list of Presenters and abstracts

This paper examines early Japanese television’s engagement with live laughter and considers how mediated laughter intersected with discourses of modern temporality in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although laughter has come to define Japanese television, the medium’s use of the auditory element was tentative during the 1950s and early 1960s. Technical issues placed limitations on its capture and use in the broadcast, while early producers employed it warily, viewing it as disruptive to the normative temporal flow of the program. By the end of the 1960s, in contrast, a new generation of producers came to welcome those same interruptions, viewing in laughter a means to deliver on the medium’s promises of immediacy and intimacy.

Through an analysis of comedy programming of the era and production discourse, I argue that laughter’s impact upon the television medium can reframe how we understand early television’s temporality and its intersection with the everyday. In its earliest and most circumscribed use, laughter, I contend, served an ordering role, in which it punctuated the broadcast and supplemented its narrative development. However, as producers allowed laughter to break out of its restricted role over the course of the 1960s, the audiovisual contract—to borrow Michel Chion’s terminology—was renegotiated, and laughter’s ludic time became synonymous with that of the medium itself. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that laughter provided a form of interruption that both mirrored and augmented that of the advertisement central to Raymond Williams’ foundational notion of flow; however, it also forged inroads with other timeframes within the everyday, establishing itself as the voice of an asynchronous but always present now. In the process, it lay the groundwork for a temporality that would come to define later media while sounding out new experiences of time emergent within late modernity.

After the success of Fuji TV’s Nichinichi no haishin in 1960, TV stations concentrated on melodramas that depicted extramarrital affairs and tragic romance at 1pm time slot to grasp the hearts of housewife viewers. This popularity of the afternoon TV melodramas had much to do with the creation of the middle class society that was represented by the construction of ‘danchi’ apartment complexes. During the Cold War, the “free world” made great efforts to create middle class societies in suburbia because the lifestyle of the new suburban middle class became the centerpiece of the ideological effort of the capitalist societies. Japanese government also strove to create a strong middle class society through the construction project of the ‘danchi’ apartment. In the newly created middle class society, housewives were often described as queens in the home who efficiently managed household, using a variety of consumer electronics offered by the capitalism. Through “New Life Movement,” postwar Japanese government and corporations emphasized the central role of housewives in the construction of rational and modern households. However, real life housewives suffered despair and solitude when they faced the reality where they had to perform their domestic role given by the postwar society without any help. This situation created a fertile ground for the popularity of TV melodramas. Helped by the everyday scheduling that encouraged habitual watching, afternoon melodramas invited housewives to romantic daydreams. However, these melodramas failed to offer criticism on and resistance against the existing family system and gender role while presenting female protagonists as victims of the situation or the bearers of ultimate maternal virtues.

Over the past decades, the term jyoshi (女子) has been commonly used in women’s magazines in Japan. Jyoshi refers to women in Japanese, as in jyoshi judo (women’s judo) and jyoshi toire (women’s washroom). However, jyoshi also means ‘girls’, and many Japanese people imagine this meaning when they hear the word.

This presentation examines the changes in images of women in women’s magazines in Japan, focusing on magazines targeted at women around 40 years old. Women of this age are generally categorized as adults, and the magazines targeting them used to see them as such. However, around the year 2000, the word jyoshi began to appear in women’s magazines, as in otona-jyoshi (adult girls), 30dai jyoshi (30-something girls), and 40dai jyoshi (40-something girls). These terms have been commonly used not only in magazines but also on television and in everyday conversation. Though jyoshi connotes female children and teenage girls, the term occasionally refers to women in their 40s who are supposed to be recognized as grown adults.

The word jyoshi implies youth and vigor. This presentation examines how the image of women around 40 years old has changed over the past decades and jyoshi has become an accepted word to refer to them. Contrary to its positive image, the word also connotes immaturity. The presentation discusses the immaturity of Japanese women (as well as men) in their 40s, compared to women of the same age group in the 1980s, in terms of conventional image. It examines how the image of maturity and adulthood has changed in Japanese society by looking chronologically at Japanese women’s magazines.

In the 1950s, the middle-class Japanese family was modelled as a centre of consumption that reinforced a national ideology of economic recovery. Situating consumption within the ‘private’ sphere, the dominance of the middle-class family helped to construct the ‘salaryman’ as the symbol of Japanese masculinity in its entirety. And, as a warrior fighting an economic war at the national level and one for everyday survival at the local, the salaryman continues to inform much of the discourse surrounding late-capitalist liberal democracy in Japan. Recent reports of his demise only help to reinforce the hegemonic nature of a masculinity overdetermined by the social, political and economic forces of a very different era. This paper examines the foundations of hegemonic salaryman masculinity in the promotion of consumerism and the development of a market for popular magazines in the 1950s and 1960s.

The neat division between the space of production-outside the home, for the nation and masculine-and the space of consumption-within the home, for the family and feminine-was already coming under strain as the government focused on the doubling of incomes. By the mid-1960s, many young, single men in blue collar jobs were in a better financial position than their ‘salaryman’ counterparts working in the same company. In magazines such as Heibon Punch and Playboy they encountered an eroticised, ephemeral, superfluous and hedonistic consumer culture, and a ‘modern masculinity’ that valued personality, youth, malleability, cooperativeness, expressiveness, and sexuality. Free from the familial obligations of the ‘salarymen’ with whom they shared an office and side-lined as the unions pushed to guarantee a family wage, through men’s lifestyle magazines young, single Japanese men encountered a culture of consumption that challenged and undermined developing ideas of ‘salaryman masculinity’.

The 2019 Aichi Triennate International Art Exhibition was forced to terminate only a week after its grand opening. Titled in a tongue-in-cheek way, the Expression of Non-Freedom Exhibit (表現の不自由展) exhibited several controversial pieces, including a replica of a statue of a young girl sitting next to an empty chair called Shōjo of Peace, which Japanese critics considered a degrading symbol of the WW II comfort women. Censorship of art works is not new in Japan (though it often takes the form of self-censorship or jishuku), but in recent years, the opposition to the circulation of certain images seems to have hardened.

My paper looks at how consensus building and censorship function in contemporary Japan. Focusing on the consumption of the image of shōjo (young teenage girls), a ubiquitous trope that is at the core of the “cool” Japanese popular culture, the paper considers the delineation of aestheticism, the boundaries cultural cognition, and the global/domestic consumption divide. Specifically, I will use the works by contemporary artist Aida Makoto and artists in the Superflat Movement such as Murakami Takashi, Nara Yoshitomo, and Aoshima Chiho to compare their appropriations of shojo, which are distinctly different from those populating the manga and anime that are a staple of Otaku culture.

Aida Makoto is considered “the most representative artist to emerge during the 1990s” yet is often seen as “an artist for domestic consumption” and not as cool, hip, or global as Murakami or Nara, who became the darlings of Western art collectors and celebrities of the Euro-American art scene. (Adrian Favell 2018) Aida’s provocative works have not received attention outside of Japan. Aida himself is no stranger to censorship. His provocative graphic and performative art works are both deformative and transformative representations of shōjo iconography camouflaged through the use of kawaii and moe cultural elements. They reveal his blurring of the fault lines separating elegant/vulgar, academic/popular, and global/domestic in Japanese gender politics.

To what extent are transmedia adaptations of Boys’ Love (BL) narratives in China both influenced by commercial interests and the party-state in China, but are also potential sites for transnational fan resistance and subversion? I seek to propose two objectives: One, to explore the involvement and incentives of the Chinese party-state and corporate firms in increasing transmedia adaptations of BL narratives for not only domestic but also international audiences. Two, to address how subversive online discourse about commercialized BL narratives is facilitated transnationally by fans through online networks, and how this phenomenon potentially challenges our understandings of civic organization and participation. I consider this issue by first examining censorship differences in the Chinese BL media franchise Mo Dao Zu Shi 魔道祖师, with a particular focus on the 2019 Chinese web series The Untamed 陈情令 as a case study, due to the significant international popularity of the adaptation both domestically and overseas. I discuss how the asymmetrical and increasingly sophisticated nature of Chinese censorship can be demonstrated through the examination of transmedia practises pertaining to the The Untamed, specifically in relation to how state and private sector cooperation can facilitate indirect policing and political intervention. At the same time, I also evaluate how fans subvert censorship through transmedia activities, specifically through the creation of queer fan-generated products inspired by The Untamed, and the implications of these practises when they occur across transnational lines. Finally, I consider how investigating The Untamed provides greater insight on the complex negotiations amongst the Chinese party-state, corporate incentives, and fan interests, specifically in relation to the popularization and the transnational dissemination of Chinese BL adaptations.

