Japanese Popular Culture Research Articles

Kawaii Culture’s Influence as Part of Japanese Popular Culture Trends in Turkey

Kawaii is a Japanese adjective meaning cute. The word’s meaning evolved and it has turned into a facet popular culture in the 1970s. It can be regarding anything that is cute, innocent, pure or even ugly. Kawaii has been advancing around the globe since the 2000s due to the widespread popularity of Hello Kitty, Japanese anime (animation), manga (comic books), fashion brands, celebrities and so on. Therefore, Japanese companies and government sections took action to promote this popular culture. Turkey is one of the countries that has been affected by the impact of kawaii. Hello Kitty, considered as the icon of kawaii culture, has become very trendy among Turkish children. The number of teenagers who love and watch anime has been increasing and adults who grew up watching anime are now interested in manga. There are several conventions where people share their interests in Japanese popular culture and join cosplay (costume play) contests. People wearing cute accessories or stores that sell kawaii goods and clothes are growing in number day by day. From celebrities to football teams, kawaii culture’s impact will be observed in Turkish society.

Perceptions of ASEAN Youth Towards Japan: Impact on the Japanese Economy

In exerting soft power to pursue its economic interests in Southeast Asia, Japan has been challenged by its regional rivals. In retaining its position, Japan needs to win the hearts and minds of ASEAN youths, a generation moving toward the middle class with significant purchasing power. Hence, a three-month online survey and a series of focus group discussions were conducted to gather information and perspectives about Japan from 222 youth respondents from the ten ASEAN countries. It was found that ASEAN young generations have a good impression of Japan and Japanese people, even though most of them have never been to Japan or personally interacted with a Japanese person. This perception has been built most effectively by Japanese popular culture, including animation and manga. However, youth development and exchange programs, and interactions with Japanese people are less influential factors, especially for those who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Thus, exposures to Japanese products and services to ASEAN young generations have not only contributed to the Japanese economy but also contributed to the positive perception toward the country. Given tighter government budgets, streamlining Japan’s soft power strategy will help it win over ASEAN youths for its future economic prosperity.

STRATEGI KEMENTERIAN EKONOMI, PERDAGANGAN DAN INDUSTRI JEPANG DALAM MEMPERKUAT SOFT POWER DAN MENINGKATKAN PENDAPATAN INDUSTRI KREATIF MELALUI KEBIJAKAN COOL JAPAN/CREATIVE INDUSTRIES TAHUN 2010-2016

ABSTRACT 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

Construction of Gender Identity in Japanese Popular Culture

This study discusses the phenomenon of fujoshi which is a favorite of a woman in enjoying anime and manga that has the genre Yaoi or Boys Love. Yaoi is a genre that tells about same-sex relationships made by men. This research was conducted with qualitative research methods with virtual ethnographic analysis. This study will examine how the construction of gender identity is built on yaoi fans on social media by using the communication theory of gender from Michael Hecht. The results showed that the gender identity of fujoshi was formed through three layers, namely the personal layer, the enactment layer, and the communal layer. This study also found that Fujitsu tends to have multiple identities in their lives. Fujoshi is more willing to show identity about their passion for yaoi on social media.
 
