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267 12 Media Culture in Taishò Osaka JEFFREY E. HANES In 1920, Òbayashi Sòshi set out to conduct a comprehensive survey of “popular recreation” (minshû goraku) in the city of Osaka. By the time he released his hefty 380-page study in 1922, however, he had restricted his purview to the “for-profit entertainment industry” (eiriteki kògyò goraku) in four discrete amusement quarters—Dòtonbori-Sennichimae, Shin Sekai, Tamatsukuri, and Kujò (Òbayashi 1922). This essay retraces the topical and spatial boundaries of Òbayashi’s pioneering survey, revisiting the alluring amusement quarters of Taishò Osaka, but it also asks why Òbayashi put this particular form of popular recreation at center stage. I will suggest that this social scientist, trained to look for signs of social and cultural change, was ultimately mesmerized by the same staged spectacle of mass media entertainments that drew “the people” (minshû) of his study into its net. The unprecedented sight of Osakans by the thousands descending on the city’s electric-lit amusement quarters, week in and week out, was merely the lure. The entertainment industry itself reeled Òbayashi in, making a believer out of the skeptic. Inclined by his popular sympathies to unmask the hucksterism of Osaka’s “for-profit entertainment industry”—but enjoined by the objectivist spirit of modern social science to suspend disbelief—Òbayashi left himself open to the power of suggestion. That the entertainment industry wielded this power, in the amusements it staged and the marketing and advertising schemes it launched, placed the interrogator in a deliciously compromising position. And, to judge from the trajectory of Òbayashi’s analysis, the industry ate him up. While Òbayashi took to the streets as a professionally trained social scientist of the people, he went to press as a self-styled media maven of the masses. That he was gradually implicated in the object of his own inquiry raises important questions about the persuasive power of the entertainment industry—questions that require us to take a closer look at the processes of cultural production and cultural consumption. The moneymaking entertainments that Òbayashi dispassionately identified as popular venues of the “for-profit entertainment industry” in the amusement quarters of Taishò Osaka were part of a larger cultural phenomenon triggered by technological change. While Osaka had long been a lively locus of popular entertainment (so lively that Englebert Kaempfer fancied it a “universal theater of pleasures and diversions” in the 1690s), it spawned an entirely new entertainment culture under the influence of the mass media. The revolutionary technologies that made newspapers, magazines, and movies accessible to a “mass” audience, combined with the marketing and advertising schemes that drew them into the nexus of urban consumption , changed the face of Osaka. Once marshaled by the entertainment industry, the power of the mass media to attract a “mass” audience seemed infinite. It is not surprising, therefore, that historians of the era have identified a “mass culture” in the making. As a theoretical formulation, however, this term has limited reach. Lifted wholesale from the European and American literatures on cultural modernity, it never fully grasped the Japanese case. Now that cultural historians across the world have begun to question its utility, the writing would seem to be on the wall. It has come time to introduce new formulations that resonate with the realities of cultural change in modern Japan. I hope to do so here. As Òbayashi amply illustrates in his survey of Taishò Osaka’s amusement quarters, the entertainment industry did not even attempt to ensnare “the masses.” And for good reason—it could not identify any such classless, androgynous, ageless social animal. The audiences it did identify were nothing if not diverse, and they also were discriminating. Hence, far from trying to homogenize popular tastes, the entertainment industry strove to diversify its offerings. It did so by wedding mass cultural forms (mass media) to subcultural norms (the tastes and values of identifiable urban interest groups). Douglas Kellner identifies this dynamic cultural configuration with what he calls “media cultures.” As he summarizes their common credo, “Difference sells. Capitalism must constantly multiply markets, styles, fads, and artifacts to keep absorbing consumers into its practices and lifestyles” (Kellner 1995, 40). The “media culture” of Òbayashi’s Osaka in the 1920s followed much the same capitalist logic of cultural reproduction as the “media culture” of Kellner’s America in the 1990s. In these settings, as elsewhere in the modern capitalist world, the culture industry in general and the entertainment industry in particular...

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