In recent years, the TV series produced by China have been becoming popular in Taiwan, while these shows are constantly broadcasting on popular channels at prime time. Nowadays, watching and discussing Chinese TV series becomes Taiwanese’s daily entertainment, and the discussion of the books related to these series are also common. In this paper, I will illustrate how this common phenomenon influences Taiwanese’s everyday life; meanwhile, I will explore whether the scenes from such series will become the factors to concrete audiences’ images to China.

Two methods will be conducted in this research, including textual analysis and in-depth interview. The most popular Chinese TV series in Taiwan are the ones for textual analysis. Firstly, the historical development of Chinese TV dramas will be elaborated to reveal what were the type changes. In doing so, the research illustrates how the media policies in China impose industry to transform the types of these dramas for production. Furthermore, I will discuss when the dramas have been considered as culture commodity to audiences, whether the dramas will influence people to change their daily behavior after watching them. Secondly, some audiences from social websites, who have participated the discussion of Chinese TV series actively will be chosen, for in-depth interviews. These interviews are important to analyse how audiences are influenced by such shows after the consumption. Do the audiences form convert any Chinese cultural image or cultural identity after they watch the TV series produced by Chinese audiovisual industries?

In Machiko Hasegawa’s manga Sazae-san—which ran from 1946 to 1974 and became the world’s longest-running anime series starting in 1969—water, and the technologies that bear it into the home, play an inconspicuous, yet crucial role in framing depictions of the labors and intimacies of postwar domestic life. In early issues, for example, Sazae-san’s father, siblings, and son relax and play in the family’s new wooden bathtub, but it is Sazae-san who pumps well-water, carries heavy water buckets, and hand-washes laundry in a wooden bucket as she sings “Tokyo Boogie Woogie.” Postwar Japan saw a flood of new water technologies, such as electric washing machines, that symbolized modern technology’s promise to relieve women from the drudgery of housework. Yet, water was central not only to debates about domestic labor, but also other key concerns of family life, including health and hygiene, leisure time, childrearing, and family bonding. This paper uses water as a lens to consider how popular culture registered shifts in the most intimate corners of family life, sometimes in ways that did not neatly align with the narratives of advertisers. For example, what can Hasegawa’s use of comic faux-pas in bathrooms or toilets reveal about how children are taught about their bodies and behavioral norms? And what do depictions of water-related chores like mizukumi (drawing water) or cleaning bathtubs tell us about shifting family hierarchies, and how does this change when new water technologies are introduced into the series? When are specific technologies used to signify the modern and when are they used to evoke nostalgia, and what might this reveal about the conflicting ways people approached new technologies? In analyzing depictions of water technology in popular culture, this paper explores water as key site for how family life and intimacy were negotiated in postwar Japan.

The technologies of internet and social media have radically changed the production of Chinese literature as an institution, creative process, and reception. While contemporary Chinese writers traditionally become “professional” through conventional publishing houses as well as the institutional affiliation of the Writers’ Association, the online spaces offer a readily accessible platform to “novice” writers who would otherwise be left out by the traditional political economy of literary production. This paper uses the sensational rise of two celebrity writers, Yu Xiuhua and Fan Yusu, to examine the ways in which social media and internet have altered some fundamental notions of literature such as authorship, readership, and literariness. I argue that the boundaries between literature and popular culture, in the age of social media and mass culture, have become more and more unclear and that in fact the two often collaborate to create cultural memes and literary celebrities. Whereas Yu Xiuhua’s widely circulated poem titled “Crossing Over Half of China to Sleep with You” made her rise to fame overnight when her triplely marginalized identities (gender, class, and disability) were exploited online as sensational consumption, the migrant worker Fan Yusu became a literary sensation after she published her essay “I am Fan Yusu” online. The paper looks at their rise a cultural event in which various agents in contemporary China such as the state, society, and market negotiate with one another to produce a distinct form of internet literature that shares features of popular culture.

In recent years, postmodernism theories including queer theory have influenced and changed the activities of research and art in Vietnam and Taiwan. Issues of periphery ranging are currently drawing more attention from scholars. The queer cinema in Vietnam and Taiwan does not merely revolve about gender, but also shows a picture of familial-social relationships and lives in countries and regions influenced by Confucianism. Confucian thought upholds the role of family in maintaining social order. In Confucianism, family is a patriarchal institution in which the relationships between father and son, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother are respected. Confucianism’s emphasis on the continuity of family and lineage creates the dualities of ancestors – heirs, male – female, high position - low position. As a result, Confucianism establishes strict rules to maintain and protect this dualistic state. Meanwhile, queer theory which is based on the viewpoint of deconstruction resists all the rules that protect Confucian patriarchal institutions, breaking down their dualities and standards. This paper is going to study “Goodbye Mother” (2019), a debut film by Trinh Dinh Le Minh in comparision with “Dear Ex” (2018), a debut film by Chih Yen Hsu. Both films describe a love story of gay people in a family in which Confucian thought resists queer aesthetics. Therefore, the similarities and differences of queer aesthetics between cinema in Vietnam and Taiwan and the interaction between Confucianism and the political ideology in Vietnam (socialism) affect its reception of queer theory will be explored.

Can Japanese minimalism save souls engulfed in capitalism and lost in chaos of over-consumption? Marie Kondo, a smart businesswoman, TV heroine, and recently a manga character, believes it can. Kondo, a famous celebrity in many countries by now, has built a successful career by creating a perfect mélange of New Age ideologies and aesthetics of minimalism topped with stereotypes of popular Japanese Zen images. Merely by de-cluttering closets and keeping order, Kondo offers a recovered Self and a peaceful mind, flourishing in an environment of colorless harmony and a clean home space. Her presence on YouTube videos and her program on Netflix along her recent new manga have made her a guru that some worship and some see as a new threatening cult. And yet, in Asia and in her own home country, Japan, Kondo’s success fails and is far from reaching the American obsession. For Japanese, she is an American curiosity far from their real houses. Asian countries, on the other hand, adopted the idea and responded quickly with their own famous personalities, and we can already find HK fan groups Following their own Orange Tam and Chinese falling in love with Han Yien’s method.

Surprisingly, Netflix reacted by sending the famous team, Queer Eye, to Japan, to teach Japanese how to organize their rooms, pour their souls in distress, and learn to hug the American way. The study analyzes the cultural meetings of the two ideologies as seen through the channels of popular media, and it will investigate the impact they have in Japan and Asia. Following the changes in economy and the shifts in socio-political values, the research seeks to understand where and why such programs are booming or fail.

This paper examines “Queer Taiwan”, an episodic documentary about LGBTQA+ life in Taiwan, which is among the very first original content produced by GagaOOLala, Asia's first LGBT-focused film streaming platform. “Queer Taiwan” was released in early 2018, the crucial moment in Taiwan’s fight for marriage equality, which imbues this film with messages of social import. This documentary sparked an open dialogue on related issues, with the goal of enhancing mutual understanding and shedding light on common misconceptions about LGBTQA+ community. In this paper, I will take a close look at the production, exhibition and distribution of “Queer Taiwan” to explore how these conversations reflect the changing social outlook and public attitudes in the road toward marriage equality. This paper will discuss the politics of sexual identity by situating it within the development of Taiwan’s national identity politics, a popular discourse in Taiwanese queer literature and cinema. This discourse will be correlated with that of queer cinema, documentaries in particular, to illustrate the ability of these non-fiction visual works to effectively reflect the parallels between the queer representations and the island’s self-identification. The discussion will also highlight LGBTQA+ community’s demand for inclusion in the film industry and the larger society, and will elaborate on the relationship between queer cinema and the socio-political landscape at a time when Taiwanese society is anticipating the legalization of same-sex marriage. My focus is the aesthetic, political and institutional frameworks of such cinema as well as the crucial dialogue and social change that a critical mass of LGBTQ-related films, especially documentaries, have triggered. I will also compare this film with its western counterparts, such as Gaycation, to further explore the idea of queer Taiwan, and more broadly, queer Asia, and investigates the position, specificity and significance of GagaOOLala in Taiwan, in Asia, and across the globe.

Male actors with feminine beauty in television and films are today known as “little fresh meat” (xiao xian rou) or, more insultingly, “sissy pants” (niangpao) in China. Notwithstanding the long history of gender fluidity in Chinese performance art, these actors are currently suffering social criticism and a professional blacklist implemented by state media. Yet, despite this masculinist backlash, effeminate-looking stars and the androgynous aesthetic they embody are enjoying increasing popularity among high-school students and other young people. Stylish men who wear makeup represent a new form of embodied masculinity for young middle-class men in urban China.

