge fantasies of queer love rather than finding boyfriends face an even greater backlash than their male counterparts. She believes that, via yaoi, fujoshi demonstrate dissatisfaction with traditional Japanese expectations of what a woman’s life should be.

"Our old enemy 'poverty' somehow disappeared, and we can no longer find an enemy to fight against" (Miyazaki, 1988). In other words, after Japan's industrial success since the Meiji restoration in 1890s and recovery from WWII cast out poverty from the nation, people still remain possessed by an illusion of gaining a wealthy everyday life and continue living with a gap between their ideal and real life. As a result, an endless and unsatisfying cycle of production and consumption has begun destroying harmony among family and community (Harootunian, 2000).

Zizek (1989) points out that people of late capitalism are well aware that money is not magical. To obtain it, it has to be replaced through labor, and after you use it, it will just disappear, as will as any other material. Allison (1996) adds to this point: "They know money is no more than an image and yet engage in its economy where use-value has been increasingly replaced and displaced by images (one of the primary definitions of post-modernism) all the same” (p. xvi).

Related to its presentation of the loss of spiritual values, the film elaborates an extensive critique of another contemporary global issue: identity confusion. A symptom of identity loss is seen in the way that cultures today encourage people to constantly refashion their self-image, so that individuals construct their identity based on ideals presented in popular media.

"Gundam as the symbol of Tokyo's revival as a green city will send a strong message of 'Green Tokyo' and world peace to children who play a main role in Tokyo's future and the next generation," the event organizer said on its Web site. Gundam was chosen for the project in part because of parallels between environmental problems facing the world and the plot of the TV series, according to the Web site.