Digital Play
Digital Play

Author: Stephen Kline

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0773525432

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In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries. -- publisher description.

Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan
Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan

Author: Shigeru Nakayama

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1136154825

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First published in 1991. The study of Japanese science and technology (especially tech­nology) is a fashionable subject at the present time, and numerous English language works appear month by month claiming to explain the 'miracle' of the recent rise of Japanese technology. Most of these works are, however, seem to be superficial treatments of Japan's recent technological performance, lacking in historical insight. This book is an attempt to introduce a critical examination of the mechanisms by which Japan has promoted science and technology by looking at its post-war historical development.

Dream Super-Express
Dream Super-Express

Author: Jessamyn Abel

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1503629953

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A symbol of the "new Japan" displayed at World's Fairs, depicted in travel posters, and celebrated as the product of a national spirit of innovation, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen—the first bullet train, dubbed the "dream super-express"—represents the bold aspirations of a nation rebranding itself after military defeat, but also the deep problems caused by the unbridled postwar drive for economic growth. At the dawn of the space age, how could a train become such an important symbol? In Dream Super-Express, Jessamyn Abel contends that understanding the various, often contradictory, images of the bullet train reveals how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use as a means of transportation to perform cultural and sociological functions. The multi-layered dreams surrounding this high-speed railway tell a history not only of nation-building but of resistance and disruption. Though it constituted neither a major technological leap nor a new infrastructural connection, the train enchanted, enthralled, and enraged government officials, media pundits, community activists, novelists, and filmmakers. This history of imaginations around the monumental rail system resists the commonplace story of progress to consider the tug-of-war over the significance of the new line. Is it a vision of the future or a reminder of the past, an object of international admiration or a formidable threat? Does it enable new relationships and identities or reify existing social hierarchies? Tracing the meanings assigned to high-speed rail shows how it prompted a reimagination of identity on the levels of individual, metropolis, and nation in a changing Japan.

Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality And Gender In Contemporary Japan
Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality And Gender In Contemporary Japan

Author: Wim Lunsing

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1317793048

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First published in 2001. This volume is based on the author's visit to Japan in Summer 1986 on his findings about some of the questions he was asked whilst there. He was 25 and these questions centred around asking if he was married or had a girlfriend, when in his homeland of the Netherlands he openly identified as gay. This research is an investigation of how gay and lesbian people, women's and men's liberationaists, singles and other people, such as transsexuals, transvestites and hermaphrodites, whose ideas, feelings or lifestyles are at variance with Japanese constructions of marriage and inherently the construction of life, live in Japan.

Manga Discourse in Japan Theatre
Manga Discourse in Japan Theatre

Author: Yoshiko Fukushima

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-03-24

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 113677274X

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During the Japanese 'bubble' economy of the 1980's, the youth of Japan began to exert unprecedented influence on Japanese culture through their spirited patronage of certain art forms previously deemed subcultural or avant-garde. Among these were manga (Japanese comics or animation) and shogekijo (Japanese little theater). These art forms, while very unlike in the manner in which they were produced and disseminated, can be shown to exhibit a common language: manga discourse. This discourse presents the ludic, image-oriented, and seemingly infantile but simultaneously transhistorical language. The range and meaning of these discursive forms as they are related to changes in the forms of shogekijo in Japan between the 1960's and the 1980's are explored here, using the work of Noda Hideki and his troupe Yume no Yuminsha as example.Founded in the early 70's in the dark recesses of the University of Tokyo, Noda's troupe blossomed into a major component of the theater boom of the bright leisure-oriented 80's. The question which Noda's theater raises for those who seek to define Japan's modernization in the arts is how something defined as instinctively 'little' could become so big? In line with its predecessors in the avant-garde movements of the 1960's and 70's, the 1980's shogekijo borrowed from popular theater of the pre-modern period, in reaction to the western - and script-oriented shingeki, and from modern comedy in early twentieth century Japan.But unlike its avant-garde predecessors, it eschewed direct political confrontation with the power holders and consciously sought to expand its audiences through capitalistic means. Japanese youth born in the postwar generation could be led to appreciate the anti-shingeki message of shogekkijo, Noda predicted, only if it could be put in the playful and fantastic language of manga discourse. In some ways, this counterintuitive movement to youth subculture fulfilled shogekijo's mission to return theater to its Japanese roots and thereby complete the process of a truly Japanese modernization in the arts.

