[KineJapan] End of "Cool" Japan Workshop; Ann Arbor

[Markus Nornes]

I wish you all could come. At least you'll know what's up. This will
eventually be a book, it seems.

Markus

=================================================

End of "Cool" Japan Workshop


A one-day workshop hosted by the Center for Japanese Studies and the
Department of Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan

Organizers: Mark McLelland and Markus Nornes

Saturday 5 April 2014

Program

9.30 Welcome
Markus Nornes

9.45-10.30 Opening Address
Mark McLelland

10.30-10:45 Coffee

10.45-12.00 Panel One: Negotiating Student Expectations
Alisa Freedman
Laura Miller

12.00-1.00 Lunch

1.00-3.00 Panel Two: Sex and Violence In and Beyond the Classroom
Sabine Fruhstuck
Kirsten Cather
Patrick Galbraith

3.00-3.15 Coffee

3.15-4.00 Future Directions: “The End of Cool Japan?” Roundtable Discussion
____________________________________________________

About the Event

This workshop addresses some pressing concerns for all those with an
investment in teaching and learning about Japan via its popular culture. It
brings together Japan specialists, both educators and researchers, in order
to identify key challenges in research and pedagogy and to develop a
framework for a code of ethics that can serve as a guideline for Japan
Studies professionals.

Since the early 2000s, interest in “cool Japan,” particularly young
people’s engagement with animation, comics and gaming (ACG), has been the
driving factor in recruitment to undergraduate Japanese language and
studies courses. Tertiary institutions and the Japanese foreign office
alike have sought to capitalize on this interest to boost enrolments in
Japanese courses. Young people’s interest in and contact with Japanese
popular culture now often begins in school and continues into undergraduate
life. An increasing number of faculty and graduate students are also
focusing on aspects of Japanese popular culture across a range of
disciplines including anthropology, screen studies, literary studies,
cultural studies and sociology. Today’s convergent media environment offers
unprecedented opportunities for sourcing and disseminating previously
obscure or hard to find pop culture content from Japan. However alongside
this convenience are heightened ethical and legal concerns surrounding the
sourcing of content that bypasses national licensing and ratings systems.

Today’s students occupy multiple roles as fans, students and “produsers” of
Japanese cultural content that is available via the Internet. Most Japanese
pop culture students are young and tech-savvy and are involved in some form
of online fannish interaction. In addition to mainstream ACG titles that
have been licensed to overseas companies, translated into English, given
appropriate ratings and conventionally distributed, students access an
enormous amount of unofficially translated and transmitted Japanese
material on the internet. Original Japanese titles are dubbed and subtitled
into English and other languages by circles of fans and distributed via fan
sites and peer-to-peer networks. Fans themselves have taken on active roles
as mediators and distributors and facilitated the bottom-up spread of
Japanese pop culture across geographical and linguistic borders, thus
circumventing traditional distribution and ratings systems.

The ease of manipulating digital content in today’s “remix culture” has
also resulted in an equally voluminous amount of fan-generated content
based on Japanese originals. Known in Japanese as dōjin (coterie) products,
these “transformative works” that appropriate existing titles and
characters and develop new story lines are also widely available online and
popular among student fans who both consume and produce them. Yet, despite
the fact that “fansubbers” evince a strong desire to support the local
animation industry by promoting anime culture and widening anime’s
accessibility, given that these circuits of production and redistribution
are illegal in terms of international copyright law, they have at times
resulted in the Japanese ACG industries and local licensees taking legal
action.

In addition to these concerns over copyright, there are problems to do with
the increased flow of Japanese cultural materials that are treated
differently by various national ratings systems as well as different
audiences and interest groups. While many librarians and literacy experts
have welcomed the upsurge of interest in graphic novels among young
readers, an alternative narrative points to the “dark side” of Japanese
popular culture, with its emphasis on adult-themes, violence, sexual
fetishes and seemingly under-age characters. Recently, the violent and
sexualized content of some Japanese media, particularly in regard to
representations of characters who may only “appear to be” minors, has
caused considerable concern among international agencies such as UNICEF. In
some countries, notably the US, the UK, Canada, Sweden, and Australia,
fictional depictions of child characters have been included in the
definition of “child-abuse publications.” Japan itself has been affected by
this new global scrutiny of pop culture representations as evidenced in
2010 by the successful passing of the Tokyo Metropolitan Authority’s Bill
number 156 (the so-called “Non-Existent Youth Bill”) placing enhanced sales
restrictions on ACG deemed “harmful to youth.”

