Organizer and Chair: Stephen D. Miller, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussant: Anne Allison, Duke University
The papers of which this panel is composed propose to look at Japanese popular culture from the viewpoints of several different media: television, print, animation, movies, and music. What is common to each, however, is the aim of exploring the boundaries between texts and representation, between media and consumption. In short, how does the cultural text produce meaning or profit (cultural or economic) out of that which is being represented?
Akiko Hirota examines the transformation of the Tale of Genji Scrolls into its modern variations (comics, animation, movies, TV) with the aim of showing how that transformation leads contemporary viewers to an understanding of both Heian-period and Heisei-period court life. Laura Miller, on the other hand, examines the print media in particular to understand how images of "unsatisfactory women" can be used as a socializing force as much as images of satisfactory women can. Christine Yano also focuses on women in her paper, but in this case she examines the importation of foreign women to sing traditional Japanese music (enka). The question being posed here is how does the image of foreign women enhance the cultural production of music that is represented as essentially Japanese. And finally, Stephen Miller examines the representation of homosexuality in a 1994 television drama entitled "Dôsôkai." Unprecedented in its content and extraordinarily frank in its production, "Dôsôkai" is a good example of how oppositional forces in society are repackaged into dominant terms for the consumption of a general audience.
The "Reunion" of History and Popular Culture: Japan "Comes
Out" on TV
Stephen D. Miller, University of Colorado, Boulder
Until the early 1990s, the public acceptance of homosexuality in Japan-either collusively or circumstanially-was discouraged, mostly by means of circumscribing its discussion. With the recent appearance of novels, movies, film festivals, political manifestos and gay pride parades, this silence was broken. Yet, none of these publications or events could ever have the impact of a television program.
In the fall of 1994, a ten-hour Japanese television drama entitled "Dôsôkai" ("Reunion") was broadcast once a week on a commercial station during prime time. While "Dôsôkai" is ostensibly about a group of reunited college friends, its focus is most assuredly on an unprecedented subject for commercial TV: the "coming out" process of a gay man. With extraordinary emotional and sexual frankness (quite unlike what is found on American television), the story reveals the personal implications, rather than the societal ones, that accompany this process.
This paper-with the help of clips from "Dôsôkai" itself-will examine what appears to be a paradox. If the public discussion of homosexuality in Japan has been restricted or unexplored, what are the terms by which it can be understood? "Dôsôkai" presents us with a rare chance to look at how the unacknowledged is given recognition (in part through reference to nanshoku, or male love in the Tokugawa period) and how that recognition is integrated into the contemporary value system of the culture.
Images of Unsatisfactory Women in Japanese Print Media
Laura Miller, Loyola University of Chicago
It is evident that Japanese popular culture provides models of culturally-sanctioned forms of female behavior, appearance and language use. These media prototypes function as socializing agents that help maintain a normalized and homogenized ideal. What then are the representations of that which is outside the limits of good? Are there corresponding models of incorrect behavior and appearance?
This paper will examine exemplars of the improper, inappropriate, and unsuitable found in popular media. Opinion polls, self-help manuals, and women's magazines will be used to illustrate the range of phenomena which come under scrutiny, from faulty posture, gestures, attitudes, and appearance to inappropriate language use, financial administration, and interpersonal behavior. Both imaged types and real individuals (such as Miyazawa Rie) are held up as cautionary archetypes.
In some cases, that which constitutes the deficient and unfitting has endured from earlier decades. For instance, those who exhibit what is considered selfishness and self-centeredness continue to be castigated. Some models of incorrectness are new: women who deal with sexual harassment inappropriately by giggling or acting flattered are censured, as are those who act too indecisive and uninformed. The findings also indicate that there are differences in what young men and young women view as undesirable appearance and behavior. Within this realm of popular images we see an interplay between forces of homogenization and difference, incorporation and resistance to dominant, class-based ideal of femaleness.
Modern Images of the Tale of Genji Scrolls
Akiko Hirota, California State University, Northridge
The Tale of Genji Illustration Scrolls have visually enhanced the text of The Tale of Genji since the Heian period. In the modern era Genji scrolls have transformed into illustrations for modern language renderings, comic versions, animation, and movie and TV dramatizations. The visual representations, whether they are Heian scrolls or their modern mutations, augment the narrative descriptions and help the audience understand the characters, clothing, and surroundings both indoors and out.
The differences in the traditional illustrations and the modern visual images demonstrate an aesthetic evolution. An examination of the modern images of the Genji also leads us to questions of narrators, viewpoints and story-telling techniques as well as the role that illustrations play in the dissemination of a tale
The Genji scrolls have also come alive to modern audiences as photographic and TV screen images of the real-life drama of the current imperial families. Reporters often describe a court rite such as the enthronement ceremony and an imperial wedding as "a Heian scroll being unfolded right before our eyes." The detailed reports on the lives of the players of these rites, such as the royal romances and the aristocrats' resentment and hazing of the commoner princesses, make modern audiences privy to the kind of intimate knowledge that Lady Murasaki's audience had about life at court and contextualize the stories of The Tale of Genji for a new audience.
Fanning Desires: The Place of Foreign Female Singers in Japanese Popular Music
Christine R. Yano, Harvard University
The rhetoric of desire plays an important part in the promotion of popular culture consumption in Japan as elsewhere. Economic pleasures become conflated with sexual and sometimes national ones. In this paper, I analyze the recent trend to recruit and promote young foreign female singers from Korea and Taiwan to Japan. These singers are imported to sing enka, a "traditional" Japanese popular music genre. What is particularly ironic about this trend is that enka is known in Japan as expressive of "the soul of the Japanese," idiomatic of the land/culture/nation. In light of this nationalistic discourse, the recruitment of these Asian singers to boost record sales demonstrates the successful manipulation of desire by record companies. This paper analyzes the contours of that desire-its objects, the construction of their desirability, and how that construction intersects with ideas of the nation.
My analysis suggests that although consumer desire encompasses these foreign "others," the genre remains intact as a national one. Enka is not internationalized, so much as these foreign females are domesticated. However, the process of domestication stops short, purposely leaving traces of the foreignness of the singers. In doing so, the presence of foreign singers may be interpreted as a metaphor for controlling the "other," constructing desire around the nation's gaze.