Contemporary Japanese Culture Research Articles

Replicating the White Self and Other: Skin Color, Racelessness, Gynoids, and the Construction of Whiteness in Japan

ABSTRACTThis article explores representations of whiteness in contemporary Japanese culture. Specifically, I argue that although representations of caucasian whiteness pervade Japanese media and popular culture, they have largely remained racially unmarked, scholarly and popular discourse presenting caucasian whiteness in cultural not racial termes, where it finds expression in notions of an idealized, fetishized, cosmopolitan westernness. As a result, the discourse of whiteness in Japan has largely escaped the kind of sustained critical commentary in Japan and the United States that characterizes the discourse of blackness and other explicitly racially marked Others as well as the literature on whiteness studies, which has yet to fully engage constructions of whiteness outside the (post)colonial experience and the Euro-Americocentric black/white binary. I discuss how representations of whiteness provide a template through which Japanese reflexively construct both the foreign White Other and the ‘white’ Japanese Self, the evaluation of these selves often being ambiguous and conflicted. I conclude that as Japan’s exposure to whites and non-whites increases and as its own internal diversity becomes more visibly salient, Japanese have begun to contest and more critically interrogate (re)presentations of themselves and to renegotiate their place within given racial and aesthetic hierarchies.

Franchising and Film in Japan: Transmedia Production and the Changing Roles of Film in Contemporary Japanese Media Cultures

Franchising practices in Japan are controlled by production committees that are collapsing the boundaries between media productions as Japan’s media industries work in collaboration to create large transmedia intertexts. This article examines the promotional discourses circulating around Japanese franchise fi lm releases to understand how these new franchising practices are affecting the roles and status of popular cinema in contemporary Japanese culture.

Design and Society in Modern Japan: An Introduction

Introduction to a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Review of Japanese Culture and Society. The introduction, which draws on the expertise and knowledge of the three co-authors in modern art history (Adriasola), social history of design (Teasley) and spatial design studies (Traganou), sets out research questions, challenges and opportunities for studying the relationship between design and society in Japan, 1900-2015, looking both historically and at contemporary practice. The introduction intends to introduce current concepts of design as social practice to historians and other arts, humanities and social science scholars of Japan, and to demonstrate how a perspective that sees social spaces and networks as 'designed', and that views design and architecture practice and products as valid, valuable examples of historical conditions, can enable humanities scholars to engage more effectively with research into modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society. The introduction also offers an overview of key historical developments and conditions for design as an industry, profession and product in Japan, c. 1900-present day. It ends by challenging scholars who engage with design in Japan to address questions around gender, class and other determinants of power relations, and to understand design as an expanded practice, beyond the outdated, inaccurate and limiting view of design that persists within Japanese studies.

Cultural specificity in food choice – The case of ethnography in Japan

Previous studies examining food choice from a cross-cultural perspective were based primarily on quantitative research using the Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ). This study suggests ethnography as a complementary research method in cross-cultural food choice studies.While use of the FCQ resulted in findings of cultural differences in food choice processes, within a preliminary motive list, ethnography allows the exploration of new, possibly culture-specific motives for food choice. Moreover, ethnography allows a deeper understanding of the cultural background of food choice processes in a studied culture.Using Japan as a case study, this research demonstrates the use of ethnography to argue that variety is a primary motive for food choice in contemporary Japanese culture. Variety is hence regarded here as a part of a larger food culture attribute, an “adventurous palate,” which can also provide a background for previous FCQ findings (Prescott, Young, O'neill, Yau, & Stevens, 2002).

