East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017

Japanese subcultural groups create safe and inventive spaces for youth to explore new identities, styles and globalization that are not available to them in other areas of their dominant culture. Japanese youth often join subcultures in the process of rejecting their parents’ generational values and the workforce uniforms commonly associated with adulthood and socio-economic failures of past generations. Accordingly, the Japanese subcultural street styles visually communicate a desire for prolonged childhood and deferred responsibilities of adulthood, while drawing significantly from global stimuli. Using ethnographic methods, it is revealed how many of the elements from Japanese subcultural dress are culturally authenticated from western styles and aesthetics, and their public display communicating the subculture member’s understanding of conspicuous consumption of perceived global ideals − wealth, diversity, authenticity and individuality. While these subcultural street styles function as alternatives to the standard Japanese uniforms (e.g., the business suit or occupational uniform), this dress style also communicates a new and modern identity for Japanese youth. Japanese subcultural street styles are so prescribed that they are, in fact, uniforms.

Enjo-kōsai, the term attributed to the practice of teenage girls selling dates and sex to older men, became a major controversial issue in Japan in the nineties, followed by political debates and public concerns regarding the nature of the habit and its social and ethical consequences. The article investigates the origin of enjo-kōsai and its development from a trivial subculture game to an actual practice defining sexual conduct and creating rising moral panic all over the country. Drawing on a long ethnographic research including 96 individual interviews and thousands of online surveys, the research explores the ambiguous forms of manipulation and control exercised by the hegemony of the media and fashion magazines in order to promote enjo-kōsai and rebalance the power relations between the teenager girls and their buyers. Based on participants’ testimonies, the study tracks the historical events while following the rise of Girl Power ideologies of empowerment and liberation versus the opposing political pressure that attempted to restore and reinforce traditional images of submissive femininity. It also attempts to contextualize the enjo-kōsai boom within the social changes and economic turbulences that Japan had gone through during the post-bubble decade.

Men’s lifestyle magazines came to China at the turn of the twenty-first century as a result of the commercialization and globalization of the media. Existing investigations of these publications focus on a new form of masculinity that is associated with middle-class identity and the cult of cosmopolitanism that the magazines promote. However, the consumption of men’s lifestyle magazines remains an uncharted area, leaving unanswered such important questions as who the readers of these magazines are, why they read them, and whether there is any discrepancy between their target and actual readerships. Based on two online questionnaire surveys with magazine readers, this study fills this gap by comparing textual readings of Chinese men’s lifestyle magazines with the findings of reader reception studies. It argues that, on the one hand, men’s lifestyle magazines generate fantasies about and project a ‘cosmopolitan masculinity’, particularly among China’s younger generation, that invites fruitful interpretation in light of the concepts of cultural capital and ‘technology of the self’; on the other, however, there is tension between the ideal masculinity featured in these magazines and the real-life perceptions and situations of their readers, primarily owing to a lack of purchasing power. This tension indicates the limitations of the lifestyle magazine, despite its growing power of influence, in the construction of new identities in present-day China.

This article critically analyses the concept of ‘gay manga’ to ascertain how fan ‘produsers’ and casual consumers understand both geikomi (also known as bara) and Boys Love (BL) manga. Drawing upon interviews with four Japanese gay men, one Japanese Korean man and one Japanese Brazilian man, I investigate how ‘gay manga’ is understood as a locus for the construction of gay subjectivity. I argue that the informants understand BL and geikomi as two aspects of the same meta-genre, revealing how attitudes to the term ‘gay’ have evolved in Japan. For the informants, geikomi and BL are interconnected and they are both understood as legitimate expressions of gay subjectivity that play a crucial role in their understandings of gay desire. Importantly, by focusing upon readers’ subjective relationships with texts, this article demonstrates how ‘gay manga’ is understood through an affective lens, with consumers locating their understandings of ‘gay manga’ within their overall patterns of ‘gay media’ consumption. Throughout the article, I reflect upon the necessity for scholars to engage with genre in a more nuanced fashion in order to better understand how individual consumers engage with media texts in their everyday lives.

‘Webtoons’ – online comics – have now been a staple of popular culture in Korea for over a decade. Both profitable and accessible, they have long since overtaken print manhwa in popularity and market size, and the cultural role that they occupy is continuing to grow. Yet in viewing webtoons as a new media form, I feel that we are in danger of eliding the important shifts occurring between manhwa and webtoons, both in terms of the content (layout, serialization format, social relevance) and the sociocultural, physical/digital space that they occupy. In my article, while I will be remarking on changes that occur content-wise, I plan to more specifically focus on media space: the physical space in which print manhwa was read, the relation of space to the sociocultural standing that manhwa occupied, and the changes that occurred with the elimination of that physical space. I plan to argue that the dramatic shift in reading space – from manhwa rental stores (which was the primary space where print manhwa was read) to electronic devices (mobile devices in particular) – is not important merely because the digital facilitates access to the comic material, but because this change of space leads to a change in sociocultural connotations attached to the genre. The mediating space that links the consumer/reader to the material is a key factor that has influenced not only how comics are read, but how comics are viewed as a kind of visual media in cultural hierarchy.

The image of contemporary Japanese men fighting alongside samurai warriors is impossible, but not simply because time-travel does not exist. As I argue in this article, Japan is tethered to an historical narrative of samurai virtue that can no longer exist. This is a paradox that threatens to destabilize Japan’s contemporary military spaces and its contested history of militarism. I explore this paradox through the concept of Japan’s military space–time, which draws attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of Japan’s demilitarization and the tensions that arise when a demilitarized space coexists with a militant history and the legacy of Japan’s epitomic masculine figure, the samurai. In order for contemporary Japanese SDF personnel to identify with the samurai they inevitably encounter the spectre of Japan’s twentieth–century militarism, and thus the samurai returns to the present as an uncanny embodiment of a repressed masculine self. Through the close analysis of two Japanese time-travel films, Sengoku Jieitai (Saitō, 1979) and Sengoku Jieitai: 1549 (Tezuka, 2005), I demonstrate how the attempt to reconcile Japan’s contemporary pacifist identity with its feudal past threatens to rupture the narrative of a cohesive national selfhood.

This article thematically examines how Cape No. 7 directed by Wei Tesheng in 2008 has culturally reconstructed and imagined the conception of Diqiucun (literally ‘globalized village’) during the ‘global postmodern’ process. Following Stuart Hall’s understanding of the process, I argue that the film focuses on a thematic context that depicts multi-layered psychological and cultural reconciliations among ethnic conflicts and between past regrets and the present coexistence. Situated in the imagined Diqiucun, Cape No. 7 presents how multi-ethnic groups of people in Hengchun have borne a grudge against Japanese and one another in a multilingual community and thus how they are desperate to seek collective reconciliations and individual accommodation since the end of World War II. Retelling the local histories of the postcolonial repatriation to global listeners through the cooperation of completing an opening concert act, on the one hand, makes the localism visible to the global market; on the other hand, it has piggybacked the film onto a phenomenal accomplishment that satisfies both the local and international audiences with an agreeable closure, or compromise, of the unsuccessful past in multifarious ways.

DUBIOUS GASTRONOMY: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EATING ASIAN IN THE USA, ROBERT JI-SONG KU (2014) Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, x and 290 pp., ISBN: 9780824839970, p/bk, $28.00