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DOI: 10.1177/1206331210367579
2010 13: 285 originally published online 28 April 2010Space and Culture
Brian Morris
Un/Wrapping Shibuya: Place, Media, and Punctualization
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DOI: 10.1177/1206331210367579
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Un/Wrapping Shibuya:
Place, Media, and
Punctualization
Brian Morris1
Abstract
This article discusses cultural studies approaches to the role of media and communication
technologies in the constitution of place. The discussion emerges out of the author’s ongoing
study of the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Known for its trendsetting youth cultures and as a site of
conspicuous consumption,Shibuya is also marked by an unusually intense proliferation of screen
technologies, from the large scale (such as television screens embedded in building structures)
to the miniature (individual mobile telephone screens). An examination of the articulation of
these ubiquitous media technologies with a range of human and institutional actors in Shibuya
provides broader insights into contemporary spatial practices and formations. It is argued that
a combination of Law’s notion of “punctualization,” drawn from actor-network theory, and
Hendy’s social anthropological concept of “un/wrapping” provides a generative framework for
conceptualizing and describing the processual production and experience of Shibuya’s mediated
place identity.
Keywords
cultural studies and place, Shibuya, wrapping and unwrapping, punctualization, urban cultures,
ubiquitous media
Introduction
Cities are increasingly marked by an intensified integration of media and communication technologies
within urban space, which sets up theoretical and practical challenges for cultural and
media studies researchers concerned with adequately rendering and analyzing contemporary
culture in place. This article argues that cultural and media studies researchers might productively
use the insights of actor-network approaches that so far have been more assiduously employed in
cognate fields such as cultural geography to describe and analyze these increasingly pervasive
types of urban environments.1
First and foremost, an actor-network theory approach can provide
a useful antidote to overly Heideggerian-influenced accounts of place, which are framed primarily
through connotations of dwelling and fixity. Place, as Kevin Hetherington (1997) has argued,
might be more usefully conceptualized as a combination of what he terms mobile effects, a
1
RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Brian Morris, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University (City), GPO Box 2476V,
Melbourne,Victoria 3001, Australia
Email: brian.morris@rmit.edu.au
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“non-representation that is mobilized through the placing of things in complex relation to one
another and the agency/power effects that are performed by those arrangements” (p. 187). Equally
important within such an approach is a definition of “things” (or social actors) that includes media
and other technologies, as well as individuals, texts, and institutions, each with different potentialities
and means of transforming and re-presenting urban space and time and its power geometries
(Massey & Thrift, 2003). Such an understanding of place framed in these terms might also be
useful in avoiding some of the unhelpful binary impulses implied in Augé’s (1995) influential
work on place, which analytically separates anthropological place (characterized as the local,
familiar, organic, and occupied) from supermodern “nonplaces” (marked by transit, circulation,
and concentrated textual mediation).
Actor-network theory supplies a helpful term, punctualization, to describe the representational
effect by which a particular placement of things becomes consolidated under the sign of a communicable
place identity. Punctualization refers to the mechanism by which agglomerations of
actors, relations, institutions, and objects come to be concealed from view, to provide the appearance
of unity and readability (Law, 1992). In defining the term, Michael Law cites the useful
example of a television set, which most of the time is
a single and coherent object with relatively few apparent parts. On the other hand when it
breaks down, for that same user—and still more for the repair person—it rapidly turns into
a network of electronic components and human interventions. (1992, p. 4)
Urban places might usefully be conceptualized in a similar manner. Place identities such as
“New York,” “Beijing,” or “Shinjuku” all too often rhetorically operate, in a range of narratives
from news stories to academic analyses, as taken-for-granted, unified entities that are the product
of historical sedimentations of versions of themselves. They are often deployed as if they were
coherent actors rather than heterogeneous assemblages of visible and invisible actor networks whose
relations need to be repeatedly performed in order to produce the effect of place.Amode of analysis
that elaborates the process of punctualization offers a nuanced form of place description in which
the organic continuities and contingent interventions of various actors might be attended to.
Un/Wrapping Shibuya
In July 2005, I moved from Melbourne to Tokyo, where I lived for 7 months during a period of
research leave. One urban site I found myself drawn to time and again was the Shibuya area, one
of the more (in)famous of Tokyo’s various urban nodes (Figure 1). That fame, particularly at the
level of global cinematic representations,2
is largely due to the area’s signature image of its spectacular
scramble crossing (which are actually a number of intersecting pedestrian crossings used
simultaneously) and the mega-sized television screens that front the buildings surrounding it.
Shibuya is also famous for its crowds of trendsetting, keitai (mobile telephone)-toting youth, as
well as fashion-conscious youth subcultures, who have in various highly visible ways claimed
the area as their home over the past 30 or more years.
Shibuya is located in the southwest pocket of central city Tokyo on the traditionally affluent
western high ground, the yamanote of Edo times. Although Tokyo lacks a “downtown” in the
western sense, it does contain within itself a number of extraordinarily dense and thriving satellite
feeder “cities” such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro, many of which are located on the central
JR (Japan Rail) Yamanote loop line. These places function as important sites for a range of urban
activities, particularly shopping, eating and drinking, and entertainment. For a huge number of
Tokyo’s sizeable population they are also a crucial nodal point connecting the spaces of work,
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Figure 1. Shibuya—aerial view and Centre Gai
Source: Author.
