This book analyzes the role of manga (Japanese comics) within contemporary Japanese public discourse, and explores its role in propagating new perceptions regarding Japanese history. Through the analysis of a variety of cases studies ranging from nineteenth century magazines to contemporary online comics and fandom, it focuses on the representations and interpretations of history in manga, and clarifies this medium's interrelation with historical memory and political debate. Stories for the Nation delineates alternative modes of historical memory and expression as they are manifested and contested in manga, and argues for manga's potential to influence the historical and political views of wide audiences in Japan.

Over the past two decades, Japanese popular culture has reached consumers of other countries in a variety and scale unseen before. As any lecturer in Japanese studies in any part of the work can testify, anime and manga is what brings students into class, and not the economy or Japanese managerial systems, as it used to be the 1980s. One of the interesting aspects of this unexpected aspect of Japan's internationalization is a growing discourse in Japan about the new opportunities created by the globalization of Japanese popular culture. While some emphasize the economic benefits of cultural exports as a new source for revenues and as a way to upgrade the economy, others point to the diplomatic advantages of popular culture as a way to boost the country's image abroad and attain "soft power". The Japanese government, for its part, has been increasingly interested in this sector and is gradually placing popular culture production and export on its agenda. In such context, this chapter examines the way the globalization of popular culture has been treated in domestic discourse in Japan and analyzes the way it is being bureaucratized and utilized by the state.

This book introduces a multilayered approach to the study of democracy, combining specific knowledge of Japan with theoretical insights from the literature on democratization. It examines different aspects of Japanese democracy–historical, institutional, and sociocultural–to provide a conscious understanding of the nature and practice of democracy, both in Japan and beyond. The book's chapters give testimony to the dynamic nature and continuity of Japanese democracy and analyze its strengths and weaknesses. The central argument of this book is that Japan's democratization should be seen as a multilayered experience shaped by the gradual process of absorbing democratic ideas, forming democratic institutions, and practicing democratic behaviors and rituals at various levels of society. As the case of Japan shows, democracy is neither a structured formula nor only a set of democratic laws and institutions, but a continuous, gradual process.–

East Asia1 over the last three decades has experienced a cultural renaissance rooted in the growth of its economies and booming urban consumerism, which is manifested in its massive circulation of contemporary popular culture and media-related commodities such as movies, pop music, animation, comics, television programs, and fashion magazines, as well as their derivative products such as games, food, toys, accessories, etc. The confluence of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean popular cultures, in particular, has intensified in recent decades reaching consumers of different national and linguistic boundaries, as well as inspiring a variety of transnational collaborations and co-productions involving creative personnel and companies from different parts of East Asia (Fung 2013; Lent and Fitzsimmons 2012; Otmazgin and Ben-Ari 2013). Some of these industries have formed alliances with international distributors and promoters and their products have sometimes circulated outside the East Asian region, particularly in Europe and North America (Jin and Otmazgin 2014, 47-48).

In the past two decades, the enthusiastic global reception of Japanese cultural exports has drawn wide academic attention. In the case of Japanese animation ("anime"), its penetration into the United States, the world's biggest media market, has been described as owing greatly to the crucial role of fans as cultural agents, the deterritorializing effects of globalization, the domestication and heavy editing of anime to suit local tastes, and being part of the wider global flow of Japanese pop culture and "soft power." Drawing on interviews with Japanese and American key personnel in the anime industry, field research and market surveys, this paper focuses on the organizational aspect of the anime market in the United States since the mid-1990s, with particular attention to the role of entrepreneurs, who are imperative for bridging organizational rigidities and cultural differences in global markets. The key argument presented is that entrepreneurship is a central feature in the process of transnational penetration, distribution, reproduction and consumption of cultural commodities and genres, which produce ever more complex and disjunctive economic, cultural and political orders.

This special section is to explore several key issues related to the development in three of the biggest East Asian cultural industries, namely in China, Japan and South Korea. It addresses a few important dimensions of change that merit analysis: the emergence of East Asian cultural industries in terms of growths in scale and exports; the transnationalization of production and distribution; the relaxation of foreign ownership restraints; and changing relations between the cultural industries and the state. The attempt is to conceptualize the relations between the cultural industries and cultural policy; draw insights from critical media studies and cultural policy studies; and explore what it means for policy makers when culture and creativity move from the margins to the centre of economic activity.

In popular culture, Hong Kong is probably the most "Japanese city" outside Japan. It is home to a wide variety of Japanese popular cultural products and a regional base to many of the Japanese music and television companies who expanded their operations in the city in the early 1990s. Hong Kong's emerging middle class, especially the younger generation, has enthusiastically accepted Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle, making the city one of the biggest destinations for Japan's cultural exports. Based on fieldwork surveys and interviews, this paper looks at the organizational aspect of popular culture during the heydays of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s and early 2000s. The investigation focuses on the marketing strategies and promotional efforts used by agents of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong and the role of popular culture piracy in this process. Beyond analyzing the Japanese case, the paper introduces a new framework to examine the transnational expansion of popular cultures across markets in East and Southeast Asia, highlighting the role of companies and promoters in this process.