 Keywords: Popular Culture, Fujoshi, Social Media, Gender Identity Communication

(Re)Playing Anime: Building a Medium-specific Approach to Gamelike Narratives

(Re)Playing AnimeBuilding a Medium-specific Approach to Gamelike Narratives Selen Çalik Bedir (bio) The ontological status of fictional characters has been a central issue in theoretical discourses on Japanese popular culture, especially in Japan. Since the early 2000s, while Ôtsuka Eiji has attracted attention to the mortality of semiotic bodies as a noteworthy particularity of manga and anime narratives, some researchers following his lead have focused on characters’ increasing clinginess to life in recent works of Japanese popular culture. Being from the second camp, in Gêmuteki Riarizumu no Tanjô (The Birth of Gamelike Realism),1 Hiroki Azuma extensively discusses light novels featuring characters dying and coming back from death, or getting stuck in time loops to live the same day or hour again and again. While Azuma’s focus falls mainly on light novels, not surprisingly this motif of “restart and repeat” is fairly common in manga, anime, and even beyond Japanese popular culture, as it arguably finds its roots in the coming of postmodernity. The weakening of widely accepted social norms and values, which is usually acknowledged as a characteristic of the postmodern age, seems to have deprived narratives of dominant directions for plot development, while the possibility of restarting a story after it reaches an ending has been embraced as an efficient narrative strategy. Today, in official sequels or prequels as well as in fan-made derivative works, dead characters can be resurrected easily and their fates can be redrawn or “replayed,” which brings to mind the experience of playing games. However, what seemingly emerges as a unifying quality, that is to say, a “gamelikeness” that can be observed in contemporary narratives finding form across media, goes against what is commonly acclaimed as a unique quality that sets games apart from storytelling media. The distinguishing trait of games is widely considered to be enabling repetitive interaction as opposed to the developmental teleology of movies or novels. While Azuma does not make it his goal to address medial differences, his discussion may provide a new entrance point to reconsider the media that are compared to games, [End Page 45] specifically to reconsider anime, which incorporates audio elements like most video games, and possesses dynamic as well as static qualities. The question is, can we talk about an overarching similarity between contemporary media, that is, a gamelikeness, without disregarding media specificities? Can we use the concept to discover anime’s specific take on gamelikeness? Before addressing these questions, a definition of “medium” here is in order. In “Narration in Various Media” (2012), Marie-Laure Ryan lists three conceptual frameworks capturing three different aspects of media: semiotic, material-technological, and cultural.2 Semiotically, for instance, anime is a pluricodal medium (combining visual and aural codes with language), which possesses both static and dynamic properties and produces narratives that extend over time and space. Anime’s material-technological background (especially its reliance on the use of celluloid sheets, hand-drawn images and limited animation techniques) has particularized its narrative style further and even more visibly. On the other hand, anime has been in contact with digitalization for long enough to leave its material-technological limitations behind, at least, potentially. But instead, anime today chooses to embrace its material-technological heritage on a cultural level, by preserving cel animation style to a great extent even when computer graphics (CG) are heavily employed, and by keeping on picturing 2D worlds in a fashion that the audience has come to recognize. With the addition of its particular positioning on the cultural level, anime comes forward as a distinct medium. In order to address media specificities, as the above application shows, at least the three aspects that Ryan covers should be taken into consideration, not only in connection with each other but also with time. To begin with, there is an intrinsic connection between a certain technology and the age in which it appears or stays in use. Moreover, the semiotic as well as the material-technological potential of a medium is always activated in relation to its cultural background, and to the predominant tastes or ways of thinking of the age. Thus, time leaves a significant mark on media, to the point...

Японская популярная культура и диджимодернизм

The article addresses the socio-philosophical interpretations of Japanese popular culture. Pointing out the unique position of the latter, the author believes that the experience of a number of successful Japanese projects that have become global phenomena can be used by social and cultural theorists to analyze modernity. The article refers to the genesis of Japanese popular culture in the mid-90s of the XX century, when the most popular part of Japanese pop culture in the West — anime — embodied the postmodern canon. However, a closer look reveals that the optics of postmodernism, which by the end of the XX century had already ceased to be advanced research optics, may not be enough for analysis. A number of phenomena, among which the author highlights the Pokémon media franchise, require a different research approach. As a relevant methodological optics, the article refers to the concept of «digimodernism» by the British theorist Alan Kirby. With the help of its main provisions, it is shown that Japanese popular culture was at the forefront of the cultural process, offering several interesting finds to modernity. After analyzing the socio-philosophical reasons for the success of Pokémon, the author points out that the concept of digimodernism has some applicability for the analysis of modern cultural phenomena, аnd a number of ideas of Alan Kirby about the autistic nature of modern digital civilization could be found as reflected in the culture

A Cycle, Not a Phase: Love Between Magical Girls Amidst the Trauma of Puella Magi Madoka Magica

