‘I am human’: A Blochian glance at daydreams in Turkish advertising and popular culture

This chapter examines the commodification of popular culture in Japan as well as the capacity of the domestic market to manufacture and export anime, movies, video games, television programs, music, and manga. It first considers the structure of Japan's cultural industries and the process of cultural commodification based on examples from music, television, and manga in order to provide a broad picture of the Japanese popular culture markets. It then discusses the main features of popular culture production and the capacity of Japan's cultural industries for production, consumption, and export. It also explores the role of “freeters” and “otaku” in Japan's popular culture production, along with the Japanese government's involvement in the production and export of popular culture and its initiatives to support the sector. It argues that the structure and size of the domestic market and the experience of Japan's cultural industries at home have fostered the competitiveness of Japanese popular culture products abroad.

The themes of terrorism and counter-terrorism have infused the America media’s cultural production for several decades. These popular culture products were designed first for consumption by domestic audiences but also for export to audiences throughout the world, quickly assuming a role in US cultural imperialism. Much of this production took the form of news reports about political turmoil, sectarian violence and liberation, independence or nationalist movements—almost always occurring “somewhere else” in the world. Still others appeared as fictional narratives embedded within diverse entertainment genres such as political thrillers, war, sci-fi, romance and suspense, sometimes in a lifeworld that paralleled that of the domestic audience. But more often than not this production took the form of lifeworlds mimicking foreign lands, mythical pasts, or dystopian futures. Popular culture’s tales of terrorism and counter-terrorism maintained this relatively stable pattern for much of the last quarter of the 20th century. Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 considerably impacted that narrative pattern, and while not fundamentally changing the script, this attack resulted in significant rewrites. To begin, the portrayal of terrorism and the War on Terror, both real and fictionalized, became the central theme in a great deal of popular culture, including television programs, feature films, PC/video games, YouTube videos, advertisements, popular music, and of course, the news. These mediated texts—in essence, stories that the US cultural industries tell about terrorism and the state’s attempts to fight it—reconstituted the social reality of terrorism and counter-terrorism. In the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks, the American cultural industries increasingly served as a conduit for US hegemony, both at home and abroad. While there is a long history of arm’s-length cooperation between the state and the entertainment industry in the production of popular culture products that can be traced back to the early 1930s, the immediate post-9/11 period heralded an era of not only more terrorism and counter-terrorism narratives but also narratives whose content changed incrementally (but ultimately markedly) largely as a result of the state’s direct involvement in crafting them. Chief among the changes was the streamlining of a narrative that emphasized the growing ubiquity of terrorist threats to the American people on US soil. Indeed, in the lifeworlds created by post-9/11 popular culture, terrorism and counter-terrorism are no longer things that happen primarily or exclusively elsewhere. America’s business interests abroad, its embassies and military installations, are no longer the only likely targets of terrorist activity. These traditional targets have been augmented by many others, including iconic buildings in major cities, national monuments, and critical infrastructure—as well as by more mundane parts of the US landscape, such as schools, sports stadiums, amusement parks, and shopping malls. Like that espoused by the state, the culture industries’ narrative is clear; no one is safe from terrorism. Predictably, the narrative shift that amplified the danger, barbarism, and proliferation of the terrorist threat was complimented by one which aggrandized the counter-terrorist efforts of the United States. In popular culture’s various lifeworlds counter-terrorism strategies, no matter how extreme, are understood as reasonable and legitimate. The narratives, comprised almost wholly of fetishized presentations of military, national security, and law enforcement agents with state- of-the-art weaponry dispatching terrorists with deadly force, provide virtually no political or socio-historical context and offer no alternative to resolving conflicts other than the unfettered use of state violence. As such, popular culture’s presentation of terrorism and counter-terrorism serves to provide the resolution that the real-world War on Terror promised but did not deliver, while at the same time contributing to a narrative that demands its continuation.

