Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan

Matthew Allen, Rumi Sakamoto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134203734
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: History

Japanese popular culture is constantly evolving in the face of internal and external influence. Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan examines this evolution from a new and challenging perspective by focusing on the movements of popular culture into and out of Japan.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book argues that a key factor behind the changing nature of Japanese popular culture lies in its engagement with globalization. Essays from a team of leading international scholars illustrate this crucial interaction between the flows of Japanese popular culture and the constant development of globalization. Drawing on rich empirical content, this book looks at Japanese popular culture as it traverses international borders flowing out through such forms as manga consumption in New Zealand and flowing in through such forms as foreigners writing about Japan in Japanese and how American influences affected the formation of Japan's gay identity.

Presenting current, confronting and sometimes controversial insights into the many forms of Japanese popular culture emerging within this global context, Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan will make essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, cultural studies and international relations.

1 Introduction

Inside-out Japan? Popular culture and globalization in the context of Japan

Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto

It has become something of truism that in recent years ‘Japanese’ popular culture has spread its influence across the globe. This book addresses the relationship between Japan, popular culture, and globalization in ways that problematize the ownership of ‘Japanese popular culture’. The chapters in this anthology all examine movements of popular cultural ideas and artefacts into and out of Japan, and are new takes on forms of popular culture that extend beyond the current Eurocentric notions of what it is that informs the production, distribution and consumption of ‘Japanese popular culture’; that is, Japan as the Oriental or exotic Other.

By opening discourse that moves beyond the stereotypes about Japan that are commonly traded in within the academies and media of Europe, Asia, Australasia and the United States, we can ask significant questions about how ‘global’ influences cross borders. Using Japan as a case in point, we demonstrate that movements of ideas, technologies and products across borders influence both local and ‘global’ ideas and practice. From literature to art, from anthropology to history, from music to gay studies and from sports to media studies, authors in this anthology canvass a broad range of topics which employ the triplet of Japan, popular culture and globalization. In particular, authors focus on the dynamism of the processes; that is, all recognize that culture and popular culture are part of a highly mobile and transformative process that spreads beyond the borders of any single nation.

Globalization and Japan

In 1997 Mark Schilling wrote that from within Japan it was recognized that Japan had a ‘strong presence’ in the global economy but was perceived to have no international cultural presence (Schilling 1997: 9). This reflects a similar view of Japan’s cultural global capital to that penned by Frederic Jameson, when he wrote, on Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures and Matsushita’s buyout of MCA, that ‘[despite Japan’s importance for the global economy], the Japanese were unable to master the essentially cultural productivity required to secure the globalization process’ (Jameson 1998: 67). In recent years this has changed. Following the expansion of communications, the development of new technologies like cellular phones and the now almost redundant Walkman, and the prominent acquisitions of global film and music production and distribution houses by Japanese interests in the 1980s and 1990s, the explosion of international interest that began with manga, anime and video games and the increasing interpenetration of ideas, capital, culture and economics throughout Asia have led to things Japanese occupying a very high profile on the global stage. From Hello Kitty merchandise to Pokemon with its associated marketing, from the acclaimed films of Miyazaki Hayao to the less acclaimed but hardly less popular Sailor Moon, Japanese popular culture occupies a prominent place in today’s increasingly connected globe.¹

Scholarship on cultural globalization has advanced over recent years from early accounts of globalization as homogenization to more sophisticated interpretations. Its early variations included globalization as the West-centred advent of modernity into the rest of the world (Giddens 1990; Axford 1995; Spybey 1996); globalization as homogenization by the capitalist forces of multinational and transnational corporations; and globalization as American cultural domination, i.e. as a version of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Schiller and Nordenstreng 1979; Thomlinson 1991). Global processes of homogenization may be given a positive twist (celebrating the ‘end of history’; see, for example, Fukuyama 1992) or a negative one (‘McDonaldization of the world’ and its clashing of local cultures). But, either way, in this schema the world is seen to be converging into a single, monolithic space under the juggernaut of global capitalism. Such arguments, which tend to assume an unproblematic relationship between economic and cultural spheres, equating economic and cultural forces, are not very convincing seen from outside the United States. In Japan, for example, although McDonald’s can be found at every corner of its big cities and American and British popular music is a staple of Japanese youth, diverse and celebrated local forms of food, music, films and other cultural elements are also thriving, and there is also increasing influence pouring in from other parts of Asia. In terms of the outflow, too, despite Japan’s place as the second largest economy in the world, the influence of Japanese technology in media and communications, the recent and rapid expansion of its popular culture abroad, and its location at the forefront of trends and fashions in Asia, clearly, the world is not being ‘Japanized’ either.

Rather than the homogenization thesis, then, what seems more useful is another set of more recent scholarships on globalization that proposes more complex models of interconnectedness and unevenness (Piaterse 2004; Appadurai 1996; Thomlinson 1999). According to these writers, what emerges through the process of globalization is not a uniform ‘Global Culture’, but increasing differences and complexity of locally inflected meanings due to hybridization and indigenization, which often contain conflicts and contradictions. In this book, we demonstrate that local differentiations and creative processes of adoption and adaptation with inflection are indeed happening around Japan-related popular culture. The process of cultural globalization understood this way also often involves a tension or even antagonism with a national desire/agenda, assumes a complicity with it or exhibits a total indifference to the national, depending on the what, who and when of each concrete case. Still, there is no doubt that multiple and often unpredictable interconnections are creating new situations and cultural hybrids rather than reducing human experiences to a monolithic mode.