In line with the creation of “desiring subjects” in postsocialist China, the young celebrities who are labeled as “little fresh meat”—with a strong implication of (hetero)sexual desirability—are created and promoted by commercial agents and, once they have become successful idols, are in high demand by Chinese and foreign companies keen to promote their products to China’s vast market. The cult of sissiness reflects shifting masculinity in a consumer society and is believed to be a strategy to distance young men from the conventional masculinity of their fathers and to respond to women’s desires. At the same time, however, stigmatization of the effeminate aesthetic reveals not only generational divide in terms of masculinity but also deep-seated anxiety over national virility and the obsession with a masculinity marked by national essence.

This paper focuses on recent Chinese TV programs that feature this type of embodied masculinity and explores audience reception and criticism of the effeminate-looking male images. The discussion situates sissiness and sissyphobia in contemporary China at the intersection of queerness, the political economy of popular culture, and nationalist politics.

‘Amulet’ is an important material in faith. On the one hand, ‘amulet’ represents the building relationship between gods and believers; on the other hand, ‘amulet’ is also a physical form of well-wishing and lucks from gods. Foretime, people’s faith or belief was strongly related to the major god worshiped in her/his family or hometown, and as a result, his/her amulet became the strong bond between ‘individual’ and ‘place’. And most believers would have amulets from one particular god. However, due to modernity in people’s everyday life, such as cross-border migration or tourism, people not only change the face of faiths, but also the forms and meanings of ‘amulet’.

By adopting in-depth interview and participant observation, this research attempts to demonstrating the changing meanings, changing practices and changing forms of ‘amulet’ nowadays. Firstly, there are two types of ‘amulet’; some amulets are like a decoration, and some amulets are more like a physical form of gods’ protection. Usually, the latter is considered as a traditional and superstitious symbol. So more and more believers contain their amulets in their wallet, rather than wear amulets for avoiding to any criticism based on modernity. Secondly, the interviewees usually have amulets related to more than one particular god. This research also finds that gods ‘living’ in interviewees’ wallets are not definitely related to the god worshiped in their hometown, but many amulets were collected in interviewees’ special religious experiences, or trips around the world. In other words, these amulets are souvenirs labelling their cross -border experiences. Last and the most interestingly, some interviewees claims that their amulets are not brought from shrine, church or temple, but the hand-made crafts or materials with lucky symbols, such as hand-made string or even dessert (乖乖). Therefore, the forms of the sanctified materials are diverse and these ordinary materials become holy relics because of practicing ceremonies in the sacred place. In other words, the forms, the meanings and the ways to produce a ‘sacred materials’ are created by believers, rather than by any official authority, such as temple or shrine.

In conclusion, ‘amulet’ does not simply symbolise the strongly bonding between human and gods in modern time, but becomes a material labelling diverse sacred meanings and practices as well as the individual experiences of modernity. This conclusion may shed light on a brand new insight of the amulet industry. After all, ‘amulet’ now becomes one of the most significant materials possessing personal trajectories and experiences, and also the most profiting business in tourism.

Magic objects, such as flying daggers and divine books proliferate in late imperial vernacular Chinese literature. However, to what extent is the label “magic” appropriate to these objects? This article surveys how and when an object is described as magical in English-language scholarship on late imperial vernacular Chinese literature, with the intention of establishing a historiographical definition for magic objects. Historical and anthropological scholarship on magic is then used to contextualise this definition, showing its largely modern and Western roots. Having established what characteristics define magic objects to scholars, the article examines to what extent those characteristics define objects depicted in mid-to-late Qing, women-authored tanci or string ballads. String ballads form the basis for this investigation, because they represent a unique opportunity to gain insight into how women, who are often more closely associated with magic across different cultures, themselves wrote about magic.

The article will examine how objects used in warfare in two string ballads are characterised. The objective is to understand how these objects are differentiated within the texts themselves. These differentiations are then juxtaposed against the existing historiographical definition for magic objects. The conclusion is that objects that correspond to the historiographical definition can be found in string ballads. However, unreflectively describing these objects as magic limits our understanding of how they work. The term “magic” connotes independent efficacy. What the string ballads show is that magic objects are, far from being independent, identified specifically by the relationships that produced them.

Locally developed Boys Love (BL) or wai (Y) content including comics, novels, and TV series have been increasingly consumed in Thailand for over two decades. Adapted from Japanese BL/yaoi content, Thai BL/wai content expands and becomes so stable that it is capable of gaining and maintaining a consistent audience base in Thailand’s media marketplace. While the size of BL/wai content remains humble compared with other media genres, small and big commercialized content producers are now willing to invest in producing and creating their own BL/wai-related products. Drawing on the framework of media adaptation under globalisation, I seek to unfold how local content creators and audiences are localizing BL content to match the Thai context. I argue that the popular local BL/wai media contents – TV and online series, novel, and comics – have only become well-established and spreadable through this process of adaptation. I thus produce a history of the emergence of this popular culture in Thailand and demonstrate its thematic and commercial links to Japanese BL/yaoi media. Observing BL/yaoi adaptation, I also consider two other reciprocally connected topics: the practice of consuming BL/wai content and the audience of BL/wai in Thailand. In so doing, this presentation extends our knowledge of the transnational circulation of Japanese BL/yaoi media. In particular, I stress the importance of Thai BL/wai content to young women in Thailand, revealing that just as Japanese BL/yaoi has become an important space for young Japanese women to explore their sexual identities, Thai BL/wai provides women an opportunity to contest patriarchy and heteronormativity within Thailand.

Fan conventions dedicated to anime and manga are celebrated almost every weekend in Japan and on a quarterly basis throughout many Southeast Asian nations. While conservative critics often question the passing fancies of fans of such popular culture, the longevity of these conventions – some of which span forty years – highlights fans’ passion and dedication to create highly affective spaces. In particular, fan conventions have emerged as important sites to explore fandom for queer popular culture in regions that are remarkably heteronormative and patriarchal. In this presentation, I showcase how certain affects are mapped onto and throughout fan conventions in both Japan and Southeast Asia in an effort to educate fans about how queer cultures may be negotiated. I specifically focus on how Boys Love (BL) culture, which celebrates the romantic potentials between two men, is mapped onto fan spaces such as Comic Market in Japan, Dojima in Singapore, Comic Frontier in Indonesia, and Komiket in the Philippines. In this presentation, I will be analyzing these conventions and the spaces they allocate for Boys Love content through ethnographic reflection. Given how BL presents representations of masculinity that are non-normative within the contexts I examine, it is interesting to analyze how fan events map this kind of content in order to covertly or overtly showcase the queer literacies that I argue sit at the heart of BL. I posit that the ways convention organizers and attendees negotiate these queer BL works ultimately convey literacies that capture the affective fantasies of consumers which in turn allows fans to develop knowledge not only concerning how to read and appreciate Boys Love, but also knowledge concerning queer sexualities and politics more broadly. To conclude, I think through the queer potentials of these literacies in combatting discrimination faced by same-sex identified individuals throughout Southeast Asia.

This presentation explores the emergence of a new form of queer popular culture that has recently developed in Thailand and become increasingly influential across Southeast Asia known as “series wai (Y)” or “Thai Boys Love (BL).” Drawing upon five years of observation of this emergent media genre and its fandom both within Thailand and the Philippines, I argue that Thailand is fast becoming a new regional hub for Asian queer popular culture. This presentation particularly traces the celebrity culture that is central to Thai BL/wai fandom through case studies of celebrity management and promotion by two production companies – GMM and Motive Village. I argue that GMM, Thailand’s largest media producer, has developed a “BL machine” that draws upon the tropes of Japanese and South Korean idol management to produce “BL celebrity ships” designed to be consumed by heterosexual female fans of homoerotic media. In contrast to East Asian idol culture where celebrity “shipping” remains fundamental but implicit, I argue through a focussed case study of one of GMM’s celebrity “ships” entitled TayNew that Thai media companies have explicitly and strategically co-opted the grassroots shipping cultures of K-pop fans in the production and promotion of their idol talents. I then turn my attention to the transnational nature of this celebrity culture through an ethnographically-informed discussion of a fan-meeting for Motive Village artists held in Manila. I reveal that Thai media producers are responding to Philippine fandom for East Asian popular culture to promote their own talent and are thus situating Thailand as a Southeast Asian alternative to Japanese yaoi and South Korean K-pop idol shipping. Through interviews with Philippine fans, I reveal that “Thai BL” has important emancipatory affects, dislodging Japan as the leader of Asia’s queer popular culture production within the Philippines.

The Paralympic Games are the second largest sports event in the world and the next edition will be held in Tokyo, Japan, this year, already promising to be the largest in its history. The focus of the Paralympic Games is sports for persons with a disability. Therefore, a key topic in the Paralympic discourse is the creation of ‘inclusive and diverse societies’ through the medium of sport (Lemke 2015). In fact, the global Paralympic Movement depends on its perceived role of ‘empowering those with disabilities’ (Peers 2008). The current motto of the Olympic and Paralympic Games reflects this sentiment: ‘Unity in Diversity’.

