Italian Transnational Spaces in Japan: Doing Racialised, Gendered and Sexualised Occidentalism

Since the global success of the Made in Italy brand in the 1980s, Japan has witnessed an Italian boom which has turned Italy in the last decade into the most loved foreign country in Japan, especially among women and youth. This popularity is unparalleled in intensity and duration, but had seen little academic investigation. This essay explores how the transnational space of Italianness takes form through cumulative encounters between emotional geographies of 'the West' articulated in Japan (Occidentalism), as well as of 'the East' in Italy (Orientalism). There is a focus on the fluid intersections with the lived experience and projections of both Japanese and Italians in contemporary Japan to issues of nation, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality

‘Cin ciun cian’ (ching chong): Yellowness and neo-orientalism in Italy at the time of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has put in the foreground the dramatic actuality of global and local inequalities, undermining neo-liberal, communitarian, democratic or cosmopolitan projects of collective identity. In the light of intersecting inequalities such as class, race/ethnicity and gender, an explosion of Sinophobia, social stigma and physical attacks targeting people of East Asian and Southeast Asian appearance or heritage has been widely reported in Euro-American media. This article will focus on the case of Italy during the initial stage of the pandemic in early 2020. Italy has not only been the first European country to be exposed to the pandemic and to undergo national lockdown but also a country where the wave of racist assaults started in late January 2020, even before the first clusters have been detected. The critical investigation of Italian media discourses will highlight how deep-rooted, colonialist and ambivalent assumptions about the ‘Oriental’, ‘Asian’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘yellow’ other may have been crucial to the reproduction of racism against specific people, cultures and civilizations, regardless of nationality, class and gender. It will refer in particular to the concept of ‘yellowness’, resulting from a process of bio-cultural racialization within the hegemonic frame of ‘Western’, ‘White’ or ‘Italian’ identity. Furthermore, it will indicate how this process of racialized othering has emerged, but has also been contested, within the specific context of citizenship, Asian immigrants and governmental actions in contemporary Italy. The overall aim is not so much to denounce higher levels of racism in Italy compared to other Euro-American countries; rather, this article refers to the Italian case to stress how both global and local trajectories do mutually overlap to shape, and eventually to transform, a national context, offering further insights on the glo-calization of the civilizational ‘West’/’East’ divide in the 21st century

Mostri del Giappone. Narrative, figure, egemonie della dis-locazione identitaria

Contemporary Japan has become the stage for displaying an endless assortment of traditional, modern, and postmodern monsters. But why have old and new monsters gained such prominence with regard to folkloric customs, premodern urban culture, contents industry, and trans-national flows? How is this popularity connected to national identity formation and institutional legitimacy, as exemplified by the modern rise of yōkaigaku, the nativist science of monsters? And finally, what is the critical potential of monstrosity in terms of displacing naturalised identification and Othering, within the globalising entanglement of self-representations in Japan and hetero-representations of Japan? These questions aim to complicate our understanding of ‘Japan’ and ‘monsters’ in order to contribute to a transcultural theory of monsters, in contrast to prevalent investigations that focus instead on the cultural-intrinsic or the historical-specific Japaneseness of its monstrous repertoire. The book explores the «ontological liminality» addressed in monster theory (Cohen, 1996) by means of a multi-disciplinary approach, cross-cutting literary studies, visual studies, cultural anthropology, history and sociology. More specifically, it examines the discursive emer-gence of monstrous Japan, as configured by the modern intertwining of hegemonic Occidentalism, Orientalism, and self-Orientalism. The volume brings together different case studies on some of the most popular monsters in Japan, from the classical past to the contemporary present. Particular attention is given to the interlinking of narratives, figures, and hegemonies involved in the establishment of the tengu (the mountain monster), the kappa (the water goblin), the hybrid monsters in Miyazaki Hayao’s animation, and the wider trans/national monstering process shaping present Japan

Doing Occidentalism in Contemporary Japan: Nation Anthropomorphism and Sexualized Parody in Axis Power Hetalia,