A Cycle, Not a PhaseLove Between Magical Girls Amidst the Trauma of Puella Magi Madoka Magica Kevin Cooley (bio) The specter of the mahō shōjo (magical girl) fuses the form and content of animated narratives. She gains power not from a comic book fall into a vat of chemicals, or a bite from a magic-science spider, but from the genre itself. Like the gender role she so extravagantly over-performs (and out-performs), she is, to borrow from Judith Butler's terms to describe gender itself, a "panicked imitation of a naturalized idealized self."1 In imitating herself, the magical girl is drawn time and again to the metatextual icons of her performance—the over-pronounced eyes, the glitzed-out sailor suit, the spectacle of transformation—that bring her into legibility. She is the idea of a human constructed completely out of human-made, but nonhuman, actants—not just formal elements of animation such as light, sound, visual icons in acrobatic conjunction, and transparent cels (whether hand-drawn or digital); but of content elements: skirts, sailor suits, magic powers, and transformation spectacles. As Kumiko Saito claims, "Although the visual rhetoric of power relies on feminine implements like frills and long hair, it is becoming increasingly difficult to equate representations of the magical girl's gender with biological sex" because the magical girl participates in "a new configuration of gender that wields its power in its youthfulness and cuteness."2 Both in spite of—and because of—all the otaku-baiting and the fetishizing and the heterosexualized fan service of the larger "beautiful fighting girl" category she belongs to: that of the magical girl—that evocative and evil-fighting, sailor-suit-clad young woman who so often transforms from an average schoolgirl to a celestial being with magic powers—is and always has been wrapped up within a variety of queernesses. Certainly, the glamorous body modification and hyperstylized wardrobe changes invite and emit questions about the dominant imaginary of the human body and animation's ability to reconceptualize it. But a magical girl is also so often prone to overtly falling in love with her sailor-suited companions. What is it about this mythological type that has so consistently pushed back on the heterosexual imaginary of [End Page 24] the body, and that so regularly produces characters ranging from the ambiguously but evocatively queer to conformity with LGTBQ+ categories? Why is the queerly saturated mythological type of the magical girl so infectious, both as part of a staple of Japanese popular and visual culture and through its transnational circulation, where the magical girl has inspired western cartoons like Steven Universe, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil to enact animation's latent inborn ability to give shape and motion to otherwise unthinkable sexualities? As visual culture so often does, the magical girl provides all of the tools we need for understanding her gendered interventions within the archetype's own visual conventions. But if framing the precarious ontology of the magical girl in theoretical terms does anything to expedite our theorizing of her gendered intervention, it would help to say that her dynamic identity is fueled by the paradigmatic relations between units of language. In short, the cartooned visual language in which the magical girl participates is one that eschews photorealistic film's devices, and in doing so, it prefers relations between units of language defined by absence. More specifically, we might call these different relations the present, but declined, possibility of using other signs to articulate something of language (in this case: the visualized existence of the magical girl). As Ferdinand de Saussure frames it, this paradigmatic relation "unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series."3 Certainly, as an art of fairly linear narrative storytelling, the visual languages of cartooning that write or draw the magical girl into existence also rely on that foil of paradigmatic relations: syntagmatic relations which, as Saussure writes, immediately suggest how "an order of succession and a fixed number of elements combine present elements in sequence to make additive meaning."4 But by reveling in the paradigmatic relations of animation—as is visually embodied...

