Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic

7 - Time and the Neighbor: Japanese Media Consumption of Asia in the 1990s

Over the 1990s, Japan’s gradual tilt toward Asia was clearly visible. Following a long retreat after the 1945 defeat, Japan began actively reasserting its identity as an Asian country, in response to the rising economic power of other Asian states as well as to the changing post-Cold War geopolitical landscape. It had never truly ceded its regional influence, but in fact, the new “Asia” Japan is rejoining has had, in cultural geographic terms, to be reinstated in the Japanese national imagination in the last decade. Japan’s so-called “return to Asia,” therefore,shouldbeunderstoodasastrategicproject.“Returning”hasinvolved Japan in a process of reconfiguring its position within a familiar prewar, panAsianist narrative, which allows it to assign itself the (imperialist) mission of leading the “backward” Asian nations while simultaneously stressing cultural and racial commonality among Asians. While overall, representations of Asian societies and cultures have risen dramatically, Japan’s historically constituted and Orientalist trope of an “Asia behind the times” still informs most national mediamarkets.Inthisconception,JapanisalwaysinandyetalwaysaboveAsia.1 However, the problem is that 1990s’ “Asia” is no longer amenable to the older image of a traditional, underdeveloped neighbor available to Japan’s civilizing mission. In fact, Japan’s return to Asia is taking place largely in response to its own national imperative, since it is Japan that faces real challenges to its (re)constructednational/culturalidentityinaneraofwidelyproliferatedAsian modernities. Consequently, it is also Japan confronting an increasingly visible gap that separates a discursively constructed “backward Asia” from actually industrializing or already highly modernized neighboring Asian states. 7 Time and the Neighbor: Japanese Media Consumption of Asia in the 1990s Koichi Iwabuchi 152 Koichi Iwabuchi This paper focuses on Japan’s encounter with “modern” Asian neighbors through what I call “popular Asianism.” I mean by this term Japanese media representations of “Asia” generally, but in particular Hong Kong popular culture and Japanese audience reception of it. Especially, this paper examines Japan’s contradictory posture toward Asia, the ways in which the spatiotemporal similarity and difference between Japan and other Asian nations are articulated. A conspicuous trend in 1990s Japan was mounting interest in other Asian popular cultures undergoing processes of media globalization. The development of communication technologies in the advent of giant transnational media corporations such as News Corp. and Disney have facilitated the simultaneous circulation of media images and texts on a global level. At the same time, media globalization has generated the de-centering of Western (American) cultural hegemony. Non-Western players now actively collaborate in the production and circulation of global media commodities. In most non-Western markets, locally produced media products are better received than the Western (American) counterparts. Furthermore, the predominance of Western (American) culture has been seriously challenged by the intensification of intra-regional cultural flows and connections in the non-West. Since the 1990s, media interactions among East Asian countries have also surged.2 While at the moment Japanese popular culture plays the central role, the inflow of popular culture from other parts of Asia into Japan has also increased and other kinds of Asian (particularly Hong Kong and Korea) film, TV drama and pop music have captured wider media attention and broader viewing audiences over the 1990s. In this latest cycle of reengagement, as Japan has struggled through the so-called bubble economy and confronted serious social contradictions, what I am finding is a tendency to characterize other modernizing Asian nations as possessing the social vigor and optimism Japan is alleged to be hemorrhaging or to have lost its will. I propose that although consumption of Hong Kong popular culture by Japanese audiences tends to be informed by nostalgic longing, more is at stake than nostalgia. Hong Kong is held to be the modern equal of Japan in saliently promoted and widely consumed cultural artifacts. This current nostalgia is thoroughly infused with something Japan actually never had, which is a different mode of non-Western mimetic modernity. So, the recognition of Hong Kong’s synchronous temporality with Japan actually displaces the notion of Japanese cultural superiority and generates selfcritical insights into Japanese modernity itself. Thus, while consumption of Hong Kong popular culture in Japan does not indicate a critical engagement or effort to dismantle prevailing conceptions of “Asia,” the consumption of popular culture has become a site where the continuities, rearticulations and Time and the Neighbor: Japanese Media Consumption of Asia 153 ruptures of historically constituted “Asia” in Japan are complexly manifested. It is...