Carolyn S. Stevens

You Are What You Buy: Postmodern Consumption and Fandom of Japanese Popular Culture

In recent years, Japanese popular culture has received much attention both inside and outside the academy. Its success overseas has contributed to theories of transnational cultural flow, ‘soft power’ and ‘Gross National Cool’. At the same time, public opinion of fans, both in Japan and overseas, remains low. This article attempts to rescue fandom from its current association with social ostracism, placing it instead in a logical structure of a historical consumer culture in Japan and in the West. Fandom can be considered a rational consumer strategy, rather than a deviant psychological attribute, when considered within the hyper-developed context of a media-saturated, late-capitalist consumer society. Fandom, when viewed from this perspective, can be distinguished from pathological behaviour and focuses on pleasure, the pursuit of social capital, and individualised identity building, especially in a society where traditional corporate groups such as the family or the workplace no longer offer the same attraction.

Disability, caregiving and interpellation: migrant and non‐migrant families of children with disabilities in urban Australia

The process of interpellation (and its opposite, misinterpellation) is taken as a metaphor for understanding the lived experience of personal difference. This research focuses on two interpellative experiences: disability and migrant status. Parents of children with moderate to profound intellectual disabilities were asked about their engagement with the community; their access to support programs; and their sense of well‐being. Responses were divided between the non‐migrants (who were misinterpellated once) and migrants (who were misinterpellated twice). Were the migrant parents doubly isolated due to migrant status and carer status? What differences were there between migrant and non‐migrant responses to their parental experience? Although migrant parents were more negative about their children’s future, they rated themselves as equally happy and socially connected as non‐migrant parents.The process of interpellation (and its opposite, misinterpellation) is taken as a metaphor for understanding the lived experience of personal difference. This research focuses on two interpellative experiences: disability and migrant status. Parents of children with moderate to profound intellectual disabilities were asked about their engagement with the community; their access to support programs; and their sense of well‐being. Responses were divided between the non‐migrants (who were misinterpellated once) and migrants (who were misinterpellated twice). Were the migrant parents doubly isolated due to migrant status and carer status? What differences were there between migrant and non‐migrant responses to their parental experience? Although migrant parents were more negative about their children’s future, they rated themselves as equally happy and socially connected as non‐migrant parents.

Touch: Encounters with Japanese Popular Culture

1The papers for this special issue are based on a panel presentation at the American Anthropological Association Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 3 December 2009, with contributors Ian Condry...

Globalisation and Body Politics

‘Globalization’ is on everyone’s lips; a fad word fast turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a pass-key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries. For some, ‘globalization’ is what we are bound to do if we wish to be happy; for others ‘globalization’ is the cause of our unhappiness. For everybody, though, ‘globalization’ is the intractable fate of the world, an irreversible process; it is also a process which affects us all in the same measure and in the same way. We are all being ‘globalized’ – and being ‘globalized’ means much the same to all who ‘globalized’ are (Bauman, 1998, p. 1).

Running risks of gender inequity: knowledge transfer policy in Australian higher education

Knowledge transfer (KT), or third stream activities of universities, has attracted attention from funding and regulatory bodies in recent years. While approaches differ from country to country, moves to improve measurement and monitoring of such activities with a view to encourage or better direct it have occurred in several settings. This article analyses some issues arising from moves to define and measure KT in an Australian university. There are tensions between approaches to definition and measurement that focus on research commercialisation and those that acknowledge the benefit derived from broader activities of universities. We argue that budgetary pressures which focus attention on commercialisation can lead to the adoption of KT policy that is likely to have harmful consequences for academic staff in the long term. In particular, policy with a priority on commercial benefit has the potential to reinforce the existing disadvantage of female staff by according lower value to work directed to public or community benefit, and focusing on successful outcomes rather than the time and effort needed for KT development. These issues need to be considered in developing policy to define and measure KT.

Living with Disability in Urban Japan

This article explores the uneasy juxtaposition between the user access and user reality of ‘barrier-free design’ (bariafurii desain) in urban Japan. It argues that the growing number of accessibility features in Japanese public spaces has not necessarily resulted in a ‘barrier-free’ society. While these visible reminders raise public awareness about the difficulties physical and intellectual disabilities present to individuals, people with disabilities and their carers still live in physically narrowed spaces, primarily because of the reality of the urban landscape and pressure from the number of users.

Disability in Japan

1. Introduction: Thinking about Anthropology, Disability, and Japan 2. Disability in the Japanese Context 3. Disability, Language, and Meaning 4. Disability Policy and Law in Modern Japan 5. Disability and the Life Cycle 6. Caregiving 7. Accessibility: Complementing Environments with Bodies, and Minds 8. Conclusion

Debating Human Rights and Prenatal Testing in Japan

Abstract 1 Disability in Japan is often conflated with the problems of an ageing society, but the disability identity is not one merely associated with the ageing process. As diagnostic science inches our understanding of disability further and further back into ever earlier stages of the individual’s life course, the disability identity can be taken on at the very earliest ages. The use of prenatal testing has an impact on our understanding of disability because prenatal testing and selective abortion challenges our views of disability by asking bluntly, “Is this life worth living?” This article analyses the literature on prenatal screening in Japan by comparing and contrasting its findings with autoethnographic vignettes. The literature presents a complex juxtaposition between law, technology, culture and personal values where two parties claim human rights primacy: the person with a disability and the reproductive woman. The positions of various stakeholders – the medical profession, activist groups, families and individual mothers – demonstrate that prenatal testing poses ethical questions regarding disability and human rights. This analysis also demonstrates the importance of communication at all stages of the process.

Irasshai! Sonic Practice as Commercial Enterprise in Urban Japan

ABSTRACT Street music in Japan is often associated with the performance of one’s shōbai, translated as one’s trade, business, or occupation. An examination of sonic practices in the public performance of retail work in Japan traces the links and departures between premodern, modern, and postmodern expressions, focusing on the affective interpretation of work songs and chants through the notion of gambaru (striving for achievement). While recorded music has mostly replaced live performances of street music in contemporary urban Japan, recordings that sell certain everyday products still reference traditional practices, creating a sense of nostalgia and renewed longing for these products. This strategy, however, can also fail when consumer expectations do not match the nostalgic vision. These sonic expressions (yobikomi, the “calling in” of customers) can serve as an index for the workers’ sense of engagement with their trade, but in post-recessional Japanese society, the sound of customer service can also be linked to the workers’ relationship to the workplace and consumers’ expectations about value for money.