"China," Japan's Chimera, and Media Cultural Globalization

China has long been a significant imaginative geography for Japan. It evokes desire, yearning, respect, and comradeship as well as disdain, hostility, fear, and the enigmatic. This is due to China's unambiguous dominance and cultural influence in the premodern era, its subjection and resistance to European and Japanese imperialism, its postwar communist revitalization, and, more recently, its drastic shift to a capitalist market system. In addition to this rich history, China's massive scale with respect to territory, population, and diversity confers the special status of a cultural entity full of promising but not-yet-fulfilled potential, appearing as a chimera in the eyes of the people of a neighboring country.

This especially has been the case since the 1990s as spectacular and rapid economic development made China come to signify a capitalist Asian dreamworld. Its huge market has captivated entrepreneurs from advanced countries who dream of making profits in the last goldmine of the world. In media culture, too, China has attracted many corporations, creators, and audiences from around the world. While most key players have been of Euro-American origins, as exemplified by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Japanese players have also been keen to enter the huge market. The rise of China as well as other Asian economies, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, has deprived Japan of the idiosyncrasy of being the only highly industrialized country outside the West. This has made it necessary for Japan not just to enter these booming Asian markets but also to reclaim its cultural ties to East Asian countries.

The possibility of coproducing a pan-Asian pop culture motivated Japanese media and cultural industries to enter the Chinese media markets.¹ Setting up local offices and employing local staff, Japanese music companies and talent agencies were actively trying to find and manufacture pan-Asian pop idols by conducting auditions in Beijing and Shanghai. They dreamed of creating a pan-Asian market, drawing on their previous experience of indigenizing American production techniques on Asian soil. While this attempt coincided with the then popular discourse of Asianism, which was most strongly advocated by Singapore and Malaysia, the idea was apparently overdetermined by Japan's historically constituted ideology of an East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

However, there was more to the Japanese goal of creating a pan-Asian market than a mere attraction to the vast mainland market and an overdetermined imperial desire. They were no less propelled by sheer interest in communicating with geographically proximate but emotionally distant Asian neighbors through media and popular culture. Despite the diversity of language, religion, race/ethnicity, and culture in East Asia, globalized media and popular culture formats became a basis for meeting and conversing with talent and personnel from other countries. Intra-regional media and popular cultural connections in East Asia gave a new opportunity for Japan to encounter and work together with (nearly) equally modernized cultural neighbors.

Other Japanese were fascinated by the radical possibilities of Chinese cultural expressions that emerged out of the contradictions and contestations of a dazzlingly modernizing society. Although rock-and-roll had lost its oppositional political potential in the West and in Japan, its renewed possibilities were passionately explored in China, with pioneering rock star Cui Jian a particular favorite of many Japanese. In the course of rapid economic development, widening gaps between the haves and have-nots, and the urban and the rural, as well as apparent contradictions between freedom and control and between capitalism and socialism, became palpable. Some alternative cultural expressions and imaginations, it was expected, would be produced out of the unprecedented socioeconomic upheaval. Dreaming of what one could no longer pursue or had forgotten in the Japanese context, no small number of producers, critics, journalists, academics, and audiences were keen not just to witness but also to join and support the production of these new cultural expressions.

All of these sociohistorically articulated desires for "China" in the 1990s were never fulfilled, however; hence, China became Japan's chimera. Except for the attraction of the size of the market, though, the fascination with China now...