Does an Upcycling Kimono Practice Support Recycle-Oriented Cultural Sustainability? Japanese College Students’ Perspectives

Kimono (a traditional Japanese garment worn by women) has played an important role in Japanese indigenous cultural origins. Ecological and sustainable ideas have inherently existed in kimono culture within this lifestyle. Since the United Nations announced the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the Japanese government has focused on creating healthy spaces with a sustainable direction in mind. However, textile-related product recycling rates were relatively low in Japan at the time. This empirical study used SDGs as a conceptual framework to examine Japanese college students’ perceptions of kimono upcycling practices and challenges. A mixed method was used to analyze the data. An open-ended questionnaire was distributed to college students in June 2019 in Liberal Arts at a national women’s university (n=155). The findings showed that interest in kimono upcycling moderately correlated to those and an interest in western garments upcycling (.578; p<.01). The relationship between these variables was significant (Chi-square: 48.471; p <.001). In the qualitative analysis, a coding method was used to explore common themes of students’ awareness and knowledge of upcycling kimono practices and found four strong themes to be present. The students perceived that upcycled kimono items connected to preserving family memories, whereas others noted upcycled items were used for sustainable resources. Also, three common challenges were found: practicality, technical issues, and people’s awareness. Some students also associated items with Japanese cultural preservation. College students’ attitudes and perceptions towards cultural sustainability engagement could therefore be a crucial mediator during sustainable development drives.

The Influence of National Cultural Attributes on Locally Produced Designs: Case Study of Malaysian Design

This paper examines the influence of national cultural attributes on locally produced designs (i.e. comics, animation, commercial advertisements, printed materials and graphics). Drawing from the inconsistent results of past literature on influences of national cultural attributes on design; it is considered an under-researched area of the important role of cultural values on designs, specifically in the Malaysia context, in which cultural differences among different ethnic groups exist. Because of the paucity of research in this area, this study adopted a quantitative research approach with results derived from the content-analysis of 18 Malaysian designs using a visual preference survey by six experts from the design industry in Malaysia. This study incorporates two stages of sample screenings of a visual preference survey with brief interviews; results show that Malaysian designs need to adhere strictly to requirements and specifications set by the Malaysian authorities; incorporation of Islamic values and code of conduct to reflect the racial harmony and national ideology; and some unique characteristics of the respective ethnic groups in Malaysia were not upheld, thus, they gradually disappeared and/or were blended in the designs. The results and discussion from this study extend the literature on Malaysian design and provide practical implications on how local design industries could produce designs which abide by the boundaries of a Malaysian pluralistic society.

The Three Epochs of Hong Kong Lolita Subculture: Cultural Hybridization and Identity Construction

Lolita is identified as a female oriented subculture phenomenon which came about in the 1990s in Harajuku, Japan. Youths in Hong Kong, because culturally and geographically in close proximity to Japan, will usually adapt their neighboring city Tokyo’s cultural movements. This paper explores the development, meaning, significance of Lolita phenomena in Hong Kong from the postmodern historical and socio-cultural points of view. By assembling and examining the ethnographic data from face-to-face interviewees and materials from online resources between 2014 and 2017, we reviewed and proposed that there are three major epochs of Lolita subculture development in Hong Kong. The study concludes that the changes in online practices over the past two decades lead to the transformation of Lolita identity within the group. It also indicates that the development of Hong Kong Lolita subculture shows a positive impact of cultural hybridization. Moreover, through the active practice on virtual platforms, the group creates an imagined community for the participants to share their beliefs and dreams freely.