Interestingly, the organizing committees of the Games have embraced Japanese popular culture products, such as anime (animation) and manga (comics) to promote the events. In relation to the Paralympic Games, the national television network NHK has aired several anime episodes that depict athletes practicing Paralympic sports (AniPara 2018). In addition, special issues of manga have been produced featuring disabled athletes with engaging narratives of courage and endurance, mimicking the popular manga magazine Shonen Jump (Shueisha 2018).

The organizations involved in the creation of these products are doing so to promote the Paralympic Games among the Japanese populace. By creating narratives of ‘overcoming’ and ‘endurance’, consumers are encouraged to sympathize with the stories’ characters. However, this paper argues that these narratives still feed off of a discourse of ableism. They are informed by depictions of disabled athletes as ‘super humans’ or ‘supercrips’ (Silva and Howe 2012), leaving intact the notion that those with disabilities deviate from what is considered normal and able. Although some stories attempt to avoid this trope, a large portion of these consumer products still present stories that contradict with the Paralympic mission: creating a diverse and inclusive society.

Japan’s role as hosts of the 2019 World Cup along with the national team’s success in qualifying for the quarter finals of the tournament for the first time saw interest in the sport reach new levels within the country. Coverage of the competition and the team has also led to fresh debate around the topic of multiculturalism and cultural diversity in Japan. Rugby union rules stipulate that a player can represent a country at international level if they meet one of four criteria: The player was born in the country, have a parent or grandparent born in the country, have lived in the country for three consecutive years, have lived in the country for a period of ten years cumulatively. This set of criteria has meant that a significant number of professional rugby players born outside of Japan are eligible to represent the country on at international level. The national rugby union team’s decision to select players from diverse cultural backgrounds over the last few years has coincided with the number of international residents in Japan reaching an all-time high. This study looks at the representation of the team in Japanese media to better understand if the sport reflects societal changes within the country and the extent to which the 2019 World Cup influenced the wider public.

The Japanese colonial administration (1895-1945) helped to bring about significant modernization in Taiwan in cultural, political, and infrastructural terms, despite the violence of colonial rule. One development that has received comparably less scholarly attention was the introduction of modern sports and physical education into Taiwan. In this presentation, I examine the cultural history of Japanese-Taiwan through the history of sports and physical culture. By analyzing the legacy of sport, physical education and public health policies from the colonial era, we may gain new perspectives on modern Taiwan’s ambiguous cultural and national identity. Did colonial sport serve to deepen or bridge the divide between colonizer and colonized? How did sports and education policies impact inter-ethnic relations? What was the legacy of Japanese-era sports in the Chinese Nationalist era and in the post-colonial present? The history of modern sport is inseparable from that of empires and colonialism. Unsurprisingly, relations of power and domination manifested themselves in the practice of sport, which could be especially pronounced in colonial settings. Taiwan is an interesting example of a state with complex narratives surrounding Japanese colonialism, and studies of physical culture offer a promising avenue for research that centers on the lived experience of colonized peoples. By using Taiwan as a case-study, we can locate points of innovation, similarity, and divergence in comparisons between Japanese and Western techniques of colonial assimilation.

Ponzi scheme refers to a form of financial fraud, which lures individuals to invest money into the schemes by promising high returns. Initially, payouts are actually made to the early subscribers from the funds provided by later investors. In the present such schemes are rather uncommon in developed economies due to strict financial regulation, its enforcement by strong states as well as decent degrees of financial literacy. Ponzi schemes are, however, rather common in Thailand.

What makes them an interesting topic for research is arguably not so much their ‘mechanics’, which after all are well understood, but their cultural embedment. Ponzi schemes are initiated by con (wo)men, who gain the confidence of their victims. They achieve this by employing cultural symbols that resonant with the specific sub cultures of the demographics that they target and make them appear authentic and legitimate. This paper will classify the larger Ponzi schemes that Thai newspapers have reported about recently based on their diverse cultural symbols as well as targeted demographics and attempt to draw some conclusions about the changing perceptions of wealth and investment success in contemporary Thai society.

This paper discusses the emergence of business stories and their cultural significance in early 20th-century Chinese mass media. Business stories (shiye xiaoshuo or shangye xiaoshuo) published in popular fiction magazines and business magazines were new developments in response to the social change and growing industrial economy in early 20th century China, the “golden age” for the expansion of China’s capitalism and national industries.

Business stories produced during this period were fictional or nonfictional success stories of people in the field of industry, commerce, and agriculture, featuring characters who rose from poverty to wealth on their merits. I argue that as a cultural form that attempted to negotiate between traditional and modern experience in a transitional society, these stories arose as an articulation of the middle-class vision of Chinese society. A strong-minded self-made industrialist or businessman served as a cultural icon who embodied the middle-class aspiration for individual success and economic advancement. This paper traces the translation of business stories in China and discusses how the image of “rags to riches” heroes traveled to Chinese texts and contributed to the literary representation of self-made entrepreneurs and businessmen in popular fiction. The self-made rich with business skills and social conscience epitomized the ideal of success measured by individual achievements, material well-being, and upward social mobility. Although they were often highly stylized and didactic, business stories created the role models for the emerging Chinese middle class and professionals, promoting new business ethics based on a balance between merits and pursuit of wealth, and between individual achievement and commercial modernity. The social ideal of the urban middle class was part of the new sense of individual autonomy and commercial wealth that laid at the center of modernization in China. Business stories, therefore, articulated the economic aspirations of the rising middle class and their dream of wealth and modernization.

This proposal engages two questions: Does anthropology, especially in its post-colonial guise, have something to offer East Asian Studies beyond contributing a methodology? And: What place does Taiwan occupy in relation to China? Doing ethnographic fieldwork with younger adults in Taiwan shows that the latter question not only occupies researchers but also their interlocutors, who have to navigate the role of (Chinese) traditions in the framework of a modern, sovereign, democratic state and an increasingly localizing society. In this paper, I analyze how the members of a religious association playing Pak-koan (北管) ritual music negotiate questions of identity that arise from the historically and geographically Chinese origins of their brand of music, its traditional cosmological backgrounds, and their application of this music in a modern, urban context in contemporary Taipei. In part, their struggles reflect contradictions inherent in Taiwanese modernity, in which political institutions promote cultural expressions, including Pak-koan music troupes, as living traditions that authenticate and anchor Taiwanese history in concrete practices, i.e. focus these practices on an historical and geographical center. At the same time, runaway modernization shapes distinctly urban attitudes, expectations, and stigmata among residents regarding noise, privacy, and individual-based cultural consumption. The changing preferences of urban denizens create pressures on religious troupes to adapt and innovate, thereby driving cultural change through the threat of marginalization. Members of the music troupe struggle to find ways to counter stereotypes and stigmata which work to undermine their ability to uphold the very traditions so prized as authenticating practices.

Hatta Yoichi (1886–1942), a civil engineer famous for constructing the Chianan irrigation canal in colonial Taiwan, is highly appreciated not only in Japan but also in Taiwan. Even former Taiwanese presidents Lee Teng-hui and Ma Ying-jeou have praised Hatta for his achievements. Hatta’s story has been made into visual products, including the Taiwanese television drama Shuise Chianan (2008) and the Japanese animation film Pattenrai!! (2009). Furthermore, in both Taiwan and Japan, the Taiwanese baseball film KANO (2014) drew wider attention to Hatta’s contribution to the colony’s development. Hatta and his achievements, however, are often mythicized and sanitized in these works, resulting in the support of a popular belief that Japanese colonialism was overall benign.

This paper critically examines the representations of Hatta in the above mentioned visual materials. It observes some important differences between the Japanese and Taiwanese productions. The first difference is the use of language. While KANO reflects the reality of a multilinguistic society in the colonial Taiwan by using multiple languages, a single language is used in making Shuise Jianan and in the Japanese version of Pattenlai. In depicting the relationship between the Japanese engineer and the Taiwanese, the hierarchical structure of the colonial rule emerges in the former while it submerges in the latter. The second difference is that while the Japanese film emphasizes the state-of-the-art technologies used for the construction in great detail and depicts Hatta as an emotional figure who laments for the Taiwanese and exposes anger against injustice, they are absent in the Taiwanese visual works. The paper argues that highlighting Japanese modernization of Taiwan and reinventing Hatta a person compassionate to the Taiwanese have an effect of mitigating Japanese burden on its colonial past. In other words, Hatta’s story depicted in each productions tell more about the current social realities and politics than historic truth.

