Japan Pop: Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture

Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture

Timothy J. Craig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317467205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

A fascinating illustrated look at various forms of Japanese popular culture: pop song, jazz, enka (a popular ballad genre of music), karaoke, comics, animated cartoons, video games, television dramas, films and "idols" -- teenage singers and actors. As pop culture not only entertains but is also a reflection of society, the book is also about Japan itself -- its similarities and differences with the rest of the world, and how Japan is changing. The book features 32 pages of manga plus 50 additional photos, illustrations, and shorter comic samples.

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Introduction

Tim Craig

“Where … Where am I? I know I must have drowned, but….

You have died. Akanemaru has ceased to exist. His body has decayed and dissolved into the sea…. Look around you….

“WHAT?!! What is this?! What am I?!”

You are now a microscopic sea creature. You are nothing more than a miserable little speck. The instant your human form ceased to exist, you were reborn.

“But WHY?! Why have I changed? What have I done to deserve this?”

You didn’t do anything wrong. … This was simply your destiny—to become something different, when your life as a human ended….

“NO!! I’m a man!! And I want to live like one!! … Oh No! Something huge is coming! I’m going to be swallowed!”

—From Phoenix, by Osamu Tezuka¹

* * *

Hey you say you were a butterfly

I see you in a peaceful field

Hey you say you were a butterfly

I see you in a beautiful garden

I wanna catch you catch you

catch you Butterfly Boy

—Shōnen Knife

* * *

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

—Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz

Japan’s New Pop Power

Cartoons and comic books, TV dramas and pop music stars, fashion trends and crooning businessmen—until two decades ago such familiar and fun areas of life would have been unlikely entries in the journal of images commonly associated with Japan. For the greater part of this century, Japan presented two very different faces to the outside world. One was the exotic Orient, a land of sword-wielding samurai, kimono-clad geisha, and Zen Buddhism whose fascination and charm lay in its distance—geographic, temporal, and cultural—from our own everyday worlds. The other was Japan the power, first military and later economic, whose impact on our lives was closely felt, formidable, and not always pleasant. In the arena of popular culture, a sphere that is both part of our everyday lives and a source of pleasure, Japan was a very minor player, unless one counts the televisions, stereos, and videocassette recorders that Japan produced so efficiently and that brought us the cultural products of Hollywood, Disney, and our various home countries. Although Japan’s own postwar pop culture had in fact been creative, vibrant, and commercially successful domestically, this was a fact that few people outside Japan were aware of. In the international consciousness Japan remained a serious nation and people, accomplished in traditional arts and modern manufacturing, but hardly a wellspring of entertainment and appealing cultural creations that would one day spread beyond Japan’s shores.

Today it’s a different story. Japan’s pop culture has not only continued to evolve and blossom at home, it has also attracted a broad, street-level following overseas, giving Japan a new cultural impact on the world to complement its established economic impact. Japanese animation and comics have built a huge global following, and their Japanese names, anime and manga, have entered the international lexicon. A new generation of young Americans, Europeans, and Asians have grown up watching not Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny but Japanese cartoons, from Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Star Blazers, and Robotech to Doraemon, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Crayon Shinchan. Anime fan clubs, “fanzines,” and Web sites have sprung up by the hundreds, and hit movies such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell have helped Japanese animation gross tens of millions of dollars in yearly international box office and video sales. Japan’s manga (comics) are translated and read eagerly throughout the world, and the influence of manga’s fine lines and realistic aesthetic style can be seen in Western fashion and graphic design.²

Recent Japanese films have won top awards at the Cannes and Vienna Film Festivals, while Japan’s TV dramas and variety shows are in high demand throughout Asia. One Hong Kong shop routinely sells fifty video compact discs of a single Japanese TV drama per day, to customers who want to see the latest episodes as soon as possible.³ Japanese pop singers perform to packed venues in Hong Kong and mainland China, top “Canto-pop” (Hong Kong pop music) and other Asian recording artists do cover versions of hit Japanese pop songs, and the techno-pop sound of Japanese music tycoon Tetsuya Komuro provides the sound track for major Hollywood movies. Dreams Come True vocalist Miwa Yoshida graces the cover of Time magazine, and the all-girl rock group Shōnen Knife has a strong alternative following in the United States. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, teenagers take their fashion cues from the clothes of Japanese “idol” singers and TV stars and from Japanese teen magazines such as Non-No. Gossipy stories about Japanese entertainers such as Takuya Kimura and Noriko Sakai fill local newspapers.⁴ Among the Nintendo and PlayStation set, which encompasses most of the school-age population in many countries, Japanese video games such as Street Fighter, Tekken, and Final Fantasy rule the roost. Karaoke is a household word worldwide, and the parade out of Japan of hit pop culture products like Hello Kitty goods, Tamagotchi virtual pets, and Pokémon toys is unending. Even in South Korea, where anti-Japan sentiment thrives as a result of Japan’s 1910–1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, demand for Japan pop is strong among the younger generation. Japanese music, comics, and fashion magazines commonly circulate “underground” despite a decades-long ban on the importation of Japanese cultural products, while popular manga such as Slam Dunk, which set off a basketball craze in South Korea, are translated into Korean, with the names and places changed so that they can be imported legally.⁵

In short, Japan pop is ubiquitous, hot, and increasingly influential. Once routinely derided as a one-dimensional power, a heavyweight in the production and export of the “hard” of automobiles, electronics, and other manufactured goods but a nobody in terms of the “soft” of cultural products and influence, Japan now contributes not just to our material lives, but to our everyday cultural lives as well.

