University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Animated subjects: globalization, media, and East Asian cultural imaginaries

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Animated subjects: globalization, media, and East Asian cultural imaginaries

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Content ANIMATED SUBJECTS: GLOBALIZATION, MEDIA, AND EAST ASIAN CULTURAL IMAGINARIES by Jiwon Ahn A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) May 2008 Copyright 2008 Jiwon Ahn ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Animated Subjects: on the Circulation of Japanese Animation as Global Cultural Products 22 Chapter 2: Fans and Players: Costuming Bodies and Consuming Pleasures 51 Chapter 3: Manga Visions and Anime Dreams: Anime Art and Ways of Seeing 106 Chapter 4: For a Textual Analysis of Absent Narrative Texts in Global Character Products 139 Chapter 5: Hard-boiled Robotica: Giant Robot and the Globalization of Asian Cool 160 Chapter 6: Disrobing the National Body: the Transnationalization of the Recent South Korean History Film Genre 184 Afterword 206 Bibliography 209 iii Abstract This dissertation is an examination of the process by which cultural texts and related products of Japanese animation (anime) are received differently in different locales, inducing polyvalent meanings embodied by various kinds of fan practices, artistic and commercial re-appropriation, and the reconfiguration of the existing film culture. Situated within a larger discussion on the impacts of cultural globalization on our everyday life (an overview of which is provided in the Introduction), I suggest that studying specific experiences of individual subjects who utilize global media products in their everyday lives can serve as a useful counterweight to the fear of global monoculture, and a means of transcending the increasingly restrictive debates on “global vs. local.” In its first five chapters, the dissertation provides a comparative analysis of anime fan cultures and the consequent industrial and institutional developments in North America, South Korea, and Japan, at different historical moments. In particular, Chapter 1 examines generational differences and changing implications of being a fan of Japanese animation under the postcolonial conditions of South Korea in the 1990s, while Chapter 2 focuses on varied implications of participating in “cosplay” (costume+play) in Japan and North America, which enables us to examine different notions of fan cultures and subcultures. Chapter 3 through 5 consider the dialogic practices between art and commerce in the appropriation of anime inspirations: with a special emphasis on fan art production and its incorporation into the mainstream art scene in Chapter 3, on character iv design and toy manufacturing in Chapter 4, and fanzine discourse and DIY aesthetics as trans-local cultural strategies in Chapter 5. In its concluding chapter, the dissertation suggests a strong connection between the transnational flow of anime influences and the transformation of a larger, global film culture. Overall, the dissertation argues that we can consider the “animation” of individual subjects in the context of globalization, evidenced in the case of transnational anime fan cultures, as an emancipation of human subjectivity from the constrictive framework of understanding our identities and selfhood in modernity, even if the conditions of such animation are thoroughly commercialized and methodically mediated by various media technologies. 1 Introduction: The Concept of Globalization in Its Cultural Dimensions I. The Globalization of “Globalization” Inasmuch as it involves almost every field of intellectual understanding to fully define its meaning, globalization is an inherently ambiguous concept of which the implications can hardly be encapsulated in definite terms. In spite of such a theoretical challenge, or precisely because of that, consistent efforts to conceptualize globalization more clearly have been made by numerous scholars from the nineteenth century on, most notably beginning with the work of Saint-Simon, in response to the development of expansionist capitalism. Especially from the 1970s onward, a growing recognition of global connectivity has been vigorously articulated through socio-economic studies and political discourses such as theories of interdependence, interconnectedness, flow and the world- system (Wallerstein 1974), even though the specific concept of globalization has become an object of even more rigorous study with the fall of Soviet Bloc and the end of the Cold War in 1989. Interestingly enough, despite the extensive scholarship on globalization in various academic fields including political science, international relations, sociology, economics, ecology, and anthropology, critical endeavors to consider the concept of globalization specifically in its cultural dimension have hardly been made until the time of the rise of transnational capitalism as a truly dominant global system in the mid- 1980s. This is not to argue that the interconnection between the process of modernization or capitalist standardization and cultural formations has never been 2 recognized before. Among the pioneering works, the prediction by Marx and Engels, for example, of the universalizing power of bourgeois culture in capitalist expansion is increasingly mentioned as one of the early foresight of cultural globalization in the mid- 19 th century. 1 While clearly different in its overtly critical and pessimistic tone, the cultural imperialism debates of the 1960s could also be considered as another early detections of the close link between (imperialist) global expansion and cultural transformations, as is argued by Jonathan Friedman. 2 However, it was not until the late 1980s that more piercing recognitions of the cultural in globalization were made. Growing organically out of theoretical speculations on other aspects of globalization, these recognitions of the cultural dimension in globalization were initially partial and indirect. For example, one of the leading “globalists,” Anthony Giddens, has come to explore the transformation of social, and to a lesser extent cultural, interactions mainly in terms of time-space compression within modernity, whereas Fredric Jameson has turned to the cultural issues of globalization by way of his systematic schematization of postmodernism as a cultural logic of late capitalism. 1 “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid imprvoment of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization… In one word, it creates a world after its own image” (1969: 53). 2 Friedman argues that much of the currently large literature on globalization “has centered on what at first appeared to be an aspect of the hierarchical nature of imperialism, that is the increasing hegemony of particular central cultures, the diffusion of American values, consumer goods and lifestyles…not just in the official ‘economic’ periphery but in Western Europe, where in the late 1950s and 1960s there was a genuine fear, at least among the cultural elites, of the defi americain and the hegemony of Coca Cola culture” (Friedman 1994: 195). 3 Yet what is even more striking in the subsequently flourishing field of study on cultural globalization is that regardless of its relatively late start, within only a few years of time the concept has become such a theoretical bandwagon that it has quickly acquired the reputation of cliché. Once trendy, any discussion of globalization in cultural dimensions these days, it seems, cannot be adequately begun without self-reflexively mentioning the explosive status of the discourse and questioning its effectiveness as an analytical category. This phenomenon of the globalization of the term "globalization" itself is far from being unique just to cultural approaches to the concept, as is clearly enunciated by Giddens himself: The global spread of the term [globalization] is evidence of the very developments to which it refers. Every business guru talks about it. No political speech is complete without reference to it. Yet as little as 10 years ago the term was hardly used, either in the academic literature or in everyday language. It has come from nowhere to be almost everywhere. (Giddens 1999) However, the degree to which the tiredness and “dated” quality of globalization discourse is recognized, and indeed the intensity of doubt about the validity of cultural globalization due to its excessively globalized usage, make the case considerably exceptional when juxtaposed with such a short history of cultural globalization as a subject of critical inquiry. One of the most sophisticated views expressing such an exhaustion of the concept of (cultural) globalization can be found in Ien Ang's contention that we are already now living in a "post-globalized world": 4 This doesn't mean that the economic, political and cultural processes generally subsumed under the term ‘globalisation’ are not ‘real’ and significant; on the contrary. The diverse and contradictory tendencies toward increasing interdependence and interconnectedness between disparate locales and dispersed communities across different parts of the globe are as undeniable as they are confusion. And while ‘globalisation’ did once serve as an effective rhetorical device to make us aware of these tendencies, we need to go beyond this rhetoric to analyse and examine them... (Ang 1994) While Ang’s term “post-globalized” may sound prematurely radical if read out of the context, we can understand in a larger scope of her arguments that Ang is reasonably suggesting that it is time for us to get over the initial fascination with the novel term “globalization” and move on to a more profound and engaged discussion of the implications of the full-scale transformation currently in progress, generally called globalization. Still, one apparent question to ask concerns exactly how to “go beyond” the rhetoric of globalization in order to analyze and examine its underlying tendencies. What critical procedures does the move “beyond” globalization involve? In other words, what do we need to do to overcome the impasse of the globalized “globalization” and reach a better understanding of the current stage of cultural globalization? II. The Origins of Skepticism One immediate measure we can take would be to examine the historical origins of the skepticism toward the concept of globalization on the assumption that contemporary criticisms that undermine, if not completely dismiss, the validity of globalization as an analytical category may have more concrete and deep-seated reasons than just extremely broad applications of the term. First, the political atmosphere of the time period in 5 which globalization has risen as a powerful frame of reference is worth contemplating. A significant moment, at least in the Western hemisphere, seems to be around 1989- 1990 when the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe was ceremoniously proclaimed by the Bush administration’s new phrase, “the new world order,” which ambiguously referred to the reconfiguration of international power relations, amongst many other things. Similarly in South Korea, one of the national cultures/locales mainly discussed in this thesis, the concept of globalization was officially introduced when then President Kim Yong-Sam announced segyehwa (a literal translation of “globalization” into Korean) as a new direction for the nation in 1994, although the doubly ambiguous term in translation only functioned to draw more public ridicule to the already unpopular president who could not pronounce the term accurately because of his regionally accented Korean (he could only pronounce “segaehwa,” meaning three-ification). Because of the political and rhetorical implications often associated with the concept, a number of critics have readily dismissed the discourses of globalization as a hegemonic discourse that normalizes the worldwide domination of the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, western capitalism. Stephen Toulmin’s 1999 statement, “‘Globalization’ is both an historical fact and a political football,” succinctly addresses such a cynical approach. Even scholars who recognize the multi-dimensionality of globalization, such as Hirst and Thompson, still call globalization “largely a myth”: One can only call the political impact of “globalization” the pathology of over- diminished expectation... we have a myth which exaggerates the degree of our helplessness in the face of contemporary economic forces. (Hirst and Thompson 1996) 6 Especially when this kind of skeptical stance is applied to investigating the cultures of globalization, critic’s concern for the ideological function of the discourse seems to be further increased since the cultural texts in general could indeed be effectively utilized as a means of justifying neoliberalist projects (open markets, small governments, de- regulated operations of multinational corporations, etc.) and convincing the general public of the uncontrollable nature of the “forces” of globalization. Another reason for the still widely-shared doubt about discourses of globalization in cultural spheres can be said to originate from the seemingly close relations of influences often formed between cultural critics and the culture industry. Because of the formative power held by multinational media corporations in the current situation, critical discourses on cultural globalization frequently employ terms and notions from the industry itself. For example, the claim made by Coca-Cola Inc. in the 1990s, “We are not a multinational, we are multilocal,” has been referenced in academic discourses to exemplify the sophisticated understanding of the dynamic between global and local by transnational corporations (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996). It is also noted that the often discussed theoretical notion of glocalization, a negotiated position between globalization and localization theorized by scholars like Roland Robertson (1995), is a term originally coined by the previous Sony chairman Akio Morita. Morita is known for using the term to emphasize the principle of “insiderization” (Ohmae 1992), which is currently promoted by Honda Motors Inc. as its corporate philosophy. These mutually influential relations between theoretical fields and the marketing strategies of conglomerates, while 7 inevitable to a certain degree, often generate a negative view that academic discourses merely function as the industry’s cheerleaders, ultimately legitimizing the relentless operations of global capitalism. In the course of preparation for the current thesis, I have met a number of people who, when introduced to my research topic of globalization and the circulation of East Asian popular cultural texts and practices, frankly expressed their concerns by saying, “I am personally skeptical about globalization...” or simply, “I am opposed to globalization.” One question that comes to my mind upon hearing such a comment is, “Which globalization are we talking about?” Which aspects and dimensions among many do we refer to when speaking of globalization? If we feel skeptical toward what we call globalization, isn’t it often because we consider globalization mainly in terms of the relentless operation of the transnational capital and the spectacular spread of neoliberalist market economy? Are we inescapably preoccupied, in thinking about globalization, by the unequal distribution of power and wealth between developed and underdeveloped sectors of the world? Are we too appalled by the ever-growing separation between the so called global north and the global south? Are we troubled by the ostentatious protectionism of various governments’ policies and accompanying nationalist ideologies that can be doubly marginalizing toward the already disempowered within the nation-state system? Are we conflating “globalization” with the sectarian movements and religious fundamentalism of which violent embodiments seem to be realizing Samuel Huntington’s nightmarish vision of the “clash of civilizations”? Ultimately I cannot but wonder, would any discussion of other 8 implications and consequences of globalization lead us to a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the transformative procedure we generally call globalization? In the following six chapters, I attempt to provide different ways of thinking about globalization in its cultural dimensions, examining a series of specific cultural texts and practices within local contexts that can help us move beyond the unsatisfying notions and skepticisms, or the rhetoric of globalization in Ien Ang's terms. Before that, however, I would like to present another set of theoretical issues to take into consideration in order to establish a clear understanding of major concepts and my intention in employing them in various discussion in the chapters to follow. III. Beyond the Binary Division of Global and Local In addition to the entangled relations between the concept of globalization and the political economic process we often refer to as globalization, there is a theoretical problem that contributes to the general impression that the discourse of (cultural) globalization has become too broad and tired to function as a critically useful framework. Ever since the term globalization began to be considered in its cultural dimensions from the mid- to late-1980s onwards, the main focus of the rapidly expanding discourse has usually been centered around one binary set of inquiries: global vs. local. The well-known definition of globalization provided by Immanuel Wallkerstein in 1984 and elaborated by Roland Robertson in 1992, “the twofold process involving the 9 interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism” has been inspiring as a model of thinking about the dialogic relations between the global and the local, precisely because of its openness and flexibility. However, discourses that have emerged since then seem to presuppose a more rigidly polar and opposed division between the two categories, typically as involving global domination vs. local resistance, or “global homogenization” vs. “local heterogenization,” in Arjun Appadurai’s terms. While Robertson “insist[s] upon the general structuring significance of the particular-universal connection—its crystallization as the elemental form of global life (my emphasis, Robertson 1997),” a number of discussions since then have developed with an emphasis on the separation or differences in agenda of the two. Most markedly in the debates about globalization as a new form of (cultural) imperialism and domination by the west of the rest of the world, the cultural dimension of globalization is often formulated in such a way that we are led to develop a fearful imaginary of the dreaded “global monoculture,” which, manufactured and distributed by the multinational media conglomerates, will eventually eradicate existing local cultural traditions and diversity. For example, Benjamin Barber’s powerful provocation of the “McWorld” in the following has been repeatedly visualized in popular cultural imaginings of the global future, as early as in Blade Runner (1982) and more increasingly in recent Hollywood productions such as Austen Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Idiocracy (2006), to name just few: McWorld is an entertainment shopping experience that brings together malls, multiplex movie theaters, theme parks, spectator sports arenas, fast-food chains (with their endless movie tie-ins) and television (with its burgeoning shopping 10 networks) into a single vast enterprise that, on the way to maximising its profits, transforms human beings. (Barber 1995: 97) Such disheartening imaginaries are consistently mobilized along the conflicting binary between global and local in a series of terms that delineate similar and related phenomena such as McDonaldization (Ritzner 1993), Disneyification (Sorkin 1992), and Coca-colonization (Deen 1999), while works by some other media scholars shed lights on the same depressing outlook without necessarily using any catchy labels (Schiller 1989). 3 One of the more refined views of globalization as a binary process between domination and subjugation can be found in the works of Masao Miyoshi who, while focusing on the inhumane operations of transnational corporations (TNCs), reads the current period of global capitalist development as “not an age of postcolonialism but of intensified colonialism, even though it is under and unfamiliar guise.” (Miyoshi 1993) At the other end of the spectrum in which various discussions of globalization revolve around the two axes, we can also find discourses of globalization that are more hopeful precisely because of the binary view of the process. For example, both of the well- known, technological-determinist concepts of globalization, Marshall McLuhan’s 3 For example, Benjamin Barber’s description of “McWorld” is found in an increasing number of popular cultural texts in a dystopian future, such as Mike Judge’s Idiocracy: “McWorld is an entertainment shopping experience that brings together malls, multiplex movie theaters, theme parks, spectator sports arenas, fast-food chains (with their endless movie tie-ins) and television (with its burgeoning shopping networks) into a single vast enterprise that, on the way to maximising its profits, transforms human beings” (Barber 1995: 97). 11 “global village” and Thomas Friedman’s “flat world,” could be understood as an embracing act in discussing the absorption of the latter by the former through spectacular innovations in media and communications technologies. Of more critically developed researches, Leslie Sklair’s work provides a superb example of the binary discourse of globalization, which emphasizes the potential of local social movements to disrupt the workings of TNCs, in order to prove that “although contemporary capitalism is organized globally, it can be resisted only locally.” (Sklair 1995) Another set of discourses in which the conflict between global and local is foregrounded is in the theories concerning the gap between local (national)/modern vs. global/postmodern societies. The binary in this case is not as clear as in the previous examples, since local and national are conflated in some cases (e.g. national governments’ protectionism toward the local film market against the bombardment of Hollywood’s big-budget, mass-cultural imports), whereas the two are opposed to each other in views that promote the emancipatory potential of global influences which can liberate marginalized local cultural practices from the homogenizing oppressiveness of modern national cultures (for more discussion on this point, see Mike Featherstone's concept of “third cultures,” 1990). While the latter position may sound particularly attractive for the extensively homogenous local/national cultural environments such as those in South Korea, the fact remains that in both cases the central ideas of these theories of cultural globalization operate on the basis of an apparent dualism and opposition. 12 The binary opposition, although potentially a useful framework if the dialectic connection between the categories is sufficiently articulated, seems to more often generate a theoretical dead end which can easily exhausts critical energies and provide deeply schizophrenic readings in switching ceaselessly between positive and negative reviews or utopian and dystopian outlooks. 4 More importantly, the overarching Eurocentric and phallogocentric implications of the binary way of thinking, as is powerfully shown in Edward Said’s conceptualization of orientalism, can further deflect our critical endeavor to better understand the general changes in our lived experiences due to globalization in which previously “otherized” subjects could be potentially mobilized as agents for social changes. In providing the aforementioned definition of globalization as “the institutionalization of both the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism,” Roland Robertson has differentiated his own position from that of Arjun Appardurai’s by accusing Appadurai’s theory of cultural globalization that emphasizes a “disjuctive” series of five “scapes” (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes) of being a “chaos-theoretic approach to global culture.” Robertson explains that some of his own differences from Appadurai “may arise from his [Appadurai’s] implication that the Enlightenment ideas of universalism and particularism were 4 Mureen Turim has also pointed out the same discursive dilemma between the universal and the specific by citing a passage from the novel, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: “I cite it to raise basic questions about our patterns of logic, our ways of thinking. Are they dialectic? Do they move beyond the dialectic? Do they incorporate the specific and multiplicity that feminist criticism, particularly, has introduced into our discourse? These seem to be very important questions in this context, ones that call for anti-totalizing theories” (Turim, 1997: 145-146). 13 necessarily incongruent. My own interpretation is that they were basically complementary.” In disregarding the disciplinary differences between Robertson’s and Appdurai’s positions—the former based in sociology and the latter in anthropology—for the sake of the current discussion, we can see from this comment how fundamentally Robertson’s notion of globalization is motivated by his “modern” impulse of envisioning the world in its total sense, through a schematization of dialectic axes—in other words, in a grand narrative. Although I still consider Robertson’s definition of globalization useful because of its flexibility and adaptability, I cannot but disagree with Robertson’s reading of Appadurai’s theory as too amorphous to be effective. In fact, Appadurai’s suggestion of looking at the five main sites of global transformation as “landscapes” can be considered as an exceptionally innovative way of drawing out a structural understanding of globalization without universalizing or totalizing the whole, thanks to the limited and fragmentary nature of individual perspectives in viewing landscapes. In similar vein, I will try to bypass in the following discussions, yet another familiar binary division working centrally in a number of discourses of globalization: center vs periphery. Even critical discourses that significantly challenge the rigid binary between the west and the rest, the same linguistic imaginaries of binarism are employed without a proper amount of questioning of the potentially normalizing effects of the terms involved. For example, in his influential book, titled Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (2002), Koichi Iwabuchi illustrates the complicated process in which Japanese popular culture has taken a dominant position in East Asian cultural markets and media consumptions, while also discussing how “Asian 14 popular culture” has been received within Japan in turn. Even though most arguments Iwabuchi makes within individual chapters which I will return to later in more detail, are fairly well-balanced, the indirect invocation of the “re-centering” of Japanese popular culture in his overall research, as an alternative to the western imports within the Asian cultural bloc needs to be still questioned. Not surprisingly, one of Iwabuchi’s latest works, on the “Korean Wave,” the unprecedented popularities of Korean popular cultural products such as pop music and television dramas in East and South East Asian cultures, also shows how much of Iwabuchi’s scholarship is preoccupied with the hegemonic struggle of various cultural players to occupy dominant positions in the division between center and margin. Again, while I find Iwabuchi’s work useful in certain contexts of local discussions, his general concern with shifting power relations between “winners and losers” in the process of global transformations, needs to be considered with more caution. This cautionary approach to the terms ‘center and margin’ I suggest here, does not mean that I intend to ignore political implications of the transnational cultural flows I will delineate in the following chapters. However, using the same set of analytical terms majorly exhausted in the existing discussions of modernization and capitalist expansion—such as core vs. periphery, the west vs. the rest, the First world vs. the Third world, culture vs. nature, civilization vs. wilderness, developed vs. underdeveloped, modern vs. pre- (or post-) modern, and ultimately, “us” vs. “others”--, would inevitably fail to lead us to a more nuanced understanding of the uneven developments of power and the complex interconnectedness of individual agents within them. To the extent that 15 we consider the current phase of human connectivity as a new experience in a collective sense, we need new approaches and new critical agenda with which we can adequately articulate the deeply chaotic and fluctuating, yet conceptually still comprehensible phenomena of cultural globalization. In other words, I am less interested in exploring in what hegemonic procedure certain players become a new center and others a new periphery in globalization, but more excited at the prospect of reflecting upon how “today all cultures are border cultures”—transitory, unstable, hybridized, yet identity- forming cultural practices-- as Nestor Garcia Canclini provocatively argues (Garcia Canclini, 1995). Thus one of my largest objectives in the following chapters is to explore possible ways of escaping this entrapment of binary divisions, by paying a critical attention to a number of intently specific cultural practices in different local contexts and historical moments in South Korea, Japan and the United States, which cannot be adequately mapped out by any one of the existing (binary) terms of local, national, regional, international, transnational, and global. IV. Following chapters Globalization is the process by which the relatively separate areas of the globe come to intersect in a single imaginary ‘space’; when their respective histories are convened in a time-zone or time-frame dominated by the time of the West; when the sharp boundaries reinforced by space and distance are bridged by connections (travel, trade, conquest, colonization, markets, capital and the flows of labor, goods and profits) which gradually eroded the clear-cut distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ (Hall 1995) If you talk globalization too much you really believe it is happening. That is why I want to interrogate the discourse of globalization itself. I think that there are discourses of what I would call “hyper-globalization.” Everything is transformed; everything is an outcast in the same way by the global process. 16 There isn’t any local that isn’t written, re-written through and through by the global. That just doesn’t seem to me to be true. It doesn’t ring true; I think it’s a myth. On the other hand, I think there is something significantly different about the pace and rate at which these uneven interdependencies now constitute our world. And that does have something to do with what I call convening locals under the canopy of the global so that local differentiation not only remains but actually intensifies. Therefore, the reason that I am partially interested in globalization is exactly the reverse process, the intensification of the commitment to the local. Simply because the global is in some ways antithetical to the local, more people have to find something. It may be nothing more substantial than the soccer team Manchester United, but they stake their flag somewhere. (Hall 1999) Hoping that my discussion continues and further complicates such a project of Hall’s of interrogating the “convening locals,” I would like to begin by specifying three theoretical principles that will be used in the chapters to follow. First, notions of globalization that are conceptually abstract and somewhat deliberately ambiguous in definition will be utilized in the following discussions, mainly in order to avoid the constrictions of existing frameworks discussed in the above. Roland Robertson's afore- mentioned schematization of the universal and the particular will be used as one of the foundational definitions of globalization because of its flexible quality in foregrounding the dialectic relations between the two axes, yet only in conjunction with Hall’s different definition of globalization that emphasizes the significant role played by the previously marginalized non-western “others” in the process of globalization. Second, globalization will always be considered as a process in a constantly fluctuating state of becoming. This conscious effort to dismiss any sort of stable notion of globality and locality will allow us to better understand the ongoing process by which global and 17 local shape and transform each other, as well as individual agents located in-between. Third, the discursive nature of globalization (that is, globalization as a discursive construct) will be always foregrounded, by carefully clarifying my own position in relation to the subject of critical examination. This will, I believe, allow discussions in each chapter to be situated more concretely here and now specifically defined according to the context of the topic. Just as Anthony King has pointed out that “globalization theories are self-representations of the dominant particular,” without an awareness of the hegemonic dimensions of the discourse and without any conscious effort to elucidate my own positionality, the discussion to follow will not be able to transcend the constrictive binarism of currently dominant notions of cultural globalization. In the following six chapters, I intend not to reproduce the narrative of the formidable forces of globalization—whether capitalist, nationalist, religious-fundamentalist, or other. Nor do I necessarily schematize the transformations of national/regional cultural institutions as local responses to globalization in any systematic manner. Rather, I present six separate, deeply fragmentary and deliberately partial vignettes in the following chapters as a way of thinking about the intricately altered relations between cultural texts, practices and individual subjects situated under the conditions of globalization. The first five chapters in particular, deal with a number of sites of cultural productions, consumptions and re-appropriations, revolving around Japanese animation (anime), focusing on its production procedures, fan practices, related art scenes and commercial/merchandize industry, popular publications, web forums, and so on. The concluding sixth chapter, on the other hand, deal with somewhat broader 18 tendencies of film production and reception, that are crucially related to the current formation of global mass cultures—a revised yet still potent imaginary of the national in recent South Korean cinema. In Chapter One, “Animated Subjects: on the Circulation of Japanese Animation as Global Cultural Products,” I look at the way in which global media texts such as anime are appropriated in very different ways by audiences in different local cultural contexts, provoking alternative readings and inspiring new forms of transnational community and identity. I specifically focus on the two different generations of anime fandom in South Korea at two different historical moments—i.e. pre- and post- lifting of the ban on the Japanese popular cultural imports in 1997--, as examples that prove the historical specificities that shape individual responses to the increasing global connectivity through cultural exchanges. In Chapter Two, “Fans and Players: Costuming Bodies and Consuming Pleasures” considers contemporary youth culture of cospre or “cosplay” (costume + play) in Japan and the United States, as a communicative practice that exemplifies a new modality of cultural consumption oriented towards experimenting with alternative identities that are both cosmopolitan and culturally specific at the same time. The chapter emphasizes the way in which anime fans’ responses to foreign cultural influences embody, both physically and symbolically, in often gendered bodies and circulate through an extensive use of media technologies. Chapter Three, “Anime Visions and Manga Dreams: Anime Art and Ways of Seeing,” examines fan appropriation of anime inspirations for a new cultural production—anime 19 art, composed of professional art influenced by anime, such as Japanese pop art, favorably received in the contemporary global art scene, and fan art production circulated through alternative art networks within fan communities. Chapter Four, “For a Textual Analysis of Absent Narrative Texts in Global Character Products” focuses on the other end of the spectrum of anime culture, the production and consumption of character merchandises and toys through the operation of what I call the character industry. By examining both artistic and commercial re-appropriation of anime vision and sensibility, these two chapters illustrate the way in which increasingly converging sites of anime culture function collaboratively to challenge dominant ways of seeing and subvert hegemonic cultural hierarchies. Ultimately, I argue how in the multidirectional flows of cultural exchanges in globalization, binary notions such as art and commerce, high art and mass culture, narrative and non-narrative, become challenged and revised. Chapter Five, “Hard-boiled Robotica: Giant Robot and the Globalization of Asian Cool,” focuses on the way in which an alternative fan community of teenage users of Asian media products is formed in various North American regions, mainly through the function of a fanzine-turned-a-mainstream-hit publication called Giant Robot. By looking at the multiple sites of GR’s operation—the magazine, the websites, the stores, the galleries and even the restaurant--, I examine how GR plays a pedagogic role in creating an imagined fan community with racially and ethnically diverse members through the productive commodification of the anime sensibilities and the iconography of the “Asian cool.” 20 Chapter Six, “Disrobing the National Body: the Transnationalization of Recent South Korean ‘History Film’ Genre” looks at the unpredicted boom of Korean national film industry since the late 1990s, which currently boasts its record figure of domestic market share (over 60% in 2006), a truly rare success of local production in the face of the ever-increasing domination of Global Hollywood in the world. In this chapter, I examine, as a way of concluding my discussions in the present thesis, different ways of interpreting the “success story” of Korean cinema. While focusing on the shifting patterns of representing the nation, I limit my discussion for the solidity of discussion, specifically to the genre of costume/period drama, which has been considered a successful vehicle for constructing the imaginary of nation both within and without the national boundaries. In order to understand both the altered state of national imagination and individual subject positions and identity formations, I compare the previous generations of more consciously nationalist and self-orientalizing costume dramas to more deliberately transnational, stylistically postmodern and culturally non- specific period films, which still function, in my view, powerfully to re-inscribe the centrality of the national in the global audience’s collective imagination. Through these discussions of varied sites of cultural practices and meaning production, I aim to examine the transformation or restructuring of individual subjectivity in the process of globalization, repeatedly questioning how our traditional notions of individual subjects as a site of “making sense of the world” need to be altered in order to better handle political inquiries concerning: the shifting relations between the private and the public, the blurring between body and technologies, the restructuring of cultural 21 hierarchies, and most importantly, our individual positions in relation to the local, national, regional, and transnational communities and their cultures. 22 Chapter One Animated Subjects: On the Circulation of Japanese Animation as Global Cultural Products I. Introduction In an interview performed at the end of the 1980s, Fredric Jameson elaborates on his notion of the disappearance of nature and the loss of the unconscious as we know of in the postmodern: Today I think one of the characteristics of the postmodern is very precisely this penetration and colonization of the unconscious. Art is commodified, the unconscious is itself commodified by the forces of the media and advertising and so on, and therefore it is also in that sense that one can claim a certain kind of nature is gone... And I think it’s proper to insist on that... there is a certain freedom involved in being no longer constrained by traditional forms of human nature. What Jameson means by this suggestion remains to be highly ambiguous: especially, the way in which commodification of the unconscious results in the release of human nature from its traditional limits is not clearly explained. Jameson himself admits that he is ambivalent on the concept of human nature itself, yet he further argues as follows: ... instead of replacing those [the disappeared form of older, inner-directed personality, the acquisitive individual, the centered subject, etc.] with the rhetoric of psychic fragmentations, schizophrenia, and so on, one should return again to notions of collective relations, but collectivities of new types, not of traditional kinds. That would, it seems to me, be a way of looking at human nature as a social thing that would be in my opinion the most productive socially and culturally, and politically as well. (Jameson, 354) Although still vague, it seems to me that Jameson’s conceptualization of a new subjectivity that is both mediatized and emancipated in the postmodern discursive 23 environments can be revealing about the cultures of globalization. That is, to the extent that postmodernism is argued as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” which Jameson in his later works relates more specifically with the term globalization, 5 his proposal of the disappearance of nature in the postmodern could be also used productively in thinking about our altered subjectivity in the process of globalization. Besides, I find Jameson’s basic theoretical premise in his major projects-- that the interrelationship of culture and the economic is “a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop”-- not only provides a still sensible starting point in examining the current cultures of more intensified globalization. By being attentive to the intimate interrelation between the cultural and the economic, we can also recognize the fact that in the current phase of globalization, the relationship between the two realms becomes so extremely intertwined that now it is both ineffectual and impossible to consider the two separately. Thus, in this chapter, I will examine the way in which global media products, produced through the complicated network of the cultural and the economic on an unprecedentedly transnational scale, circulate and interact with individuals and collectives at certain local junctures of global cultures. 5 Repeatedly in this article, Fredric Jameson insists on calling the current material conditions “late capitalism” instead of “postindustrialism” or “multinational consumer capitalism” to emphasize the continuity rather than the break between different historical phases of capitalist system, borrowed from Ernst Mandel’s tripartite formula. Whichever term Jameson prefers to use, however, what he means by “late capitalism” seems to be increasingly indicative of the series of new phenomena, which is now generally called globalization: “Besides the forms of transnational business…, its [the new system’s] features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges…, new forms of media interrelationship…, computers and automaton, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale” (Quotes from Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. p.xix). 24 The case I tend to focus on in the present chapter is the varied ways in which Japanese animation is circulated in different regional cultures, especially in the local cultural practices in South Korea. As a media product of a distinctively global nature, Japanese animation brings about interesting interactions between production and consumption, infra- and supra- structures, public history and private memories, the real and the fantastic, and most importantly, conscious and unconscious appropriations of the cultural texts. Indeed, there exists not only numerous, consciously organized fan groups of Japanese animation in different local cultures worldwide; here also appear to be imaginary communities that exist among broader, younger audiences across national boundaries, who share the collective memories of consuming the same media texts and the common nostalgia for their childhood viewing experiences. It is in this juncture where I find an embodiment of new subjectivity, thoroughly penetrated by commercial media, yet at the same time released from the restrictive forms of traditional (modern) human subjects. Further, the fan reception of certain Japanese animation texts, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s works, can be said to provide an illuminating example of the global media phenomenon that calls into question the existing theoretical frameworks such as the concept of national cinema and international art cinema. In this chapter, therefore, I will mainly discuss the ways in which South Korean fan appropriations of Japanese animation challenge various critical paradigms and call for a new approach to the cultures of globalization. In order to properly explore the profoundly multiple dimensions of the question, I would first contemplate on the reasons why and to 25 what degree Japanese animation needs to be considered as a prototype of cultural product of global conditions. II. Japanese animation as global media products As is well known, animation (anime) and comic books (manga) have been two of the major forms of popular culture in Japan. To take only a few examples: about 27 percent of the entire printed materials in Japan in 1984 were reportedly comics (Schodt, 12); since the late 1990s, more than 250 animation programs per week have been aired on television; average 1700 (short or feature length) animation films have been produced per year and about 2200 animated television programs produced per year-- in other words, average six new works produced everyday--, which makes Japan a number one producer of animated video and television programs that comprise about 65% of the world production in 2000 (Noh, 48) and over 70% of television animation aired worldwide in 2002. The popularity of Japanese animation (anime henceforth) has been phenomenal in Japan since the inception of the medium as a practically postwar popular cultural trend 6 and has ever increased with the sophistication of its techniques, stylistics and narrative 6 Animation was produced in Japan as early as in 1917 mainly as a form of avant-grade experimentation. While it still continues to be contended, The Tale of the White Serpent, widely considered to be the first cell animation feature film, was released for general public in 1958 (Rak-Hyeon Song, 50 Years History of the Anime Movie, p.16). However, regardless of the varied previous incarnations, I think we can reasonably consider anime as a distinctly postwar cultural phenomenon for mainly for two reasons. First, we can easily understand how the cheap and widely accessible format of manga, from which most anime developed, came to become a truly popular cultural, entertainment medium in the post war period. More importantly, the breakthrough hit of Tezuka Osamu’s Astroboy (tetsuwan atomu) series in 1963, which profoundly appealed to the postwar youth in Japan, deserves to be considered the beginning of anime as we know of with its distinctive stylistics and recurring thematics. 