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- Convenor:
-
James Welker
(Kanagawa University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Media Studies
- Location:
- Auditorium 2 Franz Cumont
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This roundtable brings together scholars of Japanese and other cultures to examine, at various scales, ways Japanese media and popular culture from manga and anime to Marie Kondo are being consumed, interpreted, and transfigured outside Japan.
Long Abstract:
This roundtable brings together scholars of Japanese and other cultures to examine, at various scales, ways Japanese media are being consumed, interpreted, and transfigured outside Japan. Moving from the local to the global, each scholar will briefly introduce one or more media texts, genres, or spheres and discuss how these have been transfigured outside of Japan, with attention to cultural context. The speakers will then discuss points of overlap and divergence in different cultural contexts across various forms of media. The final thirty minutes will be allotted to questions and comments from the audience.
The first speaker examines how American television has been repackaging and globalizing Japanese television, celebrities, and popular culture via an examination of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and Queer Eye: We're in Japan! In these shows, Marie Kondo attempts to performatively clean up American households, while the Queer Eye cast attempt to polish the lives of queer individuals in Japan. The third speaker discusses the Sanrio character Aggressive Retsuko, the angry antithesis of Hello Kitty, with attention to its representation of the precarity and angst of Japan's post-industrial neoliberal workplace and how that representation has been responded to by viewers overseas. The next speaker surveys Japanese pornography research and pedagogy in Hong Kong, elucidating media, subcultures, and approaches to the study of sexually explicit media, drawing attention to media that are small, momentary, and hidden from larger public domains. The final speaker explores ways the Japanese transmedia genre boys love (BL) has been consumed, understood, and transfigured around the world, resulting not just in local transformations of the genre but also sometimes profound effects on local cultures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -James Welker (Kanagawa University)
Paper short abstract:
I use boys love (BL) as a lens onto ways Japanese media has been consumed, understood, and transfigured in various sites around the world, drawing particular attention to effects of BL media, including challenging local gender/sexual norms and facilitating new forms of cross-cultural exchange.
Paper long abstract:
Created by and for adolescent girls and women, boys love (BL) media, which depicts romantic and sexual relationships between males, first appeared in commercial shōjo manga magazines in early 1970s Japan. BL quickly spread into other commercial and fan-produced media forms, including dōjinshi (fanzines), light novels, anime, drama CDs, live action films and TV series, live theatrical performances, video games, collectible figures, and other goods. In spite of its seemingly niche nature, BL has had an estimated annual domestic market size ranging from 21 to 22 billion yen (USD 195 to 200 million) in the 2010s.
By the 1980s, BL began to attract fans outside of Japan, possibly beginning in neighboring countries, such as Taiwan which saw commercial publication of pirated fanzines by the middle of that decade. In the 1990s, pockets of BL fandom started springing up more globally and since the 2000s BL-focused imprints and presses have been formed alongside BL themed fan events in places like Poland and Mexico and a flourishing global online fan community. More recently, it has been transformed into new forms of media that now seem to emanate from places like Thailand, as well as merged with other narrative genres such as “A/B/O” and slash fiction. It has also been used to raise awareness about LGBTQ issues and been marshalled for other political causes.
In this roundtable, I will use the example of BL as a lens through which to discuss ways that Japanese media has been consumed, understood, and transfigured in various sites around the world. I will draw particular attention to the sociocultural effects of BL media, ranging from helping female BL fans reconsider their attitudes towards romance, sex, and sexuality, to affecting attitudes about and representation of the LGBTQ community, including same-sex marriage, to facilitating new forms of cultural exchange.
Katrien Jacobs
Paper short abstract:
Critical discussions of Japanese pornography in Hong Kong contribute to a new era of transformed pedagogy, in which sexuality studies become an important and safe domain in which to debate the future of feminism and sexual entertainment amongst fading civil liberties.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution offers an overview of Japanese pornography research and pedagogy in Hong Kong with a focus on new initiatives and youth critical voices that resonate in the era of “post-democracy” and the aftermath of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement. The paper speaks back to a turning point in Hong Kong history by positioning new openings for the study of Japanese erotic and sexually explicit media. It will do so by highlighting a porn seminar and symposium that was conducted at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020-2022, coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic and the implementation of a National Security Law on July 1, 2020. Within this transformation, the role of emancipatory sexualities and sexually explicit media remained somewhat “pristine” and became a productive space for student engagement and radical-critical thought. It will sketch out an education model based on the notion of dialogic aesthetics in art theory, an opening up of definitions and practices of “art” and “pornography” to foster relations within wider socio-cultural publics and inclusive audiences. But rather than arguing that Japanese pornography can contribute to a grand narrative, it will pay attention to “de facto” media, subcultures, and approaches to the study of sexually explicit media that are small, momentary and hidden from larger public domains. The paper will also use samples of students’ in-class conversation pieces and assignments, while keeping their names fully anonymous for safety purposes.
