Localising Japanese Popular Culture in the Philippines 93 Localising Japanese Popular Culture in the Philippines ―― Transformative Translations of Japan ’ s Cultural Industry Kristine Michelle L. SANTOS(クリスティンミシェル·サントス： Assistant Professor of Ateneo de Manila University) ✉ kmsantos@ateneo.edu (ピィリピン )Executive director of the Ateneo Library for Women’s Writing and assistant professor in the Department of History and the Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University. Her research focuses on women’s queer transformative literacies that challenge norms in popular media. She also researches the transnational flows and neoliberalization of these transformative literacies across Southeast Asia. Her recent publications,“Queer Affective Literacies：Examining “Rotten”Women’s Literacies in Japan”in Critical Arts(London： Taylor and Francis LTD, 2020) and “The Bitches of Boys Love Comics：The Pornographic Response of Japan’s Rotten Women,”in Porn Studies(London：Taylor and Francis LTD, 2020) highlight these queer transformative literacies and their transnational impacts. Localising Japanese Popular Culture in the Philippines ： Transformative Translations of Japan ’s Cultural Industry Japan’s Cool Japan Initiative has aimed to tap Japan’s cultural industry to boost the country’s soft power all over the globe. In Southeast Asia, Cool Japan has its merits in countries such as Thailand and Singapore where Japanese cultural products, ranging from restaurants to television shows, have become easily accessible. Borrowing from Koichi Iwabuchi, Cool Japan provides opportunities for the country to present their “cultural odour.” That said, when the government is no longer in control of different cultural products, this ‘cultural odour’ takes a different shape. As a country that has not been central to Cool Japan initiatives, the Philippines presents an interesting case of localisations that negotiate Japanese cultural products in the Philippines. Focusing on observations of Japan’s contents industry, particularly access to anime and manga, this paper highlights how local consumers have made efforts to transform the ‘cultural odour’ of these Japanese products. This paper focuses on digital outputs such as social media fan works and dōjinshi of popular anime shows that bravely challenge the meanings of these Japanese cultural products. I argue that these localisations present critical transformations of Japanese popular culture which has led to knowledge from deviates from normative notions of Japan. Keywords Cultural Diplomacy, New Literacies, Anime and Manga, Popular Culture Abstract