One aim of this anthology is to provide a forum in which we can clarify some of the issues that emanate from the ascription of national characteristics to popular cultural artefacts, and the implications of assuming cultural ‘ownership’. There is ample evidence to support the view that popular culture and globalization face a conundrum of ownership and location; for example, in Korea during the ban on Japanese popular cultural imports (1945–2004) anime from Japan was routinely imported and dubbed into Korean, and its Japanese origins were effectively disguised. Resolving, or at least highlighting, this conundrum of ‘belonging’ was one of the reasons for the decision to put together this volume. The eleven chapters that follow focus on Japan and its relations with the ‘outside’ world to demonstrate the dynamism that accompanies flows of popular culture between Japan and the globe. Collectively they show that the relations between Japan, popular culture and globalization are inside out, upside down and back to front. Most importantly, they are not simply about ‘Japanese’ popular culture.

This volume thus problematizes the ‘Japaneseness’ of Japanese popular culture by focusing on the intersection of globalization and popular cultural products associated with Japan. Instead of assuming that because it (be it anime, computer games or Pokemon) is produced in Japan, there must be something Japanese about it, we examine, through concrete case studies, how the production and consumption of each cultural product takes place both inside and/or outside Japan, at the conjunction of multiple forces and cultural influences. Importantly, this is not simply about Japan and the Other. It is not about simplistic resistance to and acceptance of popular cultural influence as a whole where only two forces meet (local and global, inside and outside, national and foreign). Our central thesis is that there are many ‘insides’ (‘localities’) and many more ‘outsides’ (‘extra-localities’), which inform the production and consumption of ‘Japanese popular culture’. The ‘Japan’ in ‘Japanese popular culture’ is always already dislocated, contaminated, cross-pollinated and criss-crossed.

The authors in this volume (many of whom themselves have multiple connections with places and cultures) engage different levels of the production, reproduction, consumption and re-consumption of aspects of popular culture. Each chapter provides a detailed case study, with close attention paid to the multiple forces and influences that overdetermine how a popular cultural product is produced, reproduced, interpreted, hybridized, indigenized and so forth. Each considers specific places and audiences, and political, economic, historical and cultural contexts. This is because we believe that only concrete and empirical studies can bring forward the complex process of producing meaning around the triplet of Japan, globalization and popular culture today. While discussions of globalization can often be highly abstract, this book attempts to add empirical content to the concepts related to globalization, such as ‘interconnectedness’, ‘deterritorialization’, ‘compression of the world’, ‘intensification of consciousness of the world’, ‘hybridity’, ‘global flow’ and so forth. This volume attempts to link theory to empirical studies, fleshing out theory and bringing out the unevenness of globalization processes.

Writing Japanese popular culture

Postwar Japan saw little academic interest in ‘popular culture’, with a few exceptions such as Tsurumi Shunsuke and Yoshimoto Takaaki, who wrote on taishûbunka (mass culture) from a perspective of mass/subculture as a reservoir of mass mentality rooted in everyday life and a potential site for popular resistance (Tsurumi 2001; Yoshimoto 1984). Since the 1990s, however, a number of scholarly works on popular culture have emerged. They are largely by younger-generation sociologists and media studies scholars who are familiar with poststructuralism and other theoretical tools for analysing cultural texts (e.g. Azuma 2001; Ueno and Mouri 2002). This coincided with Japanese universities’ strategy to secure enough students in the time of ‘shôshika’ (declining number of children) and sharply decreasing enrolments by opening new courses on manga and other popular culture, followed by publication of books based on ‘lecture notes’ from these often highly successful courses (e.g. Abe 2001; Shimizu 2002). Studies of popular cultural texts for mass consumption such as manga, anime and TV drama are now gradually finding their way into established academia, if still at the margins.

Of particular relevance to the themes in the volume is another group of works that look at Japanese popular culture in Asia in the context of cultural imperialism and/or globalization (e.g. Igarashi 1998; Chin 2000; Ishii 2001; Iwabuchi 2001). This approach is understandable as nowhere is the interconnectedness of globalization more true, and nowhere more contested, than in Asia. Because of Japan’s past status as the colonizer/aggressor in Asia, there is wariness over the popularity of Japanese popular culture in many parts of Asia. Is popular culture simply a new way of culturally subjugating people in Asia? Or has globalization finally done away with the notion of the ‘centre’ and ‘oppressor’, instead offering a global flow of consumer goods with little or no Japaneseness attached? For some, especially those who promote ‘soft power’, the ‘Japaneseness’ of Japanese popular culture is hugely important. Aoki thus suggests that performing ‘Cool Japan’ serves ‘the national interest’ because it helps reduce anti-Japanese feelings in East Asia (Aoki 2004), whilst Ogura argues that Japan needs an active ‘cultural diplomacy’ of exporting ‘Japanese spirit’ via popular culture (Ogura 2004; see also Hamano 1999; McGray 2002).

