Special Seminar of TransAsian Cultural Studies Workshop
Taking “Cool Japan” Seriously
Beyond Euphoria and Pragmatism
4:15-7pm, June 22nd 2007
Room 311, 19th Bldg. of Waseda University
(http://www.waseda.jp/jp/campus/nishiwaseda.html)
Presenters: Anne Allison (Duke University)
Laura Miller (Loyola University Chicago)
Adrian Favell (UCLA)
Discussants: Mouri Yoshitaka (Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music)
Tanaka Yasuhiro (International Christian University)
Moderator: Iwabuchi Koichi (Waseda University)
1. ‘The calculus of cool: the value (and non-value) of Japanese youth today’ by Anne Allison
Once an American reporter proclaimed its economy to be fueled by “gross national cool,” the term took off in Japan, triggering wide-scale interest in what was now hailed to be its most culturally exportable product—youth-targeted fantasy goods. Circulating the globe with faddish appeal, these products of fancy and imaginative creation (manga, anime, Kitty-chan, video games) are recognized to have value of both a real and symbolic kind. Bringing in revenues, they also generate a sense of attraction: what, as some hope, is a vehicle for Japanese soft power: something to be manipulated, from a cultural and economic resource, into a national(ist) one. In all this rhetoric, engineering, and attention paid to its “GNC,” what, I ask in this paper, is the connection to and construction of “youth”? After all, at the same time that playful youth goods have been praised and milked for their utility, real youth in Japan have been widely decried for their too-playful (as in, problematic) stances towards work, school, reproduction, and the future. What is the calculus then by which youth, in some iteration, is accorded productive value and other youth, denounced as lacking value and productivity altogether? Looking critically at neoliberalism as it operates today in Japan, I examine the value it assigns, extracts, or denounces from youth as imaginative laborers.
*Anne Allison is professor and chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University. She is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994); Permitted and prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (1996); and, most recently, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination(2006). She is currently starting research on youth and capitalism in the 21st century.
2. ‘Unmarketable Girl Cool’ by Laura Miller
Pundits and bureaucrats are reveling in a perceived tsunami of Japanese cool, pointing to the global spread of Gundam, Ghost in the Shell, and the Godzilla Roll (yellowtail, hot sauce, and green onions) outside Japan as examples of influential new forms of cultural diplomacy. Foreign Affairs Minister Aso urges Japan to pimp popular culture more assertively, particularly anime, manga, J-Pop and fashion. This leads one to wonder who decides what constitutes coolness in the Cool Japan campaign, as well what the basis is for selection of putatively exportable content. This paper will question the ability of male elders to grasp, let alone package for foreign consumption, various cultural innovations and forms produced by girls or for girls. Girl culture, which often encodes aesthetics and desires that go beyond an overwrought cuteness that is usually the sole focus of analysis and attention, is explored as a counter to better known and officially promoted male geek culture.
＊Laura Miller is Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. She recently published Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (2006) and co-edited Bad Girls of Japan (2005). She is currently working on a new book tentatively entitled Girl Power Japan: Gendered Domains of Cultural and Linguistic Vigor.
3. ‘Little Boys and Big Money: Creators, Entrepreneurship and Opportunism in the Making of "Cool Japan"’ by Adrian Favell
Whatever else is lurking behind the notion of “cool Japan”, it is clear that the instantly recognisable vision of “neo-Tokyo” currently being sold with great success to the West lies at some remove from the source it represents. Though the image is now globally ubiquitous in a variety of creative and cultural fields, this vision is a bizarre one, equally in terms of timing (by all accounts, 1998 was way cooler than 2007), its narrow selection (what gets represented and consumed in the West is but a marginal slice of any given creative field in Japan), and its tastes (which veer off into underground and sometimes perverse territories). My ethnographic, investigative research focuses on the people behind the making of “cool Japan” – the creators, entrepreneurs, go-betweens and commentators here and in the West – pushing a global bandwagon the Japanese government now appears desperate to board. Leaving aside the irony of dubiously nationalist right wing politicians buying into a self-consciously ‘weirdo’ Otaku culture, in my talk, I will focus particularly on Art as part of the vision: particularly, the rise of Murakami (Takashi, not Haruki) and his KaikaiKiki organisation, beginning to piece together the role of curators and big business in LA and New York, his relation to the Mori Building company and the high fashion world of Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs, and ongoing struggles within the contemporary art world in Tokyo. While dominant theories and methodologies in cultural studies tend to focus attention on the virtual, textual and discursive in their accounts of cultural globalisation, my work emphasises how the global mobility of art (and all contemporary culture) in fact depends crucially on the physical mobility and networks of creators and entrepreneurs, as well as material connections between specific places—even when the products themselves are largely fantasy representations of the society that inspired them.
*Adrian Favell is Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a Japan Foundation Abe Fellow 2006-7 at Hitsotsubashi University, Tokyo. He is the author of Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (1998), The Human Face of Global Mobility: International Highly Skilled Migration in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific (with Michael Peter Smith, 2006), and Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Moving Urban Professionals in an Integrating Europe (2008, forthcoming).
