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Japan Pop: Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture
Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture
Timothy J. Craig
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eBook - ePub
Japan Pop: Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture
Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture
Timothy J. Craig
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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
âWhere ⊠Where am I? I know I must have drowned, butâŠ.
You have died. Akanemaru has ceased to exist. His body has decayed and dissolved into the seaâŠ. Look around youâŠ.
âWHAT?!! What is this?! What am I?!â
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.
âBut WHY?! Why have I changed? What have I done to deserve this?â
You didnât do anything wrong. ⊠This was simply your destinyâto become something different, when your life as a human endedâŠ.
âNO!! Iâm a man!! And I want to live like one!! ⊠Oh No! Something huge is coming! Iâm going to be swallowed!â
âFrom 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
âShĆnen Knife |
* * *
âToto, I have a feeling weâre not in Kansas anymore.â
âDorothy, in The Wizard of Oz |
Japanâs New Pop Power
Cartoons and comic books, TV dramas and pop music stars, fashion trends and crooning businessmenâuntil 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 distanceâgeographic, temporal, and culturalâfrom 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 Japanâs 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 Japanâs shores.
Today itâs a different story. Japanâs 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, âfanzines,â 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. Japanâs manga (comics) are translated and read eagerly throughout the world, and the influence of mangaâs 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 Japanâs 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 âCanto-popâ (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 ShĆnen 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 âidolâ 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 PokĂ©mon toys is unending. Even in South Korea, where anti-Japan sentiment thrives as a result of Japanâs 1910â1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, demand for Japan pop is strong among the younger generation. Japanese music, comics, and fashion magazines commonly circulate âundergroundâ 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 âhardâ of automobiles, electronics, and other manufactured goods but a nobody in terms of the âsoftâ 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 Japanâs 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, womenâs 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 Japanâs 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: Whatâs 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 Japanâs pop culture.
Quality and Creativity
Asked why Japanâs pop culture products are now so popular internationally, Hidenori Oyama, director of TĆei Animationâs International Department, has a simple answer: âItâs because theyâre high quality, thatâs all.â7 Not all Japan pop is high qualityâfar from it. Even the most avid fan would readily admit that Japanâs 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, Oyamaâs 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 nationâs 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 todayâs 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 Japanâs Edo period (1603â1867). The novels of adventure and eroticism produced during this period by writers like Ibara Saikaku burst with the joy of life, expressing âan unbridled taste for everything pleasurable, amusing, extravagant, sensational.â8 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 nĆ (classical dance-drama). Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the man considered Japanâs 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 BashĆ popularized haiku (seventeen-syllable poems), which Japanese of all classes (and many non-Japanese as well) have written and enjoyed since BashĆâs 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 popâs quality, then and now, is an extraordinarily high standard of artistic skill and craftsmanship. Examine an inrĆ (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...