Mutual Images

Japanese pop culture has influenced Italy over the last thirty years. In the ‘70s anime started to fill the airtime of emerging private TV channels, marking the childhood of those Italians who grew up in those years and until the early ‘90s, when manga finally appeared in the Italian market. Globalization and the Internet have made other aspects of Japanese pop culture available to Italians and the rest of the world alike. It has resulted in a very active Italian fandom spanning different generations, and in a strong fascination with Japan. This paper aims to provide insights into the way Italian fans perceive Japanese pop culture and Japan; on the kind of bonds with Japan they develop, and how they socialize. It does so by considering the biggest Italian web-community, AnimeClick.it, as a microcosm of the Italian fandom’s interactions and emotions. Privileging a qualitative method, it focuses on the people who give life to the website. Their images of Japanese pop culture reveal the recognition of a specific cultural odour perceived as pleasant, which translates into an interest in Japan. Those fans associate Japan with images of fantasy and charming mystery that nevertheless co-exist with perceptions of extreme difference, echoing the notion of Japanese uniqueness, so that Orientalist processes are re-enacted. There are intergenerational differences in the way fans have developed an emotional bond, and look at Japanese pop culture. However, these are mediated and transcended through their socialization and collaboration in the webcommunity, opening up new perspectives for the future evolution of Japanese pop culture’s influence in Italy.

necessarily also produces them as a semiotic-material reality. It makes "the West" -by stripping away elements, adding information -and similarly also "Japan," by assembling selected elements into a single coherent whole. 4 By closely tracking the endeavours of Tenra's translator-cum-cultural broker to bring J-RPGs to the West, this paper illustrates this argument and shows that the "Japaneseness" of this game was its selling point and that this Japaneseness was not simply there but was created through telling the audience what "authentic" Japan looks like.

A Primer and Brief History of Role-Playing
The often retold origin story of role-playing games usually links these games to war-gaming in 19th century Prussia ('Kriegsspiele,' cf. Peterson 2012; Appelcline 2013; but also Morton 2007;Tresca 2010), which had antecedents in ancient India (chaturaṅga, known as chess in Europe). Crossing not only boundaries of today's nation-states but also those of literary genres and theatrical practices, RPGs as they are known today gained a distinct form in the US in the 1970s by mixing elements from war and diplomacy games, science-or pulp-fiction and, last but not least, Tolkien's novel Lord of the Rings (1954). Nowadays, the most popular variant of this broad category of games is multiplayer online about such entities. Similarly, ascriptions of "original" or "tradition" are understood as ex post facto judgments that place value on such qualities regardless of when a so-called tradition was invented, for example. 4 The phrases "to make" and "to assemble" are borrowed from Latour (2005) and Law (2009) to highlight the performativity of realities: they are done in practices, such as translation, and do not precede our actions.
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the "West" Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017) 47 games (e.g. World of Warcraft; Pardo et al. 2004) that rely on mechanics refined by Japanese programmers (cf. Final Fantasy). Live-action enactments (so-called larps) 5 promoted in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe have also gained traction elsewhere.
The is an additional distinction between those players who portray just one character and the referee (e.g. the dungeon master, game master, or storyteller) who controls the setting and the supporting cast. In the course of a game, the players explore, fight, talk, and gain rewards, such as gold and experience. The latter is collected in a currency of points, and one needs a certain amount of experience points (XP) to "level up," 5 Live-Action Roleplay used to be abbreviated as LARP. Recently, however, "larp" (lowercase, as a noun; e.g. "a larp" for an event) and "larping" (the activity) are now widely used in English-language discussions of the practice (Fatland 2005, 12;Holter, Fatland, Tømte 2009, 5). Digital RPGs link directly to D&D. Contrastingly, even though larp shares elements with this "ancestor," such a singular line of development is contested (Fatland 2014). In Japanese, raibu RPG (live RPG) is sometimes used interchangeably with the term LARP in the Latin alphabet (cf. Hinasaki 2013).
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the "West" Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017) 48 to grow from a simple fighter to Rognar the Invincible -which would take many game sessions and probably also many out-of-game years for Jim's character to do. All this is accomplished by verbal tellings, by dialog between the players and the referee, and -this is a legacy from war- In many games, there is a difference between not succeeding and failing or "botching." If the dice roll is below the set target number necessary to climb the wall, the character just does not make it and may try again. If the dice shows a "1" on the other hand (or another respective number designated in the game rules), this is called a "botch" or "critical failure," which often has additional negative consequences, such as falling off the wall in this example.
