Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (review)

Anne Allison's most recent book is not, as the title might imply, about Christian millennial fears, but about the transforming and transformative heroes and monsters that, beginning in the 1990s, were and continue to be part of Japan's "soft" exports to the world. These exports, familiar to anyone in the West who has had children or grandchildren, include the program the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers"; the animated series "Sailor Moon"; the pocket toy Tamagotchi; and the toys, series, and games of the Pokémon genre. Allison begins her analysis with a discussion of "enchanted commodities," a term she borrows from Walter Benjamin (p. 16), in chapter one. She follows this with two chapters that outline the postwar history of Japanese toys and, after the four chapters on her key examples, ends with a final chapter on the "Pokémonization of America (and the World)." Her ambitious and complex argument about the global imagination is built up over the eight chapters and calls on Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault—to name just a few of the theorists she uses to make her case. It is in her epilogue that we get the key points summed up:

The first (already well known) concerns the diminishment, if hardly collapse, of American soft power as the hegemonic center of global culture. The second is about new models of the global imagination that, in the case of Japanese cool and its popularization around the world today, carry an attractive power but not one that is driven by or generates an attraction in others for the actual place or culture of the producing country. . . .

My third observation about the relationship between Japanese toys and the global imagination is that the current popularization of Japanese "cool" around the world is best understood in terms of its fantasy formation, that in turn, lends itself so productively to capitalistic marketing in the new millennium.

(pp. 276–77)

These points beg the question: does this book, in its attempt to theorize about global commodities and late capitalism in the postmodern era, achieve its aims?

It must be noted that Allison's strength as an anthropologist has always been in her ethnographic description, and this book is no exception. She has interviewed corporate producers, toy creators, and public relations firms, and these are fascinating conversations to read. Her descriptions of how children play with the toys as well as her interviews with them about why they love these objects are well done. Allison's mastery of the Japanese material and observations about Japanese society are not to be faulted either; they add an important depth to the argument she is trying to make about the fascination with the products and their ability to enchant Japanese and American children. It is clear that this book is the product of intensive multisited fieldwork in Japan and the United States, done over several years and fueled by her own affection for the products. In many ways, this is a strong candidate for a monograph to recommend to students on how anthropology should be done in postmodernity. But, and there are a few buts, there are some important issues that need to be noted about Allison's attempt to chart "the global imagination."

First of all, it has to be said that it should be no surprise that Japan in the global economy has been the subject of two recent attempts by anthropol-ogists to combine ethnographic data and globalization theory. The first book, Theodore Bestor's Tsukiji, was the result of a decade of multisited fieldwork and ambitiously tried to revitalize economic anthropology.¹ The equally ambitious Millennial Monsters is the second book on this theme. Why is it no surprise? Japan as the object of anthropological research has always been a bit of an anomaly in the field: anthropologists have tended...