CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: POPULAR CULTURE American Pop-Culture Retro-Boom |
| 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. |
Theodore Bestor :: Just as Japanese popular culture is becoming more popular in the United States through anime, manga, video games, and so forth, there’s also an awful lot of interest in Japan — amongst Japanese teenagers for example — in American popular culture. But oftentimes it’s an American popular culture of an earlier generation — there’s sort of a retro-boom. James Dean is wildly popular in Japan. Elvis is wildly popular in Japan. Dressing up as sort of teenagers of the 1950s in black leather jackets and slicked back hair is popular in Japan these days. And there’s a sense in which I think many Japanese regard America as, not the source of popular culture, but rather there’s a global popular culture to which anybody is entitled to participate in, and so the icons of 1950s popular culture in the United States become the global icons of Japanese youth in the 1990s. |
| Back to Asian Topics Home |