George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901) and Hatta Yoichi (1886-1942) enjoy the status of national heroes in present day Taiwan, a phenomenon worth looking into as they were initially feared and ostracized by locals. While it was through modern science and service that they eventually earned respect and a place in history, the elevation to national hero status has been due to recent waves of nationalism and popular culture. Mackay was the first Canadian missionary in Northern Taiwan and in three decades established more than sixty churches, educated local church leaders, and offered medical services to those in need. Today, Taipei’s Mackay Memorial Hospital is one of the most respected medical facilities on the island. Hatta, an elite Japanese engineer, was in charge of planning and constructing a massive reservoir and irrigation system in Southern Taiwan that increased the agricultural productivity of the Japanese colony. The reservoir was the largest in Asia at the time of construction in 1930 and was said to have improved the living standard of farmers. Every year, a local irrigation association organizes a commemoration service for Hatta that is attended by visitors from near and far. The legacies of Mackay and Hatta are remembered through numerous cultural productions that include texts, visuals, and memorials.

This paper compares the representations of these two figures in Taiwan’s popular culture and examines the narratives that are being produced and popularized. It observes that while the appraisals of the two are not without historical basis, they are being shaped by Taiwanese nationalism that sees itself as independent from China. In other words, both Mackay and Hatta, through popular culture, are being reconstructed as pro-Taiwanese figures who dedicated their lives to the welfare of the Taiwanese people. This paper argues that this image of the two makes it hard for local Taiwanese to look at Japanese imperialism, as well as Western missionaries who collaborated with the Japanese, critically.

This paper examines the reimagination of the post-war Japanese memories of the occupation of Singapore during the Second World War through a Japanese pop song film Under the Stars of Singapore (1967). The genre of pop song films (kayō eiga), many made in the 1960s, is a kind of media mix that places a traditional Japanese pop song (kayōkyoku) sung by a star singer at the center of the film. The film’s marketing then depends on the song and the star singer’s popularity. Due to low budgets, pop song films generally deal with themes of ordinary people’s everyday lives. Therefore, these films can represent general values and understandings of the world. The film Under the Stars of Singapore, based on Japanese star singer Hashi Yukio’s song released the previous month, follows the main character’s visit to Singapore to discover a wartime romance between his father and a Chinese Singaporean woman and to discover the truth of his sister’s death.

This paper analyses the representation of Japanese and Southeast Asians, particularly focusing on gendered images, and secondarily, indicating that the Japanese people’s wartime experience and their networks with local people were mobilized in producing this film and song. Previous studies on Japanese popular culture and 1960s Japanese relations with Southeast Asia have revealed that pop song films portray Japanese society’s mentality at that time, that Hashi is positioned in the genealogy of post-war Japan’s ‘new rhythm’, a series of dance tunes coming mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean through America, and that in dealing with Southeast Asia, 1960s Japanese popular media created an image of Japan as Asia’s leader. The paper discusses not only how memories of the Second World War influence this film but also how it whitewashes memories of the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia.

By using Sinophone studies as theoretical framework, and in conjunction with diaspora studies, this paper aims to study the contemporary Sinophone Malaysian films titled “The Journey” (2014) and “Ola Bola” (2016), both directed by Sinophone Malaysian Chiu Keng Guan in relation to the Malaysia socio-historical, and political context.

Both The Journey and Ola Bola are among the highest grossing films in the Malaysia’s films box office history. Despite the fact that The Journey’s main film language is Chinese Mandarin and Chinese dialects while Ola Bola’s main film language is Malay, both films contain a lot of Sinophone Malaysian Chinese cultures, customs, festivals and values which I suppose is the strategy used by the director to contest and renegotiate the national identity wherein the “Chinese” has always been excluded within the nation sphere as well as to emphasize the distinctiveness of the Sinophone Malaysian community which is different from the other Sinophone regions.

By using The Journey and Ola Bola as case studies, this paper focuses on four dimensions. First, the commercial Sinophone filmmaking development in Malaysia; second, in conjunction with Sinophone studies, diaspora studies is used to deal with the issue of the film director’s identities within the nationalism context as well as how the director addresses the issue of Chinese identity (Chineseness) through the films; third, textual analysis will be used to examine how the Sinophone Malaysian films portray the place-based culture and experience of the Sinophone communities and the other ethnic groups in Malaysia through the films’ narrative and aesthetic; fourth, how do the process of production and distribution of Sinophone Malaysian films transcend various Sinophone communities beyond Malaysia in the transnationalism and globalization discourses will be studied.

My research aim is examining the formation of Tibetan new wave cinema and film marketing strategy. In recent years, a group of Tibetan auteurs such as Pema Tseden，Sonthar Gyal and Lhapal Gyal, have gradually emerged and formed a wave. Their film productions have been awarded at many competitive feature film festivals, such as Berlin film festival ,Venice film festival and TIFF. My research will compare the links between international film festivals and film markets with Tibetan cinemas. When it comes to the reason for the formation of the Tibetan new wave cinema, firstly my research will explore this trend in the context of the vanishing Tibetan culture and religious beliefs, especially in the face of the growing development of the Chinese culture of modernity and socialist market economy, the language use value of Tibetan regions and the disappearance of other ethnic minority areas in China. One of my thesis goals will be compared and analysed that to what extent may have exacerbated the collision between modernity and tradition in the Tibetan contemporary society from works directed by Tibetan filmmakers and other non-Tibetan filmmakers. In particular, my research thesis will identify the differences in aesthetic values embodied in these film productions, different expressions of political positions, and explore the relations between the characters and the current social environment in Tibet, as well as the status quo of freedom of faith. My research will also analyze the awarded Tibetan language films in International film festivals with the post-colonialism and film marketing strategy. The wider purpose of the study is to determine whether Tibetan films can obtain better opportunities in foreign film markets than developing in mainland of China, while examine whether Tibetan Buddha that has been manipulated to serve the political purposes of the Chinese state that has once oppressed all religious activities. Identifying if these Tibetan language films can be assumed to be one of alienation and participation in a counterculture in the PRC.

In the post-Soeharto era, with the law-based equality enforced by several presidents with efforts, Tionghoa-Indonesia (Chinese Indonesians) have garnered more positive images in the mass media than before. Especially, with the indispensability and popularity of social media among the public and in the media industry, Tionghoa-Indonesia also represent themselves to good purpose so as to break stereotypes imposed with discriminatory policies in the past.

With the case analysis of several television programs, such as BROWNIS, MasterChef Indonesia and Liga Dangdut Indonesia (LIDA), this paper shows the mass media does have positive impact to improve Tionghoa-Indonesia’s image towards the Indonesian society. These prime-time television programs with high ratings not only re-portray culture and customs of Tionghoa-Indonesia, but also view Tionghoa-Indonesia as one of suku (ethnic group) of Indonesia. Moreover, with the emergence of some prominent Tionghoa-Indonesia celebrities who are active and popular on social media, such as Sarwendah Tan, Chelsea Olivia and Baim Wong, they have successfully blurred the boundaries between Tionghoa and the society of Indonesia by their large fan base and considerable influence via social media.

However, this paper also argues that due to its far-reaching influence in Indonesia, agama (religion) must be considered a critical factor to the re-portrayal and representation of Tionghoa-Indonesia on both media. While the comedian, Ernest Prakasa, was accused of blasphemy against Islam, triggering controversial debates on media, celebrities such as Deddy Corbuzier and Roger Danuarta, who converted to be a Muslim, are widely praised as the role model of bridging the gap between Muslims and Tionghoa-Indonesia.

In sum, besides showing that Tionghoa-Indonesia return to the stage of mass media with more positive images and get more supports on social media in the post-Soeharto era, this paper also emphasizes the importance of both agama and suku for analyzing and exploring the issue regarding re-portrayal and representation of Tionghoa-Indonesia.

China’s rise as a global power necessitates an accompanying soft power to attract support, following Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power”. In his speech at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007, Hu Jintao sets the precedence for the importance of sharing Chinese culture to the world as part of its soft power in order to increase international linkages and support. In addition, he also envisions a China with a strong and internationally competitive cultural industry that will boost national economy with cultural products that will meet the people’s needs. At the 18th National Congress in 2014, Xi Jinping announces the plan to improve cultural industries, that while drawing on foreign cultures to strengthen cultural exchanges with other countries, Chinese culture shall be given prominence to enhance the country’s soft power.

In light of the importance the Chinese government now attaches to improving creative industries, this study is inspired by the speeches of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping wherein Chinese culture is to be showcased and shared to world. The emphasis on international linkages should not be ignored as China is consistent in stressing cooperation and collaboration rather than competition as it markets itself as an ally in development. This is not only reflected in their ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) but also in how China wields its soft power. This paper then sets out to analyze a time-travel series CINDERELLA CHEF and probe its elements that showcase China’s commitment to its objective of introducing Chinese culture to the world. The series is chosen as case study for its reflection of the changing times, its portrayal of a minority group in China, its incorporation of foreign cultures, and more importantly, its showcase of Chinese traditions focusing mostly on Chinese cuisine.

