A COMPANION TO
JAPANESE HISTORY
Edited by
William M. Tsutsui
ß 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to Japanese history / edited by William M. Tsutsui.
p. cm. — (Blackwell companions to world history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1690-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1690-0 (hardback : alk. paper)
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Popular Culture
E. Taylor Atkins
Popular culture has been a high growth field in Japanese studies since the 1990s. This
is due to the general scholarly acceptance of popular culture as a legitimate object of
inquiry, but also to the increasing visibility of Japanese cultural products – ranging
from comics to sumo¯ wrestling, popular music to animated films – in the global
marketplace. At the end of the twentieth century, Poke´mon, Nomo Hideo, Miyazaki
Hayao, sushi, and Godzilla were household names and words of global prominence.
Whereas a scant decade earlier Japan was more renowned for its mimetic appropriation
of Western cultural products, now many are convinced of Japanese creative
genius as expressed in popular culture. The study of Japanese popular culture
has evolved significantly. Previously the realm of connoisseurs and antiquarians,
who were entranced by the aesthetic peculiarities of Edo period artifacts, popular
culture has captivated the scholarly interests of historians and social scientists, who use
it to address broader issues pertaining to gender relations, national identity,
social demography, political economy, and colonialism. At the dawn of the twentyfirst
century, few question the scholarly legitimacy of popular culture for understanding
Japan.
The English term popular culture possesses several meanings and connotations that
deserve clarification, for these definitions are complex and often contradictory. Japanese
terms generally translated as popular culture offer slightly more explicit ideological
undertones. It is important to note at the outset that popular culture
originated as a relational concept within a stratified social milieu: that is, the popular
has meaning only in contrast to the high culture or fine art of social elites. As such,
popular culture has both aesthetic and social connotations. The aesthetic connotation
is that popular culture possesses less artistic value than high or elite culture because it
is purportedly less sophisticated and profound and requires less cultivation to appreciate.
The social connotation is that popular culture (minshu¯ bunka or cho¯nin bunka
in Japanese) is by and for non-elites, the status-disadvantaged, or undereducated
groups, who by virtue of their station have neither the means nor the capacity to
produce culture comparable in aesthetic value to that of their social betters. The
status or ideological orientation of the observer determines whether the ‘‘lowborn’’
pedigree and artistic simplicity of popular culture are considered positive or negative.
Scholars with populist sympathies envisage popular culture as folk culture (minzoku
A Companion to Japanese History
Edited by William M. Tsutsui
Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
bunka): participatory rather than passively consumed, produced by a community for
itself, rather than for a paying audience. Moreover, it is (or can be) a vehicle for
resistance against social oppression. Practitioners of so-called ‘‘people’s history’’
(minshu¯shi) romanticize popular culture as counterculture: an inherently subversive
and irreverent inversion of elite values, a space where non-elites and oppressed
populations can define and valorize themselves, even making a virtue of their low
station.1
Since the populus (minshu¯) itself is implicitly responsible for cultural production,
popular culture is thus an authentic expression of non-elite sensibilities,
anxieties, and aspirations, woven into the very fabric of social life.
By contrast, other observers regard popular culture as synonymous with
mass culture (taishu¯ bunka), the product of industrial techniques of manufacture
and dissemination. Popular culture thus conceived is not actually produced by the
populus but rather by a culture industry motivated only by profit and the preservation
of elite privilege. It is thus the very antithesis of folk culture: even if a cultural form
originates among the populus, the culture industry appropriates, repackages, and mass
markets it, thereby neutralizing or trivializing its subversive potential. Cultural commodities
are consumed passively by hapless masses who have essentially surrendered
to this industry both the prerogative and the means to initiate cultural production.
Moreover, since cultural commodities are produced for profit and therefore must
appeal to the broadest possible audience, there is a concomitant homogenization
of cultural products, an unwarranted exaltation of the trivial, and aesthetic degradation.
Art and iconoclasm can no longer thrive, for ‘‘the mass crushes beneath it
everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and
select.’’2
More ominously, popular culture as envisaged by Antonio Gramsci becomes
a means whereby dominant elites exert hegemony over subordinate groups, not
through force or coercion but via a negotiated ‘‘ideological consensus’’ to which
mass media and culture can contribute. While this entails concessions to the tastes
and interests of the subordinate masses, it ‘‘cannot touch the essential . . . the
decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic
activity.’’3
Already complex and fluid, definitions of popular culture have become even more
so under the influence of postmodern theory. In an age in which so-called highbrow
or elite culture is as readily available via the same media as so-called popular forms,
and in which purportedly ‘‘inaccessible’’ avant-garde techniques are widely used in
popular music, television ads, and action movies, the social and aesthetic distinctions
between elite, popular, and folk expressions seem increasingly porous and less analytically
useful. ‘‘There are no longer any agreed and inviolable criteria which can
serve to differentiate art from popular culture,’’ Dominic Strinati asserts. ‘‘Art
becomes increasingly integrated into the economy both because it is used to encourage
people to consume through the expanded role it plays in advertising, and because
it becomes a commercial good in its own right.’’4
Moreover, postmodernists have
exposed the ways in which artistic canons serve the interests of those in power. This is
not to say that social and aesthetic distinctions have completely lost operational
power in social life (for instance, ghetto pedigree or ‘‘street cred’’ are deemed
essential for legitimate participation in the self-defined ‘‘counterculture’’ of hip
hop). But it is worth pondering whether such distinctions have only recently (in
the era of late capitalism) ceased to conform with the reality of cultural production
POPULAR CULTURE 461
and consumption, or if they ever did. As explained below, as early as the seventeenth
century Japanese popular culture pillaged from and signified on elite culture, while
elites found the diversions of the rabble so intoxicating that they risked censure to
join the party.5
As durable definitions of popular culture have become more elusive, the object of
cultural analysis has shifted as well from production to consumption. A key question
is who dictates the terms and content of popular culture, the producers or the
audience? Who is responsive to whom? Early twentieth-century mass culture theorists,
Marxists, and the Frankfurt School insisted that the industrial manufacture of
culture served the interests of the corporate elite, manipulated popular taste, and
induced apathy among the supine masses, whose interests would be better served
making revolution.6
Subsequent scholarship – generically dubbed ‘‘reception studies’’
– restored agency to consumers, arguing that cultural texts are open to multiple,
even seditious, readings and uses. For instance, Lawrence Levine has argued that
methods of industrial production and dissemination do not necessarily invalidate
cultural products as ‘‘authentic’’ expressions of popular sentiment. Since mass cultural
products are read in diverse ways and put to different uses by consumers, they
constitute the ‘‘folklore of industrial society,’’ which can even be deployed to contest
the dominance of those who produced them. ‘‘Modernity dealt a blow to artisanship
in culture as well as in material commodities,’’ Levine concedes. ‘‘But to say this is
not to say that, as a result, people have been rendered passive, hopeless consumers.
