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Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited for marketing. This book offers ethnographic case studies on the symbolic qualities of idols and how they relate to the conceptualization of self among adolescents.
This book situates the Chinese acceptance of Japanese popular culture, specifically the intriguing and sometimes awkward relationship between the “idol” groups AKB48 and SNH48, within the broad context of nationalist ideology and international relations in East Asia. It aims to enhance the knowledge and understanding of the reader about contemporary East Asian cultural exchanges and nationalist expressions in concrete forms. Additionally, this book attempts to discover heretofore overlooked aspects of nationalism’s metamorphosis in both China and Japan and challenge the existing scholarly and popular understandings of nationalism. By interrogating the nationalism factor in popular culture in Chinese and Japanese contexts, this books concludes that popular culture fandom can both be a culprit in promoting hegemonic political ideologies and serve as a potential antidote.
The first scholarly volume to investigate the impact of social media and other communication technologies on the global dissemination of the Korean Wave
Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia is the first attempt to explore how the tumultuous years between 1931 and 1953 have been recreated and renegotiated in cinema. This period saw traumatic conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War, and the Korean War, and pivotal events such as the Rape of Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which left a lasting imprint on East Asia and the world. By bringing together a variety of specialists in the cinemas of East Asia and offering divergent yet complementary perspectives, the book explores how the legacies of war have been reimagined through the lens of film. This ...
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This study introduces the concepts of naturalization and naturalized modernity, and uses them as tools for understanding the way modernity has been experienced and portrayed in Japanese literature since the end of the Second World War. Special emphasis is given to four leading post-war writers – Kawabata Yasunari, Abe Kobo, Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu. The author argues that notions of ‘shock’ in modern city life in Japan (as exemplified in the writings of Walter Benjamin and George Simmel), while present in the work of older Japanese writers, do not appear to hold true in much contemporary Japanese literature: it is as if the ‘shock’ impact of change has evolved as a ‘naturalized’ or ‘Japanized’ process. The author focuses on the implications of this phenomenon, both in the context of the theory of modernity and as an opportunity to reevaluate the works of his chosen writers.
An argument that not only do movement and agreement occur in every language, they also work in tandem to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. An unusual property of human language is the existence of movement operations. Modern syntactic theory from its inception has dealt with the puzzle of why movement should occur. In this monograph, Shigeru Miyagawa combines this question with another, that of the occurrence of agreement systems. Using data from a wide range of languages, he argues that movement and agreement work in tandem to achieve a specific goal: to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. Without movement and agreement, he contends, human language wo...