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Introducing Japanese popular culture
\"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 in Japan. 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.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Fandom Unbound
In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all, as this collection shows, is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. In this collection of essays, Japanese and American scholars offer richly detailed descriptions of how this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, this groundbreaking collection provides fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
eBook
Japanese schoolgirl confidential : how teenage girls made a nation cool
Brian Ashcraft discusses the history and impact of the schoolgirl image on Japan's society and culture, and asks j-pop idols, along with other celebrities, film directors, historians, artists, and others to explain the trend, fashion choices, and its appeal.
Book
Cross-Cultural Influences Between Japanese and American Pop Cultures
This collection features examinations of popular culture, including manga, music, film, cosplay, and literature, among other topics. Using interdisciplinary sources and analyses, this collection adds to the global discussion and relevancy of Japanese popular culture. This collection serves to highlight the work of multidisciplinary scholars who offer fresh perspectives of ongoing cross-cultural and cyclical influences that are commonly found between the US and Japan. Notably, this collection considers the relationships that have influenced Japanese popular culture, and how this has, in turn, influenced the Western world.
eBook
Be more Japan : the art of Japanese living = Nihonjin no kurasi no katachi
A celebration of all things Japan. Find out what makes Japanese culture unique, where to experience it for yourself and how to absorb some of its wisdom along the way.
Book
Beautiful fighting girl
From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausica? of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Sait? Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. For Sait?, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, Sait? understands the otaku's ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated worldùa logical outcome of the media they consume. Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose baroque imagination Sait? sees as an important antecedent of otaku culture, Beautiful Fighting Girl was hugely influential when first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.
eBook
Coffee life in Japan
This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan's vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan's coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White's book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.
eBook
Fluid Orality in the Discourse of Japanese Popular Culture
This volume invites the reader into the world of pragmatic and discourse studies in Japanese popular culture. Through \"character-speak\", the book analyzes quoted speech in light (graphic) novels, the effeminate onee kotoba in talk shows, narrative character in keetai (mobile phone) novels, floating whispers in manga, and fictionalized dialects in television drama series. Explorations into conversational interaction, internal monologue, rhetorical figures, intertextuality, and the semiotic mediation between verbal and visual signs reveal how speakers manipulate language in performing playful \"characters\" and \"characteristics\". Most prominent in the discourse of Japanese popular culture is its \"fluid orality\". We find the essential oral nature in and across genres of Japanese popular culture, and observe seamless transitions among styles and speech variations. This fluidity is understood as a feature of polyphonic speech initiated not by the so-called ideal singular speaker, but by a multiple and often shifting interplay of one's speaking selves performing as various characters. Challenging traditional (Western) linguistic theories founded on the concept of the autonomous speaker, this study ventures into open and embracing pragmatic and discourse studies that inquire into the very nature of our speaking selves.
eBook