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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
Nele Noppe

Promoting 'Cool Japan' | The Japan Times Online - 3 views

  • Eight years have passed since American journalist Douglas McGray first coined the phrase, but now the Japanese government is getting behind "Cool Japan" in a big way. A new Creative Industries Promotion Office was established in June within the Manufacturing Industries Bureau of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) to coordinate the promotion of "cultural industries" by various arms of government such as the Agency for Cultural Affairs, METI, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
  • Mr. Kondo believes that the free market was originally a tool for increased prosperity and a richer nonmaterial life, but that it somehow became an end in itself. A task for the 21st century is to move toward a richer spiritual life, and he thinks Japan is in a unique position for that as a non-Western economic power. While a bureaucratic-led push for creativity has its problems, any soft power contribution Japan can make to the world will surely be welcomed, especially if it can also stimulate renewed self-confidence and vitality within Japan itself.
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

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

Frenchy Lunning: Japan Journey! - 0 views

  • the distinctive characteristics…reflect the Japanese subconscience and can be identified only by stripping away the influences of the modern history of manga as an imported style…Yet highlighting only those characteristics would slant the debate toward a closed argument…an echo of Orientalism.
  • Toys, animation, gaming, and western comics all show the influence of manga and anime, but evidence of this aesthetic can also be found in fashion, graphic design, industrial design, and fine art. Though initially this was considered a trend that would peak and be replaced, this movement, has steadily expanded since it emerged in the late 1980’s (in the US), and has established itself as a substantial and sustaining aesthetic, one that has transformed western design and consumer culture.
  • the continuing steady growth of manga and anime around the world in markets like France and Italy, which embraced manga years before the U.S. did, would appear to indicate that interest in anime and manga is not a flash-in-the-pan fad, but a trend that will continue on the upswing for some time to come. (www.icv2.com/articles/news/2953.html)
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  • demonstrates the potential for new transnational aesthetics that become the uniting factor in such movements. Such an account of manga is crucial to understanding the ways in which transnational markets continue to expand and differentiate themselves, and begins to project how utopian images of the global village might become a reality.
  • I propose to look at manga graphics through an historical perspective, to trace lineages and flows of the art within Japan and from Japan to the world. Both from the standpoint of the images themselves, but also with an eye to other influential graphic objects whose national, commercial and popular cultural position in Japan meant that they have been overlooked as contributing influences on manga styles.
Nele Noppe

So You Wanna be a Japanese Animator - 1 views

  • Echoing the recent coverage of the troubles facing the anime industry, here are translated excerpts of blogs written by Japanese anime industry insiders. Several are taken from a fascinating website called Off the Record Animation Industry Gossip (subtitle: "Read this if you're thinking of becoming an animator! This is the true face of the anime industry! Do you think you can survive?") Bear in mind that as these blogs are anonymous, there is no way to verify the veracity of the claims. But they are a fascinating counterpoint to the "soft power"/"Japan cool"/"otaku utopia" rhetoric often espoused by foreign journalists.
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    Echoing the recent coverage of the troubles facing the anime industry, here are translated excerpts of blogs written by Japanese anime industry insiders. Several are taken from a fascinating website called Off the Record Animation Industry Gossip (subtitle: "Read this if you're thinking of becoming an animator! This is the true face of the anime industry! Do you think you can survive?") Bear in mind that as these blogs are anonymous, there is no way to verify the veracity of the claims. But they are a fascinating counterpoint to the "soft power"/"Japan cool"/"otaku utopia" rhetoric often espoused by foreign journalists.
Ariane Beldi

The Dragon and the Dazzle: Japanese Imagination in Italy - Marco Pellitteri - 1 views

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    Every Third Thursday of the month, the Sainsbury Institute hosts a lecture on a topic related to the art and culture of Japan. Talks begin at 6pm (50-minute lecture followed by refreshments). Speakers are all specialists in their field and the talks are intended to be accessible to those with no prior knowledge of Japanese history. Admission is free and all are welcome. Booking essential. To book a seat email us at sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org or fax 01603 625011 up to two days before the lecture stating your name, number of seats required and a contact number. Unless indicated otherwise the lectures are held at the Norwich Cathedral Hostry (Weston Room), Norwich NR1 4EH.
Nele Noppe

In Japan, an heroic collapse - 0 views

  • SFCG’s chairman, Kenshin Ohshima, a man not known for excessive modesty, had a passion for chronicling - and clearly dramatising - his company’s rise. A long-running online manga, or cartoon, of Ohshima - and SFCG’s - corporate adventures makes the company’s website more popular than most corporate  cyber destinations in Japan.
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    company chairman uses manga to chronicle company's story
Nele Noppe

