Intercultural Communication in Japan

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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

Introduction: Intercultural Communication in Japan

*Satoshi Toyosaki and Shinsuke Eguchi

• Part I: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body

• The Affective Politics of the Feminine: An Interpassive Analysis of Japanese Female Comedians * Sachi Sekimoto and Yusaku Yajima *

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

  Emi Kanemoto and Kristie Collins *

• The Shifting Gender Landscape of Japanese Society * Justin Charlebois

  • Part II: Performance and Queerness

• Japanese Male-Queer Femininity: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Matsuko Deluxe as an One-Kei Talent * Shinsuke Eguchi *

• Bleach in Color: Unpacking Gendered, Queered, and Raced Performances in Anime * Reslie Cortes

  • Part III: Inclusiveness and Otherness

• The Discursive Pushes and Pulls of J-pop and K-pop in Taiwan: Cultural Homogenization and Identity Co-Optation * Hsun-Yu (Sharon) Chuang *

• 'Hating Korea' (Kenkan) in Postcolonial Japan * Andre Haag *

• Japan's Internationalization: A Dialectics of Orientalism and Hybridism * Satoshi Toyosaki and Eric Forbush

  • Part IV: Media and Movement

• Ishihara Shintaro's Manga Moral Panic: The Homogenizing Rhetoric of Japanese Nationalism

  * Lucy J. Miller *

• mixi and an Imagined Boundary of Japan * Ryuta Komaki

  • Part V: Environment and Movement

• Historicization of Cherry Blossoms: A Study of Japan's Homogenizing Discourses * Takuya Sakurai *

• Alternative vs. Conventional: Dialectic Relations of the Organic Agriculture Discourse * Saki Ichihara Fomsgaard

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