Making Sovereignty Mean Something: Native Nations and Creative Adaptation

Scholarship regarding Native Nations has often focused on the problems of Native Nations caused by a brutal history of genocide, repression and forced assimilation. Relatively little attention has been paid to how Native Nations creatively adapt to their circumstances in a continual process of reinvention. This article provides insights into Native Nations through examples in the lower 48 states and Alaska. This study, based on 16 interviews the author conducted with Native Nations leaders in Alaska and the lower 48 states, demonstrates how Native Nations adapt to their unique circumstances to make sovereignty meaningful, because of and in spite of federal legislation that seeks to govern Nation Nations. Ultimately, I argue that many Native Nations today are purposefully modernizing by creatively adapting to their circumstances, transforming systems of governance, and leveraging economic tools, integrating their own evolving cultural practices. While modernization implies following a Western developmental path, purposeful modernization is driven by the choices of the people. While change was forced upon Native Nations in numerous, often devastating, ways since colonization, they have nevertheless asserted agency and formed governments and economic institutions that reflect and reinforce their own cultural norms. This article highlights examples of how Native Nations and the lower 48 have adapted given the very different circumstances created in part by state and federal policies such as the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).

The Ancestors of a New Society: The Tribes (Buzoku) and their Journey through the Misunderstandings of the Japanese Countercultural Scene

Buzoku 部族, generally translated as The Tribe (or The Tribes), was a transnational collective of artists, poets, activists, and young people who soon became one of the most vital Japanese counterculture voices. Between 1967 and 1980, they participated in what they called “building a new society into the shell of this civilization” in the Japanese islands. Despite scholars and mass media’s recent interest in their lives and literary works, there are common misunderstandings resulting from characterizing Buzoku as the Japanese hippies, or fūten. This paper focuses on the transition period (1965-1968), going from the foundation of the prior group named Bum Academy to the formation of Buzoku. This article recounts this part of their history to show that this transition was vital for forging Buzoku’s identity and original ideology guided by a cross-cultural approach to spirituality and arts. They used a range of synchronization, translation, appropriation, and juxtaposition skills to set the bases of a “dreamed” community of tribes. This research shows that at least one countercultural collective in Japan’s sixties scene was involved in complex linguistic, artistic, and spiritual synchronizations with the global scene while simultaneously practicing the art of embodying the dream of building a new civilization.

Toward a Juris-cultural Studies of Human Rights

This special issue grew out of an advanced seminar on Cultural Studies that I guest-taught at the National University of Singapore in 2018, where there has been a long-time engagement with interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the field of Cultural Studies through NUS’s Asian Research Institute (and more recently through the university’s Department of Communication and New Media). The essays collected here represent a collection of sincere efforts to reframe political and ethical crises through a unified framework that can be called juris-cultural studies of law and rights. By “juris-cultural,” I refer to a genre of critical cultural analysis that investigates the mutually constitutive nature of law and culture, through dissecting “law as culture” in which cultural signifying practices are traceable to the presence or absence of legal norms, as well as through “culture as law” in which the contested meanings of cultural communities, their practices and politics, can shape or even dictate social norms and regulations. It is both a political language and a method that avoids separating law and culture but confronts their uneasy entanglements. The essays are united by a common critical method of combining critical legal theory with a cultural critique of law. Each essay centers on a particular court case, and performs critical reading of the legal logics and reasoning alongside a broader attention to social and cultural ideologies and power relations that overdetermine the outcome of the court judgment. The insights produced by such a method will hopefully present to readers an innovative approach adequate to the task of bringing the problems of rights, legal subjectivities, and critical justice squarely to the doorsteps of Cultural Studies.

The Air-conditioned Nation under Global Warming – An Exploratory Study of the Speech and Assembly Freedom and Politics of Space in Singapore

Singapore is known to have a citizenry loyal to its one-party dominated government. Cherian George refers Singapore as the “Air-conditioned Nation,” wherein free speech is sacrificed for economic stability in this metaphorical or virtual greenhouse and fostered a controlled and docile politic. Dissent from members of registered opposition parties or ordinary citizens, however, has been voiced during “illegal gatherings” in public places. Many of these attempts, both purposeful and accidental, challenge rules designed to limit the citizenry’s ability to voice publicly. In this paper, I examine these civil disobedient acts under the framework of construction and politics of socially- and mentally-constructed space in connection to the laws of Singapore. Utilizing the ideas of space as defined by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, I analyze three separate accounts of assembly and/or procession. I identify the relevant laws of Singapore and examine how these laws are interpreted and applied by law enforcement, revealing a tension between space and the body politic. Politics of space is a concept usually connected to social class; yet, class consciousness is what the Singaporean government strives to eliminate through the control of ideology and by limiting the freedom of speech in public spaces. My contribution examines the relationship between space and politics, reflecting the conflicts between the government, which has the power over the use of places and citizens who would like to express ideas differently from governmental-led ideologies physically and publicly in these places, and the opposition’s actions in this virtually-caged public space named Singapore.

