Hi, I'm a graduate student doing my master's thesis research on the globalization of Japanese popular culture, especially jrock, and its effect on youth culture abroad.
If anyone has time, I would really appreciate you filling out my survey online. Your answers would really help me in my research.
I did the survey. I thought my responses had some followup potential, if you were interested, so I included my email.
Incidentally, when I finished the survey, I was not redirected to any kind of confirmation page, but rather to the surveymonkey.com homepage. Was this supposed to happen? Luckily, I copy and pasted one of my responses, so I could just resend it to you if you didn't get mine (I'll PM you with more details).
When you hit the done button I believe the redirect page means you're done so no worries, your answers showed up.
I believe when the survey is done (I may keep it up for another few weeks to get more responses) I can give you all a link to view the results. I'll let you know.
And thank you guys so much for taking the time to do this. Jrock fans are the best.
It'd definitely be interesting to see a more academic, and more importantly, more objective, approach regarding Jpop culture, so I wish you good luck. I know there was a Laura Miller who did a study on Gackt, Hyde and male masculinity in Japanese culture, but I haven't been able to get a hold of her work.
Let us know where we can find your work, when you're done (or... maybe a bibliography of helpful sources?). I've been meaning to write a personal reflection/essay on Japanese Pop Music Culture, just for myself, but I haven't been able to find much academic material on it that would help to reduce my own subjective perspective.
I have another year to finish my thesis, and I am unsure if it will be published at all.
An article by Laura Miller entitled "Male beauty work in Japan" can be found in Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman doxa edited by James Robertson and Nobue Suzuki (2003). I am unsure where else to find her work.
In terms of Jmusic, there isn't much written on the subject yet. Most American academics are writing about anime in the global landscape and not looking at other cultural forms much.
If you're interested in globalization and how things become popular and are localized, I recommend Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon, edited by Joseph Tobin. Also, Koichi Iwabuchi has written extensively on Japanese popular culture in Asia, as well as in the West. I recently read Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. There is also an article by Ubonrat Siriyuvasak about Popular Culture and Youth Consumption in Thailand, it discusses Thai youth's appropriation of Japanese popular culture and discusses jrock a bit as well.
For info on Japanese popular culture, Susan Napier and Sharon Kinsella are good for info. I am also a fan of Takashi Murakami, the contemporary pop artist. His articles on the perception of Japanese culture in the West through his art, which reflect popular cultural forms, is quite insightful.
Oh, I take that back, Laura Miller will be out with a book in June called Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. (check Amazon.com)
Also, here is an article about Gackt someone posted by Miller on another forum.
"Fashion innovation, not emulation"
By Laura Miller, Ph.D (Loyola University, Chicago)
(Originally published in The Chicago Shimpo, Friday, January 16, 2004, p. 21)
One of the hottest entertainers in Japan right now is a mega-star with the stage name Gakuto or "Gackt." A former member of a Japanese Goth band, he started his solo career in 1999. Over the years Gackt has appeared with hair dyed many shades, from silvery white to the reddish brown hue known as chapatsu (literally "tea head"). He often wears contact lenses that change his brown eyes to blue or green. Older Japanese and people outside Japan assume that Gackt, and the thousands of young men like him, are attempting to look "foreign" or "white." But is this really a case of warped imitation, or might there be more to it? Could it be that Gackt and the others have models of appearance that originate in Japanese popular culture? My suspicion is that they are not looking to Hollywood or Madison Avenue when they change their appearance, but are drawing on Japanese fashion and media for their inspiration.
Perhaps sources for their altered looks are the characters found in Japanese comic books, anime and computer games. Indeed, fans of Gackt love to hunt for his "lookalikes" in domestically-produced media. An instance in which Gackt explicitly modeled himself after a character was when he dressed up as a Meiji-era (1868-1911) samurai straight out of the popular series Ruroni Kenshin. At other times, Gackt himself has claimed that media characters were created after his likeness. His nickname for Squall Leonhart of the Final Fantasy VIII role-playing game is "Gackt Number Two." In August 2003, the game company Taito announced that it was working on a new Sony Playstation game named Bujingai, in which the main character is patterned directly after Gackt. Gackt also worked on voice acting and motion-capture for the project.