Moe and the Potential of Fantasy in Post-Millenial Japan - 2 views

  • If kawaii, or the aesthetic of cute, is the longing for the freedom and innocence of youth, manifesting in the junior and high school girl in uniform (Kinsella 1995), then moe is the longing for the purity of characters pre-person, manifesting in androgynous semi and demi human forms. This is called 'jingai,' or outside human, and examples include robots, aliens, dolls and anthropomorphized animals, all stock characters in the moe pantheon. A specific example would be nekomimi, or cat-eared characters. More generally, in order to achieve the desired affect, moe characters are reduced to tiny deformed 'little girl' images with emotive, pupil-less animal eyes
  • I argue fantasy characters offer virtual possibilities and affect
  • Moe is also used by fujoshi, zealous female fans of yaoi, a genre of manga featuring male homosexual romance. However, the word moe indicates a response to fantasy characters, not a specific style, character type or relational pattern. While some things are more likely than others to inspire moe, this paper will focus mainly on the response itself rather than the forms that inspire it.
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  • Both otaku and fujoshi
  • The moe character is a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and the response to its virtual potentials is affect.
  • Massumi argues affect is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential (Massumi 2002). The experience, what he calls an 'intensity,' is outside of logical language and conscious control. Moe provides a word to express affect, or to identify a form that resonates and can trigger an intensity.
  • It is for this reason that moe is consistently misunderstood as first and foremost images of young girls instead of a response to virtual potentials
  • In the field interacting with otaku and fujoshi, I was constantly confronted by the concept of moe, and found it necessary to engage it.
  • These are both men and their discourse centers on male otaku, but I will argue from them a more general theory, applied later in the paper to fujoshi structures of desire.
  • Honda, a youth-oriented novelist and self-styled moe critic, defines moe as 'imaginary love'
  • the salient point is his judgment that a relationship with a mediated character or material representations of it is preferable to an interpersonal relationship.
  • the moe man is feminized
  • While recognizing the conservative nature of otaku sexuality, Azuma attempts to account for the schizophrenic presence of perversion in the moe image. For Azuma, otaku are postmodern subjects with multiple personalities engendered by their environment and enthusiastic media consumption
  • To feel moe for all characters in all situations, the narrative connecting characters or moments in time is de-emphasized.
  • cat ears,
  • response is unconnected with 'reality' and thus offers new potentials to construct and express affects.
  • Separating their desire from reality allowed for a new form of affect called moe.
  • Simply stated, moe is about unbounded potential.
  • Moe is affect in response to fantasy forms that emerged from information-consumer culture in Japan in the late stages of capitalism.
  • conditioning of young girls into 'pure consumers'
  • Such a space is disconnected from social and political concerns, and exists for the preservation of the individual.
  • the media and consumption feeding into moe is a specific sort centered on affect.
  • Manga scholar Itou Gou argues that since the end of the 1980s characters in anime, manga and videogames became so appealing that fans desired them even without stories (Itou 2005). Ito dubs such character types 'kyara,' distinct from characters (kyarakutaa) embedded in narratives.
  • Proof of this can be found in the rise of 'parody' doujinshi,
  • The doll-like and semi-human Ayanami became the single most popular and influential character in the history of otaku anime; fans still isolate parts of the character to amplify and rearticulate in fan-produced works to inspire moe.
  • In works featuring these characters, the original work functions as a starting point, and the extended process of producing and consuming moe takes place among fans in online discussions and videos, fan-produced comics (doujinshi), costume roleplay (cosplay) and figures.
  • virtual potentiality
  • That the moe form, the body without organs, is outside personal and social frames is precisely why it triggers affect.
  • 'moe otaku' a superficial fixation on surfaces and accelerated consumption of disposable moe kyara, impetus for him to declare this younger generation culturally 'dead'
  • One man I spoke with said, 'Moe is a wish for compassionate human interaction. Moe is a reaction to characters that are more sincere and pure than human beings are today.' Similarly, another man described moe as 'the ultimate expression of male platonic love.' This, he said, was far more stable and rewarding than 'real' love could ever be. Manga artist Akamatsu Ken stresses that moe is the 'maternal love' (boseiai) latent in men,[xxi] and a 'pure love' (junsui na ai) unrelated to sex, the desire to be calmed when looking at a female infant (biyoujo wo mite nagomitai) (Akamatsu 2005). 'The moe target is dependent on us for security (a child, etc.) or won't betray us (a maid, etc.). Or we are raising it (like a pet)' (Akamatsu 2005). This desire to 'nurture' (ikusei) characters is extremely common among fans. Further, moe is about the moment of affect and resists changes ('betrayal') in the future, or what Akamatsu refers to as a 'moratorium' (moratoriamu). Moe media is approached as something of a sanctuary from society (Okada 2008), and as such is couched in a discourse of purity.
  • I will now demonstrate how it is further possible to reduce people to characters, or to reduce reality to fantasy in pursuit of moe.
  • Association with the two-dimensional world, and lack of depth or access in the three-dimensional world, makes a maid moe.[
  • The appeal of the maid cannot purely be sexual: As many as 35 per cent of customers are women
  • this arose in Japan in the late stages of capitalism as a result of shifts in consumer-information society
  • bias towards male fans of anim
  • aoi erases the female presence because fans say female-male or even female-female couples[xxxvi] are too 'raw' (namanamashii). Put another way, the reality of relationships is removed from yaoi to make the moe response possible.
  • the ambiguous yaoi 'male' is quite literally a body without organs
  • Many other fujoshi I spoke with dated men even as they imagined possibilities of coupling them as characters with other men.[xl] As Saitou points out, the reality of heterosexual relationships and virtual possibilities of homosexual couplings are separate and coexistent (Saitou 2007). Journalist Sugiura Yumiko explains this as the crucial difference between fujoshi and otaku, who approach fantasy as an alternative for things that they actually want but cannot realize in this world (Sugiura 2006).[xli] A fujoshi, for example, would not 'marry' a two-dimensional character the way some otaku advocate;
  • Sugiura is importantly highlighting that fantasy and reality are separate and coexistent, but this is widespread in moe culture and not solely a female quality.[xlii] As much as male otaku boast of their two-dimensional wives, they often do so with levity as a self-conscious performance
  • While it is true that men tend to feel moe for single characters that they can possess while women feel moe for relationships or character couplings, this broad difference is fast disappearing. In truth, the media popular among so-called 'moe otaku' in recent years has come to resemble yaoi aesthetics: multiple girls in a nostalgic or fantastic world with minimal male presence and heightened emphasis on relationships and emotions
  • In all cases, the database (Azuma 2009) is present. The elements that constitute and indicate a certain type of top or bottom, for example glasses or hairstyle or height, are predetermined; any given top or bottom is a construct of defined character traits and behavior.
  • One of the most recognizable features of the moe phenomenon is the anthropomorphization of objects into objects of desire. Otaku turn cats, war machines, household appliances and even men of historical significance into beautiful little girls to trigger moe. Reality is flattened, and from it emerge polymorphous forms of stimulation. Similarly, fujoshi can rearticulate anything into beautiful boys and sexualized yaoi relations. Moe characters can be based on a written description or drawn image, a physical person or even anthropomorphized animals, plants and objects.
  • The erotic fantasy effectively re-mystified their world, adding a layer of potential to the mundane (the very ground under their feet!) and making the familiar queer and exciting. Latent potential so unlocked, the three friends replayed the moe relationship across other potential players such as shampoo and conditioner, knife and spoon, salt and pepper.
  • More startling and subversive is 'moe politics' (seiji moe), where national histories, international relations and imposing world leaders are reduced to moe characters across which yaoi romance can be read.
  • It should be noted that Hetaria was written by a man, and these sorts of stories are becoming increasingly popular among young men known as 'fudanshi' (rotten boys).
  • it precisely because it is pure that it can give birth to such perverse and polymorphous possibilities.
Ariane Beldi

