Millennial Monsters (review)

For readers of a certain age—meaning most of us over forty—Anne Allison's book on the transnational production and consumption of Japanese toys can be a bit tough going. Far more mysterious than any traditional ethnography of a Japanese village, company, or suburb, this virtual world of "pocket monsters," "Tamagotchi," and "morphin power rangers" is truly baffling for those who did not participate in these commercialized fantasies as children. Parents of small children will undoubtedly be familiar with some of these toys and media products, but as Allison points out, most parents have long given up on trying to figure out the intricacies of the commercialized fantasy games their children play. The tasks of the ethnographer in explaining this alien landscape to the reader and analyzing its relations to the larger social world are challenging indeed.

Allison—arguably America's leading anthropologist of Japan—proves up to the task she has taken on. Based on interviews with cultural producers and consumers as well as visual and documentary analyses, the book is a model ethnographic account of the production of children's culture in global capitalism. Each chapter provides an informative case study and lucid analysis of a particular commercial cultural product aimed at children—focusing on those that have been successful in the U.S. market as well as in Japan.

Allison describes how each product was produced and marketed in Japan, and then localized and marketed for the U.S. audience. These detailed accounts of cultural production and localization are the greatest strength of this book. Through concrete descriptions of decisions made in cultural production and marketing, Allison also articulates more general comparisons of Japanese and American differences in conceptualizing character goods. We learn—perhaps not so surprisingly—that Americans love strong heroes and unambiguous stories of good and evil. Japanese seem drawn to moral grey areas, ambivalently benign heroes, and teams of heroes. Japanese prefer to hang narratives on a multitude of characters and tolerate more narrative gaps and/or unclear motives.

The chapters could be read or assigned to students as stand-alone essays. Taken together, however, they form a narrative history of Japan's postwar emergence as a dominant global player in the production of fantasy products aimed at children and young adults. The story begins with the first product defeated and resource-poor Japanese industrialists were given permission to export after the war: toy jeeps, shipped to the United States in time for Christmas 1947, made out of tin cans discarded by American soldiers. Cheap toys were followed soon by the first Japanese media exports—and the only significant ones for decades—the Gojira (Godzilla) movie series and the Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) comics and animations, both of which dealt with the traumas and promises of the atomic age. In the case study of the nuclear-powered robot boy Atomu, we are introduced to a conception of mechanical objects as having a spirit or soul akin to humans, a consistent theme of techno-animism in postwar Japanese popular culture that Allison argues is inspired by the Japanese religious tradition of animism "in which everything is endowed with a spirit and spirituality imbues the whole universe from boulders to ants" (p. 63).

The historical narrative picks up again in the 1990s with the export to the United States of the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" and "Sailor Moon" television series. The action of both series hinges on the physical transformation or "morphing" of the characters. Allison points out that the moment of physical transformation is the visual "money shot" in the animated versions of these stories. Ordinary youthful bodies are shown to have secret powers that are revealed only in these moments of physical transformation. "Rangers" morph into mechanized robots that are extensions of their human bodies—a kind of fusion of hero and machine. In "Sailor Moon," ordinary secondary-school students morph into scantily clad superheroes. A gendered logic of "bodily secrets" is revealed in this comparison. Young men's bodies are enhanced...