April 30

Book review on Japanese television

Micky Lee has published a book review entitled “Television as a site, place, and space”.  It has been published in the International Journal of Communication (the pdf file can be downloaded here).  One of the books reviewed is Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan, written by Gabriella Lukacs, an anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh.  Here is an excerpt on how the book fills in a void in media studies on Japanese culture:

Japanese popular media and culture is an understudied area. When it is studied, scholars (comprised of academics and journalists) focus on some quintessential Japanese genres, such as anime, manga, and samurai film, rather than media, such as television and magazines. An illustrative case is the “100 books for understanding contemporary Japan” program sponsored by the Nippon Foundation. The 100 books include those on anime (Napier, 2005), manga (Gravett, 2004; Schodt, 1996), and film (Mes & Sharp, 2004; Schilling, 1999); none of them is on television or magazines. Given the proliferation of Japanese popular media, its influence on youth culture in other Asian countries, and its cult following in Western countries, it is puzzling why scholars do not pay much attention to Japanese television and magazines.