Taking “Cool Japan” Seriously
Beyond Euphoria and Pragmatism
4:15-7pm, June 22nd 2007
Room 311, 19th Bldg. of Waseda University
(http://www.waseda.jp/jp/campus/nishiwaseda.html)
Presenters: Anne Allison (Duke University)
Laura Miller (Loyola University Chicago)
Adrian Favell (UCLA)
Discussants: Mouri Yoshitaka (Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music)
Tanaka Yasuhiro (International Christian University)
Moderator: Iwabuchi Koichi (Waseda University)
1. ‘The calculus of cool: the value (and non-value) of Japanese youth today’ by Anne Allison
Once an American reporter proclaimed its economy to be fueled by “gross national cool,” the term took off in Japan, triggering wide-scale interest in what was now hailed to be its most culturally exportable product—youth-targeted fantasy goods. Circulating the globe with faddish appeal, these products of fancy and imaginative creation (manga, anime, Kitty-chan, video games) are recognized to have value of both a real and symbolic kind. Bringing in revenues, they also generate a sense of attraction: what, as some hope, is a vehicle for Japanese soft power: something to be manipulated, from a cultural and economic resource, into a national(ist) one. In all this rhetoric, engineering, and attention paid to its “GNC,” what, I ask in this paper, is the connection to and construction of “youth”? After all, at the same time that playful youth goods have been praised and milked for their utility, real youth in Japan have been widely decried for their too-playful (as in, problematic) stances towards work, school, reproduction, and the future. What is the calculus then by which youth, in some iteration, is accorded productive value and other youth, denounced as lacking value and productivity altogether? Looking critically at neoliberalism as it operates today in Japan, I examine the value it assigns, extracts, or denounces from youth as imaginative laborers.
*Anne Allison is professor and chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University. She is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994); Permitted and prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (1996); and, most recently, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination(2006). She is currently starting research on youth and capitalism in the 21st century.
2. ‘Unmarketable Girl Cool’ by Laura Miller
Pundits and bureaucrats are reveling in a perceived tsunami of Japanese cool, pointing to the global spread of Gundam, Ghost in the Shell, and the Godzilla Roll (yellowtail, hot sauce, and green onions) outside Japan as examples of influential new forms of cultural diplomacy. Foreign Affairs Minister Aso urges Japan to pimp popular culture more assertively, particularly anime, manga, J-Pop and fashion. This leads one to wonder who decides what constitutes coolness in the Cool Japan campaign, as well what the basis is for selection of putatively exportable content. This paper will question the ability of male elders to grasp, let alone package for foreign consumption, various cultural innovations and forms produced by girls or for girls. Girl culture, which often encodes aesthetics and desires that go beyond an overwrought cuteness that is usually the sole focus of analysis and attention, is explored as a counter to better known and officially promoted male geek culture.
＊Laura Miller is Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. She recently published Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (2006) and co-edited Bad Girls of Japan (2005). She is currently working on a new book tentatively entitled Girl Power Japan: Gendered Domains of Cultural and Linguistic Vigor.
3. ‘Little Boys and Big Money: Creators, Entrepreneurship and Opportunism in the Making of "Cool Japan"’ by Adrian Favell
Whatever else is lurking behind the notion of “cool Japan”, it is clear that the instantly recognisable vision of “neo-Tokyo” currently being sold with great success to the West lies at some remove from the source it represents. Though the image is now globally ubiquitous in a variety of creative and cultural fields, this vision is a bizarre one, equally in terms of timing (by all accounts, 1998 was way cooler than 2007), its narrow selection (what gets represented and consumed in the West is but a marginal slice of any given creative field in Japan), and its tastes (which veer off into underground and sometimes perverse territories). My ethnographic, investigative research focuses on the people behind the making of “cool Japan” – the creators, entrepreneurs, go-betweens and commentators here and in the West – pushing a global bandwagon the Japanese government now appears desperate to board. Leaving aside the irony of dubiously nationalist right wing politicians buying into a self-consciously ‘weirdo’ Otaku culture, in my talk, I will focus particularly on Art as part of the vision: particularly, the rise of Murakami (Takashi, not Haruki) and his KaikaiKiki organisation, beginning to piece together the role of curators and big business in LA and New York, his relation to the Mori Building company and the high fashion world of Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs, and ongoing struggles within the contemporary art world in Tokyo. While dominant theories and methodologies in cultural studies tend to focus attention on the virtual, textual and discursive in their accounts of cultural globalisation, my work emphasises how the global mobility of art (and all contemporary culture) in fact depends crucially on the physical mobility and networks of creators and entrepreneurs, as well as material connections between specific places—even when the products themselves are largely fantasy representations of the society that inspired them.
*Adrian Favell is Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a Japan Foundation Abe Fellow 2006-7 at Hitsotsubashi University, Tokyo. He is the author of Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (1998), The Human Face of Global Mobility: International Highly Skilled Migration in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific (with Michael Peter Smith, 2006), and Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Moving Urban Professionals in an Integrating Europe (2008, forthcoming).
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