26 competence. It is thus no wonder that tickets sold for anime theatrical features are estimated to reach about half the entire annual box office sales in Japan (Corliss, 94). It is also consistent with that Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 record-breaking hit Princess Mononoke remained as the highest-grossing Japanese film until 2005 (Napier, 7) when another Miyazaki production, Howl’s Moving Castle broke the record. 7 Yet, what is more striking about anime for the current discussion is its border-crossing appeal that has attracted numerous fans in many different regions of the world. While it is an intriguing question worth a separate critical interrogation how such a local cultural development could translate to such a broad international audience, the fact remains that anime texts travel increasingly across the national-cultural boundaries as important media commodities. Certainly, anime has induced lively fan cultures in diversely different parts of the world, most noticeably in South Korea and Taiwan, the former colonies of the Japanese Empire, yet also as widely as in other Asian regions such as Hong Kong, Thailand, other South Asian countries, in both Eastern and Western European countries and in North and South Americas including the United States. To take just one example, in Italy, the popularity of Yumiko Igarashi’s comic and animated series Candy Candy was so enormous in the 1980s that, after the end of the original Japanese series, Italian producers had to hire local artists to draw new stories of Candy in Igarashi’s style (Schodt, 157). 7 KOCCA, “World Animation Industry Trends.” 27 However, the global quality of anime does not simply lie in the scope of international fan cultures. More significantly, the process of anime production reveals its status as a global media product, through its close connection to the multinational capital and the outsourcing of labor process. First, we need to think about the magnitude of the capital and industry involved in the production of anime. As a lucrative commodity produced in a highly rationalized media industry, anime can be more fully understood within the web of influences organized according to the successful “media mix” strategy. Typically there exists a full circle of related industries around anime in Japan: in many cases, it starts, although not necessarily in a chronological order, from the original manga series; then the manga is adapted to animated series for television or to film or to both formats; also video production of the animated series follows, while video series (called OAV, original animated video or OVA, original video animation) are often directly created from the original manga, too; then almost simultaneously, various goods related to the manga and anime, including original soundtrack CDs, paperback books, fanzines, and numerous character merchandises such as action figures, toys, stationery goods, confectionery products, etc., are distributed in the market. 8 Also, the release of computer games based on the manga and anime follows, which in turn increases the sales of the original manga series, magazines, books and videos and encourages the creation of 8 For instance, in 1984 and 1985, anime TV shows such as Voltron, Defender of the Universe, Robotech, Transformers and Gobots generated an astounding boom worldwie in toys, coloring books, and even locally scripted and drawn comics. According to Frederik Schodt, “Hasbro Bradley’s robot toys, Transformers (designed and manufactured by Takara) reaped $100 million in their first year to become the most successful toy introduction ever.” From Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comincs. p.156. 28 extended editions of the original manga and anime. 9 These close relations among several different culture and consumer industries have been apparently very functional on a financial level, contributing to inaugurating such Japanese TNCs as Sony and Nintendo as notable players in global economy. 10 Yet, at the same time, the media mix policy has been very significant in terms of the dialogic influence on all the forms and contents of the media products under the synergistic effect of the circle. 11 For a more specific example, we can briefly digress to look at the case of the far-reaching popular craze, the Pokemon series. Pokemon, an abbreviation for “pocket monsters,” originally started in Japan in 1996 as a computer game for Nintendo’s Game Boy and has been quickly morphed into a global multimedia phenomenon of comic books, animated television shows, movies and videos, trading card games, collectibles and toys. The entire series revolves around the adventures of a twelve year old boy who aspires to be a great “Pokemon master,” who trains various kinds of Pokemon (biological creatures 9 This strategy of using one “content” in a number of related media for maximum financial gain has been referenced by other similar terms as well, such as “window (mado-guchi) effect,” “one source multi use” (OSMU) or “one brand multi use” (OBMU), in an increasing number of industry discourse in Japan and South Korea. While it would be worth contemplating implications of employing these business models, to the extent that the main purpose of current discussion is not to analyze effeciency of different business models but to gain a better understanding of our subjective reception of globally circulating anime texts, I think it suffices to use “media mix” as a term that generally refers to the industrial strategy described above. 10 Nikkei B.P. Company’s 1999 report, “Anime Business Changes (Anime Business Ga Kawaru)” explains how SONY’s decision to consider animation centrally in its “visual contents business” worked effectively in allowing the corporation to get ahead other multinational competitors. 11 For more discussion of the media mix strategy, see Mizuko Ito’s work such as “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes” and “The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix.” Focusing on children’s media in the context of increasing global cultural exchanges and media convergence, Ito argues “the Japanese media mix has been central to a shift towards stronger connections between new interactive and traditional narrative forms” (Ito, 2006). 29 with supernatural powers of an unknown origin) to defeat other Pokemon trainers and become a more advanced master. Logically, the overarching theme of the series and games is to collect all the Pokemon, as is repeatedly reminded in the catch phrase of the series, “Gotta Catch 'em All.” This phrase can be meaningful in a viewer’s real life, since a viewer/player can also participate in the imaginary competition by consuming Pokemon products and become a “trainer” as in the diegesis, who captures each different Pokemon and uses it to advance to higher levels of mastery. In this sense, it is not surprising that the detailed information on over 150 Pokemon creatures-- concerning their names, fighting abilities, special features, various evolutionary stages, etc.-- requires such an extraordinary amount of expertise from the collectors. In other words, to collect more and gain more knowledge, one needs to consume more of various products including books, cards, videos, and computer games. It is thus clear that the Pokemon series exemplifies a carefully engineered fusion between textual pleasures and serially encouraged consumption. Such a design to produce a synergy among different media formats is certainly not new in Pokemon as it has been discussed with Marsha Kinder’s notion of “supersystem of entertainment” in different discussions of children’s media (Kinder, 1). However, the extent to which such intertextuality is configured within the text of the anime series is still remarkable. That is, the careful designing for the convergence in the case of Pokemon can be found in not merely in its narrative or thematics, but also in its formal structures. As was highlighted in the case of Pokemon the First Movie which was commercially successful worldwide yet mostly criticized by adult viewers and critics for 30 the lack of any distinctive narrative structure, the Pokemon anime series often has a highly fragmented plot line, with each fragment only loosely connected to each other without any strong, causal connections. This format, although boring to uninitiated viewers, can directly appeal to regular audiences, as home shopping television programs do to their regular viewers, presenting each product more powerfully with the sensory stimulation of excessively repeated visuals and utilizing narrative devises only secondarily. At the same time, we can find a significant parallel between the formal strategies of the Pokemon anime and those of its original computer games. To name just a few, the battle sequences in the anime seems to derive directly from the computer game format, with often split screen, stylized action choreography, and conventional musical accompaniments. Similarly, the fluid identities of characters in Pokemon could be related to the game format in which we can pick any pair of fighters for battles: thus the division between good and evil can never be absolutely clear as is exemplified by the ambiguously evil duo Team Rockets in Pokemon. These intertextual qualities within the anime texts of Pokemon support Koichi Iwabuchi’s point that “Pokemon is the product that to date has most efficiently capitalized on emerging market trends.” Since, according to Iawabuchi, Japanese media industry leaders consider computer games and animation as main features of the aforementioned “supersystem of entertainment,” the phenomenal success of Pokemon series cannot be adequately understood without examining its textually integrated intertextuality. (Iwabuchi 2004) 31 As has been discussed so far with the example of Pokemon, the circulation of anime is closely interconnected with varied kinds of media and other consumer industries that function uniformly according to the logic of the transnational capital. Thus, an anime text could be best understood only when we take into consideration its status as a media product of global economy which determines not just production and distribution of anime, but affects its communicative facilities and affective powers as well. Another aspect of global quality of anime is caused by its connection to the Third World labor, which I will examine with a more specific example of South Korea. III. South Korea, the Surrogate Manufacturer of Anime The labor intensiveness in the production of animated materials is hardly unique to the Japanese case: whether it is fully hand-drawn or mechanically-generated to a degree, 2D cell animation in general entails the painstaking procedure of production in which thousands of animation cells are processed through some kinds of human labor practice. What is specific to Japanese animation is, though, that it is produced within a highly developed studio system with a rigorously rationalized division of labor. Hence, it is not surprising that because of the high labor cost in Japan, since the 1980s in most cases of anime production, only preproduction (script, storyboard, character design, etc.) and post-production (film editing, color timing, sound, etc.) of anime have been done within Japan and other jobs of the production such as coloring, inking, painting, background, and in-between animation have been done in other “less developed” regions in East and South Asia-- mainly in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, but recently in Thailand 32 and other South Asian countries as well—employing mostly young, female, low-waged labor force with their supposedly “nimble fingers.” 12 The South Korean case appears to be particularly interesting to think about in examining anime’s relation to the Third World labor. According to a report written in 2006, South Korea is the third largest producer of animation worldwide, following Japan and the United States: there exist 250 animation-related companies that employ 17,000 professional animators who can produce 1,200 television episodes. However, 95% of its output is manufactured by foreign order and none of the animation studios in Korea is fully committed to making domestic shows. Even though the manufacturing facilities that are established as early as in the late 1960s has led to the expansion of animation industry throughout the 1980s, domestic production of Korean animation during the same period has remained marginal both quantitatively and qualitatively but for a few exceptions (e.g. Hong Gil-dong in 1967, Robot Taekwon V in 1976, Maruchi Arachi in 1977 and a number of television series produced in the late 1980s such as Run! Hani! and Baby Dinosaur Doolie). 13 Around 1995, recognizing the commercial potential of animation as 12 Understandably, the rationalization of production and recruitment of the inexpensive Asian labor in animation production was first started by Hollywood studios since the 1960s, which have established their production facilities in as many countries as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Indonesia, China and maintained them to the extent that about 90% of the “American” television animation is still produced in Asia (Lent, 6). Nevertheless, the relationship between the Asian labor force and the Japanese animation production, in my view, needs to be considered in a more elaborate way than that between the Third world labor and Hollywood studios. In addition to the geographical proximity, we need to think about the complicated historical past (Japan’s colonial expansion in the first half of the 20 th century) and the intricate cultural present (the laborers’ attached relations to anime texts). 13 There was no theatrical animated features produced in Korea between 1986 and 1993 in spite of the booming of the industry due to manufacutring of foreign orders from the US, Japan, France, Canada, and Taiwan (Han, The Strategy of Japanimation and Disneymation, p.222). 33 demonstrated by a series of box office hits by Disney, the South Korean government announced to support the animation industry in order to increase its domestic production, by granting a number of tax incentives as well as providing production fund of $8.5 million for the following ten years. As a result, many studios that used to produce to foreign order, turned more domestic, bringing out about a dozen features and a number of shorts and television series within the following few years that deal with Korean folklore and traditional cultural aspects. According to the KOFIC (Korean Film Council) report in 2004, there were 12 domestic theatrical feature animation, out of 72 theatrical animation screened in Korea between 2000 and 2004. In particular, Wonderful Days, an SF fantasy produced in 2003, drew 140,080 viewers (KOFIC 2004), which can be said to be at least a modest achievement for a domestic animation of recent years. 14 However, even with these small successes, the number of domestic audience for domestic animation production has not yet proved to be substantial enough to sustain the industry, composing only 4% of theatrical animation ticket sales between 2000 and 2004. In spite of the continuing expansion of the industry throughout the 1980s and especially after 1995, Korean animation production still relies heavily on manufacturing orders as is seen in the 2005 Ministry of Culture and Tourism industry report, which shows 51.1% of animation production revenue in 2004 comes from simple copying jobs. 14 Although Armageddon, a notoriously ambitious theatrical adaptation of Lee Hyun-se’s popular original manhwa (Korean graphic novel or manga), drew 220,000 audience nationwide, it is still considered a failure because of its disappointing textual quality and financial performance. 34 It is still early at this point, in my view, to produce any definitive evaluation of the situation of animation production in South Korea. As the leading animation critic Han Chang-Wan suggests, the situation after 1995 could be viewed positively because of the steady production of theatrical features in spite of repeated box office failures and the qualitative growth of television animation as an alternative against the financially risky theatrical ventures (Han 2001). On the other hand, Korean animation is still in urgent need of finding a more stable audience base both inside and outside Korea as well as establishing more distinctive textual identities, as Ki-su Park argues with the example of the recent boom in the industry around 2002 when 235 domestic projects were in production by the end of the year, yet a number of them were cancelled at the news of rather disappointing performances, both commercially and critically, of much anticipated features such as Oseam, Wonderful Days, and Ellysium (Park, 253). Regardless of these divergent readings however, the case of Korean animation production provides us with a series of questions worth scrutinizing. First of all, it would be necessary to ask about what to make of the seemingly exploitative relations of anime production. Does the still subsidiary status of animation production in Korea as a mere manufacturing base for foreign studios simply reflect a new world order in the age of globalization, when the division between core and periphery grows even more severe and permanent? Or is there any possibility of change or intervention in the relentless operation of transnational media conglomerates? Moreover, considering the intricate past history between Korea and Japan (especially, the 36 years’ colonial rule of Korea by Japan in the early 20 th century), which caused the former to ban most popular cultural imports from the latter for almost half the century, we need to question the validity in reading the current situation simply as 35 manifestation of an economic and cultural imperialism. In other words, can we properly map the current involvement of Korea in the production of anime simply in terms of new colonial relations of domination and subjugation? More importantly, there is at stake the implication of anime fan cultures in Korea: what it means to be a fan of texts which are mass produced by the former colonizer’s culture industry through the compatriots’ labor practice. 15 Indeed, it seems to me a significant question to ask what kind of meanings Korean and other non-Japanese anime fans are negotiating through the reception and consumption of the Japanese animated texts. IV. The Cultural Logic of Global Anime Kids As is briefly mentioned above, the importation of almost all the popular cultural materials produced in Japan has been prohibited by the Korean government for the past fifty years for “historical” reasons. It was not until 1998 that the government finally started lifting the ban, gradually enlarging the scale of importation over the following eight years, although opinion polls around this period still show a consistent number of objection to deregulation for reasons of “national sentiments” (Han, 198). 16 As of 2006, after the fifth “opening up” (kaebang) in January, most 15 It may seem irrelevant to consider anime consumption in South Korea in relation to the past colonial history when anime has been consumed by viewers who are mostly under the age 40 and watched anime in their teens and early 20s. However, to the extent that discourses concerning colonial relations still comprise a significant portion of the discussion on anime and that the historical past still affects the infrastructure of cultural consumption, e.g. government policies regarding Japanese cultural imports, we need to think about the historiographical dimension of this cultural phenomenon. 16 In an interview Han Seung-Mi had with “one [Korean] citizen” concerning deregulation of Japanese popular cultural imports, the interviewee emphasizes the symbolic meanings attached to the banning of Japanese cultural imports to the Korean market: “I think it is too early to deregulate Japanese popular culture when in fact there already exist ways for enjoying all kinds of Japanese popular culture without any 36 Japanese popular cultural materials, including theatrical anime, are followed for importation in South Korea with an exception of certain formats of Japanese television program and videos, and extremely violent or pornographic materials. 17 This means the South Korean market is officially open for Japanese popular cultural imports for the first time in its modern history, although the importation procedure is still more controlled by the state than by the market or corporations. However, in spite of the consistently nationalist policy of the government and educational authorities, or precisely because of them in some cases, there have been formed rather broad underground cultural circles in which most renowned Japanese comics and animated materials were available for eager audiences. Then, what it meant to watch anime prior to its legalization in Korea must have been very different from the implication of viewing anime in the current legalized environment. Indeed, its banned status must have added a unique appeal to anime as a subcultural text, which was passionately embraced by the general public whose anti-governmental sensibility was visibly mounting against the dictatorial regime of the 1980s. Looking back, it seems now quite bizarre and almost perverse to have utilized the light-hearted icons of Japanese commercial media, like Totoro (the adorable roundfigured imaginary creature in My Neighbor Totoro), in making serious political statements on the public demand for democratization. However, it is certainly not accidental that anime was one difficulty in Korea. Only 50 years have passed since our independence” (Han, 198). 17 “The Trajectory of Japanese Popular Culture Opening,” Yonhap News, Dec. 3pth, 2003. 37 of the most popular and regular components, together with banned political films from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in programs of college film festivals, which functioned as important venues for anti-governmental gatherings in the People's Movement of South Korea in the 1980s. 18 Nor it was a solely Korean phenomenon since the use of anime images as a symbol of subversion was witnessed in other cases of socio- political turmoil as well, as Susan Napier’s research mentions. 19 Anime in this context can be said to have been appropriated to disseminate drastically alternative meanings of the culture, regardless of the mainstream, commercial origin of the text. It is no wonder then that by and since the time of the lifting of the ban in Korea in 1998, the fan cultures of anime have become much more widespread, active and self-asserting. In fact, there exist thousands of anime fan clubs in South Korea currently operating through the Internet, grouped around specific shows, characters, genres, themes, creators, and so on. It is also understandable the fan activities of these younger generations do not necessarily have the same kind of political agenda as their predecessors’ projects did. Yet, I think it is still true to say that anime provides these young Korean fans valuable means to build communities with and share cultural vocabularies to express themselves 18 Among the most frequently selected programs were Hayao Miyazaki’s theatrical features produced in the 1980s, such as Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa, 1984), Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Tenku no Shiro Laputa, 1986), and My Neighbor Totoro (1988) since Miyazaki’s television anime series had been already familiar and favored by young Korean audience at that time. Other anime films often featured in college festivals include Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka, by Isao Takahata, 1988) and Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988). 19 Japanese critic Toshiya Ueno is reported to have felt shocked to find an image of Kaneda, a juvenile delinquent character in Katsuhiro Otomo’s hit anime Akira, among the political posters in war-stricken Sarajavo, Servia in 1993; other posters according to Ueno featured the images of Mao Zedong and the Chiappas liberation group (Napier, 4-5). 38 with. For major fan activities of these groups are not simply confined to chatting about their favorite shows and sharing information about where to locate hard-to-find videos, but genuinely extensive, ranging from lively discussions on various current events to sharing and distributing their own creative works including photos, drawings, diaries, novels, music videos, and so forth. To take just one example of various fan activities, we can think about the practice of “cosplay” in Korea, the fan activity that has become especially popular since the opening of the Korean media market to Japanese popular cultural imports. Cosplay, which is a fan term originated in Japan as an abbreviation of “costume play,” indicates the cultural practice of imitating anime or manga or computer game characters by creating the same costumes as in the shows and masquerading in the costumes for public display and picture-taking. For over the past two decades, cosplay has been practiced mostly in Japan, where extremely sophisticated costumes and photo works have been produced: yet, with the increasing popularity of anime, manga, and comic conventions worldwide, cosplay has quickly gained more visibility in various local cultural scenes throughout the globe. Then, what seems to me particularly remarkable in the Korean example of cosplay is that, in spite of the still remaining anti-Japanese sensibility (especially among older generations) and the consequent criticism against anime fans for mindlessly accepting the Japanese “trashy” media products, the participants of cosplay in Korea readily utilize the cultural vocabularies most available in their everyday lives—that is, the 39 vocabularies of comics and anime-- in order to negotiate complicated meanings of social life and construct their own identities. In other words, this Korean case makes it clear that however low the status of anime in the existing cultural hierarchies of the importing country (i.e. Korea) may be, fans are willing to use anime as a precious channel of social discourses to the extent that it plays a significant part in their daily experiences as active cultural subjects. These locally specific meanings of now globally practiced cosplay will be discussed more in detail in the following chapter, with an emphasis on some of the North American examples. I have so far discussed the fan activities in South Korea that consciously appropriate anime to create cultural and political meanings that differ from the dominant readings of the texts. There exists, I would argue, yet another significant layer of anime fan culture we need to look at in South Korea: for those now adult audience groups (mostly in their late 20s and 30s), while not necessarily participating in any obvious fan activities such as collecting anime videos and DVDs, chatting on the Internet, attending fan club meetings, etc., could still be said to comprise latent fan communities on a broader scale, by remembering the anime texts they watched in their childhood with strong emotional attachments and passionate nostalgia. Of course, it may not be new that people can develop a collective nostalgia toward certain popular cultural materials of certain historical times, especially in a postcolonial context. 20 However, in the case of the invisible fan communities formed around anime in Korea, there seem to be several 20 For instance, African fans of the Belgian cartoon character Tintin or Indian fans of British children’s adventure writer Enid Blyton could be considered as other examples of the post- and trans-colonial nostalgia shared amongst younger generation media fans. 40 noteworthy aspects that can help us better understand the issues of altered subjectivity in the ongoing process of cultural globalization. First, it seems to be appropriate to consider the specificity of the cultural context in which the aforementioned, less conscious fandom of anime has been formed in Korea. That is, contradictory to the South Korean government’s strong nationalist policy of banning theatrical release of any Japanese films, a large number of Japanese animation series have been aired on the Korean television throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Surprisingly enough, there has been only one case in which the broadcasting of Japanese animation program was problematized. 21 Television networks have otherwise successfully promoted anime series sometimes as American-produced using fake names such as “American Pictures,” or simply as nationally non-specific cultural texts with universal values, in pursuit of cheap programs to fill the air time. 22 As a result, younger viewers in South Korea came to build rather an ambivalent relationship with anime, to the extent that they were enjoying their early cultural experiences from watching the Japanese animated programs at home, while learning about the evilness of the national origin of the texts at school. In other words, these younger generations must have 21 And this problematization which led to the cancellation of The Queen of a Thousand Years (a.k.a. The Millenium Queen) in 1983 happened only because the extraordinarily fatalistic world view represented in the anime series caught the attention of concerned parents. The History of the Korean Animated Film, p.104-106. 22 Even as recently as in 1997, a television producer complains about the ambiguity of state censors in judging “Japanese color” (waesaek): “Although it is the Korean state that officially discourages importing television cartoons with strong Japajnese color, it is also the National Broadcasting Station that buys out every Japanese television cartoon available in the market with its incomparably larger budget. The real problem is that there is nothing you can not do in Korea. Everything is possible if you really mean it, even against the state regulations” (Han Seung-mi, p.199). 41 developed inevitably split and radically fragmented subjectivity in the situation where public cultural identities were hardly compatible with private aesthetic pleasures. Further, it is not difficult to imagine that there formed a sort of rupture between the cultural sensibility of these younger generation viewers and that of older generations who do not have the early memory of watching Japanese animation on TV. Unlike their seniors who had been educated in a more traditional way, taught more of long-standing values and trained to experience culture in a more coherent and orderly manner, the young anime kids had to learn instead, how to negotiate meanings in contradictory domains-- between official cultures and subcultures, between high art and cheap entertainment, between public history and personal memories, between reality and fantasy and so on. Also, it would be hardly fortuitous that so many texts of anime, which itself started as a communicative medium for Japanese youth in the devastating postwar situation, reflect the break (and almost disavowal) between generations, usually featuring young, orphaned protagonists. What is even more significant for the current discussion however, is that this unintended reception of anime and its influences on younger viewers happened quite similarly in Taiwan, another former colony of the Japanese empire, where Japanese animated programs were widely shown, owing to the loosening of the ban on Japanese media imports since the 1980s. Although it may be problematic to claim generalized uniformity in different fan cultures and ignore disparities in social and historical conditions of Taiwan and South Korea, it can still be said that there has formed an unprecedented scope 42 of transnational anime fan cultures among young audience, both on conscious and unconscious levels, commonly in Korea, Taiwan and Japan (as well as in other regions). For example, the majority of young audiences who had spent their childhood in the aforementioned East Asian regions can be considered to hold the similar early memory of watching some of the anime TV shows by Hayao Miyazaki, who is often considered a spiritual father figure of anime kids due to the extent and intensity of emotional impacts of his works on them. While renowned most for his more recent theatrical hits such as Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001), Hayao Miyazaki has also contributed to the production of a number of television anime series since 1963, mostly with the collaboration with Isao Takahata. To name just a few, Miyazaki has participated in the production of Gulliver's Space Travels (1964), Little Witch Sally (1968), Animal Treasure Island (1971), Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (1971), and World Masterpiece Theater since 1974, which included literary adaptation into anime series such as Alpine Girl Heidi (1974), The Dog of Flanders (1975), Three Thousand Miles in Search of Mother (1976), Anne of Green Gables (1979), and so on. Miyazaki has also made his directorial debut with the television series Future Boy Conan in 1978, which has become immensely popular in East Asia in the 1980s. These programs by Miyazaki have in general, more realistic mode of representation and more complicated plot lines and thematic issues than typical children’s programs, especially when compared with the Disney animation with its transparent narrative structure with unfailingly happy endings and universalizing values. Thus, to the extent that Miyazaki’s anime series conveyed strong messages of hope and belief in humanity to which the anime kids nostalgically hold on, I would 43 argue, Hayao Miyazaki’s television works of the 1980s (and earlier theatrical features to a lesser degree) have stimulated a kind of imagined communities of collective media consumption, or “communities of sentiment” in Arjun Appdurai’s terms. The latent fans of anime can certainly be called “imagined communities” in the sense that, as communities larger than a pre-modern village, which cannot operate through the members’ face-to-face interactions and thus need to be imagined, anime fan communities retain certain comradeship based on the same cultural sensibility-- same imagination, frustration, longing, and memories-- which is mobilized through the consumption of anime texts. And, if Benedict Anderson’s schematization of imagined community effectively showed the way in which print capitalism roused a sense of community in replacing the antiquated cognitive framework of religion with the then-fresh concepts of nation-state and nationalism, I would maintain these postcolonial communities of animated sensibility clearly illuminate how the notion of nation-state is now significantly challenged by the fluid cultural identities of fans across national boundaries. If communities are, as Anderson justly remarked, “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,” the communities of East Asian anime fans certainly need to be taken seriously since they are, in spite of the anime’s illegitimate national origin, imagined in an alternatively meaningful style. (Anderson, 6) V. The Power of Animated Subjects It is truly interesting to look at several ways in which the practices of the anime fan communities have gained cultural agencies and, in turn, inflected recent developments in 44 certain parts of the global culture industry. One example that is useful to consider is how the cultural sensibility of the latent anime fans I described in the above have contributed to the emergence of the so-called nostalgia industry. Various commercial products that recycle certain aspects of old anime series could be viewed as examples of the (anime) nostalgia industry, which include the re-release of previously popular anime series, the revival of old anime characters in television commercials, the remake of theme songs of existing anime series, the reproduction of vintage anime toys, etc. For instance, in South Korea in 1992, a popular singer/song-writer Lee Seunghwan produced a remake of the theme song of The Dog of Flanders, one of the television anime series aired in South Korea in the early 1980s. Lee’s song became widely popular primarily because it smartly appealed to the unnoticed community of young Korean fans who share the tender childhood memory of watching the affectively powerful show (partially because of the main character’s unfulfilled dream and tragic death at the end). The mid-1990s comeback of Hello Kitty, a character line originally from 1974, could be considered as a similar example in which the consumer demands for nostalgia products proved to be strong enough to rejuvenate an entire line of character goods and the corporation (Sanrio) itself. Nevertheless, the potential of the transnational anime fan communities can be speculated not just in terms of their commercially mobilized consumer power toward nostalgia products but also in their evident influences in a broader discursive context. The recent art movement generally called Japanese Punk Art or “superflat” art could be a useful example to think about for a better understanding of the increasing power of anime fan 45 culture. Although it is a still ongoing phenomenon that might be challenging to grasp fully, we can reasonably notice a tendency in which a group of young Japanese artists, most famously represented by Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, have become highly influential in contemporary art world by extensively drawing upon anime, manga, and computer games. By successfully incorporating the aesthetic and thematic motifs from such popular cultural texts into their own creative productions, which range from T-shirts and plush toys to fine art paintings and sculptures that are highly sought after in designer toy shops and art galleries both within Japan and abroad, these young artists show the creative potential as well as the scope of the audience’s demands for anime sensibilities. 23 This art movement and other successful non-Japanese pop art and design trends, which I will discuss more in detail in the “Anime Art” section in Chapter 3, seem to me to reveal the profoundly mobile and versatile nature of the imagined communities of anime sensibility. As we can see in the following interviews with leading Japanese punk artists, Kenji Yanobe, Yoshimoto Nara, and Aya Takano, the shared cultural sensibilities of animated subjects seem to function as a new kind of border-crossing language of communication: When I was a child, I saw TV animation, and got impression from them. I wanted to find the center of beauty from this [Japanese popular] culture. (Nakamura 1997) 23 To get a sense of how these artists’ strategy of re-appropriating anime influences has empowered them, look at ArtReview’s “Power 100” list, in which Takashi Murakami, the leading Japanese punk artist, has been repeatedly included since 2002. In 2004, Murakami was ranked as the 10 th most powerful man in the art world. 46 ... people say, "You have a big influence from Japanese animation." No. I have a big influence from my childhood. The animations gave me influence, but they are not animations you can now watch on TV. The animations I saw before when 1 was a child. Sometimes, people have kind of nostalgic from my paintings. (Nakamura 2000) (In an interview) She [Aya Takano] adds that she grew up watching animation and comics, but is influenced by it only "unconsciously." (Nakamura 2001) This tendency of openly embracing anime influences for a new artistic production and its global circulation might be critiqued as a deliberate appropriation of the so-called cuteness culture (kawai culture) of contemporary Japan, especially considering the blatant fore- grounding of sexualized images of adolescent girls’ bodies (as in Mr.’s paintings that show young girls’ knowingly innocent poses with lifted skirts and panties showing underneath). 24 However, regardless of different interpretations of individual texts, we can certainly understand a kind of trajectory of cultural influences in this case of Japanese punk art and other anime art: from the production of anime by the culture industry to the mobilization or indeed, animation of fans of anime into a creative agent through both explicit and implicit fan activities and then to the reshaping and redirecting of the global culture industry and taste hierarchies. In other words, through the examination of the process in which a new iconography of Asian cool is constructed and embraced through a conscious use of anime imagery, we can understand that both discursively and geographically, animated 24 On the other hand, it is hard to separate entirely between commercial appropriations of kawaii iconography and other more politically motivated cultural projects, as is convincingly argued by Sharon Kinsella in the following: “Cute style is anti-social; it idolises the pre-social. By immersion in the pre- social world, otherwise known as childhood, cute fashion blithely ignores or outrightly contradicts values central to the organization of Japanese society and the maintenance of the work ethic. By acting childish, Japanese youth try to avoid the conservatives’ moral demand that they exercise self-discipline and responsibility and tolerate severe conditions whilst working hard in order to repay their obligation to society. Rather than working hard, cuties seem to just want to play and ignore the rest of society completely. Cute is one element of the vast popular culture which has flourished in Japan during the last quarter of a century, overwhelming and threatening traditional culture…” (Kinsella, pp. 251-252). 47 subjectivity can be expanded to a truly global dimension, forming dialogic relations among separate fields of cultural production and crossing boundaries of national identities and cultural hierarchies. VI. Concluding Thoughts and More Questions As I have illustrated so far, the complexities and dialectic dimensions of anime fan cultures in South Korea of different historical contexts do challenge many of the binary frames of understanding such as the colonizer and the colonized, core and periphery, the First world and the Third world, and so forth. I thus argue that it is extremely meaningful to pay more critical attention to the questions concerning the imbalance between the fans’ cultural attachment to the texts and the underlying implications of economic exploitativeness of anime production and consumption. It is also important to examine more carefully the broad scope of imagined communities latently formed and possibly mobilized around the collective memory of watching the same anime texts. And finally, the ambivalent subjectivities of young Korean anime audience and fans that are deeply split between guilt and pleasure, between public imbuing of official history and private consumption of forbidden media texts, need to be further explored as one of many examples of diversely animated subjects in the process of cultural globalization. What is engendered in this juncture is apparently not one-dimensional reflections of the logic of the transnational capital, but dialogic discursive contexts that can stimulate alternative cultural practices while reinforcing hegemonic power relations to a degree as well. An apparent point that can be thus reminded once again here is that the globally yet diversely animated subjectivities of anime fans cannot be adequately examined in simple 48 terms of cultural and/or economic domination and subjugation—nor in those of the binary between the global and the local. Exploring the similar questions on reception of Japanese mass culture in Taiwan, Leo Ching argues, although there used to be certain historical contexts in which the discourse of cultural imperialism could be used functionally—such as the 1970s’ Chilean revolutionary situation which required anti-American imperialist manifesto such as Dorfman and Mattelart's How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1975)--, now in a world of transnational corporations, telecommunication, information network, and international division of labor, the existing model of center-periphery relations is “no longer viable.” Pointing out the limits of both of anti-imperialist diagnosis and the depoliticized, almost celebratory analysis of the prevalence of Japanese mass culture in Asia, Ching emphasizes, “Not only can the institution of cultural production no longer be isolated to a single ‘center,’ but the passive reception of the ‘periphery’ should also be questioned.” After all, the heterogeneous ways in which people use the dominant cultural texts in the “periphery” can never be formulated effectively through any generalizing schematization: If global mass culture represents the new configuration of a changing capitalist relations in which a nation-centered response or resistance is no longer adequate, we need, on the one hand, to recognize that this cultural process is spatially and temporally uneven and discontinuous, and on the other hand, to be attentive to the different, at times, contradictory and unintended, ways social agencies are articulated and empowered at every point of cultural practices. (Ching, 192) 49 Therefore, we can conclude, in examining such global media texts as Japanese animation, the necessity, and the urgency indeed, to be attentive to specificities of each case has become unprecedentedly high. Only carefully localized examples that are historically contextualized at the same time could shed lights on the blind spots of meta-narratives of globalization, which have been so far mostly limited to delineating of the shifting powers of existing nation-states and their supposedly corresponding cultural relations. As David Morley suggests, in globalization “locality is not simply subsumed in a national or global sphere... [but] increasingly bypassed in both directions: experience is both unified beyond localities and fragmented within them.” (Morley, 9) Most importantly, the study of the individual and private patterns of media appropriation is now, more than ever, closely related to political questions. For, a new subjectivity in the age of the global and postmodern, which is thoroughly penetrated by commercial media, yet at the same time, released from the restrictive forms of traditional human subjectivity, can be possibly imagined as political agency. It might be a bit too soon to wholeheartedly share Arjun Appadurai’s hopeful vision of the political future of the imagined communities of global media reception, which he believes to be capable “of moving from shared imagination to collective action” and of “creating the possibility of convergences in translocal social action that would otherwise be hard to imagine.” (Appadurai, 8) There still remain a series of critical questions to be answered, on how the border-crossing imaginary communities can be mobilized as political agency and how the individual subjectivity formed within the global media environments can be returned to 50 collective relations, and the like. Nevertheless, the implications of being actively engaged with global media texts and participating in discursive communities by becoming an animated subject and agent for social imaginations could be deeply political. For being animated by global media texts such as anime is, I would argue, the most profoundly personal yet powerfully social activity, and the most schizophrenic yet possibly liberating experience in forming a new subjectivity in the context of globalization. 