Transgressing Death in Japanese Popular Culture
Transgressing Death in Japanese Popular Culture

Author: Miguel Cesar

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-27

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 3030508803

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This book focuses on the theme of the transgression of life and death boundaries through its representation in Japanese contemporary visual media, more specifically in the manga Fullmetal Alchemist, the animated film Journey to Agartha, and the computer game Shadow of the Colossus. By addressing how the theme was constructed by three different media and what these texts say about it, the book focuses on the narrativization of Japanese ontological anxieties. The book argues that, although these texts deal with matters of afterlife through fantasy worlds, the content of their stories, the archetypes of their characters, and their existential journeys echo contextually-situated conversations. Matters of gender, societal structure and, most of all, the tensions between individuality and sociocentrism not only permeate but structure the interrogation of our relation to the afterlife. This book stands to contribute significantly to media studies, literary studies, and Japanese studies.

Contemporary Horror on Screen
Contemporary Horror on Screen

Author: Sarah Baker

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 9819949653

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This book highlights how horror in film and television creates platforms to address distinct areas of modern-day concern. In examining the prevalence of dark tropes in contemporary horror films such as Get Out, Annabelle: Creation, A Quiet Place, Hereditary and The Nun, as well as series such as Stranger Things, American Horror Story and Game of Thrones, amongst numerous others, the authors contend that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘horror renaissance’. They posit that horror films or programmes, once widely considered to be a low form of popular culture entertainment, can contain deeper meanings or subtext and are increasingly covering serious subject matter. This book thus explores how horror is utilised as a tool to explore social and political anxieties of the cultural moment and is thus presented as a site for contestation, exploration and expansion to discuss present-day fears. It demonstrates how contemporary horror reflects the horror of modern-day life, be it political, biological, social or environmental. A vital contribution to studies of the horror genre in contemporary culture, and the effect it has on social anxieties in a threatening and seemingly apocalyptic time for the world, this is a vital text for students and researchers in popular culture, film, television and media studies.

Player vs. Monster
Player vs. Monster

Author: Jaroslav Svelch

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-02-07

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0262373238

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A study of the gruesome game characters we love to beat—and what they tell us about ourselves. Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our culture’s conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them. Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War–era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.

Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture
Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture

Author: Ashley Pearson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-27

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1351470507

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In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.

The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan
The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan

Author: Karen M. Gerhart

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780824868888

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Explores the ways medieval Japanese sought to overcome their sense of powerlessness over death. By attending to religious practice and ritual objects used in funerals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this book seeks to provide an understanding of the relationship between the two.

Final Days
Final Days

Author: Susan Orpett Long

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9780824829100

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"Grounded in ethnographic data, the book offers an examination of how policy and meaning frame the choices Japanese make about how to die. As an essay in descriptive bioethics, it engages an extensive literature in the social sciences and bioethics to examine some of the answers people have constructed to end-of-life issues. Like their counterparts in other postindustrial societies, Japanese find no simple way of handling situations such as disclosure of diagnosis, discontinuing or withholding treatment, organ donation, euthanasia, and hospice. Through interviews and case studies in hospitals and homes, Susan Orpett Long offers a window on the ways in which "ordinary" people respond to serious illness and the process of dying."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture
This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture

Author: Katherine L. Turner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1317010531

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The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the ’notes themselves,’ in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.

Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema
Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema

Author: Isolde Standish

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 113683768X

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This study argues that in Japanese popular cinema the 'tragic hero' narrative is an archetypal plot-structure upon which male genres, such as the war-retro and yakuza films are based. Two central questions in relation to these post-war Japanese film genres and historical consciousness are addressed: What is the relationship between history, myth and memory? And how are individual subjectivities defined in relation to the past? The book examines the role of the 'tragic hero' narrative as a figurative structure through which the Japanese people could interpret the events of World War II and defeat, offering spectators an avenue of exculpation from a foreign-imposed sense of guilt. Also considered is the fantasy world of the nagare-mono (drifter) or yakuza film. It is suggested that one of the reasons for the great popularity of these films in the 1960s and 1970s lay in their ability to offer men meanings that could help them understand the contradictions between the reality of their everyday experiences and the ideological construction of masculinity.

Unspeakable Acts
Unspeakable Acts

Author: Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2005-08-31

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 082486543X

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Terayama Shûji (1935–1983) was one of postwar Japan’s most gifted and controversial playwrights/directors. Since his death more than twenty years ago, he has been transformed into a cult hero in Japan. Despite this notoriety, Unspeakable Acts is the first book in any language to analyze the theater of Terayama in depth. It interrogates postwar Japanese culture and theater through the creative work of this unique yet emblematic artist. By situating Terayama in his historical milieu and by using tools derived from Japanese and Western theories of psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and aesthetics, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei has woven a sophisticated and provocative study.