East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Religion in Popular Global Culture, Apr 2023

The younger generation of Taiwanese do not merely consume Japanese popular culture as a ‘foreign’ product; they have integrated Japanese cultural elements into many aspects of Taiwan’s local cultural creations as a Taiwan–Japan hybrid form. One example of this is that the majority of Taiwanese visual artists follow the Japanese manga format, aesthetics and grammar when they create their own work. In this article, we examine trends of moe anthropomorphism in manga, a method that personifies animals, objects, cities and natural phenomena as cute human characters. Using a cultural studies framework, we trace how Japanese moe anthropomorphism helps Taiwanese visual artists and local governments to promote domestic tourism and further individuals’ desire to get to know Taiwan. The spokes-character, Sakura Shrimp, serves as an example to illustrate the trend, the purpose and the readers’ responses to this new way of local tourism marketing.

In 2017, I launched a survey on the importance of Japanese and Korean popular cultures in Kuwait. I discovered a paradoxical pattern of resistance to the East through the adherence to another eastern culture. I wanted to examine how other non-western countries handle ‘Japanese culture’ in comparison and decided to adopt Singapore as a sample case. Both Kuwaiti and Singaporean students stress the differences between Japan/Korea and their own country, but also insist on similarities. In both surveys there is a strong emphasis on ethics. Both are impressed by the Japanese politeness and their capacity to organize life, and most reasonings evolve around the theme of ‘conservatism’. Singaporean students, when asked about Japan and Korea, point to conservative patterns predating what they perceive as the Americanization of Asia. The positive values located in this part of East Asia correspond with precisely those values that Kuwaiti students (as well as Singaporean Muslim students) single out as particularly compatible with Islamic mindsets. In both countries, respondents see Korea/Japan as the ‘real’ Confucian/Muslim nations harking back to more pristine values. Negative evaluations, for example of hallyu as a soft power for Korean economic interest, are almost absent.

Manga as a cultural art form delves into various sociocultural issues and narratives, and the representation of diverse cultural contexts in manga has increased over the years. The role of Japanese manga as a site for intercultural understanding and engagement is worth further investigation, and research in this area is still growing. This article explores intercultural dialogue through a case study of the Japanese manga Satoko and Nada Volume 1 by Yupechika, which narrates the friendship between Satoko, a young Japanese woman, and Nada, her Saudi Muslim roommate. It adopts a literary approach to the analysis of the manga and employs textual analysis as the methodology. The manga is analysed through the lens of interculturalism and deep dialogue focusing on the themes of food, fashion and faith. Through the analysis, readers are exposed to the narrative of intercultural engagement as portrayed by the mangaka. Yupechika incorporates pre-existing prejudices in the engagement between the two culturally diverse characters. The narrative arc reveals the importance of empathy, space and value sharing in forging intercultural understanding. This reading into Yupechika’s intercultural narrative is a microcosm of the type of dialogue needed in the world today to overcome the acute racism and xenophobia.

Men have historically dominated the artistic production of cultural exotifications. This article flips the script by analysing how two prominent female Japanese manga artists – Kuranishi and Shinsan Nameko – erotically illustrate Tibetan men, specifically Tibetan Buddhist monks. Through textual analysis and fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021, we show how their manga depictions of Tibetan young men, in particular monks, tend towards eroticization and sexual innuendo. This discursive and aesthetic trend in manga parallels ethnographic data on how Japanese women – facing unprecedented social precarity, seeking spiritual healing and self-transformation and desiring alternate masculinities – look elsewhere, outside of Japan and the perceived inadequacies of Japanese masculinities. We explore how liberative erotics, especially homoeroticism and love between boys, fuses with Buddhist and alternative spiritualities in yaoi and shōnen-ai genres and gestures towards a changing landscape of female desire.

With the assistance of textual analysis, this article examines the images of yingling (spirits of aborted or miscarried foetuses) in The Tag-Along and The Tag-Along 2. This popular cinematic demonology searches for a Taiwanese identity through urban legends and folklore. In the films, yingling are imagined as pitiful and malevolent. The spiritual being has desires, emotions and agency. This feto-centric imagination echoes the religious discourses that frame the newly popularized abortion ritual in Taiwan. Women are depicted as determined, independent and mutually supportive. However, the essentialist sexual differences remain highlighted, meaning that they are portrayed as mothers, and their bodies are represented through polluting blood, a signifier of excessive yin that serves the patrilineal needs of reproduction. During the process of modernization, Taiwanese society experienced drastic changes, yet, the ghost, as the persistent past, continues to impact the present. Through the investigation of irrationality, the reality surrounding women and children is revisited and debated.

This article examines Chinese animation Baishe: Yuanqi (White Snake) (2019) and discusses how ecoaesthetics are intertwined with questions of gender representations. Ecoaesthetics are broadly defined to consider the relationship between the human and natural world via de-anthropocentrism – which is the criticism of a human-centred view of the world that surrounds us. The film White Snake focuses on a man who becomes a monster to be with the creature he loves. This article argues that White Snake provides a multi-species model for ecocriticism. On the one hand, the film presents ecological thoughts that showcases a contradictory but symbiotic relationship between human and non-humans; on the other hand, the film neglects the connection between ecoaesthetics and feminist criticism so that it ends up portraying an ecological system that is under the inveterate patriarchal reign and therefore violates ideas around equality in ecoaesthetics. I propose a notion becoming-monster to decipher this ambivalent ecoaesthetic representation. The representation of becoming-monster showcases the harmony that can potentially exist between the human and the non-human appealing de-anthropocentric actions while the ideal image of the equality between human and non-human others is in fact under the male gaze.

Review of: Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media, Lindsey Nelson (2021)

Lexington, KY: Rowman & Littlefield, 148 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-79361-367-7, h/bk, $90.00

Review of: Queer Media in China, Hongwei Bao (2021)

Abingdon: Routledge, 254 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36727-945-5, h/bk, $160.00

Review of: Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience, Rongbin Han (2018)

New York: Columbia University Press, 315 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23118-475-5, p/bk, $32.00

Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State, Luzhou Li (2019)

Boston, MA: MIT Press, 296 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-26204-317-5, h/bk, $40.00

Review of: Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science and the Paranormal, David E. Presti (Ed.) (2021)

New York: Columbia University Press, 213 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23118-957-6, p/bk, £20.00/$25.00

Philosophy’s Big Questions: Comparing Buddhist and Western Approaches, Steven M. Emmanuel (Ed.) (2021)

New York: Columbia University Press, 317 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23117-487-9, p/bk, £25.00/$30.00

The Transcendental and the Mundane: Chinese Cultural Values in Everyday Life, Cho-Yun Hsu and David Ownby (Trans.) (2021)

Sha Tin: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 279 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-88237-212-2, h/bk, $60.00