This paper focuses on the use of occult elements in a Japanese action hero franchise whose basic themes are already replete with religiosity. In this way it follows the longstanding Japanese popular culture trend that while modernization defangs its monsters and supernatural beliefs, it preserves them in playful popular culture. Previous research has already connected Ultraman, probably the most widely known action hero, with Shinto and Buddhist themes. More recently, and alongside the local mascot (yuru kyara) boom, local heroes are burgeoning in Japan to promote their localities and provide exciting entertainment in live or video shows. Local action heroes are a form of regional representation that, like mascots, derive identity from aspects of their hometown, usually a peripheral one. Hailing from Miyazaki, Japan, where many origin legends are placed, Himukaizer employs dramatic narratives pitting a team of good characters, who evoke mostly Shinto icons with a touch of Onmyodo, against a team of fantastic villains and mischievous accomplices. The villains hearken from various ogre legends and stock horror themes. One of the villains’ main plots for domination, reoccurring over several episodes in the franchise, involves the imported Chinese horary astrology symbols also popular in Japan, but other occult forces also appear. In one notable effort, the villains used magic to create an evil version of the Japanese Kojiki, “Record of Ancient Matters”. That effort included wordplay, which in itself has been an important aspect of Japanese religiosity. An even more frightening set of villains were labeled “godeaters”, whose leader began their quest for power by devouring the usual lead villain, a ‘rough god’ himself. Despite all these occult dangers, the heroes are able to preserve their primacy and as their catchphrase states, “continue telling the renewed legends”.

Comics in Taiwan have a long history of association with Japanese manga, children’s entertainment and negative value judgments. In recent years, the mainstream manga-style art has been paralleled by the rise of independent artists who cultivate individual styles, target older audiences and work on a variety of topics including social activism, local culture, history and memory. Despite these developments, homegrown artists still tended to remain invisible to both the general public and to state institutions promoting Taiwan’s cultural and creative industries and its international image.

This project focuses on the Angoulême International Comics Festival, where Taiwanese artists gained acclaim and have been showcased since 2012 by local organizers at first, and later also by the ROC Ministry of Culture. Based on interviews with three kinds of actors participating in this prestigious festival (artists, publishers and representatives of state institutions), this study attempts to assess how and to what extent Taiwanese comics have been revalued and granted visibility, supported and integrated into official projects related to public diplomacy. It will also look at how artists and publishers themselves perceive this European event and state backing for homegrown comics.

The following aspects will be considered: 1) criteria and procedures for selection of state-subsidized works, artists and publishers; 2) Taiwanese comic artists’ and publishers’ motivation for participating in the festival and its potential impact on their careers or marketing strategies; 3) the extent to which all these actors work towards capturing a specifically Taiwanese “cultural geometry” (K. Murphy) in internationally promoted comics.

Street dance, like other four most important elements of hip hop culture—Djing, MCing and graffiti, has developed in the United States mainly by African American youths in 1970s and diffused into Eastern Asia in 1980s. The street dancers or hip hop practitioners around the world have diversified the appearance of street dance culture with their local elements. This paper hence attempt at analysing how Japanese fictional storytelling, exemplified by Shin’ichirō Watanabe’s amine Samurai Champloo (2004-05) and Santa Inoue’s manga Tokyo Tribe-2 (1997-2005) and its anime adaptation Tokyo Tribes (2006-07) by Tatsuo Satō, transcribes the hip hop elements influenced by contemporary American subculture into Edo period’s art scene and fictitious urban city “Tokyō”, and provides a basis for an understanding of street dance culture in Japan, by borrowing Charles Taylor (1985)’s concept of “perspicuous contrast.” Despite the fact that manga or anime do quickly reflect popular culture trends in Japan, hip hop elements did not manifest as main material until Tokyo Tribes was released. There is apparently a prolonged interval between hip hop culture and manga/anime after Japanese youths fancied street dance. It is assumed that the guise of street dance culture has transformed or been developed within the Japanese context when this interval was prolonged. Hence, this chapter also examines the transformation of street dance culture in Japan, by drawing on Paul Gilroy (1993)’s articulation of African-diasporic cultural expression in “call and response” structure to analyse the representation of hip hop in manga/amine. On the other hand, apart from textual analyses, this chapter also contextualises the development and transformation of street dance in Japan and the Japanese social background to unfold why the interval is prolonged.

Flowers are commonly used as pictorial motifs in shōjo manga, but what do they represent? While scholars like James Welker, Mizuki Takahashi, and Deborah Shamoon have interpreted flowers in shōjo manga as symbols of homosexual relationships, characters’ personalities, and the purity of girls’ culture, I argue that flowers function as “potential images”: ambiguous images which, dependent on the viewers’ perspective, simultaneously allow for multiple and diverse interpretations. My research focuses on a historical analysis of flowers as image and a visual analysis on Keiko Takemiya’s The Song of the Wind and Trees (1976-1984). I reveal how the ambiguity of flowers in the latter manga can be attributed to flowers’ semiotic roots in Japanese and Western culture. For instance, in the The Tale of Ise, irises are used to represent absence. In nineteenth century European literature, roses are used to represent homosexual relationships. And in Christianity, white lilies are used to invoke women’s purity and chastity. All of these connotations are called to mind at once by polysemic flowers in Takemiya’s manga. The ambiguity of Takemiya’s flowers allows viewers to build their own interpretations based on personal experience and cultural knowledges derived both inside and outside of Japan, in the past and the present. Indeed, Takemiya’s flowers offer an intermediary space for both manga artists and readers to exchange their ideas not only about their understanding of flowers but also about other topics such as emotions, relationships, gender, and identity. By examining the polysemic nature of flowers in shōjo manga, my research deepens our understanding on how flowers shape readers’ understanding of local and global cultures.

This paper explores the topos of “self-loathing” in contemporary Chinese science fiction, focusing on the work of Han Song. The notion of “self-loathing” follows Geremie Barmé’s description of the term. Barmé uses this term to describe a peculiar way many Chinese intellectuals across the 20th century reacted to China’s ill-fated modern history. Barmé stresses the double nature of Chinese “self-loathing“ tradition: On one hand, it is posed as a humiliating recognition of China’s backwardness with the implication that the true reason for this state is a deep-rooted corruption of Chinese culture and nature. On the other hand, the typically extreme imagery of the Chinese “self-loathing” tradition reveals a patriotic zeal, a prevalent sense of national uniqueness, and an urge for the nation’s renewal. There are two typical references of the Chinese self-loathing. One is the corruption of pre-modern Chinese culture and society (which is supposed to haunt Chinese nation even in modern times), the second one is Cultural Revolution (as a major example of Chinese nation’s being haunted).

This paper argues that another “self-loathing” reference point can be detected in what is perhaps an unlikely medium – in contemporary Chinese science fiction. It is argued that in Chinese sci-fi we encounter a criticism of contemporary Chinese society and politics, though veiled as fictional dystopic visions. The paper focuses on several works by Han Song with briefer references to other writers (Liu Cixin, Chan Koonchung). It is argued that the criticism of China in these works can often be plausibly read in the self-loathing tradition described above. The paper concludes that despite the grandeur of China’s rise in the 21^st c. (in both reality and these sci-fi works) the contemporary authors express the same strange sentiment with the earlier authors of the 20^th c. – the problem of China’s monstrosity vis-à-vis modernity.

A foundational element of the culture of democracy in the twenty-first century is conflict: democracy rests on the idea that vigorous contest and dissent in civil society are not only natural but also salutary. Modern democratic culture involves the production of norms that at once enable and manage conflict.

But this notion that conflict makes society flourish is neither natural nor universal; it is historically manufactured. Defining a culture of conflict as a set of ideas and practices premised on a view of dissent and discord in civil society as beneficial, this paper argues that democratic activists in Tochigi prefecture in the 1880s developed such a popular culture in their prefecture as a means of advancing the cause of freedom and civil rights. The paper thus builds on important scholarship from Eiko Maruko Siniawer and Andrew Gordon identifying violence as a core component of the historical development of democratic culture in Japan, but it departs from them in seeing violence not as an incidental means of promoting democracy but as a core and meaningful ideological element of it. The paper places particular emphasis on the imagination of Korea and China as anti-democratic places in the construction of a culture of Japanese democracy.

The paper takes as evidence the case of Arai Shōgo, generally regarded as one of the three foremost democratic activists in early Meiji Tochigi. Arai was intimately connected to the emergence of popular party politics in the region and actively promoted a wave of terrorism that swept Japan in the early 1880s; he was connected to the Kabasan Incident of 1884 and played a leading role in the Osaka Incident of 1885. Through Arai, this paper examines the ideological, social, and cultural context of 1880s Tochigi, with a focus on the rise of local newspapers and reading culture, to reveal how the origins of political terrorism and conceptions of Japan as ideologically distinct from the rest of East Asia had roots in problems of popular culture.