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leisure, and home; as such they are sites of rapid in- and out-flows of bodies of commuters and
visitors (Shibuya is ranked second after Shinjuku as the busiest commuter rail station in the world).
The topography of Shibuya is shaped by a basin that descends from the western and also
northern higher ground of Harajuku andYoyogi park. More broadly, the area is physically defined
by a number of human constructed material and symbolic boundaries. For instance, running
eastwest to the south of the station is the formidable “brick wall” of the elevated metropolitan
expressway, whereas the northern boundary of Shibuya is partly defined by the massive NHK
television broadcasting complex. The research conducted in association with this article focuses
primarily on the area radiating out to the north and west of the JR Yamanote line stop from the
conjoined complex of the busy Shibuya railway stations. Although Shibuya-ku, one of the
23 wards that make up central Tokyo, covers a broader area (and includes other well-known and
culturally differentiated urban areas such as Harajuku), the symbolic and popular understanding
of “Shibuya,” as manifest in this tourist map (see Figure 2), is focused on this dense concentration
of consumption-based, private and public activities radiating out from the area’s transportation
core. The spatial organization of Shibuya generally matches the standardized urban morphology
found in a range of similar Japanese city districts. This consists of a central railway station acting
as a hub to clusters of retail areas, amusement quarters, business office blocks, a love hotel area,
and then a peripheral belt of residential apartment housing. In many cases the large corporations
owning and running the railway lines have also developed major retail c­omplexes that are physically
part of the station complex, often with a flagship department store as a hub. Shibuya is an
exemplary instance of this specific Japanese capitalist urban form. The area has long been associated
with the Tokyu Corporation (Seidensticker, 1991), which began as a real estate developer in
1918 (as Den-en Toshi Co.). Over time Tokyu has expanded its interests to include not just rail
lines but also what it refers to in its publicity material as the “Urban Life Support Business”
(Tokyu, n.d.), an umbrella term covering a massive assortment of department stores, travel agencies,
grocery stores, hotels, airline investment, golf businesses, and so on. Although Shibuya is
overwhelmingly known for the high-end consumption activities it offers—leading Tokyo department
stores (such as the Tokyu-owned “109” (Ichimarukyu), up-market designer outlets, boutique
stores (in the compact “Spain-zaka” lane), restaurants and bars, music shops, and clubs—it also
has other associations and functions as a place. For example, although it does not have an industrial
history, Shibuya has more recently become known as a center of postindustrial production through
being home to the second largest concentration of Web and multimedia businesses in Tokyo (Arai
et al., 2004; Large, 2000) and is known colloquially as “Bit valley” (a play on the meaning of
Shibuya’s name, “bitter valley”). Notwithstanding these varied urban functions and associations,
Shibuya is perhaps most usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of the Japanese
historical urban form of the sakariba, literally a “place where many people come together” (but
more specifically referring to an uplifting place of crowds and excitement; Linhardt, 1998;Yoshimi,
2001). Sakariba can be understood as sites where older ritual forms of festivity and commercial
activity have been recast in a modern consumerist guise.
In considering how to write about Shibuya, it is useful to briefly note the broader character of
extant academic literature on Tokyo as a whole. On the one hand, the size of Tokyo and its continuing
global economic importance—despite the recession that followed on from the 1980s
bubble economy—has guaranteed it an important place within the big picture literature on world
cities and globalization (e.g., Sassen, 2001). At the same time, a distinct strain of writing has also
provided a contrasting and complimentary micro-analysis of urban experience in Tokyo.Anumber
of writers, for instance, have provided richly detailed descriptions of the city (e.g., Cybriwsky,
1998; Richie, 1999) that analyze the cultural specificities of the lived, daily experiences it offers.
Within scholarship attuned to this more intimate perspective, three broad approaches can be
identified as being germane to my study. The first is from Japanese cultural studies scholars
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interested in the cultural transformation of areas such as Shibuya and its relation to the historical
ebb and flow of similar, often competing, areas of entertainment and consumption such as Shinjuku
and Ginza (see, e.g., Yoshimi, 2001). The second body of work has been concerned with the
ongoing “rediscovery” and promotion of an “authentic” traditional past within the present urban
environment. This has rediscovered older Edo within contemporary Tokyo—particular through
a resurgence in official and popular interest in shitamachi (or “low city”) culture, associated with
areas such asAsakusa, and which is usually set in opposition to the consumer good life of  Yamanote
Figure 2. Detail from free tourist map of Shibuya
Source: Tokyo Convention Visitors Bureau, www.tcvb.or.jp.
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(“high city”) areas such as Shibuya (for critical accounts, see Jinnai, 1995; Waley, 2006). Third,
there are some quite diverse recent studies that gesture toward a promising understanding of  Tokyo
places as being constituted by diverse networks and spatially dispersed arrays of actors. Examples
of these range from Bestor’s (2004) rich ethnographic account of Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish
market to a number of recent studies of Tokyo-based mobile technology users (Ito, Okabe, &
Matsuda, 2005; Konomi & Sezaki, 2010). These latter studies are particularly valuable in directing
attention to analyses of the geographically dispersed time-space operations that actor networks
comprised of users and communication technologies bring to bear on places.