Settings, themes and rules may reciprocally encourage certain play styles (Jara 2013, 43) but the agency lies with the players. 7 Regardless of labels for genre or style, how game designers describe their creations, how elaborate or simple their rule systems might be, these do not necessarily determine actual styles of play at the game table -in each and every system one may encounter "roll-players" who favour competition and clear achievement tiers as well as "role-players" who prefer storytelling and in-character enactments. 8 Game designers know this and thus often include phrases such as: "But the rules are only intended to help your imagination. The most important things are your inspiration and your intention to have fun" (Kitazawa, GroupSNE 2008, 9; translated by the author).
When fantasy role-playing first saw the light of day in the 1970s, Japanese model and toy shops were also selling war-gaming equipment, 7 The high-level, almost limitless agency distinguishes TRPGs from their digital cousins. 8 Incidentally, the Japanese TRPG magazine Rōru & Rōru (Role & Roll, Arclight Publishing) hints at both play styles with its title and markets itself as a caterer to both, role-players and (the often derogatorily used label of) roll-players.
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing  (Yasuda. GroupSNE 1989;Mizuno 1997). Intrigued by this new kind of game, Yasuda and his colleagues not only started to play but also to spread the word and create one of Japan's first TRPG game studios.
News about games like D&D mostly spread via war-gaming and computer game magazines, for example, in TACTICS (Takanashi 1982).
Yasuda and his colleagues later incorporated their university circle as "GroupSNE" and sought to teach others about these games. They published their playing as a serialised "replays," which were novelisations of game session transcripts, in the computer game magazine Comtiq. The first issue of this serial, entitled Rōdosu tōsenki (Record of Lodoss War), was released in September 1986 (Yasuda and GroupSNE, 1986). 9 Record of Lodoss War would not only become a multimedia franchise successful in Japan and abroad as anime and manga but also the basis for Sword World RPG (Mizuno. GroupSNE 1989), Japan's "gold standard" TRPG throughout the 1990s.
Despite a small boom in the early 1990s which saw the release of many popular media franchise adaptations of Japanese TRPGs and vice-9 Replays today represent the most economically successful part of Japan's TRPG market, as members of GroupSNE, Bōken and other game studios have emphasised in conversations (cf. also sale ranks on amazon.co.jp, for example). Judging from self-introductions on online forums, the number of replay readers far exceeds that of TRPG players. As novelised, verbatim transcriptions of player conversations and game events, they go beyond the brief "example of play" found in English or German rulebooks. Along with the commercially produced light novel replays and those by amateurs, sites such as niconico increasingly feature replays in video form.
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing annual "Game Market", a convention for analog gaming and the biannual "Comic Market" (komike), Japan's largest convention for amateur-produced manga, anime, and games. Not unlike the indie genre in the US, many of these games explore not only new mechanics or design ideas, but also over-the-top themes or parodies of other media.
Maid RPG, for example, takes cues from the figure of the French maid that is prominent in anime and related fan practices. Similar to Paranoia (Costikyan et al. 1985), in which player characters are at the mercy of a capricious computer, the maid players have to fulfil tasks for a nonplayer "Master" character, gain rewards, and assist as well as backstab each other during the game. As a light-hearted but still self-reflexive game parodying current (occasionally sexist) anime tropes, Maid RPG appeals to fans of respective anime and manga products and goods from Japan.
While most non-gamers in Japan associate the term "RPG" solely with computer games, TRPGs also remain in the shadow of manga and anime from a consumer standpoint outside Japan. Despite the popularity of the Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the "West" Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017) 52

Studying "Cultural Brokers"
Between the summer of 2009 and the winter of 2014, I conducted fieldwork on sites related to TRPGs in Japan, Europe, and the US to trace the flows and dynamics of role-playing games across national borders. I followed a cyber-ethnographic approach, which distances itself from studies of the "virtual" by not limiting itself to Internet communication alone. Borrowing from thinkers such as Donna Haraway (1991), a cyber-ethnographic approach understands the cyberspacial life-worlds of humans as "entangled" realms of technology and the social: Mediated by computers 10 but also fundamentally linked to allegedly "real" sites.