Erotes Studio is a Taiwanese indie game group famous for their visual novel games. Erotes Studio’s works challenge their audience’s knowledge rather than just please their audience. How did an indie game group challenge their audience with visual novel games? What kind of difficulties they faced when they challenged their audience? This study focus on national identities in Erotes Studio’s visual novel games and people’s reviews to try to answer the questions. Erotes Studio is trying to communicate with people to start to imagine possibilities of human society through their visual novel games. However, the efforts of communication in their works are dreadful to gamers. In people’s reviews, even though most of the people are fond of the appearances of characters in games, some of them refuse to mention politics, and some of them show little recognition of Erotes Studio’s works and get upset after playing the games. This study is different from previous study that thought Erotes Studio successfully created a gal game but sacrificed knowledge; there are facts that show Erotes Studio did not make a commercially successful game, but tried to contain many avant garde thoughts in their visual novel games. From this case, we can know that the arts in popular culture are now facing a more complex situation, which cannot be simply solved by finding a good balance point between knowledge and entertainment.

This paper explores the shifting representation of human and nonhuman body in post-war Japanese manga and anime, which exposes key questions such as, what is it to be human? how is human identity negotiated across boundaries of species, gender, and nation? Concretely, taking Japanese filmmaker Oshii Mamoru’s works as a focal point, this study examines the underexplored yet extraordinarily central aspect of the basset hound’s body in relation to Oshii’s philosophy of human identity, gender, and politics. I argue that the complexity of dog’s body in Oshii’s oeuvre has wide-ranging implications in not only media landscape of film and anime, but also social and cultural environment shaping ideas of human identity in Japan, East Asia, and the world.

Drawing from theoretical frameworks of posthumanism, animal-human studies, gender studies, and media studies developed in Japan and elsewhere, this paper situates Oshii’s works in two larger contexts. First, from a historical perspective, I analyse the transforming representation of corporeality in anime and manga from postwar to contemporary Japan. Further complicating existent studies on the intertwined relationship between the body, reality/fiction, and national identity, this paper sheds light on possibilities of associating in-text representation human/non-human species with anime and filmmaking technologies that mediate sensory experience and public discourse of modern and postmodern identity. Second, I adopt a comparative approach to examine how East Asian and Western popular cultures understands animal and human bodies in similar and different ways. Through close investigation of literary and visual media from various cultural contexts, this paper presents the crucial roles of social and historical contingencies in formulating imagination of human/non-human bodies, and of media technology in destructing cultural borders towards a new understanding of human, animals, and environment.

In the middle of the 20th century, India and PRC emerged from the yoke of colonial domination with the endeavour of building strong nation states. To this end, their respective leaders adopted different forms of political systems- social democracy in India and communism in China. However, both states retained a patriarchal and paternalistic character such that unlike in the West, where feminist movements were more autonomous, there emerged forms of state feminism. Carrying forward the legacy of the nationalist struggles, when state led emancipation of women became symbolic of national rejuvenation, governments in both countries undertook ‘social revolutions’ aimed at modernization and economic development.

From a paradigm of political sociology, this paper seeks to examine the variations in state feminism in India and China. It does so by answering the following questions in a comparative perspective. First, what was the state’s construct of the ‘ideal woman’ and how was it to be achieved? Second, how did the state relate to the emerging forms of women’s movements and vice-versa? Third, how has the nature of state led emancipation changed in the period after market reforms? This final question is important to assess the impact of changed state-society relations on the feminist movement. Have there opened up more avenues for autonomy, subversion, and international cooperation for feminists and women’s movement or if the loss of state support is a set back?

This research contributes to the emerging sociological studies on cosmopolitanism by presenting a historical and institutional analysis of the production (and to a lesser extent reception) of an arguably “cosmopolitan” film, My Nightingale (Watashi no uguisu, dir. Shimazu Yasujiro, 1943), produced at the height of Japan’s ethnic-nationalist period during WWII. I ask the following three research questions: 1) Which aspects, if any, of the film text entail cosmopolitanism?; 2) How and why did the possibly cosmopolitan aspects of the film text emerge under the existence of ethnic-nationalist policies, institutions, attitudes, and behavior in the Japanese colonial empire?; 3) What implications does this case study have on the ongoing debate on cosmopolitanism? By providing answers to these questions, I argue that ahistorical, normative call for cosmopolitanism hinders our grasp of a possibility that some claims to cosmopolitanism may entail the rationality of narrow ethnocentric nationalism. As a historical hindsight, it is easy to dismiss Manchuria’s slogan of gozoku kyōwa (peaceful co-existence of the five nationalities) and ōdo rakudo (heavenly place of virtuous rule) as simple political propaganda. But it may also be the case that this apparently cosmopolitan justification might have strengthened the repressiveness and discrimination of the Japanese colonial rule in Manchuria. In other words, I contend that the case study of the Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation and the production of My Nightingale suggests the possible co-existence of cosmopolitanism and hegemony.

Female portrayal in Indonesian media has been subject for discussion on gender bias narratives in the country (Luviana 2007; Karolus 2018). This study offers a comparison on portrayal of Indonesian female national hero in New Order’s R.A. Kartini (1984) and post-Reformation’s Kartini (2017). It treats the movies as cultural artefacts which provide insights regarding the society in which they are produced and acknowledges its potential as medium for transferring social values. Indonesia has undergone political and socio-cultural changes in the two eras which affect how Indonesians view their identities, gender wise included. After more than 50 years since the Presidential Decree No. 108/1964 announced R.A. Kartini as a national hero, Indonesians still consider her a relevant figure in association with empowered Indonesian women and equality in education movements. The nation annually celebrates her birthday of April 21^st as “Kartini Day” and she is the only female national hero depicted most frequently in movies.

Kartini was a member of central Java royal court who lived during Dutch colonial period Indonesia. In more than 30 years, with the first one in 1984 and most recent 2017, her biopics were made with adaptations tailored to cater audience of each era. This study considers anger, silence and women’s culture (Kaplow 1973, Heilbrun, 1988) also post-colonial concepts. It elaborates references to mother-daughter, siblings and female sisterhood relations, and exploration between Kartini’s public-private spaces from the movies. Using findings from content analysis and interviews with female movement activists as data, this study shows that despite production differences, both movies reconfirmed the engrained patriarchal views toward women’s role in Indonesian society. When Kartini—the empowered women role model, stays portrayed as “emancipated but within allowed boundaries”, it hints at a preserved stance on how Indonesian society normatively view women’s role that may hinder movement toward gender equality.

This paper reassesses the artwork produced during Mao’s era (1949-1976) by lifting the veil of homogeneity in the making of propaganda posters. Existing research contextualises the Chinese Communist propaganda system as the quintessential Leninist "transmission belt". Which was primarily for the indoctrination of Marxist philosophy to the masses. Therefore, there is a dearth of research done on the Sinification of the practice. Hence, the philosophy and by extension, the artwork is ubiquitously seen as absolute theft of western ideas. They are analysed with complete condensation of the artist’s position, accompanying practices or institutional spaces. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna by providing a constellation of a diverse social, cultural and aesthetic assemblage of the given epoch.

The study follows the trajectories of academic artists in People's Republic of China (PRC) who worked under Konstantin M. Maksimov^[1], the Soviet Art Educator. This academic training in socialist realism transgresses the contours of painting as a medium with the foundational continuity visible in posters. This paper examines the departures from earlier Soviet influences in visual language embedded in politics of the times. The diverse thematic that then evolved, specific to the politics of PRC, enabled to attain an immutable model of Chinese art. However, the works I accessed were located in collections patronized by very different political systems that seem to have determined the nature of the collections.

Employing the framework of Melissa Chiu’s concept of “transexperience”, the study excavates the generation of knowledge system around the collections held in mainland China and Hongkong. The analysis focuses on the authentic representation in the collection which plays a huge role in understanding a different culture. A close analysis of these collections reveals a more contextual language specific to China and the diluted power structures that permeate in the local and global cultural production of the collections.

^[1] Konstantin M. Maksimov was one of the most influential Socialist realist painters who was sent to Beijing to teach at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in from 1955-1957.