The ever expanding scope of this legislation has led to serious charges
being laid against some manga and anime collectors in the US and elsewhere.
A very large number of Japanese pop culture students have encountered or
even actively sought out such material which is ubiquitous in the fandom.
Furthermore, dōjin works, which might have received a PG rating for their
official versions, are often “sexed up” in fan creations to an extent that
they would receive adult-only ratings or be banned altogether in some
jurisdictions. The fact that young readers can move seamlessly from
searching out official content on the internet to fandoms circulating these
niche products is cited as a cause for concern among educators.

Concerns about copyright, ratings and exposure to potentially illegal
content are serious issues for those teaching and researching Japanese
popular culture, although to date the literature discussing these issues is
scant. This workshop brings together leading experts in the study of
Japanese popular culture who have faced ethical and legal challenges in
pursuing their own research and in teaching about Japan to undergraduate
students. Speakers from the US, Australia and Japan address the different
ways in which their academic practices are challenged by local regulations
and the difficulties they face when sourcing, researching and teaching
about pop culture content in an increasingly “deterritorialized” media
environment.

Topics addressed include:

· Copyright in the classroom: teaching fan appropriations of Japanese
popular culture.
· Japanese and American culture industry responses to dōjin culture.
· The impact of “child-abuse material” legislation on research and teaching
about manga and anime.
· Recent trends in ACG censorship and legislation in Japan.
· Cultural resistance among students to learning about aspects of Japanese
popular culture.
· Challenges from ethics committees for researchers into sexualized
subcultures.
· The range of gatekeepers who control, censure or mediate access to
Japanese popular culture
____________________________________________________

Presentation Abstracts

9.45-10.30 Opening Address

Ethical and Legal Issues in Teaching Japanese Popular Culture to
Undergraduate Students

Mark McLelland

Interest in Japanese popular culture, particularly young people’s
engagement with manga and animation, is widely acknowledged to be a driving
factor in recruitment to undergraduate Japanese language and studies
courses at universities around the world. Contemporary students live in a
convergent media culture where they often occupy multiple roles as fans,
students and "producers" of Japanese cultural content. Students’ easy
access to and manipulation of Japanese cultural content through sites that
offer "scanlation" and "fansubbing" services as well as sites that enable
the production and dissemination of dōjin works raise a number of ethical
and legal issues, not least infringement of copyright. However equally
important are issues to do with the transnational consumption and
production of Japanese cultural materials that are subject to different
ratings systems and censorship. The sexualised content of some Japanese
media, particularly in regard to representations of characters who may
"appear to be" minors, has become the site of increased concern in some
countries, notably Canada and Australia where fictional depictions of child
characters have been included in the definition of "child-abuse
publications". The ever expanding scope of this legislation has led to the
recent arrest and prosecution of manga and anime fans in both these
countries and in the US. In this presentation I ask what role, if any, do
we as educators have in alerting students to the problematic nature of
studying, consuming, producing and disseminating images of a sexualized
nature? How do we negotiate students’ interest in potentially problematic
Japanese genres such as BL, hentai and rori in the classroom? How do we
support students who wish to pursue their interest in these genres,
balancing the need for academic freedom against requirements to live by the
ethical and legal frameworks set by local authorities?

