Alisa Freedman

“Count What You Have Now. Don't Count What You Don't Have”: The Japanese Television Drama Around 40 and the Politics of Women's Happiness

Abstract Voted top new Japanese word of 2008, “arafô”, abbreviated from the English “around forty”, has been used in various media to describe women born between 1964 and 1973, who came of age during Japans Bubble Era, and who entered the workforce as the countrys Equal Employment Opportunity Lawwas being implemented in 1986. Arafô, or “forty-something women”, theoretically have more choices in relation to work and family than previous generations. During a time when society is ageing, their choices in employment, marriage and childbirth have been judged in journalistic and government discourses to be both progressive and problematic. At the same time, arafô have been associated with difficulties regarding individual freedom in the spate of television programs, books and magazines for and about them. The term and the gender trends it encapsulates were brought to national attention by the critically acclaimed 2008 television drama Araundo 40: Chûmon no ôi onnatachi (trans. Around 40: Demanding Women). We situate Around 40 in discussions about Japans demographic crisis to argue that the series presents a wide array of life courses available for women near age 40 but ultimately recasts postwar gender roles for the 21st-century sociopolitical climate. Around 40 shows how the diversification of life courses is interpreted in the influential medium of television drama.

Erotic, grotesque, nonsense: the mass culture of modern times

The 1920s through the 1940s was a time of unprecedented change in Japan. Tokyo, more than other cities, became a construct through which to view the advances and contradictions of national modernisation characterised by both capitalist growth and control of the police state. Tokyo was rebuilt after the 1923 earthquake into a modern metropolis and was filled with mass transportation, new architecture and crowds at work and play in bustling business and entertainment districts. The urban labour force grew and new middle classes arose. Yet, economic recessions were a source of social instability and the numbers of unemployed and homeless increased. Publishing industries flourished, while subject to strict censorship, and a variety of magazines became available for a diverse readership. In the late 1920s and early 1930s mass media, literature and visual culture, the Anglicised buzzwords ero, guro, and nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense) were widely used to describe, playfully and pejoratively, the spectacles that epitomised Tokyo’s excitement and dangers. Especially as war escalated and imperialist ventures in Asia increased in the 1930s and 1940s, allegiance to the emperor as the spiritual leader and supreme military commander was demanded of the Japanese people. An academic field has developed to re-examine this complex time (the effects of which are still felt today) and to reconsider Tokyo mass culture, once dismissed as urban decadence or as mere propaganda. Miriam Silverberg, late professor of Japanese history and gender, spearheaded this research. Silverberg’s Erotic grotesque nonsense: the mass culture of modern times is, in a sense, a compilation album of extended versions of her previously published articles, connected and contextualised with new essays serving as liner notes. It represents a decade of research before her death in 2008. Here, and in her other work, Silverberg argues that mass culture is a means to understanding politics, society and economics. This is especially true of interwar Japan, for authors, journalists and filmmakers with different ideological stances shared what Silverberg calls a ‘documentary impulse’, a fascination for cataloguing and debating the material content of Tokyo daily life. Using an approach that combines extensive archival research and close textual reading, Silverberg proves that films, middlebrow literature, popular songs, Tokyo guidebooks, and especially masscirculation magazines provide access into emotional experience of this ‘self-consciously double-edged modernity’, in which Japanese people had agency as consumers but were interpolated as imperial subjects. Silverberg demonstrates that intellectuals, then as well as now, play an important role in interpreting dominant trends. She brings seminal texts by twentieth-century Japanese cultural critics to the attention of English-speaking readers. Silverberg has been particularly influential in disclosing how issues of gender and class structure Japanese modernity. She is perhaps best known for her work on the ‘modern girl’ (modan gāru or moga), a media figure prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s as explained below. Silverberg’s 1991 article on the ‘Modern Girl as Militant’ (reprinted in this