My research on Shibuya has benefited from these three strands of critical work on Tokyo in
terms of their focus on the particularities of Japanese urbanity, the role of multiple social actors
in shaping place, and the relationship between the historical and newly emergent forms of cultural
technologies that organize urban experience. However, none of the aforementioned studies has
focused on the growing role of the differently scaled and differently “capable” (in terms of operations
on space and time) media technologies that shape Tokyo’s distinct urbanscapes as well as
inhabitants’ experiences of it. A symptomatic instance of this increasingly familiar and global
urban scenario can be experienced in the plaza-like area outside of the Shibuya railway station
complex (ekimae) where thumbing through the messages on your mobile, while standing next to
the area’s intimate and nationally famous human-scaled statue of the loyal dog, Hachikō, you are
also often strongly aware of being physically enveloped by the multiple cinema screen–scale
images dancing across the surrounding canyon of building surfaces. This experience is sensorily
amplified by noisy soundtracks that are themselves frequently challenged by the ear-splitting
sound systems of a number of vehicles temporarily passing through that range from the giant
mobile light boxes on large truck rigs advertising J-pop stars and their latest release to the black
armored sound trucks of various right wing groups emitting nationalist diatribes.
How, then, might we more closely describe that process by which the identity of “Shibuya”
becomes reified as a punctualization effect available for mobilization by different actors? My argument
here is that Joy Hendry’s Wrapping Culture (1993) provides a useful framework for analytically
describing the ways in which place identity and its experience is constituted via various
complex layers of urban form and technology and cultural practices, both historical and emergent.
Whereas Hendry begins her book with an examination of the significance of present wrapping and
presentation in Japanese culture, her primary aim is to mobilize the trope of wrapping/unwrapping
as a frame for analyzing broader relations between language, bodies, spaces, and temporalities in
Japan (also see Ben-Ari, Moeran, & Valentine, 1990). The value of her work for analyzing urban
culture has two crucial dimensions. First, her concept of unwrapping is not underwritten by
an assumption that Japanese culture can simply be read off the surface of the object examined, nor
does she seem to assume that her analysis is accessing some “real” Japan encrusted beneath the
sedimented layers of modernity. Instead, like the notion of punctualization, Hendry puts forward
the persuasive argument that a study of wrapping and unwrapping helps disentangle us from a
problematic focus on the search for an underlying essence in our object of study by focusing instead
on the different modes of social interaction, ritual, and everyday experience that contribute to an
imagined (or, indeed, represented) wholeness. As she notes,
[There is a] problem in our Western propensity to want always to be unwrapping, deconstructing,
seeing the objects at the centre of things. Bognar, too, comments about Japanese
cities that “if we try to lift the veils wrapping them in endlessly juxtaposed layers, surprisingly
. . . [they] become ‘empty’” (1985:67). Undoubtedly, what we need to do, is to learn
to value the wrapping, as well as the wrapped, and seek the meaning they together convey.
(Hendry, 1993, p. 109)
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Second, her work has a general applicability to cultural practices beyond those found in Japan:
although her empirical materials may be Japanese she is not arguing that her analytic is identifying
some essential Japanese trait: un/wrapping can usefully describe social processes as they occur
in other cultures. More broadly, the concept of un/wrapping provides a means of elaborating the
plasticity of contemporary urban environments while still accounting for the persistence and
historical transformation of sedimented meanings and related cultural practices.
This analytical frame also directs us toward an understanding of place that includes layers of
historical and present day meanings as well as practices and modes of institutional organization.
Furthermore, it highlights the materiality of the practices of un/wrapping used in the city itself—
from the screen-clad buildings to the complex style codes performed by the various youth subcultures
inhabiting its streets. Rather than assuming or seeking an “authentic” explanation of a
Shibuya experience beneath these layers—behind the “façade” of modernity—such an approach
posits that these various surfaces and screens are active participants in the urban experience of
this area. Un/wrapping, drawing on Hendry’s anthropological concerns, is about producing a thick
description of urban place that involves accounting for the relationships that bind visible and
spectacular technologies with hidden networks. Un/wrapping assists in operationalizing the theoretical
concept of punctualization by making visible the latter’s effect, that is, the production of
a specific place, “Shibuya.”
As a means of narrativizing recent un/wrappings of Shibuya, the following sections are focused
around three media technologies, namely, large screen advertising, keitai technologies, and print
media, central to its punctualization.
Advertising and Big Screen Architecture
To walk around Shibuya as a foreign visitor is to encounter an urbanscape at once familiar and
unfamiliar. Globally branded cafes, fast food businesses, and retail stores such as Starbucks and
HMV appear with as much frequency as the ubiquitous depato or department store chains that
are a cornerstone of the modern, Japanese urban consumer economy. Other elements of the urban
fabric and its spatial organization more obviously mark out the area’s “Japanese-ness”: the omote
(front) of wider avenues and ura (back) of walking scale laneways; a central pedestrian-scaled
shopping street (gai); a large love hotel district; the semipermanent, blue tarpaulin-covered dwellings
of the “homeless” in public Miyashita park; pachinko parlors; the presence of shrines; and so on.
What is perhaps most remarkable about this Japanese urban space at a visual level is the sheer
density and variety of textual material, usually commercially oriented, inscribed on all available
surfaces (Figure 3).
