The Ethics of Affect

Based on ongoing fieldwork in the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo, specifically a targeted subproject from 2014 to 2015, this book explores how and to what effect lines are drawn by producers, players and critics of bishōjo games. Focusing on interactions with manga/anime-style characters, these adult computer games often feature explicit sex acts. Noting that the bishōjo, or “cute girl characters,” in these games can appear quite young, legal actions have been taken in a number of countries to categorize and prohibit the content as child abuse material. In response to the risk of manga/anime images encouraging underage sexualization, lawmakers are moved to regulate them in the same way as photographs or film; triggered by images, the line between fiction and reality is erased, or redrawn to collapse forms together. While Japanese politicians continue to debate a similar course, sustained engagement with bishōjo game producers, players and critics sheds light on alternative movement. Manga/anime-style characters trigger an affective response in interactions with their creators and users, who draw and negotiate lines between fiction and reality. Interacting with characters and one another, bishōjo gamers draw lines between what is fictional and what is “real,” even as the characters are real in their own right and relations with them are extended beyond games; some even see the characters as significant others and refer to them using intimate terms of commitment such as “my wife.” This book argues for understanding the everyday practice of insisting on lines, or drawing a line between humans and nonhumans and orienting oneself toward the drawn lines of the latter, as demonstrating an emergent form of ethics. Occurring individually and socially in both private and public spaces, the response to fictional characters not only discourages harming human beings, but also supports life in more-than-human worlds. For many in contemporary Japan and beyond, interactions and relations with fictional and real others are nothing short of lifelines

Maiden’s Fashion As Eternal Becomings: Victorian Maidens and Sugar Sweet Cuties Donning Japanese Street Fashion in Japan and North America

Lolita fashion is a youth street style originating from Japan that draws on Victorian-era children’s clothing, Rococo aesthetics, and Western Punk and Gothic subculture. It is worn by teenage girls and women of a wide range of ages, and through the flow of related media and clothing aided by the Internet, Lolita style has become a global phenomenon. Wearers of the style are known as Lolitas, and local, national, and global communities can be found around the world outside Japan from North American to Europe. This study is a cross-cultural comparison of Lolita fashion wearers in Japan and North America, examining how differences in constructions of place and space; conceptualizations about girlhood and womanhood; perceptions of beauty and aesthetics; and formation of social groups and actor-networks have bearing on how an individual experiences the fashion. This work deconstructs Lolita style by using Japanese cultural concepts like shōjo (‘girl’ as a genderless being), otome (maiden), kawaii (cuteness) to explore the underlying framework that informs Japanese Lolita’s use of the fashion as a form of subversive rebellion, creating personal spaces to celebrate their individuality and revive the affects and memories of girlhood that are distanced from gendered social expectations. English-speakers, not having the same social and cultural knowledge, attempt to recontexualize Lolita fashion along the lines of feminism, sisterhood, personal style, and escape from the ‘modern’ to give meaning and purpose to their involvement with the fashion. Lolita fashion allows wearers to travel in between the lines of becoming-girl and becoming-women by offering a way to access girl-feeling and its associated happiness objects