The Strange Child
The Strange Child

Author: Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0804798567

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The Strange Child examines how the Japanese financial crisis of the 1990s gave rise to "the child problem," a powerful discourse of social anxiety that refocused concerns about precarious economic futures and shifting ideologies of national identity onto the young. Andrea Gevurtz Arai's ethnography details the different forms of social and cultural dislocation that erupted in Japan starting in the late 1990s. Arai reveals the effects of shifting educational practices; increased privatization of social services; recessionary vocabulary of self-development and independence; and the neoliberalization of patriotism. Arai argues that the child problem and the social unease out of which it emerged provided a rationale for reimagining governance in education, liberalizing the job market, and a new role for psychology in the overturning of national-cultural ideologies. The Strange Child uncovers the state of nationalism in contemporary Japan, the politics of distraction around the child, and the altered life conditions of—and alternatives created by—the recessionary generation.

Japan and the Global Economy
Japan and the Global Economy

Author: Jonathan Morris

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1134921799

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The revaluation of the yen in 1985 helped stimulate a dramatic increase in the already high level of Japanese outward investment. Few developed countries do not now host a large and growing community of Japanese businessmen and Japanese corporations are now major players in more or less every market. Japan and the Global Economy looks at the reasons for this growth and at the impact of Japanese FDI, both on the countries who receive it and on the Japanese. It was Japanese investment in manufacturing, particularly in high profile industries like automobiles, that first caught widespread attention. Consequently this book pays particular attention to manufacturing, but it also includes individual chapters on the three major trade blocks - the European Community, North America and South East Asia.

Ambient Media
Ambient Media

Author: Paul Roquet

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-02-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1452945470

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Ambient Media examines music, video art, film, and literature as tools of atmospheric design in contemporary Japan, and what it means to use media as a resource for personal mood regulation. Paul Roquet traces the emergence of ambient styles from the environmental music and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation. Focusing on how an atmosphere works to reshape those dwelling within it, Roquet shows how ambient aesthetics can provide affordances for reflective drift, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and novelists in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient as a style generating “calm, and a space to think,” exploring what it means to cultivate an ambivalent tranquility set against the uncertain horizons of an ever-shifting social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding the emphasis on “reading the air” in Japanese culture, Ambient Media documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of the increasing deployment of mediated moods. Arguing against critiques of mood regulation that see it primarily as a form of social pacification, Roquet makes a case for understanding ambient media as a neoliberal response to older modes of collective attunement—one that enables the indirect shaping of social behavior while also allowing individuals to feel like they are the ones ultimately in control.

The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media
The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media

Author: Richard Maxwell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-16

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1135042489

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Labor resides at the center of all media and communication production, from the workers who create the information technologies that form the dynamic core of the global capitalist system and the designers who create media content to the salvage workers who dismantle the industry’s high-tech trash. The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media is the first book to bring together representative research from the diverse body of scholarly work surrounding this often fragmentary field, and seeks to provide a comprehensive resource for the study and teaching of media and labor. Essays examine work on the mostly unglamorous side of media and cultural production, technology manufacture, and every occupation in between. Specifically, this book features: -wide-ranging international case studies spanning the major global hubs of media labor; -interdisciplinary approaches for thinking about and analyzing class and labor in information communication technology (ICT), consumer electronics (CE), and media/cultural production; -an overview of global political economic conditions affecting media workers; -reports on chemical environments and their effect on the health of media workers and consumers; -activist scholarship on media and labor, and inspiring stories of resistance and solidarity.