Touching Japanese Popular Culture: From Flows to Contact for Ethnographic Analysis

Abstract

This essay explores the idea of touch as a means to think about Japanese popular culture in a transnational perspective. In the years since Appadurai coined the idea of ‘scapes’ of flow, we have witnessed a growing interest in phenomena associated with border crossing. As a counterpoint, I consider several examples of Japanese culture that could be seen as ‘transnational flow’, but provide different insights if viewed in terms of touch, encounter, and contact. In particular, I consider a Japanese rapper's dismay at the selection of his album cover as one of the worst of 2010, an American reviewer's distaste at a style of Japanese figurine production, and the integration of contemporary art exhibits in a rural island community in Japan. In each case, the moments and spaces of contact point to a way of understanding cultural influence less via the process of crossing borders than in terms of highlighting locations where cultural difference comes into contact. These examples of ‘touch’ also offer a way of understanding what makes fieldwork and ethnography such a useful analytical perspective for Japanese studies.