Donald Richie has characterized the Tokyo street in terms of its forms of promiscuous display:
“[h]oardings bellow, flags and banners yell, neon points and kanji grabs” (1999, p. 37). Even in
Edo times, the center street (gai) was marked as a place of display by the kishi and bana (doorway
banners) of various merchants. This tradition continues in contemporary Tokyo, proposes Richie,
whether it be in the form of “facade-high neon or a mile-long laser” or the piles of silicon chips
out on the “sidewalk—like exotic nuts—inAkihabara” (p. 54). Richie’s claims here to the uniqueness
of the Japanese city street may seem tenuous at one level if we think of the semiotic richness
of any modern city, until, perhaps, you also consider the extended verticality of “the street” in
places such as Shibuya. Here the businesses that in many Western cities would usually be confined
to the ground level or first floor at most (thus working to organize the gaze and spatial perception
of the passerby in a specific way) are instead densely spread up through five or more stories as
well as often extending underground. The spatial reach of the Japanese city street expands downwards
and upwards to include those shops, eating places, bars, and businesses located anywhere
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within this vertical range. This has crucial consequences for advertising signage, which colonizes
every available space in order to maximize the chances of customers finding or choosing a particular
establishment to patronize.
Although numerous Tokyo city spaces are marked by this dense level of advertising—Shinjuku’s
well-known neon iconography being a case in point—Shibuya, as Shunya Yoshimi (2001) has
argued, has a special relationship to the advertising industry. Shibuya effectively became known
as a fashionable place in the 1970s via institutional advertising strategies promoting its vanguard
position in terms of trendy consumption.Although Shibuya had been an important railway transport
junction since the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, it did not emerge as a major urban gathering
place, or sakariba, until the 1970s,3
when it started to be seen as one of the most stylish places in
Tokyo, especially for youth (Yoshimi, 2001). Following on from major redevelopments in the area
for the 1968 Olympics, the two rival department store complexes that commercially dominate
Shibuya, Tokyu and Seibu/Parco, attempted to enhance the area’s general image “by turning its
streets and architectural spaces into a fashionable consumer stage, showcased in architectural
design, posters, television commercials, and magazines,” a strategy that was subsequently emulated
in other areas of Tokyo and Japan (Wakabayashi, 2005, p. 305).
From the mid-1990s an important shift occurred with the growing incorporation of advertising
into the actual physical form of Shibuya. That is, the institutional inscription of a specific image
of Shibuya in the popular media became supplemented by another kind of material inscription
witnessed in the increasing prominence of advertising technologies in the street, with large display
screens integrated into the architectural skin of buildings, such as the Tokyu-owned Q-Front,
Figure 3. Hachiko¯ crossing
Source: Author.
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Morris	 293
which faces on to Hachikō’s and the ekimae. Through the interventions of these advertising institutions
and technologies, the city becomes an “information-archive-space” (Wakabayashi, 2005,
p. 306) marked by the symbolic and physical saturation of the built environment with advertising
artifacts. As Krstic (1997) observes, these screens differ from billboards in terms of their transformation
of the existing sense of “dimensional containment” of urban space, specifically through
their ability to embody time.
These large screens are now central to the experience of Shibuya because of their proximity
to the railway station and their materiality produces a monumental media-architecture threshold
that dwarves and supplants the existing traditional entrance arch marking the start of Centre Gai.
Partly the screens function to affectively amplify a sense of excitement about the urban territory
being entered and the sense of expectation that might accompany entry into the labyrinthine spaces
of Shibuya in which one can easily become lost—a practice that itself might constitute a playful
temporary unwrapping of the subjectivity of the visitor.4
Although the screens constantly attempt
at one level to communicate advertising and other promotional information to the passerby, they
just as often appear to be ignored or registered with a distracted level of interest. The scale and
prominence of the screens does enable a degree of authority and insistence in their address—they
are certainly at the more visible and foregrounded end of a continuum of what Anna McCarthy
(2001) refers to as an increasingly pervasive phenomenon of “ambient television.” Although
not always successful in gaining the attention of distracted passerby, the screens do nevertheless
interpellate the disparate crowds waiting at the crossing as a potential collective (at the
very least they are a fundamental part of being in Shibuya as a distinct and nationally known
urban place).
While these display screens are integral to Shibuya’s urban distinctive character they paradoxically
also function as a technology that unwraps that place by insistently pumping out images of
multiple other places within Japan, from around the globe, and from the fantasy worlds of advertising.
These screens can be understood as a key Shibuya “actor” whose role is to produce a
mediated spatiality, what Margaret Morse (1998) has identified in terms of increasingly prevalent
postmodern “everyday” environments. As she argues, “[t]he late twentieth century has witnessed
the growing dominance of a differently constituted kind of space, a nonspace of both experience
and representation, an elsewhere which inhabits the everyday.”Awalk through Hachikō Crossing—
jostled by dense crowds and surrounded by large screen advertising—provokes an experience of
distraction in which the self drifts between a here of Shibuya and a series of rapidly changing
virtual elsewheres.5
These screens are technologies that function to simulate Shibuya as always
“on,” as a special place characterized by excitement and possibility whether it be for young people,
tourists, or those passing through between work and home. Yet even these screens cannot completely
and consistently maintain the fiction of such a unified imagining of Shibuya for other
temporalities and actors, such as the train system with its rhythms of commuting times and the
presence of particular social groups at different times of the day, effectively modulates the texture
of Shibuya.At other times, such as in the early morning otherwise invisible actors become momentarily
visible; for instance, teams of service workers, scavenging crows, and piles of rubbish
dominate the otherwise deserted Centre Gai and alert us to the mundane and micro-level activities
and cycles of repair and maintenance that are just as intrinsic to the sustained fiction of this place.
