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  • A History of Popular Culture in Japan: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present by E. Taylor Atkins
  • Toby Slade (bio)
A History of Popular Culture in Japan: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present. By E. Taylor Atkins. Bloomsbury, London, 2017. xii, 276 pages. $88.00, cloth; $29.95, paper; $26.95, E-book.

Although this title promises a history incorporating the present, if you are looking for Pokémon, you are in for a long wait (p. 216). Indeed, we do not really even get much mention of Japan until chapter 2. The pacing in E. Taylor Atkins's A History of Popular Culture in Japan, as well as the chronological structure, has the deliberate clip and the confidence of a book that is intended to be read from cover to cover. And this is not without good reason; the quality of the writing alone would be enough to recommend this book to all scholars of Japanese popular culture.

Atkins does not really foreground what he is up to until well into the text, although what he is attempting is a set of very worthy and well-executed agendas. He is, first, presenting an updated and comprehensive metaanalysis of the Japanese history of popular culture suitable for students at the undergraduate level and beyond. Second, he is elaborating a Pan-Asian perspective of that history, showing the popular cultural flows among Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, and Japan. And third, he is using a Gramscian hegemonic framework to explain the relationship between elite authority and the regulation of popular cultural expression.

The text gives the feeling of a cozy and persistently fascinating senior seminar, refined over decades of extensive reading and vibrant discussion, which left me feeling jealous of Atkins's students. The rich vocabulary and clarity of explanation had me constantly underlining things I already knew simply because they were so well stated. The writing is humorous too, seemingly direct from the seminar script, witty and apt although sometimes with a father-knows-best condescension to current popular culture. Still, the book follows a Zen Buddhist pedagogy of teaching through jokes—because these lessons are the most memorable and effective. The material has a definite completeness as well, with Atkins making all the right stops at the field's currently sanctioned theoretical and exemplary stations. The author draws on a comprehensive and up-to-date range of sources to form a very engaging overview of not just the historical narrative but also of the major contrasting scholarly approaches to it. There is, however, an acknowledged bias toward the canonized sources. This is not a book in which outliers or rare eccentric countertheories will be engaged, and no new material is presented nor famous source radically reinterpreted. But in this way, it constitutes [End Page 196] a first-rate account of the current state of the field, summarized with katana-sharp clarity.

The Pan-Asian turn is perhaps the most exciting addition to this large-brush historical narrative of popular culture in Japan. It builds on previous scholarship by Atkins, particularly his Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze 1910–1945 (University of California Press, 2010). In this earlier book Atkins argued, more positively than other scholars, that the enthusiasm for Koreana among the Japanese metropole constituted a way of approaching a mutually desirable intercultural union. This time Taiwan and mainland China are also included and form a dynamic interplay of popular culture. Starting in the historically named sakoku isolation period, Atkins very quickly establishes the misleading nature of that characterization by using the reports of various envoys to Edo and shows how they were conveyers of, and witnesses to, various popular cultures. Far from complete seclusion, Japan and the popular culture therein had regular interaction with, and extensive knowledge of, its neighbors, and its culture developed with reference, and in contrast, to these. Even in the Edo period, depictions of foreigners were an essential means of self-identification. Atkins continues this analysis of Pan-Asian cultural flows into the colonial period with a comparative discussion of popular entertainment in the Japanese empire. One of his key contributions here is to treat the empire not as...

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