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Media Convergence in Japan Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin, 2016 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2016 by Kinema Club “Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame Industry,” by Mia Consalvo, in Cinema Journal 48, no. 3: 135-141. Copyright 2009 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Typeset by IntegralDMS A Kinema Club Book kinemaclub.org Table of Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: At the Crossroads of Media Convergence in Japan 1 Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin Part I: Media Convergence After 3/11 1. Precarious Consumption After 3/11: Television Advertising in 30 Risk Society Jason G. Karlin 2. Networking Citizens through Film Screenings: Cinema and 60 Media in Post-3/11 Social Movements Hideaki Fujiki Part II: Industrial Convergence 3. Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame 90 Industry Mia Consalvo 4. When the Media Do Not Quite Converge: The Case of Fuji 99 TV and Livedoor Shinji Oyama and Dario Lolli Part III: Cultural Convergence 5. Obasan and Kanryū: Modalities of Convergence of Middle- 124 Aged Japanese Women Around South Korean Popular Culture and Gender Divergence in Japan John Lie Part IV: Convergence of the Virtual and Real 6. On Two-Dimensional Cute Girls: Virtual Idols 144 Yoshida Masataka 7. Ensoulment and Effacement in Japanese Voice Acting 169 Shunsuke Nozawa 8. Producing Hatsune Miku: Concerts, Commercialization, and 200 the Politics of Peer Production Alex Leavitt, Tara Knight, and Alex Yoshiba Part V: Affective Convergence 9. The Labor of Love: On the Convergence of Fan and 232 Corporate Interests in Contemporary Idol Culture in Japan Patrick W. Galbraith 10. Anxious Proximity: Media Convergence, Celebrity and 265 Internet Negativity Daniel Johnson Illustrations Cover photo by udocorg (DID) Frontispiece by Clifford Ivie Celebrity public sphere Television commercials broadcast in March 2011 Public service announcements “What can I do now [to help]” “Stop buying multiple copies of the same CD” Types of television commercials broadcast after March 11, 2011 Japanese actress Takeuchi Yūko sings a verse from “I Will Keep My Head Up as I Walk” The NTV drama Ashita Mama ga Inai Crypton’s official image of Hatsune Miku Fan cosplay of Calne Ca Screenshot from Hatsune Miku Live Party 2013 in Kansai A fan concert against a fly net set up in a restaurant in Downtown Los Angeles in 2014 Flier for UNIDOL 2014 A view of the growth of UNIDOL Ticket to UNIDOL 2014 Sponsors of UNIDOL 2014 Cover of the July issue of Freo magazine Shimoda Misaki appearing on Out X Deluxe (Fuji TV) on July 11, 2013 Acknowledgements Beyond a collection of chapters that assume and deal with the dynamics of convergence, this edited volume is an experiment in convergence. Unlike our previous books this volume is not coming out through a commercial or university press. The reasons for this decision are threefold: access, price and collaborative creativity. These three reasons are interrelated. Trends in the market are such that printed books, especially when targeting an academic audience, have increasingly small print runs and are increasingly inaccessible. This is not simply because printed books are material objects that must be ordered, shipped and stored, but also because the cost of production, in combination with low sales, can lead to prices of US$100 or more. When an edited volume is released for an academic audience, it is often in hardcover and purchased primarily by university libraries, which in turn contributes to a vicious cycle of shrinking sales and higher prices. Readers who cannot afford the purchase and do not have privileged access to university libraries cannot read these books. This inaccessibility is not only unfair, but also unproductive. It leads to exclusively “academic” discussions that are without influence from, and impact on, the world outside of closed “academic” circles. By making Media Convergence in Japan available in digital form online and for a price lower than is possible for a print publication, let alone an academic one—for free—we intend to make it accessible to more people. We do this in order to participate in, and contribute to, open and free discussion. As anyone working in the humanities will attest, writing is not a road to riches. It is not customary to pay researchers to write book chapters, for example. Rather, researchers are asked to contribute to edited volumes, and do so to share ideas, intervene in discussions and receive recognition, which plays a part in securing paid teaching positions. An edited volume is an example of free labor and collaborative creativity. However, not only are researchers not paid to write—and, at some academic journals, must pay to publish—but readers—and, perversely, sometimes even the original writers—have to pay to access what has been written for free. This is not right. If one writes and conveys ideas for little if any monetary gain, then these ideas should be made accessible for as close to free as possible. We have been told that publications in this form do not “count” for much in some academic circles. Well, some academic circles are complicit with the exploitation of free labor and marginalization of large numbers of readers behind publishing protocols (i.e., copyright) and pay walls (i.e., fees for database access or to download articles). If the goal is to produce quality content, then academics who already work towards it should not need a seal of approval from a press or journal. Let the goal of our free labor be for others to read, review and respond to our work freely—to contribute to collaborative and creative thought and action. This volume was edited and produced by scholars of media convergence in Japan and beyond. Despite not being published by a commercial or university press, it has been as vigorously edited and peer- reviewed as any other—perhaps more so. Each chapter went through two rounds of revisions. First, the editors read and prepared detailed comments that were shared with the contributors. After each contributor made revisions based on these comments, the manuscript was submitted to Kinema Club for editorial review. Kinema Club is an international, informal collective of scholars devoted to the study of Japanese moving images. The collective sent the entire manuscript for external review to two anonymous readers, who provided another set of detailed comments on the manuscript and each of the individual chapters, which informed further revisions. Like the editors of this volume, its contributors and the members of Kinema Club, the external reviewers were uncompensated for their time and labor, which they provided for free as a service to better the field. We thank these two reviewers, whose contribution made this a much better volume. The process of producing this edited volume was as invigorating as it was exhausting, and many debts were incurred along the way. This volume could not have been completed without the support of Markus Nornes at the University of Michigan and Aaron Gerow at Yale University. We thank them, and all of the members of the Kinema Club Editorial Collective. Marc Steinberg offered advice and encouragement that improved this volume in countless ways. His work is a foundation for us and continues to inspire. Ian Condry cautioned us about the risks of self-publishing. His counsel helped us decide to approach Kinema Club, for which we are extremely grateful. Keiko Nishimura translated Chapter 6. Fiona Jayde designed the cover, and Clifford Ivie kindly provided the frontispiece photo for the Introduction. The cover image came from udocorg, a young Japanese photographer and fashion movie director. His creative work in a precarious media economy is what inspires this exploration of media convergence in Japan. We hope that it contributes in some small way to discussion and understanding of the media worlds that we inhabit and share. Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin January 2016 Contributors Mia CONSALVO is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the co-editor of Sports Videogames and author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. She has most recently completed Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts, a book about Japan’s influence on the videogame industry. Hideaki FUJIKI is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Letters at Nagoya University. He is the author of Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan, and co-editor of The Japanese Cinema Book. Patrick W. GALBRAITH received his Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of Tokyo and is currently pursuing a second Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Otaku Spaces and The Moé Manifesto and co-editor of Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture and Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan. Daniel JOHNSON received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. His research interests include cultures of anonymity and experiences of proximity of space and simultaneity of time in online media. Jason G. KARLIN is an Associate Professor of media and gender studies in the Interfaculty Initiative for Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History and co-editor of Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. He is currently completing a book on Japanese television and advertising. Tara KNIGHT is Associate Dean for the Division of Arts at the Humanities and an Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of California, San Diego.