+ About the Speakers

RELATED TOPIC:
URBAN & RURAL LIFE

RELATED TOPIC:
THE JAPANESE FAMILY

RELATED TOPIC:
EDUCATION & WORK

RELATED TOPIC:
JAPANESE SOCIETY

RELATED TOPIC:
RELIGIONS

 
CONTEMPORARY JAPAN:
POPULAR CULTURE

Portability
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 :: One of the interesting things about Japanese popular culture, and the fact that it really is youth culture, is that on the one hand you have the sense of Japanese children not having a lot of time, not a lot of “youth” to spend, they’re so wrapped up in the education system. On the other hand you have this incredibly complex, incredibly vibrant popular culture. I think one of the keys to understanding this apparent contradiction is that Japanese popular culture has excelled in portability. There are all of these things that kids can take with them and do as they’re traveling, perhaps on the trains or the subways from school to cram school, or from cram school back home. Think, after all, about the Sony Walkman. I mean, this is music on the move. You’re no longer tied to anything; you can just seal out the world and listen to music. Think about video games, Game Boy, things like that — all of which are portable, highly engaging, but can be taken anywhere.

All of the little characters — the dangling key chains, the Hello Kitty, the Hello Kitty notebook, the Pokémon pencil box — all of these are educational tools that are easily wrapped in the characters of popular culture, so that children can sort of carry popular culture with them wherever they go through the adult world that looks and says: “A-ha! They're going to school. That’s fine.” Well, yeah, they’re going to school, but they’re also spending as much time as they can paying attention to the idols and the heroes of their popular-culture world.