As a robot-obsessed kid growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, I always thought so. But for years, the anime and manga that drove me to learn Japanese and start a career in Tokyo was maligned as “junk culture” at best and scandalous at worst. One of my all-time favorite manga artists, Go Nagai, was even branded an “enemy of society” by Japanese school PTA groups after the publication of his admittedly edgy “Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School)” in the early ’70s.