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THE WORLDS OF JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE: GENDER, SHIFTING BOUNDARIES AND GLOBAL CULTURES EDITED BY D. P. MARTINEZ Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998
212 pages. Cloth, 40; paper, i14.95
Japan, the Japanese used to complain, could export its products, but not its culture. The solution, for many years, was to underwrite overseas tours of kabuki troupes and exhibitions of tea ceremony utensils. But what the world really wanted, as it turned out, was Nintendo games and animation videos. As a consequence, college students in the West are more likely to be acquainted with the robots and other high-tech mecha created by cartoonist Otomo Katsuhiro than the aesthetics of tea master Zeami (13631443).
Interest in Japanese popular culture is flourishing abroad not only at mall game centers and within anime fan clubs, but in academia, as studies of everything from Hello Kitty merchandise to soft-porn pinku eiga pour from university journals and presses. Unlike their students, however, academics need a justification and focus for their enthusiasm. What aspects of Japanese pop culture are worthy of attention? How does one organize the study of a subject so diffuse?
One solution is that of the interdisciplinary collection of scholarly papers, with an editor providing the necessary filter. The strengths and weaknesses of such an approach are evident in The Worlds of japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by Dolores P. Martinez of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. A lecturer in anthropology, Martinez recruited five of the book's 10 contributors from her own discipline, and commissioned essays from a linguist, a journalist, a film theorist and two literary scholars. The range of nationalities represented is likewise broad, with contributors from Japan, Britain, North America and Iceland, although most are currently teaching or working in Japan.
Her aim is to present a diverse collection of views, from both the Japanese and Western sides of the cultural divide, organized around the three themes of gender, global culture and the shifting of cultural boundaries within Japan.
The anthropologist's job, Martinez reminds us in the introduction, is to "explore the relationships between material culture and symbolic culture."
"It is the interaction between these apparently separate aspects of society," she continues, "that...