Stories of boys and buildings: Ishida Ira's 4-Teen in 2002 Tokyo

Abstract During the past few years, the construction of luxury residential and commercial towers in neighborhoods along the Sumida River has accelerated dramatically, altering the social composition and cultural images associated with downtown Tokyo. The new buildings stand in contrast to the sinking economy and are markers of the growing gap between rich and poor. They also reflect the pattern of urban construction and destruction as well as the unobtainable desires promised by commodity capitalism. Concurrently, the Japanese media have featured articles on the escalation of youth crime and discontent, as well as the many forms of corruption that teenagers are exposed to in transformed downtown Tokyo. The 2002 Naoki literary prize was awarded to a book that reacts to both urban development and the problems facing Tokyo adolescents – Ishida Iras 4-Teen. Ishida shows the effects of Tokyos transformations on teenage social norms and uses descriptions of urban places to reveal contradictions embedded in these roles. Ishidas eighth graders show hope despite an estranging cityscape, poor economic conditions and violence. In this article, I combine literary analysis and architectural history to examine the context of 4-Teens publication and the awarding of the Naoki Prize. I explore how stories that mix fiction and historical experience provide new ways of viewing the changes in Tokyo.

Street nonsense: Ryūtanji Yū and the fascination with interwar Tokyo absurdity

Abstract Interwar Japanese authors who sought to convey the power of the city called for the creation of literary realism based on incongruous images that represented the times. They used the buzzword ‘nansensu’ to describe aspects of Tokyo that epitomized their historical moment and to position themselves against proletarian literature, which they attacked for not presenting the realities of modern life. Although glamorizing poverty, nansensu literature made ordinary occurrences alluring and critiqued social conditions. Ryūtanji Yū (1901–92), then widely read but now rarely studied, exemplified the aspirations of nansensu literature. He was also the spokesperson for the New Art School (Shinkō geijutsu-ha), the coalition to which most authors engaged in this literary trend belonged. A former medical student with a lifelong interest in cacti, Ryūtanji had an eye for urban details. Ryūtanjis ‘street nonsense’, to borrow the title of his 1930 anthology, magnified common Tokyo spectacles to expose how the city shaped human subjectivity and cultural production. I explore how Ryūtanji used nansensu lightheartedly to critique places and practices that were becoming part of daily life, expose paradoxes underlying Japans capitalist growth and parody the act of writing. Ryūtanjis career provides insights into the publishing industry of the time and his stories reveal the contradictions of urban modernity during a complex historical period.

Our Gang Age, 1970

Uehara Noboru (1947) is a member of the generation of postwar Okinawans who grew up throwing stones at, and taking hits in return from, American children in the housing area for foreigners near the U.S. military bases. “Our Gang Age, 1970” (1970-nen gyangu eiji) first appeared in the November 10, 1982 issue of the Ryūkyū shinpō (Ryūkyū News) and was awarded the magazine’s short story prize. The year 1970 is remembered in Okinawa for the Koza riot. Koza was the name of the city established by the U.S. military government in the area formerly called Goeku. Present-day Okinawa City (founded in 1974) combines Koza and the neighboring village of Misato. It had been known since late 1969 that Okinawa would revert to Japan in 1972, but tensions rose as it became clear that the U.S. military was to remain in Okinawa leaving the bases intact. Clashes between American servicemen and Okinawan civilians increased, and crimes, such as rape, homicide, child sexual abuse, and robbery, were committed by soldiers returning from Vietnam. In 1970 alone, 960 criminal cases and more than 1,000 traffic accidents were reported.1 The U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement protected American servicemen from prosecution by the Ryukyuan police. On July 8, 1969, fatally poisonous gas leaked from a secret American military powder factory in Misato. On December 7, American servicemen who killed an Okinawan woman from Itoman in a September 1970 traffic accident were acquitted. Okinawan citizens’ resentment about the above events and others boiled over in the December 20 Koza riot. Triggered by a traffic accident just after one o’clock in the morning in which an American soldier hit an Okinawan civilian employee, rioting continued past dawn; over seventy-five American cars were burned, and more than 120 people were injured. The Okinawan children in Uehara’s story only fight with American children their age; they are friendly toward American adults. There is, moreover, a tacit understanding Our Gang Age, 1970 Uehara Noboru

Selections from "Ukiyo-e Landscapes and Edo Scenic Places"

