Contemporary Japan And Popular Culture

Explores a wide range of cultural practices - including popular literature, film, television, fashion, music and advertising - and the methods for analysing them.

This book explores the monstrous-feminine in Japanese popular culture, produced from the late years of the 1980s through to the new millennium. Raechel Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. The book focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.

Dolores Martinez heads an international team of scholars in this lively discussion of Japanese popular culture. The book's contributors include Japanese as well as British, Icelandic and North American writers, offering a diversity of views of what Japanese popular culture is, and how it is best approached and understood. They bring an anthropological perspective to a broad range of topics, including sumo, karaoke, manga, vampires, women's magazines, soccer and morning television. Through these topics - many of which have never previously been addressed by scholars - the contributors also explore several deeper themes: the construction of gender in Japan; the impact of globalisation and modern consumerism; and the rapidly shifting boundaries of Japanese culture and identity. This innovative study will appeal to those interested in Japanese culture, sociology and cultural anthropology.

Specifically designed for use on a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, Introducing Japanese Popular Culture is a comprehensive textbook offering an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as, politics, society, and economics. As a result, more than being a time capsule of influential trends, this book teaches enduring lessons about how popular culture reflects the societies that produce and consume it. With contributions from an international team of scholars, representing a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to art history and media studies, the book’s sections include: Television Videogames Music Popular Cinema Anime Manga Popular Literature Fashion Contemporary Art Written in an accessible style by a stellar line-up of international contributors, this textbook will be essential reading for students of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and popular culture, and Asian Studies in general.

Since the 2000s, the Japanese word shōjo has gained global currency, accompanying the transcultural spread of other popular Japanese media such as manga and anime. The term refers to both a character type specifically, as well as commercial genres marketed to female audiences more generally. Through its diverse chapters this edited collection introduces the two main currents of shōjo research: on the one hand, historical investigations of Japan’s modern girl culture and its representations, informed by Japanese-studies and gender-studies concerns; on the other hand, explorations of the transcultural performativity of shōjo as a crafted concept and affect-prone code, shaped by media studies, genre theory, and fan-culture research. While acknowledging that shōjo has mediated multiple discourses throughout the twentieth century—discourses on Japan and its modernity, consumption and consumerism, non-hegemonic gender, and also technology—this volume shifts the focus to shōjo mediations, stretching from media by and for actual girls, to shōjo as media. As a result, the Japan-derived concept, while still situated, begins to offer possibilities for broader conceptualizations of girlness within the contemporary global digital mediascape.

This encyclopedia covers culture from the end of the Imperialist period in 1945 right up to date to reflect the vibrant nature of contemporary Japanese society and culture.

Specifically designed for use in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, while reaching specialists and general readers, this second edition of Introducing Japanese Popular Culture is a comprehensive textbook offering an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as politics, society, and economics. As a result, more than being a time capsule of influential trends, this book teaches enduring lessons about how popular culture reflects the societies that produce and consume it. With contributions from an international team of scholars, representing a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to art history and media studies, the book covers: Characters Television Videogames Fan media and technology Music Popular cinema Anime Manga Spectacles and competitions Sites of popular culture Fashion Contemporary art. Written in an accessible style with ample description and analysis, this textbook is essential reading for students of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and popular culture, globalization, and Asian Studies in general. It is a go-to handbook for interested readers and a compendium for scholars.

The cultural practices and cultural meaning of health care in urban Japan.

Fanning the Flames examines the worlds of fans in the exuberant and commercialized popular culture of contemporary Japan. The works collected here profile denizens of all-night rap clubs; sumo stable patrons; passionate fan clubs of a professional baseball team; enthusiasts of traditional rakugo storytelling; a club of middle-aged female fans of a popular music star; youthful followers of Japan's longest-running rock band; vinyl record collectors; and a thriving community of girls and women who produce and devour amateur comics. Grounded in close, often extended fieldwork with the fans themselves, each case study is an effort to understand both the personal pleasures and political economies of fandoms. The contributors explore the many ways that fans in and of Japanese mass culture actively search for intimacy and identity amid the powerful corporate structures that produce the leisure and entertainment of today's Japan.