Fanning the Flames: Fandoms and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan

FANNING THE FLAMES Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan Edited by William W. Kelly Fanning the Flames SUNY series in Japan in Transition Jerry Eades and Takeo Funabiki, editors Fanning the Flames Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan EDITED BY WILLIAM W. K ELLY STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fanning the f lames : fans and consumer culture in contemporary Japan / edited by William W. Kelly. p. cm. — (SUNY series in Japan in transition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6031-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6032-0 (pbk. : alk.paper) 1. Popular culture—Japan—History—20th century. I. Kelly, William W. II. Series. DS822.5b. F36 2004 306'.0952'09049—dc22 2004041740 10987654321 Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Locating the Fans 1 William W. Kelly 1 B-Boys and B-Girls: Rap Fandom and Consumer Culture in Japan 17 Ian Condry 2 Letters from the Heart: Negotiating Fan–Star Relationships in Japanese Popular Music 41 Christine R. Yano 3 Buying Intimacy: Proximity and Exchange at a Japanese Rock Concert 59 Carolyn S. Stevens 4 Sense and Sensibility at the Ballpark: What Fans Make of Professional Baseball in Modern Japan 79 William W. Kelly 5 It’s a “Gottsan” World: The Role of the Patron in Sumo 107 R. Kenji Tierney 6 Rakugo Fans at Play: Promoting the Art, Creating Community, Inventing Selves 127 Lorie Brau v vi Contents 7 Vinyl Record Collecting as Material Practice: The Japanese Case 151 Shuhei Hosokawa and Hideaki Matsuoka 8 Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan’s Amateur Comics Community 169 Matthew Thorn Glossary of Japanese Terms 189 Contributors197 Index199 Illustrations Table 1.1 “Music I Like” (Urban College Students), 1990 26 Figure 3.1 The Alfee. 60 Figure 3.2 Two sisters with homemade dolls of The Alfee for presentation to the group. 68 Figure 4.1 The right-field bleacher fans at Koshien Stadium. 82 Figure 4.2 A Private Association drummer in the right-field bleachers at Koshien Stadium. 87 Figure 5.1 The raised sumo ring surrounded by the front-row “sand-covered” seats. 108 Figure 5.2 A view of the Kokugikan Hall in Tokyo during a sumo tournament. 112 Figure 6.1 A meeting of the rakugo circle “Sharaku.” 128 Figure 6.2 Front page of an issue of the fanzine Yose suzume (Yose Sparrow). 144 Figure 8.1 A yaoi parody of the popular television series Kamen Raida Kuga (Masked Rider Cougar) by Urata Satoko 177 vii Acknowledgments The initial idea for this volume was hatched by Christine Yano and Carolyn Stevens, who organized a panel on “Intimacies, Identities: Fandom as Consumer Culture in Japan” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Asso- ciation in Washington, D.C., on November 27, 1997. The coherence of the pa- pers and the reactions of the audience then prompted me to organize a follow-up conference with several more contributors at Yale University on September 18–20, 1998. We are grateful to the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale for pro- viding very generous funding from its Sumitomo Endowment to cover all ex- penses of the conference. All of the presenters at the conference are indebted to the thoughtful and supportive commentaries of Ted Bestor, Takie S. Lebra, Jen- nifer Robertson, and Merry White. At the Japan Anthropology Workshop meet- ings in Osaka in March 1999, several of us heard the presentation by Shuhei Hosokawa and Hideaki Matsuoka, which was so close in spirit to the other cases that we asked them to join us in this final volume. In preparing the final version of the manuscript, I benefited enormously from the assistance of Allison Alexy. Finally, the authors and I appreciate the work of SUNY Press in producing this volume, especially Jerry Eades, series editor, Nancy Ellegate, senior editor, and Kelli Williams, production editor. ix Introduction Locating the Fans WILLIAM W. K ELLY Who are the fans among the viewers, listeners, and readers of today’s mass culture? To many nonfans, especially among the professional and upper middle classes, they are either the “obsessed individuals” or the “hysterical crowd” (Jensen 1992). They are condescendingly dismissed as incapable of discriminating admiration, prone instead to abject adulation. They are the “cultural dopes” of consumer capitalism (a phrase from Grossberg 1992), the most duped and ignorant of the already co-opted audiences of Culture