Intimate Urban Place
Although television-building screens present a spectacular example of the wrapping and unwrapping
of Shibuya, more small-scale and everyday media technologies are equally crucial to its
experience as a particular place. One immediate instance of these technologies at work can be
observed in the vicinity of Hachikō’s statue (Figure 4), Shibuya’s most iconic landmark and central
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to its experiential geography. The popular myth surrounding this dog tells how during the Taisho
era of the 1920s he loyally waited at the station for his master to return. Even when his master
had died the dog reputedly continued to wait there for 11 years after. In terms of scale the Hachikō
statue is a truly incidental feature in the context of the vast crowds and giant building-screens that
overshadow Shibuya’s scramble crossing.6
Despite its comparatively modest size, Hachikō’s
statue continues to function as a handy meeting point for those getting together in Shibuya, forming
a pivotal point of stillness in an area marked by perpetual flows. In his seminal urban planning
work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch (1960) characterized monuments such as this as unique
nodes in city space—vital landmarks that enabled the cognitive mapping of urban space by inhabitants.
Henri Lefebvre (1991) argued for the function of such monuments as sites of “intensity”
in urban space, points of capture for certain relations of power and their associated social meanings.
Hachikō became a national celebrity in the 1932 when Tokyo newspapers publicized his
story and he arguably became a propaganda vehicle for nationalist values of loyalty in relation to
the Japanese war with China at the time. Yet that original inscription of meaning has undergone
a series of transformations from ideological tool to popular wayfaring marker. Whether the focused
intensity referred to by Lefebvre is registered or “practiced” by the passerby is less certain. To sit
by Hachikō’s statue is to witness a range of urban practices that include meetings, tourist pilgrimages,
and crowd watching: activities that transform an old mythic (national) narrative into a range
of more intimate and everyday experiences. It is a moment when the imaginary, personalized, and
the concrete fuse together.
Figure 4. Hachiko¯
Source: Author.
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Morris	 295
The contemporary everyday practices that wrap themselves around this landmark are increasingly
mediated by the small screen of mobile telephone (keitai) technology (cf. Rheingold, 2002).
Rather than simply displacing the use of known landmarks such as Hachikō as meeting places,
the keitai is most frequently used, as Ito and Okabe (2005) note from their ethnographic studies,
to micro-coordinate rendezvous at mutually familiar urban places: a series of to-ing and fro-ing
text messages typically presages the actual meeting. A landmark such as Hachikō’s statue is no
longer a unitary urban marker as characterized by Lynch, but one node in what Ito and Okabe
describe as a “technosocial” situation; a framing that is site specific but that also incorporates
other places and different social networks via an electronic mode of connectivity. Such technologies
would appear to electronically augment our experiences of urban space. More vitally, these
technologies are agents in the production of a new conceptual form, “a hybrid space . . . created
by the merging of borders between physical and digital spaces, because of the use of mobile
technologies as social devices” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 265). As de Souza e Silva goes on to
observe, although the initial concept of cyberspace applied in relation to the Internet tended to
imply a disconnection of physical and digital spaces, the mobile phone challenges our thinking
on this matter through its “embed[ding] of the Internet in public spaces” (p. 273).7
Its ontological
consequences are significant and are worth distinguishing from the aforementioned split between
a “here” and virtual “there” engendered by the giant television screens. The mobile telephone
would appear to go much further in becoming the visible locus of a distinctive “mixed reality.”
As Galloway (2004) notes, in a related discussion of the rise of ubiquitous computing in everyday
city life, such a mixed reality needs to be rethought “as shifting intensities or flows of the virtual
and the actual, rather than as points on a continuum between the virtual and the real” (p. 402).
At another level of intimacy and very pragmatic materiality, the keitai has been deployed as a
much more practical kind of prop to deal with the here and now consequences of the proximity
of strangers. One feature of Japanese urban life is a wide range of commercial solicitations at the
street level. These range from the “tissue kubari” (individuals employed to hand out packets of
tissues wrapped in advertising), to restaurant and karaoke workers sent outside to drum up business,
to the “talent scouts” who lurk at busy intersections or street corners and try to persuade
young women to take up work in Japanese hostess bars or other areas of the sex industry (and
who are more prevalent in areas of the city popular with youth). Often the tactics of the usually
male talent scouts are spatially aggressive in that they will crowd in on their “target,” or even step
directly into her path, all the time engaging in a low-key but persistent and obvious nagging.
Simulated mobile telephone conversations become a way for those harassed to deflect unwanted
attention or, equally, as I witnessed recently, a tactic by which a scout might “legitimize” his
presence in an area (in this case the talent scout—in-between approaching young women walking
by—faked a telephone call for about 4 hours at the same street intersection).