What people can do and do do is to refashion the objects created for them to fit their
own values, needs, and expectations.’’7
But Jackson Lears questions Levine’s assertions
of the consumer’s sovereignty:
Levine remains oblivious to the fundamental fact of cultural power: not its capacity to
manipulate consciousness but its existence as a set of givens that form the boundaries of
what the less powerful can do or can even (sometimes) imagine doing . . . Each human
subject is born into a world filled with chains of signifiers: the expressive forms in which
social and cultural power is constituted. . . . The chains are not unbreakable: they can be
constructed and reconstructed to meet the needs and desires of the individual subject.
But they are chains.8
Nowadays, mass-manufactured cultural products with anti-establishment messages
are abundant and lucrative, allowing the culture industry to endure and profit
through self-excoriation. This is clearly a concession to popular taste for the risque´
and rebellious, but one that admittedly does nothing to endanger corporate control
of cultural production. Thus chastened, we hereby proceed with a notion of popular
culture less beholden to rigid, ideologically loaded social and aesthetic categories, and
which embraces its paradoxical nature as its defining trait. Popular culture is a
‘‘compromise equilibrium,’’ a continual struggle for ‘‘sovereignty’’ between consumers
and producers.9
It simultaneously provokes new, sometimes revolutionary
thoughts and behaviors as it encourages frivolity and indifference. It is also the arena
in which competing constituencies debate matters of great material and spiritual
import. Popular culture initiates and sustains discussions on gender norms, inequities
of wealth and status, tolerance, national identity, sexual morality, political and civil
rights, and social violence, matters that are not or cannot be addressed via formal
political processes, legal channels, or grievance procedures.
462 E. TAYLOR ATKINS
Japan has had mass-produced, commodified, urban popular culture since the
seventeenth century and its influence has been dramatic. One need only glance at
the Tokugawa government’s copious sumptuary edicts, censorship regulations, and
field surveys to realize how pervasive popular culture was and how staggering its
impact. Many contemporaneous observers (and not a few subsequent scholars)
detected the warrior elite’s ruin in its insatiable appetite for slumming with the
common folk in their theaters, teahouses, and bordellos. Popular culture – the
‘‘impulse to create, to enrich leisure time with cultural pursuits, to imitate the lifestyle
of the upper-class’’ – made a joke of the Tokugawa social hierarchy, by creating
social spaces and imaginary realms in which assigned status (mibun) was irrelevant.10
An exhaustive chronological account of various media and forms of Japanese
popular culture is impossible in this chapter, so the following discussion is organized
around four themes – commerce, aesthetics, appropriation, and contestation – and
draws on examples from early modern, modern, and contemporary popular culture.
This approach enables us to identify conjunctures between recent studies and to
envision new approaches for future scholarship.
Commerce
Walter Benjamin dated the revolution in ‘‘technical reproduction’’ that enabled mass
cultural manufacturing to the early 1900s. This revolution made it possible to
produce and disseminate works of art on an unprecedented scale and ‘‘to cause the
most profound change in their impact upon the public.’’ ‘‘Quantity has been transmuted
into quality,’’ he added. ‘‘The greatly increased mass of participants has
produced a change in the mode of participation.’’11
These transformations were no
less profound in early twentieth-century Japan than in the rest of the industrialized
world, but neither were they entirely unprecedented. The commodification and mass
production and distribution of cultural products in Japan dates from the early
modern era. Premodern forms of popular culture were rooted in rural religious
observances, finding most vibrant expression in matsuri (festivals) to pacify spirits,
promote fertility, commemorate seasonal changes, or celebrate harvests. There were
itinerant professional entertainers (bards, shrine dancers, theatrical troupes), but their
performances did not supplant the more participatory cultural practices of villagers,
who performed their own dances, songs, and dramas in conjunction with matsuri.
With the advent of castle towns in the sixteenth century, increasingly large numbers
of merchants and craftspeople settled permanently in incipient urban centers, thereby
creating conditions favorable to the development of urban popular culture. Matsuri
continued even in the cities of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, but the variety of diversions
and entertainments increased exponentially, as a vibrant culture industry developed in
the seventeenth century. But, while many of its cultural products and methods of
dissemination presaged the manufacture and marketing of modern mass culture,
conventional mass culture theories fail to explain the culture industry of the Edo
period. Tokugawa society was nightmarishly complex, a nascent capitalist system
under a feudal facade, in which wealth rarely corresponded with status. How could
the culture industry serve the interests of the ruling elite when it was essentially in the
hands of a despised caste? It rather undermined samurai privilege by making cultural
POPULAR CULTURE 463
products (teeming with sexual, violent, and scatological content) widely available to
commoners, who were thereby distracted from performing their assigned economic
and normative roles, and by sanctioning spaces where the castes could mingle, in the
most intimate ways.12
Burgeoning commercial networks even enabled theatrical
troupes, entertainers, and printed matter to infiltrate isolated rural communities. By
the early nineteenth century, rural folk had erected their own kabuki and puppet
theaters (in blatant disregard of bakufu prohibitions limiting theaters to urban
licensed districts) and mounted their own amateur productions. ‘‘They acted in
plays not because traveling troupes were unavailable,’’ Walthall maintains, ‘‘but
because they wanted to act.’’13
Technological innovation and capital accumulation stimulated the growth of the
culture industry in the mid seventeenth century, and again in the early twentieth.
