Sorry for the clickbait but its the main example of what I am really asking about. On r/historymemes there is often a post with falling dominos progressively getting larger, implying the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand inevitably led to the creation of anime. Obviously, this is a gross exaggeration for the meme, but it makes me wonder: How do historians assign cause to events and is there a truth to the x caused y caused z therefore x caused z logic?
The idea of causation comes to the discipline of history from philosophy, and it isn't strictly a case of logic in that it usually can't be broken down into axioms like "if x causes y, and y causes z, then z causes z." This is the "for want of a nail" approach, where a single event causes a chain of subsequent events, going back to a hypothetical first cause.
But that's a very narrow approach when you think of it. There is very rarely any incident where a single event is responsible for something by itself; it normally depends on many other different factors being in the right place at the right time for that to work.
What you normally see is historians using or influenced by different theories of causation that reflect a broader and more complicated idea of causation - i.e. that there are multiple causes that go into any given historical event or trend. So if we look at German sociologist Max Weber, he argued for two types of causation:
Adequate causation where multiple causes go into an event, and the removal of any one is not necessarily sufficient to prevent that event. So, for example, if you have a bunch of people that gathered together in a protest and a riot broke out, you normally cannot single out one individual as the sole cause of the riot - it was everyone there, acting as they would in those circumstances.
Chance causation also assumes multiple causes, but one in particular has overwhelming importance. This is usually what we consider when we talk about Gavrilo Princip; there were a lot of factors that went into the conflict that became World War I, but because of who he was and where he was and what he did in assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he is often considered a causal factor.
Now, there is always the possibility that even if Princip had failed something would have set off World War I eventually, and you can see how chance causation can dovetail with the "Great Man Theory" of history that gives greater importance for some historical individuals at the expense of our understanding of others. This is part of the reason that in the postmodern historical world, we tend to look beyond one key individual and try to identify broader understanding of the historical context - and the multiplicity of causes that go into any given event.
So to take "Did Gavrilo Princip cause anime?" as an example, the causal chain that might lead someone to say "yes" would be something like:
That is one chain of argument; we could create others. As it happens, this is wrong in several key aspects: the Japanese began producing animation in 1917, and major stylistic achievements by creators like Tezuka Osamu came about in post-war Japan more because of their age (he was born in 1928 and was 17 in 1945 when the war ended) than the occupation per se - but that is kind of where it gets sticky. Manga and anime in Japan have a longer history as an expression of Japanese art and literature, and took in a multiplicity of sources of inspiration. Walt Disney and American comic books were among them, and quite a bit influential (and vice versa - Tezuka's Kimba The White Lion was obviously a major inspiration for Disney's The Lion King, despite some hollow protests.)
And that's just looking at the end of the chain of events. Every person has many grandfathers, as the saying goes; Gavrilo Princip was not the sole cause of WWI, much less WWII or the atom bomb. He was one cause among many in a complex series of events that led, eventually, to the development of Japanese anime and manga today - but you may use the same kind of chain of reasoning to say that Qin Shi Huang caused anime.
It is a kind of historical narrowsightedness that assigns a single cause (or, in some cases, blame) to disparate historical events. There are certainly influential individuals, but none of them are living in a vacuum. Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke, but he wasn't the only one gunning for Franz Ferdinand, nor did Princip create the socio-political situation that made the Archduke's death such a trigger for the events that followed.