Japanese popular culture has developed in many unexpected and
fascinating ways. From contemporary pop culture's beginnings in the
shadow of the Second World War and the earlier China campaign,
Japan's sense of identity has been contested, challenged,
reconsidered, restructured, and revived through multiple popular
media. Pop culture, though, has always occupied a singular place in
Japan's expression of selfhood and otherness, providing vicarious
experiences of life within Japan. Today, Japanese popular culture's
global influence is felt most keenly in movie culture, animation,
television, the Internet, social media, music, fashion, and comics
(manga), to name but a few fields and technologies. Indeed, visual
culture, specifically television and movies, with a strong emphasis
on animation (anime) and manga, led the first wave of Japanese
pop-culture exports in the second half of the twentieth century.
Since then, academic interest in these exports, both at home in
Japan, and overseas, has developed rapidly. The second wave of
Japanese popular culture followed the digitization of much of the
global media: rapid communications, global connectedness, and the
development of new media have provided platforms on which Japanese
pop culture has been presented and critiqued, engaged, and
transformed. More complex, more hybrid, and more sophisticated, the
relationships between Japan and the rest of the world are often
given voice through new readings and interpretations of the
interconnected popular cultural world. The assembled articles in
Volume I of this new Routledge collection of major works provide a
comprehensive overview of the postwar history of Japanese popular
culture. Topics include the emergence of popular culture as an
academic field in Japan; the genesis of manga and anime; analyses
of various cultural artefacts and phenomena, such as censorship and
popular culture during the postwar occupation; the 1970s origin of
kawaii culture; and street fashion in the 1980s. Volumes II and
III, meanwhile, focus on the twenty-first century. Over the last
decade especially, the transnational presence of Japanese popular
culture has accelerated, and with it scholarship on Japanese
popular culture has grown in depth and diversity. The themes
explored in these volumes include the role of digital technology in
popular culture; esoteric cultural artefacts and activities, such
as loli fashion, maid cafes, otaku culture, and traditional music
reinvented as pop, as well as more conventionally popular products
such as anime, TV drama, and shojo manga. Collectively, the volume
demonstrates the complex and heterogeneous nature of the Japanese
pop-culture landscape in the twenty-first century. The final volume
in the collection addresses broader issues associated with Japanese
popular culture and globalization. As Japan sought to boost its
international 'soft power' via a 'Cool Japan' strategy, the academy
began to pay serious attention to the political-economic
implications of Japan's pop-culture exports. The soft-power
rhetoric has become a significant marker of popular culture in Asia
in particular, and Japan's influence regionally has been explored
from a number of angles. Along with seminal pieces from Nye, Huat,
and Iwabuchi, authors in the first section of Volume IV examine the
rise of Japan's pop-culture industry, and investigate the
socio-economic and political-economic implications of topics such
as 'the Japan Brand', 'Cool Japan', and 'Cute Japan'. In the second
section, case studies of soft power are brought to the fore, and
analyses of the implications for people and culture are developed.
Collectively, the materials gathered in this volume demonstrate the
highly mobile and complex nature of the globalization of Japanese
popular culture.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