Woodblock printing (which replaced movable type adopted from Korea) enabled
cheaply reproducible calligraphic and technicolor flights of fancy in print media,
and foreshadowed the media revolution (for example, sound recording, moving
pictures, newspapers, mass magazines) of the early 1900s. Innovations in stage effects
and puppetry heightened Edo era audience expectations for spectacle, just as the use
of miniatures in war films (for example, The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya,
1942) and 1960s monster movies (kaiju¯ eiga) set new industry standards for special
effects. Edo period publishing houses and theater companies likewise prefigured
modern record companies, movie studios, and production companies, establishing
the practice of contracting major talent to crank out increasingly formulaic products.
Through organized fan clubs, cross-promotions, and celebrity endorsements of
products and fashions, early modern practices presaged modern marketing strategies
that exploited reverence for celebrity. Some have argued that Japanese culture was
ravaged by the modern capitalism of ‘‘ruthless European and American entrepre-
neurs,’’14
but cultural commodification was in fact a wholly indigenous development,
making the modern mass culture revolution merely a continuation and intensification
of processes set in motion during the Edo period.15
Political conditions favored concentrating the means of cultural production in a
handful of companies and discouraging the rampant proliferation of independent
voices. In the Edo period, theater proprietors vied for a limited number of official
licenses to operate within the walled pleasure districts of Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, a
system that facilitated surveillance.16
Censorship regimes established by the Tokugawa
and modern imperial governments found it easier to monitor smaller numbers
of producers, a proclivity most visible during World War II, when massive consolidation
sharply reduced the number of recording companies, publishers, and movie
studios. Censorship of political and sexual content was random and arbitrary, but
its effect on cultural producers could be chilling if they did not exercise restraint. On
the other hand, failure to deliver titillating goods to insatiable consumers could just as
easily put them out of business.
Key to the development of commercial popular culture was the rise of consumer
classes, newly empowered by literacy, surplus cash, and leisure time to partake of the
blossoming market in cultural goods.17
Literacy was encouraged among Edo period
cho¯nin (urban commoners) as necessary for conducting business, and later among all
Japanese as fundamental to the Meiji state’s modernization project. Mass literacy
enabled commoners to breach status barriers, gain access to elite culture, and prosper
464 E. TAYLOR ATKINS
economically to the extent that a night at a teahouse, dance hall, or movie palace
would not break the bank. Denied real political rights by the Tokugawa and modern
imperial regimes, consumers nonetheless wielded some authority as customers of the
culture industry. Decided in their likes and dislikes, consumers made clear what they
found entertaining by doling out or withholding their cash. Cho¯nin were the ‘‘new
arbiters of taste,’’ who realized that ‘‘stories of their own antics and aberrations were
as entertaining as any of the tales imported from China, or handed down in their own
country.’’18
Regarding kabuki, Shively contends, it was ‘‘good box office to electrify
an audience with bold passages and parodies that spoke to the experience of the
commoner.’’19
The introduction of profit motives, of course, fundamentally transformed artistic
production and cultural behavior. Luminaries such as Ihara Saikaku and Chikamatsu
Monzaemon were very prolific because much of their work was formulaic, heeding
conventions for subject matter (that is, dissolute rakes and harlots, love suicides) that
had already proven profitable. Commodification also clarified distinct relations of
production and consumption, a trend perhaps most visible in matsuri. Although a
participatory ethos remains strong within many communities, matsuri have become
increasingly commercialized, secularized, truncated, and packaged for tourists and
spectators. Not only matsuri, but ‘‘Japan’’ itself – ‘‘generically imagined and presented’’
– has become a consumable object, the consumption of which promises a
(re)discovery of cultural ‘‘self.’’20
Commerce and culture remain inextricably entwined in contemporary Japanese
life, and not merely in the sense of art’s utility for advertising. Anne Allison, writing
about comics, remarks on the productive utility of recreation: ‘‘manga are utilized as
a diversionary and escapist ‘play’ that ‘works’ to relieve everyday tensions and thereby
replenish a person’s energy so that he or she can, for example, return to work.’’21
By
providing respites from the grinding work and study routines that characterize
modern life, play and pop thus keep Japan’s economic engines running. Interestingly,
this logic, too, has precedent in the Edo period, when official sanction of pleasure
quarters was based on the assumption that commoners required temporary release
from the pressures of a tightly wound social structure. Only a prescient few imagined
that such diversions would contribute to that structure’s very doom: as Confucian
scholar Dazai Shundai lamented in 1729, ‘‘our kabuki plays of today put on licentious
and unrestrained matters which . . . cater to vulgar sentiment. . . . There is nothing
worse than this in breaking down public morals.’’22
Aesthetics
In Japan, no less than in other traditionally stratified societies, theoretically clear
aesthetic distinctions corresponded to social status. The dichotomy between ga
(elegant) and zoku (vulgar) cultural forms not only reinforced distinctions between
hereditary elites (courtiers and prominent warrior clans) and common people, but
also denied the possibility of the comparable aesthetic worth of their respective
expressive forms. Moreover, in premodern times elite culture required mastery of
written language, whereas commoner culture was transmitted orally, an important
contrast in East Asian societies in which literacy signified status. Although elite and
POPULAR CULTURE 465
non-elite forms alike often shared a religious basis, commoner culture was assumed to
lack the refinement, restraint, and moral value of elite cultural forms such as gagaku
(court music and dance), Chinese and vernacular poetry, or Buddhist iconography.
Intent on instilling Confucian virtues or Buddhist spiritual truths, elite culture was
further distinguished by its unabashed didacticism as well as its elegant simplicity,
stylized melancholy (sabi), and affected rusticism (wabi).
Yet the distinction between ga and zoku began to cloud as early as medieval times,
when sho¯gun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu patronized a sarugaku (‘‘monkey music’’) theatrical
troupe. Yoshimitsu’s prote´ge´ Zeami refined sarugaku’s coarser attributes and in
the process created the noh (no¯), which would remain the exclusive province of
warrior elites for the next four centuries. By purging sarugaku of its more ‘‘vulgar’’
tendencies, and seeking profundity (yu¯gen) in each movement and scripted line,
Zeami aspired no less than to communicate esoteric truths and provoke Zen epiphanies.