Print Media Panic, Youth Actor Networks, Fashion, and Technology
Upstairs in the McDonalds in Shibuya’s Centre Gai (see Figure 1), a meeting takes place.Approximately
20 “gals” (or gyaru), standing out due to their intensely tanned faces and exaggerated
makeup, have commandeered a number of adjacent tables and are in the midst of what appears
to be a smoothly run committee meeting. These gyaru are the genealogical descendants (often a
post-School incarnation) of the kogal/ kogyaru, the iconic schoolgirl figure in short skirted uniform
with puffy white socks or legwarmers around her ankles that has now become a globally recognizable
Japanese stereotype (Figure 5). One key activity of these “Gal circles” (gyaru-sa) is to organize
different outings and events ranging from traditional cherry blossom viewings to dance parties
featuring “Para Para” dancing choreographed to trance and Eurobeat tracks (with the gyaru buying
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the music materials and instructional dance move DVDs at the nearby giant HMV and Tower
Record stores). The scene in McDonalds is one glimpse of an extensive youth-based network that
although highly visible at this moment in this particular place is largely enabled and active via
otherwise invisible networks, in this case “Internet message boards only accessible via cell phone”
(Macias, 2006, p. 3).
Shibuya has been the locus of an ongoing anxiety about groups of youths such as these and
their “place” in the Japanese city. Perhaps the most intense of media debates/moral panics in the
last decade has revolved around the phenomenon euphemistically referred to as enjo kousai
(compensated dating) in which young women (sometimes schoolgirls) are paid by typically older
men to engage in activities ranging from Karaoke singing through to sex. The phenomenon is
popularly understood as being driven by the consumer desires of luxury brand–hungry kogyaru,
young women mainly distinguished by their bleached hair, short miniskirts (often part of school
uniforms) with loose socks, their tactical use of pager technology then and keitai now, and their
practice of taking lots of puri-kura (sticker photos from a booth; see Matsuda, 2005). At the level
Figure 5. Kogal as mediatized urban identity
Source: Author.
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of the body and fashion it might be argued that these kogyaru practice their own un/wrapping of
the standardized school uniform through recodings of its original, decorous meanings.8
The kogyaru
combination of short skirts and oversized baggy white socks/leggings also clearly participates
within a broader sexualization of young women prevalent in a number of Japanese popular cultural
forms (Figure 6).Although the exaggerated makeup and outfits of the kogyaru refigure the schoolgirl
image, the “uniform” can also operate as a marker of outsider status, a way of symbolically
expressing a refusal of entry into normative adulthood and to some degree throwing into question
the expectations of dominant understandings of Japanese femininity.9
Similarly, the ganguro (“black face”) subculture—one of a number of related girl-driven subcultures
traceable back to the 1960s (Kinsella, 2005), which was strongly associated with Shibuya
and its Centre Gai during the late 1990s and to a lesser extent today—became a topic of condemnation
in the self-consciously masculine press at the time (see Macias, 2007). Rather than seeing
this distinctive look as the marker of a valid subcultural style, the ganguro image (and related
incarnations such as yamamba [witches]) was generally characterized by this press as an affront
to the taste of their male readers with those sporting the style being disparaged in racially marked,
colonial forms of discourse: “Professor Kashima Explores the Heisei [1989-] Jungle in Search of
Uncharted Regions of Everyday Life 3: ‘Platform Boot Witches’No Longer the Lead in Shibuya”
(cited in Kinsella, 2005, p. 146). For a number of critics (see Black, 2009; Kinsella, 2005), this
media discussion articulated with wider anxieties concerning the intersections of national identity,
race, and femininity. Why, the print media seemed to collectively ask, did Japanese girls not want
to look Japanese? In contrast to the mainstream press, street fashion magazines mediated the
Figure 6. Billboard in Shibuya: narratives of technology mediation and power involving kogyaru
(school girls) and oyagi (fathers/older men)
Source: Author.
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relation between youth and “cool” urban locations such as Centre-Gai in Shibuya or Amerika-Mura
in Osaka in quite a different way. As Cameron (2000) has argued, these magazines juxtapose
fashion commodities and actual urban spaces in order to produce “a mode of visual consumption
which transposed from the symbolic mediated space of the ‘street’to the lived streets.”As Cameron
notes, the notion of street fashion witnesses actual places such as Centre Gai becoming a crucial
resource for youth wishing to perform and authenticate their taste dispositions. But in the process
the commodities take on a heightened prominence and agency in terms of their colonization of
the street—these fashions are not simply neutral resources deployed by human actors but instead
they “have appropriated a space in which the people who wear them have been backgrounded”
(Cameron, 2000, p.180).