51 Chapter Two Fans and Players: Costuming Bodies and Consuming Pleasures In the previous chapter, I discussed different socio-political meanings created through the reception of anime texts by different generations of South Korean anime fans, in order to emphasize the significance of the historical and other contextual specificities in considering cultural formations in different local, national, transnational and global conditions. In the current chapter, I would like to discuss two more specific locales of similar fan cultural activities in two different national contexts: cospre or cosplay performed in Japan and the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As is briefly mentioned in Chapter One, cospre or cosplay is a kind of anime fan practice in which fans dress up in imitation of certain characters from anime and/or manga texts (or computer games or popular movies to a lesser degree) for the purpose of public display and photo-shooting. By thinking about different meanings articulated through Japanese and North American anime fans’ adoption of the same format of fan practice, we can also examine the usefulness of major concepts in fan culture studies and subculture theories, in studying more freely border-crossing flows of cultural influences of the present time. Before I begin a comparative analysis of the two fan cultural formations, however, it is necessary to look briefly at some of the critical terms that can be used in discussion of cosplay cultures and consider the different implications of each term. I. Fan cultures, subcultures, and alternative communities Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in 52 the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation. (Hebdige, 1979: 90) To describe the practice of cosplay, critical categories such as “fan culture” and “subculture” have often been used in much of the existing literature on the reception of anime. In order to understand the fannish aspect of anime reception then, we need to first consider the distinctive meanings associated with the term “fan” in Media and Cultural Studies discourses, and understand how a “fan” is critically distinguished from a mere “audience member,” “regular viewer” or “eager consumer” of cultural texts and products. While the term “fan” has a pathological origin (as in “fanatic”) and thus negative connotations in the English word, 25 critics who work on fan cultures, especially those in Anglophone academia, have consistently emphasized more active, productive and positive qualities of fan activities through various concepts such as “an affective sensibility,” an “investment” (Grossberg, 1992), “(semiotic) productivity and participation” (Fiske, 1992), and the best-known “textual poaching” (Jenkins, 1992). Henry Jenkins, in particular, has contributed significantly to the establishment of fan cultures as a complex and meaningful subject of critical inquiry, by specifying the ways in which fan practices can be participatory, such as the “five levels of fan activities”: a particular mode of reception, a particular set of critical and interpretive practices, a base for consumer activism, particular forms of cultural production, and an alternative social community (Jenkins, 1992: 277-281). As for the creative potential of fan activities, John 25 Fortunately, this negative connotation does not seem to be universally shared in different language- cultures, as is suggested by a Finnish researcher in “Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies” (p. 187). 53 Fiske’s more overtly optimistic account of the “producerly” qualities in fan productions, whether they are semiotic, enunciative, or textual, also remains helpful, not only in recognizing the possibility for more positive readings of seemingly trivial and obsessive fan behaviors, but also in understanding how discourses on fan cultures have since become a stable component of audience analysis in Media and Cultural Studies (Fiske, 1992). Many researchers of fan cultures have later tried to further complicate such a hopeful vision of productive fan cultures, by acknowledging various issues emerging in theoretical discussions of fans, which include those of agency, gender division, dominant ideologies, commercialization, and researchers’ own relationship with the fan community. For instance, Matt Hills’ notion of “performative consumption” tries to recognize fans’ self-reflexive positioning toward the consumerist ideologies in the culture industry (Hills, 2002: 158-171), whereas a number of concepts related to “academic-fans (or aca-fans or ‘fan-boy’ academics, etc.),” proposed by Henry Jenkins, Jeffrey Sconce (1995), Matt Hills (2007) and others, attempt to negotiate a more productive space between the objective, scientific position of fan studies researchers and researchers’ own personal involvement with fan cultures. However, it can still be reasonably said that fan culture studies essentially revolves around the emphasis placed on fans’ passionate investment in certain cultural texts and/or icons and their self-reflexive engagement with various communal activities that manifest their commitment to those texts/icons. In this sense, cosplay in the context of anime fandom needs to be discussed as distinctively devoted fan cultural practices, even if anime viewership and manga readership in general 54 include a wider variety of casual viewers, less dedicated readers, mundane consumers and even non-fans. In a similar vein, the concept of “subculture” needs to be examined in a critical discussion of cosplay practiced in different locales. Sarah Thornton, mapping out major debates on the concept of subculture, stresses two points in the overlapping notions of subculture: “states of relative transience” and “something innately oppositional.” In other words, subcultures are often defined by their members’ conscious (or less conscious) gestures of distancing themselves from existing, dominant cultures as well as by the inherently temporary and performative quality of such gestures. The defining attribute of ‘subcultures’ then, lies with the way the accent is put on the distinction between a particular cultural/social group and the larger culture/society... Subcultures, in other words, are condemned to and/or enjoy a consciousness of ‘otherness’ or difference. (Thornton, 1997: 5) Many critics in different fields have accordingly made consistent efforts to identify the specific cultural establishments those members of particular subcultures try to distinguish themselves from: most notably, for example, the researchers at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in the 1970s have argued that some of the prominent youth subcultures in the postwar British context, such as Teddy Boys, Mods and Skinheads, were rebelling against both the dominant ‘hegemonic’ culture and the subordinate working class ‘parent’ culture (Clarke et al., 1975). Such a view, inasmuch as it assumes a consciously ‘political’ agency behind subcultural formations could be problematic since not every subculture comes into existence in a uniform manner with a 55 clear political agenda. Other critical concepts from sociology and cultural theory have been thus borrowed to explicate precisely the varying degree of political orientation in different subcultures, such as Norbert Elias’s “figuration,” an “interdependent network of social actors” as a more dynamic and shifting set of connections than the stable and teleological notion of subcultures . 26 Because of his emphasis on less rational factors such as emotions in the organization of subcultures, Michel Maffesoli’s notion of the tribe as an “emotional community” has been also used effectively in examining less overtly oppositional, yet still strongly social desires in various contemporary subcultural practices. Janet Staiger, explaining the tendency of social grouping in fan cultural activities, similarly points out the problems with the existing notion of subculture, drawing upon the aforementioned work by Henry Jenkins: Jenkins uses the term alternative community rather than subculture or counterculture. Given the ambiguities of definition as well as questions about whether fandom actually constitutes behavior that is not mainstream (perhaps today it is more mainstream than not), I shall follow Jenkins’s terminology, acknowledging that the use of the word alternative does not imply nonnormative and likewise, community is used loosely here. (Staiger, 2005: 107) Staiger’s carefulness in choosing the equally ambiguous term “alternative community” over subculture or counterculture due to its supposed greater inclusiveness helps us understand how much critical effort has been made to modify the ever-influential notion of subculture theorized by the Birmingham School, which purposefully politicizes the mundane everyday practices of youth subcultures. 26 Michael Atkinson, for example, uses Elias’s notion of figuration effectively in explaining interpersonal dynamics that affect individuals’ practice of bodily modification, such as tattooing, as a way of interacting with various social influences. 56 With such circumspection as Staiger’s in mind, then, we can apply some of the insights of subcultural studies to the current discussion of cosplay in the context of globalization. For whether we use more traditional definitions of subculture such as the one by Albert Cohen (1955) 27 or more recent notions of it as in Muggleton’s study of “postmodern” subcultures (2000), copsplay can be effectively examined as a subcultural practice since what lies at its core is the transient and collective gesture of the participants to distance themselves from the mainstream cultures by using the “mainstream” cultural texts of anime and manga in a deviant way through their physical re-enactment of the texts and blurring of the boundaries between private and public space through their masquerading performances. Regardless of whether or not such performances can be read politically, cosplay needs to be understood predominantly in terms of cosplayers’ attempts to build an “alternative” community through the symbolic gestures of costuming and consuming bodies that allow them to distinguish themselves from other existing social groups. Only with an understanding of this fundamental inclination, can we grasp more specific ways in which cosplay can be interpreted as a subcultural response to particular socio-political issues under different local conditions. While there are such advantages to using the term fan cultures, subcultures, and alternative communities in examining cosplay cultures in different parts of the world, 27 “The crucial condition for the emergence of new cultural forms is,” Cohen argues, “the existence, in effective interaction with one another, of a number of actors with similar problems of adjustment.” Thus in Cohen’s definition, subcultures can be understood as clusters of individuals who seek to solve like problems of adjustment through a “subcultural solution” (Cohen, 1955). 57 however, there also exist at least two key issues that further complicate any simple application of such terms to contemporary cosplay practices. Especially when we locate global anime cosplay at the juncture between fan culture and subculture as a collective symbolic gesture to build an alternative community, I suggest the implications of “alternative” and “global” need to be examined as well. In other words, if anime fans both inside and outside Japan participate in the act of cosplay as an attempt to differentiate their own collective culture from other existing dominant social formations, a necessary question to ask here would be to what degree we can generalize this “dominant” culture anime fans in different parts of the world similarly try to rebel against—i.e. how global is the dominant or “mainstream” culture in the cultures of globalization? We can certainly detect several common threads of resistance correspondingly found in different cosplay scenes in the world: 1) resistance against the mainstream as the culture industry; 2) resistance against the mainstream as the forces of commercialization; 3) resistance against the mainstream conceived as a cluster of hetero-normative, ethnocentric, middle-class ideologies. In other words, regardless of the geographical location of cosplay scenes, anime fans’ projects of embodying certain texts through cosplay could be said to have the common agenda of subverting hierarchical power relations between anime producers and viewers/consumers through the fans’ producerly activities such as costume-making, posing and photo-shooting. We can also understand the subcultural logic of anti-commercialism commonly found in cosplay practices when considering cosplayers’ collective favoring of handmade costumes over ready-made ones 58 and the widely shared aesthetic sensibility of bricolage, (in Levi-Strauss’s term) or the principle of creatively repurposing existing objects for props and accessories. At the same time, the practice of cosplay which centrally involves masquerading in public spaces as fantastic characters of fictional ethnicity (often with blue, green, pink hair) and fluid gender identity (freely cross-dressing), could be interpreted as conveying the fundamental desire of anime fans to challenge dominant ideologies of ethnocentric and hetero-normative bourgeois culture. However, besides these broad commonalities, how much of the specific meanings articulated through cosplayers’ bodies can be generalized in studying fan cultural and subcultural performances in different locales? And more importantly, how valid is it to assume a certain amount of homogeneity in the “mainstream” culture that anime fans in different parts of the world try to dissociate themselves from? Questioning dichotomies such as mainstream/subculture and commercial/alternative, typically used as a conceptual foundation in academic discourse on youth subcultures, especially in the works of Dick Hebdige, Geoff Mungham, and Angela McRobbie, Sarah Thornton argues as follows: Both Hebdige and Mungham define subcultures and mainstreams against each other. Their antithesis partly derives from the high cultural ideologies in which both formulations are entangled. Hebdige perceives his mainstream as bourgeois and his subcultural youth as an artistic vanguard. Mungham sees his mainstream as a stagnant ‘mass,’ only their deviant others are, by implication, creative and changing. Although assigned different class characteristics, both ‘mainstreams’ are devalued as normal, conventional majorities. … Interestingly, the main strands of thought on the social structure of youth amongst these British scholars contradict one another. One positions the mainstream as a middle-class, ‘dominant’ culture, while the other describes it as a 59 working-class, ‘mass’ culture. Some then, see the alternative as (middle-class) student culture, others as (working-class) subculture. (Thornton, 1996: 94-96) The problem within academic accounts of subcultures, according to Thornton, lies in the wholesale devaluation of the term “mainstream” as a structuring absence in defining the emancipatory qualities of subcultural practices, without clarifying the meanings involved in the use of the term, mainstream. Further, abstract applications of the term in a universalizing manner to discussions of different kinds of subcultural practices situated in different socio-cultural and historical contexts aggravate the confusion over competing notions of mainstream(s) and their subcultural others. In addition, when we juxtapose such a contentious framework with a subcultural practice in a global or trans-local context, the question of defining subcultures or alternative fan communities in opposition to the “mainstream” becomes even more challenging. Martin Roberts, in his discussion of shifting meanings of subcultures in the process of globalization, raises a series of significant questions: What happens when the sub-cultural is introduced into theories of globalization or cosmopolitanism, or the reverse? How might we go about theorizing, for example, the sub-culture industry, the sub-cultural logic of late capitalism, the field of sub- cultural production, or the global sub-cultural economy? (Roberts, 2004: 586) Similarly, in the field of fan culture studies, Harrington and Bielby reflect on the question of how to revise our understandings of fans in the context of globalization, as well as the definition of “global fandom” itself: What, we asked ourselves, does the term “global fandom” even mean? Does it mean studying the meaning of “fan” in different parts of the world? Does it mean studying how fans in different countries all respond to the same “global” text? 60 Does it mean studying import/export trade patterns and how fans in one cultural context respond to texts from another cultural context? (Harrington and Bielby, 2007: 179) Answering these related questions, Roberts provides a general sketch of three multi-local subcultural scenes in order to lead us to start thinking about “the place of the subcultural within globalization, and vice versa,” whereas Harrington and Bielby perform a survey with fan studies scholars in different parts of the world. Whether the researcher is physically located within the actual site of the fan and/or subcultural practice, or performs mediated research through employing diverse communication technologies, empirical qualities in the research seem to be mostly favored in dealing with those fundamental questions concerning how to rethink fan cultures and subcultures in the context of globalization. Patrick Murphy and Marwan Kraidy, for example, strongly emphasize the importance of “a more salient commitment to ethnographic inquiry” in global media studies because they believe audience ethnography “offers a heuristic opportunity to examine the local implications of globalization, which concern how the majority of the world population experiences globalization in its everyday life.” (Murphy and Kraidy: 6- 7) I agree with Murphy and Kraidy in the sense that empirical research is needed to an extent in accounting for the lived experiences of globalization by everyday subjects, as media consumers, as fans of certain texts, and sometimes even as participants in subcultural practices. On the other hand, it seems also necessary for me to try not to prioritize “local knowledge” (in Clifford Geertz’s term) as superior in any way in heuristic projects of cultural practices in the global-local nexus. For as shown in the aforementioned article by Martin Roberts (2005), an overview of (sub)cultural scenes on 61 a macro-level could be as provocative and telling as microscopic reports of cultural experiences of localized individuals, in thinking through changing forms of cultural consumption and meaning production in globalization. Therefore, constant efforts to incorporate not either but both global and local cultural sites/sights need to be made in order to better understand the meanings of fan and/or subcultural studies in the age of globalization. To put it differently, as an answer to Harrington and Bielby’s above question concerning the meaning of global fandom/global fan studies, I would contend that global fan (and subcultural) studies would be, above all, a critical dedication to producing a balanced perspective of the altered subjectivity of everyday media users and fans between global and local, without being caught up in the dichotomy. For the remainder of this chapter, I would like to discuss the practice of cosplay, situating it at the juncture between transnational fan culture and subculture, with a focus on primarily two sites: anime cosplay at Comiket (Comic Market) in Tokyo and at anime conventions in the United States, both researched mainly in the first half of the 2000s. Through descriptions of the fan/subcultural scenes I have experienced and conversations I have had with participants in the scene, I intend to deal with two major questions: first, how do we understand differing local meanings articulated through similar fan/subcultural activities of cosplay in Japan and the US? When the original form of fan- and subcultural practice of cosplay travel to foreign locales, do meanings communicated through the practice shift as well? If so, how are the socio-political issues specific to the importing local communities embodied differently through cosplayers’ changing bodies? Or to use the phrase I presented in the previous chapter, how similarly or differently do 62 cosplayers in different parts of the world become animated and turn into creative subjects through the consumption of the same or similar global media texts? A second series of questions I want to deal with in the following discussion concern changing definitions of fans, subcultures, and alternative communities in the fluctuating environments of media and cultural production and reception in the process of globalization. As discussed above, various kinds of “alternative” or oppositional cultural practices of individuals positioned in the marginal or interstitial space of society are typically defined by their resistance to the “mainstream,” which is also called, depending on the context, dominant, hegemonic, official, parent, bourgeois, commercial, mass culture, etc. Inasmuch as the mainstream itself is shifting in the process of globalization, I contend, a different term might be useful in thinking about the blurred boundaries between fan cultural and subcultural practices in today’s transnational and translocal context. Thus, through a comparative discussion of the two local cosplay scenes, I propose to reconsider the main implications of such terms as fan, subculture, and alternative communities, and consider a different term, “player,” as a hybrid encompassing all three practices. II. Toward a perfect cosplay: conversations with a few Japanese cosplayers “I am happy cosplaying. I can be my favorite character. I can make friends.” (A cosplayer named Sakura, Tokyo, March 2006) 63 I have been visiting cosplay scenes and interviewing cosplayers in Tokyo, mainly at Comiket but also at other smaller events between 1999 and 2006. 28 To the extent that I find it difficult and usually unproductive to distinguish my investment in cosplay as a fannish observer from my interest in the scene as a researcher, I have used a mixed methodology of interview, participant observation, textual analysis as well as literature review, in order to maintain a kind of balance between subjective/objective, personal/professional, emotional/scientific and local/global. The interviews this section is based on are primarily from the two sets of formal interviews I performed in December 2001 and March 2006 in Tokyo, with about 20 groups of cosplayers. My main questions in these interviews concerned the pleasures taken from cosplaying in contemporary Tokyo: what drew the cosplayers in to getting involved, what motivations help them to continue, what makes them feel most fulfilled as cosplayers, what they consider to be the best cosplay, etc. Because a majority of cosplayers are young women in their teens and 20s and generally very shy to speak about their passion to a stranger, I asked my interviewees to either speak directly to a video camera in response to my written questionnaire or chat amongst themselves (if they were in a group, which was the case in most interviews, with groups of 4 or 5 cosplayers) about given topics with only a minimum of moderation on my part. 28 For the research in this section, I thank Ayumi Aso for facilitating recent interviews (those in 2006), and Hiroko Varela for some of the translation job. 64 Cosplay 29 is generally considered to have been practiced in Japan from the mid-1980s onwards (Kinsella, 113), although some critics believe that the first public cosplay presentation was as early as in 1978. 30 In spite of its longstanding history, however, cosplay is still largely an exclusive and isolated cultural practice in which only limited groups of fans who share the same degree of interests and knowledge in manga and anime get together and pose in costume for each other and for even smaller groups of participants called cameko’s (“camera boys” or male photographers). While these events are frequent and regular, they are hardly a mass-scale event in terms of the way they are organized (i.e. the lack of corporate, commercializing agents involved in the organization) as well as the size of events themselves, except for the biggest bi-annual gatherings of cosplayers at Comiket (Comic market for amateur manga artists and their fans) which draw roughly 400,000 attendees per year. 31 Considering the extraordinary size of the anime and manga market in Japan 32 where anime can be said to belong to the 29 The term cospre in Japanese is sometimes used more broadly, literally as “costume play,” referring to many different kinds of group role-playing activities in costume that imitate not only characters from anime, manga and other related texts, but also those from live-action television shows, pop music bands, and other types of media celebrities (e.g. “idol” cospre) and even fashion styles (e.g. gosurori, meaning “gothic Lolita,” cosplay). In this chapter however, I would use both cospre and cosplay to specifically refer to anime and manga costume play only. 30 For example, Matthew Thorn suggests that the first cosplay performance for the public was by Kotani Mari, now successful science fiction writer, who “portrayed” a character from Tezuka Osamu’s Umi no Toriton at a science fiction convention in 1978 (Thorn, 175). Some anime fans, although arguably, even suggest that the term was invented by Nov. Takahashi, the President of Studio Hard, when he was inspired by American fans’ costuming practice when he visited a science fiction convention in Los Angeles in 1984, borrowing Takahashi’s own words. (“A Fan’s View of Anime Conventions”: Project A-Kon.) 31 www.comiket.co.jp/ 32 “In 2001, more than 1.9 billion manga magazines and books were sold, with gross revenues totaling 531 billion yen ($5 billion).” (Thorn, 169); “The animation market in Japan exceeded 213,500,000,000 yen in 2002. Especially television animation occupied over 70% of world market” (KOCCA Issue Paper, Aug. 2006). 65 “mainstream” commercial culture, it is truly remarkable that cosplayers have managed to carve out an alternative cultural space through their subcultural activities, from the mass production and consumption of anime and manga. In other words, through the symbolic act of costume play that signifies conscious efforts on the side of cosplayers to distance themselves from the dominant mode of consumption and reception of anime, a cultural niche has been created in which deviant meanings from the mass-oriented texts are produced while forming a new social group. What is most consistently striking about the interviews and conversations I have had with cosplayers in Japan is how much of the cosplay community is formed through cosplayers’ strong desire to belong to the community of dedicated anime fans. Almost all of the interviewees, at some point during an interview, said that they started cosplaying to make friends or to follow their friends’ lead or to belong to the cosplaying community. What seems also remarkable to me about these answers is that not many of the cosplayers actually mention their love of anime and manga as such as the primary reason for starting cosplaying. Love of anime is taken for granted in this community; what matters instead is how their passion is realized. By choosing the most spectacular way of manifesting their attachment to anime through embodying the texts, cosplayers can be said to have decided to build an alternative system of producing social meanings by repurposing cultural products manufactured by the anime industry. Evidence for such a desire for participating in an alternative community is plentiful. Cosplayers introduce themselves by the name of the character they are playing for the 66 day, or by their nicknames. Before taking photos of each other, they usually exchange name cards with those cosplay names and their own cosplay photos. Many cosplayers perform as a team, of usually four to six but sometimes over ten members (or they cosplay at least as a pair), which enables them to embody a group of main characters from a certain show and thus recreate diegesis more thoroughly. Most cosplayers organize these groups with friends they have met at a previous cosplay event. Even cosplayers who start solo soon make friends with other cosplayers and perform in a group that is organized temporarily, depending on the show they want to recreate for an upcoming event. The usual pattern for cosplaying could be generalized that cosplayers go to an event such as a cosplay party at a park or night club individually, meet with their team members for the day, perform, have fun, “release the stress” and go home separately. One cosplayer clarified that it is rare for cosplayers who perform together to go somewhere else after the event. In my interviews with several cosplay teams, the interviewees who are mostly women, aged between mid-teens and late 20s, often seemed to be discovering new facts about other cosplayers within their group through the interview itself—for example, their actual age, occupation, how they handle their identity as a cosplayer outside the cosplaying circle. While the sense of belonging to the community is most crucial in the practice of cosplay, joining the community is not all that difficult. Cosplayers can make their own costumes for cosplay but they can also buy them at specialty stores such as those in Akihabara, or order them through an online store. If cosplaying is not a feasible option, anime fans can still participate in cosplay by taking photos of cosplayers. Most cosplayers or cameko’s 67 (camera boys) I interviewed say they just store the photos for their own private viewing, with only a few of them posting the photos on their personal blog to circulate the images amongst a small circle of anime fans and fellow cosplayers. Cosplayers who wear costumes do not usually have negative attitudes toward people who are there not to cosplay but to take photos, as long as the photographers are polite and share the same interest in anime as the cosplayers. It is reported that there has been an increasing tension in recent years, not between cosplayers and photographers, but between cosplayers with true passion for anime and cosplayers considered to be cosplaying simply for the attention by wearing skimpy outfits. For example, separate areas for cosplay have been created at Comiket, while cosplaying outside the given areas has been strictly regulated because some manga fans have problems with cosplayers on the grounds that they are simply attention seekers, not genuine manga fans (Thorn 175-176). But other than a few reports of this kind, cosplayers are generally open toward newcomers and non-cosplaying participants on-site, even when they are middle-aged men with big cameras, taking close- up photos of young girls in revealing outfits, as long as they are there because of their enthusiasm toward anime and manga. As for the quality of cosplay performers aspire to achieve, a number of cosplayers testify that they feel most accomplished when they think they have played their characters “perfectly.” Although this is a highly ambiguous concept, “to cosplay perfect,” cosplayers seem to have specific criteria such as “perfectly copied” details of costumes and props, mimetic accuracy in posing and facial expression, proximity between the cosplayer’s physique and that of the character, overall believability, etc. which all reflect 68 the cosplayer’s encyclopedic knowledge of the show and the character embodied through cosplay. It is thus not surprising that a number of cosplayers I interviewed in Japan said they choose characters to cosplay, not only because they like those characters but also because they are capable of playing certain characters better than others. A few cosplayers said that they did not choose the roles they were playing on the day of the interview, but were invited by their friends to play those roles mainly because of the physical similarity between the roles and the cosplayers. This is a significant disparity I find between the cosplay scene in Japan and that in the US where the physical difference between characters and cosplayers seems to be even willfully ignored. This does not mean that cosplayers in the U.S., are any less meticulous in embodying the characters or that cosplay outside Japan is any less elaborate in general. Rather, this approach to embodying anime characters most closely in every sense of the word by Japanese cosplayers could be better understood by a distinction made by Virginia Nightingale and reintroduced by Matt Hills in their respective studies of fans/imitators of media celebrities such as Elvis and Madonna: the distinction between improvisation and impersonation (Nightingale, 1994; Hills 2002). While this distinction cannot be universally applied to all cosplayers in the two national contexts, it is certainly interesting to see how physical differences between cosplayers and characters are negotiated through two different perspectives involving improvisation and impersonation. In his discussion of Elvis impersonators who consider Elvis “as a platform for their own personality,” Matt Hills follows: 69 Replication, then, is not the end of the story: it is a moment (or a stage) in the impersonator’s dynamic career trajectory. Reproducing a ‘wholeness’ of the other, the successful impersonator finally returns to his or her own body and their own expressive idiom: ideally, the other is used as an object to assist in the unfolding of self and subjectivity. This object-use can be viewed neither as a pure replication of the cult icon, nor as a matter of passive impersonation on the other, being realized through this process of attachment. (Hills, 2002:166) Thus, a lot of US cosplayers’ approach to impersonating anime characters in spite of the physical difficulty of closely replicating them in order to reach a more expressive level of symbolic re-production could be understood as an act of improvisation rather than impersonation. On the other hand, while there were a few cosplayers I interviewed in Japan who said they enjoy adding “variations” to the scenes they re-enact, a majority of cosplayers indicated that their pleasures in cosplaying comes from “becoming more like the character”: i.e. a complete identification. One cosplayer summarizes this mode of impersonating performance clearly in the following conversation: Question: What is the happiest moment of cosplaying for you? Answer: When I can see the world of that character through the character’s eyes. While the story on the screen is seen from an outsider’s view (not from the character’s view), I am glad if I can change my way of looking at the story by looking through the character’s eyes. Participating in the diegesis of anime shows through “becoming like the character,” not only through affective experiences but also through physical practices of impersonation, seems to be the key motivation for a majority of cosplayers in contemporary Japan for getting involved and animated by the cosplay fan culture. Whether it is a fantastic setting 70 as in Inuyasha (an Edo-period fantasy anime that has become a recent staple in many cosplay scenes), or a contemporary school setting in which characters wear school uniforms with sailor-collars, by extending the diegetic world through communal re- enactment and identifying completely with the vision of a fantastic world presented in the show, these cosplayers seem to attempt to build an alternative symbolic space in which meanings from the mainstream anime/manga can be selectively turned over and re- configured. What could be considered as the socio-political meanings articulated through such a spectacular act of cosplay still remains multifarious since cosplay is an extremely multifaceted practice that visualizes varying desires and pleasures of everyday fans of anime and manga. One of the most representative Japanophile writer Donald Richie associates the contemporary youth practice of kosupure with the traditional practice of matsuri, a longstanding carnivalesque festival in which “bands of dancing citizenry flock[ed], chanting the mantra of the new frivolity… Eijanaika!”: The Japanese spirit of frivolity is an embodiment of impotence, an inability to create actual social change and hence an attempt to mimic it. Dancing in the streets or prancing about in costume is equally frivolous in that it cannot be serious, since to be serious is to have some effect, and it is carefully seen to that eijanaika posturing and kosupure posing alike have no social effect whatsoever. (Richie, 2003: 149) Richie’s unsympathetic perspective in interpreting these two widely popular cultural practices as politically impotent and deceptively conformist is certainly not new. Nevertheless, it does not help us understand much about the semiotic significance and 71 pleasure of cosplay as a hybrid cultural practice in the age of globalization, since according to Richie’s reading, cosplayers, who display their creative potential through such an elaborate intertextual spectacle, remain merely a manifestation of “foolishness,” paternally controlled and hopelessly misled by the ruling political group to believe that “something is being expressed publicly.” Sharon Kinsella, in her more positive and extensive discussion of the amateur manga scene in Japan, interprets the creative project of parody as a major tendency in the non- commercial production and circulation of manga and fan works. Indicating the concurrent popularity of aniparo (parody based on animation rather than manga series) and cosplay from the mid-1980s onwards, Kinsella provides the possibility of reading cosplay, or “live parody” in her term, as a part of anime/manga fans’ larger parodic project that is “based on the subversion of meanings carried in the original, and frequently iconic, cultural items.” (Kinsella, 2000: 113) The association Kinsella makes between the amateur manga sense of parody and the Anglo-American sensibility of ‘camp,’ especially in that both often playfully subvert cultural materials with strong gender stereotypes, is very useful in thinking about the implications of cosplay as a reaction against the normative gender division in contemporary Japan. Another possibility of understanding cosplay more specifically within the context of contemporary Japanese society is presented in Kinsella’s previous work on the kawaii or cute style that saturated media and popular culture in Japan between 1970 and 1990. In analyzing the popular craze of celebrating childlike style and identity, especially in 72 fashion and consumer goods and services, Kinsella concludes that the kawaii style can be read as a youth cultural response to societal expectations of adult responsibilities specific to Japanese society of the 1970s and 1980s: Cute is one element of the vast popular culture which has flourished in Japan during the last quarter of a century, overwhelming and threatening traditional culture. This popular culture is almost entirely devoted to an escape from reality, and its dominant themes have been cuteness, nostalgia, foreignness, romance, fantasy and science fiction… The rule for Japanese popular culture has been any space or any time, but here and now in Japan. (Kinsella, 1995: 252) Cosplay can also be considered effectively in this context of kawaii culture in which the pressure to enter the adult world of monotonous, stale and austere reality and authoritarian ideologies is playfully challenged through fans’ spectacular embrace of manga and anime (media often associated with less mature taste) and the rigorously fluid and syncretic non-identities of cosplayers. Another way of reflecting upon the social and political implications of cosplay within the context of contemporary Japan may be related to the notion of the subcultural capital, repeatedly theorized by some of the authors mentioned earlier, including Sarah Thornton and Martin Roberts. While the subcultural capital gained through the practice of cosplay can be said to function in a more conventional way in many cosplay scenes outside Japan, as I will discuss later in this chapter, subcultural capital within the Japanese cosplay scene, I contend, works less predictably and requires us to rethink the applicability of the notion, especially in a transnational context. First, within the community of cosplayers in Japan, the sense of hierarchy is less apparent and stable, primarily due to the flexibility of 73 the characters cosplayers impersonate, the ephemeral quality of cosplay performance itself, and often the collective nature of group cosplay. In some of the discussions I have had with cosplayers concerning the fame and popularity of certain cosplayers within the community, a majority of cosplayers, while vaguely recognizing the presence of “star” performers who have made a career out of modeling anime costumes, said that their favorite cosplayers are usually not those well-known cosplayers, but some of their cosplaying friends whom they met because they were cosplaying the same character or performing a character they commonly like. Thus, because of the instability of cosplay as a transient performance that permanently changes and moves, cultural capital within the community can hardly be considered in a stably hierarchical manner. In a similar vein, the subcultural capital gained outside the cosplay circle by showing off cosplayers’ esoteric knowledge of the exotic subculture to non-fans does not always function positively in the Japanese case. While such a tendency of gaining social distinction by revealing cosplayers’ subcultural knowledge is often prominent in the North American context and explained via critical concepts such as “pop cosmopolitanism” to which I will return later, Japanese cosplayers seem to be more ambivalent about revealing their identity as cosplayer to people outside the circle. Because of the “mainstream” status of anime and manga and because of the wide availability of those texts and information about them in Japan, displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of those texts and literally embodying such knowledge do not seem to make the cosplayers immediately “cool” as they sometimes do outside Japan. More importantly, the stigma of being labeled as otaku (a colloquial Japanese term that 74 refers to an obsessive, excessive, and addicted fan of certain popular cultural materials), although it has been improving since the 1990s onward, still seems to bother many cosplayers I talked with. As many as half of the cosplayers I interviewed mentioned they do not tell people outside the cosplaying community about their involvement in the subculture. In particular, most male cosplayers I talked with said that they hide their subcultural life as cosplayers because of the social bias against cosplay. All interviewees said they consider themselves otaku or Akiba-kei (a type of geek seen in the electronic goods district of Akihabara in Tokyo). While most cosplayers state that they consciously accept their extraordinary involvement in the anime/manga fan/subculture of cosplay with a full awareness of its implications (“We cosplay because we love manga and the art, not only cosplaying. So we call ourselves “otaku.”; “It’s better to have a consciousness of being otaku, but sometimes people may have prejudice.”), some of them also seem be extremely wary of the prejudice society has toward otaku and deviant subcultural behavior in general. In fact, the shared fact that some of the cosplayers cannot be truly open with people outside the cosplay subculture, whereas they can inside the subculture seems to be one of the reasons why cosplayers gravitate toward cosplay events and enjoy a sense of belonging to the community. One pair of cosplayers articulated their idea of the differences between cosplaying friends and “ordinary friends” as follows: Question: Do cosplaying friends different from other friends? Answer 1: I can say anything about my interests to cosplaying friends without any hesitation, but with ordinary friends, I have to consider what I say. Answer 2: I know cosplaying isn’t widely acceptable. 75 Question: Do people back away from cosplaying? Answer 1: Some people back away from talking only about anime, so I cannot talk about cosplaying. Answer 2: If I say anything at work like, “I’m going to an event [for cosplaying],” people react by saying “Hmm…” Thus, it is apparent in the Japanese cosplay scene, cosplayers do not usually aim to gain cultural capital and social status amongst their friends outside the subculture by conspicuously engaging in cosplay, because in many cases, they still fear the revelation would bring them social stigma, not social distinction. On the other hand, cosplayers seem to have carved out an alternative symbolic space not only by building a subcultural community through the act of cosplay but also by imagining a transnational allegiance amongst devoted anime fans by sharing a discourse of global cosplay. In the last series of interviews I conducted with cosplayers in Japan in 2006, I asked if the cosplayers are aware of the popularity of cosplay as a fan cultural practice outside Japan. Every one of the twenty or so interviewees answered that she or he is well aware of the global spread of cosplay as a significant component of anime fan cultures worldwide. Whether they know about foreign (gaijin) cosplayers from reading articles in a cosplay magazine such as Cosmode, or watching a television program, or meeting a few at Comiket, Japanese cosplayers generally seem to have a positive impression of cosplayers outside Japan or foreign cosplayers visiting Japan. Question: Are foreign cosplayers different from Japanese ones? Answer 1: They have a different feel. They are having fun without worrying about their shape. It’s cool for a foreigner to cosplay a foreign character. Answer 2: I saw American, French, European [cosplayers], etc. They are fantastic. 