Queer will: hikikomori as willful subjects

This article considers hikikomori as willful subjects. The hikikomori are a portion of the Japanese population who withdraw into their homes. These are mostly young people (between the ages of 15 and 35) and mostly young men. The focus of this article is how hikikomori constitute a challenge to dominant national imaginaries of Japan as a “corporate-family system.” This article analyses popular media and psychiatric representations of hikikomori, particularly from Saitô’s work as exemplifying Ahmed’s notion of “willful subjects.” It is argued that the hikikomori’s apparent willfulness produces them as Queer subjects who are out of place and pace with the dominant heteronormative, masculinist culture of contemporary Japan.     

The Itinerary to Explore Headwaters of the New Left’s Cultural Studies

Abstract

The 1980s was a period when the academic current for leisure studies led to the birth of the study of sports history. Japan was not a latecomer in this scholarly stream. More significantly, cultural issues were thought not the part of various phenomena in a society, but the key issues for class integration and class strife. After writing my PhD thesis on Pierce Egan, one of the earliest sport journalists influenced by the idea of early radicals in the nineteenth-century Britain, my attention turned over to the question of why the study of sport history was necessary. There was the academic impact inherited from the New Left’s belief that ‘without understanding the state of people’s culture, class issues are unable to be truly comprehended’. The Initiation of sport journalism had a similar destiny. This consequence appears to be a synchroflash between the early radicals’ concern in popular culture in the nineteenth century and the New Left’s interest in cultural studies in the twentieth century. There was an obvious reason why the radical essayists and contemporary academics had to pay attention to the ‘cultural turn’ with critical thinking in a society.     

‘We Will Try Again,Again, Again to Make It Bigger’: Japan,American Football,and the Super Bowl in the Past,Present, and Future

Abstract

This study is to analyse how the Japanese have traditionally received and currently perceive the Super Bowl, and for this purpose, it aims to locate the position of American football in Japanese history, society, and culture. It explores the game’s history and then examine the degree of its spread among Japan’s sporting population. A two-dimensional approach of historical study and inter-game comparison gives context to the analyses of reference frequency and contents of news media, followed by speculative discussions of what the near future of Japan’s American football would be like. To conclude, it clarifies the ways the Super Bowl has been received and is now being perceived by two groups: The first group is the general people who see the Super Bowl as the convenient and useful medium by which they could learn effectively about American culture through the one-night mania for ‘conspicuous consumption’. The second group comprises American football experts and enthusiasts, including 13,000 athletes and their OBs, coaches, trainers, and other staff members of the leagues and associations as well as the general sports fans. For this group, the Super Bowl is the apex of their favourite sport to which only a selected talented few could join.     

日本竞技体育发展策略研究

21世纪日本实施了一系列竞技体育发展策略并取得显著成效,基本策略包括运动员训练与比赛补助机制、对举办国际赛事的地方团体资助机制、重视体育指导者的培训和国外进修、构筑运动员培养与选拔的一贯指导系统、发挥科技医学情报信息作用。分析和总结21世纪日本竞技体育发展策略及其优势,对改革转型期的中国竞技体育制定适宜的发展策略有重要参考意义。     

Young precariat at the forefront: anti-nuclear rallies in post-Fukushima Japan

Japan suffered a catastrophic disaster on March 11, 2011. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation leakage from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant devastated the northeastern part of the country and threatened the entire country and beyond with the risk of radiation. Nowadays, movements against nuclear power plants are emerging across the country. The crisis indeed provides a chance for Japan to forge a new energy policy. However, the activists' claims are not narrowly limited to such energy issues. They call for a fundamentally fairer society and propose alternative ways of life, regarding nuclear power plants as symbols supporting the economic development that Japan enjoyed over the post-Second World War period. As an ethnography, this paper documents the 60,000-citizen Goodbye Nuclear Power Plants (Sayonara Genpatsu) rally that mobilized in central Tokyo on September 19, 2011, as well as the Occupy Tokyo action on October 15, 2011 Occupy Tokyo オキュパイ東京. 2011. “Occupy Tokyo, the Rally and Demonstration in Shinjuku” “オキュパイ東京新宿の集会とデモ.” YouTube video, 9:19, from a demonstration recorded on October 15 and posted on October 17, done by Shinya Adachi. http://youtube/FoKkhRAkwJU  [Google Scholar], presenting the real voices of the rally participants against nuclear power. In particular, I will focus on the voices of young precariat participants, the major actors in the anti-nuclear rally who were generated from and revealed as the negative result of Japan's neoliberal economic policy, held since the 2000s. Further, I argue that their mounting anger might be a trigger for new post-neoliberal politics in post-Fukushima Japan.     