Industry spectacles. A deeper and more charitable appreciation of fandom has come only recently from some scholars within cultural studies. Fans, as Joli Jensen, Lawrence Gross- berg, Henry Jenkins, and others have shown us, are those segments of mass culture audiences who most actively select from and engage with the performers, players, products, and productions of commodified culture. Their focused atten- tions are reworked into what John Fiske (1992) calls “an intensely pleasurable, intensely signifying” subculture that both shares with and is distinct from the experiences of more ‘normal’ audiences. Harlequin Romance reading circles, (Star) Trekkie conventions, Deadhead caravans, Madonna and Elvis fans, mid- night audiences of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dallas viewers around the world, and diehard Chicago Cubs fans are all examples of the process, at once derivative and creative, of finding significance and taking pleasure from among the vast output of mass culture—in certain comic book heroes, film stars, B-grade movies, musicians, sports stars (or colorful failures), pulp fiction, and so forth. Put simply, then, fans emerge out of mass culture audiences in search of inten- sified meanings and pleasures. They selectively appropriate from among this mass culture, and creatively rework their selections into a stylized matrix of practices 1 2 William W. Kelly and identities. They consume mass culture, but in their voracious and determined consumption, they produce both social communities and cultural artifacts. Fans’ relations to the persons and products they “fan-tasize,” to the Culture Industry itself and to the normal audience, are variously dependent and autonomous, even antagonistic. They, and the small worlds of “fandom” they create and inhabit in contemporary Japan, are the subjects of this collection. Consumers and Fans in Contemporary Japan The significance and the inherent fascination of the exuberant and commercial- ized popular culture of Japan need little justification. Since the 1980s, the mass cultural formations of media, leisure, and entertainment—and those who produce and consume their products—have been among the most vibrant areas of Japan studies, especially anthropology and literary studies. We now recognize that the forms and practices of music, sports, comics, film, fashion, and other areas of leisure and consumer culture are just as essential to fully understanding Japan as its factories, schools, and politics. Thus, this volume does not allege to be a pioneer of dangerous and uncharted academic territory. To the contrary, we have drawn much inspiration from and we hope to make a distinctive contribution to a rich, emerging body of analysis. Within anthropology, Joseph Tobin’s 1992 edited collection Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society and Marilyn Ivy’s 1993 essay “Formations of Mass Culture” were especially inf luential in spurring this past decade of research and publication. Jennifer Robertson’s book on the Takarazuka Review (1998), Aviad Raz’s book on Tokyo Disneyland (1999), Joy Hendry’s study of Japanese theme parks (2000), works by Brian Moeran (1996, cf. 1989) and John McCreery (2000) on advertising agencies, John Clammer’s book of essays on consumption patterns (1997), and the dissertations by Andrew Painter on daytime television production (1991, cf. 1996) and by Hiroshi Aoyagi on the production of “idols” (1999) are among a growing list of ethnographic monographs of Japanese mass culture sites (which also includes books new and forthcoming from this volume’s authors). Beyond anthropology, important publications abound. Richard Powers and Kato Hidetoshi’s Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture (1989) has been a stimulat- ing compendium. Frederick Schodt’s entertaining and informative overviews of manga (comic art magazines and books) and anime (film, video, and digital ani- mations) (1986, 1996), Sharon Kinsella’s detailed study of the manga industry (2000), and Susan Napier’s literary analysis of Japanese animation (2001) are book-length studies of that sector of Japanese popular culture that is the most commercially profitable, best known, and globally inf luential. Mark Schilling’s The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture (1997) and Robert Whiting’s books on Introduction 3 Japanese baseball (1977, 1989) are representative of many nonacademic works by commentators long involved

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