76 While this is an extremely fascinating inversion of the process of the willful adoption of otaku identity by anime fans outside Japan, which I will discuss in greater detail in the following section, this awareness of global connectivity in the cosplay subculture can also be viewed as an indicator that shows the degree to which theoretical frameworks within audience and fan studies are in need of serious revision in an age of globalization. In other words, as the imagined community of cosplayers, situated in the juncture between fan culture/subculture and the mainstream culture specific to a certain society, expands across national borders and cultural boundaries, we need to come up with a new way of thinking through the multiple implications of what it means to be a fan of a text, whether foreign or domestic, manifested through what kinds of “ordinary” or subcultural activities, in opposition to what political or commercial forces are dominant in a given social context, and with what scope of utopian imagination of symbolic alliances with fellow fans in remote locales. Before moving on to the next section on the translocal evolution of otaku identity, I thus propose to further reflect upon the meaning of the word “play” in “cosplay” and “cosplayers” as a term that can be used more centrally as a complement to both “fan cultural” and “subcultural” practices in articulating the multiple implications of the interstitial performance of cosplay in the fluctuating context of globalization. I contend that rethinking the meaning of “play” is important at this point in time because ever since Adorno discussed “play” or leisure activity for adults as a “pseudo-activity” 33 that 33 “Generally speaking there is good reason to assume that all forms of pseudo-activity contain a pent-up need to change the petrified relations of society. Pseudo-activity is misguided spontaneity. Misguided, but 77 functions to distract the politically disempowered mass from more radically political engagements, most kinds of “play” for adults (and adolescents to a lesser degree) have been devalued in modern society as intrinsically insignificant, if not entirely inappropriate. Yet the meaning of “play” in my view can be multiply significant in this particular juncture: first, it shows the attitude of being playful as a postmodern parodic strategy that can be considerably powerful in critiquing the oppressive qualities of the official, hegemonic, and/or parent culture. The concept of “play” can also help us understand the resourcefulness of cosplayers and their anti-essentialist approach towards the human body: in other words, cosplayers’ bodily transformations and constant modifications can be interpreted as a new way of thinking about such a privileged and mystified category as the human body as just another instrument to “play” or “play with,” without attaching any sacred values to it. The notion of “play” can also be significant in thinking about the current stage of transnational flows of cultural influences, to the extent that cosplayers and other active fans of similar kinds are indeed important “players” in the global media and culture industry. Not only the boundaries between producers and consumers of cultural products on the receiving end are increasingly blurred with various kinds of fan activism and fan productions such as cosplay, the distinction between the two has been challenged on the production side as well, with the increasing number of not accidentally so; because people do have a dim suspicion of how hard it would be to throw off the yoke that weights upon them. They prefer to be distracted by spurious and illusory activities, by institutionalized vicarious satisfactions, than to face up to the awareness of how little access they have to the possibility of change today. Pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the same productivity which society on the one hand incessantly calls for, but on the other holds in check and, as far as the individual is concerned, does not really desire at all. Productive free time is only possible for people who have outgrown their tutelage, not for those who under conditions of heteronomy, have become heteronomous for themselves. Free time then does not merely stand in opposition to labour. In a system where full employment itself has become the ideal, free time is nothing more than a shadowy constitution of labor…” (Adorno, 1991: 194). 78 media fans, “geeks,” and otakus moving toward more empowered positions of producers and creators in the culture industry. To examine this third point more closely, I will discuss the changing meanings of the figure of the otaku in translocal contexts in the following section. III. Otaku Reconsidered You can do that here, in Tokyo: be a teenage girl on the street in a bondage-nurse outfit. You can dream in public. (William Gilbson, 2001 b: 119) While researching for the current chapter at Comiket and other anime events in Japan, I started noticing the presence of a regular group of participants other than cosplayers—a group of geeky guys in their 20s through 40s with bulky and professional-looking cameras, relentlessly taking pictures of scantily-clad cospre girls. I was soon shocked to learn that most participants in the cosplay scene, including such apparently geeky camekos and far more glamorous-looking cosplayers, can be equally called otaku in Japan, although cosplayers and non-cosplayers are likely to fall under slightly different sub-categories of otaku. I have become also interested in thinking about the meaning of otaku more critically as I have been finding an increasing number of articles in The New York Times and other major news publications in the United States that repeatedly explain about the definition of otaku. At the same time, I have been encountering more and more (North) American youth, not just at anime conventions but in all sorts of everyday places including bookstores and classrooms, who would smile proudly and nod in response to my question, “Do you think you are an otaku?” The term otaku seems to 79 have been quickly globalized in recent years together with various anime programs, manga books and game products outside Japan. In his blatantly romanticizing article on Japan as (still) “the future of the west,” William Gibson calls otaku, “the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects.” Gibson continues: “Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra- geographic.” (Gibson, 2001 a) Whereas this comment certainly sounds like a cool way of thinking about otaku, as post-national, extra-geographic, “curators in the postmodern world,” I am also acutely aware of the fact that the statement is made by William Gibson, the leading exponent of the most vivid techno-orientalist imageries in contemporary literature and film in the Anglophone world. 34 In other words, the positionality of the speaking subject and spoken objects in such a transcultural discourse functions more significantly than ever, as is seen in Gibson’s first quote I began this section with (“You can do that here, in Tokyo: be a teenage girl on the street in a bondage-nurse outfit. You can dream in public,” my italics), whose the meaning radically changes depending on who “you” are (e.g. a Japanese teenage school girl on the street in a sexy bondage outfit) and who “I” am (e.g. a middle-aged western man who finds such a site dreamy). In this section, I would like to draw attention to these issues of positionality and contextuality by 34 For more discussion of techno-orientalism, look Morley and Robins’s chapter, “Techno-orientalism: Japan Panic,” in Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 147-173. 80 providing a brief overview of shifting discourses around the term otaku, developed differently and dialogically between inside and outside Japan, especially between Japanese and North American writers, and reflecting upon the changing meanings of otaku-ism according the positions of speaking subjects in these different locales at different historical moments. In Japan, the genealogy of otaku discourse has been described consistently by a number of critics and commentators as follows: the term was first coined by a dojinshi (fan manga publication) artist Akio Nakamori, referring to young extreme fans of manga and anime in 1983. However, it became fundamentally stigmatized in 1988 because of the serial child-murder case of 27 year-old Tsutomu Miyazaki, so called Mr. M, and his extensive collection of manga, videotapes and magazines, revealed to the national audience on live television. Although the term was practically tabooed in public media until mid-1990s, more positive images of otaku have gradually spread throughout the 1990s through the constant efforts made by well-known otaku figures such as Okada Toshio (one of the co-founders of the leading anime studio Gainax) who has been offering courses on Otaku Studies (“Otakology”) at Tokyo University as well as lecturing at other major academic institutions like MIT (Greenfield, 1993; Barral, 1999; Kinsella, 2000: 126-131). It has been also recognized that the increasing global popularity of anime and the success of anime-inspired art works in the west since the late 1990s have contributed to the shifting status of the term otaku in public discourse within Japan. For just one example, we need only to think of the contribution made by Murakami Takashi, the self-proclaimed otaku artist, to the discursive repositioning of otaku-ism as a positive 81 thread in Japanese national identity, related to youthful passion, perfectionist attention to detail, and creative energy. Another significant aspect to take into consideration in a discussion of the shifting status of the otaku in Japanese cultural discourses is the professional empowerment of otaku in the field of cultural production and the content industry. It is increasingly reported that young otaku talents are recruited as consultants for corporations like Sega, Sony, television networks, record companies, and other media corporations because of their incomparable knowledge of consumer preferences and tastes in each of these rapidly changing fields. 35 Considering the particularity of the historical context of contemporary Japan as a leading techno-cultural producer, the incorporation of the expertise of such extreme users of cultural and media products as otaku youth in the field of production is only understandable, regardless of the complicated social implications related to the Miyazaki incident. Largely due to the upward mobility of otaku youth in their social status as professional producers, as well as the rise of their discursive power as both taste- makers and vocal consumers, texts produced in the contemporary manga and anime industry have been changing accordingly, with an increasing number of “otaku genre” 35 For example, in the latest research published in 2007 by KOCCA (The Korean Culture and Content Agency) about the history of Japanese animation industry, authors argue that one of the five secrets of success for Japanese animation industry is a wide range of talents, supported by the “mania generation called otaku.” With the concentration of approximately 50,000 professional and non-professional manga- drawing and animating fans around the industry, and with their contribution as content providers, critics and consumers, it is argued, Japanese animation industry has become more and more successful and competitive (p. 18-20). Another important point made by this report is that amateur manga studies groups in major colleges have been formed between the late 1960s and the 1970s, which, interestingly enough, coincides with the fall of student movements from the 1960s (p.93). With the cultivation of extremely advanced connoisseur tastes in manga and anime through various “otaku” activities, the otaku generation has become indeed a key component, not just in the consumption, but also in the production of anime of recent years. 82 productions that encourage powerful identification between otaku characters and viewers, and which reward the demanding stylistic preferences of hyper-media-literate otaku viewers (e.g. Densha Otoko, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the Comic Party series, Animation Runner Kuromi). As I briefly mentioned in the introductory paragraph to this section, the term otaku emerged in US cultural discourses from the mid-1990s onwards, referring broadly to American fans of anime and other Japanese media products, both in public discussions of youth trends in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and in unofficial fan discourses developed in numerous fan-sites and fanzines. One of the best-known descriptions of otaku in English, written by two art curators, defines otaku as follows: Otaku are the generations of kids raised to memorize volumes of contextless information for university entrance exams. Somewhere a glitch occurred and they are stuck in information mode, hoarding and exchanging information about the seemingly useless obsessions of otaku, such as the bra sizes of idols, to information about Levi’s 501 jeans, as well as secrets about their mischievous break-ins to data-banks… Otakus are socially inept information junkies who rarely leave their homes, preferring to interface with the world via data-banks, modems and faxes. (Kessler and Blum, 1993) Another typical portrayal of otaku is provided Karl Taro Greenfield, in his book on Japanese youth generation, Speed Tribes: This blurring of man and machine, or reality and what comes in over the VDT, is spawning a generation of Japanese kids who are opting out of the conformity of Japan, Inc., in favor of logging on to computer networks. They have been dubbed the otaku by the Japanese media, from the most formal way of saying “you” in Japanese, the implication being that there is always some kind of technological barrier between people. (Greenfield, 1994: 274) 83 While these two accounts are relatively position-less and objectifying in their introduction of the youth generational phenomenon in Japan to non-Japanese audiences, there also has been another group of more concerned voices by (western) fathers who attempt to understand their sons’ geeky obsession with Japanese computer games and other popular cultural materials such as anime, through their study of the otaku phenomenon as in the following: An otaku is often described as someone who lives alone in a small room and connects with the world via computer. Of course, this touched on my own concerns about my son and the cell phone, my son and the ticket machines, my son and the Destructor simulator, please insert two tokens. (Carey, 2004: 60) Another concerned father and critic, Joseph Tobin, seems to have found a more positive way of reading the otaku lifestyle, which can be equally reassuring to other parents with similar concerns: His [Author’s son Isaac’s] otaku life provides him with a male performative identity, but also, simultaneously, with a way to pursue less macho interests, including art, corresponding, and even interpersonal intimacy… Otaku life is about relating to other while seeming to care only about one’s obsession. (Tobin, 1998: 125) Other than these discursive examples, there are also plenty of examples in which the term “otaku” is used outside Japan, to refer to a non-Japanese fans’ identity. For example, one of the major anime conventions in North America is called “Otakon” (a contraction of Otaku Convention) which began in 1994 with the same name as a celebration of anime and j-pop for a small group of devoted fans at State College, Pennsylvania. Another interesting example of the use of the term “otaku” outside Japan is found in an episode 84 reported by fan culture scholar Henry Jenkins. When Jenkins visited at a grocery store in Clayton, Georgia, a female employee at the checkout counter was asked by a man “in a broad Southern accent” to explain why she had a Japanese name on her badge, which turned out to be her cosplaying name. After the questioner left the store with her explanation about her interests in anime and manga, Jenkins reports, “I told her that I was an otaku myself. She was shocked both because she had never met an anime fan quite as old as I was and because she didn’t know that there were any other fans locally. We talked briefly and I went on my way.” (Jenkins, 2006) In these two examples, we can clearly understand that the term “otaku” is now used to refer to “a devoted fan of anime and manga” in the US while also conveying an unmistakably subcultural undertone. This increasing use of the term otaku could be logically related first, to the increasing popularity of anime and manga in North America from the 1990s onwards, which seems to have made substantial inroads into the American youth media market with its formal maturity and generic diversity, enthusiastically recognized by new fans. At the same time, what seems to be more remarkable in the North American reception and appropriation of otaku identity is the active role played by American manga and anime fans and the consequent multi-layered structure of translation and adaptation of the term. It is undeniable that the institutional hype over otaku-ism, specifically derived from representative figures such as Murakami Takashi and Azuma Hiroki, has functioned significantly in the importation of the term otaku. Murakami, in particular, has contributed greatly in exposing non-Japanese audiences to otaku discourse with a series of visually gripping and knowingly kawaii 85 projects favorably received in North American and Europe, which I will discuss more in detail in Chapter 3. Yet arguably it is North American fans of anime and manga who have played an equally, if not more, central role in the American reception of the term otaku since they have consciously chosen to call themselves otaku in order to distinguish their involvement with the foreign texts of anime from other kinds of popular cultural fan activities. On the other hand, differently from calling Japanese animation “anime” and comic books “manga,” using the term otaku for American fans of anime and manga does not immediately serve the function of providing any social distinction because of the fluctuating symbolic status of otaku within Japan. As succinctly described in Lawrence Eng’s article, “Otak-who? Technoculture, youth, consumption and resistance,” the question of whether or not the stigma attached to the term in its original context needs to be re-produced in translation is certainly an intriguing one. Nevertheless, we can understand from this ongoing debate, the level of self-consciousness in the subjective positioning of North American fans of Japanese texts as otaku, which I consider to be crucial in the formation of otaku identity in North America. Another example to be considered in the examination of the self-reflexivity of the North American otaku community is found in the consistently popular anime text, Otaku no Video, the 1991 OAV (Original Animated Video) written by Okada Toshio, which seems to have had a certain amount of pedagogical influence on fans both inside and outside Japan. Supposedly a thinly veiled autobiographical account of Okada’s own involvement 86 with a group of otaku friends and his forming of a successful anime studio with them, the two-part anime mockumentary is composed of an animated fictional plot interspersed with live-action footage of (fake) interviews with several adult male otaku, as well as charts and statistics concerning the otaku phenomenon in contemporary Japan. What is most remarkable about this endearing self-portrait of otaku for the current discussion in my view is its extremely strong emphasis on the visualization of the empowerment of otaku characters after they have tolerated social disgrace and hardship by staying true to their passion and insisting on their creative vision. Considering the extra-textual tale for which the creator Okada himself provides a role model in such a difficult yet ultimately rewarding saga for otaku, it is understandable why this anime text appeals doubly to North American fans who would certainly “get” the trivia sub-text. In addition, Otaku no Video provides non-Japanese fans of anime with a detailed cataloguing and potentially instruction in various kinds of otaku activities, while also reassuring them with a vision of an imagined transnational community of dedicated fans. In his complex discussion of the otaku movement, Thomas Lamarre acknowledges the difficulty in defining the term otaku because of the ambiguity of its boundaries: Apparently, it occurs everywhere there is anime, but how does one draw the line between anime viewers and otaku? The difference between an anime viewer and an anime otaku is one of intensity and duration—a level of interest, a degree of engagement, or a quality of passion. Such differences resist quantification. (Lamarre, 2004: 167) I would add one more defining characteristic of otaku to Lamarre’s criteria of intensity and duration: that is, self-consciousness in fans’ own strategic positioning. In other 87 words, otaku at this phase of cultural globalization cannot be otaku without an awareness of what it means to be an otaku in a given context and without their wanting to become one either in spite of, or because of, its socio-political implications. Even if fan activities in different locales might be remarkably similar, or if the amount of encyclopedic knowledge an average anime fan holds in North America might be impressively close to that in Japan, the sense of social identity and self-positioning of anime fans as otaku are inevitably different from one locale to another because otaku as a discourse cannot be freed from the historical specificity of certain socio-cultural contexts. Thus, in examining the border-crossing adaptation of otaku identity, we also need to take into consideration the historical and cultural specificity of the context. For if otaku-ism is defined by fans’ self-identification as otaku, as well as by the intensity and duration of their cultural engagements in anime fandom, transnational otaku-ism should not be readily celebrated or romanticized, since each discursive context cannot be easily subsumed under the ever- expanding umbrella terms such as global fandom and transnational culture. In the following section, I will look more closely at such a conscious otaku positioning in one specific locale: North American anime conventions. IV. Towards a disciplinary utopia: a few thoughts on the North American anime fandom If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature). I can also—through in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself—isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features, and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan. (Barthes, 1982: 3) 88 I have been researching anime fan culture, with a focus on anime conventions in the United States, between 2003 and 2006. In this section, I would like to examine US anime conventions in order to reflect further upon two broad topics I have discussed so far: the topography of contemporary fan/subculture studies and the location of US anime fandom within it; and the implications of studying such cross-cultural or transnational exchanges of cultural texts and practices. Combined with participant observation at several anime conventions I visited over a period of four years, semiotic analysis will be used centrally in this section because it seems more than appropriate for me to consider the semiotic mystification of Japan intriguingly shown in the above quotes from Barthes’s Empire of Signs, as well as Hebdige’s influential study of subcultures as projects of semiotic stylization. According to Fred Patten, a regular contributor to anime journals and fan publications, anime fandom in the US began forming as early as the 1970s, with the arrival of major anime series of the 1960s, including Astro Boy, Marine Boy, Speed Racer, on US syndication television and in Japanese community television and video stores. Also, the introduction of consumer level VCRs in 1975, argues Patten, has significantly contributed to a further expansion of the fandom, enabling fans to copy anime programs off the air and circulate video tapes amongst themselves (Patten, 52-59). In order to cater to the growing demand of anime fans eager to watch hard-to-get, unreleased anime shows, existing Sci-Fi and fantasy conventions had to gradually increase the screening hours of anime programs, while newly emerging anime clubs on the West coast primarily functioned through regular screening parties of the latest anime releases from Japan. The 89 first conventions dedicated specifically to anime started in the early 1990s—A-Kon in Dallas, TX in 1990, AnimeCon in San Jose, CA in 1991 and its sequel Anime Expo in 1992, which later moved to Anaheim, CA. Both A-Kon and Anime Expo have by now become the longest standing anime conventions in North America: Anime Expo, in particular, is considered to be the biggest anime convention in North America, currently attended by over 25,000 participants as of 2006 (KOCCA, 2007: 140). 36 There are, as of 2005, about 90 large-scale anime conventions in the US and about 100 in North America overall, with many attracting over several thousand participants such as Sakuracon in Seattle, Otakon in Baltimore, Anime Boston in Boston, MA, not to mention smaller cons run by high school and college anime clubs. These anime conventions typically take place in hotels or convention centers with accommodation facilities, allowing and even encouraging participants to access events 24 hours a day. Events usually take place over a period of three day/one weekend with standard programs including panels and workshops on diverse topics related to anime, manga, and fan activities, artist showcases, anime screenings, fan art exhibitions, various performances and contests such as costume masquerades, karaoke, dance, music video competitions, etc. There are also the side operations of merchants’ or dealers’ rooms as well as art auctions, providing fans with plenty of rare shopping opportunities. Game 36 Antonia Levi specifies further on the exponential growth of anime and manga cons: “L.A.’s enormous Anime Expo began in San Jose in 1992 with 1,720 fans attending, an excellent turnout fo the day, but it pales in comparison to the 2004 attendance of 25,000. Dallas’s A-Kon began in 1990 with 400 attendees and grew to 9,450 in 2004. Seattle’s Sakura Con began in 1998 with 313 attendees, and has grown so far (4,775 in 2004) that it now faces a real problem in deciding whether to limit membership to that number… or to find a much larger facility…” (Levi, 45-46). 90 rooms, where attendees can freely try out the newest games, seem to be a rather popular component of recent anime cons. A majority of attendees come to cons in anime/manga characters’ costumes, often hand-made, for competitions and photo shoots. Differently from typical Japanese cospre events, where cosplayers are given a changing room space and instructed to cosplay only within a designated place and time, the ubiquity of cosplay, which lasts for the entire convention period and takes place even outside the convention building, can be said to be a distinctive characteristic of cosplay at US anime cons. As I mentioned above, there are two main questions I would like to raise through the following analysis of US anime cons and cosplay. A first question involves general issues at stake within the field of fan culture and subculture studies of recent years, concerning the political potential of fan appropriations and the alternative quality of meanings created through the consumption of media texts and products. In other words, how real is a political power, which is supposedly created through the symbolic re- appropriation of given cultural texts and products? When fan activities themselves take place in today’s thoroughly commercialized and mediated environment of cultural consumption, how real is this concept of political power engendered through fan practices? Do we find the influential model of British Cultural Studies of the 1970s, which, as pointed out by many critics, inevitably romanticizes the political meanings produced by (working class, male) youth’s resistance through re-purposing of existing cultural texts and objects, still valid and useful in analyzing the contemporary US anime fan culture, which does not seem to have any overtly political agenda? Or, if the ‘heroic’ 91 model of the CCCS scholarship no longer reflects “the political, cultural, and economic realities of the twenty-first century” as Muggleton and Weinzierl suggest in The Post- subcultures Reader (Muggleton and Weinzierl, 5), how do we revise our theoretical framework in studying the supposedly more complex and fluid fan cultural practices of today’s globalizing, postmodern media environment? US anime conventions provide an interesting case study, since they clearly show a model of fan and subcultural practice that it is very hard to interpret as a symbolic challenge to the existing social order. Not only do they lack any conspicuous political agenda, but they also form an undeniably favorable relationship to both the market and the culture industry, willingly embracing every aspect of commercialization involved in the operation of the conventions. There is not even a perfunctory gesture made at a convention site to condemn “sellouts,” co-opting into the mainstream, or commodification of fans’ subcultural productions. Rather, anime cons routinely feature guests from the industry—oftentimes, established figures in distribution companies or people involved in the adaptation process, including voice actors and translators— offering workshops with the guests on how to get a job in the industry and how to train oneself for that prospect. Panel discussions often end up emphasizing the necessity of better supporting the industry, in terms of both production in Japan and distribution in the U.S. The most spectacular example, in my view, of this rhetoric of mutually interdependent (not oppositional) relationship between fan/subculture and the industry can be found in 92 the repeated panel discussions of recent cons in the US on the negative impact on the industry and ultimately on fandom itself, of fansubbing, previously considered one of the representative anime fan activities, as well as the negative impact of free sharing of anime texts downloaded from the Internet. This ideology of sustainability seems to be increasingly intensifying with the development of consumer technologies fans access in order to circulate anime materials within the fan network. Antonia Levi reports in a study of the US anime and manga fandom that most anime fans and fan clubs that used to produce fansubbed versions of the latest anime for limited circulation within the fan community “made it a point of honor to destroy fansubs once acceptable legal copies became available.” Levi further points out the complicated political implications of such fan activities in today’s technologically advanced, globally connected fan culture: Today, these discussions about the ethics of fansubbed videotapes seem almost quaint. Fansubbing has reached new heights with file sharing on the Internet where, according to fannish lore, a new record was set when the first episode of Wolf’s Rain, a shojo anime series, aired in Japan. It was immediately put online by fans in Japan, downloaded in Toronto, translated, dubbed, and put back on line as a fansub less than twenty-two hours after it had originally aired in Japan. Although first and foremost a labor of love, one fan suggested to me that such efforts might also be seen as a “glory-grabbing contest” to be the first out with a new product. (Levi, 2006: 47) Thus, now with fans’ current ethical concerns about the impact of oppositional fan activities on the stability of the multinational networks of anime industry, combined with fans’ self-reflexive recognition of the competitive quality in the fan practice vying for more cultural (and technological) capital, the rosy picture of heroic fans in anime subculture who rebel against the hegemonic bourgeois commercial culture by re- 93 appropriating mass-cultural texts and products and building a community of alternative political meanings seems no longer viable because of its anachronistic simplicity. This complicatedly a-political and commercial development of US anime conventions is also historically understandable considering anime fandom in the US originated from fans’ demands for rare anime texts from Japan and from their efforts to get new ones by whatever means necessary. Whether through participating in fan club activities of fan- subbing and swapping tapes in the 1980s, or through attending more commercially organized fan conventions in recent decades, the driving force of anime fandom in the US is fans’ desire to get the newest, rarest anime titles, not their political aspirations of positioning themselves as an alternative to the existing commercial network. This tie between the anime industry and fandom in the US context is also historically evidenced in Fred Patten’s account that since the late 1970s Toei Animation have asked its anime fan club to help promote releases of Toei titles in the US market. Similarly, it is worth noting that one of the two first anime cons in the US, AnimeCon in 1991, was initiated through a collaboration between US fans and Toshio Okada of Gainax, another major anime studio, resulting in the attendance of an impressive list of guests from Japan, including Hideaki Anno, creator of the legendary Evangelion Series. In addition, the fact that anime conventions are now run by what we can call first- generation anime fans in the Unites States further obscures any binary distinction between market forces and grassroots fan activities. The introduction of guests of honor at con brochures invariably elaborates on the biographical details of guests, reproducing 94 the identical narrative of how they landed in their current position by rigorously pursuing their initial fascination with anime from an early age. This ritualistic celebration of guests’ achievements as resulting from following their seemingly trivial passion for anime, while possibly considered mediocre outside the fan community, seems to work efficiently to inspire and encourage younger fans to participate more passionately in fan activities, including many hours of volunteer work at conventions. While abundantly understandable, however, the commercial quality of US anime cons also needs to be examined more closely within the context of “post-subcultures,” postmodern fan cultures and ever an ever-intensifying cultural globalization. Dick Hebdige in his well-known discussion of subcultures as a semiotic stylization, highlights the commercial aspects of subcultural formations: The relationship between the spectacular subculture and the various industries which service and exploit it is notoriously ambiguous. After all, such a subculture is concerned first and foremost with consumption. It operates exclusively in the leisure sphere… It communicates through commodities even if the meanings attached to those commodities are purposefully distorted and overthrown. It is therefore difficult in this case to maintain any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other, even through these categories are emphatically opposed in the value systems of most subcultures. Indeed, the creation and diffusion of new styles is inextricably bound up with the process of production, publicity and packaging which must inevitably lead to the defusion of the subculture’s subversive power… (Hebdige, 1979: 94-95) Hebdige’s reworking of Marx’s notion of commodities as “social hieroglyphs” is indeed brilliantly useful in understanding the symbiotic relations between the relentlessly commercializing forces of capitalism and constantly shifting subcultural resistances. 95 However, Hebdige’s fundamental assumption that in spite of the deep entanglement with the commercial network, there still are politically pure, oppositional moments within subcultural practice needs to be revised in the discussion of transnational anime fandom. Hebdige delineates the process of double incorporation of subcultural resistance (the ideological and the commercial) through the commodification of subcultural styles: when, for example, Cosmoplitan magazine featured punk-themed photos with the aphorism, ‘To shock is chic,’ it “presaged the subculture’s imminent demise.” (Hebdige, 96) While this insight is still useful in analyzing certain kinds of subcultural practice, I would emphasize the importance of acknowledging that such an oppositional moment of subcultural purity that ostensibly predates the process of co-option and commodification hardly exists in the case of the US anime fan/subculture. It is thus all the more apparent that we need to redefine the relationship between the ever ambiguous “mainstream” and the “shadow cultural economy” (John Fiske’s term that refers to fandom) in the age of “playful” subcultures, postmodern subcultures, and post-subcultural globalization. The second question I would like to discuss in this section is related to the fact that unlike other similarly regarded fan cultures such as the Star Trek and Star Wars fan cultures, which are similar to anime fandom in the structures of fan club organization, in fans’ costuming practices, and in fans’ reliance on media texts produced by the culture industry, US anime fan culture involves the importation of cultural texts, products, and even fan practices from a different national culture. The fact that the exporting national culture happens to be Japan adds to the complexity of these cross-cultural exchanges because of Japan’s ambiguous semiotic location between west and east, or rather the west 96 and the Orient. That is why so much recent scholarship produced in the study of US anime fandom focuses on the issue of American fans’ ambivalent relation to Japanese national culture. Although there exists a whole gamut of responses to this question, those responses mostly fall under two main positions. The first is represented by Susan Napier’s suggestion, based on her ethnographic research on US anime fans, that US fans are drawn to anime texts not so much because of their Japanese or exotic qualities as because of their textual qualities and production values. The fan’s interaction with the cultural object is deeply engaged, transcending issues of national boundaries, content, style, or ideology and it cannot be subsumed under any one-note description. The fact that anime is a Japanese, or at least non-American product, is certainly important but largely because this signifies that anime is a form of media entertainment outside the mainstream, something “different.” (Napier 2001: 242) Annalee Newitz, on the other hand, more polemically interprets American fans’ fascination with anime as an act of (reverse) cultural imperialism deriving from nostalgia for the American historical past “when culture wasn’t contaminated by political correctness.” (Newitz, 1995: 12) While Napier clearly disagrees with Newitz’s one- dimensional notion of the pleasures taken from US fans’ passionate consumption of anime, I consider the two perspectives not entirely dissimilar in their assumption that Japanese authenticity is not a major part of attraction for the US anime fans. Against these somewhat generalized views, Matt Hills insists that we should be attentive to the ways in which “national identities may yet be either explicitly or implicitly 97 performed through anime fandom” because of the fluid ways in which fans utilize the iconography of certain national cultures. Further, Hills suggests that: We also need to consider how the ‘exoticisation’ of anime may not be entirely disarticulated from notions and connotations of Japaneseness, even if the term ‘Japaneseness’ is itself disavowed by fans. (Hills, 2002: 11) I think both positions—the one that emphasizes factors other than the appeal of authentic Japanese national culture in the attraction of anime outside Japan and the other that continues to foreground the relevance of Japaneseness in the construction of transnational anime fandom—have values on their own, to the extent that both provide valuable insights into such multifaceted, diverse and constantly fluctuating pleasures of transnational anime fan cultures. The evidence I have found at US anime conventions, concerning American fans’ relation to Japanese national culture, however, shows interesting differences from what Napier and Newitz conclude from their ethnographic research through interviews and surveys in the mid- and late-1990s. At US anime cons, Japanese cultural elements, far from being disarticulated or unarticulated as suggested by the aforementioned authors, seem to be considered as a natural, if not essential, component in making a successful anime convention. In forums, fans openly discuss the quality, authenticity and superiority of certain anime cons according to the number and stature of the guests they bring over from Japan. At most cons, there are typically a number of panels and workshops on Japanese culture and society, on general topics such as gender roles in Japan and manga/anime in Japan, as well as on specific topics such as shiatsu, go, sudoku, etc. There are usually 98 several J-pop sessions where fans can learn about latest trends in the Japanese music scene as well as three-day-long screening series of live action films from Japan. Amongst the upcoming anime events promoted at cons, tour programs to Japan to attend Comiket and visit anime studios and merchandise stores are often promoted, which have been in operation at least since 1986. It is not hard to imagine that this kind of discursive environment at anime cons, thoroughly saturated by the iconography and artifacts of imagined Japan, has inspired fans’ longing for an escape to the haven for techno-media addicts (i.e. self-proclaimed otakus) of Tokyo, as is embodied in the phenomenally successful American on-line, manga-style comic, megatokyo, which revolves around two ordinary American adolescent men, hopelessly addicted to video games, find themselves stranded in Tokyo one day. Thus, even if they may not be an apparent majority, from the sincerity and enthusiasm these con participants show in wanting to learn and experience the “authentic Japan,” we should understand that the role of the national in transnational cultural exchanges cannot be easily discounted, whether it is consciously recognized, mystifyingly exaggerated, or vehemently denied by the importing subjects. In other words, even though the “Japan” evoked through such convention activities can be said to be simply a discursive construct that satisfies US anime fans’ desires for a non-mainstream culture, the fact that the national category “Japan” works as a signifier in a system of the alternative signification needs to be seriously considered. As Barthes says in the above quote, one can choose to invent an entirely fictional nation, or to pick semiotic features from an existing “faraway” land, in order to imagine a new fantasy land and an alternative culture. Many of the US 99 anime fans I met at conventions seem to have chosen the latter option. However, when the fictive system for a fantasy land is named specifically “Japan,” I would argue, the signification cannot be as neutral and blank as a “new Garabagne” since “Japan” itself is a dizzyingly complicated cluster of signs and myths, especially in the shifting context of globalization. In the following section, therefore, with some of the insights from the questions I dealt with here, I would like to focus more closely on the cosplay scene at US anime conventions, and consider the socio-political meanings articulated specifically at this translocal juncture. Cosplay in the United States has developed relatively quickly from the 1990s onward, 37 to the extent that many cosplayers now create their own costumes that are as elaborate and detailed as those found in any well-developed cosplay scene. It is certainly moving and intriguing at the same time to think that so many teenage anime fans happily go through hours of labor, struggling with sewing machines and difficult fabrics, in order to create fantastic costumes to masquerade in, so that their bodies look properly extraordinary when their symbolic community is materialized for just one weekend. The tutorials on how to cosplay circulated at workshops at cons are equally elaborate with enthusiastic fans swapping information on how to make their hair ultra-spiky, how to create believable fake breasts, where to get inexpensive platform shoes, how to “switch one’s hips” when masquerading as female characters, etc. 37 Although Fred Patten argues that “the first convention to include several anime character costumes in its Masquerade” was as early as in 1980 at the San Diego Comic-Con, cosplay at anime and manga convention can be said to have developed as a widely-practiced and elaborately-prepared performance throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. 100 This detailed nature of fan discourses on cosplay in the US cosplay scene could be reasonably interpreted via Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital: i.e. these young US anime fans are in pursuit of social distinction through an acquisition of esoteric knowledge of the exotic culture of Japanese animation. Whenever I notice US cosplayers outside the convention site proudly walking down the street in costume and telling non- fans they are masquerading as Japanese anime characters, I understand the validity of reading US cosplay generally as the embodiment of anime fans’ desire to gain cultural capital. Especially compared with a typical Japanese cosplay scene, which is strictly confined to the cosplay site (both physically and symbolically due to some of the cosplayers’ reluctance to reveal their cosplaying identity to the outside world), US cosplayers’ conspicuous self-positioning as connoisseurs of the relatively non- mainstream culture of anime can be interpreted as a way of pursuing social distinction through subcultural performance. Henry Jenkins’s discussion of “pop cosmopolitanism” in a global context similarly sheds light on this fan practice which embodies contemporary American young people’s desire to discursively distinguish themselves from their parents’ generation by displaying an easy command of cultural vocabularies from a different national context. Further complicating the political implications of such positioning, Jenkins describes pop cosmopolitan as follows: The pop cosmopolitan walks a thin line between dilettantism and connoisseurship, between orientalist fantasies and a desire to honestly connect and understand an 101 alien culture, between assertion of mastery and surrender to cultural difference. (Jenkins, 2004: 127) When this nuanced notion of pop cosmopolitanism is applied to US cosplayers and self- aware American otakus, we can productively recognize the ambivalence, between humble admiration based on genuine understanding and undeniably fetishistic exploitation, in the appropriation of foreign cultural imports, in order to define (new) social hierarchies and symbolic boundaries in a different locale. Thus, for example, when we revisit Jenkins’s story mentioned earlier, about his confession to a grocery store clerk in Georgia that he himself is an otaku, we can understand, with the balanced concept of pop cosmopolitanism, that Jenkins was in effect semiotically marking the boundary between himself and the questioning man with a heavy Southern accent, as well as claiming a symbolic solidarity with the cosplaying female clerk by invoking their commonly shared esoteric knowledge of the exotic J-pop culture. In order to further stress the symbolic dimension of such alternative positioning and different social imagining, I would like to add, in the following final section, a semiotic analysis of the connoisseur discourse in the US cosplay scene and connect it to the utopian desire of anime fans in the transnational juncture. “First law of cosplay,” says a T-shirt I purchased on-line: “coplayers must choose characters totally unsuited to their body types.” While this is a highly arguable statement, especially because of the cultural specificity of an ideology which does not necessarily apply to the Japanese cosplay scene, one thing becomes clear with this dictum. Cosplay is, more than anything else, a rule-oriented practice. And the more challenging the rules 102 are, the more enthusiastic participants become. After all, it is a form of play, a game, which necessitates a set of rules to play by. The practice of cosplay, and US anime conventions in general, is a constant process of building rules and establishing boundaries between the appropriate and the inappropriate. Often, more than half of convention brochures is dedicated to explaining rules, regulations, policies, and codes of conduct. For just one example, we can look at the following excerpt from a four-page document specifying rules just concerning cosplay, distributed at one of the anime cons I visited: <Cosplay Rules> 1. No acrobatics, jumping around, fancy matrix bullet tricks, etc. You must have at least one foot on the floor at all times… 2. No flash powder, flames, chemicals, smoke, confetti, or anything of this dangerous nature. 