"Monster" and German reunification

Naoki Urasawa's manga "Monster," the source of that "The Monster with No Name" short we watched earlier this year, deals with trauma left by the divided and reunified Germany in a way which is relevant to our discussion of "Goodbye Lenin!" Having finally finished the 74-episode anime series based on the manga, I think I can talk a little bit more about what lessons "The Monster with No Name" imparts as a fable invented for Urasawa's story. I will try and be concise.

"Monster" takes place over the course of a decade, straddling 1989 on both sides. The main narrative follows a young Japanese brain surgeon living in Munich. He saves the life of a 10 year old boy (Johan) who has been shot in the head. His twin sister, Anna, is in a state of shock. Johan disappears from the hospital and Anna is placed into the care of a kind West German family, where she assumes a different name. Johan resurfaces a decade later as a sociopath and murderer who becomes a doppelganger of sorts for the good-hearted Japanese surgeon.

We find out that Johan and Anna were the children of a Czech prostitute who, before fleeing to West Germany, were placed into a series of orphanages designed to brainwash the children into soldiers. Anna suffered at the hands of a particularly traumatic experiment (long-term solitary confinement). She tells Johan of the experience, which the brother assumes (and consumes, connecting back to the fairy tale), transforming it into his own memory and his own impetus for murder. Anna suppresses the memory, fooling herself into thinking that it was actually Johan who was the subject of that experiment. As an adult, Johan plays with his own identity quite a bit, assuming different names, personalities and, at one point, even dressing as his sister. The lines from the fairy tale, "Look at me! Look at how big this monster inside me has become!" become a motif for Johan and eventually come to stand for the idea that the evil inside him was planted by his experiences with Urasawa's interesting vision of Communist mad science. His identity is constructed by his experiences with a particularly cinematic (and Western) vision of the Eastern Bloc. The monster inside of him finds an identity, the kind young boy Johan, and coexists with the boy until consuming his personality from the inside out. Anna--the monster who eventually goes West in the fairy tale--also has her identity consumed by Johan as a means to identify himself with a particularly traumatic event as justification for his murderous tendencies.

"Monster" is particularly engaging because it was written by a Japanese author from an outsiders perspective. The story deals with numerous themes beyond the East-West identity crisis, including the lingering remnants of Nazism and how they impact Germany's large Turkish population. The hero, a Japanese immigrant, factors into these issues as well. How well Urasawa examines these issues would be an interesting research topic for someone who knows a lot more about German history than me.

"nostalgia," fashion, american culture

http://www.acontinuouslean.com/
http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ (the vintage photo contest)

Communist Nostalgia in China

After watching Goodbye Lenin, I cannot help but compare the nostalgia to Chinese's long established sentiments to Chairman Mao Zedong. Although China has evolved from a communist country to more of a socialist (or even some cities or provinces, capitalist - even though they won't admit it), Chairman Mao's status in the nation has never seized to be less important in the modern society. In fact, several studies have found that as People Republic of China goes through global crisis, Chinese turn to develop a sense of nostalgia towards Mao. A sign that shows this nostalgic comeback is Mao's Little Red Book. While this was a must-have item among youth during Mao's Cultural Revolution, the book was later on considered a touchy topic as Mao and his revolution died. But in recent years, Little Red Book has gained popularity, that it was widely published and translated into different languages, readily available to people from all over the world (in fact I bought one from a street vendor for 50 cents several years ago).

To reference from Jonathan Bach's article "The Taste Remains," there is a certain degree of nostalgia as style in the national (or sometimes even global) sentiment over communist China. Mao's images and ideologies are frequently used as tools to market and advertise products in modern world. In the West, we have Andy Warhol's famous painting "Mao" printed on t-shirts and posters. In China, people compare President Obama to Mao Zedong, making products that uses Mao's signature punch line and resembles the artistic style of Mao's era.

I just find it really interesting that Chinese government has relaxed its attitude towards their founding history by actually allowing people to make money off of the association between Mao and the ultimate capitalist icon - the American president! The MAObama phenomenon is certainly something very captivating to me. Yet I find similarities between the rise of communist nostalgia in Germany and that in China. There is, indeed, a sense of disorientation as both countries move towards the Western ideologies, thus there is also a sense of longing for "intangible material world across the border." Perhaps an interview with a student from an university in China best describes why they develop a desire towards Mao's sentiments while we move towards a more modern China:

"I have spent so much money in going to university to study," 22-year-old student Yang Lu was quoted as saying on the France24 report. "I will graduate next June, but I don't know if I will be able to find work. In this kind of situation, how could we not feel nostalgic for the Mao era, when all students were guaranteed work?"

It is debatable whether or not Communism has helped the development of the Republic of China in early years. But the nostalgia towards communist China has certainly shown that, even though communism is close to being collapse in China, it still represents an Utopia that envisions a collective dream among Chinese working class.

A German Orientalism

"This sudden switch in the perception of western goods from real to fake is partially a result of eastern Germans behaving too much like the ideal consumer. They fell for advertisements and felt at once betrayed and wiser as they came to understand that guile is part of advertising. But of course the whole idea of packaging is motivated by the supposition of consumer gullibility. In the West consumers hover between giving into the seduction of commercials and an awareness that the inside of the package never looks like the picture on the cover. East Germans, however, had to undergo a certain learning process in order to acquire the necessary “cultural fluency,” as Berdahl (1999: 137) felicitously phrases it, in their practices of consumption."