This ambitious work provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded study of the production, circulation, and reception of Japanese popular culture in Asia. While many studies typically employ an interactive approach that focuses on the of popular culture from an anthropological or cultural studies point of view, Regionalizing Culture emphasises that the consumption side and contextual meaning of popular culture are not the only salient factors in accounting for its proliferation. The production side and organisational aspects are also important. In addition to presenting individual case studies, the book offers a big-picture view of the dramatic changes that have taken place in popular culture production and circulation in Asia over the past two decades. The author has gleaned information from primary sources in Japanese, English, and other languages; research visits to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul; as well as insights of people with firsthand knowledge from within the cultural industries. From this broad range of source, he develops an integrative political economic approach to popular culture. Regionalizing Culture offers a dialectical look at the organisation of cultural production, primarily at the structure and control of cultural industries, interconnections between companies and production networks, and relations between the business sector and the state. It traces the rise of Japan as a popular culture powerhouse and the expansion of its cultural industries into Asian markets. It looks as well at the creation of markets for Japanese cultural commodities since the late 1980s, the industrial and normative impact that Japanese cultural industries have on the structure of the local cultural industries, and the wider implications these processes have for the Asian region. The growing popularity and importance of Japan's popular culture will make this book a basic text for scholars and students of popular culture as well as for those interested in political economy, media and communication studies, Japanese-Asian relations, Asian studies, and international relations.

While the common ground of art and popular culture products is human creativity, popular culture products, as the name suggests, are the products of the people. But it is possible that the productions that the public will like, turn into mass culture today, where the economic determinant is dominant. However, regardless of its basic motivation, it is possible to say that every work that contains the core of creativity has a relationship with the unconscious, which is the field of creativity. What can we see by considering movies with an analytical psychology approach? What do these productions, which contain elements from myths, fairy tales and dreams, tell us from the field of the unconscious?The Matrix series has managed to impress the audience since the first movie was released and attracted the attention of many researchers from different fields. In this study, the relationship of cinema with myth, dream, and fairy tale is evaluated from a psychoanalytic perspective, and the Matrix series and especially the last film of the series, The Matrix Resurrections (Lena Wachovski, 2021), is tried to be examined with the guidance of Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. The film, which opens up many fields of inquiry with its approach to reality, is this time handled with an approach from the field of inner reality. For this reason, this study tries to look at the elements of the film, which can be associated with popular culture and the culture industry, from the field of the unconscious. For this purpose, Jung's approach based on myths, dreams and ancient beliefs that he examined in order to understand the unconscious of man is used.

As the mass media penetrates social life increasingly, the area of social studies with the focus on the popular culture is becoming increasingly an interesting field for academical studies. In Turkey, popular culture products have increased in occurance, to the wide masses as an entertainment element occupying their whole lives than a directly engaged cultural output. Particularly after the privatization of the broadcasting industry, many television stations actualized the theme by focusing on programming of heavily popular cultural content. These reasons have made the overlapping areas of media and popular culture a worthwhile academical field of study. This study is focused on celebrity contests on television in particular and on popular culture in general. Because popular culture is emitted through the media and is consumed by individuals, the object of this study is to deliver an answer why -as typical popular culture products- celebrity contests are so much in demand among audiences in Turkey. The study is basically divided into three sections. The first section introduces the relation of the media and culture while the second section evaluates the relationship of popular culture and the media. The last section explains the methodological aspects used in the study. The sample of the study is selected from Konya and consists of 939 people. In the study various hypotheses have been tested on the relationship of media and popular culture.

This article offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary popular culture in the United States, with a focus on its development over the past two decades. The research encompasses various theoretical approaches, including philosophical, economic, sociological, psychological, historical, and anthropological perspectives, aiming to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of popular culture within the context of globalization and digital transformation. Attention is given to the impact of recommendation algorithms on popular culture, particularly their role in fostering cultural homogenization, personalizing cultural experiences, and shaping new cultural trends. The issues of cultural hybridization, the ritualization of social practices, and the significance of collective memory in the context of popular culture are also explored. Historical analysis reveals the periodization and evolution of cultural institutions, while the socio-anthropological approach highlights the importance of symbolic structures in the formation of cultural narratives. The philosophical lens emphasizes the postmodern characteristics of contemporary popular culture, including the deconstruction of traditional cultural patterns, and analyzes the dynamics of metaphysical concepts, particularly the idea of presence within the conditions of hyperreality. Sociological methodologies assist in addressing the structuration of cultural practices and adaptive processes of socialization through social networks and other digital platforms, which are emerging as new spaces for the construction of social identities. The psychological analysis focuses on the cognitive and emotional effects induced by popular culture, including cognitive disintegration caused by excessive media consumption, and the impact of social comparison on self-esteem and the psychological well-being of individuals. It is emphasized that popular culture products can be designed to appeal to unconscious desires and internalized norms, shaping motivational structures and social behavior patterns. The economic perspective highlights the processes of commodification of cultural products and the monetization of cultural industries. The article underscores the necessity of integrating these approaches to gain a deeper understanding of how contemporary popular culture in the United States influences global cultural processes and shapes the future directions of cultural practices and social structures. The conclusions emphasize the importance of an interdisciplinary approach that allows for a comprehensive consideration of the impact of popular culture on society, its cultural norms, identities, and social dynamics.

In the years between the two World Wars, Italian publishing houses Rizzoli, Mondadori, and Vitagliano worked on the model of a specific ‘popular’ weekly. They built up a combination of periodicals constituting a complete and integrated offer, experimenting marketing strategies — such as frequency, distribution, price, and advertising message — and editorial formulae capable of attracting a large readership. This article analyzes these strategies and formulae in weeklies, so-called rotocalchi, such as Il Secolo Illustrato, Novella, Lei (by Rizzoli), Le Grandi Firme, Grazia (by Mondadori) and Excelsior (by Vitagliano). As the analysis shows, their publishers and editors focused on a product based on both a precise interpretation of the concept of ‘popularity’ and an interpretation of the expression ‘popular culture’ that was different from that of the past, when ‘popular’ cultural products were such because they were destined for the uneducated and less well to-do classes. Rizzoli, Mondadori, and Vitagliano abandoned this static view and the hierarchy of cultural systems and adopted a different, more modern, more flexible, and more dynamic approach. In their case, rather than being associated with a distinct sector of the audience, the popular cultural product looked towards an undifferentiated group of readers: it was ‘for everyone’. In this meaning, ‘popular’ no longer had a qualitative significance — ‘for the people’ — but a quantitative one: ‘as widespread as possible’. By the same token, they did not limit themselves to pleasing an audience that already existed, but tended to ‘build’ their own, winning over those who were not yet part of it.

Reviewed by: The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano Michael Dylan Foster The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 295. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper, $25.00 e-book. There is always a complex and ambiguous relationship between state-imposed order and cultural practices that critique that order, between official hierarchies and popular behaviors that subvert such hierarchies. Nowhere is this relationship more evident than in Tokugawa-period Japan, known both for the rigidity of government authority and the simultaneous rise of a vibrant urban culture, with such creative, expressive forms as kabuki 歌舞伎 and puppet theater, spectacle shows (misemono 見世物), woodblock prints (ukiyo-e 浮世絵), and myriad inexpensive written and illustrated texts. In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination Katsuya Hirano explores this period, and the complex interactions of power and play that characterize it, through close readings and theoretical considerations of a number of popular culture products, along with some of the legal edicts and philosophical documents with which they were in conversation. The book opens with a long quotation from Louis Althusser, the influential twentieth-century Marxist thinker. Indeed, the words and work of Althusser—along with a panoply of other Marxist and post-Marxist philosophers, sociologists, historians, and literary critics—inform Hirano’s thought-provoking readings of cultural production under the Tokugawa bakufu 幕府. The “dialogic imagination” of the title is also, of course, an explicit reference to M.M. Bakhtin and his [End Page 476] focus on the “dialogical interaction of divergent voices and perspectives” (p. 3).1 Hirano’s own focus is the way in which conflicting voices within popular culture, particularly from the eighteenth century onward, critiqued the hegemonic order and “provoked the sustained concern and interference of the authorities” (p. 2). He also explores how these relationships changed with the onset of Meiji-period modernity. Hirano chooses to use the body and its regulation as a touchstone for exploring the complex interplay between popular cultural production and the hegemonic discourse of the Tokugawa government and Neo-Confucian elite. He explains in chapter 1 that, to the powers of the early Edo period, an idle body or a body at play was a problem: “The state made attempts consistently to delimit the meaning and function of the body to the moral imperative of productive work based on its deep concern that the failure to regulate the body, especially its excessive desire, would result in people’s awakening to the irrepressible presence of history” (p. 68). The formal structure of the state, with its official hierarchies and rice-based economy, was threatened during the eighteenth century by the emergence of “a new space of cultural production and consumption” (p. 56). Each of the next three chapters focuses on a different form of production within this new space. But rather than structure his argument around specific genres—for example, kabuki, woodblock prints, puppet theater, gesaku 戯作, and the like—Hirano explores particular rhetorical modes of expression: parody in chapter 2, comic realism in chapter 3, and grotesque realism in chapter 4. The concluding chapter of the book (chap. 5) focuses on the Meiji period and new discourses on subjectivity that emphasize “interiority” over bodily desires and excesses. A careful reading of Hirano’s text reveals a narrative arc that traces the meaning of the body in popular culture. In chapter 1, we see the rift between individual bodily desires and the imperatives of governmental power expressed through, for example, the love-suicide dramas of Chikamatsu Monzaemon 近松門左衛門 (1653-1724). This sort of dramatic and literary expression gives way in chapter 2 to the [End Page 477] visceral, defamiliarizing parodies by writers such as Santō Kyōden 山東京伝 (1761-1816), which are followed in chapter 3 by the laughter in response to a master farter in a spectacle show. And this bodily humor resonates in chapter 4 with the emergence of a critical role for the grotesque and ghostly body in late Edo-period kabuki such as, for example, The Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan 東海道四谷怪談) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV 鶴屋南北 (1755-1829). Throughout...

