CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: POPULAR CULTURE Global Influence |
| Nowhere in the world is popular culture more influential than in Japan. From Hello Kitty and Pokémon to anime (animation) and manga (comics), the culture of youth dominates Japanese media. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre explain what Japanese popular culture reveals about the society’s history, religions, and national consciousness. |
Helen Hardacre :: Japanese popular culture has become one of the most globalized aspects of Japanese society and culture today. And, in the United States, there are many college-age students for whom the Battleship Yamato is a memory of a story much like folk tale might have been to previous generations of people. Thus, Japanese popular culture is coming to have a global influence and a deep influence on the psyches of many people around the world. Theodore Bestor :: The first Godzilla movie, and then the many sequels that were spawned by it, is definitely a story about Japan and its experiences with atomic warfare. But it’s not a story that’s necessarily aimed at explaining to other societies, other cultures, the impact of atomic bombing, or the impact of war. I think it’s really a story for Japanese, by Japanese, to Japanese about those sorts of things. But there are many other examples of Japanese popular culture coming out of World War II that do in fact seek to teach the rest of the world. There are many Japanese comics, for example, that take Hiroshima survivors as a theme, and many of those have been translated into foreign languages and make a real statement to a global audience about the horrors of war and the impact of the atomic bomb on the lives of innocent civilians. |
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