Nonetheless, here was an elite art with clear plebeian pedigree.
Further complicating matters was the penchant of Edo period playwrights, artists,
musicians, and writers for plundering and inverting elite aesthetics. The ability to
make allusions to classical literature, poetry, historical events, and myths (many of
Chinese origin) had traditionally been the exclusive province of courtiers and warrior
elites. But the producers of early modern pop ostentatiously dropped references to
The Tale of Genji and continental culture into their plays, novels, and prints, a
tendency that would have mattered little had there not been an increasingly literate
and savvy audience to appreciate such erudite displays. Wealthy cho¯nin indeed prided
themselves on their intertextual literacy, their ability to recognize or brandish allusions
to the classical Sino-Japanese literary canon. Commoner and elite cultures also
shared a preference for ‘‘commingled media,’’23
that is, adding poems to paintings,
or setting literature to music.
However, within the pleasure quarters commoners developed their own aesthetic
terminology – for example, tsu¯ (connoisseurship), sui (elegance), or iki (refinement) –
or shunned elite culture’s esoterica, cultivated restraint, and elegiac sorrow in favor of
the quotidian, lewd, obnoxious, and over-the-top. No less an authority than master
playwright Chikamatsu, for whom common people in uncommon plights were
favored subjects, insisted that ‘‘Art is something which lies in the slender margin
between the real and the unreal.’’24
Some artists, to whom Chikamatsu must have
seemed priggish, positively venerated zoku, finding elegance in vulgarity. This was, in
essence, what iki represented: the rendering of (unconsummated) erotic desire into
aesthetic experience.25
Most kabuki and jo¯ruri dramas emphasized spectacle, acrobatics,
swordplay, and virtuoso manipulation of puppets at the expense of literary
quality. The ‘‘culture of play’’ of the late Edo period disregarded morality and the
‘‘Heavenly Way’’ (tendo¯) in favor of the ‘‘gargantuan joys of the flesh.’’ ‘‘Bodily
imagery in both verbal and illustrated texts signified a different kind of social reality
with an inverted scale of priorities for the Edo townsmen. It was an order that had as
its head the genitalia or anus and as its heart the stomach.’’26
The Meiji era importation of Western aesthetics was revolutionary, though
its influence was uneven. Scholars have typically celebrated the arrival of naturalism
in Japanese theater, visual art, and literature as indicative of ‘‘progress’’ toward
more ‘‘realistic’’ renderings of the natural world. Donald Richie’s work on film,
for instance, assumes a dichotomy between traditional Japanese ‘‘mediation’’ or
466 E. TAYLOR ATKINS
‘‘presentation’’ (art is ‘‘rendered a particular reality by way of an authoritative voice’’)
and Western ‘‘representation’’ (‘‘in which one assumed the reality of what was being
shown’’).27
Meiji reformers did in fact disparage kabuki specifically for its fantastic
scenarios and its stylized, deliberately unrealistic acting techniques,28
and crafted new
theatrical genres (shinpa and shingeki) to address these ‘‘defects.’’ The confessional
fiction genre known as the ‘‘I-novel’’ (shisho¯setsu), too, was partially a concession to
naturalist tastes. But newer work points out realist strains in pre-Meiji art – early
experiments with linear perspective and ocular technologies, an obsession with material,
social, and psychological detail – that make it difficult to argue that Japanese
culture developed naturalist tendencies only under Western influence.29
Notwithstanding the undeniable aesthetic impact of the West, modern Japanese
popular culture has clearly – and self-consciously – retained time-honored, native
aesthetic principles. A fascinating example is the silent film narrator (katsuben or
benshi), whose performances captivated movie audiences for the first three decades
of the twentieth century. Genealogically linked to medieval bards, etoki and gidayu¯
narrators, and rakugo storytellers, katsuben provided an authoritative mediating
presence and a link to earlier narrative conventions at a time when Japanese film
showings were hardly ‘‘autonomous’’ but rather ‘‘commingled’’ with live stage
performances.30
In later years, filmmakers as stylistically distinct as Ozu Yasujiro¯
and Kurosawa Akira drew on native aesthetics, Ozu in his modest framings and
elegiac moods, and Kurosawa in his adaptation of noh music and acting techniques
in films such as Throne of Blood (1958). Ties to the past likewise remain a central
aspect of contemporary sumo¯, which, in spite of many modern innovations that
‘‘genesis amnesia’’ has rendered invisible, exudes an aura of indisputably native
traditionalism.31
Still, the aesthetics of modern Japanese popular culture suggest how globalized (or,
some would say, homogenized) standards of popular taste have become. Most
Japanese today are thoroughly desensitized to the charms of wabi/sabi, iki, or
yu¯gen. Anyone approaching Godzilla or television programs such as, say, Iron Chef
or Crayon Shin-chan, with the cardinal principles of classical Japanese aesthetics
(suggestion, asymmetry, perishability, and simplicity) in mind risks disillusion.32
Since the early twentieth century, imported entertainment (hakurai geino¯) has largely
dictated standards of popular taste, particularly in music and cinema. Surprisingly few
Japanese have ever seen cinematic masterpieces by Kurosawa or Ozu, voicing a clear
preference for the Hollywood product. Those with niche interests in jazz, reggae, hip
hop, or so-called ‘‘ethnic’’ musics cherish the aura of exoticism and authenticity
enshrined in imported records and fanzines straight from ‘‘the source’’ (honba). In
the 1990s it was tres chic to purchase vintage Levi’s jeans worn by ‘‘real Americans,’’
suggesting that imported cultural goods still enjoy aesthetic cachet at the turn of the
millennium.
