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Nele Noppe

Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural dista... - 0 views

  •                                   H-JAPAN                                April 5, 2009 From: David Slater <d-slater@sophia.ac.jp> Graduate Fieldwork Workshop April 18th, 2009 Sophia University (Yotsuya Campus) http://www.fla.sophia.ac.jp/about/location.html Bldg. #10, room 301 10 am-noon ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural distance to claim global leadership in comic book publishing. Julien Vig (Sociology MSc candidate at Hitotsubashi University and research student at the Institute of Innovation Research) ABSTRACT: Since the 1990s, the joint influences of nation branding efforts and the increasing globalization of the economic and technological contexts within which media organizations operate have brought upon an era where America's dominant position as an exporter of contents is becoming increasingly challenged by new entrants, often industrial consortia backed by state agencies. Serious contenders may include India's Bollywood movies, Brazil's telenovelas, or South Korea's array of dynamic entertainment industries. Yet beyond the cultural significance of the phenomenon, their actual export performance only qualifies them as cultural niches when compared to the incumbent transnational American corporations, whose distribution monopolies and market power make their economic control of global flows a reality that remains hardly escapable. Japan, however, distinguished itself by securing global leadership in no less than three content industries. In videogames, animation and comic books, it stands out a leading exporting country, boasting impressive trade surpluses with America and Europe. There is a solid, established interdisciplinary body of international literature dedicated to Japan's videogame industry, and the anime industry has been similarly attracting increasing attention in the past ten years. The comic book industry on the other hand, arguably because of its limited legitimacy and economic significance outside the $4bn+ Japanese domestic market, remains largely understudied except for comic book and popular culture scholars. An overlooked specificity of the comic book industry stems from the most peculiar pattern of globalization it has experienced. From the 1950s onwards, the United States, France and Japan each developed their own publishing paradigm and standard formats: *comic book*, *album* and *manga*. These path-dependent creative and industrial trajectories would hardly interact until the second half of the 1990s. After their late encounter, Japanese manga emerged as the undisputed winner, reaching shares of about 1/3 of total comic book sales in value in both France and America in 2007. This achievement has interesting theoretical implications. On the one hand, media scholars showed that the primary vehicles for the development of * contra-flows* (defined as non-Western media flows which counter the previously established one-way information flow from western to non-west countries) are geographic, cultural or linguistic regionalism; yet this framework cannot account for how Japanese manga could succeed in Western markets, as none of the above patterns seems to apply. On the other hand, management scholars, in the dominant models of firm- and industry-level internationalization, accept as a prerequisite that agents are actively and strategically trying to internationalize; yet Japanese manga publishers long maintained a passive attitude towards market expansion outside of Asia. Drawing upon fieldwork in France and Japan, international comparisons of industry data and evidence from a consumer survey conducted in France in December 2008, my research aims to uncover the economics at work behind the success of Japanese manga on the global comic book scene. What are the conditions for the emergence of sustainable contra-flows? The study of Japan's prominent success in exporting domestic contents may hold the answer to this question and provide a blueprint for later entrants in the global cultural market. -- David H. Slater, Ph.D. Faculty of Liberal Arts Sophia University, Tokyo The Sophia server rejects emails at times. Should your mail to me get returned, please resend to: dhslater@gmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience. 
Ariane Beldi

Lost in Scanlation » Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives - 2 views

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    "Welcome readers who found this site in Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives."
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    This is a site from one of the author of the book "Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives", available from Amazon.com!
Ariane Beldi

Visualizing Asia Conference - Home - 0 views

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    About the Conference The Visualizing Cultures project and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University are pleased to announce an academic conference focused on the relationship between visual imagery and social change in modern Asia entitled, "Visualizing Global Asia at the Turn of the 20th Century." This will be one of the first academic conferences devoted to "image-driven scholarship" and teaching about Asia in the modern world. We have selected scholars of history, art history, history of photography, and history of technology specializing in China, Korea, Japan, United States, Europe and the Philippines to discuss how to integrate visual and textual media in research and teaching, using to the fullest the opportunities presented by the new technologies and the use of the internet as a publishing platform.
Nele Noppe

Japan's Gross National Cool, By Douglas McGray - 0 views

  • Japan is reinventing superpower—again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an equally powerful national message?
  • But cultural accuracy is not the point. Less important than authentic American origin is the whiff of American cool.
  • Yet Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower.
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  • At times, it seems almost a strange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship, to argue just how little Japan there is in modern Japan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread of Japanese cool.
  • Hello Kitty drives an empire worth almost $1 billion in global sales per yea
Nele Noppe

Local meanings in global space: a case study of women's 'Boy love' web sites in Japanes... - 0 views

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    "Local meanings in global space: a case study of women's 'Boy love' web sites in Japanese and English"
Ariane Beldi