Cultural systems are grouped into high culture, folk culture and popular culture. High cultural, scientific, philosophical, aesthetic information, etc. Folk culture is based on folklore information from the past day. Popular culture represents the degraded and dissolved state of traditional cultures, various subculture areas, which have failed after modernization efforts.
 The aim of the study is to reveal the influence of young musical genres on the entrepreneurial tendencies. The first method used in the research is the questionnaire survey for senior students studying in the university business and economics.
 According to the survey data, questionnaires were distributed out of a total of 350 students, only to the evaluation of the survey of 311 eligible. The most important findings of the research can be summarized as follows. While 6,1% of the "youth of higher education" who participated in the survey preferred "high culture product" music; 10,6% were "folk culture products" music; and 83,3% preferred "popular culture product" music.
 The "entrepreneurship tendencies", which are the main aim of the subjects of "education for young people" receiving basic courses in economics and business administration, were found to be 131,5 (Min 36, Max.180). According to the research findings, in the direction of the basic assumption of the study, "entrepreneurial tendencies" of students who prefer music, which is a high cultural product, are higher than others. The sort of "entrepreneurial tendencies" is followed by popular genres and popular music genres.

Creative Misreadings of "Thai BL" by a Filipino Fan CommunityDislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption Thomas Baudinette (bio) While browsing the internet one night in late December 2014, I encountered a Thai television soap opera, or lakhon, named Lovesick: The Series. As a scholar of Japanese queer popular culture who investigates boys love (hereafter BL), a genre of homoerotic media produced and consumed primarily by heterosexual women,1 I quickly recognized that Lovesick conformed to the generic tropes associated with classic Japanese BL texts.2 Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had serendipitously stumbled upon an emerging genre of popular culture known in Thailand as "series wai."3 But in 2015, as I scoured the internet to learn more about this intriguing series, I came across English-language fan spaces on Facebook where Lovesick was being discussed as representative of a phenomenon that fans called "Thai BL."4 Curious, I began to observe these English-language fansites for "Thai BL" and determined that the majority of the people participating in the space were young Filipino men and women and that most sites were curated and administrated by Filipino men who identified as gay. In fact, the Philippines has emerged as an important space for fandom of so-called Thai BL, a point recently recognized by Philippine media.5 As I observed such fan sites over several years, it became increasingly apparent that the Filipino men and women participating in this fandom viewed BL as fundamentally Thai and that they actively attempted to differentiate it from what they called "Japanese yaoi."6 For these fans, BL was positioned as a form of Thai popular culture and was therefore understood to be categorically not Japanese. Previous work exploring the transnational circulation of BL has tended to advance theory which firmly centers Japan within its analysis, exploring how "culturally Japanese" products such as BL are adapted or "glocalized" to new contexts.7 Many of these studies draw upon Koichi Iwabuchi's seminal exploration of the transnational circulation of Japanese popular culture throughout East and Southeast Asia in the late 1990s.8 Iwabuchi develops a sophisticated [End Page 101] framework for understanding how the "cultural odor" of a product—that is, a product's recognizability and desirability based in its embeddedness or centering within a specific cultural context—plays an influential role in its reception. Iwabuchi further contends that the Japanese government has played an active role in bolstering the Japanese "cultural odor" of certain popular culture products such as anime and manga by essentializing what he terms Japan's "national brand."9 Throughout his scholarship, Iwabuchi calls upon scholars to "re-center" Japan within processes of globalization and to draw upon this re-centering of Japan as a space for critical reflection on the politics of transnational cultural flow. In so doing, Iwabuchi suggests, scholars can account for the influence of national producers on the reception of Japanese cultural products outside Japan.10 Iwabuchi's theories of transnational flow are useful in understanding the processes of adaption when a Japanese cultural product such as BL leaves Japan and enters a new national space. But Iwabuchi's theories become less useful for understanding how a glocalized product further transnationalizes and potentially develops new meanings and associations through this process. Iwabuchi's insistence on "centering" analysis on the point of production (i.e., Japan) thus fails to account for situations when the so-called cultural odor of Japan is diminished or even extinguished. Furthermore, Iwabuchi's emphasis on critical reflection based in "centering" analysis on Japan may lead one to conclude that consumers who fail to recognize the "Japaneseness" of a cultural product such as BL are somehow "mistaken." While I am broadly sympathetic to Iwabuchi's scholarly project, I am concerned by his criticisms of fans whose reading practices are positioned as "misunderstanding" Japan's role in the production of the texts that they consume. Like Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto, I am also troubled by Iwabuchi's conflation of nation and culture and his lack of engagement with the intensely affective nature of fannish consumption.11 Taking inspiration from Eve Sedgwick's call to read data through...