More broadly, Shibuya figured prominently in a range of mainstream press panic narratives
about youth and particularly young women.As a youth-centered consumer-oriented space, Shibuya
was frequently positioned in these media discourses both as a literal location where this “problem”
was concentrated as well as a metonym for broader social anxieties about contemporary Japanese
life. Of significance here was the way in which the rise of ubiquitous technologies from pagers to
mobile phones figured in these institutional discourses of panic. For example, in the late 1990s,
widespread media attention was being given to early technology adopters such as the group of
young men and women known as jibetarians (a hybrid combination of the Japanese word jibeta
for “the ground” and the English suffix arian; see Matsuda, 2005). Closely associated with areas
such as Shibuya, jibetarians were identified by their “signature practice of squatting or sitting on
curbs or in a corner of a shopping street” (Matsuda, 2005, p. 26) and associated with inconsiderate
use of keitai in public. As Matsuda notes, it was the “bad manners” of this group that underpinned
the criticisms appearing in local media. Media coverage of this group focused on the ways in which
they broke the rules of social etiquette in terms of their uses of public space and communication
technologies: “jibertarian . . . not only sit on the street but eat and drink there” (p. 26) and “can’t
distinguish [between] public and private” (p. 26). This problem continues to be reiterated in dominant
media discourse. A television program screened in February 2008, for example, followed the
exploits of the Shibuya Centre Gai Patrol, a uniformed volunteer nonpolice group that, sometimes
accompanied by German Shepherd dogs, traverse Shibuya and harass perceived troublemakers,
which includes youth simply sitting or standing in the street.10
Dominant media discourses, in other
words, provide evidence of attempts to wrap and contain the symbolic threat of urban youth cultures
whose meanings undermine the heterogeneity of the dominant social and urban order.11
At the same
time, as the billboard pictured in Figure 5 playfully acknowledges, the power relations between
the social groups central to media discourses of Shibuya (the kogyaru and oyaji [father/older men
figures] symbolized here by Darth Vader) are complex. For as Fujimoto (2005) traces, it was the
kogyaru who were central in fashioning the now paradigmatic use of keitai as a technology actively
producing—in conjunction with its users—new urban selves and forms of social belonging.
At one level the intensity of that wider dominant social gaze on this particular group of urban
youth gestures toward a broader anxiety about the emergence of symptomatic “good” and “bad”
iterations of enterprising neoliberal subjects within a Japanese context. The dilemmas associated
with these emergent subjectivities have been most imaginatively explored in the narrative of
Harada Masato’s film, Bounce Kogals (1997), which focuses on the coming-of-age journey of
Lisa, a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sendai who has stopped in Tokyo, and the Shibuya district in
particular, on her way to New York. Robbed of her savings, Lisa is drawn into risky activities as
well as friendships with a group of entrepreneurial, keitai and stun gun–toting, local kogyaru who
are involved to different degrees in aspects of the compensated dating and sex trade. The film
charts and celebrates the efficacy of the friendships among young women in contrast to a decline
of confidence in traditional institutions such as family, while at the same time positioning these
bonding processes as being framed by commodity-driven desires and uneven power relationships
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in which Lisa and her friends attempts to fend off various talent scouts, drug dealers, dodgy clients
with unusual sexual fetishes, and an increasingly agitated organized crime (yakuza) boss whose
business territory is being cut into by the kogals. Lisa, the audience understands, has precisely
come to this part of Tokyo because of her own knowledge of its sensationalized national reputation
as not only a center of cutting edge youth culture marked by a certain kind of “girl power”
but also as simply a place where a desperate schoolgirl might make some money, in her case
through selling her used underwear and uniform at a fetish shop.
Conclusion
Ben Highmore (2005) has argued that the predominant rationale for many studies of urban cultures
in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly those conducted by urban and social planners, was a
concern with the idea of making the city legible, driven by a desire to control the heterogeneity
of the social. Such an orientation underwent a broad range of criticisms in the 20th century. Trying
to articulate a different approach for urban cultural studies today, Highmore suggests in his study
of cinema and the city that “the study of urban cultures could declare its object to be the social
anxiety caused by the city’s perceived illegibility,” with the aim of making “legible the effects
and affects of illegibility” (p. 7).
Whereas Highmore’s focus on cinema here is generative, cultural studies scholars also need
to extend their analysis beyond the repertoire of circulating city representations to consider the
suite of media and cultural technologies pertinent to the lived experience of places like Shibuya.
Such a move recognizes that new communication technologies such as mobile telephones are for
many users either usurping or radically remediating older forms such as cinema and their role in
the constitution of urban experience and place. Hendry’s notion of wrapping provides a useful
framework through which the distinctions used to classify urban communication technologies—
such as new/old, mass/personal, static/mobile—might be rethought more in terms of their relation
to increasingly coarticulated cinematic, televisual, and mobile technologies.
Un/wrapping also offers a lens through which to capture the socially and technologically mediated
nature of place and its “punctualization”—focusing on the shifting potentialities and the
processes of becoming that constitute urban experience rather than holding on to the notion of a
fixed, essential urbanity. It provides a starting point from which to examine contemporary city
places such as Shibuya in terms relevant to the concerns of cultural studies, that is, as sites of
“both cultural imaginaries and lived cultural experiences” (Healy, 2003, p. 55). Thus, Shibuya is
a space whose concrete “actuality” as place is thoroughly embedded—wrapped as it were—in
built and imagined forms and technologies, which are in turn tied to and produced by complex
networks of social actors. Here I want to gesture then toward a mode of spatial analysis that
foregrounds the layered, processual, and emergent nature of city space through focusing on the
role of media while drawing on both the notions of punctualization and un/wrapping.
