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This paper gives an overview of Zainichi Korean magazines (magazines published by ethnic Koreans living in Japan) from 1980 to the present and examines the directions of major magazines. Zainichi Korean magazines started mostly as outlets for the ethnic Korean community in Japan in the political environment of the 1940s and 50s. Faced with factors such as the division of their Korean homeland and the suppression of Koreans in Japanese society until the 1960s and 1970s, they developed towards conveying a unified voice for the ethnic Korean community in Japan. In the 1980s, the third generation came to account for the majority in the population of the ethnic Korean community in Japan, and their perceptions of the Korean community in Japan, their homeland (Korea), and Japan were different from those of the older generation. The role and stature of Zainichi Korean magazines began to be undermined as an increasing share of the younger generation no longer expected an answer to the question of which source ethnic Koreans in Japan could rely on, now that the age of a collective consciousness had passed. The dwindling role of the Zainichi Korean magazine as an outlet for a collective consciousness was an inevitable trend. As if proving this, in the 1990s Zainichi Korean magazines rapidly lost their cultural dominance in all areas, including literature, politics, history, and popular culture. Since the 2000s, the market for Zainichi Korean magazines has generally been on the decline. Not only is the launch of new magazines dropping rapidly, but they can hardly be said to function as a public forum that can unite the entire Zainichi Korean community. As the specialized nature of the "Zainichi" Korean media is no longer appealing not only to the younger generations but also the older generations, the drift towards breaking away from the Zainichi Korean media is already a fait accompli. Notwithstanding this, many of the Zainichi Korean magazines are still looking for new roles to play in the midst of a changing environment for the Zainichi Korean community, and the future of Zainichi Korean magazines will depend on their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets forth the history of the academic activities of the Asian American Literature Association (AALA) in order to explore the evolution of Asian American Studies in Japan. When the AALA was established in 1989, several scholars had already published research papers on Asian American literature, as had researchers involved energetically in the study of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Around the time when AALA was established, other research groups focusing on immigration studies were formed. In 1993, several members of the AALA presented their papers at the annual meetings of other associations and, as a result, the activities of the AALA became known to a wider academic community. In 1994, the AALA published its first annual journal and, around 1995, the number of papers on Asian American literature and culture accepted by authoritative journals in Japan began to increase. By the end of the 1990s, Asian American studies made its presence conspicuous in the field of American studies in Japan. Since the turn of the century, a growing number of Asian Americanists in Japan have become engaged in interdisciplinary studies, thus providing new perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the emergence of the so-called ‘liberal historiography’ in the mid 1990s, historical revisionism in Japan has been one of the most hotly debated academic topics in Japanese studies. While the majority of the current scholarship focuses on the structure of the revisionist texts and the individuals behind them, the case study presented in this paper seeks to explore the way young readers in Japan actually receive the revisionist texts, with a particular focus on the revisionist manga. Building on Stuart Hall's conceptualization of the relationship between media producers and the audience, this paper analyzes the results of a survey conducted among students of two Japanese universities. Its main argument can be divided into two parts. In terms of empirical findings it shows that in general the respondents engage in critical reading of those narratives that contradict the dominant discourse. Drawing on these findings the paper argues that academic scrutiny of a certain cultural product needs to take into account the broader discourse when speculating on its possible effects on the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses one way to articulate queer male identity politics in 1990s Japan through Fran Martin's conceptualization of the 'mask' (Martin 2003). By comparatively examining two key Japanese 'gay' coming-out narratives, the paper shows how a reading of queer subject formation in the decade through a metaphor of 'masking' can shed light on the complex scenarios functioning beneath the surface of identity politics. I argue that the notion of 'masking' is useful in reading the multiple axes incorporated into queer identity formation in Japan in the context of globalization. The paper further refutes any reductive claim that queer identity in Japan can be understood in terms of essentialist epistemological binaries, such as global/local, West/non-West, and Japan/abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the magazines published by ethnic Koreans in Japan from 1945 to 1979. In the 1940s and 1950s, the majority of ethnic