Japanese street dance culture in manga and anime: Hip hop transcription in Samurai Champloo and Tokyo Tribe-2

Street dance, one of the four most important elements of hip hop culture, was developed mainly by African American youths in the 1970s and imported to Japan in the 1980s. Since then, street dance has been diversified by local media such as manga/anime in Japan. This article therefore analyses how Japanese storytelling, exemplified by Shin’ichirō Watanabe’s anime Samurai Champloo (2004–05), Santa Inoue’s manga Tokyo Tribe-2 (1997–2005) and Tatsuo Satō’s anime adaptation Tokyo Tribes (2006–07), has transcribed the hip hop elements into the Tokugawa-Edo period’s art scenes and fictitious ‘Tōkyō’, and provides a basis for understanding hip hop culture in Japan by drawing on Charles Taylor’s ‘language of perspicuous contrast’ (1985). Although manga and anime quickly reflected popular cultural trends in Japan, hip hop elements did not manifest as main material until Tokyo Tribe-2 was released. Thus, there was apparently a prolonged interval between the arrival of hip hop culture in Japan and its representation by manga/anime after Japanese youths’ first fancied street dance. Therefore, street dance culture could have been transformed within the Japanese cultural context. This article also analyses the representation/transcription of street dance and hip hop in manga/amine by contextualizing the Japanese sociopolitical background to explain this prolonged interval.

Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, 1st ed., Teri Silvio (2019)

Review of: Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, 1st ed., Teri Silvio (2019) Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 290 pp., ISBN-13 978-0-82487-662-3, h/bk, $80 ISBN-13 978-0-82488-116-0, p/bk, $30

A heteropatriarchy in moderation: Reading family in a Thai Boys Love lakhon

A subgenre of popular culture, Thai Boys Love (BL) series is increasingly significant within Asia, but it remains under-researched in the light of new series that push the parameters of viewer acceptance of homoerotic romance in Thai society. Drawing upon a close reading of the BL lakhon Love by Chance, this article explicates how Thai cultural concepts surrounding the family are reflected in the series. While acknowledging the impact of East Asian popular culture on Thai understandings of gender and sexuality, the article highlights how the themes of familial dynamics and parental acceptance in Love by Chance represent a glocalization of the BL genre, or BL with Thai characteristics. By introducing the concept of ‘moderated heteropatriarchy’ and sketching the role of family in Thai queer lives, the article suggests that there is still space for subtle challenges or changes to the heteronormative structure as plotted in Love by Chance, even as the lakhon continues to uphold national and patriarchal principles that deny overt expressions of homoerotic romance.

Language, identity and unintelligibility: A case study of the rap group Higher Brothers

The Chengdu-based quartet Higher Brothers recently became the first China-born hip hop group to gain global fame. As rap music – originally a local, ethnic African American culture in the United States – has been continually relocalized all over the world and thus globalized, the Higher Brothers have undergone another process of glocalization. This presents a new case study to further examine the dynamics between the global and the local. Because rap is an intensely verbal art, this article explores how the Higher Brothers construct and negotiate their complicated and multiple (local, national and global) identities from the perspective of language. It analyses the language used in their songs – Sichuan Chengdu Mandarin, Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) and English – before and after they signed with 88rising, the media company that brought the group to the West. Due to the rappers’ distinctive ways of vocal production, many of their trap-style songs prove hard to understand not only for global audiences but also for most Chinese national audiences and even for the quartet’s local audiences. Drawing on recent studies of mumble rap, this article explores the politics and sonic aesthetics of unintelligibility of the Chinese trap music.

Animist influence and immutable corporeality: Repositioning the significance of Japanese cinematic zombies

In terms of zombie film output, Japan’s is perhaps the second largest in the world after the United States and above the United Kingdom. Yet only a relatively small number of these films have received academic attention. Having sourced and verified an exhaustive catalogue of over 160 feature-length Japanese zombie films produced between 1959 and 2018, and through recent field work in Japan, including personal interviews with local film, media and folklore scholars and professionals, this article constructs a clearer overview of this uncharted corpus. It presents some of the most predominant cultural specificities of Japanese zombie films and their compelling narrative and stylistic heterogeneity. Previous assertions confined these films to a ‘cult’ sub-genre, restricting the Japanese monsters they feature to mere western imports; however, this article demonstrates that Japanese cinematic zombies defy simple categorization and repeatedly challenge some of the key posits at the centre of zombie studies, especially regarding their defining characteristics. The Japanese folklore and literary tradition in particular provides a new lens through which these popular fictional ‘Others’ can be (re-)examined, uncovering new significance and offering new insights into both Japanese and western cultures.

Democracy in female fast-fashion: A case study in Taiwan

This article investigates the influences of fast-fashion on the dynamic performance of dressed bodies of female consumers aged 18–45 in Taiwan, the demographic that most enjoys buying fast-fashion clothing. It analyses the types of fashion democracy that fast-fashions provide Taiwanese female consumers. This article also proposes an alternative qualitative research method and concept that allows researchers to investigate the intricate relationships between clothing, the body and society by reviewing the interactive relationship between clothing patterns and wearers’ bodies. Findings show that Uniqlo is the most popular fast-fashion brand in Taiwan exhibiting fashion democracy for Taiwanese female consumers.

Writing girls through girls’ magazines: (En)gendering childhood, 1895–1912

Throughout Japanese literary history, though the shōjo genre (a genre for girls) was often marginalized, it evolved and was renewed at every stage in the development of print media, blending with another or several different genres. This article examines how the circulation of girls’ magazines such as Shōjokai (Girls’ Sphere) shaped girls’ reading communities to accompany the sense of national belonging that arose in tandem with the reinforcement of gender ideologies. An analysis of Shōjokai will show how, why and by whom images of desirable female ‘little citizens’ were constructed, fractured and expressed through print media. As the first girls’ magazine, Shōjokai delineated how the reading and writing of girls opened up a new arena in which subscribers expressed their ideas and opinions without constrains while understanding the value of being good ‘little citizens’. Thus, the development of girls’ communities created tensions between universal principles of love and national consciousness, illuminating the ways in which the discourse of modern girlhood alternately negated and affirmed their association with fluid communities for ‘little citizens’.

I Hear Your Voice, Young-Ha Kim (2017) (trans. Krys Lee)

Review of: I Hear Your Voice, Young-Ha Kim (2017) (trans. Krys Lee) New York: Mariner Books, 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-544-32447-3, p/bk, $13.99

The applicability of Big Five facets and Dark Tetrad traits on Yukio Mishima’s novel protagonists

Psychological accounts of literature research are chiefly associated with a psychoanalytical nomenclature, while research on personality psychology like the Five Factor Model and the Dark Tetrad has mostly been investigated using questionnaires and quantitative statistics. However, building upon a lexical understanding of the 30 Big Five personality facets, in tandem with the application of Dark Tetrad traits on popular culture analysis initiated by Jonason et al., this study analyses the personality profiles of five fictional protagonists, specifically five well-known novels of the renowned Japanese author Yukio Mishima.