Touching Japanese Popular Culture: From Flows to Contact for Ethnographic Analysis

Abstract

This essay explores the idea of touch as a means to think about Japanese popular culture in a transnational perspective. In the years since Appadurai coined the idea of ‘scapes’ of flow, we have witnessed a growing interest in phenomena associated with border crossing. As a counterpoint, I consider several examples of Japanese culture that could be seen as ‘transnational flow’, but provide different insights if viewed in terms of touch, encounter, and contact. In particular, I consider a Japanese rapper's dismay at the selection of his album cover as one of the worst of 2010, an American reviewer's distaste at a style of Japanese figurine production, and the integration of contemporary art exhibits in a rural island community in Japan. In each case, the moments and spaces of contact point to a way of understanding cultural influence less via the process of crossing borders than in terms of highlighting locations where cultural difference comes into contact. These examples of ‘touch’ also offer a way of understanding what makes fieldwork and ethnography such a useful analytical perspective for Japanese studies.

Notes

¹See Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference’, and Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, as representative works in this area.

²Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference’.

⁴Howes, ‘Can These Dry Bones Live?’, 445.

³For further discussions on this, see Adams, ‘Shiatsu in Britain and Japan’; Howes, Sensual Relations; and Hsu, ‘Towards a Science of Touch, Part 1’.

⁵Hsu, ‘The Senses and the Social’.

⁶Ibid., 436.

⁷See also Chau, ‘Social Heat’.

⁸Hsu, ‘The Senses and the Social’, 437.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰TBS Radio, Raimusutaa no Utamaru.

¹¹Allison, Millennial Monsters.

¹²See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5G5bD2Do-k.

¹³See Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, and Lamarre, The Anime Machine, for more on moe characters.

¹⁴Bricken, ‘Astro Toy Column’.

¹⁵For a discussion of the Anglophone media's negative stereotyping of Japanese otaku, see Stevens, ‘You Are What You Buy’.

¹⁶Akimoto et al., Naoshima, 6.

¹⁷Akimoto et al., Naoshima, 21.