Japanese New York: migrant artists and self-reinvention on the world stage

Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals who live and work there--young English students, office workers, painters, and hairstylists. New York City, one of the world's most vibrant and cities, is also home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. Among them are artists and designers who produce cutting-edge work in fields such as design, fashion, music, and art. Part of the so-called creative class and a growing segment of the neoliberal economy, they are usually middle-class and college-educated. They move to New York for anywhere from a few years to several decades in the hope of realising dreams and aspirations unavailable to them in Japan. Yet the careers they desire are competitive, and many end up working illegally in precarious, low paying jobs. Though they often migrate without fixed plans for return, nearly all eventually do, and their migrant trajectories are punctuated by visits home. Japanese New York offers an intimate, ethnographic portrait of these Japanese migrants living and working in NYC. At its heart is a universal question--how do adults reinvent their lives? In the absence of any material or social need, what makes worthwhile for people to abandon middle-class comfort and home for an unfamiliar and insecure life? Author Olga Sooudi explores these questions in four different venues patronized by New York's Japanese: a grocery store and restaurant, where hopeful migrants work part-time as they pursue their ambitions; a fashion designer's atelier and an art gallery, both sites of migrant aspirations. As Sooudi's migrant artists toil and network, biding time until they make it in their chosen industries, their optimism is complicated by the material and social limitations of their lives. The story of Japanese migrants in NYC is both a story about Japan and a way of examining Japan from beyond its borders. The Japanese presence abroad, a dynamic process involving the moving, settling, and return to Japan of people and their cultural products, is still underexplored. Sooudi's work will help fill this lacuna and will contribute to international migration studies, to the study of contemporary Japanese culture and society, and to the study of Japanese youth, while shedding light on what means to be a migrant worker in the global city today.

Suicide: a Socratic revenge.

2400 years have passed since the occurrence in Athens, Greece of one of the famous suicides recorded in human history. This autobiographical essay provides a montage on the history of suicide, with snippets from the final hours of Socrates, as described by Plato. Suicide in contemporary Japanese culture is also explored briefly, with reference to the deaths of internationally acclaimed movie directors Akira Kurosawa and Juzo Itami. The author also questions why no researcher has yet been honoured for the past 99 years with a Medicine Nobel prize for his or her work on suicidology or thanatology.

Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame by Robert Thomas Tierney, and: Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific by Naoto Sudo (review)

Reviewed by: Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame by Robert Thomas Tierney, and: Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific by Naoto Sudo Josh Levy Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney. Asia Pacific Modern Series 5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. isbn 978-0-520-26578-3; xi + 307 pages, notes, bibliography, index. us$57.95. Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific, by Naoto Sudo. Amherst, ny: Cambria Press, 2010. isbn 978-1-604-97731-8, viii + 221 pages, notes, bibliography, index, us$104.99. For many years, disciplinary boundaries have hindered the production of major analytic works on Japan’s Pacific empire, particularly in Micronesia. As Robert Tierney notes in the introduction to Tropics of Savagery, postcolonial theory tends to be relentlessly focused on Europe and its colonies, and the tendency of many universities to relegate scholars of Japan to area studies programs only exacerbates the problem. Even within Japanese Empire studies, the politically anomalous position of Micronesia within a League of Nations Mandate and its relatively smaller population have caused it to be neglected in favor of other, more visible colonies. Micronesia scholars like Wakako Higuchi, Keith Camacho, and Greg Dvorak have made important contributions to the growing body of scholarship on the region’s Japanese occupation, but sustained engagement between Pacific studies and East Asian studies remains rare. Tropics of Savagery and Nanyo-Orientalism are ambitious, theoretically [End Page 579] rich studies of the culture of Japan’s Pacific empire and welcome contributions to the field. Tierney, a scholar of Japanese literature, focuses primarily on the figure of the “savage” in colonial discourse during Japan’s occupations of Taiwan (1895–1945) and Micronesia (1914–1945). This trope of savagery, Tierney argues, is central to understanding the imagination of Japanese colonial writers and the imperial culture they helped to produce. Tierney is careful to note that the savage was “without a referent or indeed without any basis in reality” but that it nevertheless operated as a “polyvalent signifier” for a conflicted and evolving imperial culture (7). Imperial culture, both different from and mimetic of Western imperialism, embraced the image of the savage as a foil against which Japan could be made over into a modern, civilized nation. At the same time, the savage functioned within a “rhetoric of sameness” (21) through which Japanese authors claimed a closer kinship to the people they colonized than Western imperial rulers could. While Tropics of Savagery mainly seeks to intervene in Japan studies and empire studies, Naoto Sudo’s Nanyo-Orientalism aims more directly at a Pacific studies audience. Sudo is primarily a scholar of postcolonial literature. Like Tierney, he is concerned with making sense of the triangular relationship among Japan, the Pacific, and the West that proved so powerful in defining Japan’s imperial culture. But Nanyo-Orientalism reaches farther in its temporal and geographic scope, engaging colonial and postcolonial Japanese discourses and English-language Pacific Islander responses in Hawai’i and Guam. If there is a “polyvalent signifier” in Sudo’s work, it is the South Seas (Nanyo) itself. Sudo organizes his readings of the Nanyo as trope into two broad categories. On the one hand, what he calls “Nanyo-Orientalism” frames the Nanyo as a “primordial chaos to be reclaimed or liberated from Western rule by the Japanese” (5). This discourse originates in the prewar period but continues in modified form within contemporary Japanese culture. On the other hand, Sudo understands the Pacific as a “locale of diverse subjects striving together under imperialist regimes” and a site for the production of postcolonial and decolonizing literary work (19). Thus Sudo offers readings of Japanese and Islander-produced texts as “incomplete, unstable, and fluid—‘oceanic’—decolonizations produced from vantage points of the colonizer, colonized, diasporic returnees, emigrants, and hybrids” (20). There is significant overlap in terms of theoretical grounding, methodology, and source base between these two works. Postcolonial theory is a touchstone for both authors. Tierney uses Homi Bhabha’s notion of “colonial mimicry” as a jumping-off point for his analysis, adapting Bhabha’s work to account for the implicit presence of Western colonial...