Koreans in Japan supported socialist ideology. The poor publishing environment of the 1940s and 1950s, the censorship of the GHQ, the lack of magazine writers, and economic hardship—all these factors contributed to attracting ethnic Koreans living in Japan to Korean organizations. The magazines, many of which were organs of those very organizations, started out by accommodating the urgent and diverse needs of the Korean community in Japan. Following the Korea–Japan Treaty in the 1960s, there was a change in the question of national identity of ethnic Koreans in Japan, which had been determined so far only in relation to North Korea. This political event, which shook the Korean community in Japan, brought attention back to the political sphere, and various Korean magazines published at this time had to focus on these concerns. In the 1970s, a great change came to the Korean community in Japan. As the second and third generations of ethnic Koreans came to account for a large proportion of the population, the change in the political discourse and cultural consciousness within the Korean community in Japan accelerated. Naturally, as with the notions of "national identity" and "homeland," issues surrounding everyday life and social reality emerged as important factors for Koreans in Japan. These aspects are well represented in the Korean magazines published in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self-naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non-normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter-discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous 'name' may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper not only gives an overview of the transgender word in contemporary Japan but also attempts to illustrate the male to female cross‐dressing (MTFCD) community in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which plays an important role in the overall transgender world and how people in the community think and live, by conducting comprehensive fieldwork. The MTFCD community consists of amateur cross‐dressers and their patrons, and it is formed around about ten bars/clubs in Shinjuku. This community differentiates itself from the gay community in their customs and consciousness; they tend to recognize gender based on gender performance rather than biological sex, which is usually accepted for distinguishing sex. Therefore, a MTF cross‐dresser with feminine performance is considered as a ‘woman,’ regardless of one’s physical and biological conditions. Because of this recognition of gender based on gender performance, people in the community are able to develop the ‘quasi‐heterosexual’ relationships as men and ‘women.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first great wave of American influence on Japanese popular music came before the Second World War, and coincided with the rapid expansion of Japan's record industry that began in the late 1920s. Imports of American records, sheet music, and movies, together with Japanese performances and recordings of American songs, brought a wide range of American music into the complex emerging mixture of Japanese popular music. Among these American imports were numerous songs and musical elements that referred to places or cultures considered exotic from the standpoint of mainstream America. I focus on three songs and the roles they played in the development of Japanese popular music exoticism. American-made exoticisms were not simply imposed upon Japan, however. Japanese culture producers actively initiated and carried out the process by selecting American songs, adapting them to the needs of their audience and drawing selected elements from them to be recombined with material from other sources, both Japanese and foreign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an insight into the theorization of sōgō geijutsu or the work of total art during the postwar decades in Japan, primarily through the language of Hanada Kiyoteru, a notable communist critic during the 1950s, as a way to present a discursive precursor to what would be explored as intermedia in the 1960s. It is an attempt to trace the debates that were seen in journal Sōgō Bunka, which was established immediately after the war, and how the question of collectivity and collective production of art was discussed among the contributing critics, artists, and intellectuals. Totality as some may know already, is a problematic term that comes close to the wartime notion of ‘totality’, as it was employed for Japanese government's ideological deployment for its war efforts. Although the term has accrued a sinister ring, the critics mentioned in the article, especially Hanada, were determined to reclaim the term as a way of devising a postwar aesthetic-political platform. One important component of sōgō geijutsu was popular art and its relationship to the masses, as it was designed to relocate avant-garde art practices to the juncture of popular space and political praxis, while critiquing the modernist avant-garde art associated with high art. In addition to providing a fuller historiography of intermedia (or transmedia) in Japan, interrogating sōgō geijutsu also serves to shed some light on the complex and multivalent discourse of locating a ‘people’ and their communicative action. Through this history, the term totality gains a greater texture, no longer dismissible as a mere vestige of fascism in the minds of the Japanese artists and critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]