Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In Japan’s aging society, economic precarity and loneliness have contributed to the decline in traditional forms of intimacy. However, commercial intimacy serves its purpose in fulfilling one’s physical or emotional needs without the commitment of a full relationship.

Paper long abstract

In Japan’s aging society with declining birth rates, many people face economic precarity and social isolation, which affects how they form relationships. This paper investigates commercial intimacy, including sex work, host clubs, rental girlfriends, and concept cafés, as an important part of satisfying emotional or sexual needs. Based on ethnographic research in Tokyo and Osaka, it shows that motivations for these practices are gendered. Women often seek emotional intimacy, for example through host clubs or concept cafés where they can talk, be listened to, and enjoy fantasy-like settings. Men, on the other hand, more often pay for sexual or affective services, such as visits to girl bars, prostitution, or rental girlfriend services. While these practices are common, they are not equally normalised: in Japan’s patriarchal society, men’s use of sexual services is more socially accepted, while women who buy emotional intimacy face stigma. At the same time, traditional forms of intimacy, like marriage and long-term partnerships, are declining, often seen as economically risky or burdensome. This paper argues that commercial intimacy reorganises relationships around practical, time-limited, and emotionally safe interactions. In this way, it acts as a form of affective infrastructure, helping people manage loneliness while also reflecting existing gender inequalities.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

An ethnography based on ten years of fieldwork in a Tokyo pink film company, this paper explores how pink films are produced, circulated, and consumed, revealing how marginal media economies in Japan negotiate precarity, creativity, and intimacy in contemporary cinema.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an ethnographic account of Japan’s pink film industry—the softcore cinematic genre that has persisted on the fringes of Japan’s media and cultural economy for over half a century. Based on ten years of fieldwork inside a Tokyo-based pink film production company, the paper traces the everyday practices, negotiations, and material infrastructures that sustain the making and circulation of these films in the twenty-first century.

Through long-term participant observation and interviews with directors, actors, producers, and distributors, the study explores how pink films are produced and circulated within a tightly interconnected network of low-budget studios, theatre owners, and niche audiences. Far from being a mere relic of the postwar erotic cinema boom, the pink industry today operates as a microcosm of Japan’s broader media ecology—where economic precarity, affective labour, and creative aspiration intersect.

The paper follows the life cycle of a pink film—from script development and shooting to theatrical exhibition and audience reception—to reveal how workers navigate shifting moral regulations, digital transitions, and diminishing exhibition spaces. It examines how this marginal industry adapts to new platforms and changing publics while maintaining an ethos of artisanal, face-to-face production that resists full incorporation into mainstream cinema or digital pornography.

By attending to the intimate economies and aesthetic negotiations that define pink film production, this paper contributes to media anthropology, film studies, and media studies in general. It highlights how zones of marginal media practice can illuminate broader transformations in Japan’s media infrastructures and the affective economies that sustain them.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This study examines the migration of visual kei musicians into men’s underground idol scenes. Based on participant observation and comparison, it shows how performance, fan relations, and monetization are reconfigured, highlighting labor mobility and emotional labor in Japanese music subcultures.

Paper long abstract

The visual kei music industry, once a central pillar of Japanese youth subculture, has experienced long-term contraction amid changes in media environments and live performance economies. In contrast, men’s underground idol scenes have grown by leveraging highly personalized fan engagement and intimacy-centered monetization strategies. Against this backdrop, visual kei musicians have increasingly migrated into men’s underground idol activities. This study investigates why this transition occurs and how forms of performance, intimacy, and labor are reconfigured through it.

Methodologically, the study is based on participant observation conducted within men’s underground idol venues, supplemented by comparative analysis of visual kei live performances and fan practices. Rather than treating the two scenes as discrete genres, the study approaches them as adjacent subcultural industries connected through shared audiences, aesthetics, and affective economies.

The analysis focuses on three dimensions: (1) performative practices and bodily presentation, (2) modes of fan interaction, and (3) monetization structures. While visual kei emphasizes visual spectacle, narrative distance, and musical authorship, men’s underground idol culture foregrounds proximity, repetition, and emotional availability. Musicians transitioning between these spaces transfer skills in character construction and visual performance, yet must adopt new forms of emotional labor that render intimacy itself a primary economic asset.

This comparison reveals a broader transformation in Japanese music subcultures, where loyalty, care, and affective engagement increasingly function as forms of investment. By conceptualizing this shift as labor mobility across subcultural music industries, the study contributes to anthropology, sociology, and media studies by highlighting how intimacy-based business models reshape gendered performance and creative labor. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that contemporary subcultures are not isolated domains but dynamic fields linked by circulating practices of monetization, media strategy, and affective work.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This ethnographic paper introduces a case study of Ikebukuro and Otome Road as an urban space re-imagined and co-produced by Japanese female fans, examined through the lens of the recent oshi-katsu phenomenon and its effects on lived, embodied and material fan practices.

Paper long abstract

Although previous scholarship on Japanese fan geographies often centres on Akihabara as the representative urban neighbourhood and commercial epicentre of the otaku culture, its male-oriented consumption practices are often implicitly stated and rarely analysed, while urban spaces significant to female fandoms remain understudied. This paper will introduce a case study of Ikebukuro, Tokyo, as an urban space re-imagined and co-produced by Japanese female fans as a ‘sacred site’ (seichi) relevant to multiple Japanese popular culture-related female fandoms. Widely regarded as a major commercial space for the BL (Boys’ Love) manga and anime and fan derivative dōjinshi cultures (Sugiura 2006, Steinberg and Alban 2018), Ikebukuro recently underwent a major redevelopment project as part of the district’s ‘International Art and Culture City’ initiative, which included reopening of the flagship Animate shop and building the Hareza complex. The transformation affected the spatial dynamics of the area by not only revitalising the consumption practices centred around the iconic Otome Road but also extending beyond it, diversifying and expanding into whole new generations of female fans participating across seemingly unrelated genres.

Informed by participant observation and ethnographic research conducted in the area between September 2024 and November 2025, this paper examines the spatial politics behind the redevelopment of the Ikebukuro neighbourhood. By contextualising the rapid shifts in gendered expressions of fandoms through the lens of the recent proliferation of the oshi-katsu phenomenon, or the broad range of the often consumption-based fan practices aiming to support one’s ‘oshi’ (a favoured artist, fictional character or object), I argue that the redeveloped Ikebukuro space functions as the urban seichi for female fans and their embodied experiences of routinised fan consumption practices centred around second-hand retail shops and themed cafés. Demonstrating that urban fan spaces remain central to the female fans’ consumption practices despite ongoing market shifts and increasing digitalisation of fan experiences, this paper contributes to the broader discussions of the spatial aspects of fan cultures, affective economies and politics of belonging in contemporary Japanese popular culture.