Mark McLelland is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the
University of Wollongong and author or editor of seven books focusing on
issues to do with the history of sexuality, popular culture and new media
in Japan, most recently, Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the
American Occupation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012


10.45-12.00 Panel One: Negotiating Student Expectations

Student Sensibilities and Gatekeeper Protests: Teaching and Presenting
Research on Unwelcome Japan Studies Topics

Laura Miller

Increasingly, many of us with academic specializations in Japan Studies are
pressured to include popular culture in our teaching menus in order to
entice the growing ranks of animation, comics and gaming (ACG) fans.
However, many students take our courses because they fulfil a diversity or
multicultural requirement. For these students, course material might be met
with responses ranging from disdain to active protest. In the state of
Missouri, a newly passed state amendment gives students the power to reject
any part of their academic assignments (including reading assignments) that
contradict or offend their religious beliefs. How do we negotiate protests
from students who object to aspects of our course content? Similarly,
although academic institutions, local Japanese societies, and community
groups claim they want more AEG as part of their programming, what they
envision is Miyazaki Hayao and Hello Kitty rather than Mizuno Junko or Matō
Sanami, and kimono dress-up rather than maid café enactments. This
presentation will focus on types of cultural resistance from those around
us (students, community members, and colleagues). What happens when our
students object to the sexual, religious or violent content found in our
lectures and research? How do we respond to colleagues, native Japanese
observers, and other gatekeepers who protest that our material or
programming on contemporary Japan is presenting a negative or tainted image
of the nation and its people? How do we deal with attempts to censure or
control the nature of our research programming and presentations on Japan?

Laura Miller is Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese
Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St.
Louis. She has published widely on Japanese culture and language, including
topics such as English loanwords in Japanese, the beauty industry, girls’
slang, self-photography, and divination. She teaches courses on Japan and
linguistic anthropology and works to promote Japan Studies through a
variety of campus and community programming.


Death Note and Crimes in the Classroom: Issues in Teaching Japanese Popular
Culture to the Ne(x)t Generation

Alisa Freedman

My talk explores moral, ethical, and cultural issues of teaching and
researching Japanese popular culture and the fandoms it inspires through
the trans-medial example of Death Note (Desu nōto). Death Note – manga
series written by Ohba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi (2003-2006), television
anime (2006-2007), three films (2006, 2008), light novels (2006, 2009), and
videogames (2007, 2008), all commercially available in several languages –
is the story of bored male student who kills criminals with an old notebook
dropped by a death god and the characters who pursue him. Death Note has
attracted fans worldwide because of its genre-bending narrative,
multifaceted beautiful boy (bishōnen) characters, commentary on justice and
surveillance, and advocacy of the power of youth, among other reasons. Yet
Death Note has been cited as a source of real-life crimes, implicating it
in debates about the morality of manga. Importantly, the global popularity
of Death Note has been thanks to fans, who have extended its meanings and
turned it into more than a niche fad. Death Note was marketed at a time
when Internet developments were making manga and anime more immediately
accessible. Death Note fan appropriations represent primary ways fans have
used digital media to personalize popular culture, including fanfiction,
slash, scanlations, and fansubs. I argue that Death Note is an instructive
text to make students aware of how they have collaborated in the global
domination of Japanese popular culture and how they have challenged
copyrights and other laws governing the dissemination of texts.

Alisa Freedman is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at
the University of Oregon. Her current research explores issues concerning
globalization, gender, and urbanization in twentieth and
twenty-first-century Japanese literature and popular culture. Her major
publications include Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and
Road (Stanford University Press, 2010), an annotated translation of
Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (University of California
Press, 2005), and a co-edited volume on Modern Girls on the Go: Gender,
Mobility, and Labor in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2013). She has
authored articles on Japanese modernism, urban studies, youth culture,
media discourses about gender norms, television history, humor as social
critique, and intersections of literature and digital media, along with
translations of Japanese novels and short stories.


1.00-3.00 Panel Two: Sex and Violence in and Beyond the Classroom

“Every Picture Tells a Lie:” Teaching the Popular Culture of Sexuality and
Violence

Sabine Frühstück

In this paper I would like to briefly describe my use of (visual) popular
culture materials in two of my undergraduate courses, ‘Representations of
Sexuality in Modern Japan’ and ‘Violence and the State in Japan.’ In each
course, I have integrated one or more sessions that take up the popular
cultural treatment of the core topics, sexuality in one case, violence in
the other. Materials in these sessions range widely from pornographic
ukiyoe to over-the-top violent Yakuza films. I will also describe and
speculate about students’ responses to such materials.