Schoolgirls, money and rebellion in Japan

Japanese society in the 1990s and 2000s produced a range of complicated material about sexualized schoolgirls, and few topics have caught the imagination of western observers so powerfully. While young Japanese girls had previously been portrayed as demure and obedient, in training to become the obedient wife and prudent mother, in recent years less than demure young women have become central to urban mythology and the content of culture. The cultic fascination with the figure of a deviant school girl, which has some of its earliest roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, likewise re-emerged and proliferated in fascinating and timely ways in the 1990s and 2000s. Through exploring the history and politics underlying the cult of girls in contemporary Japanese media and culture, this book presents a striking picture of contemporary Japanese society from the 1990s to the start of the 2010s. At its core is an in-depth case study of the media delight and panic surrounding delinquent prostitute schoolgirls. Sharon Kinsella traces this social panic back to male anxieties relating to gender equality and female emancipation in Japan. In each chapter in turn, the book reveals the conflicted, nostalgic, pornographic, and at times distinctly racialized manner, in which largely male sentiments about this transformation of gender relations have been expressed. The book simultaneously explores the stylistic and flamboyant manner in which young women have reacted to the weight of an obsessive and accusatory male media gaze. Covering the often controversial subjects of compensated dating (enjo kosai), the role of porn and lifestyle magazines, the historical sources and politicized social meanings of the schoolgirl, and the racialization of fashionable girls, Schoolgirls, Money, Rebellion in Japan will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, sociology, anthropology, gender and women's studies.

Being Alice in Japan: performing a cute, ‘girlish’ revolt

There is a certain curiosity inscribed to the character Alice of Lewis Carroll's famous children's books. Perhaps reflecting the ‘enigmatic’ sexuality of the author, Alice herself has been perceived and interpreted in a dualistic way, namely as an innocent child and as a self-assertively sexualized ‘Lolita’. However, Alice can also be perceived as an emotionally flat yet autonomous character. My article explores this reading of the heroine, which is notable in the context of Japanese culture. In aspects of contemporary Japanese popular culture, for instance, the idea of ‘Alice’ embodies the idealised image of the ‘shojo’ (girl), who is situated between child and adult and is largely detached from the heterosexual economy. Paying particular attention to a group of music videos in which female Japanese pop singers offer their own versions of Carroll's heroine, I examine significant meanings that lie in Japanese appropriations of the imagery of Alice. The importance of their performances as Alice is highlighted by the tendency in which the aesthetic concept of kawaii (cuteness), particularly when it is mingled with sweet, girlish, and ‘infantile’ qualities, is deemed as unfavourable and demeaning in Euro-American cultures. Do their performances of Alice demonstrate a compatibility between girlish aesthetics and senses of agency and autonomy? Can their emphasis on sweetness, demureness, and femininity without hinting at sexual allure or seeking the male gaze serve to repudiate the stereotyped representation of femininity as passive, compliant, and powerless and prevent the sexual objectification of women?

