Abstract: American consumption of Japanese culture

I swear I wrote this before reading Misa's abstract, but I'm also interested in looking at American interaction with Japanese culture.

I am interested in writing about the fetish-izing of Japan in American culture. While I’m not entirely sure where research would take my argument, I want to look both at how Japan is presented in Western media and how Japanese culture is imported and branded. The way Japanese popular culture is presented to Americans now is far different from the deodorization that took place in the ’80s, so an argument might spring from looking into why the American media’s importation and branding of Japanese culture has changed. It will be important to look into the degree to which different American subcultures consume Japanese media, and how those segments are marketed to and what they produce as fans should reveal interesting things about the natures of their fetishes.

My paper will first look at anecdotal evidence of American fan interaction with Japanese culture, and simultaneously at how the culture is marketed and branded to those fans. Then I will bring in larger questions of cultural consumption and fetish-ization. I will look at Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as a specific example of that fetish-ization of Japanese culture by American filmmakers. Hopefully combining all these elements will lead me to an argument about the varying levels of depth and shallowness that occurs with American consumption of Japanese culture, and how those levels relate to the ways in which the culture is branded.

Coppola’s Lost in Translation is an example of how American films present Japan as very romantic in its extreme otherness. Coppola’s film inspired an entire generation of Japan-philes, and it will be interesting to see if the images it presents endure in our culture perception of Japan (and Tokyo in particular). I will reexamine the readings by Jenkins and van Zoonen on fan cultures, as well as some of the readings on consuming places and tourism as consumption. I also want to reread bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” and other similar articles, as well as works on Orientalism. It is interesting that a sort of neo-Orientalism has come about, referring to stereotyping of the Islamic world, so it would be necessary to limit myself to texts analyzing the older, colonial form of Orientalism and perhaps how it relates to Western consumption of Japanese culture. It would also be necessary to look at other studies of forms and levels of consumption of Japanese culture in America.

I don’t know how much has been written on this subject, but just from the survey last class three or four people said they wanted to go to Japan. This is a subject very close to me, as Japanese popular culture has been a major focus in both my personal and academic life. I hope that writing this paper will give me a better understanding of my own interests, and that it would appeal to others reading it for those reasons. The conflict between whether or not fan consumption leads to fetish-ization or a genuine understanding of another culture comes up a lot in readings on fan cultures and multicultural consumption, so I hope that my paper offers some useful analysis on the points where those ideas converge and diverge. A lot of people who write about Japanese culture are, like me, fans of the culture, so I think these kinds of questions are sometimes dismissed much in the same way McRobbie accuses feminist scholars of dismissing criticisms of Sex and the City. In order to write about Japanese pop culture credibly, we must be aware of how we and others interact with it.