The three sketches of networks of social, technological, and geographical relations in Shibuya
remind us that place as a physical location is articulated to and produced through numerous networks
of actors, both visible and invisible. To adopt the language of ANT, place itself needs to
be rethought as a shifting assemblage of actor networks that settle at and flow through any particular
set of geographical coordinates, subject to moments of punctualization and flight. Crucial
to this assemblage are ubiquitous technologies that themselves function as important actors in
shaping social space. Studying Shibuya in particular reminds us that these range in scale and
degrees of visibility from media forms insistently clamoring for collective attention (such as
advertising banners and giant televisions-cum-building); to the miniature, intimate, and barely
visible (the keitai screen); and those such as the gal circle message boards that because of mass
media attention find themselves “hiding in the light.”12
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Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of
this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
Notes
  1.	 The relationship between cultural geography and cultural studies is the subject of a recent brief article by
Dunn (2006), himself a geographer. He makes the useful point that place should not be seen as “simply
as the bounds of a case study” (p. 425), whatever your disciplinary training and allegiance.
  2.	 Shibuya features prominently, for example, in Lost in Translation (2003; Directed by Sofia Coppola) and
Babel (2006; Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu).
  3.	 Yoshimi (2001) notes comparative surveys between 1954 and 1979 showing increased lengths of time
spent in Shibuya arguably because of the rise of window-shopping as an activity there.
  4.	 Thanks to Shin’ichi Konomi (University of Tokyo) for reminding me of Shibuya’s significance as a place
of playful exploration. In a forthcoming article, coauthored with Kaoru Sezaki, they discuss the results
of a small qualitative study of Shibuya users that, among other findings, notes the pleasures a number of
regular visitors experience in terms of “getting lost.”
  5.	 As Scott McQuire (2006) has argued, these screens can be read as the latest phase in a 150-year-old
process in which the terrain of the modern city and its attendant notions of public and private space and
interaction have been refigured through the increasing mediatization of the city. Occasionally, at Shibuya,
the insistent flows of image and sound that usually consist of rapid, jump cut mixes of advertising shift
to narcissistic images of the crowd at the crossing—a cosmopolitan (in a global citizen-consumer sense)
“public” reflected back to itself. Beyond this—for the moment at least—the Shibuya screens seem to offer
little in the way of “producing new forms of public relationships” explored by McQuire (2006, p. 13) in
his discussion of artistic projects using this particular technology. This debate is further complicated in the
Japanese context because of culturally specific notions of the public and private that recast understandings
of urban space (see Jinnai, 1995).
  6.	 On first going to Shibuya it took me a few visits to find the famous statue; first, I mistook theAkita reliefs
on the wall of the station as being the famous object referred to in my guidebooks and, second, the density
of the crowds made it easy to miss him!
  7.	 Japan has consistently maintained high adoption rates of Internet-capable mobiles since the introduction
of the i-mode Internet service in 1999 by NTT DoCoMo (Ito, 2005).
  8.	 Thanks to David Slater for this particular suggestion/observation. In Japan, the vast majority of high school
students still wear school uniforms. See (Macias and Evers 2007) for a potted history of the origins of the
kogyaru uniform and its adaptations.
  9.	At the same time the uniform has also become a fetish as evidenced by a market for second-hand
“collectors” and its availability in some chain variety goods stores.
10.	 The Shibuya Centre Gai Patrol has its own Web site at http://center-gai.jp/activity01.asp. Clips from the
mentioned program can be found on the blog “Japan Probe,” http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=3861, and
YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoyVy_VYirI. Shibuya is also home to a chapter of the
GuardianAngels Japan (based on the original New York organization) who are regularly seen patrolling
the area (see http://www.guardianangels.or.jp/eng/).
11.	 Existing in conjunction with such practices are popular and/or subcultural attempts to tactically resignify
everyday urban places through the media resources made available in a consumption-based society.
Shibuya-specific examples discussed elsewhere range from the practices derived from purikura
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(coin-operated miniature photos (see Miller, 2005) to the rave demo protests that have taken place in
Shibuya’s Miyashita Park (see Hayashi & McKnight, 2005).
12.	 This is, of course, Dick Hebdige’s (1989) evocative phrase, from his book of the same name, used to
describe youth/youth subcultures and there media “presence” only where they are perceived to be a social
problem.
Acknowledgement
This research was made possible thanks to a period spent as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Comparative
Culture, Sophia University, Tokyo, in 2005. Thanks to my generous and knowledgeable hosts, in particular
David Slater and his students in the Tokyo Urbanism class, as well as my informal guides to Tokyo, particularly
Erez Golani Solomon and Ken Segami. Thanks also to those who offered critical feedback to earlier versions
of this paper presented at the 16th Biennial conference of the Australian Asian Studies Association at the
University of Wollongong (July 2006) and at Ubiquitous Media:Asian Transformations at University of Tokyo
(July 2007), and to the anonymous Space and Culture reviewers who provided generative feedback.
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Online Resources
Shibuya City Office: http://www.city.shibuya.tokyo.jp/eng/index.html
Live camera feed—Koen-dori, Shibuya: http://www.koen-dori.com/townmap/
“Abusive Shibuya Center-Gai Patrol [1]”—Television show clip: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PoyVy_VYirI
“Gal-cir”—Television show clip: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=o6oW0XzmIL0; http://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=PoyVy_VYirI
Bio
Brian Morris is a senior lecturer in media at RMIT University, Melbourne. His current research interests
include the role of comparison in the formation of city identities and Japanese urban cultures. He has published
articles in UTS Review (now Cultural Studies Review), Meanjin, and Cultural Studies and chapters
in the edited collections Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy (2004) and Virtual Globalization (2001).
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