3. Don’t show up naked, or nearly naked… we won’t let you on the stage, and most likely not even at the convention… 4. All things you take on the stage with you need to go off with you. If you make a mess, you clean it up. Just like at home. 5. No real weapons of any kind are allowed. There is no peace biding either. If your character needs a weapon, we suggest a toy one or make a prop weapon. And if it’s firearm, please be SURE that it has the government safety orange on it somewhere, don’t paint over it. You don’t want any new holes in your body, and we don’t want that either… 7. All costumes must in some way be from Japanese culture. Whether that be anime, manga, JPop, movies, or whatever. Things that do not apply are American comics redone in the Japanese art style or anything obviously American… (From Ushicon 2006 Website) While all these rules may seem excessive, oppressive and too prescriptive for a youth cultural event to an outsider as I felt at first, insiders in this fan-/subcultural community seem to commonly acknowledge the necessity of such rules, because building rules is the first step in the discursive practice of constructing their own, symbolic utopia. It is also interesting to note that many of the rules at US anime cons and cosplay sites are 103 concerned with safety regulations and weapons instructions, whereas rules distributed at Japanese events I visited are more related to “not disturbing the general public”:  Please do not cosplay those things that may disturb the ordinary people who don’t understand cosplaying or animation.  Cosplay as a woman is prohibited for men.  Military cosplay might be rejected depending on the situation.  Please put makeup on in the indicated area.  Costumes that are skimpy, easily allow underwear to be seen or easily expose skin, or not adequately secured (are not allowed: this part is accompanied by a drawing of human figure with gray areas, such as the chest, that are not allowed to be exposed.)  Please be careful not to expose underwear.  If the skirt is short, wear a pair of underpants… In other words, from these noticeably different sets of rules enforced in US and Japanese cosplay sites, we can understand how the “alternative communities” of anime otaku, constructed through the symbolic acts of cosplay, resulting from passionate consumption of same manga and anime texts in different locales, function to build a different system of values that are responses to the locally specific, existing social relations, unique to the physical location and the historical moment. On a panel on anime copyright at Katsuconin D.C. in 2006, Greg Ayers, a voice actor and regular at anime cons, expressed his frustration with this plea: “Please don’t ruin this [anime fandom] (by breaking copyright regulations) because this is the only place I know where everybody comes and gets along.” As is clarified by Ayers, the first and foremost rule at anime cons is that everybody should get along, be respectful and never judge. Fans can discuss their favorite anime shows or characters, but are never encouraged to debate over the best anime shows or characters (Patten, 51). Indeed, the ruling ideology 104 at cosplay scenes and anime conventions in the US can be generally related to the fans’ collective utopian imagination, although an unmistakably disciplinary one. Thus, I would argue that US cosplayers, through their spectacular performances at anime conventions, engage in a semiotic project of not only building an alternative community but a disciplinary utopia. There have been other similar concepts that can help us recognize the sense of “discipline” or “order” within different kinds of supposedly free-form youth cultural, fan cultural, and subcultural formations. Noy Thrupkaew, for instance, in her interesting discussion of slash fan fiction, suggests it is the quality of “ordered freedom” in the science fiction genre that inspires so much slash fiction writing. That is, because of the perceived “order” in the fantastic diegesis provided in the original work, fans feel tempted to mess around a bit while still maintaining the “rhythm” of the original: “a harmonious balance between working within the framework of a show and spinning a tale of her own imagination.” (Thrupkaew, 2006: 195) Paul Willis, in his book Profane Culture, also refers to the concept of an “extreme orderliness” which characterizes the internal structure of any subculture: “each part is organically related to other parts and it is through the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense of the world” (Willis, 1978). This common notion of orderliness in freedom is similarly meaningful in the case of the US anime fandom considering how well-behaved and well-organized most teenage anime fans are at conventions, even though they are away from the watchful authority of parents and teachers for an entire weekend (although some convention goers are even accompanied by their parents at cons). 105 Thus, while the sense of orderliness at US anime cons and cosplay scenes may not be uniquely found only in the US, we can understand the practice of cosplay semiotically in this context, as fans’ symbolic project of building boundaries and creating a utopia through an extreme and spectacular appropriation of the semiotic features of a faraway culture and by changing their physical selves and using their bodies as markers of the new territory. If, as Matt Hills argues, western fans’ adoption of the term otaku as a signifier of their proud fan identity is a discursive practice of forming a “semiotic solidarity” with Japanese fans with whom they imagine a shared utopian community (Hills, 2002: 6), cosplay is a physical practice, performed more solidly here and now, through the laborious transformation of their bodies, which are the signifiers of a symbolically built, disciplinary utopia, inspired by transnational media consumption uniquely pervasive in the current culture. The faraway land those semiotic features are selected from, therefore, no longer needs to be called Japan. It is anywhere, everywhere, transformed by the producerly activities of global media fans such as US cosplayers, into a passionately disciplined utopia. 106 Chapter Three Manga Visions and Anime Dreams: Anime Art and Ways of Seeing The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. – John Berger, Ways of Seeing If we all reacted the same way, we’d be predictable. – Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell In the previous chapter, I discussed the subculture of cosplay currently performed in Japan and North America, as an example of changing fan practices in the transnational flows of cultural influences. By focusing on anime fans’ desire for community building through their elaborate semiotic projects of costume play and masquerade, I attempted to exemplify one way in which our notion of subjectivity is altered and differently animated in the process of cultural globalization. In the present chapter, I would like to present another example of anime fan activity through which anime fans in different parts of the world position themselves not just as passive consumers and media addicts, but as artists and designers through their fan art production and creative consumption. While cosplay is an intriguing fan practice because of its transient performative quality, which can hardly be appreciated without some sort of mediation such as photos and blogs, anime art is an interesting case to think about because of its real, physical and potentially lasting presence in the art market and creative industry. In the first half of this chapter, therefore, I will discuss the process in which both our “ways of seeing” and senses of taste are impacted through fans/artists’ active mobilization of the distinctive visual codes of manga and anime, with an emphasis on primarily three “fields” of (fan) cultural production: J-Pop art scenes both within and without Japan; art auctions at anime conventions in the US; and on-line anime art sites. 107 I. Anime Art: Encoding the World through Anime Aesthetics I would like to start with two vignettes I consider to be useful in thinking about the implications of producing and consuming art works consciously inspired by the commercially-produced and mass-distributed products of manga and anime. The first scene is from the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, in September and October 2003, where Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s Reversed Double Helix exhibition is held (Figure 1). There stands one large sculpture called “Togari-kun” (“Mr. Pointy” in Japanese) in the middle of the plaza that looks like a blown-up plastic character toy, surrounded by four smaller statues that look similarly cute and cuddly. The exhibition also includes two other main components: two gigantic balloons, each 30 feet in diameter, in the shape of “cute” eyeballs hovering over the plaza as well as a candy- colored pathway with mushroom-shaped benches and repeated patterns of smiling flowers. As an exhibition funded by the Public Art Fund, the installation is designed to be enjoyed by the general public visiting the center, tourists and New Yorkers alike, many of whom seem genuinely intrigued, if not uninterested, at the unexpected sight of the fun figures and childlike colors. Regardless of the seemingly mixed public reaction, this exhibition can be said to signal the pinnacle of Murakami’s achievement as a global promoter of the new aesthetic mode he names “Superflat.” In the same season, Murakami was ranked as one of the “Power 100 People” by the British art journal ArtReview in recognition of his successful collaboration with Louis Vuitton that resulted in an instantly popular handbag line with candy-colored logos and smiley flowers, as well as his ambitious solo exhibition at Rockefeller Center. 108 The second scene I would like to sketch is an “art auction” event at the anime convention “Ushicon” in Austin TX, in late January 2006. It is held at the end of a three-day art exhibition at the convention site, in a room filled with about a hundred young art enthusiasts, collectors and artists. Once the auction begins, as a relative newcomer to this scene, I feel immediately overwhelmed by two discoveries. The first is that the price of some of the art works auctioned at the event goes far beyond my stereotypical notion of the amateur art market dominated by teenage buyers, with a few of the pieces sold at well-over several thousand dollars. What is more unusual about the auction, however, is that the manner in which both the auctioneer and the audience behave is deliberately different from that found at a conventional art auction. In other words, if a fine art auction scene can be described as a site of extreme discretion and control of both physical and emotional movement through which any trace of a commercial transaction is hidden and denied, the anime art auction is conspicuously positioned as an alternative by the playfully raucous behavior and down-to-earth comments of its participants. Unlike at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, at an anime art auction, audience members freely yell “Come on!” or “What?!” when the bids placed seem too high for a “commonsensical” buyer, while the auctioneer himself happily shouts out “Loser!” with an exaggerated gesture of pointing when an auction participant is beaten by a higher bidder. All the details of the auction seem to have been created in imitation of those of a conventional art auction, including the rules of registering and bidding, only to mock the ritual of the “official” art auction. Anime art auctions, at least the ones I have participated in, seem to function as a site where anime fans come together not just because of their love of anime-inspired art works, but also because of their communal celebration of the popular aesthetic, by 109 collectively positioning themselves as opposite to the imagined aesthetic disposition of social elites. I want to argue in the current chapter that these two cultural sites, a sensational New York installation work by a “hot” Japanese artist and a parodic art auction by a group of teenage anime fans in the US, completely separate as they may seem, both in terms of their respective geographical and symbolic locations in the existing cultural hierarchy, are in fact, in a deeply dialogical relation with each other in cultural globalization. While Murakami utilizes manga and anime inspirations and related otaku identity as a valuable source of rebellious meaning in his rigorously cute and knowingly exploitative images, US anime fans at art auctions are using anime as a symbol of an alternative aesthetic sensibility that potentially challenges the stern outlook of official taste culture. In other words, while their specific agenda in utilizing the visual codes of anime may differ, Japanese Pop artists as represented by Murakami and anime fan art collectors in the US are united in their goal of subverting the hegemonic aesthetics of the power bloc. Stuart Hall defines “the structuring principle of ‘the popular’” as “the tensions and oppositions between what belongs to the central domain of elite or dominant culture, and the culture of the ‘periphery.’ It is this opposition which constantly structures the domain of culture into the ‘popular’ and the ‘non-popular’” (Hall, 188): … what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define ‘popular culture’ in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture. It is a conception of culture which is polarized around this cultural dialectic… 110 The people versus the power-bloc: this, rather than ‘class-against-class’, is the central line of contradiction around which the terrain of culture polarized. Popular culture especially is organized around the contradiction: the popular forces versus the power-bloc. (Hall, 189-191, my emphasis) It is not my intention here to romanticize the stylistics of anime art as a new vocabulary of transnational popular resistance against a globally dominant hegemonic culture. As Hall himself warns, defining certain types of cultural practice as a universal popular aesthetic would be “certainly profoundly mistaken.” Instead, I will discuss anime art scenes in three different locations as varied examples of how the language of anime is mobilized to challenge the dominant aesthetic codes of specific locales. What I call anime art here broadly includes two components: amateur art production by fans of Japanese animation, circulated in various sites of anime fan culture; and fine art works by professional artists allegedly inspired by anime and manga, which are circulated in established art institutions such as galleries and auction houses. Since both categories are elusive to pinpoint precisely, with many questions unanswered-- how to define a fan, how to separate amateur from professional, what does “allegedly inspired” mean, who is the agent of alleging here, etc.-- I will focus mainly on institutional aspects of these cultural formations, looking at both the texts and the contexts of the production of anime art. I will further suggest that while not universal in any way, these three examples provide a model of trans-local popular culture in an age of global cultural exchanges. Thus, even though the visual codes of anime themselves should not be universalized as the aesthetic codes of the popular, the collective positioning of fans and artists in different locales as forces of contradiction through the embrace of anime inspirations, needs to be recognized 111 as a form of transnational popular resistance toward globally-imposed taste hierarchy and the supremacy of the universalized high cultural. II. New Pop Art: aesthetic alliances through the vision of “super flat” The world of the future might be like Japan is today—super flat… Within this concept seeds for the future have been sown. Let’s search the future to find them. “Super flatness” is the stage to the future. (“The Super Flat Manifesto” by Takashi Murakami, 2000) Takashi Murakami’s artistic venture began to draw attention in the west from the late 1990s with his solo exhibitions appearing in small but influential galleries from 1995 onward. Especially in spring 2001, when the Super Flat exhibition, curated by Murakami himself, was held as the first show at the Pacific Design Center, a new west-side branch of Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition was successful on multiple levels: first, it made Murakami’s name known together with his notion of “super flat” as an aesthetic concept that connects traditional Japanese culture, contemporary anime influences and the digital future through the common visual principle of “flatness.” It also made it acceptable for the western audience to closely study and admire photographic images of Japanese schoolgirls in mini-skirts (Hiromix) or pre-pubertal female bodies drawn in an ultra-cute manga style (Mr’s paintings, Figure 2), or a three- dimensional plastic statue of a naked girl milking her massive breasts (“Hiropon” by Murakami, Figure 3). And most importantly, the show worked well with the viewers’ orientalist fantasy by accentuating the otherness of the aesthetic sensibility of the artists, inspired by manga, anime and other Japanese popular cultural media, combined with their 112 seemingly anachronistic sense of political (in)correctness, especially in gender representations, shown in many of the works exhibited. I think it is worth emphasizing that this was the inaugural show at the Pacific Art Center, the Westside subdivision of MoCA which the director at the time, Jeremy Strick, opened “amenably” because of his recognition that “much of the museum’s funding comes from L.A.’s affluent West Side.” (Drohojowska-Philip, 2001) Murakami’s Super Flat show was in many ways a perfect match for the venue in the sense that it worked well on both sides: to the “affluent” audience on the Westside, the show provided an opportunity to check out what was currently cool, which happened to be a playful reworking of whimsical images of girls, animals and toys that enabled viewers to discreetly fetishize the otherness as well as gain cultural capital from learning about the latest art trend. For the Super Flat artists, on the other hand, the show also worked well to delineate the new landscape of symbolic resistance because the otherness perceived by the “affluent” audience in West L.A. defined the very contradiction between “the popular forces versus the power-bloc” Stuart Hall theorizes and thus gives meanings to the otherwise blank rebellion in the art works (or random meanness combined with adorable images of children and animals, as in Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings). Even though MoCA is a public institution any member of the public can visit, by presenting the show not to the more eclectic downtown crowd, but to the financially better-off Westside audience, Super Flat demarcated the lines of cultural alliance, clarifying questions such as who was rendered “the other” here, who was enjoying the privilege of “otherizing,” who was willing to be otherized, and why. It is thus not surprising that Murakami’s works and those by a 113 number of artists featured in the show have since become highly sought-after in art galleries and auction houses in the west. 38 There are other aspects of Murakami’s notion of Super Flat that require careful critical discussion: notably, the way in which the signifier of “Japan” is mobilized, the way that the future is evoked, and lastly, the way in which otaku identity is used as the core of creativity in the new generation of J-Pop artists. First, the “Japan” Murakami evokes is a particular idea or a representation of Japan in which the world is pictured in two dimensional images. In these images, the graphic lines themselves have more aesthetic values than their realistic, representational meanings. Murakami specifically relies on the visual language of traditional paintings of the 17 th through 19 th centuries, including ukiyo- e (woodblock painting) in order to suggest how the modern notion of art, called “contemporary art” in Japan, has been artificially constructed and ideologically manipulated by the self-westernizing elites from the Meiji Period onward. Thus, Murakami’s attempt to make a connection between the pre-modern paradigms of the “flat” visual codes of traditional Japanese paintings and the postmodern visuals typically found in manga and anime needs to be considered symptomatic of the new generation’s search for a new national identity that bypasses the problematic period of modernization 38 Murakami’s sculptor “Hiropon,” mentioned above, was sold at Christie’s in May 2002 for $427,500 against an estimate of $120,000 (Telegraph, 12/11/2002). “Tongarigun,” the center piece of Murakami’s solo show at Rockefeller Center is said to have been purchased by Christie’s owner Francois Pinault for about $1.5 million in June 2003 (ArtNews 2003). Murakami’s works were mentioned in the “The Most Wanted Works of Art” article in Art News in November 2003. 114 in Japanese history, which may as well be called the age of westernization, according to the pop artists’ ideas. The second aspect that is significant in Murakami’s provocation is the way in which he uses the term “the future” repeatedly as an entity that can be grasped through the super flat mode of configuring the world. James Carey schematizes the ritualistic functions of the discourse of the future in the US context via the following three categories: the future as exhortation, especially for a certain political leadership; the future as prophecy that technological progress will solve our problems and lead us to a better tomorrow; and the future as a ritual of participation in planning and shaping our communal civic lives (Carey 1988). I interpret Murakami’s recurring use of the future in his writing and lecture as a way of addressing the anime and manga generation in Japan and their culturally shared desire for a complete break from the past, or at least a certain part of it, and the present which results from that particular past. In this sense, the function of the “future” in Super Flat discourse could be called future as an embodiment of alternative history—an evocation of the collective desire for anytime but now. Even though the present (of the New Pop and Super Flat, from the early 1990s to the present) is nothing like as horrible as the immediate postwar situation in Japan, the view that considers the present as something to be denied and overcome is powerfully embedded in the manga and anime worldview, as Antonia Levy maintains in her convincing analysis of anime stylistics of human bodies that represent a new race. 39 39 Antonia Levy argues the generic manga and anime styles for human bodies, especially typical in Shojo manga (girls’ comics), represent neither Japanese, nor westerners, but a whole new race: 115 The third aspect of Super Flat discourse I consider to be relevant to the current discussion of anime art is the emphasis given on otaku identity. As I discussed in the previous chapter, otaku is a contemporary Japanese term that has had mixed connotations so far— evoking both socially inept media addicts and the new creative forces behind Japan’s globalizing media and culture industry. Not surprisingly, Murakami identifies himself as an otaku, 40 hailing the otaku, as art critic Midori Matsui describes, as a new prototype of cultural connoisseurship. During a Q&A session after a lecture given by Murakami about the concept of Super Flat and otaku identity which I attended in New York in April 2003, an audience member questioned, “Don’t you think you are too successful to be called an otaku?” Murakami answered immediately, “I don’t consider myself successful at all.” 41 In other words, in the Super Flat vision, otaku-ism has more to do with a concept, an idea of oneself, and self-positioning as a societal “other,” rather than the reality of the socially stigmatized, obsessive media consumers. This is instructive in understanding both the role of otaku identity in the construction of the new aesthetic mode of Super Flat and in grasping how all three modalities I have described so far are equally related to the To contemporary Japanese, the large, round eyes and varied hair colors of anime characters no longer indicate race… By the 1960s, the huge eyes were no longer so much a racial trait, as a gateway to the character’s soul. Those eyes could glisten with hope, blur with tears, or melt with love. The situation is further complicated by the fact that so many anime are science fiction, and will often deliberately combine a Japanese name with a non-Japanese identity (or vice-versa) to indicate a future in which intercultural marriage is the norm (Levy, 1996: 11-14). 40 “I am one of the people who are categorized as otaku… I like to immerse myself in thinking and talking about things in the fantasy world that have no role in society whatsoever.” (Takashi Murakami, “POP+OTAKU=POKU,” Big, no. 21 (1999): 44. 41 Public Art Fund: Tuesday Night Talks at the New School, Spring 2003. 116 symbolic positioning of both young fans and producers of contemporary Japanese popular culture as new visionaries. However, what seems to me even more significant in the theories of Super Flat is that the three symbolic discourses, concerning nation, history and youth, all revolve around one core issue: the specific ways of seeing or the alternative visual code (of super flatness). Other interpretations of the art trend—generally pop-influenced, determinedly playful, and often ironic works by young artists in their 20s and 30s emerging in Japan from the early 1990s onward-- are also worth briefly considering here, since Murakami’s concept of Super Flatness is just one, albeit perhaps the most internationally visible, component of the trend, variously termed J-Pop, J-Art, Japanese Pop art, New Pop, Tokyo Pop, or Poku (Pop+ otaku, in Murakami’s term). For example, Japanese art critic Midori Matsui introduces another influential critic, Noi Sawaragi’s suggestion to call the new art movement Tokyo Pop as follows: Sawaragi sees in the emergence of the new Pop art in the early 1990s the first authentic opportunity to break open the closure of Japanese contemporary art... Absorbing the vulgar energy of mass culture while possessing cool irony, the new Pop marks a clear break with the previous practices of Japanese contemporary art… Sawaragi argues that the chaotic flourishing of subculture in Tokyo today provides an opportunity for deregulating the academic categories of contemporary art, whose wealth he proposes to call, “Tokyo Pop” after the example of Lawrence Alloway. (Matsui, 1999: 26) Whereas later in her article titled, “Toward a Definition of Tokyo Pop,” Matsui contradicts Sawaragi’s position due to the “confrontational” nature of his definition of Tokyo Pop, she generally agrees with Sawaragi that this new pop art movement is 117 committed to challenging the lethargic “contemporary art” in Japan through making an alliance with pre-modern visual codes, since in both critics’ views, the so-called contemporary art in Japan is a negative result of the mindless acceptance of western aesthetic paradigms during the period of modernization in the early 20 th century. Matsui sensibly concludes her reading of both Murakami’s and the new pop art’s rebellious attempts as follows: The definition of Tokyo Pop is fundamentally related to his [Murakami’s] struggle to find a language for his identity, both as an artist and as an individual. Paradoxically, Murakami’s artistic maturation will depend on his ability to sharpen his aesthetic of “immaturity,” to reconcile the grace of Japanese tradition with the traumas of modernization. (Matsui, 1999: 29) Whether it is called the “vulgar energy of mass culture” or “the aesthetic of immaturity,” major issues involved in the visual and discursive positioning of Tokyo Pop similarly resonate in other critics’ analyses of the same art movement. In another anthology on the Japanese pop art trend, Margrit Brehm categorizes three characteristics of the new art trend as “nihonga, as a painting technique and reference to tradition; manga, as a formal repertoire and expression of a pictorial idiom of the present; the child or childlike as an opportunity for identification and a metaphor for a status in society…” (Brehm, 2002: 12) While Brehm seems to have a distinctive notion of New Pop as an early 1990s development, she also recognizes a common quality in later J-Pop artists’ works, better- known in the west, as an “attitude” that marks their works as an expression of New Pop. Thus, whether called Tokyo Pop, or New Pop, or new New Pop, we can understand the commonly detected tendency in this art movement as related to the new visual language of manga and anime that is strategically connected back to a premodern, supposedly more 118 authentic “Japanese” visual code, and to the positional attitude of immaturity and childlikeness taken by youth in contemporary Japanese society. When it comes to the discussion of another representative artist of the Pop Art movement, Yoshitomo Nara, the emphasis placed on the “childlike” becomes even more prominent because of Nara’s tendency of working predominantly with child-like figures and animals (Figure 4). Not so differently from critics mentioned so far, Stephan Trescher interprets the childlike figures in Nara’s works as “[wearing] the regressive features of those who never want to grow up. Since this attitude of defiance is no longer just a phase for adolescents, but also cultivated immaturity as a societal phenomenon of global proportions, Nara’s supposed rebels speak a language that is understood internationally” (my emphasis, Trescher, 2001: 16). This is an important observation that recurs in the discourse on J-Pop art, which recognizes the connection between the two- dimensional visual code and the thematic motif of childlike sentiments of powerlessness and rebelliousness. In other words, the Pop artists’ conscious mobilization of manga and anime inspirations through simple imagery and almost amateurish stylistics reminiscent of childhood angst can be said to be telling because it clearly positions the Pop art movement as a contradictory force of opposition to the official aesthetics of the “contemporary” (westernized) art that values mimetic realism. Further, as Trescher recognizes, if this is indeed appealing not just to Japanese but global anime kids, the implications of constructing such a triangular alliance through the super flat visual codes (between traditional Japanese culture—contemporary anime/manga—new Pop art) can be 119 said to have a global resonance in the ever expanding anime fandom in transnational contexts. While I try not to be prematurely optimistic about this art trend, it is certainly exciting to acknowledge how the art works of female artists in the group have become visible and empowered enough to encourage viewers to rethink the way we look at and think of female bodies and non-normative (i.e. non-heterosexual-male) sexualities. This is an especially significant issue in the Japanese context to the extent that, as Fran Lloyd suggests, “concerns with sex and consumerism in Japan are part of the complexities of a specifically Japanese experience of modernization and commodification which, embedded in the past, continues to affect and transform the present” (Lloyd, 6). Although some of the works that claim to be ‘by otaku for otaku’ foreground the “ero- (tic)” factor of otaku culture too overtly, blurring boundaries between critique and knowing exploitation, some artists attempt to provide different ways of visualizing and considering women’s bodies. For example, Chiho Aoshima, one of the founding members of Murakami’s Hiropon Factory (unmistakably an homage to Warhol), now called Kaikai Kiki, has been producing digital paintings and murals with extremely detailed images of teenage girls either naked or in “girly” outfits such as school uniforms, kimonos, cheerleading outfits, etc., often bleeding, bound, and even mutilated, sitting in the middle of nature, together with deer, plum trees, and green mountains (Figure 5). While Aoshima actively utilizes the manga and anime inspirations of flat stylistic of girls with big eyes, slim legs and mini-skirts or skimpy dresses, the mixture of unexpected violence with innocent girly images certainly makes the viewers think of the exploitative 120 nature of typical images of “innocent” girls, ubiquitous in the commercial visual culture of contemporary Japan. Another artist, Aya Takano, who also has been working in Kaikai Kiki from the beginning (since 1996) and is currently considered one of the most successful members of the group, has been drawing pre-pubertal female figures in two-dimensional lines that garnered her international acclaim. Whereas Aoshima creates a sense of absurdity by juxtaposing the conventional cuteness of girly images with extremely violent situations that draw viewers’ attention to the exploitative nature of this regime of female representation, Takano’s images are more overtly manga-esque, with almost amateurish simple lines that do not aspire to present images in any conventionally realistic way. Instead, Takano creates a fantastic space, often set in the middle of the ocean or in the space, where waiflike protagonists with nimble floating bodies interact with different creatures and explore the possibilities of different existence (Figure 6). As pointed out by Ivan Vartanian, in these manga and anime inspired works by Aoshima, Takano, and other female artists of the New Pop movement, male figures are consistently absent (Vartanian 2005: 8). What we see instead is not a denial of female sexuality or sensual desires, but a curious exploration of new types of intimate interactions that challenge the boundaries between human and animal, human and machine, and human and the seemingly inanimate world in general. What interests me most about these two styles of representation by Aoshima and Takano is how the works by these two artists exemplify the two main arguments I am trying to 121 present in this chapter: first, how anime art subverts the existing cultural hierarchy and taste culture; and more importantly, how it changes ways of seeing as dominantly reproduced in the classical western art paradigm. First, inasmuch as Aoshima and Takano belong to the pop art collective Kaikai Kiki, both have been contributing to producing a whole gamut of works that freely cross boundaries between fine art and commercial merchandise. In addition to helping Murakami’s “factory” produce various kinds of consumer products that range from postcards and T-shirts to collectible model figures and plush toys, Aoshima has had exhibitions of her mural series, titled City Glow, in subway stations in New York and London in 2005 and 2006, bringing her art closer to the general downtown crowd (Figure 7). Aya Takano, on the other hand, has been authoring her own sci-fi manga series in the same style as her art work, actively challenging the boundary between fine art and manga art. Thus, by working through different formats, platforms, and institutional locations, the two artists can be said to have contributed to the increasing dialogue between official channels of high art circulation and the matrix of everyday popular cultural experience. More importantly, I would argue that Aoshima’s and Takano’s works represent new forms of gender representation that help us change the ways of seeing, especially seeing female bodies and thinking about female sexuality in public media. In his famous and still inspiring analysis of the objectifying ways of seeing female bodies embedded in the classical western art tradition, John Berger argues, “…men act and women appear”: Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. 122 The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (Berger, 1972: 47) Laura Mulvey’s similar discussion of the male gaze in narrative cinema, which renders women a mere image and passive object of gaze, is also relevant to the present discussion inasmuch as anime art, originating from the literary and visual texts of manga and anime, always implies both motion and narrative (Mulvey, 1975). Although it is arguable whether Aoshima’s and Takano’s works are developed in a somewhat different cultural context from the western tradition of classical art, and thus that the ways of seeing constructed by their works may not be similar to that in the west, I think a comparative analysis is still useful since it can be generally said that non-western art and ways of seeing have been indelibly impacted by the normative visual codes of mimetic western art in the process of modernization. Especially considering how New Pop has originated from young Japanese artists’ efforts to find an alternative visual regime that bypasses the one implemented by the violent forces of modernization, it is certainly worth thinking about the alternative qualities in the ways of seeing presented by these two Pop artists. Even though both Aoshima and Takano almost always have female or feminine figures as the main characters in their paintings—and they are often naked--, it is hard to see the female figures in their paintings put on display as Berger explains of nude portraits in the western art tradition, which carefully conceals any exchange of looks (between the 123 painted protagonist and the spectator) in order to enhance the sense of control and sexual pleasure of the male spectator. As Berger argues, “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude… Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.” (Berger, 54) One way of understanding how the New Pop paintings do not function in the conventional way of objectifying female bodies would be, then, to consider how the female characters in Aoshima’s and Takano’s paintings are naked yet also confidently themselves, sometimes looking right back and sometimes busily engaged in the scene without posing their bodies for a surveying male gaze. However, what is more significant to notice concerning the two artists’ paintings is the impossibility for a single unifying perspective to develop in viewing them because the intentional flatness of the images functions superbly to resist the typical process of objectification and sexualization of female images from happening. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain the significance of perspective in the western visual regime dominant since the Renaissance as follows: One of the primary aspects of Renaissance perspective is its designation of a single spectator in space. Perspective emphasizes a scientific and mechanical view toward ordering and depicting nature, and focuses a work of art toward a perceived viewer. The spectator defines the center of the image. Whereas, for instance, Medieval imaging conventions assumed that there could be many vantage points from which a scene could be depicted, perspective demanded that one, unique point be established. Thus, it has been said that the technique of perspective turns the viewer into a “god,” whose view is the defining position from which to look at a scene. (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001: 113) 124 Precisely because of the lack of a clear definition and differentiation between foreground and background, and thus because of the absence of a single viewing position for which objects are arranged with the assumption of the male spectator’s fetishizing gaze, the scenes in Aoshima’s and Takano’s paintings are arranged in a less formulaic manner with meanings produced in potentially multiple ways. If “the world of perspective indicates the desire for vision to be stable and unchanging and for the meaning of images to be fixed,” as Sturken and Cartwright argue, it can be said that the deliberately flat images of naked female characters, neither foregrounded nor centralized in the paintings by Aoshima and Takano, reflect the New Pop artists’ desire to destabilize the objectifying male gaze systematically reproduced through the visual regime of classical western paintings. It is still questionable to what extent the alternative visual potential of Aoshima’s and Takano’s flat images can be distinguished from that of the works by other (male) artists who belong to the same collective or who share similar aesthetic principles. For example, Mr, also an active member of Kaikai Kiki, is renowned for his paintings featuring images of mostly naked pre-pubertal girls that unmistakably reference the Lolita Complex. It is certainly not my intention here to valorize Aoshima’s and Takano’s works over those by other New Pop artists simply because the former are female representations produced by female artists, automatically assuming some sort of essentially different experiential and perspectival qualities in them. That the two Pop artists whose works I find most remarkable in professional anime art happen to be female, is largely subsidiary, as I agree with art historian Lisa Tickner’s suggestion that 125 the question is no longer “why are there no great women artists?” but “how are the processes of sexual differentiation played out across the representations of art and art history?” (Tickner, 1988) In other words, it is not necessarily the actual gender of the artists I am interested in discussing here as a source of alternative potential in their works, but the visual systems they present, in that these differ significantly from the hegemonic system of Renaissance art with a fixed perspective, as valorized by a traditional art criticism that has consistently constructed women as Other. On the other hand, I must admit my own, not wholly unbiased excitement at recognizing the alternative visual potential in the works of these women artists, as well as those by Seonna Hong, another female artist I will discuss later, because this recognition, I believe, adds another dimension to existing discussion of the larger transnational anime culture, in many parts of which gender remains to an unresolved issue of contention (as in Annalee Newitz’s provocation discussed in the previous chapter). Norma Broude and Mary Garrard argue in their discussion of feminist art history after postmodernism that “[t]he first casualty of poststructuralist gender studies was the possibility of women’s agency” (Broude and Garrard, 1). It is indeed exhilarating to think that artistic appropriations of those cheap, mass-produced, commercial texts of manga and anime, by active female fans, can lead us to a challenging of the dominant visual regime in the western mimetic art tradition that has naturalized objectifying representations of the female body. Even though it may be an uncomfortable conjunction with anti-essentialist notions of gender which I generally embrace, I find it meaningful to point out that the cultural appropriation of anime influences embodied in Aoshima’s and Takano’s Pop Art 126 works exemplifies not only how such a profoundly commercial culture as that of anime can animate its users into creative subjects, but also helps us rethink the question of female agency more generally in visual representations and media discourses. As Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine Grontkowski convincingly suggest, vision as a privileged sense of logos has been systematically gendered male in western philosophical tradition from Plato on (Keller and Grontkowski, 1996). A critical reading of anime art by the two female artists can help problematizing the naturalized connection between vision and male gender through discussion of alternative perspectives and gender representation. Thus, while there exist similarly flat and counter-mimetic art works in the anime art trend, I maintain that these two female artists’ works represent the most positive development in the New Pop Art emerging in Japan since the early 1990s. For unlike the knowingly exhibitionist female figures in Mr’s, Murakami’s and other (male) artists’ works that still construct a centralized (male) viewing position, Aoshima’s and Takano’s works more actively disrupt any kind of totalizing vision that assumes hierarchical relations between space and objects within that space. Interestingly enough, this reading of the two pop artists’ works is reminiscent of John Berger’s reading of cubism as a unique form of revolutionary art, as examined in David James’s discussion of Berger’s creative writings: While not entirely destroying illusionist, three-dimensional space, cubism breaks its continuity. A cubist painting implies space to the extent that one represented form can be inferred to be behind another, but the spatial relations between any one group of forms do not determine all the spatial relations in the entire painting. In the absence of a single represented space, the internal, otherwise discrete, spaces cohere only on the picture surface, ‘an arbiter and resolver of different 127 claims,’ against which all spatial relations must be assessed and comprehended. This surface, ‘which is now the origin and sum of all that one sees,’ becomes the only image of totality provided by the work, replacing that previously supplied by perspective, which posited a fixed point of observation in nature and so affirmed an autonomous and coherent space outside the picture. (James, 1996: 50) It may sound absurd to compare the Japanese New Pop artists’ inconsequential and displaced political aspirations with those of Berger’s novels which, according to James, successfully negotiate between Marxist materialism and high modernism through the concept of cubism, which builds a revolutionary realism by repurposing the surface and rethinking spatial relations in art works. However, it is noteworthy that these anime- influenced young artists explore similar questions to those of Berger concerning visual representation, bourgeois/masculine perspective, and political meaning, in their pop art works. Thus, even if the art works of Aoshima and Takano are only marginally political in comparison with the overtly political project of the Cubists, I would argue, the act of viewing the unconventional female representations in the two artists’ works that defy an illusion of a reality stably organized around the male viewing position in the normative western paintings, can lead us to question unequal gender relations in our everyday reality. I have discussed so far a new Pop Art trend emerging from the early 1990s onward in Japan as an example of anime art, since, in spite of individual differences amongst the artists in the group, their indebtedness to the alternative visual codes of manga and anime as well as to the thematic motif of consciously marginal positioning of otaku have been homogenously recognized in the art discourse. I have specifically focused on two 128 potentials presented by the movement: first, the capacity to challenge the cultural hierarchy between high culture, perpetuated through the operations of well-established institutions such as art galleries, museums, and auction houses in the industrialized west, and popular culture, mass-produced, commercially circulated, diversely received and unexpectedly appropriated in everyday contexts. Also, I have discussed the contributions made by the works of two New Pop artists, Chiho Aoshima and Aya Takano, to changing our ways of seeing and thinking of female bodies and sexualities, through their construction of carefully flat images that frustrate the creation of the illusion of three- dimensionality and the resulting central, single perspective that privileges fixed, totalizing meanings. In the following section, I would like to discuss the larger proportion of what I have called anime art: art production by non-professional anime fans who adopt the stylistics of anime and manga as alternative codes for visualizing the world. While this is certainly a less visible, less glamorous and less stable field of cultural production than Japanese New Pop Art, I suggest that anime fan art production is truly significant, specifically in the context of cultural globalization, because the fans’ passionate embrace of the new visual language of anime impacts both taste hierarchies and ways of seeing in different local contexts worldwide. III. Anime Fan Art: For an Imperfect Vision of the Ever-globalizing World Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything. –Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema” 129 Unexpectedly, Espinosa’s deeply politicized and inspiringly revolutionary notion of Imperfect Cinema seems to me an effective analogy to think through the current stage of anime fan art production in different locales outside Japan. It is certainly not incorrect to think that there is not much overtly political quality in most of the anime fan art works that are created in imitation of the rigorously commercialized textual products of the Japanese culture industry: other than as expressions of mostly teenage fans’ existential angst, sexual frustration, sense of social marginalization, and other more personal issues. Nevertheless, I would argue that the fans’ devotion to mobilizing a new regime of visual representation for artistic and semiotic purposes functions to initiate a similar rethinking and shifting in the existing cultural hierarchy and conventional ways of seeing, as I suggested in relation to Japanese New Pop Art in the previous section. In the case of anime fan art, however, the changes are far less prominent and less enthusiastically theorized, but are more diffuse and pervasive to the extent that it is not hard to spot a quiet teenager patiently scribbling images of anime characters on her or his notebook in the corner of a classroom, in different parts of the world in the context of cultural globalization. Thus, by delineating this field of fan cultural production, I intend to prove how the “Art” we know of can and is indeed, disappearing through the collective efforts made by amateur anime artists who long to build an alternative visual language that is different from the paradigm of the elitist, bourgeois, Eurocentric, and phallocentric tradition of classical fine art. Anime art as a non-professional practice is typically divided into two categories: fan art and original art. Fan art is a category of drawings and paintings created by anime fans 130 based on existing anime shows or manga series. Characters in the paintings are already known and recognizable by fellow anime fans; and scenes depicted in the paintings faithfully conform to the existing diegesis, with the same setting and narrative background, without much extra-textual embellishment or improvisation. Original art, on the other hand, refers to the category of fan art works that are created in the style of anime and manga, inspired by recurring thematic motifs, formal styles and generic conventions, but not copying or directly based on any particular existing texts. It is typical for fan artists to aspire to produce both without a rigid sense of separation between artists who produce fan art only and those who paint original art only. While good fan art works are much admired by anime fans in the community, often auctioned at high prices if they are convincingly copied or depict scenes from a currently popular show, original art seems to enable some of the amateur artists to claim a slightly different status within the community. Generally speaking, works by those artists who produce original art seem to be received a bit more enthusiastically in anime art circles due to the fact that producing original art is considered proof that the artist has achieved a certain level of technical competence as well as literary creativity through endless hours of laborious practice in copying many shows and painting numerous fan art works. In other words, it seems that it is the labor of love fans notice, sympathize with, and admire in original works, not necessarily the originality or distinctive individuality expressed in the original art. Thus, those artists who do produce both fan art and original art tend to have more visibility in anime fan art circles because of the sympathetic recognition on the one hand, and the versatility of their works that give them more opportunity to participate in a variety of anime art venues. 