Challenging the Constitutionality of Section 377A in Singapore: Towards a More Humanist Treatment of Homosexuality in Singapore Law

This paper examines the tensions between the law, politics and public opinion in Singapore via a landmark 2014 ruling that upheld the constitutionality of Section 377A of the Penal Code criminalising sex between men. It argues that the ruling dealt a serious blow to the human rights project for minority groups in Singapore due to complex socio-political biases towards homosexuals and a narrow legal logic that is overly deferential to the legislature. This “tyranny of the majority” not only reinforces longstanding prejudices against the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community and deprives them of their rights, but potentially results in the graver consequence of compromising the integrity of the Singapore Constitution and the country’s democratic ideals. The paper also illustrates how the court of public opinion, split between conservative and liberal pro-humanist camps, not only keeps this issue at an impasse through opposing representations of homosexuality but also reflects an important ideological juncture that Singapore currently finds itself at as it navigates the path to modernisation and liberalisation. It urges a humanistic re-imagination of the law where the formulation and instrumentalisation of laws are constantly renegotiated and reworked to become more responsive as historical contexts and social relations between various parties beyond the State and its apparatus evolve. It also ventures that decriminalising homosexuality presents Singapore with the opportunity to define a new Asian post-colonial modernity and that the concept of “rights capital” can introduce greater equity and dignity within society.

Killing with No Punishment: Police Violence and Judicial (In)justice

This article offers a critical reading of the Limbu Case that took place in 2009 in Hong Kong. The Limbu Case was about an ethnic Nepalese named Dil Bahadur Limbu who was shot dead by a police constable on a hillside, which resulted in controversies around issues such as excessive police use of force and discretionary policing in Hong Kong. In the coroner’s inquest (court case no.: CCDI298/2009) regarding Limbu’s death, a verdict of lawful killing was reached by a jury of five. In other words, the killing was defined as a permissible killing. Drawing attention to the process of questioning “reasonableness” of the killing, I attempt to shed light on the ambiguities of the coronial system in Hong Kong which results in a missed opportunity to prevent future deaths. In other words, this article uncovers how the state is unable to live up to its promise to protect people's right to life.

A Quest for “Justice” in Capital Punishment: A Socio-Legal Study of the Nirbhaya Gangrape Case

The December 16, 2012 gang rape case in India’s capital ignited fierce discussion on women’s rights, safety measures as well as the punishment for the rapists. A major question stemming from this case and elaborated in this paper is: is capital punishment for a rapist an effective measure, as a form of “justice” for the victim? The paper concludes that capital punishment should be abolished even for gruesome crimes like rape and it further raises the question whether capital punishment can serve as a reform tool for the existing and oftentimes dysfunctional criminal system in India. Through a thorough analysis of Mukesh & Another Vs State of NCT of Delhi and others (known as the Nirbhaya gang rape case), the paper explores capital punishment for the rapist from a socio-legal and cultural perspective. The case particularly becomes important as, along with other issues, it is concerned with the question of rights of the victim vis-à-vis the rights of the offender. In other words, the paper delves deeper into the conflict between the victims’ interests and the right of the offender in the justice system by examining who is responsible for what and to what extent. Taking a human rights approach, the paper examines the human rights jurisprudence in India as well as in international laws. Further, it maps the social and historical perspective revolving around rape victimhood and gender along with arguments that have been predominant for and against capital punishment, particularly for rapists in an Indian context.