Intermarriage and imperial subject formation in colonial Taiwan: Shōji Sōichi's Chin-fujin

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the political significance of Shōji Sōichi's Chin-fujin (The wife of Mr. Chen), an intricate story of an interracial family in colonial Taiwan struggling to come to terms with their cultural identifications against the backdrop of political upheavals in the late 1910s to the mid-1930s. The novel was well received in wartime Japan and received a 1943 Greater East Asia Literary Prize. Contemporary critics praised it for depicting the perseverance of a Japanese woman married into a Taiwanese family and for representing a Han-Taiwanese intellectual realistically. Yet it was the political effect of the novel that was appreciated by those who selected it for the prize. Shōji demonstrated how the policy and political discourse of the Japanese empire could be acted out in a site of family life, the site that was regarded as critically important for colonial control. He depicted a Taiwanese elite man, his Japanese wife, and their mixed-blood daughter as trying to transcend the old categorical distinction between metropolitan Japanese and natives of Taiwan and seeking a new unified identity position based on colonial Taiwan. I want to show the repressive nature of the national subject formation outlined in this colonial fantasy.     

The undulating contours of sōgō geijutsu (total work of art), or Hanada Kiyoteru's thoughts on transmedia in postwar Japan

This article provides an insight into the theorization of sōgō geijutsu or the work of total art during the postwar decades in Japan, primarily through the language of Hanada Kiyoteru, a notable communist critic during the 1950s, as a way to present a discursive precursor to what would be explored as intermedia in the 1960s. It is an attempt to trace the debates that were seen in journal Sōgō Bunka, which was established immediately after the war, and how the question of collectivity and collective production of art was discussed among the contributing critics, artists, and intellectuals. Totality as some may know already, is a problematic term that comes close to the wartime notion of ‘totality’, as it was employed for Japanese government's ideological deployment for its war efforts. Although the term has accrued a sinister ring, the critics mentioned in the article, especially Hanada, were determined to reclaim the term as a way of devising a postwar aesthetic-political platform. One important component of sōgō geijutsu was popular art and its relationship to the masses, as it was designed to relocate avant-garde art practices to the juncture of popular space and political praxis, while critiquing the modernist avant-garde art associated with high art. In addition to providing a fuller historiography of intermedia (or transmedia) in Japan, interrogating sōgō geijutsu also serves to shed some light on the complex and multivalent discourse of locating a ‘people’ and their communicative action. Through this history, the term totality gains a greater texture, no longer dismissible as a mere vestige of fascism in the minds of the Japanese artists and critics.     

Rajnikant in Japan: Indian “superstardom” and low value markets

This paper draws attention to some questions thrown up by the increased circulation of mass-produced cultural commodities sourced from Asia in the relatively new markets of the region. Juxtaposing the short-lived success of the Indian star Rajnikant in Japan in the late 1990s and the unsuccessful attempt to promote Korean films in the Indian theatrical circuits a decade later, the paper argues that in spite of their considerable differences both instances foreground the difficulties cultural industries of Asia have in generating revenues in the region's markets. The paper goes on to elaborate on a model of stardom, exemplified by Rajnikant, which has evolved as a direct response to the challenges posed by low value markets.     

Scandalous equivocation: a note on the politics of queer self‐naming

Abstract

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self‐naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non‐normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter‐discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous ‘name’ may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named.     

中日足球青少年培养比较

通过查阅文献资料和专家访谈等研究方法,对中日足球青少年培养工作进行比较后发现:日本足球较中国足球的发展目标既长远又具体;培养途径上,日本非常重视学校足球的开展,中国则过多依赖俱乐部后备梯队和足球学校;中国足球青少年培养成本远远高于日本;中国高水平的青少年足球教练员较少,围绕青少年足球培养的理论研究还不够深入,缺乏先进的、科学的训练理念和方法手段;日本高度重视足球青少年文化教育,中国却是将足球训练与文化学习对立起来。由此提出改善中国足球青少年培养工作具体对策:足球管理部门、教育部门、社会企业以及家庭要多方共同携手;要高度重视青少年足球人才的文化教育,树立"以足球培育完人"的培养思想;加强青少年足球教练员队伍建设,做到科学化指导与训练;要充分利用中国的人口优势。只有在全国范围内掀起青少年足球热潮,中国足球才能真正做到可持续发展。