Making Audiences

Scholars have long debated the state of Japanese civil society, its relative strengths and weaknesses, and the nature and extent of bureaucratic intervention into everyday life. The newest contribution to this field comes from film scholar Hideaki Fujiki in his ambitious and far-ranging Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media, originally published in Japanese in 2019. Fujiki traces the connections among media theories and broader intellectual currents, examining how public discourses on audiences for cinema, television, and digital media emerged in conversation with various conceptualizations of the “social subject” throughout Japan's modern history. In particular, Making Audiences traces the rise, overlap, and transformation of five discursive terms: “minshū (the people), kokumin (the national populace), tōa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishū (the masses), and shimin (citizens)” (1). Its chapters span the social study of leisure and popular entertainment in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods (chapter 1); Japan's wartime media ecology and mobilization (chapters 2–3); film policy, colonialism, and “the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” (chapter 4); postwar television and Cold War theories of mass media and society (chapters 5–6); and independent film screening events and citizenship in post-Fukushima Japan (chapters 7–8).Centering on the 1920s, chapter 1 focuses on how the term minshū emerged in association with the ills of industrial capitalism, appearing roughly around the same time as a new concept of community—shakai (“society”)—that was not reducible to “the state” (kokka) (39). In this context, “the people” were regarded as a “social problem” (29). Researchers like Gonda Yasunosuke made the study of “popular entertainment” (minshū goraku) central to the burgeoning field of “social education” (shakai kyōiku). Cinemagoing was viewed as part of the “life cycle” of the new urban classes, symptomatic of the behaviors, values, and desires instilled by industrialization (48).Chapter 2 turns to discourses on kokumin from the 1930s to the mid-1940s, which construed the “national populace” as homogenous, idealized, “self-disciplinary subjects who should voluntarily or spontaneously serve the state and who transcended differences and inequalities, in social class and region among others” (85). Fujiki, however, emphasizes the “fluidity, multiplicity, and diversity of identit[ies]” constructed through media and consumer culture at this time (108), arguing that the wartime regime “consolidated its status” by subsuming capitalist transmedia culture, even though the state ostensibly repudiated materialism and individualism (84).Chapter 3 analyzes wartime film policies and the attempt to incorporate provincial and colonial audiences while suppressing various forms of social difference that threatened the idealized unity of the kokumin. Despite efforts to mobilize these “new audiences” with films officially designated as “national films” (kokumin eiga) or “culture films” (bunka eiga), filmgoing remained a voluntary activity. Accordingly, Fujiki argues, efforts to attract audiences stayed grounded in capitalist principles. Intellectuals tended to ignore this contradiction and struggled to reconcile the importance of “entertainment” and “mass appeal” with wartime objectives of art and edification. Chapter 4 continues this discussion by analyzing fantasies of “empire” and the “East Asian race” that were based on a disavowal of ethnic difference, Japanese military aggression, and the tension between competing logics of empire and capitalism.Turning to the postwar period, chapter 5 focuses on “how the proliferation of television led to both the reassembling of transmedia consumer culture and the redefinition of cinema audiences” (265). Fujiki traces three strands of discourse on taishū (“the masses”)—mass society theory, mass culture theory, and mass communication theory—which debated the relationship of individuals to the postwar bureaucratic-capitalist system. Continuing the focus on television, chapter 6 takes a closer look at what Fujiki calls the “consumer-lifestyle-oriented democratic subjectivity” associated with television, with careful attention to television's restructuring of identity, sociality, and relations among different forms of media (312).Chapter 7 shifts focus to the conceptualization of “citizens,” social movements, and volunteerism in Japan from the Anpo movement to the present. In particular, Fujiki highlights the influence of Ulrich Beck's concept of the “risk society” and Manuel Castells's description of the “network society” for contemporary theorization of post-Fordist, neoliberal Japan. Chapter 8 analyzes citizens' film screening events on nuclear radiation in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident of March 11, 2011. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and others, Fujiki argues that “the screening event functions both as a nexus of networks—of media, knowledge, and shared concern—and as a hub where citizens can generate and expand networks” (450). Participants are able to create an “intimate-public sphere” around their shared concerns, offering “a mode of resistance to the privatization of risk and responsibility promoted by the network of power [of Japan's so-called nuclear village, or genshiryoku mura]” (453).Throughout this sweeping, erudite study, Fujiki demonstrates how twentieth-century intellectuals and authorities regarded social subjects as both agents and objects: capable of resistance and spontaneity but formed within power relations and available to study and control. Perhaps Fujiki's most fascinating observation is that the enlistment of the voluntary subject in state projects has been a major theme in media discourses from the early twentieth century to the neoliberal present. In tracing the vicissitudes of this idea, Making Audiences decisively rejects the binary terms often used to characterize spectators in canonical film theory—as either active or passive, resistant or subjected, conscious or unconscious—revealing that media discourses in Japan have long posited a self-disciplinary, voluntary (male) social subject with the ability to choose and refuse. However, as Fujiki points out, the discursive construction and idealization of this autonomous subject depended heavily upon the suppression of difference and conflict based on gender, class, geography, ethnicity, language, employment, and citizenship status. He argues that scholars must pay more attention to how gender bias and other forms of inequality have shaped the discursive construction of audience tastes, desires, and behaviors as well as basic assumptions about the place, time, and sociopolitical function of media consumption. Essential reading for historians of Japan, Making Audiences is landmark study that will spark new conversations among scholars researching media policy, transmedia and media transitions, and social subjectivity

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