This ambitious work provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded study of the production, circulation, and reception of Japanese popular culture in Asia. While many studies typically employ an interactive approach that focuses on the “meaning” of popular culture from an anthropological or cultural studies point of view, Regionalizing Culture emphasizes that the consumption side and contextual meaning of popular culture are not the only salient factors in accounting for the proliferation of popular cultural products-the production side and organizational aspects are also important. In addition to presenting individual case studies, the book offers a big-picture view of the dramatic changes that have taken place in popular culture production and circulation in Asia over the past two decades. The author has gleaned information from primary sources in Japanese, English, and other languages; research visits to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul; as well as insights of people with firsthand knowledge from within the cultural industries. From this broad range of source, he develops an integrative political economic approach to popular culture. Regionalizing Culture offers a dialectical look at the organization of cultural production, primarily at the structure and control of cultural industries, interconnections between companies and production networks, and relations between the business sector and the state. It traces the rise of Japan as a popular culture powerhouse and the expansion of its cultural industries into Asian markets. It looks as well at the creation of markets for Japanese cultural commodities since the late 1980s, the industrial and normative impact that Japanese cultural industries have on the structure of the local cultural industries, and the wider implications these processes have for the Asian region. The growing popularity and importance of Japan’s popular culture will make this book a basic text for scholars and students of popular culture as well as for those interested in political economy, media and communication studies, Japanese-Asian relations, Asian studies, and international relations.

This volume examines the relations between cultural industries and the state in East and Southeast Asia (hereafter “East Asia”), comprising mainly the urban centers and middle classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. We analyze the emergence of new cultural industries throughout East Asia by looking at the processes by which popular culture is produced, distributed and consumed, with particular attention to the role of states in these processes.

The purpose of this study is to conceptualize the relationship between the transnational dissemination and consumption of popular culture and state image through a focus on the acceptance of Japanese popular culture in different regional contexts. Specifically, this research builds on the work of surveys conducted in East Asia, Western Europe, and the Middle East comprising: 1) a questionnaire survey conducted among undergraduate university students in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Bangkok; 2) an online questionnaire survey conducted among manga fans in their 20s in France, Germany, and Italy; and 3) an ethnographic study and in-depth interviews conducted among fans of Japanese pop culture in Israel. Rather than comparing these three surveys in detail, the purpose of this study is to examine the meta-narratives they offer in relation to the way popular culture shapes Japan’s image in the world.

This volume examines the relations between popular culture production and export and the state in East and Southeast Asia including the urban centres and middle-classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. It addresses the shift in official thinking toward the role of popular culture in the political life of states brought about by the massive circulation of cultural commodities and the possibilities for attaining ‘soft power’. In contrast to earlier studies, this volume pays particular attention to the role of states and cross-state cultural interactions in these processes. It is the first major attempt to look at these issues comparatively and to provide an important corrective to the limitations of existing scholarship on popular culture in Asia that have usually neglected its political aspects. As part of this move, the essays in this volume suggest a widening of disciplinary perspectives. Hitherto, the preponderance of relevant studies has been in cultural and media fields, anthropology or history. Here the contributors explicitly draw on other disciplinary perspectives - political science and international relations, political economy, law, and policy studies - to explore the complex interrelationships between the state, politics and economies, and popular culture. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian culture, society and politics, the sociology of culture, political science and media studies.

Japan's cultural policy and cultural diplomacy in Asia has changed dramatically over the past one hundred years, from actively introducing and imposing Japanese culture during its empire-building period, to essentially avoiding the promotion of Japanese culture in Asia for most of the postwar period due to fears of being seen once again as engaged in cultural imperialism, and more recently, to supporting and encouraging the export of Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle in order to attain "soft power." Looking at the fluctuations in Japan's cultural policy over these three periods allows us to understand how Japan has used cultural policy to further its geopolitical goals and more basically how it has viewed the role of "culture" in the context of its relations with Asian neighbors. In a broader sense, the Japanese experience shows that cultural policy, even when inward-looking, is not isolated from a country's geopolitical position and its ambitions in the world, regardless of the political system under which it operates.

Let us begin with four pictures: first, a multinational action movie being financed by producers from Hong Kong and filmed in Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia or Thailand; second, a housewife from the Philippines watching a Korean family drama on TV; third, a group of Indonesian fans translating a Japanese comic book into Bahasa; and fourth, Kitty-Chan chopsticks being sold in Singapore. What kinds of order or orders (or disorders) underlie these popular culture productions and products? Who are the agents that produced them and how do their actions involve cross border collaboration?.