From this perspective, the ethnography of online groups is not limited to investigations online, but means "the ethnography of online and related off-line situations, the ethnography of humans and non-human actors in these related fields" (Teli, Pisanu, Hakken 2007). This perspective corresponds to a semiotic-material image of humanity as "cyborgs" (Law 1991;Law, Hassard 1999;Latour 2005), that is, as networks of human and non-human parts (the "identity" and "performance" of researchers, for example, are linked to books, presentation notes, or voice recorders without which they could not play their role). Consequently, such investigations are not limited to one location -in this case, the Internet -but should follow the human and non-human participants to different places, on-and offline. This approach is similar to and also based on current developments in translocal anthropology (Hannerz 2003;Rescher 2010;Brosius 2012). 10 The term "computer" also includes smartphones.
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the "West" Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017) 53 In the course of my fieldwork online and offline, I dealt not only with technologies of (inter-) connection, that is, different types of non-human mediators such as kanji encodings or verification protocols of socialnetworking sites (Kamm 2013), but also encountered a number of entangled human actors who stood out in the sense that they made themselves -or were made -into nodes of translation, that is, into transforming what is widely considered a hobby into a source of income.
Broadly speaking, "cultural brokerage" refers to the mediation between environments or spheres, such as the transfer of knowledge, which can be either deliberately ("manifest") or involuntarily ("latent") (Höh, Jaspert and Oesterle, 2013b, p. 9). As the brokers I encountered are translators in the most common sense of the term (mediators between languages), their activities of can be categorised as "manifest:" Their inter-, cross-or trans-cultural brokerage are intentional acts and Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing the main function in this instance. There are other cases where brokerage appears as a "latent" function; for example, nintentional brokers such as deported slaves (cf. Höh, Jaspert and Oesterle 2013a, 23). A manifest brokers acts as a spokesperson, such as an expert, an insider or a political representative, who speaks on behalf of "silent" entities (such as a group of other humans or games, in this case) and simplifies the networks of these others. Simply put, Japanese-language TRPGs (and often their designers and players) appear in need of such a spokesperson because they cannot speak for themselves to non-Japanese-speakers. This spokesperson displaces these other entities and their goals and ideas to fit his or her representation -such a series of transformations may be called translation (Callon 1986, 214).
Translation here does not simply refer to the displacement of one natural language into another but to characterising representations, establishing identities, and defining and controlling network elements.
Representation in this sense is always understood as translation in order to "undermine the very idea that there might be such a thing as fidelity" (Law 2006, 48 This paper traces one case of cultural brokerage: the translation of the TRPG Tenra Banshō Zero into English and the entangled creation of a whole group of (silent) entities, ranging from Japanese role-playing games to Japanese players and Japanese culture. Kitkowski did not remain not alone on his site but asked others with Japanese language proficiency and access to Japanese games to join him.
Posts included brief presentations and reviews of J-RPGs, a term Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing Initially, Kitkowski picked Tenra for his translation because of its appeal to him as a gamer, its many "cool" characters and its "Hyper Japan as Written by Japanese effect" (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014, 34). Thus, Japaneseness played a major role in Kitkowski's choice: "I particularly wanted to translate Tenra because it was clearly the most 'Japanese' RPG in terms of art, focus, setting, and rules." His meaning here is twofold.
For one, it is a "practical" summarising of game mechanics as Japanese, which were introduced in the 1990s, combined with artwork and modes of storytelling which follow conventions that developed in manga writing. F.E.A.R. had been at the forefront, according to Kitkowski (cf. Kitkowski 2015, 12, 18), when it came to revitalising the TRPG market in the 1990s with Japanese settings, and producing fast-paced, dramatic games that could be played in spaces where time was a rare commodity, for example in community centres.
F.E.A.R. -which had developed out of a dōjin circle, like so many other game studios -introduced ideas and mechanics for scenes to its games.
This cut the play experience into smaller chunks, and encouraged metagaming. 12 Such mechanics produce a clearly structured narrative instead of an endless series of events without a distinct end, common for many TRPG campaigns before Tenra. According to Kitkowski, Tenra and subsequent titles focus "on the anime/manga/console gaming 12 Meta-gaming refers to decisions that are based on dramatic effect or narrative plausibility instead of sticking to character knowledge or motivation.
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing  The artwork of F.E.A.R. games (see fig. 1) and also those of competitors underscores his point and links Japanese TRPG to the broader sphere of stylistic elements globally referred to as manga and promoted by the Japanese government as Japanese. Many illustrators Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the "West" Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017) 60 also produce common story-manga in addition to creating images for TRPG books. Inoue Jun'ichi is one of them. Many US games, such as D&D, favour artwork that is closer to neoclassicism and sometimes photorealism (see fig. 2). When talking to "old school" gamers at the international game trade-show SPIEL in Essen, they suggested to Kondō from Bōken, for example, that he should avoid the manga-style artwork of his games when attempting to enter the German TRPG market.