Axis Powers Hetalia (2006–present), a Japanese gag comic and animation series, depicts relations between nations personified as cute boys against a background of World War I and World War II. The stereotypical rendering of national characteristics as well as the reduction of historically charged issues into amusing quarrels between nice-looking but incompetent boys was immensely popular, especially among female audiences in Japan and Asia, and among Euro-American manga, anime, and cosplay fans, but it also met with vehement criticism. Netizens from South Korea, for example, considered the Korean character insulting and in early 2009 mounted a protest campaign that was discussed in the Korean national assembly. Hetalia's controversial success relies to a great extent on the inventive conflation of male-oriented otaku fantasies about nations, weapons, and concepts represented as cute little girls, and of female-oriented yaoi parodies of male-male intimacy between powerful "white" characters and more passive Japanese ones. This investigation of the original Hetalia by male author Hidekaz Himaruya (b. 1985) and its many adaptations in female-oriented dōjinshi (fanzine) texts and conventions (between 2009 and 2011, Hetalia was by far the most adapted work) refers to notions of interrelationality, intersectionality, and positionality in order to address hegemonic representations of "the West," the orientalized "Rest" of the world, and "Japan" in the cross-gendered and sexually parodied mediascape of Japanese transnational subcultures

進行性尿路上皮腫瘍に対するM-VAC(methotrexate, vinblastine, doxorubicin and cisplatin)療法と治療強度に基づいた効果

41人の患者を術後補助化学療法24人, 術前補助化学療法5人, 救済化学療法12人の3グループに分け, 各群について調査した.平均の治療強度は術後補助化学療法群77±11%, 術前補助化学療法群73±4%, 救済化学療法群74±12%であった.他因死を除いた5年生存率は補助化学療法では69%であった.術前補助化学療法の5例中2例は治療開始より23ヵ月で癌なし生存, 救済化学療法の全例は33ヵ月以内に癌死或いは副作用で死亡した.生存期間の中央値は術後補助化学療法群で38ヵ月, 術前補助化学療法群で21ヵ月, 救済化学療法群で7ヵ月であった.75%以上の治療強度は各群において生存率を改善しなかったThe effects of the M-VAC (methotrexate, vinblastine, doxorubicin and cisplatin) regimen, which has been reported to improve the outcome of patients with urothelial cancers, were studied on 41 patients treated at our hospital. The patients were divided into adjuvant (24 patients), neoadjuvant (5 patients), and salvage (12 patients) groups. We investigated the dose intensity, the cause-specific survival, response rate and toxicities in the three groups. Although 36 patients received > or = 95% of the initial doses projected, the mean dose intensity (+/-standard deviation) in the adjuvant, neoadjuvant, and the salvage groups was 77 (+/-11), 73 (+/-4), and 74 (+/-12)%, respectively. The five-year cause-specific survival in the adjuvant group was 69% (95% confidence limit: 50-88%). Only 2 of the 5 patients (40%) in the neoadjuvant group survived 23 months after the initiation of the treatment, and all patients in the salvage group died of cancer or treatment-related toxicity within 33 months. The median survival was 38 months in the adjuvant group, 21 months in the neoadjuvant group, and 7 months in the salvage group. A dose intensity > or = 75% did not improve survival in any group. The overall response rate was 33% in 15 patients with evaluable lesions. A complete response was noted in 1 patient and a partial response was noted in 1 patients. Two patients died of treatment-related complications. Nausea and vomiting were observed in all patients. Leukopenia, thrombocytopenia and anemia > or = WHO grade 3 were observed in 25 (61%), 4 (10%), and 7 (17%) patients, respectively. Thrombocytopenia, anemia, and pyrexia > or = grade 3 were seen relatively more often in the patients receiving a dose intensity or = grade 3 appeared to be more frequent in the patients receiving a dose intensity > or = 75%. Adjuvant M-VAC might be beneficial, while its efficacy was limited in the neoadjuvant and salvage settings. Although dose intensity is considered to be important, it did not appear to be related to survival, the response rate, or the toxicity of M-VAC