Malaysia Boleh ?: Carles Casajuana and the Demythification of Neoliberal Space

THE first pages of Carles Casajuana's Kuala Lumpur (2005) succeed in introducing the reader into a nation-state that is often only entered through the glamorous and picturesque propaganda of international sporting events (Formula One, the Commonwealth Games, etc.) or feats of record-breaking (tallest buildings in the world, etc.). The novel is particularly taken by the role of space in the construction of modernity, centering the plot and its characters around the Petronas Twin Towers, once the tallest buildings in the world, and now a spatial metonym of the topologic approximation towards Western modernity in the global South. It is no coincidence that the title of tallest building in the world has taken on a rotation among countries vying to establish themselves as modern global destinations. The recent riots in Brazil concerning the FIFA World Cup exemplify this political and ideological strategy, as it is not consistent economic growth and a politically and socially enlightened middle class that defines modernization, but the fixation on the construct of magnanimous spaces and their resulting series of events that systematically and conveniently locate such formally disparate topographies such as Kuala Lumpur and Dubai on a global mapping of development. (1) This facet to the politics of development is repeatedly alluded to in Casajuana's novel, as the Catalan writer-diplomat develops a cogent, calculated, and critical text that pulls no punches in delving beyond the simulacra of modernity that the nation-state projects through the populist slogan Boleh by then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. (2) Instead of portraying the made-for-tourism places, faces, and cultural idiosyncrasies of multiracial Malaysia that the government has repeatedly disseminated through diplomatic and corporate channels, the novel chooses to peel away at the facade of racial harmony, political stability, and unmitigated economic growth, ironically, through the very space of Western mimicry, that is, the Towers. Written in a noir style, Kuala Lumpur traces the efforts of Jordi Sureda (a Spanish diplomat) to find the killer of Miguel Cuadrado (a Spaniard employed by a subcontractor in the Towers). Cuadrado is murdered in the basement of the Towers, and the police are quick to blame Andres Minambres as a suspect. The latter maintained a clandestine relationship with the former's wife, fueling the police's hypothesis that this is a crime of passion. Facing this situation, Sureda must navigate the corrupt local and foreign authorities to exculpate Minambres. The novel is not the first Spanish-language text to locate its diegesis in an East/South/Southeast Asian space (and neither will it be the last), but it bears special consideration in that it is the first to exclusively concern itself with contemporary Malaysia, though colonial and 19th-century pieces have mentioned the Malayan peninsula. Unlike contemporary works that profit from the editorial and market fascination with a generic, sterilized, and enlightened Orient through the depiction of cliched cultures, characters, and places (see Santiago Roncagliolo's Tan cerca de la vida, for example, which is more an encyclopedia of contemporary Japanese culture than a real foray into its underlying mechanisms), Casajuana goes beyond simply locating his text in Asia. This can be evidenced by how the novel opens with the plotline of Ravi Subra, an Indian-Malaysian contractor who guides the narrative towards a critical reading of the racial politics of the nation. By introducing the reader to Kuala Lumpur via the figure of Subra, Casajuana subtly destabilizes the political myth of racial harmony and its politics of favoring the ethnic Malay. This critique is repeated through different characters in the novel, and signals to the reader the text's aim in destabilizing official narratives of the country. This is primarily done through the investigation surrounding the murder of Cuadrado within the underground parking of the in-construction Towers. …

West Meets East

PAJ 106 (2014), pp. 59–68.  59 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00177 After decades of fascination with all things Japanese, in September 2012 I went to Tokyo on a Fulbright Fellowship. My teaching responsibilities left plenty of time to see theatre and dance, as well as visual art and architecture, both classic and contemporary. The formality, measured pace, and discipline of much of the traditional work led to some naptaking on the part of spectators — Japanese salarymen and women, who work long hours and commute long distances, sleep wherever they can, even standing on the subway. The audiences for new work were somewhat younger, but since tickets to theatre and dance are expensive in Japan, they tended to be older than in downtown NYC. I’d anticipated seeing radical new performance work, yet the most exciting events were an exhibition by visual artist Aida Makoto at the Mori Museum that included performance on video, and a concert by Noh flute player Yukihiro Isso, who innovatively incorporates contemporary experimentation into his compositions and improvisations. Makoto’s work referenced and transformed classic and traditional forms in an ironic way that critiqued contemporary Japanese culture and society. For example, he painted a monumental silver screen, in the tradition of rimpa style, but instead of delicate songbirds and tendrils and vines, there were big black crows and telephone wires — the contemporary natural landscape. He also constructed pagoda-like structures from cardboard in a subway station as housing for homeless people; the buildings were carted off by cleaners before anyone could move in. Isso, an extraordinary flute player from a traditional Noh musician family (since the sixteenth century), has performed Noh music since childhood but incorporates elements of Western and world music into his compositions — melodies, improvisation, minimalism — and casts West Meets east

Role of the Ephemeral in Recovery and Renewal

Installed during the Tohoku earthquake relief fundraising event, CONCERT FOR JAPAN, at Japan Society in New York City on April 2011, the Luminous Washi Lanterns was a meditation and celebration of renewal through light and impermanent materials. The paper examines the role of the ephemeral from the ancient to contemporary Japanese culture, collective experience during an ephemeral performance, and translation of traditional Japanese renewal rituals into a piece that engages a diverse range of people outside of Japan. How can designers instigate a process of renewal following a disaster in manners that engage people of all ages and backgrounds in a collective healing experience?

Japanese philosophy: a sourcebook

With Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, readers of English can now access in a single volume the richness and diversity of Japanese philosophy as it has developed throughout history. Leading scholars in the field have translated selections from the writings of more than a hundred philosophical thinkers from all eras and schools of thought, many of them available in English for the first time. The Sourcebook editors have set out to represent the entire Japanese philosophical tradition--not only the broad spectrum of academic philosophy dating from the introduction of Western philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but also the philosophical ideas of major Japanese traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. The philosophical significance of each tradition is laid out in an extensive overview, and each selection is accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of its author and helpful information on placing the work in its proper context. The bulk of the supporting material, which comprises nearly a quarter of the volume, is given to original interpretive essays on topics not explicitly covered in other chapters: cultural identity, samurai thought, women philosophers, aesthetics, bioethics. An introductory chapter provides a historical overview of Japanese philosophy and a discussion of the Japanese debate over defining the idea of philosophy, both of which help explain the rationale behind the design of the Sourcebook. An exhaustive glossary of technical terminology, a chronology of authors, and a thematic index are appended. Specialists will find information related to original sources and sinographs for Japanese names and terms in a comprehensive bibliography and general index. Handsomely presented and clearly organized for ease of use, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook will be a cornerstone in Japanese studies for decades to come. It will be an essential reference for anyone interested in traditional or contemporary Japanese culture and the way it has shaped and been shaped by its great thinkers over the centuries.

Baśnie i bajki w japońskich komiksach

Manga is a fascinating product of contemporary Japanese culture. Strongly rooted in tradition, inferred from art, associated with literature, it has become an inexhaustible source for researchers who wants to explore the achievement of sequential art. Everything is interesting about manga, starting from the artists themselves, ending with the transition from idea to effect. Japanese artists creating comics draw a lot of inspiration from literature and world art. Much comes from myths, legends, fables and fairy tales, both domestic and from around the world. They can be found in the text layer, but mainly in the iconic layer. Among them three main groups can be distinguished: one dealing with the scenario, the second and third will focus on the image, while the third will provide a single borrowed illustration from a particular theme or in a convention. The aim of this paper is to outline the issues relating to Japanese comic books on selected examples, including: trying to determine the potential audience of manga, which were based or only used themes from fairytales, trying to define the role of the artist as a modern-day equivalent fabulist, and pointing out an indication of the most popular topics and methods of presentation.

A Japanese form of social anxiety (taijin kyofusho): Frequency and correlates in two generations of the same family

One specific type of social anxiety, occurring primarily in Japanese culture, is called taijin kyofusho. Taijin kyofusho is characterized by an intense fear that one's body parts or functions displease, embarrass or are offensive to others. The main aim of the present study was to compare the frequency and correlates of taijin kyofusho symptoms (TKS) in Japanese adolescents and their parents. The sample included 351 adolescents, aged 12 to 17 years, and one of their parents/guardians. These adolescents were recruited from secondary schools in Miyazaki, Japan. All participants completed a set of questionnaires that were used to measure TKS, DSM-IV anxiety disorder symptoms, general difficulties and positive attributes, self-construals and social support. Adolescents reported significantly more TKS than their parent/guardians. In each generational sample high TKS was significantly associated with high levels of anxiety symptoms, the strongest correlation being with social phobia. The pattern of the relationship between self-construal and TKS differed across the two generations. Among adolescents, independent self-construal was associated with lower TKS, whereas among parents, interdependent self-construal was associated with lower evaluative concerns from others. The present study illustrates the importance of the diverse roles that self-construals play in TKS across different generations of the same family constellation in contemporary Japanese culture.