I propose that the analysis of popular cultural materials in the classroom
– if done well – can go a long way in accomplishing a number of important
teaching goals: Such materials allow me to “pick up” the students where
they are most “at home,” namely in current-day popular culture, much of
which in California is Japanese. Such materials also help to irritate
students’ sensibilities and thus allow me to more effectively convey the
specific cultural conditions of Japanese (and their own) beliefs and
attitudes. In addition, they allow me to fully exploit the potential of
such materials for the purposes of entertainment and humor (After all, some
representations of both sex and violence, in Japan at least, are supposed
to be funny!).

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. She is mostly concerned with the
history and ethnography of modern Japanese culture and its relations to the
rest of the world. Her current book project examines the various relations
between childhood and militarism in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Frühstück is the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social
Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and
Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007). Both monographs were
translated into Japanese.


Trying Obscene Manga in the Courtroom and Classroom:

Ethical and legal issues in teaching Japanese popular culture to
undergraduate students

Kirsten Cather

In 2002, a half-century after the first of a series of sensational,
high-profile obscenity trials of literature, film, and photography in Japan
and after a lull of almost twenty years, a new medium became the target of
government prosecution: manga. As some feared and others hoped, the
publisher of the adult erotic manga Honey Room was convicted in a verdict
that was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2007. Both inside and outside
the courtroom, lawyers, witnesses, judges, and a wide array of commentators
from legal and cultural spheres offered their competing arguments about the
appropriateness (or lack thereof) of the manga. This unprecedented trial
paved the way for the increased regulation of pop culture media, including
a subsequent conviction of another ero-manga publisher by the lower courts
in the fall of 2013. What can we learn by studying such judicial
proceedings? They suggest the high stakes of policing Japan’s pop cultural
sphere for authorities today and offer a window into Japan’s contemporary
legal and cultural standards of censorship. Might these trials also help us
navigate the potentially murky ethical and legal terrain of handling these
“obscene” materials in our lives as researchers, teachers, students, or
readers? By dissecting the rationale behind the externally-imposed
standards of a censorship regime, we can probe our own deeply held, yet
oft-unexamined standards about what we feel is acceptable to create, teach,
learn, and consume and what we designate as beyond the pale. In other
words, the solution may be to “try” an obscene manga in the classroom that
has been tried in the courtroom.

Kirsten Cather is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian
“Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Her interests include Japanese
literature and film; censorship; fictional and non-fictional
representations of suicide; literary and filmic adaptations. She is author
of The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, University of Hawaii Press
(2o12).


Is There Room for Lolicon in Cool Japan?

Patrick Galbraith

This paper considers possible limitations in Japan Studies through the case
of lolicon, or desire for girl characters from manga and anime. Looking
back at the so-called “lolicon boom” in Japan in the early 1980s, it is
apparent that one cannot discuss otaku, or manga and anime fandom, without
addressing lolicon in some way. Indeed, lolicon has been the subject of
academic inquiry for over two decades in Japan. Despite this, the study of
lolicon has been severely retarded in the United States by its conflation
with “virtual child pornography.” Conservative backlash leads to the
suspension of lolicon manga localization; private individuals face
potential jail time for importing it. Further, even critical writing on
lolicon is stifled because of the fear of inciting a “moral firestorm.”
This inability to discuss lolicon, or posses or show images of the works so
categorized, leads to serious misperceptions about manga, history and fan
culture in Japan. Academic inquiry, which should rise above the concerns of
popularity, is similarly limited. Much of the funding for the study of
Japan comes from the Japanese government, whichis still deeply invested in
the Cool Japan project and wary of topics such as lolicon. Further,
relevant materials are not archived in the Diet Library, and private
collectors risk imprisonment. The paper asks if there is room in Cool Japan
for lolicon, or, to put it another way, is there room in the study of
popular culture for unpopular topics? What are the ethical implications of
such a study?

Patrick W. Galbraith received his first Ph.D. in Information Studies from
the University of Tokyo, and is currently pursuing a second Ph.D. in
Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of The Otaku
Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan (Kodansha
International, 2009), Tokyo Realtime: Akihabara (White Rabbit Press, 2010),
Otaku Spaces (Chin Music Press, 2012) and The Moe Manifesto: An Insider’s
Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime and Gaming (Tuttle, forthcoming), and
the co-editor of Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture (Palgrave,
2012). <patrick.galbraith at duke.edu>
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