Japan’s international prominence, and its high profile in entertainment, fashion, literature and art, has also attracted English-language interest in Japan’s relations with popular culture. John Treat’s Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (1996), D. P. Martinez’s The World of Japanese Popular Culture (1998) and Timothy Craig’s Japan Pop: Inside the world of Japanese popular culture (2000) all testify to this renewed fascination with things popular and Japanese. On one hand, their focus on the popular has certainly challenged the ubiquitous image of homogeneous, corporate Japan typically found in nihonjinron literature in the 1970s and 1980s, and offers a more differentiated view of Japanese society and culture. On the other hand, however, many such works seem to retain the local/global (national/international) dichotomy and the assumption that Japanese popular culture is essentially a ‘national’ culture. Effectively, many of these works seem to share assumptions about the nature of the ‘essentialized Japan’.

The issue of the ‘essentialized’ Japan is a recurring theme in this anthology. Although the images of Japan as a country of tea ceremony and Noh theatre or of workaholic salarymen may have given way to those of Japan as quirky with a nerdy otaku subculture,² such new images are still understood to be something uniquely Japanese, especially in the English-language literature. Insofar as the ‘Japaneseness’ of Japanese popular culture is uncritically assumed, the basic logic – that it is the myth of the nation that retrospectively gives the unity to Japanese popular culture – remains the same. The same can be said about Japanese-language scholarship on Japanese popular culture, much of which focuses on Japanese popular culture in Asia in the context of Japan’s cultural and economic hegemony in the region. While such works do usefully challenge the thesis of ‘globalization as homogenization as Americanization’, they seem uncritical of the assumption of Japanese popular culture as essentially and originally Japanese ‘national’ culture, which then travels intact to Asia.

Underscoring our inquiry, then, is how we can usefully engage the concept of globalization with specific relation to Japan and the production and consumption of popular culture. Although the issue of globalization has received considerable intellectual attention over the past decade or so, globalization and Japan’s relationship with it have been relatively understudied. While Eades, Gill and Befu’s contribution, Globablization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan (2000), contains some excellent work and Iwabuchi’s Recentering Globalization (2002) breaks new ground in its theoretical location of Japan in the global community, few coherent studies have yet been produced in either Japanese or English that engage and ground Japan and globalization. This volume hopes to redress this through authors’ individual engagement with the triplet mentioned above: globalization, popular culture and Japan.

We are also interested in the new cultural forms of ‘local globalization’ and ‘global localization’ that are emerging. In today’s world, with increasing physical, monetary, linguistic and popular cultural mobilization and dissemination, the notion of any society free from the influence of others has become moot. And this means more than just saying that all ‘national’ cultures are under some global and external influence. Rather, locality is often fundamentally restructured and re-imagined through enmeshing global elements; but, simultaneously, global influences may also be restructured and re-imagined on the ground in socially distinctive ways. As a result, differentiating the local and the global is not always possible or useful. It seems to us that the concept of ‘locality’ itself must be reconsidered in the context of the movements of people across borders, the establishment of diasporic communities, linkages between the new and old homes, and significant restructuring of notions of belonging. Ideas associated with claims to ‘ownership’ of ‘original’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘traditional’ culture, which are used to reify the production of nationalism and cultural identity, would appear to have less and less explanatory power in understanding what is really happening.

Structuring accounts

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, ‘Reconfiguring Japan’, looks at what happens when Japan-originated cultural icons travel to other parts of the world. The chapters in Part I encompass a range of topics, all of which look at issues of global importance, with a focus on the movement offshore (to America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand) of icons that are identifiably Japanese. Each chapter introduces specific cases and each author engages the complexities of globalization in varied and interesting ways.

The section starts with Koichi Iwabuchi’s chapter (Chapter 2) on the movement of Japanese popular cultural icons to Asia and the recentring of Japan in the region. He opens discourse on how historically driven concepts of national belonging can be overdetermined, particularly in Asia. The chapter looks critically at the privileging of ‘America’ as the centre of globalizing trends and proposes that by closely examining some of the intra-regional flows of popular culture in Asia, and the history of relations between Japan and its former colonies, we can see how these contribute to the formation of the feeling of ‘living modern in East Asia’. Like other authors in this volume, he incorporates the wars in the Pacific and in Korea into his rhetoric of how history influences contemporary cultural flows. In the context of America-driven cultural globalization that has engendered the proliferation of global mass culture, he demonstrates how these flows forge transnational connections both dialogically and asymmetrically in terms of production, representation, distribution, regulation and consumption.

Matthew Allen’s chapter (Chapter 3) focuses on the popular US animation series South Park’s representations of Japanese history, Japanese animation (Pokemon), Japanese culture, Japan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Japanese names and words
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Inside-out Japan? Popular culture and globalization in the context of Japan
• Reconfiguring Japan
• Becoming Global
• Index