Appropriation
Japan is often described as a ‘‘hybrid’’ culture: a memorable line from the 1991
documentary The Japanese Version asserts that borrowing from other cultures ‘‘is as
Japanese as eating rice.’’ A corollary cliche is that once Japanese appropriate a foreign
POPULAR CULTURE 467
cultural artifact, they domesticate it, or ‘‘make it Japanese’’ (whatever that means),
without compromising their ‘‘national/cultural core.’’ Iwabuchi Ko¯ichi maintains
that this sponge-like ‘‘Japanese capacity for cultural borrowing and appropriation
does not simply articulate a process of hybridization in practice, but it is strategically
represented as a key feature of Japanese national identity itself.’’33
Such depictions of nonchalant, ‘‘strategic’’ appropriation underestimate the tensions
aroused in the process. Since the foreign origins of so much of what is known as
‘‘Japanese culture’’ are indisputable, two issues are always at stake: the ‘‘authenticity’’
of the appropriated artifact or cultural form;34
and the integrity and clarity of
Japanese cultural identity. Such trepidation may have been more acute in the modern
era: the adoption of Portuguese pantaloons and the Okinawan shamisen seems to
have generated considerably less controversy over national identity or authenticity in
the sixteenth century than the importation of sleeveless dresses and the ‘‘lascivious’’
saxophone did in the twentieth. Nonetheless, the Confucian revival of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was essentially a quest for a more authentic Confucianism,
to be procured through the study of original ancient texts rather than later
commentaries, just as the ‘‘national learning’’ (kokugaku) movement was in part a
reaction to this renewed influx of Chinese thought and culture, an attempt to identify
and recover an indigenous cultural, spiritual, and moral heritage uncontaminated by
foreign influence.
Kokugaku foreshadowed the modern Nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness),
which sought to recoup a national character allegedly menaced by Western modernity.
In the realm of popular entertainment, perhaps no single medium better expresses
discontent over Japanese hybridity than the enka song genre, whose principal message,
in Yano’s estimation, is ‘‘We long for our past Japanese selves.’’ Indeed, among
enka fans, flirtation with imported culture is depicted as a life stage, a youthful
indiscretion: ‘‘Fans explain their turning to enka in terms of a musical taste that lay
dormant, waiting only for their life experiences and, for some, a sense of their innate
Japaneseness, to catch up to its lyrics and music.’’35
Paradoxically, cultural appropriation
had served Japan well as a strategy for preserving national sovereignty and
integrity. Sinification of politics, music, religion, and art from the sixth through the
eighth centuries was intended to earn the esteem of Tang China and thereby stave off
a possible invasion. And the study and implementation of Mongol military tactics
after the 1274 invasion helped repulse the second attempt in 1281. So, when the
Western imperial powers came knocking in the mid nineteenth century, the new Meiji
state had historical precedent for believing that a determined effort to study and
replicate what they called ‘‘international standards’’ might achieve similar objectives.
Popular diversions were not exempted from such attention.36
The effects of Meiji cultural reforms – which emphasized emulation of Western
models in music, theater, literature, visual art, and architecture – were rapid and
dramatic in some quarters, less so in others. Commoners not so well integrated into
the modern age continued to enjoy their yose (variety shows), rakugo, and misemono
(peep show) entertainments. And when the government tampered too much with
their beloved kabuki, they simply created new variants (taishu¯ engeki, popular theater)
that retained the bawdy irreverence of old and still allowed cheering, jeering, and
spontaneous disruptions of stage action. If ‘‘enlightenment’’ meant sitting quietly in
one’s seat, then enlightenment be damned.
468 E. TAYLOR ATKINS
The longstanding official contempt for popular entertainment now enjoyed a new
rationale, based on ‘‘scientific’’ notions of progress, pragmatism, and ‘‘enlightenment,’’
not to mention the prudery of Victorian era Western culture. Ury Eppstein
argues that the practical utility of Western music, rather than its ‘‘artistic merits,’’
intrigued Meiji leaders, some of whom apparently were within earshot of the military
music emanating from British warships when they shelled Kagoshima in 1863.
Besides its military applications, they believed that Western music could also have
educational value for ‘‘character building, maintaining good order, and promoting
clear enunciation and good reading ability.’’37
The government also encouraged the
proliferation of school undo¯kai (sports days) and the adoption of ‘‘manly’’ American
and European sports such as baseball, rugby, fencing, gymnastics, and swimming,
hoping to promote moral education, military efficacy, and modern lifestyles, and to
offset the presumed physical inferiority of the Japanese.38
The leaders were less
enchanted, however, with Western-style political cartooning, with which dissenters
ridiculed officials and their programs. Cartoonist Honda Kinkichiro¯ satirized the
Meiji milieu (and circumvented libel laws) with a ‘‘hybrid cartoon vocabulary’’ that
‘‘drew both on the cultural knowledge from the world into which he had been born
and from the outside world that had impinged on it.’’39
In virtually all respects, including cultural policy, the Meiji transformation was a
‘‘revolution from above,’’ no less than the ancient Taika Reforms had been. But with
the technological revolution that produced modern mass media – sound recording,
radio broadcasting, moving pictures, and print media – and the increasing integration
of the world economy during the era of colonialism and World War I, cultural
products from abroad literally poured into Japan, more or less directly into the laps
of consumers, unfiltered and undiluted by elite intervention as in previous times. To
be sure, censors prevented Japanese movie audiences from ever seeing Rudolph
Valentino’s lips touch those of his leading lady (‘‘kissing movies’’ were not permitted
until the American occupation, during which there was a veritable deluge), but
nativists fretted over the direct influence he and other Hollywood screen idols exerted
on the mating rituals of so-called ‘‘modern girls and boys’’ (moga and mobo). By the
early 1900s, Japanese partook of a cosmopolitan smorgasbord of foreign literature
and plays in translation, popular songs, sports, and films. After World War I, American
entertainment and lifestyle eclipsed those from Europe, but opera (Italian or
Beijing), French chanson, Argentine tango, American jazz, Hawaiian hula, Russian
ballads, and Cuban rumba were all available for musical entertainment. Even ‘‘Arirang’’
– a folk song which for Koreans expressed indignation toward Japanese colonial
rule – was a hit record in interwar Japan, in several recorded versions.
