A History of Popular Culture in Japan From the Seventeenth Century to the Present

This is not an easy book to read for anyone unfamiliar with East Asian studies, but it is a rewarding one in introducing the sociohistorical and political aspects of Japanese popular culture. Historian E. Taylor Atkins is one of a burgeoning number of scholars in this field, and in this relatively short book, he not only covers a huge swath of time and territory but also integrates into his writing a host of Japanese words and names as well as iconic Japanese cultural figures—kabuki actors, puppet artists, writers, singers, and printmakers over a period of more than 400 years—affording a virtual immersion into Japan. Atkins vividly illustrates his contention that Japanese popular culture did not parallel that of the West but predated it, ‘having a fully conceptualized notion of popular culture as we understand it today, earlier than any other country on earth’ (p. 32). Ironically, and significantly, the reason for the growth of scholarship in this field may derive from JPC itself (the acronym for Japanese Popular Culture or today’s J-Cult). The popularity of video games, manga, anime, ‘Lolita’ girls, and the empire of Hello Kitty drives many to investigate historical roots for what is now Cool Japan. Atkins, however, affirms Japanese popular culture as a critical feature of imperial Japan as it helped to formulate a cohesive national identity utilizing music, theatre, and print culture. At about the same time that Atkins's book was published, so were two other books on the subject: Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade (eds.), Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) and Deborah Shamoon and Chris McMorran (eds.), Teaching Japanese Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: AAS, 2016), each offering different approaches to Atkins's chronological or diachronic study that covers the Edo (or Tokugawa) (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) eras, Taishō (1912–1926) or the interwar period, the Second World War and its aftermath, the 1980s, etc. This is not to say that Atkins does not also at junctures give detailed examples or case studies of cultural forms

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Anime · Art · Comics · Cult · Freedman · Kabuki · Literature · Media studies · Period (music · Political science · Popular culture · Popularity · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law

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  Open Access•Fumihiko Kobayashi•Folklore Electronic Journal of…•2019

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