131 There are two major venues that currently function for the exchange of anime art: one is the physical space of the various anime art fairs, which include art exhibitions, artist showcases, art auctions at anime conventions and other fan events; and the virtual, on- line anime art sites where fans post their own works and feedback on other artists’ works, swap tips on drawing techniques, circulate tutorials, and share other kinds of fan production such as fan music, diary, fanfics, original manga works, video clips, and so on. The two venues are also interconnected to the extent that fans can get information on upcoming local anime art events via on-line bulletin boards, whereas fans attending local events can meet artists from a remote area such as Japanese guest artists at US anime cons and later check their works through their Internet sites. Some artists participate in both venues often encouraging their online fans to come to meet them at a certain event, while others focus more exclusively on convention circles or internet forums only. Accordingly, there are different pleasures anime art enthusiasts can take from participating in each of the two venues. For example, Dirk is an African-American male artist I met at a convention in Washington D.C. who seems to prefer to promote his works to other anime art fans in person at conventions (Figure 8). By meeting him, fans can not only look at the original copies of his works but also see him paint in front of their eyes, often drawing fans’ portraits in anime style on the spot for a nominal fee. PMBQ is a creator of an on-line manga called Tea Club I started reading years before I met her at a convention in California. By seeing her art and comic works on the Internet first, I enjoyed more abstract textual qualities of her work without knowing about more contextual meanings related to her personal experiences as a young Filipino-American 132 female artist. Juno Blair B. is an artist whose works I first saw at an art show at an anime con. Since then, I started checking her website regularly where she has since developed a popular manga series titled Star Cross’d Destiny which features not only her original characters and stories but also her own music. There are many more artists who exemplify some form of combined practices of anime arts between these venues: to name just a few, Apsylus in Australia, Lady Veronica in France, Farah in London, Stuart Ng in Vancouver, gibea in China, Artoki in Wolverhampton, UK, etc. Most of these artists’ works can be appreciated on-line, or seen in person at conventions, purchased or commissioned through PayPal on line or seen as a part of other commercial work. A German/Danish anime art website animexx.de boasts that there are currently about 550,000 pictures posted by 37,758 artists on-line. In his discussion of fan art production in Star Trek fandom, Henry Jenkins introduces Howard Becker’s notion of the “Art World” which “refers to systems of aesthetic norms and generic conventions, systems for the circulation, exhibition, sale, and critical evaluation of artworks.” Jenkins considers fandom as constituting a part of “the mass media Art World,” which can be applied to anime art production as well. Due to copyright issues and the limited opportunities for fans to turn pro, however, Jenkins argues that “the importance of media fan cultural production far exceeds its role as a training ground for professional publishing” as fans have come to regard fandom more as “a permanent outlet for their creative expression” (Jenkins, 1992: 46-49). Interestingly, another (fan) cultural commentator, Roland Kelts, who has observed popular cultural practices in Japan including anime fandom, also shares the anxiety over the formidable 133 power of US copyright laws in discussing the unimaginable tolerance of the Japanese manga and anime industry toward fan publications called doujinshi, which function simultaneously as a main vehicle for distributing fan art works, a training ground for future professionals, and a testing ground of consumer tastes for the industry at the same time (Kelts, 168-9). While it may be an accurate estimate that such an obvious copyright infringement through fan art production would not be tolerated in the U.S. legal and cultural environment, it is also important in my view to point out the profound interconnectedness between active fandom and industrial practices. For example, one marketing strategy used by TokyoPop, one of the most successful manga importers/publishers in the United States, has been cultivating American doujinshi through a fan manga contest called “Rising Stars of Manga,” promoted via the internet since 2002. Works by competition winners have been featured in annual anthologies with the same title; and some of the winning titles including Peach Fuzz, Van Von Hunter and Mail Order Ninja have gone into syndication in a wide selection of America’s Sunday newspapers since 2006. TokyoPop’s CEO Stuart Levy proudly states, “[W]e are one of the few [manga competitions] in America, and the quality has risen dramatically. The American fans really are learning how to make manga. We call it the ‘manga revolution’” (Kelts, 173) I agree with Levy on his point that American fans are learning rigorously how to draw manga and anime, judging from the number of tutorial books available through major book retailers in the US, which typically take up as much shelf space in stores as manga 134 books or anime DVDs themselves. Titles such as Draw Your Own Manga, Let’s Draw Manga, How to Draw Manga, How to Draw Anime and Game Characters, Manga for Dummies, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing Manga, and so on, mostly written by Japanese manga artists, provide extremely meticulous tips on drawing techniques, useful tools, character design, narrative and other generic conventions, as well as conveying inspirational advice from the authors about their experiences in the industry. It is worth noting here that such an eager body of discourses of self-education that disseminate particular ways of constructing visual representation in the style of manga and anime show a completely reverse process to what Bourdieu calls “parenthesizing”: The parenthesizing of the social conditions which render possible culture and culture become nature, cultivated nature, having all the appearances of grace or a gift and yet acquired, so therefore ‘deserved,’ is the precedent condition of charismatic ideology which makes it possible to confer on culture and in particular on ‘love of art’ the all-important place which they occupy in bourgeois ‘sociodicy’. The bourgeoisie find naturally in culture as cultivated nature and culture that has become nature the only possible principle for the legitimation of their privilege. (Bourdieu, 1993: 233-234) We can thus read the implications of the enthusiastic embrace of anime art by transnational youth in a close connection to their resistance to the stuffiness of bourgeois high art, and their longing for an alternative visual culture. The discursive environment at anime conventions in the US is also similar in that fan activities at cons, including the circulation of anime art, are considered in a close association with the industry rather than composing an independent outlet for the creative expression of fans with “a limited chance of gaining entry into the professional media art world” as Jenkins argues (Jenkins, 1992: 48). In many ways, the manga and anime industry in the US is not a structuring 135 absence but a structuring presence at anime conventions to the extent that the ideology of staying true to one’s passion for anime even to the point of getting a job in the industry is most pervasively (and arguably perversely) shared by fans at cons, often walking around in T-shirts that say “Will Work for Anime.” Thus, the Art World constructed through the various practices of anime art— i.e. its own systems of aesthetic norms and generic conventions, systems for the circulation, exhibition, sale, and critical evaluation of artworks—can be said to form a micro- or sub-Art World within the larger Art World of anime and manga which is composed of both the industrial practices and the active fan activities of collective self-education, the cultivation of a system of connoisseurship, and consequently, the enacting of changes in ways of seeing. The most spectacular evidence of an animated subject at this juncture between overlapping Art Worlds can be found in the works of an L.A.-based Korean American artist, Seonna Hong, an Emmy Award winning animator who started as a background painter for US animation productions such as Power Puff Girls the Movie and My Life as a Teenage Robot. While working on her time-consuming day job, Hong also has produced art works that feature childlike figures and animals that powerfully evoke a sense of both nostalgia and alienation that one can relate to common experiences of childhood (Figure 9). Quickly embraced by the western art world, Hong’s works are often considered within the tradition of “pop surrealism,” an art movement that originates in L.A. which can be generally characterized as expressing the locally specific punk mentality as shown in underground comic works by Robert Williams and Gary Panter. In the context of the current discussion of anime art, Seonna Hong’s own “surreal” mix of 136 childhood innocence and alienation can be viewed as a representative example of anime art not simply because the artist recognizes her indebtedness to various children’s literary texts, including shojo (girls’) anime Sailor Moon. More importantly, Seonna Hong’s works, as a result of her personal and social experiences in interstitial positions—between animator and artist, Korean and American, fan and producer, and realist and symbolist--, visually represent the creative project of challenging dominant regime of representation and system of aesthetic canonization which in my view lies at the heart of anime art. For example, Seonna Hong’s 2005 project, Animus, embodied as a story book with her own story and images, leads viewers/readers to interestingly layered experiences since the “moving picture book” format with its anti-mimetically flat and simple images encourage viewers to pay attention to alternative dimensionality through its interactive design with different pop-up images and animated figures on each page (Figure 10). As for her choice of the particular format for Animus, Seonna Hong eloquently provides three somewhat interrelated reasons: because she has always been “fascinated by the medium, by the mechanics of it, [by] that the motion itself propelled the story even further”; because of the influence from her past works in animation; and also because the thematic issues she often deals with, the disparity between surface and underlying layers, works well with the format that reveals different realities on different layers and in different dimensions. 42 Such projects of Seonna Hong’s, I would argue, enable different visual (and tactile) experiences that help us explore the world differently without forcing 42 From my interview and follow-up conversation with Seonna Hong (June 2006). 137 one totalizing vision over the others and thus developing different notions of our own subjective position. It is also meaningful to think about how such projects contribute to restoring art to the popular (thus, the disappearance of art into everything) in the context of cultural globalization. In his discussion of the concept of Popular Art, John Storey expresses his frustration at other critics’ efforts to define “popular art” as a qualitatively superb part of existing popular culture or mass culture “which has risen above its origin.” Instead of valorizing certain parts of popular culture as upwardly mobile to the level of high culture because of their exceptional textual values, Storey calls for more rigorous de-naturalization of the institutions that function to reproduce and perpetuate the existing cultural hierarchy (Storey, 2003). For as Bourdieu similarly suggests, “The struggles which aim to transform or overturn the legitimate hierarchies through the legitimating of a still illegitimate art of genre are precisely what creates legitimacy by creating belief not in the value of this or that stake but in the value of the game in which the value of all the stakes is produced and reproduced” (Bourdieu 1984: 569). Considering some of the anime artists I have discussed in this chapter disrupt hierarchical notions of beauty and cultural meaning by presenting alternative ways of seeing, visualizing and configuring the world, we can see how these artistic developments can be considered a step towards Popular Art Storey hopefully theorizes. More specifically, I would argue, anime artists such as Chiho Aoshima, Aya Takano, Seonna Hong, and many other amateur artists in anime fandom, contribute to the political project of unsettling the dominant hierarchy of high art tradition to the extent that their strategic positioning as hybrid figures between mainstream and 138 underground or high art and pop culture can reveal the arbitrary nature of the criteria of high and low. In what Seonna Hong jokingly calls a DIYOW [do it your own way] mentality (Sluke, 2007), artfully mobilized global anime fans are also “doing it in their own way,” collectively challenging hegemonic notions of beauty and cultural meaning regardless of the hierarchical notions of culture, constructed by the western art market, cosmopolitan elites, global capital, and the multinational culture industry. 139 Chapter Four For a Textual Analysis of Absent Narrative Texts in Global Character Products This chapter, as a counterpart to the previous chapter on anime art, explores a case of commercial appropriation of manga visions and anime dreams: the character industry. More specifically, I explore how the more overtly commercial utilization of similar visual codes and cultural sensibilities in the global character market and collectible toy culture functions to change our notions of vision and human subjectivity as well as the hierarchical notion of high culture and popular culture, as I argued in the previous chapter through the example of anime fan art production. As I will define in more detail, “character” in my discussion refers to any kind of commercial, and often artistic, embodiment of animated icons—ranging from vinyl figures and stuffed toys to textual characters, advertising symbols, event mascots and even corporate logos. If we define text broadly as “any finite organized discourse intended to realize communication” as Christian Metz does, it is largely misleading to call character texts “absent” since the intention of communication is mostly present. According to Shintaro Tsuji, founder and CEO of Sanrio, who started his successful character goods company as a “social communication” business in 1960, 43 it can be argued that character products are circulated in variously communicative ways and can thus be considered as cultural texts. Further, if a text is defined as “an object to be 43 From “Sanrio’s History” (http://www.sanrio.com): “Consistent throughout all Sanrio activities on all continents is our aim to provide the means to enrich interpersonal communication.” 140 examined, explicated, or deconstructed,” as literary critic Michiko Kakutani suggests in her reading of the surfaces of daily life as texts to be explicated, 44 character goods can be regarded as texts in urgent need of examination, given their increasing popularity in the current commodity culture 45 and their growing importance in the global culture industry. The title of the current chapter, “For a Textual Analysis of Absent Narrative Texts in Global Character Products,” therefore originates not from an intention of minimizing the textual importance of character goods by calling it absent, but from an attempt to demarcate a specific type of character icons that are increasingly successful in the global market, which are characterized by their semiotic blankness and cultural non- specificity. In this discussion, I would like to explore how we can better understand the textual meanings of character icons and related products and their functions in the context of cultural globalization, as another example of how manga visions and anime dreams challenge dominant ways of seeing and meaning production. Character icons can be grouped roughly into three categories: the historically oldest and commonest in our daily life are characters created specifically for the promotion and advertising of products, companies, events, and public campaigns (see Figs. 11-12). From Tony the Tiger for Kellogg’s breakfast cereal to the colorful M&M characters, from the increasingly popular Michelin Man to the oddly Caucasian-looking Sony Boy 44 Merriam-Webster English Dictionary. 45 In a survey by Kayama, Rika and Bandai Character Research Center in 2001, 87% of Japanese people answer they like characters, which, according to Ivan Vartanian, “function as means of getting in touch with one’s emotions and have become a kind of tool for brining internal psychic machinations out into the open” (“Introduction” to Drop Dead Cute). 141 (no longer in use since the 1960s), from Olympic mascots to the friendly character for koban, the Japanese police kiosk, these promotional characters have worked rigorously to facilitate product recognition, make public events more memorable, and add a friendly facade to twentieth-century commodity culture and the various social relations in it. Even if it is not unusual for these character goods to take on an independent economic existence separate from their original promotional context, and sometimes circulate as highly sought-after items in the collectibles market, 46 this first category of characters can still be distinguished from other types in that their primary function is to promote certain consumer products or events, and that they typically come as a part of the products or events they are promoting rather than as goods in their own right with their own identities and values. The second type of characters would be thus closer to what we conventionally think of in connection with “character” merchandising. These are the characters based on original manga, anime, television series, films, videos, computer games, or any combination of these, to commercialize and further promote the original texts. From the variously-sized stuffed figures of Totoro (Figure 13) to practically everything one can purchase at a Disney store and Snoopytown (in Japan), this type of character is ubiquitous in our life-world, reminding us of the textual pleasures associated with the consumption of original narratives. These characters have formed a major part of the character industry and will continue to do so, judging from the consistently successful 46 For example, Bibendum, the Michelin Man, the one-hundred-year-old icon for the French tire company Michelin is known for having become a character on its own right, collected and enjoyed for its own iconic qualities. (Plastic Culture. p.27) 142 reports from the industry 47 and the introduction of ever more sophisticated narrative strategies as marketing tools, as exemplified by the crafty narrative structure of the Pokemon series with its famous slogan: “Gotta catch ’em all!” Discussions of the diverse pleasures of these textually-based characters have also been varied and rich, including Anne Allison’s notion of “enchanted commodities,” which, borrowed from Walter Benjamin, refers to the “fantasy fair” that “consists of imaginary creations that both extend and collapse the materiality of play products into other dimensions” (Allison, 2006: 16). 48 However, the main focus of the present discussion is the third category of characters, which are currently gaining in visibility and popularity in the face of the ever-increasing power of the global culture industry. These are characters whose origin is neither promotional, as in the case of the first category, nor literary, televisual, filmic nor textual in any other way. They are the kind of characters created purely to sell licensed merchandise such as vinyl figures, plush toys, clothes, fashion accessories, stationery goods, confectionery products, electronic items, and so on, entirely based on the cuteness 47 For example, Gundam, the long-running anime series from 1979 has been estimated to have earned 100 million yen annually through merchandizing between 1993 and 1997 (From Anime Business Ga Kawaru by Nikkei B. P. Sha Gijutsu Kenkyubu, 1999). Hatakeyama and Kubo estimate that there have been about 12,000 purchases of Pokemon character merchandise as of 2000, 8,000 of which took place outside Japan. (Iwabuchi, 2002: 30) 48 Marc Steinberg, in his unpublished manuscript, “Immobile Sections, Trans-series Movement: Astroboy and Commodity Series in Japanese anime,” (presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, Vancouver, March, 2006) also provides a convincing reading of the narrative appeal of character toys that originate specifically from Astroboy (Tetsuwan Atomu), the ’70s Japanese TV anime, which successfully utilizes static sequences that were used because of the shortage of production budget and thus the lack of number of cells to create an illusion of movement and action. 143 of the characters themselves, and to a lesser degree the originality of the character setting. The best-known and most popular example of this category by now would be Hello Kitty (Figure 14), created by Sanrio in 1974, although Hello Kitty has often been mistakenly compared with Mickey Mouse or other cartoon figures in both popular and academic discourses. 49 In terms of its narrative background, all we can tell from the familiar image of the character is that Hello Kitty is a cat of female gender, judging from the ribbon or flower on its left ear. Upon visiting Sanrio’s official website, we can get additional narrative information about Hello Kitty, concerning her relations with other friends, her family background and even national origin, which was decided later on as British in response to Japanese fans’ wishes in the late 1970s. 50 What is striking about this third type of character is that in contrast to the second category of characters such as Pikachu, Tintin, Sponge Bob, Bart Simpson, etc. which require us to have a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge of the original narrative in order to be able to appreciate the related consumer goods, buyers need to know hardly anything about Hello Kitty in order to appreciate its cute products. 49 For example, in the promotional blurb for the “first in-depth study” of the Japanese character (in English), Hello Kitty: the Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, we can find this common tendency of confusing characters that belong to different categories: “Hello Kitty is Japan’s brilliant answer to Walt Disney’s Micky Mouse. This book explains how Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty, turned a cute cartoon cat into a multi-billion dollar global commodity…” (Belson & Bremner, 2004) 50 Woodrow Phoenix argues that Sanrio has chosen to release narrative details of Hello Kitty slowly, bit by bit, in order to make fans continuously involved with the character because of their curiosity (Plastic Culture, p. 40). 144 It should be pointed out here that the three categories of character icons described so far overlap with one another in varying degrees. For instance, we can think about the case in which existing manga or anime characters are used for the promotion of new consumer products (e.g. Natto, promoted by the anime heroine Magic Princess Seri) as a crossover between the first and the second categories. Elsewhere, characters originally developed independently of any literary or other text are often used for different narrative forms after they gain popularity, thus blurring the boundary between the second and the third categories. For instance, Pucca and Garu (Figure 15), created by Vooz in 2000 in South Korea, have drawn much attention from young consumers in Asia, North America and Europe, not only through the sales of various “fancy” products branded with the two main characters’ cute images, but also through the release of a series of innovative 2D and 3D flash animation shorts, titled “Pucca Funny Love” on the Vooz website. As a result of the success in multi-media PR as well as character merchandising, Vooz has grown to expand Pucca both intertextually and globally. “Pucca” has since been produced as a comic book series, animation music videos, as on-line game, picture books, and most recently, television animation (in 2006). A report by Chosun Ilbo, one of the major new agencies in South Korea, attributes the success of Pucca overseas to a multinational collaboration, since “Korea’s Vooz Character Systems developed and marketed Pucca, the UK’s Jetix put up the funds, Canada’s Studio B produced the animation, and an American writer took care of the story.” 51 Pucca has been released as over 2,500 products, available in 130 countries by 2005, according to the same report. 51 “Korea Makes Big Strides in Global Character Industry,” Digital Chosun Ilbo (8/21/07). 145 What interests me about this success story is that regardless of its format and location of release— whether Pucca is enjoyed as a DVD series in Germany, snack food in Israel, television animation in Latin America, or cell-phone straps in Asia--, the iconic character of Pucca precedes in its significance its vague narrative setting in which Pucca, a daughter of a Chinese restaurant owner, pursues her love interest, Garu, a trained ninja who would do anything to avoid Pucca’s advances, albeit unsuccessfully. In other words, Pucca and Garu, as flat visual icons without much narrativity attached to them, seem to represent a new type of character merchandise, an autonomous character that has as much currency in the global character market as more traditional characters known through the circulation of narrative texts, such as Shrek, Dora, and Clifford. In the case of manga, anime and games in particular, characters are often developed by professional character designers as autonomous stock characters and retained until they are purchased for separately developed narratives, seriously blurring the distinction between the second and the third categories. This aspect of the character industry has been further explored since 1999 by two French artists, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, who purchased the rights to a generic character from a Japanese character-development agency, which Huyghe and Parreno named Annlee (Figure 16), and used it in collaboration with about a dozen artists for different art projects in order to “work with her, in a real story, translate her capabilities into psychological traits, lend her a character, a text, a denunciation...” 52 These projects 52 “SFMOMA Presents No Ghost Just a Shell: Annlee Virtually Comes to Life in the Museum Gallery” (Press Release, Sept. 09, 2002). 146 collectively touch upon a series of intriguing questions concerning the semiotic blankness of Annlee (and merchandising characters in general), the status of authorship in postmodern culture, and copyright issues in the global content industry. It is arguable how to interpret these two European male artists’ intentions in their “rescue” of a generic (female) manga character by repurposing it for their supposedly more meaningful art works. Although Annlee is a deliberately blank character designed for different narrative texts, when Huyghe, the legal (co-)owner of the character, calls it “a virgin” and claims to “set her free” by “filling” “her,” “the empty sign, with significance,” 53 the political implications of Huyghe and Parreno’s artistic intention of commenting on the workings of the culture industry by using Annlee as an icon that represents the artificial life-cycle of a character at the mercy of the industry and market, becomes deeply complicated and potentially problematic. For the current discussion, however, I would like to focus on one particular aspect of character texts-- their blankness, as summarized by Huyghe in the following comment: She [Annlee]’s a polyphonic character. What’s interesting about this manga figure is that it’s a way to tell a story. A sexual story? You can use her. A dark story? You can use her. A nice story? You can use this character. She’s almost like a tool” (Nobel, 106) In other words, a generic character like Annlee, while industrially developed for merchandising and other commercial purposes, can be understood as a sign, an adorable yet blank signifier—indeed a perfect vehicle for the global circulation of cultural 53 Philip Nobel, “Annlee: sign of the times—Japanese anime comes to life” in ArtForum (Jan. 2003). 147 meanings, whether or not mediated by narrative forms. Characters that belong to this third category in particular can certainly be characterized by their semiotic blankness and cultural non-specificity, which prove to be effective in today’s increasingly globalized culture industry. To take some other examples, “Tare Panda” (Figure 17) is a lazy panda that apparently does not like doing much except rolling around and eating its favorite fruits. Tare Panda has been popular since it was first introduced in 1995, with stable sales of stuffed animal toys and stationery goods. “Kogepan” (Figure 18) is an over-baked, burnt loaf of bread which tries to live with its own flaws, overcoming chronic depression. “Afro Ken” (Figure 19) is a dog with colorful hair in interesting shapes which tends to change anything it gets near to into versions of itself. Among these three, all developed by the Japanese character goods company San-X, none has any specific narrative texts other than these one-line descriptions associated with them. “Mashimaro” (Figure 20) appears to have slightly more narrative identity since it is also known as a “pervert bunny.” Although the name sounds vaguely Japanese, Mashimaro was developed by the Korean company CLKO in December 2000 and has since become famous for its unpredictably raucous behavior and bathroom humor, largely thanks to the popular flash animation on the company’s website. Often carrying a bottle of soju (Korean national liquor) or with a plunger stuck to its head, the white bunny has been enthusiastically received by fans in South and East Asia and North America, selling over 1,700 products. Accordingly, CLKO has grown phenomenally into one of the most 148 successful character producers in Korea, reporting near $100 million sales worldwide in 2001, even drawing the attention of the national government, which has increasingly supported the character and content industry through a new department, the Korean Culture & Contents Agency. Although constantly struggling with and negatively impacted by piracy in China and South East Asia since the early 2000s, CLKO has still been successful with its other characters, including The Dog, a character merchandise line that features extreme close-ups of different breeds of dog. Whether in the form of a stuffed bunny on a toilet seat, or the digitally manipulated image of a dog, these characters with varying degrees of narrativity still can be said to operate more as empty visual and tactile signs, rather than as semiotically closed texts. Even when there is a specific narrative setting, the stories around the characters are never complete: narrative elements float around instead, providing an environment for new ideas to be developed. In other words, narrative qualities in these character texts tend to be abstract, contextual and fluctuating rather than definite and stable, enabling the formation of a series of narrative modules with a thematic consistency. This narrative system is geared toward the production of a set of invariably shallow and spontaneous mini-stories instead of episodes in a serial master narrative. The narrative formations from merchandising characters therefore can be characterized by their carefully fragmentary nature and incompleteness, encouraging users’ imaginations to fill in the blanks. In his overview of some of the major critical theories of contemporary culture and their relation to the newly emerging digital visual culture, Andrew Darley presents useful critical notions by theorists including Benjamin, Eco, and Jameson, and connections 149 amongst their ideas, most of which are reiterated in Baudrillard’s work. First of all, Darley emphasizes Benjamin’s insight in recognizing reproducibility as a key feature of twentieth-century cultural production, increasingly rendered for mass audiences with technological innovations. Baudrillard similarly observes the precedence that reproducibility assumes in late industrial societies and remarks that our lives are now regulated by “the perpetual reactualisation of the same models.” He also observes a shift away from contemplating a cultural text in terms of form, content and meaning and toward understanding it as part of a differentiated but related series. Umberto Eco, on the other hand, focuses on repetitiveness, seriality and redundancy of information as defining qualities of a new aesthetics in contemporary culture, which is in many ways similar to Baudrillard’s notion of simulation or “the precession of models” and “difference within repetition” (Darley, 2000). Ultimately, what these modern and postmodern theorists are commonly dealing with can be summarized as the disappearance of meaning, or more specifically, the disappearance of profound meaning that presupposes an underlying and more authentic truth hidden beneath a textual facade. This new depthless-ness, this superficiality, according to Fredric Jameson, becomes a general characteristic of twentieth-century cultural consumption, providing us with a source of unremitting fascination and pleasure. 54 54 Baudrillard concludes that contemporary audiences no longer search for “the richness of imagination in images” but look for “the giddiness of their superficiality, for the artifice of detail, the intimacy of their technique.” 150 It is apparent that the concepts described by Darley as defining qualities of contemporary visual culture-- reproducibility, modulation, seriality, repetitiveness, depthlessness, and above all, pleasure taken from the surface-- coincide with the features of character texts discussed above. These characteristics, especially the flatness of texts and the relative marginality of narrative meaning, can also be said to be shared with other contemporary media texts such as television shows and digital video shorts. If so, a more relevant question to ask for the current discussion is: in what ways is the superficiality of character texts worthy of our critical attention, specifically in the current situation of intensifying cultural globalization? How does the “absent-narrative” quality of character texts discussed so far facilitate the circulation and increasing mobility of cultural products in the global marketplace? How is the eclipse of narrative as a key to understanding deeper meanings related to the cross-cultural travel of character texts in the process of globalization? How does the intentional lack of culturally specific references in the new type of characters affect their transnational reception? These questions become even more intriguing when the unevenness of global character markets is taken into consideration. That is, while there are markets that are old enough to have a nostalgia niche in which character companies revive, rejuvenate, or re-package some of their older characters such as Hello Kitty (which was born in 1974 and made a comeback in the mid-1990s), character companies also exploit the commercial potential of new markets created by the uneven timeline of modernization by successfully introducing character products into regions where there have never previously been any legal sales outlet for character goods before (e.g. the opening of Sanrio do Brasil Commercio e Representacoes Ltd. in 1987). 151 Because of such a heterogeneous group of audience the companies try to address, character goods tend to have increasingly multi-layered appeal: they are irresistibly adorable to any user, as is the case with Hello Kitty Hawaii with the Hello Kitty character wearing bikinis and Hawaiian leis. At the same time, it can be particularly rewarding for existing fans and collectors to see Hello Kitty with a slightly brown hue, which is initially a shocking deviation from Hello Kitty’s white skin color, but then an enjoyable variation as fans realize that Hello Kitty got a tan in Hawaii. Whereas these are discreet design strategies on the corporate side to attract diverse users, such variations are also made by users as well as distributors. In fan art forums, many character art works can be found with creative details added by fans: for example, fans who work on or with Hello Kitty have produced art works with the character icon in widely different contexts in which Hello Kitty wears a gas mask, dresses up as Darth Vader or a Gothic Lolita, carries a bloody knife with a creepy smile on her mouth, or even masquerades as Hitler in a Nazi uniform. In an exhibition that commemorates Hello Kitty’s 30 th birthday, titled “Kitty Ex,” a group of well-known artists and designers, both Japanese and non-Japanese, have presented a similarly eclectic collection of Hello Kitty art works in which the 30 year-old character mutates into many different guises, including the former Japanese Emperor Hirohito (by Groovisions), Venus de Milo (Jeremy Scott), and even assumes a form of hi- fi loud speaker (David Ellis). 55 For another example of a character transformed through global circulation, we might consider a photo of a street vendor in Tijuana, Mexico (Figure 21), taken in January 55 Kitty Ex.: Perfect Guide Book. Kitty Exhibition Committee. Tokyo: Bijutsu, 2004. 152 2002, who was selling various tourist souvenirs, including Hello Kitty toys side by side with miniature statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. What is striking in this photo is that the apparently pirated Hello Kitty on the stall does have a mouth. From a haiku writer in Japan to a feminist installation artist in Southern California, 56 the enigmatically mouth- less image of Hello Kitty’s face has attracted countless comments. The Frequently Asked Question list on Sanrio’s website reiterates the same old question “Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth?” and answers the question with official authority: [Because] Hello Kitty speaks from her heart. She is Sanrio’s ambassador to the world and isn’t bound to one certain language.” 57 The cheerful universalism of this answer seems to me to sum up the central strategy of contemporary character goods and other related media products which are designed and produced with a vast and diverse global market in mind. The mouth-less design of Hello Kitty can be seen as a metaphor for the global media industry’s attempt to minimize the cultural specificity of its products in order to maximize their appeal to the widest possible group of consumers. Discussing the function of Japanese cultural products in the context of globalization within Asia, Koichi Iwabuchi terms Japan’s major export items, such as electronic goods like the Sony Walkman, cartoon and anime texts, and computer games, as “culturally odorless” products in the sense that “the cultural presence of a country of origin and images or 56 Jamie Scholnick’s solo exhibition, “Hello Kitty Gets a Mouth” (POST Gallery, L.A. in 2002 and Kobo Chika Gallery, Tokyo, 2004) articulates the frustration and outrage at the patriarchal social norm that consistently silences female icons, such as Hello Kitty, through installation works including video projection about Hello Kitty’s adventure to literally, get a mouth. (“Hello Kitty finally gets to talk back,” Los Angeles Times (Oct. 25 th , 2002). 57 FAQ (http://www.sanrio.com/faq/#27) 153 ideas of its way of life” are deliberately reduced and replaced with local flavors. (Iwabuchi, 2002) Therefore, narratively abstract and culturally (as well as racially) non- specific characters indeed become ambassadors to the world, yet with their mu-kokuseki (no-national identity-) identity, simply promoting the new order of global capitalism and the logic of the ever-intensifying consumer market. In his discussion of globalization and culture, John Tomlinson borrows sociologist Anthony Giddens’ notion of disembedding as a key concept in understanding globalization. Giddens considers globalization as a consequence of modernity, which can be characterized by the lifting out of socio-economic relations from their original physical locales through the development of capitalist expert systems and symbolic tokens. Tomlinson explains cultural globalization as involving a similar process of disembedding of cultural texts and practices from their physical context (Tomlinson, 1999). The notion of disembedding is also closely related to Nestor Garcia Canclini’s concepts of deterritorialization (“the loss of the ‘natural’ relation between culture with geographic and social territory”) and reterritorialization (Garcia Canclini, 1995). All these notions are useful in thinking about trans-cultural practices of character consumption since they help us understand the relation between the appeal of narrative- less/nation-less character products and the issues of agency on the consumers’ side through a dialectical process of disembedding and re-embedding. That is, the textually ambiguous and culturally abstract quality of today’s character products, although an effective marketing strategy developed in response to the border-crossing distribution of cultural products in the process of globalization, have opened up possibilities for a more 154 active and creative consumption on the part of the users, inspiring diverse readings to fill in the semiotic blanks and narrative vacuum. We can thus read the new mouth of the illegally reproduced Hello Kitty in Tijuana as symptomatic of this “filling-in” process and re-embedding of global character products by a collective choice of local artisans and consumers who find Kitty with a mouth more pleasing to their popular aesthetic sense. More importantly, however, I think the specificity of character toys in the global market place needs to be reflected upon further. After all, the topic of current discussion is not any other visually spectacular or elaborate literary texts, but vinyl toys and stuffed animals with cute smiley faces and cuddly figures. Woodrow Phoenix, the author of Plastic Culture: How Japanese Toys Conquered the World, describes the unique power of toys as follows: The power of toys is not about regression or infantilism. It is the recognition of possibility. Toys are symbols that have a figurative power to embody thoughts and emotions that may have their origins in childhood, but are not childish. We recognize parts of ourselves—our secret, wishing selves—in toys. The part of us a toy touches is our unexpressed, dream(ing) self. (Phoenix, 9) The figurative power of toys indeed seems to function significantly in the transnational flow of character merchandise since they seem to inspire lively fan cultures in different parts of the world without much mediation through either language or specific narrative. 