Special Issue CFP: Transnational Boys' Love Fan Studies (March 2013) - 2 views

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    "'BL' (Boys' Love), a genre of male homosexual narratives (consisting of manga, novels, animations, games, films, and so forth) written by and for women, has recently been acknowledged, by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike, as a significant component of Japanese popular culture. The aesthetic and style of Japanese BL have also been assumed, deployed and transformed by female fans transnationally. The current thrust of transnational BL practices raises a number of important issues relating to socio/cultural constructs of BL localization and globalization. Scholarly endeavors in relation to BL can be enriched by further research concerning the activities of transnational BL fans, fan communities, fandom, and the production of fan fiction. Most previous BL fan studies have remained circumscribed to Japan and North America. Therefore, in order to further develop transnational BL fan studies, we are seeking contributors who are engaged in the exploration of non-Japanese and non-North American contexts (e.g. Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and others). Transnational BL fan studies may also be incorporated into the broader socio/political critical frameworks offered by studies in economics, gender/sexuality, race/class, and other areas. "
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    For those who are studying fandom and Boy's Love, this might be an opportunity to share your researches!
Nele Noppe

The Genealogy of the Cyborg in Japanese Popular Culture - 0 views

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    chapter in 'World Weavers: Globalization, Science Fiction, and the Cybernetic Revolution'
Nele Noppe

Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan - 0 views

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    by David Leheny
Nele Noppe

The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure - 0 views

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    by David Leheny "Since the Meiji Restoration, successive Japanese governments have stressed the nation's need to act like a "real" (that is, a Western) advanced industrial power. As part of their express desire to catch up, generations of policymakers have examined the ways Americans and Europeans relax or have fun, then tried to persuade Japanese citizens to behave in similar fashion-while subtly redefining these recreational choices as distinctively "Japanese." In tracing the development of leisure politics and the role of the state in cultural change, the author focuses on the importance of international norms and perceptions of Japanese national identity. Leheny regards globalization as a "failure of imagination" on the part of policymakers. When they absorb lessons from Western nations, they aim for a future that has already been revealed elsewhere rather than envision a locally distinctive lifestyle for citizens."
Nele Noppe

Seminar on Anime and Contemporary Japanese Society - 0 views

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    While anime is being watched on a global scale, there are significant differences in its contemporary reception. The gap between regular consumers and critical spectators, sometimes appearing in the form of Japanese audiences vs. foreign Japanologists, deserves special attention since it raises a number of questions, such as what sort of animated film is identified as anime; who relates anime to politics, history and society; what kind of meaning is at play in anime's performative images, and to what extent one can read "Japanese society", or even "culture", out of anime.
Ariane Beldi

Amazon.com: Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan (Asia's Transformations) (97804153... - 1 views

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    Not really new, but might be useful to have on one's bookshelves!
Ariane Beldi

Modern Art Asia - Reviews, Commentary and Peer-Reviewed Articles on Asian Art - 1 views

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    Modern Art Asia is a new journal dedicated to the arts of Asia from the eighteenth century to today, presenting postgraduate research from historical perspectives and international news on Asian art. For the rising generation of Asian art scholars, these works exist in a globalized interdisciplinary context at the intersection of scholarship, criticism, and the market. Founded to address the need within art history and art journalism for a space dedicated to the arts of Asia, Modern Art Asia combines peer-reviewed articles with insightful commentary and the latest exhibition reviews from international correspondents, providing a new forum for exchange between scholars that crosses the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines, and engages with a general readership through the addition of journalistic writing on art.
Nele Noppe

Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives - 5 views

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    Hehe! I was so happy about receiving my copy that forgot to post it on Let's Manga! Thanks for doing it!
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    Congratulations! If you have more detailed tags to add than the above, please go ahead, I haven't seen the book so I don't have details of exactly what topics are discussed in there.
Ariane Beldi

Knock it off: Global treaty against media piracy won't work in Asia - 1 views

    • Ariane Beldi
       
      This is a well-written article that illustrates the contribution of Asian audiovisual entertainment companies to the evolution of this industrial sector worldwide. It is another sign of the way this whole industry's balance is tipping progressively towards Asia. It doesn't mean that Hollywood and the rest of the Western side of this industry is loosing its ground, but that it has to share it more and more with the Asian side on the global scene.
Ariane Beldi

AJISS-Commentary-A Growing Love for "Cool Japan" - 3 views

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    Japan may appear defensive on the economic and political fronts. Has the world lost interest in an aging Japan whose economy will fall to third largest? There is, however, a side of Japan that is the object of ever stronger and deeper affection around the globe: Japanese popular culture, particularly anime (Japanese animation) and manga.
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    True. In America, this seems to be growing. I see less and less of comic books and more manga novels, although manga is part of the Japanese culture. Not only that, but it seems manga is more.. I'm not sure what you can call it, but it has a different feel to it than a comic book, for obvious reasons. It's like comparing a cartoon to an anime. Although their qualitys are alike, they come from different culture and people, etc. Plus, most animes seem a bit more serious than cartoons, but that may be just the particullar shows I'm watching.. ~Z
Ariane Beldi

Animation: Outsourcing is slowly erasing Japan's anime industry - latimes.com - 3 views

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    As production houses cut costs by sending animation jobs to South Korea, India and Vietnam, the number of experienced workers in Japan is shrinking. Competitors in China are another threat to Japan's cultural icon.
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