Today, Japanese popular culture stands as one of the leading and most prominent popular cultures around the world. Many researchers from the West studied Japanese popular culture and its relation to various aspects, namely teaching and learning Japanese, tourism, product selling, and also cultural exchange between Japan and the rest of the world. The current study aims to investigate the consumption of Japanese popular culture products among the Japanese language learners at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). The result from the study indicates that the consumption of Japanese popular culture products is high among Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) learners, and this could be implied that they are very interested in anime, manga, song, and seiyu (voice actor), and these are used as a tool to improve their proficiency in the Japanese language.

Reasearch problem/aim: In this study, it was aimed to evaluate them under the titles of the sports sector (media, consumption, marketing) by mentioning primarily popular culture and sports issues. Method: In this study, a descriptive research model, which is used to investigate the events as they are, trying to determine the situation that happened, investigating the events and situations discussed in detail and examining their relationship. Findings: The notion that sports is one of the building blocks of popular culture, and as a result of its action, the media sheds considerable light on consumption and marketing. The popular culture field, which started to develop as a field of study on its own, has become important by societies in the world and scientific studies on this subject have increased rapidly. Especially the innovations brought by popular culture in the world and the rapidly increasing interest in sports, media, marketing and consumer products have made this issue more up-to-date. Today, most of the sources explain that popular culture is under the influence of the media and that sports, marketing and consumption provide access to more people. Especially, social media, which enters our homes and becomes the most important part of our daily life, is extremely important in creating and conveying these topics (sports, marketing, consumption). In this context, the relationship between popular culture, media, consumption and marketing in sports and their roles among each other was discussed as a result of the extensive literature review. Conclusion: it is seen that sports have an effect on popular culture products on media, marketing and consumption.

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss‐crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub‐processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a ‘cultural’ boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia’; a potential ‘East Asian identity’, emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable.

Until 2010 Japan's popular culture is still a popular culture product, but post-2010 popularity of Japanese popular culture products began to decline. Facing this situation Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) initiated Japan to popularize Japan's popular culture and increase the revenue of Japan's creative industries that produce popular culture contents through the Cool Japan/Creative Industry policy. This policy aims to promote Japanese popular culture content with the theme of Cool Japan abroad and also to increase the revenue of Japanese creative industries. With the formulation of this policy is expected to become an alternative source of declining Japanese national income. METI will then conduct cultural diplomacy as a strategy of this policy in several countries including the United States, France and Singapore by holding cultural events in these countries as a means of promoting and influencing the interest of overseas consumers. Keywords: METI, Cool Japan/Creative Industry, Popular Culture, Cultural Diplomacy

There has been a surge in the interest in Japanese popular culture worldwide. The objective of this paper was to explore the extent to which products, images, and activities associated with Japanese popular culture are achieving the status of recognizable and sustainable consumer brands overseas. A specially designed survey was used to examine the levels of awareness, interest, and participation in Japanese popular cultural activities of individuals from different national backgrounds. Regression analysis and other statistical techniques were used to evaluate the empirical findings. The results strongly supported the view that Japanese popular culture products and services have tremendous branding potential overseas. By breaking down popular culture into recognizable components, it was possible to explore the underlying branding potential trends and gain insights into areas for further market development. This approach can be generally applied to the study of the development and marketing of popular culture products & services.