58 In other words, because character toys (especially those of the third category) 58 For more discussion of global reception of character merchandise, see Christine Yano’s discussion of transnational fan reception of Hello Kitty in “Worldly Kitty: the Global Marketing and Consumption of Japanese Cute,” a research presentation at the annual conference of Asian Studies Conference Japan, 2003 (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mr103/characters/index.htm) 155 can be defined by their abstract semiotic qualities and vague narrative settings, their figurative power that enables users to project their own dreams, desires and meanings onto them facilitates their travel worldwide. Interestingly, this abstract textual quality of character goods can be related to the discussion of anime art in the previous chapter, to the extent that the “absent text” of character goods can be interpreted as a sign of indeterminacy and thus immaturity. Art commentator and curator Yuko Hasegawa politicizes the concept of immaturity in contemporary Japanese culture as follows: Immaturity does not necessarily therefore signify innocence. In Japan, intentionally remaining in a state of kawaisa (cuteness), an undefined or indeterminate state in which determination (maturity) is never reached, has the potential to perform a political function of undermining current ideologies of gender and power. It could also be interpreted as a deliberately oppositional image, which juxtaposes the idea of a complete identity (a Western sense of identity) with an incomplete or hollow identity, one in which hollowness or emptiness is a natural state, never to be filled. (Hasegawa, 140) The consumption of character goods in a transnational context can therefore be viewed as an act that has political implications to the extent that indeterminacy and immaturity, although mostly style choices by consumers, can also be used to make a statement, either to symbolize a rebellious lifestyle or to embody a non-traditional identity, or both. In most cases, purchasing character goods may mean nothing more than our mundane shopping choices, such as buying a “Chococat” mechanical pencil rather than a non- descript character-less one, which does not lead to any immediate social change. However, the lifestyle of conscious indeterminacy personified by various characters with absent narrative texts can represent a significant political positioning that can be and is 156 currently being expressed in a more self-reflexive way. In fact, the recent trend of producing limited editions of new plastic figures as character toys and circulating them in the ambiguously hybrid spaces of art galleries/toy shops in major metropolitan centers, can be considered as an example of such a self-reflexive expression of the political style of indeterminacy. Diversely called “urban vinyl,” “designer toys,” “designer vinyl,” and “boutique toys,” this new category of characters can be said to form another, fourth category of character toys that are not promotional of other products or companies or events, nor based on other texts, nor produced for mass-market consumption, but designed purely for the enjoyment of a small group of collectors in the know (who will probably keep the toys in tastefully minimalist display cabinets rather than actually “playing” with them). Characters such as Be@rbricks, Gloomy Bears, Uglydolls (Figure 22-24), Smorkin’ Labbits, Bathing Apes, etc. all belong to the same category of trendy designer toys that “seem[ed] to have appeared simultaneously in Japan and China in the mid-nineties” (Bunditz, 6), which represent the subcultural re-appropriation of the politics of immaturity by both animated fans/artists and the constantly transforming culture industry. Art commentator Ivan Vartanian provides insights into the artistic subculture of designer toy production by suggesting that “the greatest distinguishing factor [of the genre of ‘artist multiples’ (the practice of creating numbered multiples, which sells usually several hundred) is who has hijacked the means of production, and that’s designers themselves”: Despite the commercial enticements to turn vinyl toys into a full-on Kmart extravaganza, the very nature of production—the designers are also in charge of 157 manufacturing and distributing the toys—means they are very informed of who is buying their toys. This is not about creating an exclusive club. Rather, this is about sharing toys with a large number of friends. The buyers know the artist or know of the artist. Compared to common toys, there is an intimacy to the entire community (Vartanian, 6-7). Paul Bunditz, founder and creative director of one of the pioneering designer toy shops in the US, Kidrobot, comments on the subcultural re-orientation in the following episode: When the Kidrobot store first opened in San Francisco people would walk in and look at the toys and say, “That’s really very nice… what’s it from?” I remember this specifically in the case of a woman who was staring at one of Pete Fowler’s early Monstrooper figures. I explained to her that the toy wasn’t “from” anything at all. The big, red camouflage-clad monster with a Cyclops-eyeball mace is a character that Pete invented as a toy, nothing else and with no other purpose. It is what it is. The woman just couldn’t understand that and said, “Well if it’s not from something, why would I want it?” We’d only been open about a week and after she stomped away one of my co-workers looked at me and said, “Thank God it’s a limited edition.” (Bunditz, 9) Precisely because of the lack of supplementary function in designer toys, which makes it impossible for those who have a conventionally instrumental notion of character merchandise to appreciate the type of characters (“Well if it’s not from something, why would I want it?”), the determinedly indeterminate identities of designer toys function to distinguish genuine connoisseurs from mundane consumers. Or, to borrow Bourdieu’s term, designer toys can be considered to distinguish the “pure taste” of their users from the popular aesthetic of passive character consumers, through their emphasis on absent functionality and indeterminate meanings—i.e. an emphasis on form over function. Yet at the same time, it is ironic to say the least that the fine taste of character connoisseurs are embodied in the most formally simple and semiotically trivial toy products that range from “Snack Detective Pudding and Jelly” to “Mini Satan” and “Headphonebaby, from 158 “Che Guevara” (the vinyl toy) to “Apethoven” (Ape + Beethoven, Figure 25) and “ApeVader” (Ape + Darth Vader). It remains to be seen whether these new character products, which appeal to urban hipsters with their DYI aesthetics and vaguely rebellious and decidedly immature attitudes, will bring about any kind of substantial change to our everyday culture. However, considering how this recent development overlaps with the anime art production of many crossover artists discussed in the previous chapter (e.g. Seonna Hong’s participation in the production of the successful designer toy series, The Neo Kaiju Project for Super 7 magazine), we can relate this new form of character product to more general shifts in cultural consumption and re-appropriation in the process of globalization. Thus, whether it is through the drawing of deliberately flat manga images or collecting deliberately meaningless/nation-less character goods or even through creating deliberately undefinable plastic toys, these animated fans/consumers/creators of transnational character texts collectively contribute to making changes to hegemonic notions of taste, aesthetics, textual meaning and centered subjectivity, turning the everyday consumption of global character products into a site of struggle for alternative aesthetic and political meanings in their local contexts. To put it differently, whether considered a cosmopolitan ambassador to the world (according to Sanrio), a “corporate whore” (according to Giant Robot magazine), 59 or a symbol of shame and form of punishment (for Thai cops), 60 Hello Kitty’s mouth-less, expressionless face will continue 59 Giant Robot Magazine 20, p. 12. 159 to inspire us to develop different meanings and project them onto in transnational flow for some time to come. For, even though the absent textual qualities of merchandising characters can always be reduced to the clever marketing strategies of the character industry, narrative-less character texts can, at the same time, work efficiently in a politics of indeterminacy which animated subjects the world over embrace as a means of realizing their manga visions and anime dreams. 60 According to BBC News report (Aug. 6 th , 2007), police chiefs in Bangkok have decided to punish officers who commit minor transgressions by forcing them to wear an eye-catching Hello Kitty armband which is meant to shame the wearer (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/6932801.stm). 160 Chapter Five Hard-boiled Robotica: Giant Robot and the Globalization of Asian Cool In the current chapter, I focus my discussion on one cultural institution that in my view has contributed significantly to the shifting of “the way of seeing” as well as of existing cultural hierarchies: Giant Robot. Giant Robot is just one of possibly numerous components in the institutional system that have collectively enabled a general shift and restructuring within global visual culture, especially in its taste hierarchy. However, by discussing the workings of this hybridized form of pop art institution within the transnational flow of cultural influences, I attempt to respond to John Storey’s call, introduced at the end of Chapter Three, for a more rigorous examination of the institution of art itself rather than the textual qualities of individual art works. More specifically, Storey argues that without interrogating the “ready-made categories” of institutionalized art practice, popular art in a truly democratic sense can never be achieved: “What should be examined, therefore, is not the distinction at the level of textuality but how the distinction is maintained and deployed in institutional strategies of power” (Storey, 106). By examining Giant Robot and its institutional strategies that have been successful in making Japanese/Asian pop art/culture visible in North America, I will argue that the ideological discourse of sincerity (passion rather than ethnic identity, good taste rather than cultural knowledge, subcultural authenticity rather than educated taste) function crucially, propagating a newly hegemonic taste formation. 161 Among its many possible meanings, “Giant Robot” is the name of a bi-monthly magazine published in Los Angeles and distributed to over 40,000 readers worldwide. As is clear in its subtitle, “Asian Culture and Beyond,” articles in the magazine are generally related to certain aspects of Asian or Asian American culture, although these are deeply ambiguous categories to identify. Leaving aside the problem of defining the term “Asian” culturally for an Anglophone audience, the “Beyond” part, which broadly means “anything the editors consider to be cool, interesting and unknown,” makes the job of describing the content of this magazine further complicated. In fact, in order to understand what Giant Robot is, it might be easier if we think about what it is not, or what it chooses not to include among the things we might expect to find in an “Asian culture” magazine. Giant Robot is certainly not typical in the sense that it deliberately avoids dealing with elements of culture that the label “Asian culture” typically evokes in the west—old, traditional, fixed and antiquated. Whether it is related to a popular cultural product or a high-art scene, the culture in Giant Robot is mostly contemporary, youth-oriented and fluid, which explains why it is usually available in the “culture/lifestyle” magazine section at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Giant Robot would hardly be considered large in terms of circulation, compared to the overall size of the current magazine industry and market worldwide: for example, another trend-review magazine, Wired, often neighboring GR in bookstores, claims to have over two million readers. 61 However, there are several noteworthy aspects concerning GR’s 61 http://www.wired.com/wired/ads 162 continuing operation with a steady, if not ever-increasing, readership. First, most periodical publications dedicated to dealing with issues specific to Asian communities have failed or changed into something else in the US in recent decades. Even relatively successful magazines targeted at Asian American audiences including Jade (the first Asian American magazine), A. magazine, and Yolk have ceased publishing largely due to financial reasons after ten to thirteen years of operation. 62 The rarity of commercially viable ethnic periodicals does not necessarily mean a lack of interest or demand for such materials, and needs to be considered in relation to various socio-cultural factors such as the spectacular rise of the Internet as an alternative discursive site over the past few years. 63 Yet, the fact that Giant Robot has passed its tenth year with steady circulation is significant, not just because of its survival but because of its gradual but constant evolution as well. Also, when we consider the beginning of Giant Robot, its readership of over 40,000 seems truly extraordinary. 64 Giant Robot was launched by two Asian American UCLA graduates as a zine based in Southern California, with an edition of 240 in 1994. 65 The first two issues had a “stapled-and-folded photocopied” format without advertisements. 62 William Wan, “Pop Culture Asian American Magazine Falters,” Los Angeles Times (Dec. 8, 2003). 63 It is my understanding that the Internet has been playing a significant role in the fall of ethnic magazines and zines as we know of, while it has opened up possibilities of some other types of communal networking as I elaborate later in the chapter. 64 This figure was provided in an article by Randy Kennedy in The New York Times, written in commemoration of the magazine’s ten year anniversary. 65 This figure is provided by Giant Robot (www.giantrobot.com). 163 The changes GR has been through since then, from the black-and-white handmade zine to a glossy magazine with original art work on the cover might indicate that Giant Robot has found “the right formula” that so many other ethnic publications have struggled to find without success. 66 I will return to this point later in the chapter. However, the most important implications of Giant Robot’s continuing presence in public culture cannot be adequately explained simply in terms of its size or circulation figures. GR seems to have developed a strong fan base, mostly among youth audience in North America over the past decade, who participate passionately in the discourse of the magazine by submitting mail, photos, stories, drawings, and attending parties and events organized by GR. I once was traveling in mid-western Canada and was approached by a teenage boy on a deserted street on one evening, asking “Do you know Giant Robot?” It turns out that he had recognized the Yoshitomo Nara T-shirt I was wearing, which was retailed through the magazine store (with a few other US distributors). What particularly intrigued me in this unexpected encounter is that Giant Robot seems to have cultivated not just a solid fan group but a fan community with a consciously shared cultural affiliation, which one of the editors once called “Giant Robot Culture.” 67 Although this may be a generalization, it is likely that regular readers of Giant Robot also watch Hong Kong movies and anime on imported DVDs and VCDs, listen to punk rock and J-pop, shop regularly at Asian markets—whether Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, 66 William Wan, Ibid. 67 Peter Noh, “Giant Robot Magazine: Asian Pop Culture with an Attitude,” Los Angeles Times (April 9, 1997). 164 Vietnamese, Thai, or Indian—, and have a certain amount of experience with one or more of the Asian communities in their locales—either through their own family background, through friends and spouses, or from experiences of spending time abroad for study and travel. Needless to say, different readers have different relations to the magazine. Readers of Giant Robot may be Asian American youth who seek to be empowered by foregrounding their ethnic heritage and claiming an authority over Asian popular culture to non-Asian friends. Or they might be white American teens in the suburbs, who pursue cultural capital by acquiring an expert knowledge of an exotic culture and distinguishing themselves from other kids as well as from their parents’ generation in a relatively culturally homogenous environment. However, the consistently significant role played by Giant Robot can be recognized in diverse forms of fan reception in constructing a new cultural hierarchy between the mainstream/established/boring vs. the alternative/subcultural/cool, using various cultural symbols drawn from contemporary Asian and Asian American cultures. Further, the fact that GR constantly emphasizes the global dimension of both the magazine’s content and its fan base indicates the magazine functions as a pedagogical institution that creates a cosmopolitan mediascape in which connoisseur consumption of Asian pop culture is encouraged as a valid means of forming and expressing one’s alternative cultural identity. As Henry Jenkins has described, “pop cosmopolitanism” has emerged as one of the distinctive responses of youth consumers to cultural globalization, strongly encouraged by the culture industry and enthusiastically reinforced by grassroots cultural practices. Thus, the construction and spread of a 165 particular type of youth-oriented consumer cosmopolitanism can be better understood through a close examination of Giant Robot as a cultural institution and its role in the globalization of “Asian cool” in this chapter. 68 I. Giant Robot: the magazine and beyond “Giant Robot is our diary, blog, black book, Palm Pilot, and memo pad.” – GR editors Giant Robot, while typically associated with the vintage manga, anime and television series of the same title (Giant Robo), is also the name of a cultural institution based in West Los Angeles, run by Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong, which operates in mainly three interconnected domains— Giant Robot magazine; its website, which includes editors’ blogs, a discussion forum for readers, an online store that carries Asian pop culture merchandise (www.giantrobot.com); and its currently five store/gallery spaces (two in West L.A., one in Silver Lake, one in San Francisco and the latest one in the East Village in Manhattan). Giant Robot also operates a restaurant called “gr/eat” in West L.A. which completes the cycle of Giant Robot Culture, propagating the “Giant Robot way of life.” In the present chapter, I would like to examine GR’s multi-faceted operation through an analysis of the various textual, virtual and physical sites of Giant Robot and consider its role in relation to new cultural hierarchies, youth consumption, cosmopolitan cultural identities and the politics of passion. 68 I use this term, “Asian cool” only loosely as Douglas McGray uses “Japan’s gross national cool” loosely in his discussion of the rise of Japan as a cultural superpower of the New Millennium (McGray, 2002). 166 The first issue of Giant Robot is a sixty four page long, black and white zine with a sleeping Sumo wrestler’s photo on the cover. The issue is packed with short essays and seemingly unrelated paragraphs of personal thoughts on various aspects of Asian and Asian American cultures—ranging from a piece on TV shows about Bruce Lee to an open complaint about a faculty member at the UCLA East Asian Studies Department. While there are superficially random pieces such as the long interview with independent filmmaker Jon Moritsugu about his idiosyncratic behavior, many articles in the first issue, authored mostly by the two editors, allow us to consider the magazine in terms of what Cornel West calls “the new cultural politics of difference”: To put it bluntly, the new cultural politics of difference consists of creative responses to the precise circumstances of our present moment—especially those of marginalized First World agents who shun degraded self-representations, articulating instead their sense of the flow of history in light of the contemporary terrors, anxieties and fears of highly commercialized North Atlantic capitalist cultures… (West, 19) Focusing on issues that have been, at best, ignored by white capitalist mainstream media, the first issue of Giant Robot humorously yet powerfully explores everyday experiences of discrimination, stereotyping and the internalization of racism in Asian American communities—as shown in the articles on the representation of Asians on MTV, interracial relationships, “Twinkie-ism” (a term used of Asian people who aspire to a complete assimilation into the “higher status” Anglo culture), contemporary patterns of yellow fever, and so on. The zine thus can be said to have begun as a means of self- representation by and for the minority youth of Asian heritage in the United States, by 167 consciously foregrounding how their socio-cultural experiences differ from those of the white hegemonic group. At the same time, it is interesting to note that Giant Robot does not try to promote any ostensibly positive qualities of Asian cultures and identities, as other ethnic publications often try to do. Rather, the cultural aspects dealt with in the pages of GR are, while practically impossible to delimit, generally consistent in their novelty value as topics of discussion in a public medium. In other words, whether it is because they are too trivial, too personal or too idiosyncratic for discussion in magazine, the topics covered by GR have hardly been considered elsewhere, at least not to the same degree and with so much attention to detail. For example, the second issue features articles on Japanese vintage toy robots, Hello Kitty role-playing, Asian penis envy, the origin of the model minority myth, double eyelid surgery, Kung Fu cartoons, American sumo wrestlers, Hong Kong cinema soundtracks, and interesting facts about tourism in Hawaii. For another typical example, we can take a look at its better-known, special “Sex” issue (14) 69 which delves into various topics relating to sex and Asia, featuring a lengthy interview with a half- Japanese porn star, a detailed review of ancient Chinese sex literature, horny Asian characters in Hollywood movies, Asian aphrodisiacs, Japanese fetish clubs, love hotels, Asian porn sites on the Internet, a report on a visit to an “oriental massage” parlor in L.A., an interview with a famous cruiser, a story about tracking down a legendary Asian male porn star, and so forth. 69 Hereafter, issue numbers will be referenced in the text by number within parenthesis. 168 While these topics clearly exemplify the truly eclectic nature of the articles in the magazine and the editors’ willingness to “sink low” in order to stay true to their interests, it would be misleading simply to conclude that Giant Robot is committed to promoting the doubly marginalized and thus doubly exotic cultural sphere of Asian popular culture, partly because many elements in the magazine do not fall under either category, and also because the tone of writing is not always promotional. Thus, although some of the articles in earlier issues can be understood in the context of a small ethnic publishing company that expresses the editors’ resentful responses to the consistently biased mainstream media representation of ethnic minorities, later issues of GR are far more ambiguous in terms of its political positioning within the existing cultural hierarchy. Especially since issue 19, the magazine has taken a drastically different direction, turning more “artsy,” featuring cutting-edge Asian(-American) artists in every issue, a change which seems to have led the mainstream The New York Times to comment approvingly that the magazine has “matured… in its tastes.” 70 It was noticeable from the beginning that Giant Robot held an unusually blurred notion of the distinction between fine art and popular culture, judging by the numerous articles on toy makers, cartoon artists, graphic designers and other types of creative people positioned between the two cultural categories. It can still be said, however, that a more 70 “Their magazine has matured somewhat in its tastes over the years. It no longer runs articles quite as silly as one in an early issue about urinating while standing on a hill or a particularly memorable one in which the underground filmmaker Jon Moritsugu explained how he once disposed of 800 pounds of rotting meat…” In the same article, even the editors of Giant Robot have acknowledged, “We were more like ‘Jackass’ than anything else back then.” (Kennedy, B12). 169 consciously artistic turn was taken around the year 2000, when GR started showcasing the work of one artist (or group of artists) per issue, featuring original artworks on the cover as well inside the magazine. Especially in issues 20 and 21, GR introduced the two then-emerging Japanese artists Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami to the US public before other art journals, who became a focus of intense attention in the western art scene shortly thereafter. 71 Through this timely association, GR has not only enjoyed the synergistic benefits from selling the two artists’ pop-art products and thereby reinforcing its own hip image, but has also contributed significantly to making the works of the two artists widely available, in keeping with the pop-artistic objectives of Murakami and Nara themselves. Giant Robot has since come to function, not only as a literary text (bi-monthly magazine), a commercial space (the GR stores and its online store), and a virtual forum for communication amongst readers and editors (via the “lounge” on its website), but also increasingly as an art institution in its own right, both through the magazine and the stores that hold regular art exhibitions, curated mostly by the editors themselves. Among its five stores, GR2 in West L.A., GRSF in San Francisco, and GRNY in New York City have continuously held solo and group art shows, presenting works by mostly young, pop-friendly artists (both Asian and non-Asian): the openings of these shows, often 71 Takashi Murakami, in particular, has become a major presence in the US art world, chosen among Power 100 by ArtReview in Fall 2003. The so-called Superflat Craze initiated partly by GR was reflected interestingly in the controversy of Art in America unmistakably copying GR’s cover design and inside layout by Murakami in Fall 2001. 170 accompanied by musical performances by punk bands, are reported both on the pages of GR and on its online forum. One of the most recent of these exhibitions, “Geisai Artists at Giant Robot” is specifically publicized as having been put together through a collaboration between Eric Nakamura of GR and Takashi Murakami of Kaikai Kiki (an art collective led by Murakami), making Nakamura’s curatorial role in art discourses official. What is truly intriguing then, about the shift in the magazine’s cultural orientation toward a more high-cultural outlook, is that Giant Robot seems to have become even more successful since its artistic turn in presenting its widely varied mix of cultural items as cool trends for eager hipsters to embrace and emulate. In other words, with its unique juxtaposition of magazine articles, art shows, and store goods that constantly fluctuate between the serious and the silly, the artsy and the kitschy, the mature and the immature, Giant Robot can be said to function as a pedagogical institution that teaches hipsters as well as geeks about cosmopolitan cool, skillfully utilizing the varied iconography of Asian-ness as signifiers of ethnic authenticity, communal connectivity and otaku avant- gardism. In the section that follows, I will examine more specific ways in which GR serves this pedagogical role and propagates an ideology of passionate authenticity in the process. II. Giant Robot the zine, transformed Some of the strategies GR employs in order to play a formative role in the construction and global circulation of Asian cool can be recognized in its preoccupation with 171 reviewing and rating. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the Giant Robot’s discourse is the frequency with which it makes lists of all kinds, mandating readers to pay attention to and subscribe. For example, “Martin’s 10” and “Eric’s 10” lists, which usually follow their terse editorial notes in each issue, never explain what the lists are actually of. The editors themselves occasionally point out the randomness of the lists: for example, in “Eric’s 10” in issue 32, Eric Nakamura writes, “4. Not there. People think I’m at the store all the time and expect me to be standing outside waving a flag or something. Actually, I’m seldom there. Why is this in the top 10?” Similarly, lists such as “Eighty-eight Things (every Giant Robot reader should know)” do not provide much information on the criteria used in selecting such seemingly disparate entries as “Vincent Chin” and “Animal Chin” on the same list. The magazine usually includes the editors’ “picks” of recently released CDs, along with reviews of newly released films and DVDs (mostly imported from Asia), anime releases, and books of all kinds. In more recent issues, we also find a new “Favorite Things” section that showcases the latest plush toys, vinyl figures, design goods, fancy products, cool gadgets, funny T-shirts, and so on. Every year, GR announces its annual Giant Robot Awards, which consist of equally random and atypical categories that range from “trendiest Asian illness” (SARS in 2003), “Dumbest Company” (A&F in 2002 for its controversial retro T-shirt line with racist slogans), “Hairy Country” (North Korea always, thanks to leader Kim Jong Il’s unusual hair style), “Fabio Award” (Bae Yong Joon, the star of the Korean Wave in 2004, known for his phenomenal popularity among middle-aged housewives throughout Asia), “Ass Breaker” (the world’s largest skatepark opened in Shanghai in 2005). What is 172 noteworthy about all of these lists and reviews for the current discussion is that by discursively rendering it simply “uncool” to ask or explain about the criteria used to distinguish the meaningful and valuable from that which is not, GR creates an exclusive symbolic territory based on the editors’ (supposedly refined) personal tastes. The entry pass to this discursive territory, as is repeatedly implied in the magazine, can only be gained through being “in the know” or through acquiring cultural capital by diligently reading the magazine rather than studying cultural trends in any other way. 72 Needless to say, it is not new to see such tactics of alternative canon-building used as a means of countering dominant cultural hierarchies and sabotaging the stability of hegemonic culture in general. Mostly notably, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has been known for announcing his own canons regarding different film genres, new categories and other aspects of contemporary culture, in order to challenge the fixed notion of quality in bourgeois culture. At the same time, alternative canon-building is also closely connected to an anti-elitist and populist project of returning culture to the hands of ordinary people previously denied access to the canon-building process due to the specialized nature of cultural analysis, with its formalist rigor and textualist obsessions. Indeed, if everyone comes up with her or his own personal “best of” list according to her or his own idea of quality and cultural value, the normative function of the existing canon 72 I once asked one of the editors Eric Nakamura the reason why GR clearly favors Shonen Knife and Cibo Matto over Pizzicato Five when all three Japanese female pop groups are similarly popular in the US. I asked this question after carefully re-listening to all three groups in case my question originated from some sort of musical ignorance on my part. Eric simply answered that it was for a purely personal reason, related to his experiences of interacting with the groups’ PR people. (From my conversation with Eric Nakamura, Summer 2002 at the GR store in L.A.). 173 can be effectively challenged. This objective of democratizing public culture through the guerilla tactics of underground cultural practices is at the heart of zine production, from which Giant Robot first originated. Influential zinesters Mike Gunderloy and Cari Goldberg Janice provoke readers to participate in the course of new canon building, in the introduction to their book The World of Zines: Over the centuries, as we’ve gone from the hired scribe to the first printing press to the photocopy machine (and now on to the computer networks), the print media have become more democratized. While a few mass media continue to dominate the communication channels, there are plenty of holes between their coverage where the dedicated and passionate small publisher can make a difference. Most zines start out with the realization that one need no longer be merely a passive consumer of media. Everyone can be a producer! That’s the underlying message of the zine world, and the greatest thing about zines… (Gunderloy and Janice, 3) Although it is undeniably ironic to read these words of provocation on the pages of a book published by one of the “mainstream” publishing power houses, Penguin Books, the idea of conjuring up dormant creativity in ordinary readers/consumers in order to democratize the public media clearly represents a key political motivation behind zine production. Giant Robot can be considered a zine, at least in its initial phase, because of its format (handmade with lots of the editors’ own drawings, and photocopied, folded and stapled together on the family dining table of one of the editors) and its initial circulation (240 copies only). It is somewhat uncertain whether the most purist anti-capitalist definition 174 of a zine can be applied to GR, due to the fact that GR has been sold for money, even the handmade first issues (for $4). Yet, more importantly, it can be argued that GR is produced by a “dedicated and passionate small publisher(s)” who aim to “make a difference” by targeting the “holes between coverage by [a few dominant mass media]” (Gunderloy and Janice, 3). In fact, even in its latest, updated, and glossy format, Giant Robot displays a number of traces of its earlier days as an ethnic zine, which help us to understand some of the particularities of this cultural institution that function crucially in mediating transnational flow of cultural influences between North America and (East) Asia. In his extensive discussion of zines as an alternative cultural practice, Stephen Duncombe describes major concerns commonly found in zines as follows: Although the world of zines operates on the margins of society, its concerns are common to all: how to count as an individual, how to build a supportive community, how to have a meaningful life, how to create something that is yours. (Duncombe, 15) What separate zinesters from the rest of the world is, then, mainly their self-identity as outsiders in relation to the mainstream culture and their commitment to voicing their experiences of social marginalization through the networks of alternative meaning construction. Giant Robot, I would argue, has actively engaged with all of the concerns of individual authenticity, the desire for communal connectivity, and the creative aspiration for meaning production, which partly explain the magazine’s commercial success as well as, to a lesser degree, its critical achievement. 175 III. “The personal is political” in an infinitely personal way As I discussed above, the way in which Giant Robot produces an alternative canon can be understood as a discursive process in which personal expression takes on political meaning. By repeatedly emphasizing the excessively minor details of personal likes and dislikes in public forums, Giant Robot potentially contributes to disrupting a dominant taste hierarchy that continuously reproduces social distinction for the elite class. In addition to whimsically personal ratings and reviews, there are at least two other major tactics GR uses in order to produce socially significant meanings, strategically drawn from the most intimately personal of media forms: the interview format; and the selection of deliberately trivial subjects for articles. Other than reviews and lists of various things mentioned earlier, most of the articles in Giant Robot magazine are written in an interview format. While interviewees are carefully varied, including Asian or Asian- American actors, filmmakers, musicians, artists, toy designers, animators, skaters, food vendors, criminals, etc., the interviews are consistently similar, with rigorous discussions of personal taste and lifestyle, but with little reference to interviewees’ ethnic identities. Even when GR interviews someone precisely because of her or his unusual achievement as an Asian(-American)—such as Peggy Oki, the artist, surfer, skater, and member of the Z-Boys skateboard gang (issue 26) or Tura Santana, the B-movie actress best-known for her role in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (issue 16)—the ethnic identities of both interviewers and interviewees functions mainly as a structuring absence in the interviews and is hardly commented upon. 176 As a rhetorical form, the interview can be understood as a means of breaking down hierarchical relations between interviewers and interviewees, cultural producers and consumers, artists and audience, stars and fans, to the extent that the conversation is collaboratively produced, potentially reducing the distance between the speaking agents. The immediacy and spontaneity of communication, the rawness of ideas discussed, and the authenticity of the speaking subjects can also be simultaneously accentuated in interviews. Stephen Duncombe suggests that interviews are used in zines as a way of ensuring “some sort of personal connection between the zinester and ‘the fact,’” i.e. making the political personal: for “introduced as a discussion between two people, [a zine written in the form of an interview] puts a human face on what are often presented as abstract social forces and political actors” (Duncombe, 29). On the other hand, I would argue, interviews can also function as a double-edged sword precisely because of the impression they create that they constitute a more democratic form of communication. That is, interviews can divert readers’ attention away from the mediating role and editorial authority of the interviewing subject, cultivating a myth of personality of the freely speaking subject as a result. This ambivalent working of the interview format observable in Giant Robot can be connected to the inherent contradictions in the politics of passion which I will return to later in this chapter. Another tactic Giant Robot often employs in order to make personal discourses politically meaningful is by delving into subjects disregarded by the mainstream media, not because of their politically transgressive content, but because of their banality and triviality within consumer culture. For example, as a magazine on “Asian pop culture and beyond,” GR 177 often runs articles on undeniably “silly” topics, such as brands of ramen, tinned Korean silkworms, Asian snack foods, Asian cold drinks, Asian men’s hair style, Asian armpit odor, Asian lactose intolerance, etc.. Considering that typical ethnic publications share a common tendency to emphasize supposedly more ennobling aspects of the ethnic culture, promoting traditional and high cultural texts and practices over those of popular or commercial cultures, GR’s selection of deliberately trivial topics from everyday cultural experience is understandable as the editors’ rebellious reaction both to white bourgeois culture and dominant ethnic cultural representations of their parents’ generation. It can also be argued that by initiating serious discussion on such minor topics, GR encourages readers to challenge the legitimacy of these cultural hierarchies—questioning who decides what is significant and what is not, on what grounds such value judgments are made, and through what institutional processes such values are implemented. At the same time, the self-conscious triviality of the topics in GR’s articles can be interpreted as a typical zinester tactic, used in order to be more original, singular, and idiosyncratic, as Duncombe argues: “… [P]art of this urge to create nonsense is the zine writer’s desire to invent something “new” in the age where everything seems to have been done, bought up, and sold out already. ‘Been there, done that,’ as the copy to a popular soda advertisement runs.” (Duncombe, 150) In a way, GR’s re-discovery of canned coffee drinks, man purses, Japanese toilets, Thai Scrabble, etc. as legitimate objects of discussion can be viewed as acts of symbolic repurposing (as well as ethnic 178 bonding), 73 the core strategy at the heart of DIY aesthetics that has inspired the zine movement itself. In other words, if DIY aesthetics lies in the cultural politics of re- appropriating given objects and technologies in consumer culture in order to articulate new meanings, GR’s coverage of subjects ignored by white capitalist media can certainly be considered as a part of a more open and democratic DIY cultural discourse through which GR seeks to adopt an almost pedagogical role in relation to its readers. On the other hand, however, the infinite triviality of such discussions needs to be examined with a certain amount of care, because it runs the risk of depoliticizing a potentially powerful cultural discourse in favor of discursively favored personal experiences (as in the case of the “Filipino superstitions” discussion in issue 27). In addition to the individual authenticity GR attempts to embody through the zine-like discursive strategies discussed so far, another major legacy from GR’s origins as a small ethnic zine can be found in its endeavor to provide a sense of communal connectivity to its readers. The most frequently used method to achieve such a vision is to represent community members themselves within the cultural text, regardless of how accurate this representation might be. In common with standard zine practice, every issue of Giant Robot magazine has a “Letters” section (previously known as “Robotmail”), which conveys readers’ diverse yet similar responses, followed by the editors’ own comments. For example, a reader named Eri Watari asks, “When is GR going political? I worked for 73 For further discussion of ethnic bonding over trivial yet commonly shared topics within an ethnic community, see Lisa Nakamura’s article on the discourse around “101 Ways to Tell if You’re Japanese American” in cyber space (Nakamura, 2002). 179 the Kerry camp and Congressman Honda (San Jose, CA)… Come to D.C.!” (issue 39) The message is followed by a typically calm and ironic one-line reply: “Our politics are subliminal.” While the letter section has gradually shrunk, compared with earlier issues, its function of community building seems to have been increasingly displaced onto a section of GR’s online site, appropriately called “Robot Lounge” and moderated by Eric Nakamura. The lounge has several forums in which visitors, or “robots,” discuss diverse issues relating to music, art, food, shopping, and other things in life, with frequently visiting robots being granted the status of “senior robot.” A fairly typical on-line forum otherwise, the Robot Lounge functions effectively to maintain a sense of belonging and unity within an otherwise eclectic community. For example, around June 2002 when one of the regular visitors to the virtual lounge was killed in Korea, members of the Giant Robot community responded, readers and editors alike, both virtually and in reality, by mourning “the death of a (senior) robot,” with a short article of the same title included under “Robotmail” in the print magazine. In thus conferring on its readers a communal identity that evokes a sense of belonging and affiliated connectivity, Giant Robot fulfills its imperative of building a supportive community of networked individuals. However, the most important legacy from GR’s origin as an ethnic zine involves two other series of related concerns shared amongst zinesters mentioned earlier: “How to have a meaningful life” and “How to create something that is yours.” In the following section, I will discuss how the way in which GR addresses these questions through what I 180 call “the politics of passion,” which plays a key role in relation to GR’s pedagogical function and curatorial mediation in the global circulation of the Asian cool. IV. The politics of passion One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!” I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them. (Haruki Murakami, 2007) Once eulogized by GR as “the best thing to happen to the novel since Gabriel Garcia Marquez” (issue 22), Haruki Murakami is very much attuned to the “GR way of life”— the social identity of a misfit, a cosmopolitan cultural sensibility, the political positioning as a subliminal observer, and overall an atomized individual connected to the world only through creative projects that validate his existential meaning. