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Women, Social Media and Political Engagement in Japan: A Survey Study
Despite comparable levels of political participation between genders, a significant gender gap in political empowerment persists in Japan. Women demonstrate a tendency towards progressive perspectives, yet exhibit lower levels of political interest and knowledge. The advent of social media has given rise to a plethora of discourse surrounding its impact, particularly in relation to women's political engagement. Drawing on a survey of 1,723 respondents, this study examines gendered patterns in social media use and political engagement in Japan. Findings reveal that while Japanese women are active on Instagram, they seldom engage in political activities on the platform - unlike men, who are more likely to use social media for political purposes. Nevertheless, social media discussions can occasionally shift toward political topics, potentially heightening gender consciousness among women. This unexpected form of political communication, occurring within intimate online spaces, raises questions about its potential to foster political empowerment for Japanese women in the future.
Journal Article
Otaku and the struggle for imagination in Japan
\"In this ethnographic study of Otaku-- a loose category referring to intense fans of Japanese animation, games, and comics-- conducted in Akihabara, the electronics-turned-pop-culture neighborhood of Tokyo, author Patrick Galbraith traces the evolving relationships of mostly male-fans with imagined female characters. The term otaku, he argues, is frequently pathologized, to mean alienated or introverted persons - usually male - who have difficulty having real relationships and thus retreat into a world of their own imagination and control. Galbraith wonders why the form of a relationship that focuses on an animated character is more problematic than other kinds of fan attachments - crushes on pop music stars or a deep investment in Star Wars or Harry Potter. Through his engaged ethnography at the height of the interest in maid cafâes and animated female characters in the early 2000s, he is able to historicize this fandom in an empathetic and detailed way, showing that what many have taken to be a single and peculiar psychological phenomenon was actually a complex, quickly evolving pop culture phenomenon. The affective relationships of the fans (seen as 3D) and the characters (2D, even when they are in three dimensions) is seen as a shifting and ordered form of closeness, a closeness between humans and animated characters. Galbraith urges us to explore rather than denigrate these relationships\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Music Generations in the Digital Age
What do we do when we listen? The act of engagement with music in everyday life may seem simple on the surface but participation, interpretation, circulation and cultural production in the digital age are more complex and entangled than ever before. It is especially so in Japan, with its vast multimedia idol and vocaloid industries. This unique ethnographic work at the intersection of cultural, media and music studies covers a wide spectrum of music-related activities embedded in the daily lives of two Japanese cohorts. The varied case studies, including teen idol groups and virtual idols, aid the detailed examination of the relation between music, generation, and society.
eBook
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
Electrified voices : how the telephone, phonograph, and radio shaped modern Japan, 1868-1945
Long before karaoke's ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity. A far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan, Electrified Voices shows how these technologies reshaped the production of culture. Audio technologies upended the status of the written word as the only source of prestige while revivifying traditional forms of orality. The ability to reproduce and transmit sound, freeing it from the constraints of time and space, had profound consequences on late nineteenth-century language reform; twentieth-century literary, musical, and cinematic practices; the rise of militarism and nationalism in the 1920s and 30s; and the transition to the postwar period inaugurated by Emperor Hirohito's declaration of unconditional surrender to Allied forces - a declaration that was recorded on a gramophone record and broadcast throughout the defeated Japanese empire. The first cultural history in English of auditory technologies in modern Japan, Electrified Voices enriches our understanding of Japanese modernity and offers a major contribution to sound studies and global media history.
Book
Resilient borders and cultural diversity
This book discusses how the evolution of market-driven cultural globalization has reinforced the administration of national cultural borders in Japan. As a result of these processes, a particular kind of cross-border connectivity and exchange is embraced while cross-border dialogue and engagement with multicultural questions within Japan are discouraged.
eBook
Seeing stars : sports celebrity, identity, and body culture in modern Japan
In \"Seeing Stars\", Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena, the products of both particular historical moments and broader discourses of celebrity. Drawing from media coverage, biographies, literary works, athletes' memoirs, bureaucratic memoranda, interviews, and films, Frost argues that the largely unquestioned mass of information about sports stars not only reflects, but also shapes society and body culture. He examines the lives and times of star athletes - including sumo grand champion Hitachiyama, female Olympic medalist Hitomi Kinue, legendary pitcher Sawamura Eiji, and world champion boxer Gushiken Yokoo - demonstrating how representations of such sports stars mediated Japan's emergence into the putatively universal realm of sports, unsettled orthodox notions of gender, facilitated wartime mobilization of physically fit men and women, and masked lingering inequalities in postwar Japanese society. As the first critical examination of the history of sports celebrity outside a Euro-American context, this book also sheds new light on the transnational forces at play in the production and impact of celebrity images and dispels misconceptions that sports stars in the non-West are mere imitations of their Western counterparts.
Book
Beyond alterity
A comprehensive collection of essays that challenges orientalist notions by proposing East and West as complementary elements of global culture Provides a new perspective on the complex international relationships in Asian German studies The study encourages a move beyond a national approach to cultural studies Employs a wide range of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies.
eBook