By the 1920s, then, Japan was fully integrated into a new globalized ‘‘community
of taste’’: cultural appropriation was thoroughly routinized, an everyday occurrence,
in which mass media empowered practically anyone to participate.40
So firmly rooted
were such voracious habits that wartime measures to cleanse Japan of foreign influences
and ‘‘overcome modernity’’ (kindai no cho¯koku) seem laughably naive in
hindsight. Defeat, occupation, and close cold war ties with the United States only
intensified the flow of cultural goods into Japan, creating a cultural ‘‘trade deficit’’
that only in very recent times is becoming more balanced due to the global popularity
of Japanese anime (animation) and video games. Flows of cultural goods are indeed
more complex today, as are Japanese reactions to them. Regarding film, Richie
POPULAR CULTURE 469
remarks, somewhat hyperbolically, ‘‘Whether something is traditionally Japanese or
not is no longer a concern – no one can tell and no one cares. Tradition is not to be
guarded. It is to be augmented as the riches of the rest of the world are assimi-
lated.’’41
It is astounding to contemplate the reversals of the turn of the millennium: as
Japan’s economic influence has waned (a model of capitalist development to avoid
rather than emulate), its prominence as an exporter of play has soared. Of course,
Japanese culture has enjoyed global prominence for some time – consider late
nineteenth-century japonisme and its influence on French Impressionism, karate
and ju¯do¯, or monster films from the 1950s and 1960s. But who could have predicted
the current dominance of Japanese animated cartoons on American children’s television,
the Major League Baseball success of Nomo Hideo and Suzuki Ichiro¯, the
prominence of Japanese ‘‘idol singers’’ and soap operas in Taiwan, Malaysia, and
Thailand, the astounding reception of Iron Chef (Ryo¯ri no tetsujin) and sumo¯ wrestling
on the Food Network and ESPN, respectively, or the popularity of manga
cartooning styles and ‘‘character goods’’ (for example, Hello Kitty, Poke´mon)
among children in much of the developed world?
Iwabuchi argues that Japanese corporations, with tacit government support, export
cultural products to ‘‘improve international understanding of Japan, particularly in
Asian countries,’’ hoping to ‘‘soothe – even suppress’’ bitter memories of Japanese
colonial aggression.42
Whether ‘‘pop culture diplomacy’’ can achieve Japanese objectives
in Asia remains to be seen, but one result of Japan’s export of cultural
products is undeniable: an upsurge of general interest in Japan – including Japanese
language – among American consumers of such products. My own classes, and those
of my colleagues, overflow with anime, martial arts, and video game enthusiasts, for
whom Japan represents not mimetic but creative genius. They favor anime’s ‘‘thematic
complexity’’ and disdain the ‘‘psychological comfort’’ and ‘‘satisfying resolutions’’
they find endemic in American popular culture.43
Anime director Miyazaki
Hayao thus deposes George Lucas in their pantheon of master storytellers.
Contestation
Popular culture discredits conventional notions of Japanese society as homogeneous
and harmonious. In Japan popular culture provided a forum in which the state, the
culture industry, and various constituent actors, representing every conceivable
demographic, ideological, or regional affiliation, discoursed on weighty issues regarding
citizenship, gender roles, identities, sexuality, social inequities, tradition, and
modernity. Recent studies have moved away from notions of popular culture either
as simply an imposition of hegemony from above (the Marxist/Frankfurt School
take), or as a vehicle for resistance from below (the minshu¯shi take), and rather have
embraced a more complex and flexible concept of popular culture as a public space in
which a plethora of agendas, interests, and values compete.44
It goes without saying that the state, working through the culture industry, did
attempt to exert hegemony via popular culture. This is evident in the Tokugawa
government’s designation of pleasure quarters as ‘‘evil places’’ (akusho), assigned to
remote, swampy districts; in the modern imperial state’s heavy-handed pre-produc-
470 E. TAYLOR ATKINS
tion censorship regime, its severe taboos regarding media depictions of the imperial
family, and its ubiquitous prescriptions for proper Japaneseness; even in the American
occupation’s doublespeak encouraging ‘‘free speech’’ while handing down ‘‘recommended’’
and ‘‘forbidden’’ subjects for film and press. Neither can we deny that
popular culture functioned as the ‘‘hidden transcript’’ by which recalcitrant non-elites
shrewdly articulated desires for personal liberation, social justice, and control of their
own destinies.45
This was certainly the case during the Freedom and People’s Rights
Movement (jiyu¯ minken undo¯) of the late 1800s, when oratorical singers (enkashi)
belted out protest songs on the streets, thereby circumventing censorship of publications
and earning reputations as ‘‘singing street guerillas.’’46
But a simplistic domination–resistance polarity does no justice to popular culture’s
historical and sociological role. One complicating factor is the fact that, contrary to
Marxist schematics, the respective interests of the state and the culture industry rarely
coincided neatly, in part because of the very marketability of counter-hegemonic
cultural practices and art forms. Moreover, to assume that people consumed cultural
products under duress is to deny them rationality and agency, not to mention
accountability, for their choices, tastes, and habits. This plays right into the hands
of those who insist that ordinary Japanese were victims of their own government,
bearing no responsibility whatsoever for aggressive militarism and colonial expansion.
Lastly, there are numerous examples of a synergy of interests, in which the culture
industry manufactured products that simultaneously satisfied popular tastes and
served agendas of the state. Jennifer Robertson identifies one such confluence in
the all-female Takarazuka troupe’s staging of ‘‘colonialist revues’’ set in exotic Asian
locales targeted for Japanese intervention. Another example is the proactive role jazz
musicians took to create a new form of nationalistic popular music, rather than
docilely mothball their horns under threat of a wartime ban.47
Chikamatsu’s melodramatic giri-ninjo¯ (duty versus emotion) tragedies illustrate
that contestation need not entail direct confrontation: rather than explicitly assaulting
Tokugawa social structures and moral codes, his stories circuitously address them by
depicting the consequences for human happiness of living by such precepts. Giri ’s
inevitable triumph may have reinforced samurai hegemony, but its devastating effects
were laid bare on stage for audiences to ponder. Likewise, it is difficult to imagine
even hardcore technophiles leaving a screening of the animated film Akira unaffected
by its dystopic imagery. Many acclaimed anime express ambivalent attitudes toward
technology,48
forcing the audience to reflect on the spiritual, social, and moral costs
of the very technological overdevelopment that makes such sophisticated animation
possible.
Popular culture raises disturbing questions about personal and group identities in a
society many still consider sublimely homogeneous. For instance, the prevalence of
Osaka dialect in manzai (comic dialogues) is a defiant assertion of localism in the face
of Tokyo hegemony. Michael Ashkenazi argues that matsuri, too, as ‘‘one of the last
culturally legitimate bastions of localism left,’’ constitute a ‘‘local counterattack’’
against the capital’s ‘‘tyranny.’’ In the 1990s residents of Kyoto’s low-rent Higashikujo¯
district – including Korean-Japanese, disabled, and working-class folk – held a
madang (Korean-style festival) exploiting their ‘‘neighborhood’s notoriety to make a
political point: democracy means difference.’’49
‘‘Against a state that celebrates
genetic and cultural homogeneity,’’ Caron writes, ‘‘and where democracy is conflated
POPULAR CULTURE 471
with a desire for uniform equality, this neighborhood festival celebrates difference as a
form of democracy and espouses an open, inclusive public sphere.’’50
Gendered identities have been a durable fixation of Japanese popular culture.
Canonical icons such as onnagata (female impersonators), which emerged as a
necessary response to a government ban on female kabuki performers, and the
Takarazuka Revue’s otokoyaku (male impersonator) performed idealized representations
of femininity and masculinity, respectively, but also made it possible to envisage
gendered identities as fluid rather than tied to biological sex.51
For women, Barbara
Sato suggests, popular culture ‘‘created a new set of images by which they could
better understand who they were, or at least who they might be.’’ When Matsui
Sumako took the stage as Nora in the 1911 production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House, her electrifying performance stirred ongoing debates on women’s roles as
homemakers, mothers, autonomous economic actors, and public figures, a discussion
that continued in the pages of Seito¯ (Bluestocking), a product of the print media
explosion of the early 1900s.52
Indeed, popular culture empowers people to don or shed identities at will, even to
contest the very boundaries of Japaneseness itself. John Russell’s ethnography of the
commodification and consumption of ‘‘blackness’’ concludes that many Japanese get
dark tans, listen to African diasporic music, choose hip hop fashions, or pursue sexual
encounters with people of African descent as acts of ‘‘resistance, self-discovery, and
empowerment.’’ As evident in an entire subgenre of explicit sexual fiction, in blackface
burlesque, and club nightlife, indulgence in black culture and mingling in the
most intimate ways with black people become ways of transcending the limits of the
‘‘homogeneous nation’’ (tanš itsu minzoku): ‘‘Consumption of the black body and its
essence liberates one’s full potential, one’s ‘true self’.’’53
Russell’s study indicates that
a ‘‘consuming passion’’ for blackness reflects profound discontent about Japanese
national, ethnic, and gendered identities, an insight that might elude us in the
absence of sophisticated scholarship on popular culture.
Conclusion
Scholarship on Japanese popular culture is growing in quality and quantity. The
historiography of the Edo period demi-monde is more voluminous than that of
modern pop, but until recently has lagged behind in theoretical development, as it
has traditionally been concerned more with artistic techniques and aesthetics than
with social issues or political economy. Most early work on Edo period pop delighted
in pointing out aspects that indicated a peculiarly Japanese genius, rather than
situating it within a more comparative theoretical framework of popular (or mass)
culture. However, in preparing lessons on early modern popular culture, I am
continually struck by how Edo period patterns of cultural commodification, production,
and consumption portend what happens in the twentieth century. Future
studies may indeed highlight continuities transcending the chronological boundary
between early modern and modern, as I have attempted to do here. In recent decades
historians of Japan have increasingly emphasized continuities that transcend the
‘‘watershed’’ moments or ‘‘turning points’’ usually used to make sense of Japanese
history, such as the unification of the country, the Meiji Restoration, or the American
472 E. TAYLOR ATKINS
occupation. Such conceptions have been instructive regarding Japan’s political, social,
and economic orders, but we may be similarly enlightened by a view of popular
culture in the longue dure´e. Moreover, from a global perspective, we may be surprised
how prescient the purveyors of pop in early modern Japan were regarding the
development and marketing of mass popular culture.
The most promising trend in the study of Japanese popular culture has been the
increased willingness to take it seriously as an object of historical investigation, to go
beyond the connoisseur’s fixation with aesthetics, and to integrate it into broader
areas of social and ideological inquiry. Specifically, recent studies highlight the engagement
of interwar and wartime popular entertainment with colonial, fascist,
nationalist, and gendered ideologies, challenging previous notions of pop culture as
a vehicle for escape from the earth-shattering events of Japan’s mid twentieth century.
We are developing an appreciation for the ways that popular culture helped shape
Japan’s modern history and the behavior and consciousness of the Japanese people,
how it facilitated exchange on contentious issues within Japanese society, and the role
it has played in Japan’s interactions with the outside world. Popular culture is ignored
now only at great peril to the historian’s comprehensive understanding of the Japanese
experience
NOTES
1 Gluck, ‘‘The People in History,’’ pp. 34, 38–40; Walthall, ‘‘Peripheries,’’ p. 372.
2 Dwight MacDonald, ‘‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’’ in Rosenberg and White, eds., Mass
Culture, p. 62. Quotation from Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, ‘‘The Coming of the Masses,’’ in
Rosenberg and White, eds., Mass Culture, p. 45.
3 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 161. See also Strinati, An Introduction to
Theories of Popular Culture, pp. 165–71
4 Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, p. 226.
5 Nakano, ‘‘The Role of Traditional Aesthetics,’’ pp. 130–1; Shively, ‘‘Popular Culture,’’
p. 708.
6 Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, p. 80.
7 Levine, ‘‘The Folklore of Industrial Society,’’ p. 1373.
8 Lears, ‘‘Making Fun,’’ pp. 1422–3 (emphasis added).
9 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. See also Storey, Cultural Studies, pp. 4–5.