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say the reverse—that the “robots” of the GR community are attuned to the Murakami (Haruki)’s way of life, given his resonance with the global youth generation. Either way, Murakami’s story featured in The New York Times for the promotion of his latest novel, After Dark, vividly represents what I call the politics of passion. In a cultural climate where the “been there, done that” mentality is unprecedentedly pervasive, and at a time when the homogenizing forces of global capitalism increasing their control of the cultural sphere, GR seems to affirm that the 181 creative desire to express one’s singularity, and the sincerity of that desire, are the only answers to every individual’s questions regarding both how to live meaningfully and how to create. Or to borrow Monk’s words, even if every humanly imaginable meaning has been created already, if one means it enough, a new meaning can still be created. In this context, creative work, whether musical, artistic, literary, athletic, culinary, photographic, filmic, etc., is far from the “pseudo-activity” which Adorno theorizes as the misguided spontaneity of a politically disempowered mass in capitalist civil society (Adorno, 194). On the contrary, in an intensely capitalist system, creative work is the only way for an individual to overcome the otherwise total alienation from one’s own labor, one’s own creation, and even one’s own consumption (Duncombe, 107). Thus, the passion for creativity, logically equated with the passion for life, single-handedly answers the recurring questions of everyday media consumers and zinesters at heart. This politics of passion—the cult of creativity, the ideology of sincerity, and the myth of individual authenticity—clearly defines the successful performance of Giant Robot as a pedagogical institution and curatorial mediator in the trans/local flow of Asian pop/art influences. The editors themselves make the point most clearly in the magazine’s ten year anniversary issue, whose “[Top 10] Secrets of Giant Robot” list begins with “Do what you believe in,” and ends with “Have fun”: “If you don’t like what you’re doing, stop and find something else” (issue 33). While I have discussed so far Giant Robot as a hybridized institution of Asian-American pop culture/pop art, which has gradually evolved from a small ethnic zine, it is pointless 182 in my view to speculate whether or not GR’s deviation from its initial format means that it has “sold out,” since the strategically hybridized structure of its current operation pre- emptively invalidates such a question. (The latter was already selected as one of the “Questionable Comments” about GR, by the editors). A more useful question to think about at this juncture would be how Asian-ness is used in this fluctuating discursive formation called “Giant Robot.” The GR print magazine still features articles addressing specifically Asian American experiences such as the one on Asian-American film festivals (issue 43) and the short piece on Asian-American lunch boxes (issue 38), although these articles are increasingly infrequent, occasionally interspersed between interviews with up-and-coming artists, both Asian and non-Asian. On the other hand, GR in its updated format has undoubtedly made a substantial contribution both as a pop-art institution and a pop-cultural product retailer: in launching the career of several Asian artists in North America (for example, the creators of the “Uglydolls” character products publicly recognize GR’s role in enabling their design team to start producing), in developing certain pop art trends into a popular craze (for example, its almost exclusive introduction of most of the Superflat artists and Japanese Pop artists from 2000 onwards) and most importantly, in promoting the politics of passion and the GR way of life to cosmopolitan hipsters in the cultures of globalization. In these operations, Asian-ness or ethnic identity of any sort is never a fixed category that needs to be promoted and preserved. As cosplayers change their costumes to perform different characters, different dimensions of “Asian” identities become mobilized in order to evoke a sense of authenticity and passion, thus forming the iconography of Asian cool. In other words, by strategically utilizing Asian-ness as an inherently evasive entity that is socially 183 constructed and historically conditioned, Giant Robot achieves both an institutional power that helps revise the existing taste hierarchy and the potential for promoting an alternative cultural politics of difference. Cornel West argues, “The most desirable option for people of color who promote the new cultural politics of difference is to be a critical organic catalyst. By this I mean a person who stays attuned to the best of what the mainstream has to offer—its paradigms, viewpoints and methods—yet maintains a grounding in affirming and enabling subcultures of criticism.” It remains to be seen how Giant Robot, having established a hybridized community (“half-Asian, half-other”) for alternative meaning production, with members who subscribe to a subcultural lifestyle based on the politics of passion, will manage to turn its institutional power in a more critically constructive direction in the ever intensifying global circulation of cultural meanings. 184 Chapter Six Disrobing the National Body: The Transnationalization of the Recent South Korean “History Film” Genre I. The Question Now At a conference commemorating the 25 th anniversary of the first degree program in Cultural Studies at the University of East London in July 2007, Stuart Hall presented a poignant question that is fundamental, in his view, to the amorphous discipline we call Cultural Studies: “What does this [the object of study, or the argument developed through the study of the object] have to do with everything else?” Recognizing the unease at “not being able to close the circle” [through scholarship], Hall argued, the question should “come back to haunt us.” 74 In the previous chapters, I have discussed several aspects of the ways in which one kind of global media product, anime, is manufactured, circulated, received and appropriated in different local, historical junctures, situated variously within the process of globalization. Even though my discussion itself by no means aspires to “closing the circle,” leaving many questions still in need of further interrogation, I am now indeed haunted, fascinated, and animated by Hall’s question: what does my discussion of anime in the context of cultural globalization have to do with everything else? How do I make a connection between the seemingly isolated encounters between the globally mobile texts of anime and any other lived experiences of the cultures of globalization? How do I even begin to think about the larger question of restructuring human subjectivity in globalization that Fredric Jameson has mystically glossed over? In place of an answer and conclusion, I 74 Stuart Hall, Plenary Talk at Cultural Studies Now, an international conference, July 20, 2007, University of East London. 185 turn to one other fragmentary experience and partial view of cultural transformation concurrent with many other global shifts: the restructuring of national film culture in South Korea since the mid-1990s. II. De-centering the Critical Discourse on National Cinema As has been gradually recognized, globalization is a contradictory process whose impact cannot be grasped in simple or totalizing terms. The multidimensionality of the process needs to be emphasized in any discussion of globalization, especially when it concerns the complicated issue of culture, as in the discussion of changing media environments in globalization. When it comes to cinema, the task becomes still more daunting, to the extent that the ever-increasing dominance of Hollywood movies in international film markets and cultures discourages any kind of positive outlook, other than the pessimistic prediction of an even more complete control of world film circuits by a handful of media conglomerates, mostly based in Hollywood. Although this familiar prediction has a certain amount of validity, analyzing cinema and globalization solely in terms of Hollywood hegemony vs. local cinemas’ resistance is necessarily limiting and reductive. In this chapter, I would like to explore possible ways in which we can begin de-centering filmic discourses moving beyond the cyclical concerns of cultural imperialism and the core-periphery model, by reflecting upon the implications of a transformation that has taken place in South Korean national cinema and film culture within the past few years. 186 III. Symptoms of Change Ever since domestic film production began—arguably around 1919 with Righteous Revenge (Kim Tosan) 75 —films have been made continuously in South Korea, although sometimes only nominally, as was the case during the Korean War period (1950-1953). What is new in this century-old national cinema (if we count from the introduction of the medium around 1903) however, is the currently extraordinary popularity of recent Korean films, both in domestic and international markets, which first became noticeable with the commercial breakthrough of Shiri in 1998 and a series of multi-million dollar blockbuster hits released thereafter. Looking at statistical information from the five years between 1997 and 2002, which attests to the unusually successful box-office performance of local productions, we can clearly recognize the scale of this “phenomenon” of Korean cinema around the new millennium. (See Appendix I: Statistics). There are two specific points regarding these statistics that should be emphasized for the current discussion. First, in the context of Korean film history, the interest some recent Korean films have succeeded in drawing from the local audience can be read as symptomatic of a larger transformation within the national cinema and culture. Although there existed a period of “Golden Age” in Korean cinema for about a decade in the postwar era, the popularity enjoyed by certain Korean films in the late 1990s and 75 On the debate about the starting-point of Korean national cinema, see Hoh Hyun-chan’s chronicle in the first chapter of his book, 100 Years of Korean Cinema. 187 early 2000s is almost unprecedented because Korean cinema has suffered both qualitatively and quantitatively since its initial golden age through competition with television and brutal government censorship under a series of military regimes, with very few exceptional hits such as Sopyonje (1993) and Two Cops (1993). It is also noteworthy that the dramatic rise of Korean cinema from its seemingly perpetual state of decline since the late 1960s to being a commercially viable popular-cultural enterprise has taken place at a time of intense global dominance by Hollywood movies in most domestic film markets worldwide. For just one example, we need only consider the 46% market share for domestic films in South Korea in 2001, which is the third largest in the world after the U.S. itself and France. Another aspect we need to think about in terms of the commercial viability of Korean cinema both in domestic and overseas markets is related to foreign interests in purchasing re-make rights for certain recent Korean films. If we look at the three films whose re-make rights were sold to Hollywood studios in 2001—My Wife the Gangster (purchased by Miramax for $950,000); My Sassy Girl (sold to Dreamworks); and Hi Dharma (to MGM)—it becomes clear that this new distribution channel (if we can call it such) is especially friendly toward conventional genre “flicks” (gangster movies and romantic comedy) largely disregarded by critics. This is a significant development for those films that are less suitable for art house distribution or the international festival circuit, which have functioned as one of the few stable distribution channels and exhibition venues for Korean films abroad to date. More importantly for the current discussion, we can understand that the sale of genre films to Hollywood (re-)producers is indicative of a 188 balanced growth of Korean cinema in both the industrial and independent spheres of production, in both commercial and artistic aspects, and in both domestic and international film circuits. However one interprets this series of recent developments, it can be reasonably agreed that there has taken place a general and substantial transformation in Korean national cinema. IV. Multiple Readings of the Shift within Korean Cinema There are several interconnected ways of understanding the transformation of Korean cinema described above. First, when we examine the reconfiguration of the political context throughout the 1990s in South Korea, the shift of public attention away from the political toward the cultural sphere can be understood as part of an organic process involving the long overdue transformation of Korean society. The transfer of political power from the repressive military government in the 1980s to the first civilian government of Kim Yong-Sam in 1993, and subsequently to the more democratic government of Kim Dae-Jung in 1998, can be considered as significant stages in this process, although the fact that these changes in political power were achieved as a result of the people’s movement (minjung movement) during the same decade needs to be emphasized. The consequent modifications in the infrastructure of Korean cinema have apparently contributed to the current boom in the film industry: in the first place, the revision of the notorious censorship code can be said to be a key factor in the current resurgence in film production. Korean cinema had been practically suffocating since the amendment of the Motion Picture Law in 1973 by the then-new dictatorial government under General Park, which insisted on a two-way censorship system of theatrical films 189 (with pre- and post-production review stages during which censors could freely scissor the materials under review). 76 Thus, it is not hard to imagine how the abolition of the old censorship law and the introduction of a more flexible ratings system in 1999 contributed to bringing about a series of potentially positive changes, including a diversification of subject matter in film texts, the influx of new talent into the film industry, increasing investment in film production by companies outside the film industry in Chungmuro (especially by major corporations such as Samsung, Daewoo and LG), a consequent increase in average production costs, and above all, a noticeable growth in the size of the theater audience. In addition, the relatively progressive policies on media of the two governments since the late 1990s—notably the gradual lifting of the ban on Japanese popular cultural imports from 1998, and the maintaining of the screen quota system in spite of increasing pressure from the US government—have worked to strengthen not just the domestic film industry but also domestic film culture more generally. On the other hand, considering that the shift in political power was induced by the persistent requests voiced by civilian social movements in the 1980s, the recent transformation in Korean cinema can also be read as a result of a transfer of public interests and critical energies from the political to the cultural sphere after the achievement of 76 For a more extensive description of the censorship code, see Kyoung-Hyun Kim, “Korean Cinema and Im Kwon-Taek: an Overview.” 190 democratization, coupled with a degree of disillusionment at overtly political projects. 77 Both the revision of the censorship law and the preservation of the screen quota system to date can be said to have been largely initiated by civilian organizations and activist groups in alliance with filmmakers. The exponential growth in audience size for domestically produced films can also be seen as symptomatic of a more general increase in people’s interests in cultural consumption and practices. The consolidation of national film culture as a major site of meaning production for ordinary Koreans is also prominently caused by the concentration of collective interest in the cultural sphere in South Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, evidenced by a series of major changes in public culture, including the launch of several film journals such as Cine 21 and Kino (both in 1995); the building of a national film school (KNUA in 1995) and archive; the formation of alternative exhibition venues, such as Pusan International Film Festival (founded in 1996) and the Puchon International Fantasy Film Festival (in 1997); improvements to public viewing facilities in general, signaled by the arrival of first multiplex (CGV Kangbyon in 1998); and the advent of cable television (since 1995), which includes a number of movie channels. 77 Michael Robinson interestingly argues that Im Kwon-Taek’s 1992 breakthrough hit Sopyonje represents the transitional moment, “both an end and a beginning within the field of Korean cinema,” situated between the culminating postwar angst and the commercial trend of the 1990s: “… [T]his marks a lifting away of the ponderous weight of social and political activism within the culture industry of Korea, a liberation, if you like, from the imperatives of the master narratives of nation, anti-Communism, and lament over modernisation’s assault upon traditional Korean culture and memory” (Robinson, 26-27). 191 V. Conflicting Views on the Recent Tendency in Korean Cinema Interestingly enough, in spite of the mostly celebratory view of the recent revitalization of the Korean film industry from the outside, the consistent tone of responses from inside the Korean critical circle can best be summarized as one of doubt and discontent. In a recent article titled “Full Service Cinema: The South Korean Cinema Success Story (So Far),” Chris Berry begins his discussion by saying “I have a need to do this [tracing South Korean cinema’s comeback story] because I find that so many of my South Korean friends and colleagues are reluctant to admit this... There may be worries about the future and there maybe ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ about the present state of the South Korean film industry. But we should start out by acknowledging its success” (Berry, 2003). Undeniably, “ifs” and “buts” are frequently used in critical discourses and film articles in South Korea, such as one article titled “Concerns in the Age of Over 40% Domestic Market Share of Korean Cinema.” 78 Lee Yeon-Ho, the former editor of the leading film journal of the late 1990s Kino (now discontinued) maps out clearly the reasons for such concerns: Understanding the situation of Korean cinema today is not [an] easy task. Outsiders may feel optimistic, but those within the film world are critical. Statistics from abroad may lead to a feeling of optimism quite at variance with the reality on the ground. The industry’s structure is deteriorating but funds for production have grown at an exponential rate; the number of films made annually has gone down but there are more and more new directors on the scene. Yet none can be assured of making a second film. 79 78 Cine 21, No. 322 79 Lee, “Mapping the Korean Film Industry” (www.cinekorea.com) 192 Other critics do not remain so calm in expressing their frustration over the uneven development of recent Korean cinema, rigorously questioning if the “Korean cinema” they have worked so hard to protect is merely the gangster movie (referring here to the commercial success of gangster films such as Friends and Kick the Moon). 80 One concern commonly presented in these critical views is that the overall transformation of the contemporary Korean film industry and film culture is deeply related to the dreaded commercialization of national cinema, through the production of formulaic genre movies such as action films and romantic comedies in a copy of the Hollywood model. Such a suggestion is not groundless, to the extent that the successful box-office performance of certain Korean films of the late 1990s has much to do with the involvement of major business corporations (chae-bol) such as Samsung, Daewoo, and LG. Since it is evident that corporations invest in film production and distribution because of their commercial interest, it is understandable that critics fear that such rampant investment may lead the industry to produce increasing numbers of capital- driven, profit-oriented, generic movies. While it is possible to read the involvement of major corporations and venture capital in film production in a positive way, as in Darcy Paquet’s optimistic discussion of the growth of the Korean film industry since 1992 (Paquet, 2005), 81 the skepticism of domestic critics about it is supported by the unfortunate statistic that while the average production cost of Korean films has been rising 80 Joo Chang-Kyu, “The Power of Korean Cinema: Melodramatic Imagination and Historical Pathos.” 81 Paquet itemizes the impact of chaebols’ involvement in the South Korean film industry in multiple aspects: a rise in budgets, a new emphasis on accounting, the nurturing of a local star system, the pushing of Korean cinema towards the mainstream, and most importantly, investment in local infrastructure (within the film culture). 193 exponentially and drawing ever-increasing audiences to theaters (a 30% increase in audience size in 2001), most smaller independent productions have been ignored by the audience mainly because of having little or no (limited) distribution and promotion. For instance, despite the commercial success of several “Korean blockbusters” 82 in 2001, critically acclaimed low-budget films such as Butterfly, Take Care of My Cat, and Waikiki Brothers in each case ended their theatrical run just one week after their initial release. The reason I have thus far sketched out the at times concerned responses to the shifts within Korea cinema of the late 1990s and early 2000s is to explore possible ways of thinking differently about that shift, and moving beyond the discursive split between naïve celebration (especially outside Korea) on the one hand, and excessive pessimism (within Korea) on the other. While recognizing the validity of the concerns of Korean critics about the rampant commericalization of Korean cinema, it is still necessary, in my view, to develop some different perspectives on the recent changes in Korean cinema, because the current discourse can be, in some cases, ineffectively prescriptive (for example, why is the gangster movie a “deviation” from the Korean national cinema, as in the earlier comment?) or exaggeratedly mournful (for example, the familiar fetishization of the “death of cinema”). Thus, instead of trying to read the current phase of South Korean cinema solely in terms of success or deterioration, or even contamination, I propose to 82 The term “Korean blockbuster” is a subject of much debate. For further discussion, see Berry. 194 approach the situation more productively and positively by focusing on the process of what I call the “disrobing of the national body” in recent Korean cinema. VI. The Genre of Costume Drama and South Korean Cinema It can be argued that South Korean national cinema has always been engaged, in one way or another, in the project of building a nation discursively by providing a unified vision of the nation and promoting the lineage of cultural inheritance from the historical past. Having begun domestic production in 1919 under the Japanese colonial rule, Korean cinema at first functioned as a major vehicle for promoting an independent spirit and a national consciousness in people’s minds, as we can speculate from some of the remaining literature from this period on popular films such as Arirang (1926). In the postwar era, South Korean cinema took on a somewhat different mission of narrativizing the nation, focusing on the authenticity of the national culture in competition with North Korean cinema. It is thus not coincidental that the interest of filmmakers in dealing with specifically “Korean” subject matter began to materialize in the genre of period/costume drama such as Chunhyang-jun (1955) in this postwar period of confusion over national identity and cultural authenticity. From 1961 onward, under the long and oppressive dictatorial rule of three (or arguably four) different military regimes, South Korean cinema had to be always conscious of the “national” dimension of productions under the tight control of a government deeply concerned with issues of legitimacy and authority. It is no wonder in this context that the format of period drama, called sah-geuk (“history drama”), has emerged as one of the most 195 dominant genres, since period drama provides a strong sense of national unity by making symbolic connections to a historical past, reassuring government censors, providing an impression of “quality” (in case of literary adaptation) and distracting the audience from the problematic present. Ranging from literary adaptation to softcore porn, numerous period films/costume dramas, such as Uh-woo-dong (1985) and Pyon-kang-soe (1986), functioned at the height of the dictatorial regime as a significant means through which the popular imagination came to terms with its troubled nationhood by replacing the uncomfortable present with the familiar pre-modem historical setting. It is also noteworthy that period films are the cultural texts which were most actively promoted abroad by illegitimate governments as representative of Korean national culture, conveying a sense of authenticity and national unity. The fact that the author of Korean national cinema, Im Kwon-Taek, won a Director’s Award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival with his period drama about a painter during the Chosun Dynasty is accordingly meaningful in that it symbolically signifies the international endorsement not just of Korean national cinema but also Korean nationhood itself. In his article on Im Kwon-Taek’s films, David James (2002) emphasizes the parallel between (pre-modern) natural scenery and the female body, as “two privileged symbols on which the historical trauma of the nation is reenacted,” both in traditional art forms and contemporary media, including cinema. To these I would add a third symbol, that of costume, which plays an equally central role in narrativizing the nation. The elaborate costume of the pre-modern period is, indeed, often deployed in the genre of “history drama” as a central visual motif evoking a sense of cultural heritage and the rich tradition 196 of the nation. Also, in relation to the female body, dressing and undressing always functions as a significant narrative as well as visual trope which can, at the same time, allude to a certain historical reference. In the Korean context in particular, the aesthetic continuity between the gentle line of natural scenery (especially that of low mountains and hills), the elegant line of traditional Korean dress (hanbok), and the subtle line of the Korean female body, has been explored—often juxtaposed together—in order to construct a sense of the unity and harmony of pre-modern national culture. Similarly, the common destiny of the three motifs in the process of modernization and colonialism—the interruption of lines in nature with modern industrial development, the humiliation of women in the trauma of modern history, and the replacement of the hanbok with supposedly more efficient western-style dress—have all been frequently dealt with. The centrality of the female body at the juncture between the national narration and cultural artifacts, including costume, is clearly not a new development in Korean cinema. For instance, in her discussion of Chinese Fifth Generation films and female representation in these, Rey Chow has convincingly shown a discursive process at work in the supposedly more progressive cinema, in which “‘woman’ is in a way that parallels the ambivalence and co-temporal makeup of the visual image, both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (Chow, 1995: 44). In addition, needless to say, costume drama is not a genre unique to Korean cinema but a longstanding format with various incarnations in different national cinemas around the world. In the British context, for example, the concept of “heritage cinema”—a sub- category of costume drama or period drama developed in the 1980s—has been a subject of heated debate since the Thatcherite “heritage industry” commodified a certain type of 197 historical narrative, as exemplified in the Merchant-Ivory films of the period. Most notably, Andrew Higson has critiqued heritage films of the 1980s and 1990s, protesting that “images of Britain and Britishness… became commodities for consumption in the international marketplace” (Higson, 1993: 91). While Higson’s critique was mainly concerned with the way in which the genre functioned conservatively, by displaying the national past “as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques,” it also prompted disapproving responses from other critics, who problematized Higson’s class-based reading of the genre as a rigidly leftist dismissal which ignored the diverse viewing pleasures which the period genre can provide, as in the following critique by Pam Cook: For Higson, the nostalgic gaze at a visually splendid reconstruction of conservative, pastoral Englishness gets in the way of what he sees as a more authentic view of Britain’s past: the loss of empire, the decline of British liberalism, the crumbling of national inheritance. This narrative of loss is offset and undermined by images of visual plenitude which stress stability rather than change… Nevertheless, his analysis manifests many of the symptoms evident in critical approaches to the historical film: a distrust of decoration and display, which is perceived as obfuscating a more genuinely authentic approach to history; a fear of being “swallowed up” by nostalgia and a concomitant desire for critical distance and irony; a view of history as necessarily offering lessons for the present; and a sense that history should somehow remain uncontaminated by commodification. (Cook, 1996: 69). 83 Claire Monk, in her continuing discussion of heritage and post-heritage film criticism, suggests that we understand the debate around the category of heritage cinema as a historically specific, critical construct that has developed within the particular socio- cultural environment of the Thatcherite period (Monk, 2002). 83 For Higson’s response to Cook and his subsequent revision of the concept of heritage cinema, see English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. 198 There are a number of aspects in this British context that are reminiscent of the South Korean situation of the past two decades: the development of the “heritage industry” initiated by the conservative government in the 1980s (although in South Korea, such projects could be argued to have begun even earlier with a series of conservative government cultural policies such as Intangible Cultural Assets, dating from as long ago as 1961); the consequent dominance of film texts dealing in which historical issues and national narratives are subordinated to the fetishistic display of a museumized vision of the past; and the emphatic connections made between particular styles of dress, national identity, and marginalized female bodies. However, the undeniable differences between the two national contexts should also be recognized: whereas British period film texts are primarily concerned with narrativizing the traumatic experience of the loss of Britain’s imperial power, Korean costume dramas are mainly preoccupied with continually building and rebuilding a sense of national solidarity, while dealing more passively with the painful legacies of colonialism and modernization. VII. The Meaning of “Disrobing” Returning to my earlier discussion of how to read the general transformation in South Korean cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s, we can now consider the changing status of costume drama in the context of this shift. Along with the relaxation of government censorship, the consequent diversification of film texts both in terms of subject matter and stylistic form, and most importantly, the growth of national film culture in general, the genre of costume drama seems to have quickly lost its privileged status as a major vehicle 199 for national narration, and to have evolved into a substantially different formation. Costume dramas produced in the early 2000s show the common characteristics of being more knowingly excessive in their visual style and openly arbitrary in their narration, as a number of examples show, including Musa (a.k.a. The Warrior, 2001), Untold Scandal 2003), and The King and the Clown (wang-ui namja, a.k.a. King’s Man, 2005). Interestingly, although set in specific time periods in the Korean historical past (Musa in 1375; Untold Scandal in the 18 th century; and The King and the Clown in the late 15 th century- early 16 th century), all three films can be characterized by their a-historical quality, in the sense that in each the historical setting has only incidental importance, while intra-personal issues (e.g. the psychological drama revolving around various kinds of sexual desire in the context of the imagined repression of pre-modern times, reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of the repressive hypothesis of the Victorian Period) and interpersonal relationships (such as undeclared romantic feelings between the main characters) are far more strongly emphasized than the historical framework itself. This tendency toward personalization in the contemporary “history drama” is in fact closely related to the recent rejuvenation of Korean cinema in general, in that the genre has helped the national cinema acquire, albeit superficially, a certain amount of confidence in its self-definition as a more flexibly national cinema, as well as aiding in its resistance of Hollywood’s domination through its commercial competitiveness and stylistic sophistication. In other words, I would argue that the liberation from the decade-old obsession with the project of narrativizing the nation, and the move toward culturally non-specific yet commercially viably genre production have helped Korean national 200 cinema to emerge as an exceptional case of balanced success, better equipped for a transnational flow, in contemporary global film culture. Homi Bhabha once remarked that “despite the certainty with which historians speak of the ‘origins’ of nation as a sign of the ‘modernity’ of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality” (Bhabha, 1990:1). In a way, contemporary historical epics in South Korea can be said to be addressing the transitional social reality through cultural temporality, with more sensitivity and openness than ever before. For example, Musa the Warrior, a lavish co-production between China and South Korea, tells the story of a doomed romance between a Korean male slave and an exiled Chinese princess, set in the vaguely ancient landscape of the borderland between the two countries in the 14 th century; Untold Scandal transposes Laclos’ French letter-novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) into the 18 th -century hyper-Confucian social setting of the Chosun Dynasty, intriguing viewers with its imaginative mismatch between the original text’s story of sexual libertinage and the relocation of its story into a context of the sexual repression. The King and the Clown, on the other hand, focuses on the intensely romantic relation between two male clowns who happen to perform for and become involved with Yeonsan, the morally fallen and ultimately dethroned king of the late 15 th century. While each of these films is loosely structured around historically-based events, collectively they show a newer type of “history drama” characterized by its prioritization of the lives of ordinary individuals over those of heroic or royal characters, its emphasis on visual symbols such as period costume and architectural set design, and its contemporary feel, most significantly embodied through the use of contemporary colloquial language (such 201 as referring to the king as “King” rather than “royal highness” in The King and the Clown). The narration of nation in these films thus becomes flexible and strategic, rather than fixed and essentialist. In an analysis of recent trends in South Korean period television dramas, the sociologist Kim Yeong-Soon distinguishes a new type of history drama from the “authentic” historical epic of the past, calling the newer kind “fusion history drama.” 84 A number of textual characteristics define this recent genre formation, such as an emphasis on everyday life, genre hybridity, unusual subject matter, the use of contemporary colloquial language, and of overtly anachronistic or de-contextualized music (for example, the medieval European music in Untold Scandal). Yet the most significant distinction of fusion period drama, according to Kim, is that “history is not realistically re-enacted in a fusion drama, but re-interpreted and restructured through a contemporary imagination,” which enables the suggestion that the fusion period drama is in actuality a “contemporary drama dressed in hanbok” (traditional dress) (Kim, 2004). Although the discussion of fusion period drama focuses primarily on recent television series—such as Dae-jang- geum, a TV drama series about a female royal physician which has been enormously popular both within and outside Korea since its original airing in 2003—rather than film 84 Understandably, the rise of “fusion period drama” is not a uniquely Korean phenomenon. One of the most notable Hollywood period epics produced in 2006, Marie Antoinette (directed by Sofia Coppola), has all the major generic features of the “fusion period drama”: addressing issues that are more relevantfor the contemporary audience (teenage angst, alienation, and the feeling of emptiness from material excess) through the décor and setting of the imagined (European) past, through a combination of visual extravaganza (especially the spectacular costume) and deconstructively contemporary language and music. 202 texts, this category is significant for the present discussion of the transformation in recent Korean cinema. In her discussion of fetishistic desire and the costume film genre, Stella Bruzzi raises an interesting question about costume films, asking “whether to look at or through the clothes” in the films (Bruzzi, 1997: 36). That is to say, costumes in costume drama can function either as spectacular fetish objects to be looked at, or elements of mise-en-scene that “submit [the costumes] to the greater framework for historical and literary authenticity.” In the case of contemporary South Korean costume dramas, this distinction, while interesting and thought-provoking, becomes largely irrelevant to the extent that the spectacular cannot be separated from the historical in the new genre formation, while the question of historical authenticity is displaced by that of the realism of inauthentic yet convincing human drama(s). More importantly, I would argue that in addition to the two functions Bruzzi mentions, costumes in recent South Korean costume films function as semiotic markers of national identity that fully recognize the mediation of the contemporary imagination in their construction. In other words, by narrating the nation through the use of openly inauthentic yet visually stunning costumes, recent history dramas produced in South Korea emphasize that national identities evoked through textual signification are not permanently stabilized, but constantly fluctuating and hybridized. In a way, the costumes in these costume dramas function in a similar way to the costumes in cosplay discussed in earlier chapters (1 and 2): just as fans of anime masquerade in different costumes to perform the identities of their favorite characters and fantastically 203 embody a utopian space both of text (anime diegesis) and context (anime fan/subculture) through the symbolic act of cosplay, the narratives of nation in recent costume films change costumes without worrying too much about historical accuracy in order to accentuate the performative, temporary, and fragmentary qualities of national identity constructed through the discursive practice of fictional narration. In discussing different terms used to refer to the genre of costume drama in the UK context—which include heritage dramas, costume dramas, period films, historical epics, “white flannel films,” “frock flicks,” and Brit-Lit movies—Julianne Pidduck claims that her choice of the term “costume drama” signifies “a refusal of historical or literary authenticity”: Costume is inextricable from historical discourses of the self, and costume drama’s play of identity and masquerade retrospectively explores Western subjectivity through the characters of the nineteenth-century novel and historical biography. (Pidduck, 4). Similarly, recent costume films produced in South Korea can be read as symptomatic of the emancipation of the national subject in the context of intensifying global exchanges of cultural influences, freed from the obligation of authenticity and the burden of inheritance of the national tradition. Thus, the animated (national) subject at this juncture calls for a revision of existing frames of reference in theorizing national cinema. Quoting Stephen Heath, Andrew Higson once famously suggested: “‘[N]ationhood is not a given, it is always something to be gained’—and cinema needs to be understood as one of the means by which it is ‘gained’” (Higson, 1989: 44). About three decades after Higson’s suggestion, nationhood is now, instead of being stably “gained” through filmic 204 narrativization, something to be tried on and played through in the deliberately inauthentic narratives of Korean costume dramas. This shift within the Korean film industry and culture from the production of consciously nationalist, self-orientalizing history dramas to more strategically transnational, culturally non-specific films about ordinary life, set in an obviously re-imagined historical past, has functioned significantly in enabling Korean cinema to perform successfully in the context of globalization. Thus, contrary to Korean critics who denigrate contemporary Korean cinema for lacking “a recognizable national style,” 85 I would contend that the very strategy of deliberate inauthenticity and non- specificity, exhibited in recent period films that deprivilege historical authenticity in favor of aesthetic style, can be understood meaningfully in the global circulation of national iconography. This tendency toward an inauthentic and non-specific narration of nation in the global context can be related to what Ulf Hedetoft calls “semiotic denationalization”: In all cases, such [authentic national] cultures and communicative processes tend to lose their national exceptionalism, and to be seen as more or less naturalised frames of reference at several removes (in time and space) from their national origin. They become semiotically de-nationalised, not because they do not have a national origin, but precisely because they have proved so successful as vehicles of national interests, cultures and identities. (Hedetoft, 280) This (commercial) strategy of semiotic denationalization can also be related to Meaghan Morris’s more critically powerful theory of positive unoriginality which she proposes in tracing a similar shift that took place in Australian national cinema, from period art-films 85 Helen Koh, “The Return of South Korean Cinema” 205 such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to more consciously commercialized movies such as the Crocodile Dundee series: One assumes that unoriginality is a Bad Thing, a byproduct of “cultural imperialism”… This is a theory of fully positive unoriginality, a context in which, for critics, the privileged metaphors of postmodernism can come in to play—image-scavenging, borrowing, stealing, plundering and (for the more sedate), recoding, rewriting, reworking. (Morris, 246-247). I would suggest that the conscious unoriginality of recent costume dramas in South Korea needs to be recognized as a positive development, wherein freedom from the obligation of narrativizing the nation authentically allows for a greater mobility of the cultural texts themselves within the transnational sphere, as well as for the formation of a more fluid sense of national identity. In the dazzling (filmic) cosplay of the national body which rejects notions of authenticity and originality, the myth of national “origin,” conventionally projected onto and enacted via the female body, can be powerfully disrupted and dismissed. The disrobing of the national body in recent Korean national cinema is thus perversely empowering in that it enables a new kind of trans/national subjectivity to be searched for, imagined, and playfully animated. 206 Afterword No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are now [no] more than starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly exclusively, White, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. (Said 1993, 407-408) Part of the still ongoing and interconnected, planetary process of modernity and colonialism, globalization does tend to standardize, homogenize, and flatten the vibrant diversity of human experiences situated within it. Multiple symptoms of this tendency of leveling, evening out and pinpointing of globalization have been widely felt by and concerned many critics in the world—especially with the relentless power of global capitalism, working through various fields of, not only geo-politics and world economics, but also cultures of everyday life. While the interactions between global players on a macro level has been intensely discussed in recent years, studies of the most immediate and intimate encounters with the global by individual subjects on a micro level have not been produced sufficiently. The present thesis has thus begun with a working hypothesis that comes from my own limited yet lived experience of global influences mediating my own understanding of the world as well as my self: the hypothesis that there might be ways of recognizing some sort of positive dimension to our varied interactions with the forces of the global. Since we all are, whether willing or reluctant, participants of the global process, fundamentally affected by and partially constructed through it, it seems to me the project of examining multiple implications of the global within us, within our selves, could not be any more 207 urgent. Accordingly, the emphasis of my discussion has been given primarily on the issues related to human subjectivity in the context of cultural globalization, dealing with mainly the question of, how can we recognize alternative (political) potential in our selves, heavily mediatized and thoroughly penetrated by the logic of capitalism? My notion of “animated subjects” is in a way, a rhetorical device that is designed to invite us to think further on the positive as well as normative developments in the cultures of globalization. Whenever I was stopped from reading a manga book in my childhood by parents and teachers, arguing that the simplistic visual style of manga prevents children’s visual facility from fully developing, I wished I had the language with which I could suggest a different scenario—a scenario in which a child/reader/viewer proves, rather unexpectedly, to develop her or his sensory as well as literary imagination in order to fill in the gap left by the beautifully minimalist texts. While trying not to be disproportionately hopeful, I recognize a parallel in some of the ways in which today’s audience and cultural consumers repurpose global media products, in order to articulate different cultural meanings relevant to their own local conditions of life. Case studies included in this thesis are to present examples of unexpectedly creative appropriations of global media products, mostly anime-related. Whereas globalization is undeniably an aggressive process that implements homogenization that serves the interests of global capitalism, it also inadvertently encourages and animates people within it to break out of the traditional constraint of 208 human subjectivity, mainly a product of the western Enlightenment. In other words, while globalization, when considered as a continuing trend of colonial modernity, “allow[s] people to believe that they were only, mainly exclusively, White, or Black, or Western, or Oriental,” it can, at the same time, lead us to question the pseudo-belief that has been limiting our understandings of ourselves as creative subjects. 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Creator Ahn, Jiwon (author)

Core Title Animated subjects: globalization, media, and East Asian cultural imaginaries

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 05/06/2008

Defense Date 11/20/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anime,fan culture,film,Globalization,Korean cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Japan (countries), South Korea (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Kinder, Marsha (committee member), McKnight, Anne (committee member)

Creator Email jahn@keene.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1212

Unique identifier UC150958

Identifier etd-Ahn-20080506 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-73308 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1212 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Ahn-20080506.pdf

Dmrecord 73308

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Ahn, Jiwon

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu