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Intercultural Communication in Japan: Theorizing Homogenizing Discourse book cover

1st Edition

Intercultural Communication in Japan Theorizing Homogenizing Discourse

Edited By Satoshi Toyosaki, Shinsuke Eguchi Copyright 2017
    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge
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    Japan is heterogeneous and culturally diverse, both historically through ancient waves of immigration and in recent years due to its foreign relations and internationalization. However, Japan has socially, culturally, politically, and intellectually constructed a distinct and homogeneous identity. More recently, this identity construction has been rightfully questioned and challenged by Japan’s culturally diverse groups.

    This book explores the discursive systems of cultural identities that regenerate the illusion of Japan as a homogeneous nation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches investigate the ways in which Japan’s homogenizing discourses are challenged and modified by counter-homogeneous message systems. They examine the discursive push-and-pull between homogenizing and heterogenizing vectors, found in domestic and transnational contexts and mobilized by various identity politics, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, foreign status, nationality, multiculturalism, and internationalization. After offering a careful and critical analysis, the book calls for a complicating of Japan’s homogenizing discourses in nuanced and contextual ways, with an explicit goal of working towards a culturally diverse Japan.

    Taking a critical intercultural communication perspective, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Japanese Culture and Japanese Society.

    Introduction: Intercultural Communication in Japan

    Satoshi Toyosaki and Shinsuke Eguchi

    Part I: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body

      1. The Affective Politics of the Feminine: An Interpassive Analysis of Japanese Female Comedians

        2. Sachi Sekimoto and Yusaku Yajima

      2. "It’s a Wonderful Single Life.": Constructions and Representations of Female Singleness in Japan’s Contemporary Josei Dorama

        3. Emi Kanemoto and Kristie Collins

      3. The Shifting Gender Landscape of Japanese Society

        4. Justin Charlebois

        Part II: Performance and Queerness

      4. Japanese Male-Queer Femininity: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Matsuko Deluxe as an Onē-Kei Talent

        5. Shinsuke Eguchi

      5. Bleach in Color: Unpacking Gendered, Queered, and Raced Performances in Anime

        6. Reslie Cortes

        Part III: Inclusiveness and Otherness

      6. The Discursive Pushes and Pulls of J-pop and K-pop in Taiwan: Cultural Homogenization and Identity Co-Optation

        7. Hsun-Yu (Sharon) Chuang

      7. ‘Hating Korea’ (Kenkan) in Postcolonial Japan

        8. Andre Haag

      8. Japan’s Internationalization: A Dialectics of Orientalism and Hybridism

        9. Satoshi Toyosaki and Eric Forbush

        Part IV: Media and Movement

      9. Ishihara Shintaro’s Manga Moral Panic: The Homogenizing Rhetoric of Japanese Nationalism

        10. Lucy J. Miller

      10. mixi and an Imagined Boundary of Japan

        11. Ryuta Komaki

        Part V: Environment and Movement

      11. Historicization of Cherry Blossoms: A Study of Japan’s Homogenizing Discourses

        12. Takuya Sakurai

      12. Alternative vs. Conventional: Dialectic Relations of the Organic Agriculture Discourse

    Saki Ichihara Fomsgaard

    　

    Biography

    Satoshi Toyosaki is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA.

    Shinsuke Eguchi is an Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico, USA.

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