Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan</i> (review)

2008; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.0.0018

1549-4721

Susan Napier,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Reviewed by: Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan Susan J. Napier (bio) Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan. Edited by Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto. Routledge, London, 2006. xiv, 226 pages. $130.00. Last year, for the first time ever, I taught a course entitled “Japanese Popular Culture.” Given the enormous and increasing interest in Japanese popular culture over the years, why had I waited so long? Quite simply, there were not enough serious books, I believed, to enable either myself or my students to take a genuinely scholarly approach to the subject. Fortunately, in the last two years or so, this situation has changed significantly. In particular, the balance for me was tipped by: Pikachu’s Global Adventure, edited by Joseph Tobin; Anne Allison’s Millennial Monsters; and Ian Condry’s Hip- Hop Japan. All three books engage with the phenomenon of Japanese popular culture in a fashion that is rigorous and approachable enough to allow me to frame lectures and class discussions in a truly academic light. Allen’s and Sakamoto’s book Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan is a worthy addition to this group, although with some caveats. Unlike the works by Allison and Condry, this is not a single-author book and the contributions vary enormously in approach, methodology, and breadth. Furthermore, unlike Pikachu which, while multiauthored, had a single anchoring theme (the rise and fall of the Pokémon phenomenon), Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, as its rather amorphous title suggests, covers a wide mixture of case studies, from the tastes in manga of first-generation Asian immigrants in New Zealand to Okinawan popular music. It is likely, therefore, that certain chapters will appeal more or less, depending on the reader and the purpose of reading. That said, the work has many strengths. Most of the authors are from New Zealand, Australia, or Japan. They add a different dimension to what, even now, has been a largely American-dominated field. As the editors suggest in their introduction, “[t]hrough these case studies it will become apparent that the notion of globalization as homogenization (and in particular as Americanization) is untenable” (p. 10). The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Reconfiguring Japan,” centers more or less on the construction of various aspects of Japanese culture outside Japan. I say “more or less” because the first chapter by the reliably authoritative Koichi Iwabuchi on “Japanese Culture and Postcolonial Desire for ‘Asia’ ” centers on transnational flows. The chapter is an exploration of the dynamics involved in exporting and importing cultural products between Japan and other Asian countries and, to some extent, between Japan and the West. One of the book’s more theoretical chapters, it is particularly [End Page 403] valuable and serves as a framework to discuss key issues in Japanese popular culture as a whole. “Reconfiguring Japan” uses the crucial concept of “hybridism” (linked with “hybrid modernization”) to explore how Japanese national identity is “reimagined in the context of ever-increasing transnational cultural flows” (p. 22). Iwabuchi does not flinch from taking on the political and ideological aspects of the spread of Japanese culture throughout Asia, which makes his work particularly provocative. Perhaps even more provocative is the next chapter, Matthew Allen’s discussion of an infamous episode from the popular American television series South Park. Entitled “South Park Does Japan: Going Global with Chimpokomon,” the chapter brings up a variety of fascinating issues revolving around the attempt by the creators of South Park to skewer the massive Pokémon phenomenon by offering an episode that included everything from penis envy to a vision of brainwashed, Japanese-speaking American children attacking Pearl Harbor. To his credit, Allen brings a balanced perspective to this difficult material, offering a carefully considered and theoretically sophisticated discussion on a controversial topic and touching on social and racial stereotyping, globalization, the defamiliarizing potential of humor, and what he calls the “banality of commodity fetishism” (p. 45). I used this chapter in my popular culture course and found it particularly useful in provoking a rich classroom discussion, not only on the specific case but on the larger question of using satire in cross-cultural and crossracial topics. The last three chapters in...