Japan fashion now

A visually stunningexploration of how contemporary Japanese and visual culture are transforming the way we experience our world Scholars have long acknowledged the significance of the Japanese fashion revolution of the 1980s, when avant-garde designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons introduced a radically new conception of fashion. But what has happened in the years since then? Lavishly illustrated, Japan Fashion Nowwill be the first book to explore how Japanese has evolved in recent years. During this time, Japanese pop culture has swept the world, as young people everywhere read manga, watch anime, and play video games. Japan has had a profound impact on global culture, often via new media. With essays by Valerie Steele (Is Japan Still the Future?), Patricia Mears (Fashion Revolution), Hiroshi Narumi (Japanese Street Style), and Yuniya Kawamura (Japanese Fashion Subcultures), Japan Fashion Now explores how the world of has been transformedbycontemporary Japanese visual culture.

Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent (eds), Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture

Perversion and Modern Japan is a collection of 13 essays analysing modern and contemporary Japanese culture from a psychoanalytic perspective. The term ‘perversion’ is intended very broadly, covering not just topics such as panty fetishism, but also such phenomena as phallic imagery, wars of national aggression, ‘mother love’, and psychosomatic illness. The collection also manages to cast the net of perversion wide enough to include cartography and the guilty memories stirred up by Japanese army stragglers. The methodology in the essays tends towards the highly theorised, and seems to be a conscious response to traces of an earlier Japanese literary critical tradition. In Irena Hayter's intriguing discussion of the Japanese rhetoric of fascism, and its literary subversion by Ishikawa Jun, her opening sentence announces, ‘Until “theory” burst upon the scene in the 1980s, literary criticism in Japan was focused mainly on explications of single works, sakuhinron, or on discussions of the unified oeuvre of a writer (sakkaron), with a strong biographical slant’ (p. 203).

Contemporary Publishing Strategies in Japan: The Role of the Literary Agent

Translations are shaped by publishing strategies developed by publishers and literary agents among others. However, little research has been carried out on the activities of literary agents within a particular language culture. This paper aims to describe contemporary Japanese publishing strategies in certain book categories by focusing on the role played by the literary agent. Polysystem theory and Toury’s methodology reveal that translation usually occupies a peripheral position in contemporary Japanese culture. Information drawn from an interview with a literary agent indicates that publishers exercise a great deal of influence: from initiating a translation project to micro‑managing textual details. The results of this research, reflected in both paratextual and textual features, suggest that the peripheral position of translation in Japan largely determines how translated books are produced.

Tiny buds whispering: flowers in contemporary Japanese culture and ideology

Japan's poetic practice not only expresses verbal beauty and deep historicity, but also maintains the power to express cultural ideals and goals of the state through the use of nature–human metaphors. The political use of nature imagery as a template for human motivation and cultivation was described during the Heian period (CE 794–1185) and continues to the present day. This paper focuses on contemporary examples of the use of flowers to represent people and thus to motivate and construct specific behaviours and outcomes to seem as natural and inevitable as blooming. One set of data derives from participatory fieldwork in events leading up to the launching of a city councilman's political campaign; the second is taken from nationally popular songs and public responses to those songs. Analysis shows how nature provides the basis for cultural logic in support of gendered as well as more generalized ideological statements designed to motivate and cultivate contemporary Japanese people.

Japanese visual culture: explorations in the world of manga and anime

Foreword, Frederik L. Schodt Introduction, Mark W. MacWilliams 1. Manga in Japanese History, Kinko Ito 2. Contemporary Anime in Japanese Pop Culture, Gilles Poitras 3. Characters, Themes, and Narrative Patterns in the Manga of Osamu Tezuka, Susanne Phillips 4. From Metropolis to Metoroporisu: The Changing Role of the Robot in Japanese and Western Cinema, Lee Makela 5. Opening the Closed World of Shojo Manga, Mizuki Takahashi 6. Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics, and Contemporary Japanese Culture, Deborah Shamoon 7. Intellectuals, Cartoons, and Nationalism During the Russo-Japanese War, Yulia Mikhailova 8. Framing Manga: On Narratives of the Second World War in Japanese Manga, 1957-1977, Eldad Nakar 9. Aum Shinrikyo and a Panic about Manga and Anime, Rich Gardner 10. Medieval Genealogies of Manga Horror, Raj Pandey 11. The Utopian Power to Live: What the Miyazaki Phenomenon Signifies, Hiroshi Yamanaka 12. Heart of Japaneseness: History and Nostalgia in Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, Shiro Yoshioka 13. National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress, Melek Ortabasi 14. Considering Manga Discourse: Location, Ambiguity, Historicity, Jaqueline Berndt Bibliography About the Contributors Index.