Why Japan Pop Is Hot

One sign of the level of interest in Japan’s pop culture was a conference on the topic held in Victoria, Canada, by the University of Victoria Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives in 1997. Launched with a one-page announcement sent to a few Japan specialists and posted on the Internet, the conference drew a strong international response and evolved into a three-day event featuring over forty presentations by scholars, writers, practitioners, and fans from four continents on Japanese pop music, comics and animation, TV dramas and commercials, movies, stand-up comedy, popular literature, and sumo wrestling, as well as issues such as social change, women’s roles, and the spread and appeal of Japanese pop culture overseas.⁶ In the audience, scholars from Harvard, Stanford, and Tokyo Universities, applying an academic lens to analyze Japanese society through its popular culture, rubbed shoulders with purple-haired, karaoke-singing otaku (hard-core aficionados) conversant with the latest pop music groups and manga artists. As diverse a group as one is likely to find at a university conference, all brought valid viewpoints to the subject and shared both a deep enthusiasm for Japan’s popular culture and an appreciation of its growing influence.

The Victoria conference received considerable media coverage, and as its organizer, I found myself being asked the same questions over and over: What’s so special about Japanese pop culture? Why is it gaining such popularity outside Japan? The chapters of this book provide a fuller answer to that question than I can give here, but in the next few pages I offer some thoughts and insights based on the Victoria conference, the writings presented in this book, and my own dozen years in Japan as a close follower and fan of Japan’s pop culture.

Quality and Creativity

Asked why Japan’s pop culture products are now so popular internationally, Hidenori Oyama, director of Tōei Animation’s International Department, has a simple answer: “It’s because they’re high quality, that’s all.”⁷ Not all Japan pop is high quality—far from it. Even the most avid fan would readily admit that Japan’s pop culture, like that of any nation, has its share of the mediocre, or worse: mindless television shows, cute but off-key pop singers, boring mass-produced manga, and the excessively violent and pornographic. Nevertheless, Oyama’s bold statement rings true, for overshadowing the uninspired and the forgettable are numerous examples, in every genre, of artists and works that are outstanding by any standard in their quality and creative genius.

That Japan, long a land of poets and artists as well as warriors and businessmen, should today excel in an area of the arts should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the nation’s rich aesthetic heritage. Japan boasts a long and distinguished record of artistic achievement, and more masters and masterpieces than can be named here, in literature, poetry, theater, film, sculpture, painting, ceramics, gardening, and architecture. The bloodlines of today’s popular culture go back in particular to the vibrant bourgeois culture, born of the common people and aimed at the new urban middle class, which developed and flourished during Japan’s Edo period (1603–1867). The novels of adventure and eroticism produced during this period by writers like Ibara Saikaku burst with the joy of life, expressing “an unbridled taste for everything pleasurable, amusing, extravagant, sensational.”⁸ In drama, the popular bunraku (puppet) and kabuki (popular plays with highly stylized singing and dancing) theaters took their place beside the older and more aristocratic nō (classical dance-drama). Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the man considered Japan’s greatest playwright, wrote for both bunraku and kabuki, and many of his powerful scripts, which turned simple characters such as shop clerks and prostitutes into tragic figures, remain popular today. This was also the period in which Bashō popularized haiku (seventeen-syllable poems), which Japanese of all classes (and many non-Japanese as well) have written and enjoyed since Bashō’s time. Still another major art form to emerge from Edo-period mass culture, and perhaps the one best known in the West, is the ukiyo-e (pictures of the ephemeral world) woodblock print. The delightful prints of courtesans and kabuki actors, as well as landscapes by masters Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Sharaku influenced the Impressionists and remain popular internationally to this day.⁹

One aspect of Japan pop’s quality, then and now, is an extraordinarily high standard of artistic skill and craftsmanship. Examine an inrō (medicine box), a sword blade, or a woodblock print from the Edo period (or consider the precision engineering and world-leader quality standards of a Toyota automobile or a Nikon camera), and you will encounter the same level of skill and attention to detail that are found in the drawings of manga artists like Akira Toriyama and Monkey Punch, the enka (ballad) singing of Misora Hibari or Takashi Hosokawa, and the beautifully blended music and imagery of Japanese television commercials.

Providing vitality to this artist...