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  • Masculinity, Makeovers, and the Ethics of Consumption in Japanese Films for Young People
  • Christie Barber (bio)

Introduction

A young woman wearing an elaborate wedding dress walks along a stage, hand in hand with a young man, accompanied by slow, tranquil music. With her pale face, tear-shaped diamanté under her right eye, tuft of fluffy white hair and miniature white top hat, the bride appears as a porcelain doll. The two seem to drift along the stage, disconnected from their surroundings, as the areas around the stage remain dark and a spotlight tracks their movement. The young woman, Mei, is deeply in love with the young man, Biito, who leads her down the stage, and she sees this moment and the events leading up to it as the realization of her full potential as a person. Low-angle close-ups depict the characters’ intense facial expressions, reinforcing the significance of this scene. When they reach the end of the stage, the mesmeric music overtakes all other diegetic sound for a moment, and the characters appear suspended in their experience of this event.

Mei is not getting married, however, but is performing in a high-school fashion show, as portrayed in the 2011 Japanese film Runway Beat. Transformed into a fashionable, doll-like bride, she walks the runway with the designer of the wedding dress as a crowd of parents, teachers, and fellow students cheer enthusiastically below (see fig. 1). This non-wedding is a collection of images that signify a real wedding. Mei has become, to use Jean Baudrillard’s term, a simulacrum: an image that has no relation to reality, a model of the real that is substituted for the real (Simulacra 1–2). In dressing as a bride, I contend, Mei replicates the simulacrum through consumption. [End Page 139]

There is an attempt here to establish a parallel between interior development that results in some form of subjective agency—marked by self-awareness, self-expression, moral integrity, and other-regardingness (Stephens, “‘A Page’” 38–39)—and a process of transformation through consumption (in this case, of material goods in the form of fashion). At the core of this parallel is a paradox, in that the female protagonist appears to achieve subjective agency as the object of a male-directed makeover. The non-wedding scene in Runway Beat is an enactment of this paradox, and Mei’s appraisal of the event and the limits placed on her agency in her relationship with Biito force questions about what exactly is achieved by the makeover process.

My aim in this article is to examine Runway Beat along with two other recent Japanese films for young people: Paradise Kiss and Kyō, koi wo hajimemasu, the latter known in English as Love for Beginners but whose title I translate as Today, I Will Fall in Love. All three films employ a transformation-through-consumption schema that involves the use of fashion and of beauty products and services in order to alter appearance. Runway Beat is an adaptation of a keitai shōsetsu (a text usually written on a mobile phone and made available for readers to download), whereas Paradise Kiss and Today are adaptations of girls’ manga series. The focalization of the female protagonists and the subjective access viewers are given to them, especially through voice-over narration, along with the common high-school setting, suggest these films are targeting female adolescent viewers.

With the goal of revealing the ideologies shaping these films, I examine the ethical dimensions, in terms of interpersonal human relationships, as well as the representation of consumption in these makeover narratives. I suggest that the contradiction in the parallel narratives of interior and exterior transformation, a narrative strategy employed by all three films, reveals a problematic ethical framing of the characters and social worlds depicted in each film text. The goals, processes, and outcomes of the makeovers through consumption of capital goods all necessarily employ definitions of what is deemed to be good and valuable in the social worlds of these films. In this article, I unpack how those definitions are formed and articulated, especially with reference to masculinity, which is of particular importance because of the ways in...

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