MIT Visualizing Cultures - 0 views

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    "Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways-cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on."
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

China, tourism feature in huge 'anime' convention | The Japan Times Online - 0 views

  • The Tokyo International Anime Fair 2009 kicked off Wednesday to a cheerful start, featuring a mix of both domestic and overseas companies presenting their newest products and exploring new marketing methods ranging from "anime" tourism to online broadcasting.
  • Reflecting the difficult economic times, however, many of the symposiums held in the first two business days had to do with future funding and marketing strategies for the industry.
  • Hideaki Tokutake of Japan Location Market — an organization promoting regional development through tourism, and a host of one of the symposiums — emphasized the growing potential of animation tourism.
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  • San-Francisco based anime-sharing site Crunchyroll is another newcomer to the fair. It hosted a symposium Wednesday on the future of Internet broadcasting.
  • The first Japanese-Chinese joint TV cartoon, based on the Chinese historical novel "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms," will be broadcast across China.
Nele Noppe

Revenge of the nerds | The Australian - 0 views

  • Twenty-five years after the idea of otaku began poking through like a sly worm from the apple of Japanese materialism, there are geek-culture wormholes everywhere.
  • Otaku is not what they do, it's the way they do it; an attitude and style associated with compulsive acquisition of popular culture objects and experiences and saturated in IT, especially interactive technology, a field in which otaku are increasingly influential.
  • Still, some popular journalism in Japan persists in casting otaku as a slur on society. Some sociologists still warn they are a hazard to themselves. Some foreign commentators keep using them to witter on about existential isolation in contemporary Japan.
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  • Otaku are often gregarious among their peers, whom some pundits feel impelled for effect to call zoku (tribes), but they do want to stand apart from the rest of the Japanese.
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