“MORE JAPANESE THAN JAPANESE”: SUBJECTIVATION IN THE AGE OF BRAND NATIONALISM AND THE INTERNET

Today, modern technologies and the rapid circulation of information across geographic boundaries are said to be making the nation-state less relevant to daily life. In contrast, this dissertation argues that national boundary maintenance is increasingly made more relevant not in spite of such technologies, but precisely because of them. Indeed, processes of circulation are themselves making and re-making such boundaries rather than erasing them, while states simultaneously react to contain the perceived threats of globalization and to capitalize on the sale of their “cultural” commodities through nation branding. For American otaku, or Japan fans, internet technologies and the consumption of Japanese media like videogames and anime are quintessential global flows from within which they first articulate a desire for Japan. Increasingly, some make the very real decision to leave home and settle in Japan, although scholars have suggested otaku are unable to understand the “real” Japan. Once there, however, the Japanese state’s ongoing nation branding policies, along with immigration control and patterns of everyday interactions with Japanese citizens, marginalize even long-term residents as perpetual visitors. Building on the work of Foucault, I seek to understand how notions of national “of courseness,” which fix Japaneseness as naturally homogeneous and impenetrable, subjectivize American fans. Drawing on 12 months of full time participant observation with otaku living in Tokyo, along with 18 months of part time follow-up research, diachronic interviews with Americans in the US and Japan, and extensive textual analysis of all things “Japanese,” this work contrasts the purported deterritorializing promise of online communications and the withering of the relevance of the modern nation-state, with the national boundary making work that these otaku migrants participate in, both online and off. Once in Japan, otaku themselves actively support Japan's nation branding efforts by teaching English and producing the very cultural commodities that motivated their migration in the first place, as they increasingly codify what Japaneseness is for other “foreigners.” At the same time, otaku migrants further reproduce Japanese national identity through accepting and affirming their status as non-Japanese, and through the reinscription of these very boundaries onto other otaku

Embrace me as I am: Japanese Pornography for Women and the Fan Community surrounding Male Porn Stars

This exploratory research looks at female fans of male porn actors in Jôsei-muke Adult Videos (AV) in Japan. Jôsei-muke is a pornographic genre aimed at heterosexual women that features good-looking male porn actors called eromen and lovemen. This new genre arose as a reaction against the decline of the porn industry due to the popularity of porn streaming websites and is an attempt to expand the market by capturing heterosexual women as new, heretofore neglected, audiences. Although the media sometimes depict this new as a form of female sexual emancipation, the genre is only economically viable because of the support (oshi-katsu) by “fans” of eromen and lovemen. This thesis argues that to read the reversal of the “male gaze” as female emancipation based solely on the content of the pornographic products is misleading. New forms of pornography must be placed in the context of pre-existing gender issues in Japanese society and in the everyday life worlds of those who consume it. The issue arose here is not only that of gender identity but also economic ones. Based on one year of field work at a series of eromen and lovemen fan events and participation in the online community of fans, this research shows that fans are largely indifferent to female sexual emancipation that is supposed to be encouraged by jôsei-muke AV and its business collaborators who produce sex toys and other self-pleasure products. Rather, it has become apparent that female fans look for intimate interactions with male actors at series of events in order to restore their confidence and to have their femininity recognised by attractive male others. The interactions with eromen and lovemen provide recognition for female fans through monetary transactions. Theory of recognition (Honneth 1995, Taylor 1994) indicates that recognition should be mutual; however, the monetary transaction changes the mutuality and the intentions of each actors (female fans / eromen and lovemen). For eromen and lovemen, it is about money and fame. Female fans, on the other hand, gain recognition even though it has to be purchased. Purchasing recognition thus appears a rational choice in a world in which romantic relationships come fraught with obligations, mutual commitment, gendered expectations and the risk of rejection. Supporting activity, or oshi-katsu underlies such a commodified recognition. And by supporting, it means that choosing one favorite among many others determines one’s identity according to whom/what one belongs to and to support is a self-less devotion which also functions as self-realisation. The commodified recognition, while it frees women from unpaid emotional labour and gives a power to have an influence over their self-realisation, conceives potentially exploitive nature. Especially for those who heavily rely on commodified recognition, which I employ structural vulnerable (Quesada et al 2011). The experience of vulnerability is excersied by how one position the self in the society. For female fans here, I have seen some women identify themselves as “incomplete” in heteronormative matrix due to the lack of romantic experience and marriage. The free market economic system which transforms recognition into commodity and provides recognition concerns its ethics because of its inclusivity. In other words, to gain recognition through purchase has been becoming a part of social relationship, rather than a luxurious commodity. From a microscope of a specific fan culture surrounding male porn actors in jôsei-muke AVs, the thesis sheds light on the problem of the ethics of commodification and consumption of recognition and contributes to the discussion of the recent trend of transaction of intimate activities in oshi-katsu

モード・オブ・プレイ : プレイワークとヴィジュアル系における生産的消費

早大学位記番号:新9180博士(学術)早稲田大

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies