Mie Hiramoto

Wax on, wax off: mediatized Asian masculinity through Hollywood martial arts films

Abstract This paper examines the mediatization of Asian masculinity in representative Hollywood martial arts films to expose the essentialism on which such films rely. Asian martial arts films are able to tap into viewers’ familiarity with idealized images of Asian masculinity; such familiarity is an essential part of the pleasure provided by these films and hence of their economic success. This study focuses on non-Asian (that is, western) protagonists’ appropriation of Asian masculinity because it succinctly encapsulates precisely how western hegemonies co-opt and commodify Asian-ness for their own purposes. Such appropriation is a use of intertextuality that not only allows western viewers to easily access a simplified model of Asian masculinity, but also allows them to reference earlier works to further facilitate the mediation and mediatization of Asian masculinity. This is a process which continues to Other and exoticizes Asian identities, even as it ostensibly carves out a niche for Asian bodies and identities in the institution of the film industry.

Inked Nostalgia: Displaying Identity through Tattoos as Hawaii Local Practice.

Almost a century after the end of the period of Japanese immigration to Hawaii plantations, the Japanese language is no longer the main medium of communication among local Japanese in Hawaii. Today, use of the Japanese language and associated traditional images are often used symbolically rather than literally to convey their meanings, and this is becoming more prevalent among locals through the medium of tattooing. Furthermore, tattooed texts and visual images now are imbued with additional local-specific indexicals that distance them from native Japanese from Japan. These tattoos are not just a fashion statement as the tattooees are committed to their own identity as represented by them. These inked identities have a value in the local community that draws on Japaneseness, but a form of Japaneseness does not necessarily share native Japanese values. Based on the data used for this study, it is clear that this method of declaring ‘true’ Japaneseness is decried as unthinkable and unacceptable to native Japanese. These different perceptions of Japanese text and images in tattoos suggest that because of their mobility, the immigrant Japanese group went through a radical transition and created new cultural values in a new homeland.

Utterance‐final position and projection of femininity in Japanese

Japanese female speakers frequent use of suprasegmental features such as higher pitch, longer duration, wider pitch range, and more instances of rising intonation vis‐a‐vis male speakers, is recognized as Japanese womens language (JWL) prosody. However, these features normally co‐occur with gender‐specific sentence‐final particles (SFPs) like the strongly feminine ‘‘kashira.’’ In this study, we examined the use of pitch and duration in utterances without SFPs, to determine whether JWL prosody is a function of SFPs or of utterance‐final position. Eight male and eight female native Japanese speakers were instructed to read prepared sentences as though auditioning for a masculine theater role and then as though auditioning for a feminine role. Results indicate that utterance‐final position is the projection point of JWL prosody even in the absence of SFPs. The data used for this study show high pitch, wide pitch range, long duration, and rising intonation at utterance‐final positions when produced (by both m...