Play (asobi) in the Japanese context is almost always ironic. In a culture of reputed workaholics, amusements are pursued with an intensity bordering on obsession. Young enthusiasts of computer games or animation, otaku, have obtained near mythic status for their extremism and lack of social contact, while their elders remain addicted to pachinko; and the frenzy for mass market toys such as Tamagotchi and Pokémon has translated into a global phenomenon. If patterns of consumption reflect an obsessive quality, the artifacts of popular culture themselves tend to fetishize certain themes and forms. The papers in this panel examine four popular culture genres, interrogating each for the ways in which ostensibly amusing, entertaining forms reveal problematic preoccupations. Cris Reyns considers the mania for manga through the lens of manga’s obsession with the Pacific War, focusing on Tezuka Osamu’s Adorufu ni tsugu. Anne Allison examines the Pokémon computer game phenomenon as mythic construct within a capitalist framework. Philip Gabriel weighs the literary and cultural implications in travel writing by Shimada Masahiko and Murakami Haruki. And Stephen Snyder explores the recurring theme in animation of large robots guided or piloted by small children. In each instance, entertainment becomes a process of working through basic cultural concerns. The panel members have agreed to limit the length of their presentations and response in order to open out the discussion to other popular culture forms suggested by the audience.

Anne Allison, Duke University

Walter Benjamin wrote about the enchantments of capitalism: how magic is used to sell commodities and consumption itself. What he wrote about modernity and adult goods seems even more present if also transformed in the business of children’s entertainment today. Pokémon, first released in Japan by Nintendo as a Gameboy game in 1997, has now proliferated into a multi-media, global phenomenon. At its root is a mythic story: children use powers within and outside themselves to fight and collect (150) monsters. Enfolded into a game about acquisition and mastery—basics of capitalism—is a fanciful universe in which the borders between human and monster, virtual and real, enchantingly dissolve. How does Pokémon come out of and reimagine the world in which Japanese children are growing up in this millennial moment? How too does the mania it enjoys outside Japan reflect the conditions of postmodernity and global capitalism which children around the world face today?

J. Philip Gabriel, University of Arizona

Travel writing is one of the most popular genres of contemporary writing in Japan, and includes a great number of sub genres: nature writing and adventure stories (e.g. the river travels of Noda Tomosuke, Kaikô Takeshi’s Ôpa! series); Paul Theroux-like train travelogues (e.g. Miyawaki Shunzô); "shoestring budget" travel writing (e.g. Sawaki Kôtarô’s Shinya tokkyu); historically-motivated writing (e.g. Inoue Yasushi’s Silk Road travels); cultural critique (e.g. Shiba Ryôtarô’s Amerika sobyô); autobiography and literary memoir (e.g. Suga Atsuko’s Italian essays).

This paper focuses on the travel writing of two of Japan’s most popular novelists, Murakami Haruki and Shimada Masahiko, in particular Murakami’s Tôi taiko (1990), Uten enten (1990), and Henkyô/kinkyô (1998), and Shimada’s Shokuminchi no arisu (1993). Travel writing in Japan is often marketed as an adjunct to travel guidebooks—as amusing, entertaining essay collections whose purpose is to flesh out the more dryly informative guidebooks; as I will argue here, however, Murakami’s and Shimada’s travel writings, while certainly entertaining and light, are definitely examples of what Casey Blanton calls "post-tourism travel writing," with its emphasis on "paradox, inscrutability, and openness." Their travel writings thus share many of the characteristics increasingly found in other contemporary travel writing: genre-mixing, a concern for memory, a nostalgic sense of loss, as well as a foregrounding of the limits of knowledge and representation. Their main preoccupations, however, most often center on notions of Japanese identity, played out through examinations of diversity, recent and not-so-recent Japanese history (including the Pacific War), and the boundaries—physical and cultural—which define Japan. Travel writing, ostensibly playful attempts to confront the Other, the exotic and unfamiliar, often ends up obsessed with the familiar.

Cris Reyns-Chikuma, Colorado College

As shown by Matthew Stretcher in "Purely Mass or Massively Pure?: The Division Between ‘Pure’ and ‘Mass’ Literature," the real debate between the partisans of low and high art could be situated in the late 1920s. It was revived in the 1980s with Oe Kenzaburo and Masao Miyoshi as central figures of opposition to what they consider rather scornfully "stylish" postmodernism (Miyoshi, 234). Although Miyoshi’s position could be seen as conservative, I see his argument about the non-commitment of the new generation as still challenging.

But the issue has become more and more complex since. While high art has tended to ostensibly be superficial or to deal with more private but as challenging issues such as John Treat sees it in the case of Yoshimoto Banana’s novellas, low art, which is not even considered by Miyoshi and his partisans, deals with "serious" topics, as in the cases of Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, 1976) and The Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka, 1988).

In this paper I focus on Tezuka Osamu’s Adorufu ni Tsugu (1985; Adolf). Serialized in the news magazine Shukan bunshun from 1983 to 1985, it is regarded as one of Tezuka’s finest works. In a very realistic style, it tells the story of three "Adolfs" during WWII, weaving "history and fiction together into a rip-roaring adventure with the richness and sophistication of a Russian novel" (F. Schodt, 249). I show how one of the most obsessive forms of entertainment might do a better "working through" (Dominick LaCapra) than some high literature pieces such as Oe’s. Without explicitly taking a stand in favor of Ienaga Saburo’s interpretation in the textbook controversy that was raging in the 1980s, Adolf not only "devictimizes," Japanese people but might also make them accept some responsibilities for what happened to Asia and to themselves in WWII in its quite realistic description of brutalities and massacres by the Japanese army and militarist politicians. I show how the visual and narrative techniques succeed in challenging the simple binary opposition, low/high, and in imposing manga as a legitimate way of teaching/learning serious subjects.

Stephen B. Snyder, University of Colorado, Boulder