Furthermore, Japanese game designers explain the desired dramatic pacing by referencing scenes from well-known anime. Again, Western TRPGs of the first hour and their successors, such as D&D or Rolemaster (Fenlon, Charlton 1982), aim less at narrativism and more at realism, resulting in often extremely complicated rules that take into account each and every possible situation or circumstance. The game mechanics of current Japanese TRPGs also often borrow from console games, such as Zelda (Miyamoto, Tezuka 1986) which was widely popular in Japan and use far less complex rules in order to immediately capture their audience. This paratextual mixture of rules, setting and artwork (cf. Jara

2013) is what Kitkowski calls the Japaneseness of Tenra that he found
appealing and subsequently highlighted as the core difference of J-RPGs.

Kickstarting a Sword & Sorcery Jidaigeki: Tenra Banshō Zero
The world of Tenra adds another layer to the mix, and this is the second entangled meaning of Japanese. Its game world is a planet populated by daimyō (feudal rulers), samurai, pseudo-Buddhist monks, Shinto priests and geisha-like artisans, but also hosts sorcery, creatures from Japanese folklore (oni, tengū) and magic-fuelled technology such as mecha and cyborgs popular from sci-fi anime. Set in a world analogue to the Warring States (sengoku) era of Japan (ca. 1467 -1603 C.E.), the game appears like a sword & sorcery jidaigeki (period piece, e.g., in the form of a TV show). Jidaigeki, however, have been problematized as a specific form of nihonjin-ron (theories of the Japanese): 13 a nostalgia for and reaffirmation of supposedly traditional Japanese ways and values.
[They depict] a 'pure' Japan, untainted by the 'barbarism' of the 'red-haired devils' of the West. People wear kimonos and clothing with Japanese family crests. They have Japanese hairstyles. They eat Japanese food and drink Japanese sake or shōchū. 14 They live in Japanese-style wooden houses, sleep in Japanese bedding laid out on tatami straw matting, and bathe in Japanese baths. They visit Japanese temples and speak a language that is pure and uncontaminated by foreign words (Moeran 2010, 154-155) The advent of jidaigeki coincides with post-war challenges to the nihonjin-ron idea of a homogenous society in the form of migrant labourers and Japanese-speaking foreigners. The genre appears as "reprocessing" history, and so as a "'structured a feeling' of Japaneseness at the very juncture of its undermining," offering lost Confucian-values and ideals embodied by mythic heroes (Standish 2011, 434 14 Usually translated as rice wine and distilled liqueur, respectively. Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing The concern over Japaneseness also plays out on role-playing related forums, for example, on RPG.net, where a participant sought clarification on which parts of L5R are "truly Japanese" and which are not (Smarttman 2014).
Kitkowski's nose for authenticity -however nostalgic a reconstruction this concept may refer to -and its appeal to non- Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing Right on the heels of the public release followed very positive reviews, even from people who expressed a dislike for anime: Thus, Tenra seems to have hit the mark by offering game mechanics that set it apart from the English-language mainstream and by flowing into an interest in an exotic image of Japan (ninja, samurai etc.) that also fuels manga sales abroad -drawing into question the argument that Japanese popular media are so successful due to their "odourless-ness," 16 See: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/diamondsutra/ryuutama-natural-fantasy-roleplaying-game?ref=users (accessed 2016/06/24). 17 See: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/111713/Tenra-Bansho-Zero-Heaven-and-Earth-Edition?term=Tenra (accessed 2016/06/24).

Tenra and "Western" Values
However, Kitkowski also received criticism which displaced the translation of Tenra from the realms of fantasy into the sphere of Kitkowski first explains cultural differences concerning nudity in the West versus Japan and the rest of Asia, where one might encounter a "non-sexual nudity and casualness that can be strange (and frightening!) to foreigners." Who is meant by "foreigners" appears obscure if one does not consider the blog's target audience, which is predominantly Anglo-Saxon and often critical of seemingly overt sexuality. Kitkowski adds that Japanese culture would also be characterised by modesty and shame (cf. Ruth Benedict's well-known way of brokerage, 1946), which is why buyers could receive paper sleeves for their purchases in bookstores to conceal the nature of their purchases.
