The Global Context of Japanese Contemporary Popular Culture and Aesthetics
Organizer: Dong-Yeon Koh, The Korea National University of Arts
Chair: Dong-Yeon Koh, The Korea National University of Arts
Scholars of
postwar Japanese culture often emphasize the historical memory of the
atomic bomb, the subsequent experience of demilitarization, the strong
American presence, and its economic and political intervention in Japan
as elements of a framework to explain the current development "cute"
aesthetics in Japanese manga and animation. This panel explores the
more complicated picture of Japanese people's self-image as passive,
infantilized "victims" and their historical memories of the Second
World War, by inviting scholarly efforts to situate the recent
development of Japanese contemporary art and popular culture in diverse
historical and social frameworks. Important topics include: the role of
otaku culture in Japanese art, especially in relation to highly
sexualized images of pubescent boys and girls, as well as uncritical
technophilia; Japanese people's efforts to come to terms with their own
economic and cultural powers during the postwar years; and the
relationship between Japanese and American culture and history as
viewed in the recent development of the Japanese avant-garde and
Japanese manga and animation. The panel includes papers from art
history, anthropology, sociology, and history that might offer a better
understanding of the distinctive Japanese experience and its subsequent
impact on the development of Japanese art and culture during the
postwar years.
1) Shige (CJ) Suzuki, University of Colorado, Boulder
Who Is Responsible for the War?: Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen and the Construction of the War Memory
Several scholars point out that Japanese popular cultural texts (anime, manga,
film, and TV drama) about the wartime experience emphatically depict
the Japanese from the perspective of the “victim.” For instance,
Takahata Isao’s anime film Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
fictionally depicts the tragedy of the two orphans who has suffered
from the US air raids in the last phase of the WWII and their struggle
to survive the hardships after the war. While reflecting the social and
historical reality of the period, the film also constitutes an
imaginary position of the Japanese only as the victims, which
ideologically brings about the collective amnesia about Japan as a
perpetrator of the war. Nakazawa Keiji’s long-seller manga series, Barefoot Gen, also narrates the same historical past through a viewpoint of a six-year-old boy. Yet, Nakazawa’s manga, based on his own experience as a
hibakusha, creates distinctively different ways of representing the wartime/postwar experiences from Takahata’s film. In this manga,
Nakazawa Keiji avoids the narcissistic sentimentalism and addresses the
intricate causes for the violence conducted by the Japanese on both
Japanese and other Asian people. It also resists and even criticizes
the ideology of victimhood that has lingered in the postwar Japan. In
my paper, I would like to examine how Barefoot Gen examines and
represents the nation’s past in terms of its aesthetics and politics
and its ability to articulate the accountability of the citizens in the
postwar period.
2) Artur Lozano Mendez, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Holier-than-Cute Techno-Orientalist Discourse
This
contribution builds on techno-orientalism, a discourse defined by
Morley and Robins (1995). Instances of techno-orientalism from the
nineties onward paradoxically present Japan as the archetype of Western
postmodernism--the accent on mass consumption culture and cuteness (kawaisa).
Techno-orientalism was essential in spreading an image of a
hyper-technified, dehumanized and materialist Japan. It emerged at the
end of the sixties, when the international “regime of translation”
could not maintain the “schema of co-figuration” (Sakai Naoki) that
bound together exclusively the words "West - Modernity - Progress." It
posed Japan as a menace for the survival of the European/American
cultural heritages and lifestyles (70s, 80s). Such ludicrous forecasts
did not materialize and so the discourse has found another way to
disavow the stab at “pluralisation of modernity” (Alastair Bonnett)
represented by Japan. Think of the contempt and scorn distilled by
articles at Wired, news about Japanese robots (presented as
cute or eccentric, but also as an unpractical waste of money), by the
character attributed to Western otaku--everything that informs
“technologies of recognition” nowadays (Shih Shu-mei). When that image
is criticized or ridiculed (be it on moral or aesthetic grounds), what
the West is disavowing is no less than its own enhanced mirror image.
Techno-orientalism has developed like a Freudian symptom, it's
a discursive malformation that conceals a repressed conflict: the
grudge that the citizens from Western countries hold against their own
social model, and the projection
of its most displeasing features to other societies.
3) Dong-Yeon Koh, The Korea National University of Arts, Seoul
Murakami’s “Little Boy” Syndrome: A Victim or Aggressor in Contemporary Japanese and American Art
This paper
examines the ambiguous nature of Murakami’s criticism toward the
postwar Japanese condition—as the artist most effectively captured in
his phrase “A Little Boy,” which was also the title of his curated
exhibition at the Japan Society of New York in 2005. As Murakami wrote
in his introduction to the catalogue, demilitarized Japan after the
Second World War underwent a collective sense of helplessness, and the
metaphor of a little boy is intended to describe Japan’s supposedly
unavoidable reliance on its big brother, America. The name “Little
Boy,” in fact, originates in the code name used by the American
military for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The
proliferation of “cuteness” in Japanese contemporary art, which draws
upon youth culture, especially otaka culture, evinces a common urge
among the postwar generation in Japan to escape from their horrible
memories and sense of powerlessness. Murakami’s rhetorical analysis of
Japan’s self-image seems, however, contradictory, given his extremely
aggressive business tactics, which can find no counterpart in the
Western art world—not even in the efforts of Murakami’s predecessor,
Andy Warhol. Like <My Lonesome Cowboy> (1998), whose hyper
sexuality defies its pubescent and immature appearance, his art,
theory, and art marketing indicate the paradoxical nature of his theory
of impotence. By focusing on his manifesto and writings published on
the occasion of his 2005 exhibition and his style of managing Kaikai
Kiki Ltd., this paper delves into the dual nature of Murakami’s
interpretation of postwar Japanese art and culture, particularly in
relation to those of America.
4) Adrian Favell, Aarhus University (also UCLA www.soc.ucla.edu/faculty/
After Murakami: Cosmopolitanism, creativity and the changing international experiences of young Japanese artists in the post-Bubble period
The
international success of Takashi Murakami, and his curated touring
shows “Superflat”, “Tokyo Girls Bravo” and “Little Boy”, has created a
dominant frame for the presentation and reception of Japanese
contemporary art: one that emphasises the cross-over of pop culture and
pop art, an aesthetics of cuteness, and Japanese art as a
nationally-specific reflection of the country’s post-war complexes and
social problems. In many ways, while seducing the West with a very
commercial neo-japonisme, it is a frame that distorts and
misrepresents most contemporary art from Japan since the economic
“bubble” of the 80s and early 90s. My paper thus presents the new
generation of Japanese artists, focusing in particular on artists
featured in a group show presented during the Yokohama Triennale of
2008, called The Echo <www.the-echo.jp>.
These emerging artists, all around 30, incorporate post-national
themes, attitudes and experiences in their work, as a result of very
contrasting international experiences to Murakami’s 40something
“bubble” generation. They reject the passive-aggressive
anti-orientalist strategies adopted by the previous generation, which
includes Murakami and artists such as Yoshitomo Nara, Mariko Mori,
Makoto Aida, and Yukinori Yanagi, ideas rooted in post-war obsessions
from childhood, an inferiority complex about the US and the West,
declining and marginal “otaku” sub-cultures, and the experience of the
80s/90s economic boom years. Rather, the younger generation, including
fast-rising artists such as Kohei Nawa, Kengo Kito, Kei Takemura, and
Taro Izumi are producing a very different art that reflects a sense of
Japan’s changing role in Asia and the world, environmental concerns,
new technologies, and new forms of youth and street culture.
Discussant: Marie Thorsten, Doshisha University, Kyoto