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents by Hiromu Nagahara

Reviewed by: Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents by Hiromu Nagahara Shunsuke Nozawa Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents. By Hiromu Nagahara. Harvard University Press, 2017. 288 pages. Hardcover, $36.00/£28.95/€32.50. Analyzing the "popular" is a deceptively difficult task, for at least two reasons. Historically the word has been used in a multiple, or at least quite fluid, manner. It sometimes signifies "commonness," or, one might say, democratic everyone-ness, while at other times it points to a specific strata of society marked by vulgarity, lowliness, obsession, and similar qualities of the abject within a hierarchy of valorization—a sense of someone-ness (or someone-elseness). Meanwhile, in modernity, objects characterized by this adjective occupy a deeply familiar dimension of consumer society as entertainment commodities, and the way these objects are taken for granted often makes it difficult even to justify a serious analysis in the first place. While cultural studies and related disciplines of research have attempted, often quite successfully, to bring popular culture to the critical discussion of political resistance and agency, it remains tricky to discern how, historically, the very category of the "popular" comes into being [End Page 176] as a salient object of public attention in specific sociocultural contexts and what continuing effects such efforts at categorization have on the reality of sociopolitical life. Hiromu Nagahara's Tokyo Boogie-Woogie may be read precisely in terms of such questioning. Highly informative and lucidly written, the book explores the complex meanings of "Japanese popular music" in the historical context of the "Popular Song Era" of the 1920s through 1950s. Presenting a diverse set of evidence—from magazine columns to parliamentary proceedings, from Occupation-era documents to memoirs by industry players—the discussion situates Japanese popular music at a point of intersection among competing genres, tastes, and social and economic interests. The resulting analysis demonstrates how music critics, record companies, intellectuals, citizens' groups, bureaucrats, and policy makers attempted to carve out, police, and manipulate the contours of this music. It shows how the very idea of Japanese popular music functioned as a kind of cultural shifter, a constellation of signs—musical as well as discursive—whose point of reference moved according to the context of their invocation. Rather than treating popular music as though it were an ahistorical or naturally occurring category, the author draws attention to the ways in which social actors voiced and were recruited to diverging political imaginations through their reflexive statements about it. Two such political imaginations or inclinations, in particular, organize the discussion: the "forces that encouraged standardization of culture," on the one hand, and those that "persistently reinscribed hierarchy and difference on the newly emerging mass society," on the other (p. 6). The author notes in the introduction that his analysis of the Popular Song Era is geared toward explicating "the ways in which the assumption of hierarchies, the desire for a democratic culture, and the interplay between these two competing inclinations among Japan's elites consistently undergirded many of the most consequential sets of ideas and forces that guided the ways in which people produced, consumed, and critiqued culture throughout the [twentieth] century" (p. 6). As such, he argues that far from being simply a chapter in the history of modern Japanese culture, the Popular Song Era was a conjuncture that produced enduring structural conditions for cultural practice and critique in the years that followed. Many readers familiar with recent developments in Japanese popular and media culture will take this argument seriously. As suggested at the beginning of this review, one may understand the interplay between the forces of democratizing coevalness and hierarchical differentiation in terms of the fundamental affordance of the idea of "popular" culture to bring the two into a dialogic relationship; the chapters of the book trace the effects and conditions of this interplay in concrete historical contexts, beginning with the Meiji era. Following a brief but informative "prehistory" of the Popular Song Era, chapter 1 closely analyzes the emergence of "the masses" (taishū) in the interwar years in relation to commercial popular music. Also examined are the processes that contributed to the birth and...

Creative Misreadings of “Thai BL” by a Filipino Fan Community: Dislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption

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...

A Field in Formation—A Citation Analysis of Japanese Popular Culture Studies

A Field in Formation—A Citation Analysis of Japanese Popular Culture Studies

Osamu Tezuka, el Dios del Manga: Exhibition at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

2019 marked a significant date for the circulation of Japanese popular culture in Spain. Manga Barcelona, the multitudinous event formerly known as “Saló del Manga”, reached its 25th edition. A quarter of a century has passed since its modest beginning as a meetup that brought together around a thousand enthusiasts of manga, anime, and video games at the Estació de França in Barcelona. At twenty-five years, the most relevant event for Japanese popular culture in the country is [...]

