Pop Culture and the Everyday in Japan: Sociological Perspectives ed. by Katsuya Minamida and Izumi Tsuji; translated by Leonie R. Stickland (review)

The proliferation of new scholarship by Japanese sociologists today can be well understood in the context of recent drastic economic, political, social, and cultural transformations. Scholars have seized the opportunity to explore, assess, and analyze the social shifts, large and small, to offer their interpretation of significant changes. Notable is the significant work of Japanese sociologists deciphering new trends that describe dramatic shifts in the social location of young generations in the first and second decades of the twenty-first century. This body of work offers new understandings and articulations of the shifting cultural meanings of issues that critically affect those young generations: disparities in regular and irregular work, stifled social mobility, uneasy gender or family dynamics and sexuality, shifting authority relations in parenting and schooling, unstable emotional moorings of hope, confidence, and aspirations, and more.

Unlike the erstwhile literature on modernization that framed these cultural questions as issues of modernity versus tradition, or change versus continuity, today’s analysts are not content to view cultural engagement in terms of such dichotomies. The emphasis on an apparent alienation and estrangement of younger people has not withered, but a critical awareness of the need to understand cultural meanings fuels today’s sociological studies of culture, embracing the complexities and difference in people’s perceptions, emotions, aspirations, and motivations. Pop Culture and the Everyday in Japan can be situated squarely in this new cultural literature, exploring the possibilities of social engagement for young generations, especially those on the margins of society, in an inquiry on contemporary Japanese culture.

Pop Culture and the Everyday in Japan is a study of cultural sociology that brings together a new generation of Japanese sociologists who work on youth subcultures and contemporary trends in an accessible single volume. Published in Japanese in 2008, this volume was translated by Leonie R. Stickland and published by Trans Pacific Press, a publisher with a solid track record of introducing important Japanese sociological work (by Ueno Chizuko, Oguma Eiji, and others) to the English-reading audience. The book chronicles trends in Japan’s popular culture since the 1990s, focused on understanding the meanings they embody for young consumers. Theoretically and methodologically informed, the chapters illustrate the shifting cultural landscape that Japanese youth embrace in their daily activities, especially those influenced by the media. The cultural consumers who garner attention in this volume range from rock music fans and otaku culture enthusiasts, to mobile phone “addicts,” television/anime/manga audiences, and cutie fashionistas roaming the back streets of Harajuku. Through these studies, the book explores sociological themes such as cultural engagement as a means of social solidarity and social differentiation, and acts of social conformity, opposition, attachment, and belonging and their different meanings for the young participants. Characteristically, the young consumers are designated as “receivers” of cultural trends in this volume and defined as the agents of cultural action.

The book is comprised of 13 chapters organized in three parts. Part 1 offers an introductory overview of the field of cultural sociology, part 2 is devoted to empirical cases on the impacts of media culture, while part 3 grounds the cultural analyses in social conditions of labor, gender/family, regional, and national identities. The chapters cohere well together as a volume through attention to the empirical and theoretical content in each chapter. In chapter 1, the editors Katsuya Minamida and Izumi Tsuji present a general survey of the field, demarcating the different definitions and meanings of culture and posing the question of cultural meaning construction in contemporary society. The authors examine recent shifts in the patterns of youth culture, grounded in social theory. In chapter 2, Tsuji introduces the reader to rock fandom, comparing two typologies of fans who seek solidarity or differentiation from their peers through their choice of the idols they identify with. Chapter 3 situates the study of...