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Near Nostalgia: Images of Home and the Recent Past in Miike Takashi's Osaka Films
Organizer: Dylan Ellefson, University of Southern California
The theme of nostalgia has been a prominent one among scholars investigating issues of culture and identity in contemporary Japan. However the dominant focus on a nostalgia for a distant, imagined, idealized and typically rural past in this scholarly discourse has overlooked the importance of a nostalgia for the recent, remembered, and often urban past in Japan today. The films of Miike Takashi set in late 1960s – early 1970s Osaka, particularly his films in the Kishiwada Shonen Gurentai (Young Thugs of Kishiwada) series, are clear examples of a certain nostalgia for a particular time and place in the recent past. In treating Miike’s sympathetic yet hardly idealistic depiction of this time and place I will offer some revisions to the conception of furusato, often translated as “old-hometown” or “native place,” that has been wedded to the predominant notions of nostalgia outlined above. In the process I will also examine the economy of television as Miike deploys it to represent local tradition as well as the defining events of an era, thereby evoking the feel of the recent past and creating a strong sense of time and place in these films.
Robot Dreams: The formation of self and masculine identity in Japanese techno-culture
Hirofumi Katsuno, University of Hawai`i, Japan
This presentation focuses on the processes and meanings by which the robot increasingly becomes the spotlight of intense politico-economic, socio-cultural, and emotional investment in contemporary Japan. Taking the robot as a confluence of cutting-edge technology and fantasy, I will examine how Japan’s fascination with robots is embedded in an uncritical celebration of and national desire for new technology shaped within the process of modernity and post-modernity. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork from January 2006 to the present in a robot-builder’s community, I will focus specifically on the humanoid-robot competition Robo-One as a paradigm of Japanese robot culture, analyzing how this technological spectacle represents a dialectic conjunction of imaginative and material desires, dreams and commerce, and collective consciousness and political economic necessity.
I will also analyze human/robot interaction as a lived experience of male robot-builders. Given the male-dominated character of the contest, I will examine how the creation of and interaction with robots constitutes a continuous re-imagining of gendered selves, identities, social relationships, and myths in this supremely high-tech nation. The successful creation of an artificial human has long been a desire of humankind, and I will explore how the modern vision of anthropomorphism is intimately associated with the symbols, practices, and institutions of masculinity, particularly in the Japanese socio-cultural context. A study of robot culture in Japan illustrates how human desires and cultural imagination in this society express themselves in technological life.
Novel Fashions: Accessorizing in Natsume Soseki's Gubijinso
Anna-Marie Farrier, Princeton University
The Meiji era saw a variety of new media for literary texts, among them the promotional magazines published by the forerunners of department stores such as Mitsukoshi. Appearing in the years surrounding Mitsukoshi’s “Department Store Declaration” in 1904, one such magazine, Jiko uses literature as advertisement. Critics have argued for the role that these promotional magazines played in creating the image of the female consumer, yet they also created literary commodities in the process of promoting the fashions of the times. As an author who was well aware both of his market value as a newspaper novelist and of his novels themselves, Natsume Soseki provides an intriguing context for Jiko and the wares it peddles within its pages. This paper will examine Natsume Soseki’s Gubijinso (1907), his first novel after joining the Asahi shimbun, in the context of an issue of Jiko published during the time of Gubijinso’s serialization. Gubijinso spawned a commodity of its own, as Mitsukoshi created a Gubijinso yukata in conjunction with the serialization of the novel. Gubijinso is thus a “fashionable” novel on many levels, both in its portrayal of the accessorized and accessorizing heroine and as a text that itself becomes an accessory. This paper will explore the links between the commodification of texts as advertisement and the actual, material commodification of literature in the form of novelty items. Literature, like fashion, panders to the tastes of the times.
Unspoken War Memories, Un-recognized Signs, and Non-realist Representation: The Battle of Okinawa in Medoruma Shun’s "Droplets"
Kyle Ikeda, University of Hawaii at Manoa
The 1997 Akutagawa Prize winning short story “Suiteki” (Droplets, 1997) by Okinawan author Medoruma Shun has been praised by numerous scholars and critics for its deep engagement with the complex issue of Okinawan war memory that reveals the gap between publicly narrated experiences and unspoken private memories of the Battle of Okinawa. Many have also characterized the story as an example of “magical realist” fiction, in large part due to the appearance of miraculous water dripping from the large toe of the story’s protagonist that instantly restores sexual vitality and lost hair. But few scholars have examined the political challenge Medoruma’s use of so-called “magical realism” contains, and practically all have overlooked the significance of the un-recognized signs of war-related phenomena that also populate the text. What are some of the un-recognized war-related signs, and how are they inter-connected with the so-called “magical realism” of the story? In what way does the miracle water constitute a political challenge and how is it related to Okinawan war memory? This presentation analyzes the combined effect of the un-narrated war memories, un-recognized signs of war-related phenomena, and the non-realist mode of representation in “Droplets” within the context of previous and ongoing controversies over the truth-value and historical accuracy of war survivor testimonies by Okinawan civilians. Such a contextualization and analysis will demonstrate how “Droplets” simultaneously reveals and critiques the limitations of public knowledge about the Battle of Okinawa gained through conventional war narratives, articulated memory, and historically “verified” testimonies.
The Net Idols: New Forms of Creative Employment and Neoliberal Labor Subjectivities in 1990s Japan
Gabriella Lukacs, University of Pittsburgh
This paper will explore a recent Japanese phenomenon, what is called the net idols—young women who produce their own websites featuring personal photos, essays, and diaries. These self-made idols attract a large number of male followers, who can chat with their female idols online. Recently, these websites have become a source of revenue for young women as advertisers have started to pay them fees for sharing access to young male consumers. At the same time, these websites have also become venues for many young women to make a career in the entertainment world. The goal of this paper is to examine new forms of creative employment and labor subjectivities that have evolved in the wake of the economic recession.
Recent theories of capitalism have identified a shift from the traditional manufacturing-based accumulation toward service-based economies. In Japan, this tendency was fostered by rapid developments in new media such as the Internet that have given rise to new forms of employment. Women were particularly predisposed to take advantage of these new labor opportunities, as their prevalent marginalization in the Japanese labor market in the postwar period was further exacerbated by the new hiring freezes in the wake of the economic slowdown. Drawing on interviews with net idols, this paper will examine the development of new neoliberal labor subjectivities in Japan in the 1990s—a period during which the economic recession and the concomitant economic deregulation simultaneously narrowed down women’s opportunities for traditional types of labor and expanded their chances for creative employment.