Pagelaran Budaya Jepang Cosplayer Dalam Perspektif Dramaturgi

Fenomena acara televisi anime serta buku komik yang berasal dari jepang memberikan ruang bagi perkembangan budaya popular Jepang di Bali. Seni berbusana dalam budaya popular Jepang seperti Harajuku Style (yang terdiri dari Lolita, Visual Kei, Ganguro dan costum player) telah menggeser busana tradisional Jepang seperti kimono dan Yukata. Seorang costum player mengagumi karakter anime, manga atau cosplayer tertentu dan mencoba menghadirkan sosok karakter tersebut dalam beberpa pagelaran budaya Jepang yang dilaksanakan di kota Denpasar dan Kecamatan Badung. Adapun tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui panggung depan (front stage) dan panggung belakang (back stage) dari pada costum player tersebut. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kualitatif, dengan menggunakan teknik pengumpulan data berupa observasi, wawancara dan teknik dokumentasi. Dalam Hasil penelitian terungkap bahwa dalam perspektif dramaturgi yang menerangkan tentang keberadaan panggung dalam kehidupan manusia memberikan penjelasan bahwa antara panggung panggung depan (front stage) dan panggung belakang (back stage) seorang cosplayer merupakan dua sisi yang berbeda, bahkan bertolak belakang, namun tidak jarang memiliki kesamaan karakter. Penyajian gaya busana para custom player sangat beragam (disesuaikan dengan tokoh) serta penuh dengan kreatifitas sehingga selalu menjadi pusat perhatian dalam pagelaran budaya Jepang yang dilakukan di The Japan Pagelaran of Udayana (D’JaFU), CLAS: H Bali Sakura Matsuri.

The Meaning of ‘Narou Style’ Web Novel in Japanese Culture

본 논문은 2000년대 이후 급성장한 일본 웹 소설 문화를 상징하는 ‘나로우계(なろう系)’ 웹 소설의 특징을 살펴보고, 이를 통해 2000년대 이후 일본 대중문화의 특징과 그것을 소비하는 일본 청년세대의 심상에 대해 알아보고자 한다. ‘나로우계’ 웹 소설이란, 2000년대 이후 인터넷 소설 투고 사이트 ‘소설가가 되자(小説家になろう)’를 필두로 빠르게 성장한 투고 방식에서 살아남은 작품, 즉 웹 소설 플랫폼에 소설을 연재하고 그 중 성공한 작품에 대한 별칭이다. 나로우계 웹 소설은 특정 장르에 대한 작가의 취향과 독자반응을 고려한 성공요소의 반영 등으로 인해 기존 대중소설과 다른 공통적 특징을 가진다. 대표적으로 소설의 시작을 보면, 주인공이 불의의 사고로 인해 현생을 마감하는 것으로 시작하는데, 여기서 ‘전생’과 ‘전이’를 통해 ‘이세계(異世界)’로 이동하여 전혀 다른 시공간에서 별개의 인생을 살거나 현생을 다시 사는 재생을 경험하게 된다. 심지어 기존 영웅 서사와는 대비되는 악역이 되거나, 조역 혹은 단역을 맡아 소설의 주요 서사에서 벗어나 한가한 삶을 영위하기도 한다. 여기서 실패한 인생을 다시 산다거나, 현생의 기억을 가진 채 다른 인생을 산다는 것 자체가 애초에 일종의 ‘치트키(cheat key)’를 가진 만큼, ‘이세계’의 삶은 현생보다 수월하거나 평화롭다. 이런 공통점은 90년대 일본 대중문화의 지배적인 특징이었던 ‘세카이계(セカイ系)’의 특징을 수용하면서도, 2000년대 이후 등장한 ‘결단주의’와 대비되는 현실 부정의 이야기 구조와 연결된다. 여기에는 현실의 경제적 어려움, 이지메, 사회적 소통 장애 등 현실세계의 어려움을 벗어나고자 하는 욕망이 투사되어 있으며, 사회 혹은 세계에서 중요한 역할을 하는 대신 소박하지만 자족하는 삶을 영위하고자 하는 일본 청년세대의 실상을 반영한다.This paper examines the characteristics of the ‘Narou Style’ web novel, which symbolizes the culture of Japanese web novel that has grown rapidly since the 2000s. Through this, I would like to examine the characteristics of Japanese popular culture and the image of Japanese youths who consume ‘Narou Style’ web novel. ‘Narou Style’ web novel is an alias for works which has published by the web novel service sites like Let s become a novelist . ‘Narou Style’ web novels have different characteristics from the existing public novels due to the reflection of the author s taste for a certain genre and the success factor considering the reader s reaction. Representatively, at the beginning of the novel, the protagonist begins by ending his life due to an accident. He or she moves to the other world through transmigration or transition and experiences new life in a completely different time and space. It can even become a villain in contrast to the existing heroic narrative, or play a role in acting or acting as a minor, leading a leisurely life away from the main narrative of the novel. The life of the other world is easier or more peaceful than the real life, because he or she has a kind of ‘cheat key’. This commonality embraces the characteristics of ‘Sekai Style’, which was the dominant characteristic of Japanese popular culture in the 90s, but is connected with the story structure of reality negation as opposed to decisionism that appeared after the 2000s. This reflects the desire to escape the real world s difficulties, including economic difficulties, bullying, and social communication disorder. Instead of playing an important role in society or in the world, it reflects the reality of Japanese young generation who want to have a simple but self-sufficient life.

1970년대 한일 양국의 ‘위안부’ 표상 -영화 『종군위안부(従軍慰安婦)』와 『여자정신대』를 중심으로-

This paper focuses on two films produced and performed in 1974 to examine the perception of ‘comfort women’ in the Korean and Japanese societies before the 1990s. It is a movie “Women’s Dei Shin Tai” and “The Japanese military comfort women” produced and performed in Korea and Japan in 1974. In order to visualize the significance and problems that each film has in the area of “Comfort women” related discourses and representations, first of all, “Korean comfort women” have been represented in post-war Japanese popular culture You need to find out. The novel “syunpuden” depicting the love and death of Japanese soldiers and “Korean comfort women”, Has been filmed three times in postwar Japan. In this process, the heroine’s “ethnicity” is made invisible.<BR> The Korean movie “Women’s Dei Shin Tai”, which borrowed the story and structure of the movie “syunpuden”, points out the contradictions inherent in the representation of “Korean comfort women” in postwar Japanese films by changing male characters into Korean. However, here, the aspect of the ‘comfort women’ problem is turning back to the ‘national’ discourse is symbolically revealed.<BR> Meanwhile, the heroine of the movie “The Japanese military comfort women” is not “Korean comfort women” but “Japanese comfort women”. This is different from the scheme of “comfort women” in postwar Japan. Here, it can be seen that the ‘comfort women’ problem in Japan in the 1970s is linked to the ‘Karayuki San’ that traditional discrimination problem of women.

Becoming illegible: the repatriation of Japanese fan culture in Genshiken

ABSTRACT Japanese popular culture has become a major global phenomenon, with thousands of manga, anime, and video game titles translated and localized every year in dozens of countries. However, despite the international success of Japanese pop culture, fandom in Japan remains insular and socially marginal. Japanese society generally regards otaku and fujoshi as undersocialized, immature, and even dangerous. This paper examines the collision of these two fan cultures as depicted in Kio Shimoku’s manga Genshiken. A somewhat self-deprecating love letter to otaku and fujoshi, the text depicts a university otaku circle that is eventually joined by an American exchange student, Susanna Hopkins. Through the inclusion of this exchange student the text expresses anxieties about the exportation and repatriation of Japanese subculture. Sue only expresses herself in quotes from subcultural texts, suggesting that the process of exportation transmogrifies Japanese subculture to the point where it is no longer legible to Japanese fans. This subculture, dehistoricized and decontextualized from the social and cultural strata of Japanese fandom, is made illegible in its home country, revealing deep uneasiness about the spread of Japanese subcultural fandoms that have escaped Japanese cultural authority and invites scrutiny to insular fandom.

The Re-creation of Yōkai Character Images in the Context of Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture: An Example of the Yo-kai Watch Anime Series

Supernatural creatures have always been an irreplaceable element of Japanese culture. Starting from the oldest collection of myths such as Kojiki to modern manga, anime and video games – they have always attracted the attention of people of all ages. However, modern yōkai have changed dramatically in terms of both visual representation and their role in the context of the work they appear in. The images of yōkai used in modern popular culture are re-created in various ways in order to appeal to tastes of different kinds of audience. Undoubtedly, the yōkai of today are not what they used to look like before: the element of fear may still be there, but after watching a TV series about yōkai both children and adults would most likely to refer to them as kawaī not kowai. To explain these changes, the author will present the yōkai image re-creation process taking place in Japanese animation on the example of the Yo-kai Watch anime TV series (the original Japanese TV series), the influence of which can be seen in modern contemporary Japanese culture.

Layers of the Traditional in Popular Performing Arts: Object and Voice as Character: Vocaloid Opera AOI

The paper analyzes how the concept of presence is put into play in connection to disappearance, contemporary popular media technology and objects in the 2014 production of Vocaloid Opera Aoi, composed by Hiroshi Tamawari. In the traditional noh theatre version of the famous story, the character Aoi does not appear “in person,” she is represented by a kimono. In the 2014 production the modified story is performed with bunraku puppets and sung by a Vocaloid singer, a software. By analyzing this, I elaborate on the connection between the recent studies on object dramaturgy and the questions of nonhuman (Bennett, Eckersall), and the nonreflective position rooted in animism from the fan base of pop culture that attributes personality and emotions to their respective robot/android/software idol. I examine the latest performative events in contemporary Japanese theatre that involve both human and non-human actors/agents (animals, objects, androids, vocaloids): the corporeality of the organic and inorganic Other, focusing on how the presence of the organic and non-organic nonhuman appears within the interplays of representation, how it relates to the layers of empathy, responsibility and consent, in the frame of contemporary Japanese popular culture.

Review of Teaching Japanese Popular Culture- Edited by Deborah Shamoon and Chris McMorran

Deborah Shamoon, Chris McMorran, and Kam Thiam Huat organised a ‘Teaching Japanese Popular Culture’ international conference that was held at the National University of Singapore in 2012, with the support of the Japan Foundation. The book, however, more than a printed upshot of that athenaeum is a production of the Association for Asian Studies, which has its headquarters in the United States. In this sense, Teaching Japanese Popular Culture is to be framed as a US-American book, edited and produced in the United States by the Aas. I will get back to this detail in the final remarks of this review. Now, anybody who ever edited a book formed of contributions by various and diverse authors perfectly knows about all the issues that may come along. One of the most frequent is to find an organic trajectory, a path, an overall meaningful structure out of what often is, at first, a discontinuous group of writings that not necessarily have much in common with each other. If the editors are not inspired, or the materials selected or available aren’t mutually matching enough, there is [...]

Deformation as Destiny: Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption

Postwar Japanese popular culture and animation in particular is often concerned with the relation between the human and a planet on the brink of disaster. While this has been explained in terms of the Japanese experience of war and nuclear disaster, I argue in this article that we should rather understand postwar Japanese animation in relation to a growing awareness of a planetary situation in what is now called the age of the anthropocene. This planetary situation has often been figured through the image of urban fortresses where a community of humans, Japanese or not, unify to fight against an external aggressor and survive. The figure of the urban fortress in Japanese animation such as Multidimensional Fortress Macross or Evangelion resonates with present discussions about the anthropocene articulated in terms of risk, sustainability and survival. By looking at the recent manga and TV series Made in Abyss, I propose to consider another figure of our planetary situation, not defined by survival but rather by an ongoing process of deformation in place allowed by kawaii consumption. Or more simply, Made in Abyss is about how much the body can take in a planetary situation

Perilaku Komunikasi Otaku dalam Interaksi Sosial (Studi Fenomenologi Pada Anggota Komunitas Jepang Soshonbu Bandung)

Otaku is a term referring to those who fond of Japanese pop culture like anime and manga. Because of some activities, negative views on Otaku developed in the society. This causes Otaku to tend to experience difficulties in interacting with non-Otaku, then they create or join groups or communities that are in accordance with their vision and mission towards Japanese popular culture. With this communities Otaku can interact openly without fear of misunderstanding. This study aims to reveal Otaku’s communication behavior in social interactions. This research method is qualitative research with a phenomenological approach and uses constructivism paradigm. Data collection techniques are carried out by interviews, observation and literatures. Based on the research result revealed that Otaku does some communication behavior in social interaction. In social interaction it produces an associative and dissociative process when Otaku interacting with both other Otaku and non-Otaku. Keywords : Communication Behavior, Otaku, Social Interaction