Intercultural Communication in Japan

Theorizing Homogenizing Discourse

Satoshi Toyosaki, Shinsuke Eguchi, Satoshi Toyosaki, Shinsuke Eguchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138351592
• eBook ISBN: 9781315516912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Japan is heterogeneous and culturally diverse, both historically through ancient waves of immigration and in recent years due to its foreign relations and internationalization. However, Japan has socially, culturally, politically, and intellectually constructed a distinct and homogeneous identity. More recently, this identity construction has been rightfully questioned and challenged by Japan's culturally diverse groups.

This book explores the discursive systems of cultural identities that regenerate the illusion of Japan as a homogeneous nation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches investigate the ways in which Japan's homogenizing discourses are challenged and modified by counter-homogeneous message systems. They examine the discursive push-and-pull between homogenizing and heterogenizing vectors, found in domestic and transnational contexts and mobilized by various identity politics, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, foreign status, nationality, multiculturalism, and internationalization. After offering a careful and critical analysis, the book calls for a complicating of Japan's homogenizing discourses in nuanced and contextual ways, with an explicit goal of working towards a culturally diverse Japan.

Taking a critical intercultural communication perspective, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Japanese Culture and Japanese Society.

Part I
Gender, sexuality, and the body

1
The affective politics of the feminine

An interpassive analysis of Japanese female comedians

Sachi Sekimoto and Yusaku Yajima

In January 2007, Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa made the infamous remark that women are “birth-giving machines” (McCurry, 2007). He apologized immediately after he made the remark; yet public outrage, especially of women in Japan, was expressed. Behind this remark lies not only the history of patriarchal and nationalist ideologies concerning women’s bodies and their reproductive rights, but also a decline in birthrates that has become one of the most troubling and urgent issues. The underlying ideologies concerning the relationship between women and the nation resurfaced publicly again in 2014 when a 35-year-old assemblywoman, Ayaka Shiomura, endured sexist heckling during her speech demanding improvements in childbirth and childcare for women in Tokyo. Several male legislators interrupted her saying, “You should hurry up and get married” and “Can’t you even bear a child?” followed by laughter from several other individuals. In the context of a shrinking population and hyper-aging society, the declining birthrate is often simplistically framed as a women’s issue, invoking hetero/normative gender roles deeply rooted in the construction of Japanese national identity.

Japan’s population is aging due to increased longevity and decreasing due to the declining birthrate. Japan has the highest ratio of the population aged 65 or above and is the only country in the world categorized as a hyper-aged society (Cabinet Office, 2013). Population decline is one of the most significant concerns faced by the Japanese government and its people. Japan’s population reached a peak of 127.74 million in 2006, and is expected to drop to 86.78 million by 2060 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2012). In 2005 the birthrate was the lowest on record with an average of 1.26 babies per woman during her lifetime, and it will stay around 1.35 in the future, which means that Japan is aging and population decline will not stop unless there is a viable solution (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2012). Among the reasons for the low birthrate is economic instability which has resulted in a tendency to marry later and have fewer children (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2010).

The escalated process of population decline and a hyper-aging society presents a gloomy prospect for the nation, deeply unsettling the historical imagination of nationhood and Japaneseness (Anderson, 1991; Oguma, 2002). Humor and comedy both reflect and shape the affective climate of the nation. The entertainment industry plays a key role in reflecting, mediating, and/or alleviating the psychological and affective experiences of viewers. Informed by Zillmann and Bryant’s (1985) mood management theory on the relation between individual stress and television viewing, Anderson, Collins, Schmitt, and Jacobvitz (1996) report that people under stress tend to watch TV programs that serve “to replace anxious thoughts and that will replace negative moods with positive moods” (p. 255). In postindustrial society, consumers seek immaterial services as sources of healing and relaxation (Plourde, 2014). Comedy also plays a significant role in helping people question and challenge taken-for-granted norms, realities, and social structures (e.g., power inequalities, hegemony, marginalized subjectivities, stereotypes) (Greenbaum, 1999). Rossing (2010) states that comedy has the capacity to unmask social inequalities and realities in society, claiming: “Because comedy exaggerates features of our everyday life it reveals overlooked tensions and contradictions” (p. 15).

