Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan (review)

The anthropology of popular culture, as a subdiscipline, has long been struggling to find its own domain and has been hampered in this process by the way in which media and cultural studies have co-opted various techniques from anthropology itself (short-term fieldwork, qualitative interviews, or, occasionally, considering broader cultural contexts).¹ Anthropologists who have an interest in the role played by the mass media in constructing, reflecting, and refracting identities, and how the human imagination continues to construct myths even in postmodernity, often find themselves having to justify working in the area. Is this something we should be doing? Such ethnographic work is regarded with suspicion by both anthropologists and cultural studies scholars, all of whom are capable of accusing a researcher of not having done the job anthropologically—that is, that "human voices" are missing. Since anthropology has a long history of doing textual analysis in its attempts to understand myths, rituals, and other social performances, the leap to doing the same for television or films is not very great. However, it never hurts to know what the producers or consumers of the mass media make of the texts at which anthropologists are looking; and it is a pleasure to find that Fanning the Flames does precisely this.

It is perhaps no accident that a collection as gripping as this should come out of the anthropology of Japan. From almost the very beginning of anthropological research by foreigners in Japan, the issues of dealing with a modern, technologically advanced nation-state have required anthropologists to take note of the role of the mass media in the everyday lives of Japanese. From considering how leisure time is spent, to noting the use or nonuse of television in childrearing,² anthropologists of Japan have had to engage with the fact that our subjects' cultural worlds were shaped by the advent of various mass media: newspapers, television, films, and sports. However, in contrast to previous work on the Japanese mass media,³ this collection of eight articles plus an introduction by William Kelly, focuses solely on the fans. The range of topics covered is impressive: Ian Condry looks at the fans of rap; Christine R. Yano examines the letters written by fans of popular music stars; Carolyn Stevens considers the subject of intimacy at a rock concert; William W. Kelly describes the social organization of baseball fans; R. Kenji Tierney analyzes the role of the patron in sumo; Lorie Brau gives us a look at rakugo fans past and present; Shohei Hosokawa and Hideaki Matsuoka come to grips with the materiality of vinyl record collecting; and Matthew Thorn completes the collection by describing the growth of and changes within Japan's amateur comics community.

Such variety within a collection is, of course, immensely useful for teaching, but does it hold together as a collection? Kelly's introduction is the key to this: it is brief but very to the point, outlining the links between fandom and Miller's theories of consumption. This is an obvious tack to take and, yet, remains rather underexplored in the literature on fans, which tends to consider fandom as some sort of anomalous behavior in which only social misfits participate. It is perhaps a minor critique to make of Kelly's introduction that he argues that this is much less the case for Japan, when the term otaku is so prevalent in the book. To quote the book's own glossary, the word has begun "to supplement 'mania' to mean 'hard-core aficionados' in the early 1980s; the term evokes an image of nerdy youths comparing comic book collections or reeling off trivia about a favorite singing star" (p. 195). The index lists 17 references to otaku in the main text, leaving the...