Author Nagai Kafū (1879-1959; given name Nagai Sōkichi ) is best known for his fictionalized personal travel accounts American Stories (Amerika monogatari, 1908) and French Stories (Furansu monogatari, 1915), short stories and novellas about Tokyo courtesans and low-ranking geisha, and an extensive illustrated diary, Dyspepsia House Diary (Danchōtei nichijō, 1917-59). Kafū was fascinated with Edo-period (1603-1868) culture, especially that of the chōnin, or urban commoners. He prided himself on his resemblance to Edo literati, such as poet Ōta Nanpo (also known as Shokusanjin, discussed in the selection below), who used kyōka (playful, often satirical, poetry) as an elegant form of veiled social commentary. Kafū challenged authority throughout his career, as evidenced in his professed dislike of Meijiperiod (1868-1912) leaders, his opposition to the war and Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s, and conflicts with censors and publishers.

Introduction to the special issue on Geographies of Childhood: Japanese versions of global children's culture

This special issue explores the social, political and economic significance of global children’s culture in Japan. In recent years, there has been much discussion about how Japan has lingered on the global stage even while its economic power has declined through the robust export of popular culture (see, for example, McGray 2002, Tobin 2004, Allison 2006). Yet scholars have largely ignored Japan’s import of international children’s media, a cultural exchange that has shaped world views, defined artistic genres and been integral to the commercial landscape. Trends among children worldwide have taken new forms for different ages of Japanese consumers. Kewpie – conceived in a 1909 comic strip by American Rose O’Neill, manufactured as dolls in Germany in 1912 and sold in Japan in 1913 – became the mascot for the Japanese Kewpie Company (established in 1919) and was used to advertise mayonnaise in 1925 (Takauchishotenshisha henshubu 2001, 127–131). In 2013 an exhibit on ‘Snoopy Japanesque’, that is, an exhibit of traditional Japanese crafts in the image of Charles M. Schultz’s Snoopy, was held in department stores and museums nationwide. Finnish author Tove Jansson’s Moomins were adapted into a sixty-five-episode Japanese television anime (Mumin, Fuji Television, 1969–1970) that took liberties with the original books; similarly, Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s Heidi books became the 1974 Heidi: girl of the Alps (Arupusu o shojo Haiji, Fuji Television, fifty-two episodes), directed by Isao Takahata and designed by Miyazaki Hayao, the duo who founded Studio Ghibli in 1985. ThisHeidi was dubbed and broadcast in Europe, Latin America and Asia. Likewise, the examples here – Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid stories, Dr. Seuss’s picture books, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, masked television superheroes and the educational Sesame Street – represent positive ways in which the global marketing of books, television

Sesame Street's place in Japan: marketing multicultural New York in cosmopolitan Tokyo

Abstract Sesame Street, the longest running and most popular childrens program in world television history, has failed to gain a large fan base in Japan because of notions of place. Since 1969, Sesame Street has taught socialization skills, pioneered programming formats, developed marketing strategies and spread American ideologies. Sesame Street has aired in English in 145 countries; over thirty countries have developed localized versions. Japans NHK public television broadcast Sesame Street from 1971 to 2004 to teach English to secondary-school students. In 2004, Sesame Street was moved to the commercial TV Tokyo network and was localized. Muppets were added to appeal to younger children. Yet the program was cancelled in 2007. A key to Sesame Streets worldwide success has been teaching cognitive skills and promoting compassion for local cultural differences, while tapping consumer desires for idealized American childhood. When New York was erased and the English language removed, Sesame Street could not compete with Japans already extensive childrens television market. Sesame Street characters, however, became more successful when removed from their original context. I overview five aspects of Sesame Street in Japan and Japan in Sesame Street that best exemplify the programs cultural and consumerist politics, significance in television history and the image of urban society it represents. Namely, I analyze Sesame Streets place on childrens television, the reasons for its importation and localization, depictions of Japan, broadcast history and legacy after cancellation. I argue that the kind of popularity Sesame Street has enjoyed in Japan is different than in other countries and provides insight into the Japanese television industry and marketing of American childhood. I explore a historical moment when television was particularly influential in international relations and in constructing notions of ‘home’.