In this chapter, we explore (un)desirable performance of femininity as ideological and affective labor, paying particular attention to how the performances of female comedians make visible, humorously challenge, and/or reinforce the social stigma of being an unmarried, childless, or childfree woman in Japan. Through the analysis of selected TV episodes and other media sources, we reveal the affective politics of female desire embedded in heterosexist and patriarchal Japanese society. Using the notions of interpassivity (Žižek, 1998) and affective labor (Hardt & Negri, 2004), we problematize what we call the affective labor of the feminine in which an array of women’s emotions—shame, guilt, jealousy, aspirations, hope, and happiness—are used to intensify or redirect the emotional involvement with, and ideological anchoring on, the gendered politics of reproducing Japan as a nation. Our goal is not to provide an overarching analysis of Japanese female comedians, but rather to propose an interpretive framework for revealing the tension between homogenizing and heterogenizing forces that shape the shifting ideological and affective landscape of femininity, heteropatriarchy, and humor.

As researchers, we engage in the critique of the cultural politics of femininity as sojourners/immigrants from Japan in the United States. Having lived away from Japan for many years, we situate ourselves as cultural “insider–outsider” whose cultural and gender identities are shaped by and implicated in the system of Japanese heteropatriarchy. Our analytical perspectives are informed and shaped by transnational cultural belonging and identity negotiation (Eguchi, 2014a). Born in the 1980s, we grew up fantasizing about the West, particularly the U.S., and have been in U.S. higher education/academia since the 2000s (first author) and the 2010s (second author) where we have been Americanized/racialized into an Other (Eguchi, 2014b; Toyosaki, 2007) and have trained ourselves to survive English hegemony (Tsuda, 2008a, 2008b, 2010) while simultaneously challenging it. Our analysis and theorizing, therefore, are critical observations from the other side of the Pacific; we attempt to make sense of the seemingly familiar, yet constantly renewed, cultural maneuvering in Japanese comedy that simultaneously upholds traditional norms while making room for more heterogeneous and counterhegemonic gender identities and ways of living.

Multiplicity in discourses of gender in Japan

The homogeneous image of Japanese society has been destabilized and collapsed in the late 1980s. The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a surge in the popularity of several unique trends in Japanese popular culture, such as anime, manga, video games, and cosplay. During this period, various interesting popular culture movements began including, but not limited to, the appearance of boys’ love (BL) manga (Martin, 2012), visual kei music (McLeod, 2013), the “feminization of masculinity” (Iida, 2005, p. 57), herbivorous men, or sōshoku-kei danshi, that reject conventional Japanese masculinity, and carnivorous women (Nihei, 2013), and TV dramas and movies about gender identities and politics (Min, 2011). These trends embody nuanced, contested, or non-normative representations/performances of gender, potentially encouraging people in Japan to criticize, question, negotiate, or transform traditional gender hierarchy as well as conventional binary gender norms and roles that are pervasive in Japanese society, “including the binaries of male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, ‘normal’/GID, homosexual/transsexual” (Min, 2011, p. 395).¹ Popular culture provides a space for people in Japan to explore—and commodify—alternative forms of gender performance outside of heteronormative femininity and masculinity.

Theoretical perspectives: interpassivity and affective labor

In analyzing the affective politics of humor and comedy in the context of population decline, we interweave two theoretical perspectives: interpassivity and affective labor. Žižek (1998) advances the notion of interpassivity as a form of commodity fetishism in which we entrust our enjoyment and suffering to something or someone else, particularly through the consumption of popular media. He distinguishes the notion of interpassivity from interactivity. The consumer is interactive when mediated signifiers seek his or her active participation—that is, the consumer experiences a spectacle with and through the signifier/Other.

Interpassivity, on the other hand, occurs when the object itself takes over the consumer’s role of enjoying, feeling, or suffering. Mediated signifiers take on the consumer’s responsibility and labor to be an active, independent, thinking subject. Examples of interpassivity include so-called “weepers” who are hired to cry at funerals, “canned laughter” on TV shows, and avatars in cyberspace. Žižek (1998) contends that interpassivity is a “relationship of substitution” in which the consumer decenters the work of subjectivity and delegates the labor of emotional life to the Other. He writes:

By way of surrendering my innermost content, including my dreams and anxieties, to the Other, a space opens up in which I am free to breathe: when the Other laughs for me, I am free to take a rest; when the Other is sacrificed instead of me, I am free to go on living with the awareness that I have paid for my guilt, and so on.