Debra Occhi (Miyazaki International College)
Paper short abstract:
Sanrio’s Aggressive Retsuko is an anthropomorphic lesser panda combining cuteness and anger in a workplace anime. Though a seeming anti-Hello Kitty, her narrative is far less revolutionary than it may seem. I argue that this anime, now in global release, is relatable to millennials around the world.
Paper long abstract:
In this roundtable I will discuss what seems to be the anti-Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s Aggressive Retsuko, and its anime depiction of Japanese office work in global reception. This low-level OL “office lady” character is a red panda and a Scorpio, twenty-five years old, with type A blood, and all the associated stereotypes. Her name “Retsuko” includes retsu “ardent, violent, furious,” as in the word for heroine, retsujo, and ko “child.” She alternates between good and evil versions of self. Her name also recalls the Japanese naming of the creature as ressā panda, “lesser panda.” Retitled Aggretsuko, multilingual versions came out globally on Netflix to positive reviews. Though she’s less cute and more expressive than Hello Kitty, this heteronormative anime doesn’t challenge the status quo.
Aggressive Retsuko is usually mild-mannered in the office despite abuse, venting anger in death-metal karaoke sessions in which her face resembles an evil character. She meekly accepts extra tasks, works late, and endures gossip, as well as other micro- and macro-aggressions. It is easy to assess her, under Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare guidelines, as a victim of power harassment, pawahara, given the treatment she receives. However, her dilemmas broadly involve generational- and gender-based differences in workplace and gendered power relations that have apparently resonated with foreign viewers. Fan comments show that this anime’s cultural odor is easily ignored or reinterpreted, such as an “herbivore man” character in the narrative’s descriptions as aromantic/asexual or stoned.
Power-based and sexual harassment are overt and are addressed, but are glossed over as inevitable in some cases and as fabrications in others. This follows neoliberalism by placing the burden on the individual workers rather than supporting institutional support. Retsuko’s imagined alternatives to this workplace are marriage or entrepreneurial work, both of which she initially craves and eventually resists. She enacts the choices of enduring the workplace or leaving it, rather than embodying any possibility for change. The pixellated displays of Retsuko’s anger remind us of contemporary social problems but ultimately dissipate them into the mediascape.
Alisa Freedman (University of Oregon )
Paper short abstract:
Comparing images of celebrities and domestic life in Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!, two programs released on American Netflix in 2019, provides insight into how television “curates” Japan for international consumption and comments on ideas of nation, identity, and home.
Paper long abstract:
Streaming sites like Netflix (with ties to Japan’s Fuji TV) and Amazon Prime (connected to Japan’s TBS network) have helped globalize Japanese television programs and celebrities, earning them more cachet in Japan for having been popular in the United States. Yet, original programs created for local markets further dominant cultural stereotypes of “cute, tidy Japan.” Prime examples are Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!, two programs released on American Netflix in 2019. Marie Kondo, a powerful celebrity in Japan with at least five self-help books, created her own series on Netflix the same year as the reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Bravo network, 2003–2007); both programs follow the format of lifestyle gurus improving the lives of hurt people by through “tidiness,” by cleaning up one’s home, oneself, and one’s personal relationships. Kondo both participates in and subverts a history of Japanese women “self-orientalizing” on American television by acting cute, playing the role of being ignorant about Japan, the United States, or both. Japan is one of the only countries the Queer Eye Fab Five visited on their show; they provide tips to people who feel alienated in Japan for choosing non-traditional lifestyles. Both programs afford viewers carefully edited views of domestic life and feature locations not often shown in tourist programs. While streaming television has paid greater attention to inclusion and diversity than commercial networks, it perpetuates beliefs in American superiority and visions of Japan as a land where people feel lost. By comparing how Japanese celebrities like Marie Kondo have been cast in American programs and how Japanese media issues are depicted in Queer Eye much can be learned about how television plays a curatorial role in displaying images of Japan for American viewers. I will discuss how American television is a useful teaching tool for understanding how Japanese media and celebrities are transfigured through globalization. Television presents an alternative history of American fascinations with and fears of Japan.