However, regardless of supposedly Japanese morals in any general sense, in Tenra's particular case, the cover and other artwork was, in Kitkowski's view, due to Inoue Jun'ichi's otaku-hood: The original designer of the game had a history of producing pornographic dollswith which he earned tremendous success but also criticism -and was merely not aware of how others might react to his illustrations, according to Kitkowski. Being married today "returned him in part to a real world with real people [ so that] now his art lacks most of the 'gooeyness' of the past." In order to rescue Japan from being seen as a strange, nudist, crotch-fetishizing "other," Kitkowski deflects criticism to the otaku stereotype of a reclusive, asocial media enthusiast. 18 He follows what I call "the disclaiming mode" to highlight what is good and what is deviant: He deflects negative images onto an "other" only to strengthen the connection between the negative image and the practices and people it is applied to (cf. Kamm, 2015). Still, Inoue himself attributes the shift in focus of his art and work to his now being part of a family, without condemning his previous work or denying his otakuhood (cf. Yajima 2013bYajima , 2013a. 19 Kreider's blog post goes on to question why female manga artists also create nude scenes of their adolescent characters or write porn-manga, which Kitkowski again explains with a general casualness towards nudity. The discussion of this blog post and the general arguments of 18 Especially in the English-language discourse the naturalisation of otaku as a single but global social group of "fans" proceeds and conflates the different, political and often negative uses of the term in Japanese with the positive self-descriptor of non-Japanese fans of manga and anime. A purely negative view as well as the current "triumphant narrative" about the mainstreaming of otaku equally overlook the tensions and contradictions inherent in this debated term (for a detailed discussion, see Galbraith, Kam, Kamm 2015). 19 He chose to keep his rather otaku-ish self-image in his bestselling manga Yue to nihongo (Yue and Japanese) about his Chinese wife's struggles with learning Japanese, for example, because he felt that it better matched the kind of statements he would like to express (Inoue 2013;Yajima 2013b).
In the instance of their translation and border crossing, these games become node points for (re-) establishing boundaries: the West versus Japan, normal people versus "crotch-fetishizing otaku," sexually moral against "cultural islandism" can also be heard on the RPG.net forums.
As a translator in the most common sense of the term, a mediator between languages, Andy Kitkowski's activities highlight his "manifest" brokerage: He has actively enrolled many other actors to build a network that resulted in the translation of Tenra, beginning with nonhuman actors such as Japanese textbooks, OCR-software, and telephones, but also including humans in the form of a fan basemainly known to him through their RPG.net accounts -which would back his project on Kickstarter. Kitkowski was not a faithful translator of the Japanese language, though again, "unfaithfulness" or "infidelity" are not meant in any morally negative sense here, but refer to the work and changes that go hand-in-hand with any translation (cf. Law 2006) and in particular, to the many adjustments necessary to sell Tenra to an Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing table-top J-RPGs to the "West" Mutual Images, Vol. 2 (2017) 69 audience that is perceived and perceives itself as different from the "original" Japanese one, as Kreider's questions attest: This game deserved more than a slap translation into English and then a kick to the presses: It needed to be more than looked at, it needed to be played. And to be played, it needed more: More history, more information, more cultural notes, more everything in order for people who didn't grow up in Japan watching weeerkly [sic!] samurai dramas and reading ninja manga to be able to understand the game enough to play. So as I was translating the book, I started adding this "More" myself (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014, 34;emphasis original).
He changed what he transported ('broker as media, ' Höh, Jaspert and Oesterle 2013a) and added those notes and explanations as a "nifty culture point" on the "quintessential" TRPG experience in Japan: singing in a karaoke box (Kitkowski, Inoue 2014, 100, Game Rules). Issuing Director's Notes with more explanations of cultural concepts and the game's background (Kitkowski 2015), 20 he also addressing the fear that he may have diluted the authenticity of the original with his amendments (Spike 2015). 21 The interview with Anna Kreider gives the impression that he not only added but also omitted elements, for example illustrations that might be offensive for an imagined Western audience, such as the cover. The potentially offending images he supposedly omitted but just did not include, however, were never part of the core rule book itself but came with supplements, from which he only incorporated some rules and bits of information.
These additions and explanations point to the economic dimension of cultural brokerage: Without the backing of nearly two thousand 20 In these Director's Notes, Kitkowski himself addresses the issue of knowledge diffusion himself, e.g. concerning Buddhism (ibid, 4). 21 The additions amount to approx. 1.5 pages in total and are mostly limited to sidebars (Kitkowski 2015).
Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing only one poster on RPG.net self-identified as a Japanese. In the past, there had been active Japanese users on English-language platforms, for example during a dispute about the fictional Japan of the science-fiction cyberpunk game Shadowrun (Charrette, Hume and Dowd, 1989).
Japanese gamers were dissatisfied with the image of a weak Japanese state in a supplemental setting book created by GroupSNE (Egawa, GroupSNE 1996). They created their own setting, in which Japan was an aggressive imperial dictator state -which they found more fitting to the overall dystopian background of the game -and distributed their ideas via the pre-Internet USENET group rec.games.frp.cyber (Nishio 1996(Nishio , 1997. Since then, the number of active Japanese users of Englishlanguage sites seems to have waned. During my fieldwork, I conducted over twenty episodic interviews with gamers from the Kantō, Chūbu and Kansai areas of Japan and spoke to dozens of other players and game designers who by and large said that they visit some English websites but would mostly use Japanese-language sites. The Japanese-language Web has grown to such a degree, also including TRPGs, that they see no necessity for engaging with websites in other languages. Many also admitted (or rather assumed) that their language proficiency would not be sufficient to post on forums, thus they remain silent.
Similarly, TRPG-related sites and groups, for example on the Japanese Facebook-like portal mixi.jp, seem to attract only very few selfproclaimed non-Japanese. As has been discussed elsewhere (Kamm 2013), one reason for this limited participation comes in the guise of non-human mediators. To register with mixi.jp and create a profile page, one is asked for a keitai mail address, an address only assigned by Japanese telecommunication companies such as DoCoMo or Softbank, Brokers of "Japaneseness": Bringing and linked to a Japanese mobile phone. After registration, a verification link is sent to the mobile or recently also to smartphones. On Englishlanguage forums, I encountered a number of players who were interested in Japanese games, some of whom also claimed Japanese language skills -so limited knowledge of Japanese could not be the reason for their non-participation. This is where the aforementioned verification script turns from simple intermediary as part of the registration process to an active mediator that blocks anyone from joining mixi who does not reside in Japan and who has no Japanese mobile phone contract. Because prepaid phones are not equipped with browser functionality, a contract phone is necessary to register and for that one needs a zairyū-kādo, a residency card gained only with a longterm visa. Thus, despite the Internet's assumed capability to connect anyone with everyone, a few lines of code can become a powerful mediator that stops flows of communication and creates boundaries, not due to xenophobic "us versus them" mentalities but due to privacy concerns: the script was implemented as an anti-spam measure.
However, mediators often bring other mediators into existence, in this case brokers such as Kitkowski who are able to overcome the obstacle presented by the verification script: His residency in Japan has given him access to Japanese language sites and games, and he has also obtained the language proficiency to translate for all those who cannot come to Japan or speak the language. By doing so, he overcomes the obstacles of non-human mediators (languages, scripts) and their boundaries to as act as spokesperson for the silent entities, players and original games alike.

In Lieu of a Conclusion
Kitkowski is only one of many cultural brokers I encountered who overcome different obstacles and create different networks. Kondō Kōshi and Bōken, for example, continuously bring Japanese-language games to the attention of European and American audiences via international trade shows, such as the SPIEL in Germany, but have difficulties in overcoming major points of passages and centres of calculation, such as customs duties. Kitkowski emerges as one of the most successful cultural brokers, making use of as many materials and connectors as possible, ranging from forums and conventions to crowd funding and podcasts. By crossing boundaries, however, modes of brokerage also rely on and rebuild borders, such as the Japaneseness and the J-RPGs they seek to translate.
The second main characteristic of these modes besides the use of other mediators is that something is at stake when they mediate. All cultural brokers I encountered at least seek to promote something they like and maybe profit from it, even if that only means that they can play more games of a kind they prefer. For some the stakes are higher, seeking a profession that does not only sustain them but gives something back, that produces joy. So they aim not only at creating a reality in which Japanese games can find a place in the English language market, but in which they can make a place for themselves. This active "reality making" or "world building" by enrolling RPGs as a resource entangles their brokerage with modes of enterprise. Brokers such as Kitkowski focus thereby on bridging language barriers and distributing information to which they have access. Other actors of enterprise play with other cultures, such as the culture of a hobby and the culture of a