10 Walthall, ‘‘Peripheries,’’ p. 386.
11 Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art,’’ pp. 221–2, 241.
12 Thompson and Harootunian, Undercurrents, p. 10; Donald Shively, ‘‘The Social Environment
of Tokugawa Kabuki,’’ in Hume, ed., Japanese Aesthetics, p. 218.
13 Walthall, ‘‘Peripheries,’’ p. 382. See also Nishiyama, Edo Culture, pp. 95–112.
14 Nishiyama, Edo Culture, p. 247.
15 Weisenfeld, Mavo, p. 167.
16 Seigle, Yoshiwara, p. 22.
17 Shively, ‘‘Popular Culture,’’ pp. 706–8, 715–33.
18 Hibbett, The Floating World, pp. 36, 35.
19 Shively, ‘‘The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki,’’ p. 194.
20 Ashkenazi, Matsuri, p. 140. Quotation from Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing,
pp. 35, 41.
21 Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, p. 74. On the engagement between avant-garde
art and commercial culture in the early 1900s, see Weisenfeld, Mavo, pp. 165–215.
POPULAR CULTURE 473
22 Shively, ‘‘The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki,’’ pp. 195–6, 197.
23 Anderson, ‘‘Spoken Silents,’’ pp. 262–5. Quotation from Hibbett, The Floating World,
p. 65.
24 Chikamatsu quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., ‘‘The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics
I, II, III,’’ in Hume, ed., Japanese Aesthetics, p. 74.
25 Nakano, ‘‘The Role of Traditional Aesthetics,’’ p. 129; Nishiyama, Edo Culture, p. 56.
26 Thompson and Harootunian, Undercurrents, p. 27.
27 Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, pp. 25–6.
28 See Yuichiro¯ Takahashi, ‘‘Kabuki Goes Official: The 1878 Opening of the Shintomi-za,’’
in Leiter, ed., A Kabuki Reader, pp. 140–2.
29 See Screech, The Lens within the Heart ; Thompson and Harootunian, Undercurrents,
pp. 27–8.
30 Anderson, ‘‘Spoken Silents,’’ p. 270.
31 Guttman and Thompson, Japanese Sports, pp. 142–5.
32 See Donald Keene, ‘‘Japanese Aesthetics,’’ in Hume, ed., Japanese Aesthetics, pp. 27–41.
33 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, p. 53. See also Russell, ‘‘Consuming Passions,’’
p. 144.
34 See, for instance, Atkins, Blue Nippon, pp. 19–43.
35 Yano, Tears of Longing, pp. 178, 6.
36 Takahashi, ‘‘Kabuki Goes Official,’’ pp. 140–2.
37 Eppstein, ‘‘Musical Instruction,’’ pp. 1, 4.
38 Guttman and Thompson, Japanese Sports, pp. 68–95.
39 Duus, ‘‘The Marumaru Chinbun,’’ pp. 50–4.
40 Atkins, Blue Nippon, pp. 90–1.
41 Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, p. 217.
42 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, p. 75.
43 Napier, Anime, pp. 256, 251.
44 See Silverberg, ‘‘Constructing a New Cultural History,’’ p. 116; and Robertson, Takarazuka,
p. 37.
45 Scott, Domination, pp. 2–4.
46 Yano, Tears of Longing, p. 31.
47 Robertson, Takarazuka, pp. 89–138; Atkins, Blue Nippon, pp. 132–9, 152–9.
48 Napier, Anime, pp. 86–9.
49 Ashkenazi, Matsuri, p. 133.
50 Caron, ‘‘On the Downside,’’ pp. 433–4.
51 Donald Shively, ‘‘Bakufu versus Kabuki,’’ in Leiter, ed., A Kabuki Reader, pp. 36–7;
Samuel Leiter, ‘‘From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki’s Female
Characters,’’ in Leiter, ed., A Kabuki Reader, pp. 211–29; Robertson, Takarazuka, p. 40.
52 Sato, The New Japanese Woman, pp. 19, 14–15.
53 Russell, ‘‘Consuming Passions,’’ p. 135.
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Hume, Nancy, ed. Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader. Albany: State University of New
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Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of
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Iwabuchi Ko¯ichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Kasza, Gregory. The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. ‘‘Making Fun of Popular Culture.’’ American Historical Review (Dec.
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Leiter, Samuel, ed. A Kabuki Reader. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002.
Levine, Lawrence. ‘‘The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences.’’
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Nakano Mitsutoshi, ‘‘The Role of Traditional Aesthetics.’’ In C. Andrew Gerstle, ed., Eighteenth
Century Japan: Culture and Society. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1989.
Napier, Susan. Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Nishiyama Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan. Honolulu:
University of Hawaiœ i Press, 1997.
Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 2001.
Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan.
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Rosenberg, Bernard, and White, David Manning, eds. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
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Russell, John. ‘‘Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transformation, and the Commodification
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FURTHER READING
Paul Varley’s Japanese Culture, 4th edn. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiœ i Press,
2000), provides an overview emphasizing arts and culture. Numerous recent collections
focus on modern and contemporary pop: Richard Powers and Hidetoshi Kato¯’s
Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture (New York: Greenwood, 1989); Joseph
Tobin’s Re-made in Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Lise Skov
and Brian Moeran’s Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (Honolulu: University
of Hawaiœ i Press, 1995); John Treat’s Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture
(Honolulu: University of Hawaiœ i Press, 1996); Mark Schilling’s Encyclopedia of
Japanese Pop Culture (New York: Weatherhill, 1997); Sepp Linhart and Sabine
Fru¨hstu¨ck’s The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998); D. P. Martinez’s The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Timothy Craig’s Japan Pop!
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); and Douglas Slaymaker’s A Century of Popular
Culture in Japan (Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellen, 2000). Recent studies emphasizing
gender and sexuality include: Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic
Images in Japan, 1700–1820 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiœ i Press, 1999); Joshua
Mostow et al., eds., Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu:
University of Hawaiœ i Press, 2003); and Phyllis Birnbaum’s Modern Girls, Shining
Stars, the Skies of Tokyo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
476 E. TAYLOR ATKINS