Although all forms of fashion, from ancient to modern, entail a degree of artificiality (consider the buttressed and shellacked shimada hairstyle), the artificial styles of today's Japanese youth are often seen as nothing more than emulation of outside or foreign models. Yet we are missing something if the only interpretation we imagine is failed imitation. New fashion conventions in Japan involve melding of both native and borrowed elements to create something entirely novel. Unlike past generations, young people exuberantly combine beauty ideals from different cultures or historical periods. Japanese fashion innovations are not the emulation of any specific foreign trend, but are based on a combination or juxtaposition of items from different eras, places and cultures. This practice even has a name: mukokuseki, "lacking nationality." The aim of the mukokuseki style is not to look "Western," or Japanese, but rather like something that cannot be categorized. The photographer Shoichi Aoki beautifully captures this aesthetic in his photos of Japanese street fashion found in the monthly Fruits, a publication that also has some popularity among trendy American teenagers.
Bleached or colored hair is spectacularly popular in Japan. Until the late 1980s, dyed hair was still a minority fashion, but it has gradually become common among all members of Japanese society, from young people and entertainers to politicians. Almost all the members of the Japanese soccer team now have dyed their hair. In the year 2000, a poll was taken of more than two thousand male and female Japanese high school students, among whom nearly 40% had dyed their hair. Other surveys have given much higher rates. For example, a 1997 poll in the magazine Nikkei Trendy found that 65% of the men they queried had dyed their hair.
Japan's own thriving popular culture industries are most likely the primary source for recent body styles and fashions found among global Japanese youth. Hair styles are often traceable to characters found in comics, or to JPop singers and other media stars. One male celebrity who has been influential is Jiro, lead singer of Glay, one of the hottest bands. Jiro's hair has been pink, orange, green, blue, black, gold, and white. He has dyed his hair more than ten varieties of brown, and more than five shades of red. To achieve Jiro's hair, Japanese men's magazines such as Bidan or Fine Boys carry detailed styling and coloring instructions. When Japanese American adolescents dye their hair, they may not have Brad Pitt in mind, but rather celebrities such as Gackt or Jiro.
Meiji-era gentlemen were the first to begin mixing Western accouterments and clothing into their wardrobes, things like hats, umbrellas, and pocket watches. People thought they were trying to be modern, not that they had weak notions about ethnic identity. These days fashion has extended further to encompass the body itself. Youth fashion around the globe includes changes to the body, including hair modification, piercing and tattooing. I wonder why only Anglo Americans are free to do these things to the body without being accused of trying to change their ethnic identity? It seems odd that whenever Anglo Americans adopt nose piercing, dreadlocks, and so on, it is seen as proof of their own creativeness and tolerance, yet when members of other ethnic groups participate in body fashion, it is not seen as fashion, but rather as evidence of a psychological problem. To press it further, Japanese and Japanese American consumers of youth fashion are unfairly viewed as victims of American cultural imperialism, a stance which denies them the possibility of creating alternative aesthetic forms and meanings. For example, one important meaning behind experimentation with the outward appearance of the body is that it underscores a severance with the older generation. A young man with plucked eyebrows and long red hair is a powerful form of "salaryman rejection." More than anything else, his dyed hair and blue contacts signify a desire to be different from the men of his father's generation.
Of course, we cannot deny the power and racism implicit in mainstream American media representation. I am of Hispanic ancestry, and grew up in Southern California where I felt oppressed by the blonde, beach-bunny beauty ideal. But I also see a different, and more complex, transnational world around me. Young people everywhere are interested in Japanese popular culture, a milieu brimming with blue, orange, white and brown-haired idols and characters, and value it for its unique and creative innovations. It is only in American media where homogenous images of black-haired and bespeckled Japanese men remain. Ironically, one way for young Japanese American men to assert ethnic identity in the U.S. is through consumption of Japanese popular culture, and by extension, through emulation of JPop stars such as Jiro and Gackt. These days, when I see a Japanese American man with dyed hair, I think to myself that he is refusing to conform to mainstream American expectations about how Asian men ought to look, and that he is in tune with the current cultural scene in Japan.
Very interesting infos and article, thanks for posting these Yukke!
As a visual artist, I'm particularly interested in checking out the work of Takashi Murakami.
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