In regard to television drama and music, the term hallyu outside of South Korea serves as a form of brand description that often signifies, in addition to the country of origin, ‘safe’ and palatable content. As a “made in Korea” brand, hallyu drama conjures recurring images of romantic, good looking and exceptionally well-attired male and female protagonists, beautiful apartments and scenic backdrops with dutiful sons and daughters living largely sexless lives in romantic quests for heterosexual love. As a result, critical practice has tended to replicate hallyu’s own prioritization of internationally profitable, appealing and engaging creative content. In addition to financial return, many positive benefits have been attributed to hallyu drama’s glossy and unoffending content, including how it is helping to greatly improve the image of Korea abroad. By way of contrast, innovative and controversial dramas that have attempted to tackle difficult or taboo subject matter or criticize widely held attitudes and beliefs in Korean society have barely appeared in English language analysis. This paper will attempt to address this imbalance and examine several dramas, including the 2012 Korean drama, Life is Beautiful (SBS), which generated extremely strong reactions from various sectors of Korean society due to its depiction of homosexuality. Life is Beautiful was the first long-running Korean serial to feature homosexuals as main characters and it was responded to by angry demonstrations and newspaper campaigns and outright bans from government agencies. Despite such impact domestically, it remains largely unknown in the regional or global markets and critically undiscussed because, it will be argued, it did not adhere to a hallyu ‘ideal’.

This paper will explore how the representation of activist spaces in the Taiwanese TV miniseries Days We Stared At The Sun interrogates notions of Taiwanese and Chinese identity through a process of screen mapping. Days was conceived and directed by Cheng Yu-chieh, the first series airing in 2010 and the sequel in 2017. During this interval, Taiwan witnessed the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, in which student and civic groups protested the passing of a cross-strait trade agreement controversially associated with the island’s closer integration with mainland China. While the first series was set in a suburban high school, the second was set in central Taipei and directly depicts the Sunflower protests and their aftermath, accommodating a range of conflicting perspectives (e.g. a student who favours Taiwan’s independence; an exchange student who believes the island is Chinese). The paper will analyse how Days maps the spaces of civic activism, tracing connections, for instance, between sites in the ‘hometown’ (where the seeds of activism are sown as a result of localized, personal experience) and the ‘centre’ (where activism is enacted on a national, mediated scale). There is a self-reflexive component to this, as in 2017 Cheng reflects on the implicit radicalism of his earlier series – where and when, he asks, does political change begin? Days arguably engages in what I will define as the ‘screen mapping’ of activist routes, dramatizing journeys that may be as much spatial (a wayward teenager moves from school, to university, to protest sites around the Legislative Yuan, to a law firm) as emotional (he comes to reject radical intervention and to instead favour systemic change). In analysing how Days contributes to evolving discourses on Taiwanese and Chinese identity, I propose a mapped understanding of screen activism that complicates how we might conceive the civic.

In China’s neo-feminist TV dramas, youth is a crucial indicator of metropolitan women’s sexuality; its signification is connoted by many signs, such as the colours of lips, for instance, crimson red signifies maturity while light pink indicates juvenescence and naiveness. Cosmetics such as lipsticks is therefore advertised as women’s youth saviour and sexuality transformer. I argue, TV dramas’ engagement between metropolitan women and cosmetics propagates women’s age anxiety and diverges it to the zeal for conspicuous consumption of cosmetics; and it is a transcultural phenomenon embraced by media worldwide since the late 1990s and corresponds with the global consumer culture in the 21^st century.

The research focuses on a popular internet TV drama broadcasted in China in 2017—“Women in Beijing, 北京女子图鉴”, with reference to “Tokyo Girl, 東京女子図鑑”, an Amazon production aired in 2016. “Women in Beijing” is a Chinese adaptation of “Tokyo Girl” inspired by a Japanese comic book. The two TV dramas narrate young working women’s dream-chasing stories in metropolis and emphasize on the importance of youth in women’s completion of dreams; the female protagonists both subscribe to self-censorship of appearance, imposing age discrimination and application of cosmetics on their own expression of sexuality when they work and look for husbands. The Chinese adaptation highlights cosmetics’ functions, such as portraying lipstick as a necessity and a handy tool to manipulate age and demonstrate one’s “self” in different occasions.

The paper introduces semiotics into the analysis of cosmetic’s signification with regard to women’s sexuality, denotes how signs work in the depictions of “business women” and “wifely candidates”, and proves a connection and similarity in the usage of signs in the two TV dramas. Decoding the signs helps us clarify the connection between certain features of cosmetics and female sexuality and that women’s expression of sexuality in the TV dramas is a commercially constructed product recognised by the global consumers to stimulate conspicuous consumption.

The paper reflects on the concepts of heritage, history, history education and memory through investigating three urban scenarios in Hengchun-- an extremely popular tourist sightseeing spot known as the ‘Aka’s House’ fabricated after the popular Taiwanese produced blockbuster ‘Cape No. 7’ and its sequel; the discreet and non-captioned/explained Japanese colonial relics such as the Chukonhi (Monument of the loyal dead) and the Komainu in front of the Tinhau Temple, laying all over the Old Town of Hengchun; and the Western Gate of the Old Town embedded with its obscured history of the thousands of Taiwanese soldiers called into the army, to fight for the Japanese against the rest of East Asia during the Second World War-- who never returned. Through collecting and reflecting on the narratives from the current Hengchuners of different generations viewing their town through different objectives, the paper explores the various connotations of colonial heritage in Hengchun in the contemporary era and hence its meaning to Taiwan, especially during the current era urging for a Taiwanese identity formation.

The grand historical narrative of “China’s Century of National Humiliation” has received an extensive academic attention trying to untie the political dynamics sustaining it. Its students have devoted significant efforts to exploring its content and its link towards China’s political leadership, but one question has escaped their queries: Has it worked? This paper picks up where the previous works ended and explores the impact of the political historical narratives on Chinese public by exploring the visitor reactions in memorial spaces devoted to an important episode of modern Chinese history - the Sino-Japanese War. This study presents an analysis of 388 visitor comments from 8 memorial halls across China and puts to trial the academic assumptions of Chinese nationalism. As the general trend is to consider the Chinese remembering of the Sino-Japanese War as nurturing strong anti-foreign sentiment and violent nationalism, this paper looks into the empirical data in order to uncover whether those assumptions stand ground. Using the tool of critical discourse analysis, the paper puts forth that although the Chinese authorities succeed in mobilizing patriotic sentiments in Chinese public, this nationalism is sustained by calls for peace, friendship and international cooperation. Moreover, it presents a deeper insight into the dynamics of this narrative transmission and offers an analysis of the emotions involved. As opposed to the idea that “shame” is the core emotion involved in the historical narrative of “China’s Century of National Humiliation”, the comments revealed the narrative is sustained by an intense feeling of “pride”. Through these findings this paper opens up a pathway for future research of Chinese nationalism asking whether the knowledge about Chinese nationalism and its relations to the politicized historical narration has been spurious from the beginning, or whether the narration content has changed.

Animated movie On Happiness Road and TV series The Making of an Ordinary Woman are works containing many collective memories in Taiwan during the 1980s, such as martial law, official language policy and cult of personality. Although these two productions have similar topics, the audience that the former had was much less than the audience that the latter had. Why did the popularity of On Happiness Road and The Making of an Ordinary Woman differ greatly from each other? What is the difference in viewing experience between watching a TV series and an animated film? This study try to answer these questions by comparing the collective memories presented by the two protagonists in both productions, and the structures of these two different types of works. Both of the protagonists grown up in the period that martial law was about to come to an end; therefore, they witnessed the turning point of Taiwan society. On Happiness Road presented a rather complete experience of the changing by revealing the whole growth process of the protagonist, but The Making of an Ordinary Woman only picked up some experiences from the childhood of the girl and inserted them into a few episodes. In On Happiness Road, the viewpoint shifted between the past and the present frequently, and the timeline of memories caught up with the states of the protagonist at present in the end. As for The Making of an Ordinary Woman, each episode started and finished with present perspectives. Most memories were placed in the middle, and they were generally about recollections in the same period. In this study, we can see that collective memories are appealing to the audience, but it is not the more the better. Also, different presentation strategies and types of the production affect the audience’s willingness to view the content.

While a lot of the Japanese political system can be considered to be modelled off the British one, one aspect where they diverge is that of the use of humour. This seems to be the case in both the parliamentary discourses that are generated by politicians where their fellow politicians can be considered to be the audience as well as the potential manner in which the public involve themselves in elections, such as standing for elections as a joke or protest. Within sessions of Prime Minister’s Question Time that occur in both countries, utterances containing an element of humour were considerably more frequent in the British data compared to the Japanese. This can be partly connected to the differences in the attitude towards both the use of humour as well as the appropriateness for its use in political settings. Japanese humour appears to be used only in situations that are considered appropriate, and with is not regarded as a debating technique in the same manner that it often is in Britain. As such these two issues combine together to exclude humour from common usage in Japanese politics to create a more serious atmosphere. This could also connect to the manner in which politics interacts with daily life and its involvement with pop culture. Considering the role humour can play with regards to political protest, there could be questions to contemplate regarding the manner in which the portrayal of humour in an exclusively serious manner intersects with such issues.