Introduction

Summary

Long shunned by academic discourse on Japan, Japanese media are at long last seeing the recognition they deserve. As anyone who has travelled to Japan can testify, media are everywhere— from the ubiquitous adverts on trains, to the tachiyomi (literally, reading while standing) of manga volumes or magazines in convenience stores, or the inevitable television sets in bars, restaurants or hotels; it is plain to see that Japan is a country saturated with media.

However, as a discipline, media studies is still relatively new. Having been born out of what was then called Communication Studies in the first half of the 20th century, which was initially almost obsessed with assessing the direct effect “mass-mediated” products had on the wider population, media studies as a discipline came to suffer under the perception that they were somehow not worthy of academic attention. Theodor Horkheimer and Max Adorno (1941) in particular, created a dichotomy between “high culture” (anything that was artistic, original and thus pure) versus “low culture” (anything that appealed to “the masses,” was produced en masse, and was essentially formulaic), stigmatizing research on anything “popular.” Naturally, this also had an impact on how Japanese media came to be studied—or, respectively, not to be studied, in spite of their prevalence and omnipresence in Japan.

When research on Japanese media started, the focus was very much on how it related to the political landscape. Several (anglophone) studies followed in the wake of the 1993 Tsubaki Incident (see page 9), an instance in which the close relationship between the media and the government became particularly visible (Feldman 1993; Krauss 2000; Freeman 2000). In Japan itself, at around the same time, research tended to focus on the representation of gender, or Otherness, in Japanese advertising and television drama, almost existing in separate spheres. What became evident, even then, were two tendencies that continue to dominate academic discourse up to the present day: a focus on case studies, often without looking at the industries that produce them, and a very clear research rationale about identities and discourses (Muramatsu 1979; Gössmann and Muramatsu eds. 1998; Iwao 2000; Iwabuchi 2001, 2002).