Gabriella Lukács

Scripted affects, branded selves : television, subjectivity, and capitalism in 1990s Japan

In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves , Gabriella Lukacs analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City , trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukacs suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukacs argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.

Iron Chef around the world: Japanese food television, soft power, and cultural globalization

Iron Chef is a Japanese television show in which cooks from around the world challenge the chefs of an eccentric millionaire. By appealing to audiences worldwide, Iron Chef epitomized a new trend in international media trade — a conspicuous rise in the exports of made-in-Japan media entertainment. Scholars have argued that this trend testifies to a shift in Japan’s status in the realm of soft power. This article uses the case of Iron Chef as an entry point to discuss the analytical limitations of the soft power discourse in theorizing shifting patterns of cultural globalization. I argue that this discourse fails to capture the complexities of how cable networks use and how viewers respond to imported media entertainment. I conclude that soft power is a tale of Euro-American modernity that renationalizes transnational cultural traffic in reaction to anxieties that the decentering forces of global capitalism will corrupt the sovereignty of the nation-state.

Labor Games: Youth, Work, and Politics in East Asia

The departure point for this introduction is the proposition that youth unemployment and underemployment are not social anomalies, but they are the new faces of labor for youth in East Asia. This introductory essay argues that a global crisis in capitalism that began in the early 1970s and peaked in the late 1990s pressured China, Japan, and South Korea to mobilize (and disenfranchise) their young demographics in their transitions from a developmental state model of economic growth toward a neoliberal model of economic management and governance. As such, the essay argues, China, Japan, and South Korea gamble with the future of their younger population in order to secure their country’s place in neoliberal globalization. Further, the introduction reviews pertinent literature on the developmental state, neoliberalism, affective/emotional labor, and postcapitalist politics that the contributors engage in developing their arguments. Lastly, it offers an overview of the specific facets of youth unemployment and underemployment that the individual authors explore in their essays.

The Labor of Cute: Net Idols, Cute Culture, and the Digital Economy in Contemporary Japan

This essay analyzes how the digital media economy harnesses young people’s search for meaningful work to develop new apparatuses and mechanisms of extracting value from activities that are not typically recognized as work. Drawing on interviews with net idols and an analysis of the digital infrastructure that evolved around the trend, the essay offers three arguments. First, it claims that the digital economy has adopted a particular mode of accumulation — the social factory — that has expanded sources of value extraction by blurring the boundaries between paid/productive and unpaid/reproductive labor. Second, this essay conceptualizes the net idols’ production of cute culture as emotional labor and claims that the digital media economy has effectively expanded the practices through which value is extracted from women’s unwaged labor far beyond the domestic sphere. Third, it demonstrates that young women did not uncritically embrace this logic. Rather, they insisted on using digital media to gain leverage in the labor market and improve their chances for upward social mobility. The essay concludes that, resonant with the ways in which women’s unwaged labor in the home was instrumental to maintaining the socioeconomic order of the high-growth period, women’s unpaid emotional labor remains central to a society in which labor precarity generates a demand for emotional labor. At the same time, by promoting to young people digital media as tools they can utilize to develop new skills, the digital economy makes the idea of unpaid labor more acceptable by repositioning it as a prerequisite to attain lucrative and meaningful work.