[From nobody Wed Jun 21 16:38:48 2017 From: Mark Anderson <ander025@umn.edu> To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Subject: Re: J-horror as national formatting Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 17:27:58 +0000 Content-Type: Multipart/mixed; boundary="NextPart_Webmail_9m3u9jl4l_26470_1149881337_1" --NextPart_Webmail_9m3u9jl4l_26470_1149881337_1 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Just to piggyback onto Anne's very insightful excursus on J-commodities, I was in Japan when the J-League was being introduced. The marketing and general vibe said this was something that would appeal to Japanese youth <i><b>precisely because it wasn't based on your father's spiritist baseball bushido</b></i>, it was cosmopolitan and a little exotic. It had the glamor of Italians and Brazilians and international sophistication. Above all, it was about expressing yourself and having fun, like the Brazilian soccer team's style, as opposed to the ascetic model of self-sacrifice in traditional Japanese baseball, or even contemporary German-style soccer strategy. The first group of J-League generation players on the national soccer team even rebelled against an early coach whose style was too repressive and team-defense oriented. They wanted to let it all hang out like the Brazilians.<br> <br> I think the J- in J-horror is very bound up with this earlier discourse on J-pop and the J-league and Anne is right to point to this aspect of the issue. The "J- to the L" in J-League was very bound up with a claim to individualism and self-expression through consumption and lifestyle. Sophistication in terms of one's self-expression through consumption in this context involved interest in Europe and the cosmopolitan perspective. For the J- world it was very important that Nakata and others played soccer in Italy (soccer's "homeland" in the eyes of many Japanese fans). There was a very fundamenttal kokusaika aspect to the J- of J-pop and the J-League. Presumably this feeds into the connotations of J-horror in some way, perhaps not.<br> <br> To digress even further, I'm tempted to wonder if manga and anime as currently constituted might even be covert J-genres--marked as intrinscally Japanese by the pretense that even the name of the genre itself is untranslatable, yet gaining their current status and importantance in large part due to their economic and cultural impact in the global marketplace, their recognition abroad, and their apparent ability to generate fantasies of Japan or the self in foreign markets as well as at home, regardless of any documentable relation to Japanese culture and tradition these hybrid fantasies of consuming "Japanese" products may or may not actually possess. <br> <br> My first response is&nbsp; that a self-conscious sense of cosmopolitanism and the exotic attraction of the foreign are more central to the definition and self-identity of fans of J-pop and the J-League than to manga and anime, although of course those layers are there in manga and anime too if you go back far enough.<br> <br> &nbsp;At the very least, I suppose my digression&nbsp; raises the point that while on the one hand it is important to think through discourses of global branding in the 90s that include the J-commodities, we should at the same time try to think through how this also relates to the several generations over which these sorts of dynamics have been repeatedly surfacing and then disappearing again from plain view. <br> <br> One of the critical distinctions, clearly, is whether Japanese cultural production was exported and found an audience abroad or not. This has clearly happened a lot more lately than before.<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Mark Anderson<br> </body> </html> --NextPart_Webmail_9m3u9jl4l_26470_1149881337_1-- ]