East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Modern Popular Culture in Middle-Class Japan, Sept 2022

Research on Hong Kong identity has focused on several pivotal periods (the 1997 Handover, and the 2014 and 2019 protests), which situates local, postcolonial Hong Kong identity as oppositional to a national Chinese identity. While these time points are critical, it is also important to attend to earlier Hong Kong media, including humorous works. Better understanding of how Hong Kong humour operates expands our knowledge about humour, identity and media studies beyond the prolific cinematic output. This article reports on the content analysis of 8.8 hours of the sketch comedy show, 雙星報喜 (The Hui Brothers Show) 1971–72. The Hui brothers broke the ‘two fools’ tradition of vernacularized and self-deprecating comedy by incorporating content reflecting Hongkongers’ everyday experience and coinciding with a rise in television viewership. We report three representative themes: (1) luxury and novelty, (2) social commentaries and behaviour governance and (3) the normalization and centring of working-class lifestyles as ‘Hong Kong’ lifestyles. We argue that these themes from the 1970s have planted the seeds to Hong Kong identity boundaries that have been (re)constructed and (re)imagined in contemporary Hong Kong history thus offering opportunities for collective self-reflection about what it meant to be a Hongkonger then and what it means now.

In this article, I examine the history of audience laughter on Japanese television and its role in producing and sustaining the image of an intimate, family-like public during the medium’s early decades. With a focus on the progressive gendering of audience laughter on Japanese television from the 1960s onwards, I demonstrate how the move to procure female laughter on the medium reflected broader ideological expectations that women and their laughter might unify a family-like, national audience. I argue that Japanese television sought to leverage female laughter – both concretely through paid waraiya ‘laughers’ in the audience and through the gender ideology surrounding laughter – to negotiate television’s foundational tensions between the public and the private. More broadly, I suggest that the history of television laughter and its gendering can throw into relief television’s co-imbrication with discourses on gender, nation and consumption.

In 1955, the HJJCC (Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce) invited the performers of an all-female Japanese theatre called the Takarazuka Revue to participate in the Annual Japanese American Beauty Queen Contest. The intention of the HJJCC was to present the performers, all women born and raised in Japan, in a way that showcased their Japanese oriental beauty. In this article I focus on this post-war Hawaiian tour and will consider how the female performers saw it as an opportunity to reject the rigid gender roles that were a persistent feature of the patriarchal system in Japan. Both the performers and the Japanese female fans of the Revue had hoped the tour would become a means of promoting broader perceptions of Japanese women’s identities. However, in reality, both the female performers and their fans continued to face societal restrictions and opposition to their efforts to move beyond established gender roles. By considering their vision of female agency, the resistance it met and the viewpoints expressed by the performers and their female fans, I argue that this post-war tour of Hawai’i enabled many Japanese women to reimagine and redefine their own identities as modern women living in post-war Japan.

Around the year 2000, the word joshi began to appear in women’s magazines, as in otona-joshi (‘adult girls’), 30 dai joshi (‘30-something girls’) and 40 dai joshi (‘40-something girls’). These terms have been commonly used not only in magazines but also on television and in everyday conversation. Though joshi implies female children and teenage girls, the term occasionally refers to women in their 30s and 40s who are supposed to be recognized as grown adults. The word joshi implies youth and vigour. This article examines how the image of women in their 30s and 40s has changed over the past decades and joshi has become an accepted word to refer to them. Contrary to its positive image, the word also connotes immaturity. Central to exploring how the notion of maturity has changed over the past 30 years are the writings of popular essayists and the women’s magazines they frequently read when they were young. This is further contextualized with a brief history of Japanese women’s magazines as to illustrate how women have responded to the notion of maturity imposed on them created after modernization.

The gendered memorializing of the War of Resistance against Japan (1931–45) has been an important part of China’s war memory politics in all of the different phases it has undergone since 1945. In the Mao era, the iconography of the ‘Anti-Japanese female revolutionary martyrdoms’ rose to prominence, while the following reformation period consolidated a she-victim/he-hero dichotomy most forcefully characterized by the visualization of the Nanjing Massacre through violated female bodies symbolizing the nation’s victimhood. This article argues that in the Xi Jinping era, women’s roles in museums have begun to transform again. Coming from the viewpoint of a feminist critique, it approaches five prominent war museums in mainland China with gender as its main analytical category, studying women’s representations in the memorial spaces and exhibitions. It suggests that the current trends introduced the role of survivor of sexual violence and female soldier into the museal landscape, slightly complicating the previous gendered repertoires in the war’s musealization. By exploring the Chinese sociocultural themes of ‘chastity martyrdom’ and ‘female warriors’ and the multi-layered politics of the so-called ‘comfort women’ it discusses the extent to which the strategies used to portray women serve patriarchal nationalism rather than women’s interests.

Review of: The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, Thomas Lamarre (2018)

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 424 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-51790-450-0, p/bk, $27.00

Review of: Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama, Guojun Wang (2020)

New York: Columbia University Press, 312 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23119-190-6, h/bk, £50.00/$65.00

Review of: The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan, Kirk A. Denton (2021)

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 284 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-88852-8-578, h/bk, HKD 620.00