Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Main Argument: Allison argues that several things were different about the "J-cool" boom that began in the 1990s, beginning with the fact that it had a far greater level of influence on the U.S. marketplace than did previous Japanese cultural imports. Allison believes that fantasy, capitalism, and globalism are conjoined and (re)configured in Japanese media mix properties [the term is anachronistic to her book], and that the "polymorphously perverse" play they engender (and embody) is key to their appeal--both at the level of practice and at the level of the media mix itself.

( Pokemon, Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, tamagotchi )

Critical assessment: I would have liked this book much better if I had read it before I read Marc Steinberg's book, which I think offers a much better grasp on much of the same territory. Admission: that is because I am not an anthropologist, and because I am allergic to culture as a primary causal factor in anything for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture but which can be symbolized by the assertion that culture changes damn quick when people want it to. The "techno-animism" argument, frankly, I think is better explained by simply saying that Japan moved into a new mode of capitalism before other countries; this is Latour's "parliament of things" in a capitalist inflection. But also, I don't like Freud, and Allison is very much a Freudian, albeit in a feminist inflection. Sidenote: WTF is with feminists liking Freud? Freud does not like you, ladies! Freud does not even believe that queerness exists! Vomit. That said, once Allison gets away from all that and into her analysis of capitalism, I think she's basically on the money, albeit in a different and frankly somewhat dated idiom. A worthwhile book, for sure, but very much not the whole story.

Further reading: Steinberg, Anime's Media Mix; The LEGO Movie

Meta notes: Gotta catch 'em all! Also, what does "New Age" even mean anymore?

Bibliographic Data: Allison, Anne. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Main Argument: Hostess clubs, and in particular the company-paid outings that frequently take place there, are sites of both work and play in which male corporate workers of a certain echelon construct themselves as a group of men together through the conduit of the woman, the hostess, who is paid to attend them. Although the habit of visiting hostess clubs is said to be 'natural,' hostess clubs in fact constitute an artificial site in which corporations are able to manipulate their employees' subjectivity, desires, and identity, suturing them tightly to their jobs.

( Hostess clubs & salarymen )

Critical assessment: This is a courageous, insightful book, with a lot of important points to make about work, money, gender, play and sex in contemporary Japan--if Andrew Gordon's The Wages of Affluence documented the creation of a gyroscopic political and social hegemony through a construction of union labor, Allison's book is concerned with how that same hegemony operates on and genders salarymen, who are nominally better off than factory workers but whose worklife regularly extends to midnight or later in hostess clubs. Though Allison makes no bones about her own feminism, and deploys feminist analysis to great effect in this book, in the end her analysis mirrors hostess clubs themselves, in which men are the focus and women are merely conduits for men to build themselves up amongst their peer group. This in itself, however, is highly valuable, and the book gains as well from Allison's determined engagement with several 'scholars' of Nihonjinron ('theories of Japaneseness') whose culturally essentialist explanations for the behaviors of salarymen at work and at play simply treat hostess clubs as natural and leave it at that.

In class discussion a lot of my male colleagues objected to Allison's final points about impotence and the salaryman--while I agree that Lacanian theory can seem suspicious after a while, my own reading of the book and their reaction is that they objected out of a discomfort that hit rather close to home rather than to the actual content of Allison's arguments in this respect, which are not meant to be universal. I think to some extent this is a reflection of the fact that at this point in academia we are fairly well acquainted with the idea that male privilege exists, but we are much more prone to perceiving how society operates on and structures "women" than we are prepared to acknowledge that it does the same to "men." And that, I think, is the real and uncomfortable truth that Allison's work here exposes, above and beyond her conclusions about the suturing of work and identity for male corporate employees in Japan. (Though for someone who has no truck with the social fiction that mahjong is not played for money, it seems bizarre that Allison fails to realize that pachinko is played for--quite a lot of--money too.)

Further reading: Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, Millennial Monsters

Meta notes: It would be really interesting for a male anthropologist to do field work in a host club today--the fieldwork in this book is 30 years old, and some of the details are clearly out of date. In particular, exploring what the women who patronize host clubs (and they do; host clubs and hosts are a visible presence in many Japanese cities, to say nothing of butler and maid cafes) are doing there would make a fascinating counterpoint to this study.

Dore, Ronald P. Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. [1978]

Ronald Dore first went to the hamlet of Shinohata, about a hundred miles north of Tokyo, in 1955 to study the effect of the recently enacted land reform there as part of his survey of land reform in Japan--Shinohata fitting his idea of the third sort of village he needed to survey to give a roughly representative picture in his book. But he kept coming back over the years, and in the late 1970s he was asked to write an ethnography of the village as it was then; inevitably, Dore drew on comparisons between the Shinohata of 1975 and of 1955, and of the Shinohata of even earlier that he heard about from people in their stories and recollections, diligently recorded and transcribed by him. The new UC edition incorporates an afterword written in 1993, just after the electoral earthquake of the LDP's temporary eclipse from power.

These years, in other words, encompass Japan's postwar, the Economic Miracle, the Bubble, and gesture towards the Recession, but Dore's focus on the village he comes to know and, it's clear, to love, and its inhabitants keeps the larger concerns of the general story in the background. Primarily Dore is concerned with the effects that increasing economic prosperity have on individuals, their livelihoods, their households, and the community as a whole, and if in the 1978 epilogue he comes down unequivocally in favor of development and the real changes in standards of living that it brings, along with many other material and non-material goods, the 1993 epilogue is, not renunciatory, but mindful of the fact that Japan's growth has real social costs that in some sense, as the recession continues, may not be worth paying.

Dore is a wonderful writer; Shinohata reads like a novel, and he shows a true understanding of and sympathy for the village and the ways it works, and explains them lucidly and with a sense of humor. I recognized aspects of my own experience in Japan in many of his recollections, and the book fleshes out a story that many people, I think, know only in broad outlines from poli sci texts and economic history lectures. I appreciated too that Dore, though by 1993 he has come to question the social costs of growth, does not abandon his conviction that economic prosperity is a real human net positive. This comes up in discussions of modernity sometimes: yes, the 20thC was bloody beyond recompense, and yes, modernity and its atomizing and anonymizing forces can be pernicious, but antibiotics and vaccines are great too, and so is the prosperity that makes our current lifestyles thinkable, and possible. And none of them are easy to decouple from the others, outside of fascist delusions.

1993 is nearly 20 years from 2011; I wonder what Shinohata is like today, and given what I know of Japanese politics and society since then, I would not be surprised to to find anything from stasis-that's-actually-a-backslide to a real retrogression in both economic prosperity and social cohesion. Japan is routinely excoriated for the rural agricultural subsidies--more or less capital transfers--that it pays, and one of the things that doomed the LDP at last in the late 00s was its cutting those payments. But Dore makes the point that those payments, at least during the Miracle and the Bubble, can rightly be seen as payback for the years of Meiji, Taishô, and Shôwa industrialization, in which the government extracted all the capital it could from the land and put it all into industry, without hesitation or apology. Those earlier transfers out made possible the later transfers in, and what I'm dancing around saying here is that, fundamentally, the Japanese and every nation have at least in theory the right to run their economy and society however they please. It's not for anyone else to question their choices, though of course that doesn't stop people from doing so; Dore doesn't do that. He does, however, ask the tough question:

So come on, Dore, said a friend to whom I was telling some of this. You used to say none of this 'where are the snows of yesteryear' business. None of this green nostalgia for a warmer, unpolluted, nonpolluting, natural human past. All the changes in Shinohata are for the better. That's what you used to say. But what about now? Are you still of the same mind? (327)