-Jonathan Bach, “ ‘The Taste Remains’: Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany,” 252

Does this strike anyone else as naively condescending? It’s not as though East Germans lived in a world completely void of consumption, or even of selling. Certainly there was a different mode of consumption that they were apprehending, and certainly this required adjustment, but this passage talks about East Germans like ignorant savages being introduced to civilization for the first time. Or, alternatively, it casts them as children who have not yet learned the harsh realities of the world. In both cases, there is an assumption that East Germans are incapable of rhetorical or figurative interpretation – they can only think concretely (a product will look exactly how it does in the advertisement…when a commercial claims a product is the best in the world, it really will be the best in the world, etc.). This is a fundamentally infantilizing, and, frankly, exoticizing assumption. It’s nearly colonialist (even if we could say that the unification of Germany actually amounted to a certain kind of colonialism). Those silly East Germans! They’ve just now learned how to wear clothes and use forks! Good thing we were here to teach them how to be civilized, because the poor buggers just didn’t know any better!

This position can be echoed in the obsession of many West Germans (the “Wossis”) with the “authenticity” and “nostalgia” of East German products. Is this very far off from the characters in Turistas who are looking for the “authentic” experience (a desire that is ultimately cast as condescending, colonialist, exoticizing, and oppressive)? Is this very far off from the American obsession with “authentically” ethnic restaurants, or “authentically” crude art and souvenirs? In this context, “authentic” means aboriginal, old fashioned, kept comfortably in a manageable past – delightfully anti-modern, anti-progressive.

sorry, more fandom stuff

I'm sort of going to travel back to last week and the week on fandom and write down some things I forgot to because I think there are some similarities between fandom in anime/manga and consuming places. Specifically when Jenkins outlines some criticisms people have made of anime fans ie: Asiaphilia where people fetishize Asian products. And as this relates to tourism:
If you go to the Akihabara district of Tokyo (essentially, the center of otaku) you can get taken on a tour by a "guidol," Japanese girls in cosplay. Or if you want, by:
a guy from Alaska dressed up as Goku. Patrick Galbraith (the guy in the picture) serves as a spectacle to both Tokyo inhabitants and tourists.

Akihabara is a major shopping center for electronics, computers, video games and anime/otaku goods that sort of boomed in the 1990's when the anime craze took off. It's a haven for otaku's who are generally frowned upon in Japan. This in part has led to Japan's tourist campaign (which is government affiliated) that has been trying to change the image of Akihabara away from the otkau image but has largely failed.

The popularity of the aforementioned tours and Akihabara itself depends on the fetishization of Japanese pop culture. Depending on your point of view, this could be a good or bad thing. Are Akihabara and people like Patrick Galbraith detrimental to Japanese culture? Tourists will go from experiencing a Japanese tea ceremony to the weirdness that is Akihabara. In my mind, going to a tea ceremony is about as culturally significant to a tourist as the International Day at an elementary school is to a third grader. But the impression I get from criticism of Akihabara is that it is sort of a patronizing practice, for a tourist to go visit Akihabara and look at the cosplay cafes and the hypersexualized images of cartoon girls or as a tour guide (ie: Galbraith) take advantage of the perception of this culture being "weird." Although not as extreme as the sort of exploitation that was talked about in the Jamaica excerpts, but there are definitely Japanese who are embarrassed/annoyed with tourists coming to visit this place and in a sense suffer because of how their culture is then perceived (but that may be too much...)

Anyways, I think this is sort of interesting because there are definitely Japanese people who participate in otaku culture and Americans who love manga/anime and the weirdness of Japanese pop culture, but would not see this interest as patronizing.

Fandom: Realizing True Needs?

I know we've since moved on from our discussion of Fandom a few weeks ago, but I've been thinking about the subject a lot recently and had a few ideas I'd like to add to our debate.

While surfing the hundreds of fan-made Harry Potter videos on YouTube, it dawned on me just how much the Internet and similar digital technologies have completely revolutionized the culture producing industry. While the vast majority of creative content today is controlled by an increasingly limited number of multinational media conglomerates, the Internet represents a democratized space where users can easily manipulate, reproduce, and produce their own content and upload it to a mass audience. In this regard, the Internet empowers the "receivers" of culture in a way that wouldn't have been possible at the beginning of the 20th century, say for the Frankfurt School scholars who viewed the mass culture industry as essentially a vehicle for propaganda and brainwashing.

The myriad of electronic tools that have been designed for the very purpose of re-imagining or manipulating pre-existing content, Adobe Photoshop being one obvious example of many, have essentially changed the landscape of Fandom forever. I want to cite Stuart Hall's essay "Encoding Decoding" where he describes the creation and reception of pop culture as a cyclical process of distinctive but linked "moments" that are discursive, or shifting, in nature. It seems to me that the empowered Fandom encouraged by the Internet represents a complication of this traditional cycle. Culture Producers still encode pop culture with meaning for audiences to decode; but thanks to the Internet, fans are able to repeat this cycle by re-encoding the original product with an entirely new set of meanings meant to be endlessly decoded and the re-encoded by other users. One example of this is the phenomenon of YouTube users posting endless "response" videos as offshoots from an original video. In this newly democratized cycle, consumer-fans use pop culture as the raw materials to start an entirely new cycle of production, distribution, and interpretation.

This is a pleasantly surprising phenomenon, and perhaps reinforces aspects of Adorno's concept of false vs. true needs. According to Adorno, people have real needs to be creatively autonomous individuals, which are masked by the false needs of consumerism that capitalism fosters in order to survive. In this respect, the newly liberated realm of online Fandom represents a way for consumers to actually participate in culture rather than simply being brainwashed by it. For this reason, I think that there needs to be some kind of legal protection for amateur-generated content. As the "Studio Executive" from our class role-play, I understand that this kind of legislation will be difficult to pass due to strict copyright laws. However, I feel optimistic that this Fandom phenomenon might encourage people to become more critically discerning consumers of pop culture.

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.