(Žižek 1998, para. 10)

The relevance of interpassivity as an analytical concept is evident in various studies on popular culture in late capitalist contexts. Muhr and Pedersen (2010) elaborate on how Facebook functions as an interpassive medium in which our Facebook personas and profiles can feel and believe for us, socialize and enjoy friendships, and support a social cause by pressing the “like” button. This “[relieves our] own real bodily self of all these sometimes unbearable duties and injunctions of being a decent human being” (Muhr & Pedersen, 2010, p. 267).

The notion of interpassivity illuminates the “outsourcing” of emotional engagement and affective labor that otherwise requires a considerable amount of energy and attention in one’s everyday life. The notion of affective labor speaks to the mode of production and consumption that sustains the interpassive relationship between the consumer and the consumed. Hardt and Negri (2004) use the term “affective labor” to refer to a form of immaterial labor that produces immaterial products such as “knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response” (p. 108). Affect refers to the intensity of our emotional and physiological involvement, commitment, or anchoring that directs and regulates social formation and social relations (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). In contrast with emotions that are felt mentally and individually, affect involves both qualitative bodily experiences (joy, sadness, satisfaction, etc.) and a collective mode of thinking, feeling, and organizing social reality (Ahmed, 2004).

Comedians are affective laborers in the sense that their job is to induce laughter—something immaterial yet bodily felt and socially cultivated. Shouse (2007) focuses on the affective dimension of stand-up comedy performance, arguing that humor is “transmitted between bodies” (p. 39, emphasis in original) and not simply conveyed by cognitive understanding of humorous words. As affective laborers, comedians produce or manipulate affects such as “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108). In analyzing selected media representations of two female Japanese comedians, Mitsuura Yasuko and Okubo Kayoko, we examine how their comedic personas engage in affective labor and enable interpassive engagement—viewers delegate and outsource their gendered obligations and negotiations with what it means to desire and feel like a woman in contemporary sociopolitical and cultural contexts of Japan.

Gender, affective labor, and female comedians

Japanese comedy has historically been dominated by male comedians, making it difficult for female performers to break into the industry. There are pervasive stereotypes that women cannot be funny and female comedians are not physically attractive (De Haven, 2013). Greenbaum (1999) argues that female comedians need to work harder than male comedians to establish and perform a comic persona (e.g., verbal roughhousing) in the male dominated arena of comedy. Even with a humorous script, their performances are not perceived as funny if they fail to create such a persona. Female comedians are required to violate the cultural expectations of femininity (e.g., not using passive voice and being “aggressive”). It is more common for female comedians to use their “less than attractive” physical appearance as a source of humor, thus playing into the existing sexist cultural framework in which Japanese women’s worth is measured by their physical attractiveness. Japanese female comedians are often found to be funny based on their self-deprecating and apologetic attitude about their unattractiveness. The gender dynamic in Japanese comedy may be considered as in stark contrast to U.S. comedy in which critics find subversive and oppositional possibility in female comedic performance (Gilbert, 1997).

We focus on two popular and influential female comedians: Mitsuura Yasuko and Okubo Kayoko. They began their careers as a duo in 1992, gradually increasing their popularity over the next two decades. Mitsuura Yasuko is one of the pioneers who established their popularity as female comedians in Japan. Mitsuura’s comedic character plays into the stereotypical framing of female comedian in that she claims her identity as the so-called busu-kyara (ugly character) and her humor is based on her tragic experiences of male rejection and unfulfilled female desire. If Mitsuura’s busu-kyara is more nerdy and introverted, Okubo’s comedic character plays on her performances of oversexualized femininity. Okubo plays into her “ugly” appearance, yet exaggerates her erotic appea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: intercultural communication in Japan: theorizing homogenized discourse
• PART I Gender, sexuality, and the body
• PART II Performance and queerness
• PART III Inclusiveness and Otherness
• PART IV Media and framing
• PART V Environment and movement
• PART VI Education and internationalization
• Index